Divine GR

[Monte Davis]

> Franz does not make any bargain with the Devil, merely falling in
> with him in the absence of any idea of what redemption might
> await him, what redemption really means. Once he finally falls 
> and understands his sin his goodness shows through. 

Fine stuff, Andrew. And, mutatis mutandis, applicable to so many other
characters and situations in the book.

Of all the encyclopedic works GR can be compared to, I've come to think of
the Divine Comedy most often. If anything, it's even more "incredibly
(over)structured" than Ulysses.

With the setting in recent history, with his story-line jumps,
foreshadowings, and flashbacks, Pynchon gets the synchronic/diachronic play
that Dante got by dating his tour a generation before he wrote, and playing
the Bible against Roman, Italian, and Florentine history.

With his chorus of narrative voices, he gets the synoptic view that Dante
got by letting the damned, penitent, and saved speak for themselves in
counterpoint to Virgil's commentary, Beatrice's, and his own faux-naif
questions.

And like Dante, he judges and invites us to judge mercilessly -- but
whipsaws our judgements with the vivid humanity of the condemned, so that
we have to go back again and again, if we want to be as just as God or TRP.

Dante, though, had the Word and the word made flesh as validation and
promise. Like Oedipa, we've lost the direct, epileptic Word,
the cry that might abolish the night.

"Did we tell [the dodoes] 'Salvation'? Did we mean a dwelling
forever in the City? Everlasting life? An earthly paradise restored, their
island as it used to be given them back? Probably. Thinking all the
time of the little brothers numbered among our own blessings. Indeed,
if they save us from hunger in this world, then beyond, in Christ's
kingdom, our salvations must be, in like measure, inextricable.
Otherwise the dodoes would be only what they appear as in the
world's illusory light-- only our prey. God could not be that cruel."

-Monte <is it oxymoronic to feel "especially preterite"?>