GRGR Slothrop & Sloth

[Doug Millison]

At 12:39 PM -0400 6/19/99, MalignD at aol.com wrote:
>Pynchon does little more in these paragraphs than toss the concept of sloth
>in with a paraphrase of some of Henry Adams's points made in The Virgin and
>the Dynamo (and eslewhere since).  It's a pretty lazy effort and reveals
>little about TRP thoughts and beliefs re "God and religion and time and
>technology."

Let's focus for a moment on the part quoted: "Sloth will continue to evolve
away from its origins in the long-ago age  of faith and miracle, when daily
life really was the Holy Ghost visibly at  work and time was a story, with
a beginning, middle and end. Belief was  intense, engagement deep and
fatal.  The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth
-- defiant sorrow in the face of God's good intentions -- was a deadly sin"

What might this snippet reveal about TRP's thoughts and beliefs?

No irony is apparent in these sentences, instead they present a
straightforward series of unqualified assertions. TRP doesn't say that
"some people believe but I don't" (he doesn't say that directly nor does he
imply it through his diction) that there was a "long-ago age of faith and
miracle, when daily life really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work".  It
seems clear from this assertion that he believes that such was the case in
an earlier historical period.

We can also safely say that TRP deems the issues of which he writes in this
essay important enough to address, in his own voice and not hiding behind
the voice of some fictional character or narrator, in the leading U.S.
newspaper, in the most widely-read and arguably most influential U.S. book
review publication.

When we consider, when the book is published four years later, that he
takes up these concerns again in M&D, a novel which treats, in exquisite
detail, the transition from that "long-ago age of faith and miracle" to an
age ruled by reason and a world which has no room left for the miraculous,
and you understand that he spent 20+ years writing about this as he worked
on M&D, it seems clear that TRP deems this issue important enough to devote
a significant portion of his career as an artist to grappling with it.
When you consider the same dichotomy appear in his fiction from his very
earliest efforts through his most recent, it seems clear that he's found it
engaging enough to keep him busy for a lifetime of writing. (Beyond this
age of miracle/age of reason disconnect, critics have identified  a set of
questions, issues, polarities that permeate his works -- that he chooses to
write about these instead of others says a lot about the man.)

Some may say these are only small things to learn about TRP's "thoughts and
beliefs" (to use MalignD's phrase), but at the very least they serve to
demonstrate that it's untenable to assert that we can't learn anything
about TRP's personal beliefs from what he writes.  We have a large body of
non-fiction writings from TRP that demonstrate all sorts of interests on
his part, and in which he says more about the things we find in his novels
-- the " interviews with rock bands and  readily supplied blurbs for the
back covers of good, mediocre, and egregious  novels e.g., Even Cowgirls
Get the Blues" that MalignD mentions in a later post -- the consistency of
what he has to say in these various venues is remarkable.  Since TRP is in
a position to publish whatever he wants to publish,  these various
non-fiction writings undeniably serve to illuminate facets of his personal
interests -- as well as giving us more information about how we might
engage these same issues when we encounter them in his fiction.

Even if you assume he's the quintessential Trickster and therefore assume
that nothing he writes can be trusted, you'd still have to admit that he
reveals himself to be a Trickster, you'd know that much about him, and that
much would be a lot more than nothing.  The idea that he removes all traces
of himself from his writings, that he reveals nothing about himself in his
writing, that you can't learn anything about what concerns him or what he
believes from examining his writing, remains absurd.


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