Classic quest

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

bruce sublett wrote:
> 
> Keith W. wrote:
> >In response to what Divid has said re: the quest... I have trouble looking
> >at Slothrop's quest as "classic", I think in many ways it is a response to
> >the classic quest and often looks more like an anti-quest.  Also, I have
> >equaql trouble with saying that Slothrop is "embarking", or for that matter
> >using much of any language that attributes much agency to Slothrop at this
> >early point in the novel.
> 
> All true, which makes it securely part of classic quest literature.  I link
> Slothrop very directly to Wolfram's Parsival as the holy fool whose quest is
> directed from the outside in order that he may gain the wisdom to achieve
> the grail.  Fifteen years down the road from my MA thesis on the topic, I've
> lost touch with the details, but GR is readable end to end as a medieval
> Grail quest.  If this topic opens up, I'll dig into the archives and find my
> research notes.
> 
> BS


"Ay, 'his breast:' so says the bond: doth it not noble
judge?-'Nearest his heart:' those are the very words."
					                                           ---Shylock,
MV

"But it's only another illusion. A very clever robot. The
more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in
reality it grows. Look at the smokestacks

          						                           ---Rathenau,
GR.P.167

Aristotle, "The Philosopher's Philosopher," in his
metaphysical sort of way, declared that money is by nature
"barren," He argued that the birth of money from money is
therefore "unnatural."  Consequently, the taking of interest
is to be censured and hated. Plato, Plutarch, Cicero,
Seneca, and various other leaders of ancient thought,
arrived at much the same conclusion.

Hard to comprehend in our day of Wall Street good greed,
when lives are bought and sold on the blocks of
multinational indifference to all sentient species, where
dirty money makes this living earth a polymerized Eden
manufactured for a consenting multitude of consumers
helplessly deaf and dumb and blind to the Chimney-sweepers
cry that every blackening church appalls, and the hapless
Soldier's sighs that run in blood down palace walls. 

**Just kidding**    "Oh bother," with a frowning forehead,
he said to Owl.  ---EEYORE, Winnie the Pooh  

Medieval thinking, in theology as well as in law, went well
beyond Aristotle's views in these matters. Aristotle had
acknowledged the importance of private property and the need
for money in the functioning of the state, but he condemned
retail trading as unnatural and usury as worst of all. The
same mistrust of merchants and their work is found in Peter
Lombard's Sentences, where he says that soldiers or
merchants unwilling to give up their professions should not
be received as penitents because they could not exercise
those professions without sin (4, d.16, q.4, a.2). But the
major thirteenth-century commentators on the Sentences,
Albert, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, modify his position
considerably. They recognize that countries are not
necessarily more self-sufficient than individuals and must
rely on the services of those who can procure supplies for
them, that in a complex society one cannot always
buy directly from the producers. Now I'll turn to Dante:
Dante's attitude towards commerce is essentially a moderate
one, accepting it as a fact of life, a potential benefit to
society, as long as it serves the common good and does not
harm the community in order to advance individuals. He
presents the distribution of wealth as the result of divine
providence in the passage on fortune  and justifies craft
and manufacture hence, implicitly, trade in his description
of art as the daughter of nature and granddaughter of God.
The importance he accords both to personal property and to a
stable currency is manifest in his treatment of their
abuses; he discusses in some detail a variety of economic
and monetary sins, not just greed, but plunder, squandering,
usury, fraudulent buying and selling of different kinds of
goods, theft, and counterfeiting. Each one appears in a
separate section of Hell,and several are attacked in
Purgatory and Paradise as well. He employs the technical
language of commerce literally, in connection with the
abuses, and metaphorically, applying it to spiritual
treasures and moral debts. The technical language and
commercial details would have been a particularly effective
means of reaching the members of the audience attuned to
them and would presumably have added a whole other sphere of
application to Dante's message. The metaphorical use of the
same language seems to be Dante's way of countering
"corporal usury," which is forbidden, with "spiritual
usury," which multiplies the benefits of God's gifts, a
distinction made by canonists and theologians.

Pynchon, like Dante and his great mentor Herman Melville,
employs these technical languages with great effect. Are
these commercial details (coal, dyes, pressure
) and the
technical jargons (rates, flows, costs profits, interest
)
effective, particularly apropos? In the next section we will
meet the engineer poet polyglot (Melville satirizes him in
like fashion with Brock Vond's physiognomist  in "The
Prairie" MD) that will send us back to V. to read chapter 11
(history, engineer poetry and the inanimate) and chapter 10
part III (the crews conversations at the spoon). 

So the smoke-stacks have Earned the compounded interest
bearing capacity of Berkshire and Gold Coast monies. Money
profits and proliferates through interests and trusts like a
Slothropian estate. The irony is, that money is not barren,
people are, and abstractions procreate and generate, are
fruitful and multiply, machines are alive and "YOU think
you'd rather hear about what you call 'life': the growing
organic Kartell," but Slothrop-the protagonist of this black
phallic comedy ---for all his sexual conquests, can not even
like Oedipus discover himself, though he searches with his
penis for his Frankensteins.   

"Death converted to more death." THEY would have their pound
of flesh, and YOU would have a rocket with your name on it.

TF