pynchon-l-digest V2 #920

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

FrodeauxB at aol.com wrote:

> TF-Sounds like Karl Marx, all this interest and commerce stuff.
> frodeauxb

Agreed! 

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.

The key word here is "community." 

What does Pynchon think of this conflict between individual
and community?

How does he resolve it? He is dialectical of mind and this
is manifest in everything he writes. Just thinking out loud
here, but he seems to suggest something akin to Unamuno's
take on Don Quixote?

Back to the animals. A community of Saintly Rats and
Symbolic Allegory. 

In Dante's DC, the character Virgil represents both the
historical author of The Aeneid and the human faculty of
reason, while the character Beatrice represents both the
historical woman of Dante's acquaintance and the concept of
divine revelation. 

The symbolic allegory, which can range from a simple fable
to a complex, multilayered
narrative, has often been used to represent political and
historical situations and has long been popular as a vehicle
for satire. A modern example of political allegory is George
Orwell's novel Animal Farm (1945).

So, in V. we have the most complex form, in the story of
Father Fairing (note the name fairing, and copy of "Knight's
Modern Seamanship," a book, still a standard text one might
find in a navy ship's library). Father Fairing reads to the
rats from the Baltimore Catachism (U.S. 1885). The debate
here addresses not only Marxism in the U.S during the
depression, but the history of conflict in the RC Church,
particularly with the Jesuits, as concerns "Community" and
is played out first by the skeptic Ignatius and his
"Marxist" reading of the  community of saints--the
creed--and the superabundance of the virgin and saints. 

"and they were judged every man according to their work."
SJD, REVELATION 20.12
TF