M&D - Tyburn Tree 'resurrections'

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> At 8:15 AM +1100 9/17/99, rj wrote:
> >Yes, it's that subjunctive mood which is being resurrected in *M&D*.
> >And, it's not spiritual resurrection per se but the *possibility* of
> >such resurrections that Pynchon is representing, at all times.
> 
> When creating and presenting characters who clearly occupy an after-life,
> unearthly plane of existence (Rebekah; Thanatoids; Lyle Bland; etc.), and
> who are as "real" on the page and in the world of the novels as his earthly
> characters, it would seem that TRP moves well beyond mere "possibility".
> Possibly. Who knows enough about what "Pynchon is representing" to be able
> to say so categorically, "at all times"?

Not me, and although I think this example from M&D
problematic, because it is the Rev here and not Pynchon, and
it is bodily resurrection from drunkenness or dream--Pynchon
does not imo agree with Wicks on most matters including
history and narrative-- I think Pynchon, unlike, for example
his friend Henry Adams, is  not fixed by the dualities of
Decartes. Pynchon is dialectical in mind. Take his prose
work and it becomes more clear. He rejects Snow's Art vs
Science for example, he rejects binary relationships,
conflicts unsovable and finality. Pynchon's fictional worlds
seem to reflect his view of a world that does not fall and
can not be pushed into neat opposing catagories--spirit and
matter, religion and technology, history and psychology, man
and cosmos, virgin (cathedral) and dynamo. The world of
Pynchon seems more in flux, in dialectic. Man is cosmic and
the cosmos is human, and "resurrection"  of physical or
spiritual is not only possible it is.  
> 
> The 'resurrection' referred to in the passage I quoted about Tyburn Tree is
> physical, not spiritual -- the hanged individuals in question not having
> clinically died, their 'resurrection' is metaphorical although their
> survival is clearly of the flesh. The after-life characters in TRP's
> fiction (examples above) would appear to be ghosts, without corporeal
> substance, somehow surviving beyond the boundaries of clinical death.
> Crossan quotes the Tyburn Tree material in a discussion of resurrection in
> the Bible, noting that, according to one early Christian acount (the
> extracanonical Gospel of Peter), Roman guards were sent to watch over
> Jesus' tomb for three days to make sure he was completely dead and that his
> followers couldn't retrieve the body and revive it; this also would explain
> the significance of the miracle of Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life on
> the fourth day (if I remember correctly) after Lazarus died and was
> entombed -- the time interval would preclude the possibility of the sort of
> physical 'resurrection' as is reported to have happened at Tyburn Tree.
> 
> d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
> http://www.dougmillison.com
> http://www.online-journalist.com