M&D - Tyburn Tree 'resurrections'

[rj]

bruce sublett wrote:
> 
> Perhaps the prototype is Odin, who hangs nine days and nights from
> Yggdrasill and is pierced by a spear, a sacrifice to himself.  In Kevin
> Crossley-Holland's _The Norse Myths__ , chapter 4 is "Lord of the Gallows,"
> Odin's account of the mysteries he learned by dying on the tree and
> resurrecting himself.  In much Northern legend, the gallows is referred to
> as "Odin's horse."
> 

Perhaps it is.

I do take Doug's point about the Tyburn Tree hangings -- I didn't read
his first post closely enough and apologise -- but these failed
executions are surely different to spiritual resurrections and the
raisings of Jesus and Lazarus &c as represented in Christian scripture,
aren't they? The word "resurrection" is being applied ironically in the
Tyburn Tree case? Unless we are meant to take Jesus as some penny-ante
magician, and the Crucifixion and Deposition as hoaxes and/or mistakes.

It seems to me that the situations of Rebekah and the Thanatoids are
contingent at best. I agree that there are many instances of
otherworldly experience represented in Pynchon's fiction, however, as
they are drawn from a vast range of different and quite distinct belief
systems which (mostly) claim exclusive purchase on such afterworldly
experience, then I'm quite confident in saying that he is merely
representing the possibility of such resurrections "at all times". The
were-beaver and Byron the Bulb and SHOCK and SHROUD are just as "real"
in the text as any of the characters Doug mentioned. But, their
otherworldly "realities" are ones that orthodox Christianity will not
countenance.

I don't intend any disrespect to orthodox Christianity, and I don't
think Pynchon does either. In taking an irrationalist 'both/and'
approach to faiths and reincarnation stories, Pynchon enfranchises the
myths of many cultures (including the loony toon mythologies of
contemporary popular culture) to co-exist in the world of his text. That
this is heresy is obvious, admitted quite overtly as a matter of course
(eg. the note of personal support to Rushdie, the classified oxyrhyncus
papyrus fragment from the "extracanonical" Gospel of Thomas on p. 537 of
*GR*, the texts in their entirety etc.) 

Orthodox Christianity doesn't permit such heretical unorthodoxies
(including the Apocrypha, or reading the Bible as history); which is why
(heretic) pastors (the status and fate Wicks posits for himself) were
being hanged at Tyburn Tree in the first place.

best