GRGR(24) Father Rapier's ABSOULUTE

[Terrance]

Jeremy Osner wrote:
> 
> The preacher man says, "To affirm their reality is to affirm Return." Is he talking
> about return to Eden? I don't quite get the connection.
> 
> J

I was confused by the quote: "their reality...." 





Father Rapier: Perhaps another 19th century
political/subtextal allusion to James T. Rapier,   Rapier,
James T.  b. Nov. 13, 1837, Florence, Ala., U.S.  d. May 31,
1883, Montgomery, Ala.

His office on Beaverboard Row might be in some southern
hell, Alabama? 

JAMES THOMAS RAPIER, black planter and labor organizer who
was a member of the U.S. House of  Representatives from
Alabama during Reconstruction.  Born in affluence--his
father was a wealthy planter--Rapier was educated by private
tutors and later studied at Montreal  College (Canada), the
University of Glasgow (Scotland), and Franklin College
(Nashville, Tenn.). Rapier returned to Alabama after the
American Civil War and became a successful cotton planter.
He began his career  in public life by serving as a delegate
to Alabama's first Republican state convention; he was a
member of the platform  committee. In 1867 he participated
in the convention called to rewrite the state constitution,
and, after losing a  campaign in 1870 to become Alabama's
secretary of state, he won a congressional seat in 1872. In
Washington he
 worked for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875,
although he was defeated for reelection in 1874.  Except for
service as collector of internal revenue in Alabama's second
district, Rapier did not again hold public office.  But he
continued as an active labor organizer, seeking to unite
poor urban workers and rural sharecroppers, and he  wrote
pro-labor editorials for the Montgomery Sentinel, of which
he was the publisher.

It's all so very confusing, Pynchon is playing puns on top
of irony and all that good stuff. 

In any event, Rapier is a Devil's Advocate, a carping or
adverse critic, but he is at the service of the "System"
(note that his use of the word "dialectic" is the only
positive use of the term in GR, but is undermined by his
fear and disclaimer) and, I think he is ironically or as is
Pynchon's familiar treatment of "religion," a satiric
inversion of Advocatus Diaboli 

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01168b.htm



Wouldn't that make him Advocatus Dei for the radical Jesuit
Teilhard de Chardin? No, probably not. Although, I think de
Chardin is a guy Pynchon would dig, until he got to that
Absolute stuff. 

Now, the word Return is a tricky one in GR. Here (GR.539) we
are told that Rapier is preaching against Return in the
sense that de Chardin wrote against it. 

See, my post on de Chardin's Absolute: 

"Life itself-Life is Irreversible." --de Chardin

and

"This is not a return to primitive and undifferentiated
cultural forms..." -de Chardin

Probably arguing right out of Aristotle and perhaps
analytical psychology, de Chardin sez, 

"In the passage of time a state of collective consciousness
has been progressively evolved which is inherited by each
succeeding generation of conscious individuals, and to which
each generation adds something." 

This is part of his idea that social heredity is  an
evolving progress and Mankind cannot go back or Return to
his primitive and undifferentiated cultural form since he is
progressing, by divine purpose, towards a wholeness of human
collective consciousness united with Christ--de Chardin's
Christian Humanism. 

"We cannot recapture the animal security of instinct."
(sounds familiar, eh Rilke?) 

"When it has passed beyond what we called the beginning of
its 'critical point of socialization' the mass of Mankind,
let this be my conclusion, will penetrate for the first time
into the environment which is biologically requisite for the
wholeness of its task." 
 
The "critical mass", and "the word has ceased to have
meaning" (GR.539) are de Chardin's ideas and Rapier/de
Chardin makes an eloquent and moving argument, but Pynchon
(this narrator here doesn't like the "loss of freedom." The
narrator puns into jokes, get it, critical mass, 1945,
criticizing  de Chardin's "critical mass", "progress", and
"socialization". The terrible (terrible is again given a
duel meaning here) possibility is de Chardin's idea that we
are at a critical time and it is also the bomb. Rapier goes
on to advocate the System and all the most terrible lies and
dirty trick the System plays on critical
masses.