Osmosis & P's Gnostic Cosmoses

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 17, 2000 4:29 PM
Subject: Re: Osmosis & P's Gnostic Cosmoses
>
> Otto Sell wrote:
> >
> > . . . and all that religious, esoterical, symbolical, technical,
> > psychological, ethnical, historical, opera, theatre, cinema blah blah
blah
> > in his books . . . all approaches to P.'s texts you named are covered by
> > deconstruction and logocentrism, but every "single" approach misses the
> > point.
>

Terrance says (in two different posts):
>
> What is the point?
>
>OH! What fools, why can't they see the Light, the Truth, the
Way of P's Deconstructed Binaries?



"Where the Truth Lies"

That Pynchon's literature is postmodern and should be looked at with the
postmodern toolbox. It's as simple as that. No
traditional or modern or new critics or pragmatic exclusive interpretation
will be enough, but they all add, have to be incorporated if one wants to
make a general statement.
But there is no binary of pomo vs other interpretation. That would miss the
point too. One is never to forget the indeterminacy of truly postmodern
texts which requires pluralism:
"Pluralism is the key term of Postmodernism" (Wolfgang Welsch, "Unsere
postmoderne Moderne," Weinheim 1991, Introduction, p. XV, eigene
Übersetzung)

> Let's try to get a simple point first.
>
> No, no one will play this game with me I'm sure, but why
> not...are you so sure it's all indeterminate play,
> subversive postmodern fable, deconstructed deconstructed?
>

Why double-deconstructed? Deconstruction is, as jbor sufficiently has
explained, if properly executed, a double-step.
The basics of all culture is play, not religion (homo ludens, Huizinga). But
I'm not gaming here.
Subversive is necessary to undermine the logocentric character of language.
But irony is another very important feature too.
V. is very ironic and as anti-rascist like GR.

> What are all these Jewish characters doing in V.?
>

Why is the major character of "Ulysses" an Irish Jew?
I assume several reasons - one is the hidden anti-Semitism in any Christian
(no matter if Catholic or Protestant/Puritan - those Jews killed "our"
Jesus) Pynchon is alluding to (as Joyce does too), a phenomenon present even
in TP's own family, if we can believe Jules Siegel in this. Again, Pynchon
is not specifically anti-Christian and no religion is generally bad. It's
just the instrumentalization of religious beliefs for other purposes. Rachel
is criticizing this.

Christianity is a second-hand religion using much stuff (images, metaphors,
imaginations) from former, older religions, especially from the Jewish,
values of a desert religion of cattle farmers.
Next week we celebrate another pagan fiest covered by Christian symbolics.
In our cultural production (high and popular) there are so many important
Jews to find throughout the centuries. Why is German postwar culture so poor
(and American so great and important)? All those Jews have gone or have been
murdered - the Jewish impetus is missing.
To put it cynically: from a cultural point of view we must thank the Romans
for 70 A.C.

The second reason has already been said several times. Monotheistic
religions are necessarily logocentric (there is no exception), thus
deconstructable, because the structure of God-Human is a binary opposition
with one elect and one preterite pole. From a structural point of view
Judaism, Christianity and Islam (chapter three, p. 83) are very much alike,
invented to cement male logocentrism against the former matriarchat which
survived in the Jewish law that the mother decides about the bloodline,
because only the mother really knows who the father is.

> Why would a kid from the gold coast know so much and write
> so much about things Jewish?
> He sure as hell didn't pick it all up working on one of his
> old man's road crews in Rachel's Five Towns neighborhood.
> Although he obviously got some of it from doing so, He
> researched it. For starters, P has the read the bible, not
> as much as Melville I suspect, but he knows it chapter and
> verse. He's also read a lot of Catholic texts, I doubt he
> read these in the Wittgenstein, I mean, philosophy
> department at Cornell.
>
> So, here, take the current chapter, Rachel is paying for
> Esther to get a nose job. Why?
>
> Deconstruct this!

Yes, she's paying for it although she's against it. There is binarity,
something pretty schizophrenic in her doing, or not? I mean, arguing with
Shylock-Schoenmaker (nomen est omen) against the procedure but paying for it
in the end. Because all literature is a quote according to postmodern theory
(intertextuality) I believe that interpreting a text only works with quoting
from it and from other texts and discourses:

The Jewish nose, an old prejudice used even up to nazi-Germany cartoons.
Anti-Semitism, a cultural heritage most of us bear despite the fact that we
are all Jewish if we take the story of Adam and Eve, which goes for all
three minor-Asian-desert-descendant religions, literally (and not only if
our mother is Jewish in the orthodox point of view),
"that whatever your father is, as long as your mother is Jewish, you are
Jewish too because we all come from our mother's womb. A long unbroken chain
of Jewish mothers going all the way back to Eve."
(p. 47)

To alter your nose is to hide your inner-Judaism which had been obvious
through your nose - phenotype vs genetype (?), outside-inside.

Luckily I've got all my familie's papers that were necessary in nazi-Germany
according to the Nürnberg-laws to avoid going to the death-camps. They prove
that in the two preceding generations there had been no Jews in my family
(which was required), but the third generation already is written down only
in pencil, exact dates are missing to forcome further research. My mother's
father Otto (1) was PM (party member) and my nose tells another story. Seems
if he'd got good reasons to hide his family genealogy since my uncle (Otto
2) found out later that one family line in the 18th century has got the name
Dreyfuß in it . . .


"You are early," he said.
"I'm late, she answered.
(p. 97)

-- Which is both true from different point of views!

"Irish, she wanted (...) Like they all wanted. To none of them did it occur
that the rétrousse nose too is an aesthetic misfit: A Jew nose in reverse,
is all. Few had ever asked for a so-called "perfect" nose (...) All of which
went to support his private thesis that correction--along all dimensions:
social, political, emotional--entails retreat to a diametric opposite rather
than any reasonable search for a golden mean."
(p. 103)

-- the massive use of binary oppositions, reversions, conversions, mirrors,
doublings, pairings etc concerning religious, political and historical
meta-stories in Pynchon's fiction simply cannot be denied. What's the
function then?
We read about a transit of Venus in M&D (the title a binary already), but
science tells us that one transit always is a pair of two transits.

Proverbs for Paranoids: master vs. creatures, innocence vs. immorality,
questions vs. answers, hide vs. seek.
The last one breaks up the binary structure:
"Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but
because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into
paranoid situations."
(GR, Episode 30, p. 292/459)
Just had to copy and paste from my website:
http://www.itap.de/homes/otto/pynchon/paranoid.htm

Intertextuality:
Laurence Sterne and his nose story (chapter 33).
The nose in GR (the giant Adenoid).
Apocryphic Rushdie who heavily relies on Pynchon. In fact I see "The Satanic
Verses" (a great book) based upon a little piece of Pynchon-text from V.:

"The Lord's angel, Gebrail, dictated the Koran to Mohammed the Lord's
prophet. What a joke if all that holy book were only twenty-three years of
listening to the desert. A desert which has no voice. If the Koran were
nothing, then Islam was nothing. Then Allah was a story, and his paradise
wishful thinking."
(chapter three, p. 83)

Would you say that Pynchon is writing anti-Islamic here and thus just being
more clever then Rushdie in leading a reclusive life? No, in being
postmodern he steps on any feet. Declared Marxists have their trouble with
his texts, with Postmodernism in general, too, like the Mystics and the
Modernists. It's easy to dislike the postwar world (blame it on pomo) but
nothing delivered a better explanantion for what has been called the
postmodern condition.

Otto

Das Leben ist ein Heidenspaß, für Christen ist das nichts!
- Wolfgang Ambros (Austrian accent, please)