Osmosis & P's Gnostic Cosmoses

[Terrance]

Otto Sell wrote:
> >
> 
> 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), 

Yes, this is true, this is a theme in both Ulysses and V.,
but it's hardly the only theme or the only reason why P,
writing after WWII, has so many Jewish charaters and themes. 


> 
> 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.

Yes, I know how to deconstruct it, but what has this to do
with all the Jewish characters in V. and P's recounting,
referencing and so on,  the Jewish Lot? 
> 
> Yes, she's paying for it although she's against it. There is binarity,
> something pretty schizophrenic in her doing, or not? 


NO,  I wouldn't use that tool to explain it, not
schizophrenic, I would go to the text where R tells Benny
and us why? 



> "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)

This is the good doctor's argument, but of course it's
rationalization of the most offensive sort, appealing to the
Orthodoxy he neither respects not practices. R argument is
sound, but rather than admit that he has been bettered by
her, the good doctor says, "inside, Outside...You're being
inconsistent, you lose me." He's not being honest here. He
understands the inside and outside argument, later he will,
just as he tortures the Orthodoxy here torture this inside
outside argument again. 


> 
> "You are early," he said.
> "I'm late, she answered.
> (p. 97)
> 
> -- Which is both true from different point of views!

Yes, P likes these. 



> 
> "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?

Extremes are satirized, the novel V. specifically targets
extremes. The on/off, flip/flop, 
love/hate and here the private thesis of the good doctor is
satirized too. 

As I posted: 

The good doctor, while yet a boy,  developed a fixation or a
strong attachment to the brave flights into the clouds, to
the noble flights like Icarus, and to loss,
to death (a major theme of V. is Love & Death, R&J, the
intensity of young Love made more intense by the presence of
Death) so noble still (WWI war in the sky), in the air not
in the Trench (no man's land and the machine gun, mud,
blood, Love)
manifested a state of Limbo (oh that Limbo state again, this
after the crash, he stayed in a kind of emotional
Limbo...believiong himself no more animate than the spanners
and screwdrivers he handled when the man he Loved, Godolphin
crashed to the ground, his face
cracked. The good doctor's obsession with the physiognomy of
flying men crashed to the ground, he assumed a state of
Limbo and swung over to the opposite side, Hate, hate  for
the Holy and unnatural Halidoms of his own calling. He would
find no reasonable middle ground, no golden mean only a
cultural harmony rationalized, an ideal established by
movies, advertisements, magazine illustrations. Remember
that when Rachel goes to pay the good doctor she blows a
halo of smoke, she is a good angel, but here the good doctor
is surrounded by the halo cast by his equipment. She argues
with him about the soul. The inside & outside. Later, he
will reverse this argument later and reveal his "Platonism"
when Esther refuses more and more surgery, refuses to
become  a duplicate of his assistant Irving, refuses to be a
Slab of clay for his purpose; a decay. Decay, that's not
good in this novel. Sorry but there is good in this novel. 

Why does the good doctor begin Act III of the nose job with
this: 

"Now ve shorten das septum ja." ???