GRGR (20) Special Topic: Is It OK to Be a Manichean?

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

 Yes it is OK to be a Manichean or a Puritan or a
Behaviorist, but in GR these positions are satirized because
they are examples of "something comforting—religious, if you
want—about paranoia" and the allegorical quests for
salvation. 


"Everything possible to be  believed is an image of truth."

This is from 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'

Pynchon is interested in what we might call the Romantic's
reaction to Milton's Satan, i.e. Blake, the Shelley's
Frankenstein or Modern Prometheus, Prometheus Unbound, and
the Satan Hero Romanticisms. However, while I think Pynchon
would be quite at home with Blake's artistic--"image of
truth", political and ideological--preterite,
mythological--as opposed to the institutionalized satan of
the church, heroic--transformation of the christian and
Miltonic diabology, sublime--casting vs forging,
cultural--philosophical skepticism, rationalism, (these
Deistic times" Cherrycoke, M&D), and even the moral and
ethical (city life, childhood, harlots, brothels, blood down
palace walls, blackening churches), he would not be at home
with Blake's apocalyptic history and prophetic visions
theologically as much as he sympathizes, no celebrates the
prophetic position assumed by Blake on all other counts,
because this would be another quest for salvation, another
way to find peace or salvation in postlapsarian reality and
consciousness.