Logocentrism.a

[Terrance]

Otto Sell wrote:
> 
> Well, we all know that catholicism is a children-religion, full of miracles,
> magic events and wonders, derived from the old desert-beliefs....[snip]


A Children's religion, full of miracles and magic events and
wonders, yes. Now that sounds like something TRP would
endorse, doesn't it?   To be happy in one's projected world,
as animistic societies, and children are, is what GR and
most of its characters yearn for. This is what I mean by,
Pynchon, like Adams, being nostalgiac for the mediaeval way
and the quest for the grail. The "positive paranoia" of the
mediaval questers, even if that "paranoia" was the belief in
the authority of the Church of Rome, permitted the certitude
not possible after the advent of rationalism and
individualism. Unlike our Pavlovian Knights, Mr. Poitsman
and CO., a mediaeval knight's belief (like the Puritan's
belief in the Holy Scripture) was so deep and complete, that
they never doubted that Christ was the center of the
universe and that the whole of the universe--all of God's
great wonders--were focused on HIM. Rationalism was not
simply the downfall of the mediaeval order, it was also the
beginning of attempts to replace it with rationalized
structures that eventually adopted as their maxim the
premise "cognito ergos sum." What is replaced, destroyed,
infected, sickened, perverted, distorted, exploited by
rationalized structures is lamented in GR, be it Hereros,
childhood, early Puritanism, the mediaeval order, "positive
paranoia", the dodoes, baby Jesus, etc. This idea of
replacing the quest, the questers, the grail, the mediaeval
order, is one of the most important patterns we can trace in
GR and I think it may  solve this dispute about language and
religion. 


Take a step back to David Morris's comments on "creative
paranoia", he wrote, "Paranoia, whether creative or
operational, is simply the natural state of human
consciousness, 'ordering' experience." 

In GR, paranoia, the ordering of experience, the projecting
of a world, is religious in nature: "there is something
comforting--religious if you want." [GR.434] Depending on
the character, it can be either a form of, or mixture of,
the "children's religion" described above (Geli) or a 
perversion of several religions (Greta), or in the case of
our most interesting characters (slothrop and Enzian) it
will include an early religion, perverted and now under the
sway of the synthesis and control of secularized rational
structures and history, so that, for example (a classic
Pynchon double theme) Slothrop's "paranoia" is "a peculiar
sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky" [GR.26]. 

TBC