Re. the "Slothropite heresy"

[jbor]

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>From: "David Morris" <fqmorris at hotmail.com>

> 
> Here is maybe a more poingant question:  What is the way forward ?
>

Well, I think that Slothrop's dissolution, or dismemberment (cf. Orpheus),
in the world of the text (i.e. myth) and his apocryphal reemergence into the
world outside the text (i.e. history) is, at least potentially, a "path
forward".

I don't think, at least with Slothrop pondering his ancestor's heresy there
on 555-6, it was ever a question of a return to some Eden. The anarchy or
tabula rasa which confronted the Puritan settlers as they set up the New
World is analogised with the anarchy or tabula rasa which Slothrop observes
in the Zone just at that moment before all the Allied factions moved in and
carved it up into mirror-images of Their bureaucracies (which is what the
Puritans had done before, and which is why W. Slothrop returned to live out
the rest of his life amidst the landscapes of his birth).

Pynchon's fascination with "road/s not taken" places him right in the midst
of the American literary tradition btw.

best