some loose ends

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> 1. Is Pynchon really a religious writer?
> 
> Doug has suggested that he is. I agree that Pynchon often writes *about*
> religion, as he also writes about many other things (which makes his work
> "encyclopedic", to quote Edward Mendelsohn), but I don't really think that
> this is enough to qualify him as a "religious writer". It seems to me that
> in writing *about* religion Pynchon is more often critiquing (and
> deconstructing) religious systems and their institutional practices and
> arrangements.

What is a religious writer anyway? Clearly Pynchon is not a
religious writer as 
Graham Greene is a religious writer,  as Dostoyevsky
(Sinners and Saints Otto) or Tolstoy, or Melville, or Joyce,
or Faulkner, or Lawrence, or Eliot (TS), or so on, and so
on.  So maybe the term "religious writer" is a box we can't
use. It's too big and too small at the same time. No boxes
you say? OK, no boxes, but as stupid as the boxes may seem,
as crunched and cramped and reductionistic and la deee da,
they are very useful if we take the time to define them,
their perimeters, their sides and angles. Genre is a good
one, and here we have only a small disagreement, the novel
V., for example, we mostly agree, is picaresque, but we
can't agree on how the picaresque is or is not subordinate
to the Satire (Menippean or Encyclopedic as Mendelson
defines it or Frye or Braha with Bakhtin--Dostoyesvsky's
Poetic Problems).  But if we insist (and we all know that
all great writers make and break their own boxes from the
materials of other boxes broken by their fathers) that a
great work of fiction is unique ( this is obvious) and
therefore can not be brought into a common or relative or
comparative or hermeneutic discourse, then this discussion
can not and should not proceed. But is P is simply an author
who writes about religion? What should we call a great
writers who critiques and deconstructs religious systems and
their institutional practices and arrangements as
Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy have, but also as Melville has and
Joyce has and Pynchon has? The two Russians may be said to
be religious writers in sense that Joyce and Melville may
not. They have a reformation of the Christian religion in
mind not found in either the fearful jesuit or  Melville the
Seeker. Pynchon is, I  submit,  our most important religious
writer. What is a religious writer in the postmodern world?
Sounds like an interesting course. Shall I put M&D on the
silly bus? 

The postmodernist Pynchon is not the problem as I see it.
What serious student of Pynchon would fail to recognize the
merit of McHale, Weisenburger, and the dominant school in
the Pynchon industry? But here, by rj mostly, this school is
presented as the wings at the expense of the poesy so that
he sails us into the sun with his ideological
baggage. When Doug and rj go at on this one, Pynchon is but
one lone Samsonite going round and round at three Oh clock
in the morning on the JFK carousel. 

Away away for I will fly with theee

			--Keats