who's Christian?

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Doug Millison wrote:

> It's clear to a demonstrably broad spectrum of observers (I provided a
> glimpse of that spectrum in some posts yesterday) that Pynchon deals in his
> writing with serious religious questions and introduces into his fiction
> material from many of the major world faith traditions, that he grapples
> with many of the issues that have animated debates, schisms, and violence
> throughout the history of religion. As far as I can tell in this thread so
> far, nobody seriously questions this fact.

Wouldn't know about the others, but I certainly don't.

> How would you define "religious writer" to distinguish it from "a writer who
> writes about religion"?

What we are dealing here with is the attitude of the author towards religion. As
I noted before, by "author" I do not mean the real life person, about whose
ethics, by the way, I couldn't care less, but the "implied author", that is, the
idea of the author's moral point-of-view we get from reading his or her
fictions, regardless whether there is a first- or third-person narrator whose
stance we may or may not identify with the implied author's point-of-view. Of
course, often - and mostly in inferior fiction - the implied author's POV can be
easily detected and the reader may rightfully assume that it doesn't stray too
far from the real author's views - that is, if he or she is not a
Deconstructionist. In major fictions like, say, "Moby Dick", "The Brothers
Karamazov", "The Magic Mountain", or all of Pynchon's novels, it is very
difficult to come to a conclusion about the implied author's POV who probably,
as Joyce once wrote, hides behind the stage paring his finger nails.

This said, the term "religious writer" to me seems to denote that the fictional
text at hand expresses an endorsement of certain religious values or ideals.
This is quite clearly the case, as Terrance said, in "The Divine Comedy" and
"Paradise Lost". The phrase "a writer who writes about religion" to me seems to
refer to texts which contain references to religion, whose structure may even be
modelled after concepts or patterns taken from a specific religion, which may
even include religion and man's relationship with the metaphysical world among
their central themes, but do not necessarily endorse the values of the religion
or religions they write about. James Joyce was a writer who wrote about
religion. John Bunyan was a religious writer.

The starting point of this strand of the discussion was the notion that Pynchon
was a "religious writer", perhaps even a writer who at heart endorses Catholic
values (at least that was how I understood Terrance; it is sometimes difficult
to discern the actual meaning of what he is saying, but that's fine with me). I
argued against it and pointed to a specific example of a reference to the RC
tradition right at the beginning of Chapter 11, namely to St. Augustine's
"Confessions", and tried to demonstrate that at least the
first-person-narrator's POV is fundamentally opposed to the attitude towards God
and memory as well as towards the ideas of a linear progress of historical time
and of the continuity of personal identity implied in the allusion to St.
Augustine. Whether the first-person-narrator's view, which is obviously the POV
of a Modernist sensibility, here does coincide with the implied author's, I
don't know.

Thomas

P.S. Sorry, I just can't keep up with this speed of discussion.