What's in a name? in a WORD....

[Terrance]

Sorry, this is a bit rough, notes pasted together is all. 

Run, run, run Terrance, run, oh shit I'm gunna be late. 

P was and may still be a Catholic. Who knows? In any event,
his fiction, his comparative study of religion begins with
Catholicism. That the Pynchon industry seems hell bent on
denying this is a problem I think. Not because I think P
should be called a catholic or christian writer, but because
his imagination is full of catholicism and to evade or
dismiss this is not critical or smart. 

Catholicism as Otto once pointed out, is a children's
religion. 


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 nostalgic,  as Eddins has 
demonstrated. 

The "positive paranoia" of the
mediaeval 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 Herero,
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 is the product of a Catholic and catholic
imagination. 


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--the realm of Blicero,  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]. Of
course the hand of the  
Puritan god gives him the finger, the binary, the elect
preterit is not christian here, P is specific about what he
is referring to. Certainly it is not Catholic. 

 The quest and the grail! Stencil, Oedipa, Slothrop, all
questers. In GR, the
quests are defiled versions of the sacral or mythical
journey. For example, Pointsman is a pavlovian
knight.  P's questers are secularized knights, Slothrop is
King George after the fact,  and their quests are  profane
mockeries of their religious ancestors, but that doesn't
mean Pynchon is anti-christian or anti-catholic. He writes a
satire of the West, it has to include some anti-christian
elements or it's not a satire of the west, surely it is not
encyclopedic if it fails to take on christianity.  GR is a
critique
of the West, so it follows that christianity is a target.
But what is it about christianity (and we would need to talk
about the various religions--Puritan, Catholic, gnostics,
etc.) that is criticized? It's certainly not the belief in
god.  Other religions in GR are praised
for exactly these reasons. GR is not even anti-puritan. This
is a common claim and it is incorrect.  There is a specific
critique of the
Puritans--the WORD. GR is quite sympathetic to the Puritans.

Yes sir. 


What about Judaism? Jewish mysticism in GR is essential to
the text. Certain Jewish mysticism, like certain gnostic
systems are associated
with evil in GR--like murdering children. But GR  unites the
ancient Jews with the pre-christian Herero and
Catholicism/Christianity  to Egyptian 
harvest and rebirth. 


Blicero is complicated, but come on, let's take a look at
this Jive Ass. 

"Blicero was a local deity." 
"Blicero had grown on, into another
animal
a werewolf
but with no humanity left in his eyes:
that had faded out, day after day, and been replaced by gray
furrows, red veins in patterns that weren't human. Islands:
clotted islands in the sea. Sometimes even the topographic
lines, nested on a common point. 'It is the map of my
Ur-Heimat,' imagine a shriek so quite its almost a whisper,
'the Kingdom of Lord Blicero. A white land.' I had a sudden
understanding, annihilation, the space and time were
Blicero's own
was it the position of the Rocket
itself? 

"the wrinkled wolf-eyes had gone even beyond these domestic
moments of telepathy, on into its animal north, to a
persistence on the hard edge of death I can't imagine, tough
cells with the smallest possible flicker inside, running on
nothing but ice, or less. He called me Katje." 



Blicero is the one they were all waiting for in a Castle,
and what are these guys up to? What's with that **CLEAR**
African mask, Joseph Conrad? Why Conrad you savage!  Oh, and
what
is this?  a Chalice of methyl methacrylate, a replica of
the Sangraal


Jesus on the cross, it's the the Holy fucking Grail, the
WORD, think 13th century papal supremacy and the persecution
of the Jews. Why? Because the Catholics embraced cannibalism
and murdered Jews in droves. 

Oh, Joseph Conrad, you savage! 

Blicero's Faustian Freedom: 
Time and Space are his. 
 Blicero is described with many of the
same adjectives as the War, Time and Space belong to the
War, the war bends time and space (there are some beautiful
essays on this theme, one in that Oaky Law review and of
course Hite's take on the parabola). 
Blicero is set free, 
he is free of them,  of all the limits of preterition, of
Humanity. 
"Gnosis" brings ubiquity, a permeation of the structure of
events by an evil
presence that has successfully completed its Faustian
compact. Death's parody of life, technology's parody of
nature, is systematic here. 


What about those other  terms?  "malignant",  "cankered
root",  "famine"?
Hey, isnt this what happens when old Blicero shoots off his
rocket? The earth gods  are
defeated? Wasteland? The murder, the end of the  harvests
dependent upon Orphic return from a fertile, nourishing
Underworld. (yeah it's a beautiful book kai, go for it). 
 
Back to Blicero and what the hell is that Screaming at the
sky in an "ungodly..." and what's up with those eyes now,
his eyes "White blank ovals," & say, this
guy is wired, Blicero has "wired his nerves back
where? Into
the Urstoff?  

What has become of Knights in GR? The Castles? The quest
for the Grail?  Religious quests in GR are perversions of
the historical
quests. In one story in GR,  the Sangraal, the Holy Grail of
Arthurian legend is
now but a replica, methyl metchacrylate, the blood of
Christ, Pointsman is member of the round (oil & plastics)
table and the Castle is  a complex physical/imaginative
structure--religious
structure in the realm of Blicero. 

In "The Quest Narrative" in his THE POETICS of PROSE,
Tzvetan Todorov says, "[T]he quest for the Grail is the
quest for a code. To find the Grail is to learn how to
decipher the divine language." Gravity's R. may be read as a
parodic fictionalization of the quest for the Logos.  

Logos:  Philosophy. a. In pre-Socratic philosophy, the
principle governing the cosmos, the source of this
principle, or human reasoning about the cosmos. b. Among the
Sophists, the topics of rational argument or the arguments
themselves. c. In Stoicism, the active, material, rational
principle of the cosmos; nous. Identified with God, it is
the source of all activity and generation and is the power
of reason residing in the human soul. 2. Judaism. a. In
biblical Judaism, the word of God, which itself has creative
power and is God's medium of communication with the human
race. b. In Hellenistic Judaism, a hypostasis associated
with divine wisdom. 3. Theology. In Saint John's Gospel,
especially in the prologue (1:1-14), the creative word of
God, which is itself God and incarnate in Jesus. In this
sense, also called Word. 

Note the importance of names ti the Herero in the stuff i
posted from Herero Heroes. 

"The Herero boy, long tormented by missionaries into a fear
of Christian sins, jackal-ghosts, potent European
strand-wolves, pursuing him, seeking to feed his soul, the
precious worm that lived along his backbone, now tried to
cage his old gods, snare them in words, give them away,
savage, paralysed, to this scholarly white who seemed so in
love with language. Carrying in his kit a copy of the Duino
Elegies, just of the presses when he embarked for Sudwest, a
gift from Mother at the boat, the oder of new ink dizzying
his nights as the old freighter plunged tropic after
tropic
until the constellations, like new stars of
Pain-land, had become all familiar and the earth's seasons
reversed...

Reversed seasons? Yes, a Pynchon favorite, and we missed
this in Mondaugen. 

The linguist Michael Krauss says that as many as 3,000
languages, comprising half of all the words on earth, are
doomed to silence in the next century
.210 of the original
300 or more languages once spoken in the United States and
Canada remain in use or in memory; 175 are spoken in the
United States
.Only 250 languages in the entire world have
at least a million speakers, considered the necessary safety
level as globalization homogenizes every nation, every
village, no matter how remote. 


In August 2000 Harper's Magazine see "The Last Word" by Earl
Shorris

What he had described was Agayun, the Chrisitan notion of
God, which arrived with the white missionaries in the
nineteenth century. Ellam Yau is the Yup'ik phrase sometimes
translated as God, though it has no such meaning. Ella means
consciousness and world or universe; in other contexts, it
means outdoors, weather, and air.  Yua is the more complex
notion, for it is the possessive form of yuk, which means
person, and what can person own in the natural world other
than his or her personhood? The Yupiit have a word for
consciousness, another for mind, yet another for the
physical brain itself, and then there is this business of
yua. According to Tacuk, if a person sees a piece of
driftwood on the frozen tundra, he or she must turn it over
to expose the other side to the air. It is a gift to the yua
of the wood. If one behaves that way toward the wood,
perhaps one day the wood will return the favor. Hunting and
gathering follow the same rules: the seal, salmon, herring,
duck, mo!
ose, caribou, cloud-berry, all things living and
inanimate-all have this yua, and all are deserving of
kindness. Was this pantheism, foolishness, a system of
morals? What would Kant say? Was this a version of the
categorical imperative "Act only on that maxim through which
you can at the same time will it should become a universal
law"? Ellam Yua-in two words ethics is born of metaphysics.
Or is it the other way around? 

In Chapter 79 of Moby-Dick ("The Prairie"), the whale, like
the rocket, cannot be captured by the word. 

"If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages,
could not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder
and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to
read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put
that brow before you. Read it if you can." 

The love of language and the quest for the logos, another
Pynchon/Melville paradox. So when Slothrop is reading his
Plastic man (irony) "something about the man (Sir S.D.
Truck) despite obvious membership in the plot, keeps him
listening
an innocence, maybe a try at being friendly in the
only way he has available, sharing what engages and runs
him, a love of the Word.""207

"But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and grasping there
with that great iron hook-poor Queequeg, I suppose, only
prayed to his Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of
his gods. Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother,
thought I, as I drew in and then slacked off the rope to
every swell of the sea-what matters it after all? Are you
not the precious image of each and all of us men in this
whaling worlds? That unsounded ocean you gasp in is Life;
those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and
what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and
peril, poor lad." 
---Moby-Dick, "The Monkey-Rope, Chapter 72