A sketch of Pynchonian politics

[Jane O' Sweet]

Richard Fiero wrote:
> 
> Most of the back and forth is below but briefly Jane O' Sweet
> responded to Phil Wise's suggestion that Pynchon takes an
> anti-capitalist stance by stating that Pynchon's texts are
> about religion which in turn may be about politics/economics at
> times. Now whenever Jane mentions religion, it's fingernails on
> a blackboard to me. 

Very busy, sorry, I will not post on this until I can write
a
complete thought. I'm getting very busy, gunna get even
busier, students are 
busy writing their final papers and I'll have to read the
rough drafts, bibs, 
abstracts, and return these and read the final papers and
put in the grades and 
I'll be teaching all of June and July and you know summer
classes are simply 
packed, condensed and silly really but hey whacha gunna
do...sadly I won't be able to teach  New Comers this summer,
my favorite thing to do next to lying in an ice cold vermont
lake in august and thanking the gods for all my
blessings...but this is my life. 

Sorry about the religion, damn, I guess I just can't
convince anyone but Terrance on this one, oh well, but I've
only been working on this for oh, a very long time, like
since I saw a little happening called Entropy and wrote a
review,  and I think I know what the hell I'm talking about,
but god knows there isn't much tolerance in these tolerant
postmodern times for religion so...but of course it's
essential to those Pynchonian texts, it's not like I'm
claiming that the holocaust in central to GR or that
Weissmann is the hero of GR when the text tells that these
claims can't be supported but oh well, it's just that so
many of P's most important sources are religious texts and
well ever since his first story he's been focused on
religion and well I've said all I want to say on the subject
so....but just consider it OK. I guess if argue that Jack,
no not JFK, but the old Beat was a RC too I'd be shot at
high moon, but so it goes....


Now surely, I think, religion must be about
> something unless it's about nothing and that something is the
> same thing that Western tragedy is about. Now which is prior
> and who cares? 


Western Tragedy, Greek that is. I don't really know what
"tragedy" is, since we are stuck with what has always been,
even in Aristotle's incomplete definition, a clouded, that
is 
fragmented definition that endures in the modern critical
lexicon.

 Fragmentation! Now that's the word
for our Mr. Pynchon, kinda like alienation after to Mr.
Eliot. 

You know Plato had a problem with tragedy and  dramatic arts
and so he smashed these in his *Republic* and Plato's ideas
on this became the basis of hostility toward theater in the
Christian era.  So Platonic notions of mimesis are at the
very heart, for example, of Augustine's rejection of
dramatic art in the *Soliloquia* and tragedy as a cathartic
experience in the *Confessions*. But I agree with those that
can't stand to box up literature and those that have made
very useful boxes. Frye comes to mind, tragedy he says
is..., satire he says is..., But we may concede that an
equivalent fuzziness grows on all conventional terms and so
with the exception of those paradigm shifting POMOs, genres
(among them, epic, romance, novel,
allegory, parody. satire), and all genre-based "literary
criticism" is a discourse shot through with conventional
terms that do not bear but hairy definitions.