$2.4 million for Kerouac scroll

[Otto]

I asked:
>
> >What's P's religion?
>

because you wrote:
> In P's religion, Life doesn't tell death to fuck off,<
which gave me the impression that you knew.

> What's Kerouac's religion?
>

As far as I know he was talking about Zen, drinking Tea and Kites in "The
Dharma Bums."

> What's Joyce's religion?

Anti-Catholic!

>
[snip]
> of course if we don't use the
> word religion we will simply substitute another
> word for it, philosophy maybe, though that wouldn't be
> right, or we could say that religion should not be
> said to be Peeee's or Kay's or Jay's, or even
> said to be present in their texts, but that wouldn't be right
> either. so religion is the term I like best because
> it describes what we find in the books these men have written.

If we "simply substitute another word for it" we do exactly what
postmodernism says about logocentrism and that's how I see P's treatment of
religious and/or metaphysical questions. He takes all these philosophical
discourses for serious and (therefor logically) proves this way that they
are just logocentric constructions, changing one false term of an assumed
"center" for another as you do with "unity" here - there's no evidence in
his fiction that the man Pynchon believes in such a "unity" of some sort. He
just sets the "unity" of (for example) the Herero-religion against the
divided idea of Heaven and Hell of Christianity, elect and preterite in
Puritanism (structurally Marxism fits as well here), but he does not say
that this or that way he regards as "true."

> We might define it as a totalizing commitment to a
> particular construct of ultimate reality, including
> the nature of humanity, the significance of history,
> and the governance of the cosmos; not ruling out of course
> the existance of spiritual forces both malign and benevolent. Of
> course feel free to define it as "religion" or to
> cite some character in P's fiction and argue that
> he/she represents P's religion or not-religion.
> I think the most important sourse for P's religion,
> for P period, is Henry Adams. If P agrees with WC on
> facts and history, does he disagree with Adams?
>
> "Man created nothing." Henry Adams
>

No, not necessarily, why?

> 1,500 years, all those block busting names he drops,
> Galileo, Kepler, Spinoza, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton,
> all religious men, all paranoid thinkers, men of faith,
> men that believed in unity. Perhaps within this unity
> we can set Puritan against Herero and discover P's
> religion?
>

No - their paranoia is exemplified by their belief in "unity" - everything
in the creation connected to everything isn't "freedom" but the contrary is
said somewhere in GR.

I very much appreciated TRESPASSING LIMITS: PYNCHON'S IRONY AND THE LAW OF
THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE, by FRANCISCO COLLADO-RODRIGUEZA, who can say it much
better than me. Because this is no seminar I let him do the work.

Otto

from:
http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/collado24.htm
which opens this way:

"The Law of the Excluded Middle, that currently proclaims that a statement
can only be true or false, is to a large extent responsible for the
categorical way western people conceive of reality. This Article traces the
Aristotelian origin of the Law and then proceeds to analyze the different
strategies Thomas Pynchon deployed from his short-story Entropy to his
latest novel Mason & Dixon, in order to comment on the implications of this
Law. The Author's ideological aim is understood here as an attempt both to
erode his readers' confidence in the validity of the Artistotelian Law and
to replace it by a new and more comprehensive paradigm.
(...)
And in order to do so, he goes back to investigate some scientific ideas
apparently related to the primordial pair of Order and Chaos, a dichotomy
that, as mentioned above, seems to be at the very roots of human
interpretation. However, as I also argue below, the inexhaustible author
does not simply advocate an option that would integrate opposites: final
integration, he also warns us, may end up in a notion remarkably similar to
a Freudian state of thanatic entropy.
(...)
Here the reader meets characters who change their names or that double each
other, and even the limits of textual reality are always under scrutiny: the
reader is watching a movie, contemplating a dream, reading a comic magazine,
and getting lost in a multilayered reality where the frontiers between the
different narrative genres and ontological levels are continuously blurred.
Once more, characters are divided in different, opposite types (such as the
cases of the post-quantum statistics expert Roger Mexico and the
traditionally behaviorist Pointsman) or they become ironic couples whose
ontological status is also unclear (the Komical Kamikazes Takeshi and
Ichizo). Spies, counterspies, false identities, reflecting characters are
all elements that frequently appear to radicalize the notion that limits are
not clear any longer, that stories have no beginning and no end, and that
the protagonist's quest for knowledge is bound to fail. Similarly anguished
by an excess of information, the reader is also bound to fail in his search
for coherence once categorical limits stop being clear.
(...)
in order to subvert the values of the Enlightenment, the ironic writer
resorts to a radical effect of decontextualization. He presents a story, set
in the eighteenth century, from a clear postmodernist perspective where life
is described as a text or a map and where poststructuralist critics will
have no problem to recognize the imprints of some of the most important
contemporary thinkers, ranging from Foucault to Derrida or Lacan. As
happened in his previous fiction, Pynchon stresses the values of different
theories and cultural beliefs that highlight the rule of complementarity,
indeterminacy
(...)
characteristic of postmodernism is the authorial possibility to present
alternative endings to the ones proposed in historical documents, and that
is precisely what Pynchon decides to do
(...)"

and ends:

"(...) as poststructuralist criticism has demonstrated, thinking in terms of
binary oppositions frequently implies the subordination of the second
element to the first (of Chaos to Order), to reverse the order of the
pairing would simply reduplicate the initial system. Subtle and ironic,
Pynchon chooses to continuously undermine such oppositions by stressing the
ambiguity of our surrounding universe, neither mythic integration nor
categorical either/or: both options only respond to our necessity to
narrativize, to map a reality whose meaning always escapes us despite the
fact that language, our tool to communicate, cannot easily escape from the
all-pervasive Law of the Excluded Middle."