$2.4 million for Kerouac scroll

[Swing Hammerswing]

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

I do. Like Kerouac, Farina, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway,
the list goes on and on, and this would be a list of the
catholics that became "anti-catholics" to use your term,   that
influence Thomas Pynchon most. But this is not a seminar so...


>
> > What's Kerouac's religion?
> >
>
>As far as I know he was talking about Zen, drinking Tea and Kites in "The
>Dharma Bums."

Yup, but he was roman catholic. I bet you didn't
know that. Why not? It's not a secret, it's a
fact and it's kinda important to know this fact.


How about richard farina?



>
> > What's Joyce's religion?
>
>Anti-Catholic!

He was a catholic too. If he were simply an anti-catholic as you
say here, we would not think so highly of the man.
He was anti-catholic not as those that hate and
kill catholics because they hate catholics and hate
christians and hate religion but as a catholic and an
irish catholic to boot. Did he hate ireland too? What would
joyce have written if he were not irish and not catholic and not
anti-catholic and anti-irish? Yes I know there is a
difference, but this aint no seminar so.
Maybe some great fiction, but not any of the books we
admire him for.




>
> >
>[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.


Here you make several points, first, I'm not sure
what you mean by postmodernism's logocentrism.
I don't disagee, just not sure. The term Unity here is
not me substituting one word for another, it's Henry
Adams' term.  I think P agrees with Adams. There is such a
center, a flux, in P's fiction after CL49.


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."

I didn't say anything about truth or "truth."

Does the Herero religion have unity?
Does GR look favorably at this unity if it exists?




>
> > 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?

No and why what?



>
> > 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.

YES!!!!! Their paranoia  is unity. Then there is the
logocentrism. Yes, yes, yes.



>
>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
>

An excellent essay, thanks 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."
>
>

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