About that book ...

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> A visitor is "perhaps being led to meditate upon Punishment,-- or upon
> Commerce...for Commerce without Slavery is unthinkable, whilst Slavery must
> ever include, as an essential Term, the Gallows,-- Slavery without the
> Gallows being as hollow and waste a Proceeding, as a Crusade without the
> Cross" (M&D, for those of you familiar with it, p108).
> 
> One should hesitate before indulging in a biblical (the Gospel according to
> His Muchness) reading here. Consider, instead, the way Pynchon links the
> different terms. Commerce, as a topic to meditate upon, is an alternative to
> punishment. This is qualified by the assumption that commerce necessarily
> includes slavery, which in turn necessarily requires the gallows. So
> punishment is equated with the gallows, ie as capital punishment; and, in
> the C18th, of course, this was a lot more common - ie as a punishment for a
> wider range of so-called crimes - than it is at the end of the civilised
> C20th. Capital punishment has symbolic importance: it allows the institution
> of slavery to survive, even prosper, unchallenged (just as a crusade, any
> crusade, is justified once we know we have the appropriate god on our side).
> 
> This passage, therefore, includes both C18th 'facts' (the generous use of
> hanging to enforce observance of this or that 'law') and also late-C20th
> sensibility (I suspect we're rather more sceptical about crusades now). Yet
> the paragraph has opened with a delightfully impressionist moment, straight
> out of Manet (or Zola): "a pair of Gallows, simplified to Penstrokes in the
> glare of this Ocean sky". Furthermore, the passage reminds us of Mason's
> line in spectator sports (which is then taken up by the rest of the
> chapter). It reminds us (as does the exchange between Cherrycoke and Mr
> LeSpark, p105) of the global economy that has politicised the scientific
> endeavour of Mason/Dixon. Signifiers one and all, with no (ultimate)
> signified to establish meaning once and for all.
> 
> So - from Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History": "Genealogy does not
> oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher
> might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary,
> it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and
> indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for 'origins'" (in
> Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p140).


I never hesitate to indulge in reading Pynchon with the bible and all
manner of religious texts  close to  hand. His Muchness is our narrator
and his knowledge of 
biblical/historical events  is surpassed only by the author's. 
Although tempting, reading this passage as a statement by the author,
above and beyond the narrator, I submit, is a mistake. Several critics
have done just this. But why? 
There is nothing in the text, as far as I can tell, to justify this. 
There are times when Pynchon addresses the reader directly, he comments
on Wicks or on Wick's tale, but this is not one of them. This is Wicks
and we can't simply discount the biblical allusions of the Reverend.
Maybe I'm misreading you here? 


The Cross and the Virgin  in Pynchon's V. is replaced by the Dynamo (we
can attribute this directly to P's reading of Henry Adams--

"As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines , he
began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much
as the early Christians felt about the cross."

Adams, continues to be, the most important text for understanding
Pynchon. 

In GR the cross is replaced by the Rocket (with a capital R). Here it is
the Gallows, another machine of Death, constructed at Munden's fort,
like the Rocket,  with Slave labor. The Crusade is now a global Commerce
that includes the selling of men, women and children.  St. Paul's as a 
gallows, I am reminded of St. Paul's in Hardy's Jude The Obscure. 

In any event, you've got me reading Foucault again. 


To late to type it up just now, but see The History of Sexuality, Volume
I. 

'IT WAS LIFE MORE THAN LAW that became the issue of
        political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through
        affirmations concerning rights. The 'right' to life, to one's
        body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and
        beyond all the oppressions or 'alienations', the 'right' to
        rediscover that one is and all that one can be, this 'right' -
        which the classical juridical system was incapable of
        comprehending - was the political response to all those new
        procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the
        traditional right of sovereignty'

        (Foucault 1976c: p.145).


Pynchon returns again and again, to the bible. Far more important than
Foucault, I think, is the story of Abraham and Isaac. 



http://users.interact.net.au/~pmir/foucaubio.htm