Sea Voyages & Insanity

[Doug Millison]

Thanks for passing that along, Terrance. I think Dewey
and McClure are onto something here, re Pynchon as a
"religious writer" and M&D being a "religious novel."
I guess such notions aren't beyond the pale of
accepted criticism after all.

> The narrative presence of Wicks Cherrycoke turns
> Mason &
> Dixon into an 
> explicitly religious novel that explores the damaged
> legacy
> of Christianity, 
> the emerging muscle of the Enlightenment and,
> finding both
> systems wanting 
> for largely the same reasons, turning to the most
> unexpected
> source-the 
> mysticism of the East-for (re)solution.
> 
> See Dewey's note #2 where he cites John A. McClure's
> essay,
> an essay that I 
> have mentioned here, wherein McClure argues,
> convincingly,
> that "Pynchon  is 
> the most exciting religious writer of our time." 
> 
> But Dewey is perhaps too eager to discover an
> Eastern
> "(re)solution."  My own reading will focus on the
> turning
> East that is  in fact a turning full 
> circle to American Christianity. But, I will argue,
> there is
> not a solution or resolution, but a conflict
> paradoxically
> sustained.  
> 
> The editors of the volume on M&D note that two camps
> of 
> Pynchon scholarship have developed. We could see
> these as 
> the camp of   secular postmodern "satires" (see
> Weisenburger's Fables of Subversion, his
> introduction is a
> near perfect synopsis of the application of
> Postmodern
> theory) and the camp that reads a deep "religious
> contemplation" that suggests, if only a wick waiting
> for a
> spark, that profane man or non religious man
> (Eliade) may
> not have extinguished all that is sacred.  Again,  I
> think
> Melville's novels and stories are all over M&D. 


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