Christianity and Pynchon

[Otto]

There may be many temporary truths under the roof of po-mo, but no eternal
ones.

By the way, I think the literary "taste" has changed. I haven't read "The
Corrections" yet, but read some reviews about it:

"Anyhow, you have to expect a degree of indeterminacy in an ambitious novel
these days; an intricately, perfectly paranoid book like Pynchon's ''Crying
of Lot 49,'' in which everything seems to have some sinister relation to
everything else, now seems as quaintly formalist as ''The Waste Land.''
Franzen coyly tips his hat to several forebears along the way: he gives us a
Web address called gaddisfly.com (Franzen's title, of course, echoes that of
William Gaddis's novel ''The Recognitions''), a magician named Alain
Gregarius, a ''brainy-looking'' cruise-ship passenger named Roth, a slasher
movie called ''Moody Fruit,'' even a city park with the same name (Waindell)
as the college where Nabokov's Pnin teaches. And some of the white noise in
Alfred's head -- cirruslike clusterings of very high frequencies off in deep
stratosphere behind his ears'' -- must derive from Don DeLillo. These shadow
presences announce that Franzen likes his fiction smart and larky, with
glimpses of scary depths and a flirtatious, on-and-off relationship with
realism. But you already knew that. And the success of David Foster
Wallace's epic, minutely interconnected, ultimately unresolved ''Infinite
Jest'' has made a novel like ''The Corrections'' -- a far less dense and
demanding read -- seem part of a new mainstream, in which either teasing
hints of formalism dress up the randomness or irruptions of randomness juice
up the formalism. (Choose one. Or not.) Whether or not this is a good idea
is a matter of taste -- and a debate dating back to the Dionysians versus
the Apollonians."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/09/books/review/09GATESTW.html

The review does not include the word "postmodern"

"In 1996, Franzen made a reckless public vow. He did it in the pages of
Harper's, in a bitter, eloquent, intensely personal essay titled "Perchance
to Dream: In an Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels." The big socially
engaged novel was dead, he declared, killed off by TV. Serious postmodern
novelists like Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo were doomed to
irrelevance. Contemporary readers wanted entertainment, not news, engaging
stories, not ideology. This knowledge filled him with despair."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/magazine/02FRANZEN.html

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Millison" <millison at online-journalist.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, August 02, 2002 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: Christianity and Pynchon


>
> >
> >I don't smash Christianity -- postmodernist literature smashes religion,
> >ideology, belief, history, science: everything that makes you bow down,
pray
> >and offer sacrifices to.
>
> Except the exalted evangelists of "Po-Mo", of course.
>
>  >Everything that tells that it's the only truth &
> >all the others are false
>
> See above.

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