MDDM World-as-text

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> And I certainly think that these similarities between the medieval worldview
> and postmodernism are something which Pynchon is alluding to in the
> 'Luddite' essay, when he talks about the 18th C. nostalgia for the Gothic,
> and "magic", and the "Age of Miracles".


> 
> [...]
> 
> The craze for Gothic fiction after 'The Castle of Otranto' was grounded, I
> suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythical time
> which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less
> literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds
> of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons,
> spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then.
> What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated
> into mere machinery. Blake's dark Satanic mills represented an old magic
> that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being more and more
> secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence
> of God and afterlife, for salvation - bodily resurrection, if possible -
> remained.
> 
> [...]
> 
> http://parallel.park.uga.edu/~arburke/texts/luddite.html



> The difference is, of course, that postmodernism doesn't fall back on faith
> in a Christian God as the ultimate or pre-eminent "truth". There is no such
> thing as the "final cause" outside human experience/belief/perception, or,
> more accurately, there is a recognition that different individuals and
> different cultures have different belief systems and different conceptions
> of what that "final cause" is, or even of whether there is such a thing as a
> "final cause" (ontology). It's a healthy thing, I think, to challenge the
> assumption that the Christian story of the world is the "true" story,
> Christianity having been responsible for "ev'ry Crusade, Inquisition,
> Sectarian War, the millions of lives, the seas of blood" (_M&D_ 75-6), as
> Pynchon's Ethelmer notes.
> 
> best




In the essay P talks about religion generally. He talks about the human
yearning for the miraculous. And he discusses secularization. This is
obviously a major theme of his fictions. 



"As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism
and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and
afterlife , for salvation - bodily resurrection, if possible -
remained."




"The Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening
were only two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of
Reason, a front which included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as
Luddites and the Gothic novel." 


Radicalism, Freemasonry, the Gothic novel, the Luddites. 



Each in its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up
elements of faith, however ''irrational,'' to an emerging
technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing.
''Gothic'' became code for ''medieval,'' and that has remained code for
''miraculous,'' on through Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of-the-century tarot
cards, space opera in the pulps and the comics, down to ''Star Wars''
and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery. 


P never mentions postmodernism. But I can understand how a very broad
definition of postmodernism could be what P is alluding to here.
However, the philosophical and anti-Christian (more specifically the
anti-Catholic) argument that is being posted here is not supported by
what P says in this essay. 

The issue that Paul is raising is an intriguing one, but I'm not sure
that it fits the anti-chrisitan postmodernism that you and Otto are
talking about.