MDDM Ch. 65 strange inconsistencies

[Dave Monroe]

>From Justin Scott Coe, "Haunting and Hunting: Bodily
Resurrection and the Occupation of History in Thomas
Pynchon's Mason & Dixon," Reconstruction, Vol. 2, No.
1 (Winter 2002) ...

   Just before publication of Mason & Dixon, Thomas
Pynchon wrote a review of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's
Love in the Time of Cholera, in which he says that "to
assert the resurrection of the body [is] today as
throughout history an unavoidably revolutionary idea"
("Heart's Eternal Vow"). That this revolutionary idea
is essentially a religious one is a fact that many
Pynchon critics attempt to placate by identifying in
his works a secularization of religious themes....

[...]

    Such representative recuperative exercises fly in
the face of Pynchon's direct assertions, in the above
and in earlier essays, such as "Is it OK to be a
Luddite?", that he is not being "Insufficiently
Serious" in his "violations of the laws of nature,"
especially "the big one, mortality itself." Again, in
"The Deadly Sins/Sloth," he recalls us back to "the
long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life
really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was
a story, with a beginning, middle and end. Belief was
intense, engagement deep and fatal." In "Luddite",
Pynchon traces this age to just before the eighteenth
century, the religious and historical "setting" for
Mason & Dixon when there was a

deep religious yearning for that earlier mythical time
which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In
ways more or 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. 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 (my emphases).

This statement, though flippant on the surface, is
evidence, not of any nostalgia Pynchon might have for
this Age of Miracles, but instead of the "deep
religious yearnings" which create nostalgia for
historical times and places, including a need to
believe in future times and places that extend beyond
the present life. Pynchon's latest novel takes up this
eighteenth century yearning and hunger for both
history and "futurity," and demonstrates that any
understanding of history, or of Pynchon, needs to take
into account his serious engagement with the
deep-seated religious beliefs on which America was
founded, and which continue to determine our future as
a nation....

http://www.reconstruction.ws/021/Haunting.htm

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/mason-dixon/resources.html

I believe Richard Romeo reminded us of this one a
short while ago ...

--- Otto <ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote:
> This is the one with the right questions:
> 
> Did a historical Jesus exist?
> by Jim Walker....

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