MDDM Ch. 65 strange inconsistencies

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/28/02 7:01:57 AM, davidmmonroe at yahoo.com writes:

<< 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....

[...]

  

I think that's correct- i.e., the revolutionary
aspect of the idea is downplayed, but mightn't
that be because of a latent recognition (and fear)
of Pynchon's aim to demonstrate the truly
damaging effects of that belief as iterated 
through the ages? But it is not just the belief 
in the resurrection of the body on which he
sets his sights, it seems to me, but the 
narsicisstic infatuation with what passes for
*identity* as it has evolved in the west, and
the appeal to that infatuation by large cultural
forces involved in commerce and control.