chaplains

[pynchonoid]

"There were men called 'army chaplains.' They preached
inside some of these buildings. There were actually
soldiers, dead now, who sat or stood, and listened.
Holding on to what they could. Then they went out, and
some died before they got back inside a
garrison-church again. Clergymen, working for the
army, stood up and talked to the men who were going to
die about God, death, nothingness, redemption,
salvation. It really happened. It was quite common."
-Gravity's Rainbow, p. 693

jbor:
>It's a poignant and moving passage, and it annoyed me
>to see it being
>wielded as propaganda. I am grateful, however, for
>the discussion.

I'm not sure what paranoid fantasies (or wishful
thinking, jbor just trying to start an argument again)
produce the phrase "wielded as propaganda" -- I've
offered this GR passage as a touchstone for perceiving
the current war in Iraq, to stiumulate thought and
discussion, at which I've succeeded, grateful for the
opportunity to give some P-listers something
Pynchon-related to talk about.  You're welcome.

It's not a stretch to say that what the chaplains and
soldiers are doing here comes within the context of
what Pynchon elsewhere in the novel calls the baby
Jesus con-game; religion is one of the institutions
used to get some people to submit and take part in the
War that never ends without seriously questioning why.

"the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang
that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the
Home Service programme, let's not forget Mr. Noel
Coward so stylish and cute about death and the
afterlife, packin them into the Duchess for the fourth
year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us how
grand it all is over here how much fun. Walt Disney
causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather
like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among
the waite-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen
around a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone,
half-dollar with the grinning sun peering up under
Liberty's wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88
fell--what do you think, it's a children's story? 
There aren't any. The children are away dreaming, but
the Empire has no place for dreams and it's Adults
Only in here tonight"
Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 134-135

At the same time (bath/and, not either/or) the
chaplain passage underscores just what a source of
strength religious faith can be, even as it
underscores the limits of what that faith can
accomplish. There's more than a hint of something
quite a bit more sinister, too, especially if you read
this passage in the context of the novel's opening
epigram.  As in Bush's war on Iraq today, the War in
GR is not "killing" people, it's liberating them,
permitting them to move to the afterlife -- a place
that, in GR if not in Bush's fantasies, may not in
fact offer the pie-in-the-sky that the chaplains
promise: "Clergymen, working for the army, stood up
and talked to the men who were going to die about God,
death, nothingness, redemption, salvation." Pynchon's
sequence of terms here -- following the line of
discourse offered by the chaplains -- leads to
redemption and salvation, what Christianity promises
the dead GIs instead of the death and nothingness they
may fear:  this persists in the current war on Iraq,
of course, the newspapers are full of accounts of
chaplains who make exactly this promise to their GI
flock and that's why GIs are getting baptized on the
battlefield; not so different from the Islamic
warrior's promise of Paradise, that is offered to
motivate the troops who face coaltion frorces.. 

Apart from the arbitrary, whimsical assignment of
Sartre as the source for "nothingness" here in
Pynchon's text, jbor's quite wrong about "nothingness"
and Christianity, too.  Christian cosmology includes
many significant voids, perhaps none greater than that
from which God creates the world; also very important
(and topical, here in the run-up to Easter) is the
negative space occupied by Christ from the time he
gives up the ghost on the Cross and is resurrected on
Easter Sunday.  Meister Eckart and other Christian
mystics -- among many other theologians -- contemplate
and comment upon the nothingness that lies beyond the
limits of human perception and how it relates to the
concept of God.

-Doug







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