Pynchon as propaganda

[jbor]

>> All that aside, I'm more than happy to acknowledge my error and
>> dissociate myself from any assertion that it is a term which has *never*
>> been used in Christian theology,
 
on 8/4/03 2:13 AM, s~Z at keithsz at concentric.net wrote:

> Yeah, that and saying it derives from Sartre and Heidegger.

That *was* the error. However, it was the immediate connection I made when
reading the paragraph. Concepts like God and Death and Redemption and
Salvation are capital-letter constructs in Christianity. Conversely, the
concept of Nothingness is a capital-letter construct in Sartre and
Heidegger, and I wouldn't say it is that in Christianity. But I can see the
logic in both the Calvinist/Wesleyian (man's absolute insignificance in the
Scheme of things) and the Eckhardt (the soul's Oneness in God) usages as
applied to the context. My argument would still be that the existentialist
connotations of the term are very tangible, and that it does stand out in
the list for that very reason.

>> And, still, the poignant tone and irony of the passage does reside in
>> that
>> disconnect between what the chaplains preach to the men, the pathos of the
>> soldiers "holding on to what they could", and the cold, hard finality of
>> death, death envisaged from an overtly atheistic standpoint: "There were
>> actually soldiers, dead now .... "

> Even when a theist I realized people died.

No, you're missing or avoiding my point. In the paragraph the soldiers are
dead. Full stop, that's all she wrote. But just before they went off to die
the chaplains had preached to them about a glorious "life after death". It's
poignant and ironic. The tone and substance of the passage, and the way it
has been constructed, relies on the ontological contrast, on the opposition
of Christian and atheist beliefs. If there is a life after death then the
chaplains were right, the dead soldiers are all up there shooting pool with
Peter and Paul, and the passage is pointless. It's more than just a question
of where the reader is coming from; it's the way in which the paragraph has
been constructed by the writer.

best