Pynchon as propaganda

[Paul Mackin]

On Mon, 2003-04-07 at 18:36, jbor wrote: 
> >> 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.

I feel the poignancy in soldiers going into combat with the strong
possibility of being killed trying to hold on to something to help them
through their terror. But I cannot see that any additional poignancy can
be pried out of the fact that dead soldiers' religious faith may not be
warranted (if that's what you are saying). All religious faith would
then be poignant because of course everyone dies. I know THAT's not your
point. I DO see that poignancy or extreme sadness would lie in the fact
that the men have died for a lost cause, or for an ignoble cause, or in
great pain, or before they are yet old enough to vote, or that they have
to die at all. But to me the content of the religion or the chaplains
preaching is fairly irrelevant. And of course it is not the chaplains
that cause the men to die. And the chaplains never promise the soldiers 
they will not die or never offer a guarantee that if they do die in
battle they will receive eternal happiness  This isn't Islam after all,
or do you think it's similar. (Or to get away from dying for a second,
men do not feel any better or worse about killing enemy soldiers because
of religious teachings--they kill because they have to) Finally, men do
not choose to die or accept death any more gladly because of their
religious faith.People with religious faith try to avoid death just as
assiduously as atheists do.

The truth of the matter is that chaplains and religious faith don't have
that much power over the course of events. They may sometimes make
people feel slightly better. 

No offense however

P.