Pynchon as propaganda

[jbor]

on 8/4/03 12:15 PM, Paul Mackin at paul.mackin at verizon.net wrote:

> 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).

No, it isn't what I'm saying. There's no reference in the paragraph to the
soldiers' religious faith(s), except the comment that they were "holding on
to what they could" while they were in the garrison-churches listening to
the (Christian) chaplains preaching. This to me implies that the soldiers
held a range of different faiths and beliefs, which is accurate and fair
enough.

I'm not trying to say that any one faith or no faith is right over all else.
I'm saying that this paragraph works by opposing the Christian belief in
life after death to the cold finality of only death.

> But to me the content of the
> religion or the chaplains
> preaching is fairly irrelevant.

Then why are these mentioned at all? I agree with you that the text doesn't
support interpretations which say that the clergymen are paid stooges and
hypocrites who are only there to brainwash the men into going out and doing
more fighting and killing. That's pretty clearly a distortion and a
diminishment of the text, though I will admit that the fact that the
clergymen are "working for the army" is part of the whole terrible irony
which the narrator perceives. But it seems to me that if you overlook the
chaplains and that list of five (give or take) core tenets of Christianity
then there's not a whole lot left to the passage. For instance, I can't see
why else the narrator is all of a sudden so amazed and appalled, and why
this is being communicated to the reader so emphatically ("There were
*actually* soldiers ... ", "It *really* happened ... ", emphasis added). I
think the "It really happened" exclamation refers not simply to soldiers
dying on the battlefield which, in the context of WWII (or any war for that
matter), is unextraordinary in itself, but to the whole sorry sequence,
including the chaplains, including the *Christian* solaces they were trying
to impart to the men, and including the psychological and emotional agony of
the soldiers "holding on to what they could" but at the same time acutely
aware that they were probably going out to die. And, nailing the irony and
the poignancy of it all, within the narrative space of the passage some of
the soldiers are going to die, do die and have died.

best

    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.
                                        (GR 693)