Pynchon as propaganda

[Paul Mackin]

On Tue, 2003-04-08 at 04:39, jbor wrote:
> 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.

The soldiers wouldn't be there listening if they didn't feel some kind
of connection with the chaplain's creed. In the American army at least
attendance is optional. Don't know about the German army.
> 
> 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.

It may work for you. I think religious belief is essentially
unchallengeable. It's impossible therefore to set up much of an
opposition between it and the fact of mortal death (on the battlefield
and off). Also, to a believing Christian mortal death is only temporary.

> 
> > 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, 

Yes, I understand, you are not one Otto and Mutualcode here :-)

> 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.

I don't think the army's hiring chaplains is an irony any more than its
hiring medics. The chaplains dispense religious succor and the medics
dispense morphine. The succor doesn't prevent death and the morphine
doesn't grow back the limb that has been blown off.


>  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.

You must not overlook the chaplains and the religion. They represent the
effort to endure in the face of what must be sheer terror. 


>  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,


Around where I live (within a hundred miles) there are many battlefields
of the American Civil War. Hoards of people visit these spaces and stand
in awe thinking of the momentous and shocking events that took place
"right here where we're standing" and they can be heard to say "it's
hard to realize all THAT actually happened." I don't think the tourists
are mainly thinking of the incompetency of the generals. They are
thinking of the bravery and suffering of the men.

>  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.


Hey, I respect your ideas. But on this one we're just going to have to
disagree.Glad we can do so without calling each other neofascists or
Holocaust Deniers. :-)




P.
> 
> 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)
> 
> 
>