re Re: death and afterlife in Pynchon's fiction WAS GR 'Streets'

[pynchonoid]

I respect your opinion, Otto, having heard it several
times before, and I also believe that, in showing how
institutionalized religion produces so many negative
effects, Pynchon's fiction shows some deep-seated
hostility towards same.

But I don't think you can suport the sweeping
statement (which I have excerpted from your longer
post, below) for a simple reason:  Pynchon's fictional
universe does, in fact, include an afterlife, realms
inhabited by characters who have passed through the
interface that separates life from death.  

Whatever Pynchon's novels have to say about religion
(or belief in any system characterized by hierarchical
power arrangements), they also affirm a cosmology that
includes the persistence of life (individual
personality, too) after death, and in other realms
(Lyle Bland's travels, for example) beyond those which
are described by Enlightenment and post-Enlightment
science; this is a given in Pynchon's fictional
universe.

His fiction does affirm the possibility that the
afterlife is not the streets-paved-with-gold of the
Christian Heaven; it's described at times as a boring
or even frighteningly bureaucratic, Kafkaesque realm. 


Pynchon also moves characters (not "dead" yet) into
states of consciousness that are described in
spiritual and religious literature but which are not
supported by Enlightenment and post-Enlightment
science.  Again, this is a given in the fictional
universe that he creates. 

So, I think Pynchon's presentation of death and what
comes after death, and what lies beyond the reach of
human senses (and their technological extensions) is
quite a bit more nuanced than your representation of
it.

-Doug

Otto:
> >> But
> the novel says that in
> reality there's no happy ending, just death when
> it's over. 

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