In the name of The Rocket

[Mutualcode at aol.com]

In a message dated 4/19/2003 7:55:44 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
paul.mackin at verizon.net writes:


> I think we can assume in our reading that Pynchon is not stupid, knows
> it's the generals who send the men out to their deaths, not the
> chaplains or belief in redemption and salvation.
> 

GR is about a new religion, or a new form of that perennial
human requirement. The old dispensations were not capable
of incorporating the level of being (and its opposite) made
possible by the sequence of scientific and technological
advances embodied in the rocket, atomic weapons, info
processing, multi-national corporations and the factory system,
etc. Pudding, I think, is a figure for the submission of the
older forms to the strange new half-animate force which is
sweeping away all those older versions of sacrality, and,
beginning to organize society around its own needs.

It's not so much that GR is anti-religious, or that the chaplains
are guilty of manipulation, as that they are quaint- irrelevant. 
They, and the older forms, have been passed over by a new
form of The Angel, and the counter-force, for the moment at
least, is in serious disarray.

GR, as fronted by Von Braun, is a seduction- not a put down 
of religion- but an invitation to a new communion.

respectfully 
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