In the name of The Rocket

[Paul Mackin]

On Sat, 2003-04-19 at 09:22, Mutualcode at aol.com wrote:
> 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.

Interesting contribution I think. Not at odds with what Vidal accused
Pynchon of doing. Except that for Gore it was something to deplore. 

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

I hate to tell you what I almost did with the book GR upon reading that
epigraph. Oh no, not that, I said to myself. Little did I know then.

P.