Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[pynchonoid]

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:

> I can barely believe 

I can well imagine. 

Born-again Bush, Slayer of Evil-doers vs. Osama bin
Laden and his band of Islamic terrorists is one
religious war that has received a lot of attention
recently.  That's the religious war that forms the
"circa 2003" context for Pynchon's _1984_ Foreword. 

> The sentence we're talking about, the one which
> addresses "religious wars"
> and "fundamentalism" (xvi), explicitly refers to
> "exotic developments" since
> Orwell's time.

I'd say the attack by Islamic fundamentalists on the
Twin Towers has been a rather "exotic development",
what Bush calls the "battle of Iraq" in the ongoing
"War on Terrorism" (where the terrorists are Muslim
and the US is a Christian nation fighting Bush's
crusade).  I guess you don't see it that way.

> I'm beginning to wonder whether Pynchon's working
> with the same definition
> or understanding of "war" as the rest of us, or
> Orwell for that matter, let
> alone "religious" or "fascism" or anything else!

Pynchon has you thinking, at least. (Combine
cogitation with an open mind and Lord knows what can
happen!)

Pynchon's been pretty explicit about what he means by
War:



"Don't forget the real business of the War is buying
and selling. The murdering and the violence are
self-policing, and can be entrusted to
non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is
useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as
diversion from the real movements of the War. It
provides raw material to be recorded into History, so
that children may be taught History as sequences of
violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared
for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a
stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to
try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still
here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of
markets." (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 105)

"It means this War was never political at all, the
politics was all theater, all just to keep the people
distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated
instead by the needs of technology . . . by a
conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by
something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying,
'Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of
Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn
is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding,
funding, ahh more, more. . . . The real crises were
crises of allocation and priority, not among firms--it
was only staged to look that way--but among the
different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics,
Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by
the ruling elite . . . " (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 521)

"There's something still on, don't call it a 'war' if
it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate's gone down
a point or two [...] but Their enterprise goes on"
(Gravity's Rainbow, p. 628)



=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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