TPPM (9): Constipation

[Dave Monroe]

"In addition, there is all the glamorous folklore
surrounding writer's block, an affliction known
sometimes to resolve itself dramatically and without
warning, much like constipation, and (hence?) finding
wide sympathy among readers."

http://www.vheissu.org/bio/eng_sloth.htm

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/sloth.html

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html
 

"much like constipation"

Cf. ...

>From Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The
Psychoanalytical Meaning of History  (Ed. Christopher
Lasch.  Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1985 [1959]), Ch.
XIV, "The Protestant Era," pp. 202-33 ...

Luther describes the circumstances under which he
received the illumination which became the fundamental
axiom of the Protestant Reformation--the doctrine of
justification by faith--in the following words:

These words "just" and "justice of God" were a
thunderbolt in my conscience.... but once when I was
in the tower I was meditating on those words, "the
just lives by faith," "justice of God," I soon had the
thought whether we ought to live justified by faith,
and God's justice ought to be the salvation of every
believer, and soon my soul was revived.  Therefore it
is God's justice which justifies and saves us.  And
these words became a sweeter message for me.  This
knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy.

... It was in the tower of the Wittenberg monastery,
where the privy was located.  Grisar explains, "in
olden times it was very usual to establish the
adjunct on the city walls and its towers, the sewage
having egress outside the town boundaries."
   Luther's candor has been too much for the
Lutherans.  Recognizing the crucial importance of the
"experience in the tower," the Thurmleibnis, as it is
called in Lutheran hagiography, Lutheran scholars have
either monkeyed with the texts in an attempt to
separate the tower from the privy, or else interpreted
the tower not as a geographical location but as an
allegory of iritual captivity. It was left to the
Jesuit Father Grisar to recover the facts ....  (202)

And see as well ...

Wolfley, Lawrence.  "Repression’s Rainbow:
   The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon’s
   Big Novel." PMLA 92:5 (October 1977): 873-89.

Also ...

Scatology and the Postmodern Subject: Tyrone
Slothrop's Excremental Encounters n Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow 

http://www.majorweather.com/projects/000039.html


	
		
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