GR: Help with the Preterite and Elite

[Paul Mackin]

On Nov 3, 2005, at 8:18 PM, Billy Internicola wrote:

> New guy here, gleaning a lot from the GRGR , thank you all...
> Here's my question, and forgive me as I'm sure this is a "basic"  
> Pynchon question.
>
> I understand that Pynchon has borrowed his conception of the  
> preterite and elite from protestant theology, which I am pretty  
> well familiar with.
> I assume that Pynchon is not interested in the idea as it was  
> conceived and as it pertains to faith.

He's at least  interested in it to the extent that a Slothrup ancestor

  "wrote a long tract about it  . . . called On Preterition. It had  
to be published in England, and is among the first books to've been  
not only banned but also ceremonially burned in Boston. Nobody wanted  
to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he  
chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these  
"second Sheep," without whom there'd be no elect."

Also an actual early New England  Pynchon wrote a tract deemed  
heretical.


> What I'm less sure of is, is the preterite and elite just another  
> dichotomy like all the rest in his work: us vs. them, black/white,  
> rossini/beethoven etc. and Pynchon is simply showing us that it is  
> a particularly insipent way in which humans divide and alienate one  
> another ?
> OR
> is Pynchon, for lack of a more sophisticated word, "siding" with  
> the preterite and pointing out the cruelty and inhumanity of the  
> elite, perhaps in a manner that a communist would talk of rich  
> capitalists and the proletariat? Sometimes I've thought of Pynchon  
> as the most "preterite" of the (mostly)  agreed upon artistic  
> geniuses of modern times, in the sense that more than any other I  
> can think of , he fully immerses himself in "low" art. ( by the  
> way, don't the Simpsons cameos just kill you?)
>
> I have a feeling folks are going to answer "both" but as this is a  
> crucial theme to GR, I thought it'd be helpful to start discussing  
> it early on.
> Cheers.

One thing I've wondered is whether the word "preterite" as opposed to  
"preterition" is also a Christian doctrinal term. Dictionaries don't  
seem to define it in that sense but only as pertaining to the  past  
or substantively as the grammatical past tense.
>
>
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