AtDTDA: General thoughts

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

For the Compassionate One:

http://www.goddessgift.com/goddess-myths/goddess_tara_white.htm

You've probably noticed that my searching for Pynchon family
history has ground to a halt. Other events have entered my life, 
but I'll be reading "Meritorious Price of Our Redemption" any day
now that I've got a card for the University's Library.

A few thoughts.

A novelist is a novelist is a novelist. First and foremost, OBA's an 
author [furthermore addicted to treacherously obvious forms of 
word play]. He's also one of the kings of obfuscation and 
misdirection, usually coiled up together in the same gesture. 
But let's call him a Satirist of epic dimensions with a poetic streak, 
kinda like the Dude's nominee for TRP's central role model, Dante.
Pynchon's central theme, as far as I can tell, is Heresy.

This boils down to family history: the founder of the clan in America
[a fur-trader with ecclesiastical inclinations] breaches the boundaries
of acceptable Calvinist behaviour when he self-publishes his more
Cynic-like [and inclusive] vision of the Christ, a vision that underscores 
Christ's essential humanity, his compassion. William Pynchon's tract 
gets the honor of the first book-burning in America. I see the motor 
for Thomas Pynchon's metaphysical musings in the heresy of 
inclusion, the possibility [very New England Trancendentalist, very 
Unitarian] that all roads lead to the river, "With a face on ev'ry 
mountainside, and a soul in ev'ry stone". I see the un-manning of that 
zany paraclete in CoL49 as a pointer to Giodorno Bruno, one of
the more famous victims of the Witchcraze, creator of a functioning
system of mnemonics who was subject to the kinds of hideous tortures 
found in the Courier's Tragedy. The themes of heresy and exclusion 
are central in all of Pynchon's writings.

As far as I can tell, Pynchon's primary obfuscation is in his relation to
"Big Science" [hallelujah, yodel-lay-de-hoo], looking [like R. Crumb]
at the older stuff, finding the newer stuff somehow lacking. He knows
enough about science and math to make it appear like these are his 
central concerns, when [capital "M"] Magick was his central concern 
from the get-go. Now, there's your misdirection, right there. "This is
magic. Sure---but not necessarily fantasy."