Follow-up: AtD (37) p.1057 Discussion alert! Major meaning section, ?? thinks Host

[Mark Kohut]

As host this week, I get to synthesize--or choose buffet-style-- all the truths the responders found in this section. I think we had great words from all, any of which might offer more to riff on, insightfully, than mine below. 

Lew. Presbyterian, i.e. a Protestant, a Puritan descendant from the "Errand into the Wilderness". From the Western Christian tradition who felt guilty of something unnamed when we first met him. I'd vote for MB's Original Sin as a very possible TRP meaning here. 

Lew works for a detective agancy that is--or is like, can't quite remember---the Pinkerton one in history. Which worked for the Establishment to bust
unions, attack strikers. Webb's fellow men. Lew is complicit. But Lew is
not a bad guy, he solves real crimes, goes with the flow, is liked, maybe is a stand-in for the writer-figure in AtD. In Pynchon's worldview.

Lew realizes that the motley crew at the party are like all the folk he has
chased down over the years. Those who have been scarred and survived some kind of dynamiting in their lives. (Sorta) Preterites, I have argued, working in the day of the new America as we all have to as best as they can.

Lew suddenly realizes his 'whole life' has been a crime. See Original Sin, see Lew's recognition of his complicity. His new 'self-clarity' is a mortal sin. Perhaps, as Ian reminds thru Jung, whom we know OBA has read, Lew realizes 'the nature of human nature", his human nature with this awareness of 'mortal sin'? Lew feels a Puritan-like Damnation, an inevitable 'Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God?".

But he was dynamited out of such damnation? Laura: such self-knowledge led
him to a zen-like awareness/acceptance of 'things as they are', called "grace" when it happened earlier. I second all LK's remarks around
Pynchon's meaning of 'grace' in AtD vs. established religious/Biblical, etc. meanings. THOSE are the traditional Protestant/Puritan meanings that
Lew was "dynamited' out of. We have to follow TRPs 'grace' within AtD to get grace anew, I say. 

(Another speculative aside: TRP might be suggesting that the Western Christian Puritanical tradition LEADS ultimately to dynamiting?. War thru
terrorism?  Or, maybe Webb's dynamiting ultimately leads to such.........
"grace"????) 

More graceless notes of an overly analytical, self-clarity kind coming on "grace", but I want Robin to take us there, to the resonant end of AtD, before I riff more. 

Thanks All. I think we got somewhere in understanding, don't you?

I have a few more posts for this section then "Rue De Depart". 



--- On Tue, 7/29/08, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Subject: AtD (37) p.1057 Discussion alert! Major meaning section, ?? thinks Host
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Tuesday, July 29, 2008, 4:50 PM
> Lew Basnight, detective, a book-length thread of meanings in
> AtD has a revelation........
> 
> What does it mean?
> 
> Who are all these people Lew is interacting with at
> Carefree Court(!); a crowd even he, old L.A. hand, finds
> hard to "read"? Just a Hollywood crowd? or as
> broad a crossection of humanity as America was
> becoming--lotsa immmigrants in Hollywood---working daily in
> the 'new America' of 'mediated reality', not
> hard labor?
>  
> The flush, energetic, wide-open [much anti-Puritanism, say
> some historians, flapper and booze 1920s? Can we see the
> whole crooked timber of humanity'--Kant--at this
> gathering? ; "the whole stock and joint company"
> --[Ishmael in Moby Dick]--living working in the daylit
> fiction that is America?  
> 
> Lew   "seeing the great point and in the 'same
> instant' "recognizing the ongoing crime that had
> been his own life"....."Self-clarity"
> .........."a mortal sin"........????       
> 
> WTF?
> 
> Okay, pretty important revelation to understand Lew and
> more of AtD, yes? Why is such self-clarity a mortal sin? [Am
> I reading that right?]...."mortal sin" is a
> concept from the Western Christian tradition mostly. Shows
> Lew's religion in his upbringing [he is Presbyterian]. A
> mortal sin is one that totally cuts one off from God, goes
> the tradition. How could this 'self-clarity' totally
> cut him off from his God?....A revelation that his whole
> life had been 'an ongoing crime"...not acts he
> committed but his whole life. ?? 
> 
> Trying to catch this ragtag assembly of humanity is the
> ongoing crime?  This some W.A.S.T.E.-like motley group of
> human beings, 'displaying scars and tattoos, etc."
> all 'having survived some calamity" ??  
> 
> Or is Lew 'unreliable' in his reflections here?
> 
> So, once Lew recognized that it was a 'crime' to
> chase the preterites, as it were, then he is no longer on
> the side of the Elect?  No longer a believer in the
> Church's/Society's way of judging, so his
> 'mortal sin' is to not believe.?
> (THAT cuts one off from one's Christian God while one
> is in that state, fer sure).....
> 
>  It is this that got him unambiguously dynamited into his
> new life. ???  Comments sought, please.
> 
> I have other thoughts which I will spare for now in order
> to open the discussion against my words above....