IVIV (1) "She came along the alley and up the back steps ..."

[alice wellintown]

Mark and others interested,

I don't have the will to go back and dig out the discussion, but we
had a long debate here about P's novels being or not being postmodern
and/or or both/and morally relativistic. I have argued, consistently,
that the texts are, at least, works that reflect a traditional and
even pragmatic American pluralism.  After reading everything, yes
everything I could find in NYC's great public libraries and in the
SUNY library and elsewhere, on Pynchon, I came to this reading. But I
admit that, as a pragmatist and a pluralist, I am a student of Richard
McKeon, my own strong misreadings (H. Bloom) of texts is unavoidable.
In 2000 I posted from Holton, who, I think also posted here, but
Monroe, where he finds the time and energy ...posted from the text at
length. It was my ascertain that Holton got it right and that the
historical events, from the margins, were proof of Pynchon's firm
moral stance. Not that I ever doubted this; I have always argued that
Pynchon is a satirist with targets, a corrective satirist and not one
who simply provokes. However, and I think this is where my reading
crosses to Robert J's reading (although I won't presume to speak for
him), the texts are not black and white. They are not, I would argue,
shades of grey. They are not BOTH/AND. Zoyd is not an angel and Brock
a devil. Pynchon's focus is on the failings of the different voices,
sometimes in harmony, but often in conflict with one another, who have
been infected by the gnostic drive to control Nature. That includes
DOc and Zoyd and Dixon and Slothrop and Benny and Stencil and Pig. The
best reading of Pynchon, as far as I am concerned, is Eddins's Gnostic
Pynchon. Still the best. Those that would save Zoyd and read on the
allegorical/political street lever may never hear the song--the Orphic
Song. They must be tied to the mast or remain Cyclopes. They are
forever agonistic, it's a political fight, but that only gives birth
to Frenesi. P's novels are dialectical.

Eddin's claims that a "religious dialectic structures the novel (GR)."
111.2 It is marked by mystical and supernatural manifestations on both sides,
by the presence of fanatical devotees, and by a drive for nothing less than
metaphysical dominance. The stakes are for far more than physical or ethical
control; they represent finally the right to define ultimate reality and to
decide what the individuals relation to this reality is to be. Pynchon locates
at the heart of nature the mystical concept of a living, conscious Earth, from
which all blessings flow and to which Gravity recalls these dispensations in a
benevolent cycle of renewal. The religious response evoked by a full
realization of this phenomenon is a variety of Orpheism that leans heavily upon
the assumptions of Rainer maria Rilke's poetry in its identification with
natural process and its assimilation of life and death into a unifying lyric of
praise.