VL-IV pgs. 98/99: Postmodern Mysticism
Robin Landseadel
robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Mon Jan 19 12:36:45 CST 2009
On Jan 19, 2009, at 5:59 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:
> Robin Landseadel wrote:
>> Got to learn more about D & G [and F], but the anti-fascist
>> language found
>> in all three seems like a natural carry-over from the radicalism of
>> the late
>> sixties/early seventies. Heresy is demonstrating that the "Elect"
>> is an
>> artificial classification, a role that's played, not some innate or
>> deserved
>> quality. If you are a Catholic [for example] and you say that the
>> Pope is
>> full of it, you have committed an act of heresy. In his own way,
>> William
>> Pynchon was doing a very similar thing in "The Meritorious Price of
>> Our
>> Redemption."
>>
>
> Meritorious Price, it seems to me, was heretical to Protestants, and
> not so much to a Catholic sensibility. Like you, it seems, I'm unable
> or unwilling to part with the 80 dollars for a copy of it . . .
. . .however unwilling, I was able to obtain a copy of The
Meritorious Price of Our Redemption.
It's 152 pages of smudgy photocopies plus a couple-two three essays I
really need to get around to, with all of Willy the fur-hench-man's
text laid out in the sort of Jacobean Olde English that drives OCR
software batty—"s's" look like "f's", there's weird pre-Webster
spellings, "doth's" and "thou's"—the sort of thing that made Oedipa
just a whiz at deciphering old Elizabethan and Jacobean texts. As
"Meritorious Price" is old enough to be in the public domain by now,
it's time that it appear on the interweb all smoothed out and
readable, though a pfd scroll of the mess would suffice. Though
"Meritorious Price" is hard to read, William Pynchon's writing style
is not at fault.
"Heresy" is nowhere near the free-range concept that we find in the
term "Postmodernism." The term Heresy comes from Late Greek:
"hairesis" meaning to take, so that the etymological root of "Heresy"
is in the taking. Heresy attempts to take away power from those
claiming jurisdictional authority from "on high." At the bottom of it
all, heresy is an act of anarchism. As the term was much used by the
Roman Catholic Church "back in the day" it is associated with that
church in particular, but anyone can play. There is political heresy—
Christopher Hitchens anyone?—there is scientific heresy, I'm an
actively heretical OBA non-scholar [a heresiarch of sorts.]
> but the drift of what I've read about it seems to go against the
> "salvation by
> faith alone" that became a shibboleth of Protestantism.
William Pynchon's heresy was that it was Christ's obedience to God's
will that constituted "The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption," thus
Christ acted "by faith alone". It was not the sufferings of abject
pain and those pangs of remorse he'd go through while burning in the
fires of hell for those three days [as the story goes] that he was not
on the scene that made him King of Kings, but obedience to the will of
his father.
Getting a little fast and loose with these materials, we note that
William Pynchon was [like Pierce Inverarity] a founding father [Pierce
being the ostensible source point for all these far-flung business
interests that Oed has to track down], a fur-trader and a bit of a
wheeler-dealer, a sometimes judge and maybe even an early proto-
humanist. This "skin" thing that's wrapped up so tightly in the
Calvinist mentality [leading to Colonization/Missionary work, slavery
and other forms of ethnic cleansing] didn't really apply to William
Pynchon like it did to his other fur-hench-men.
William Pynchon's tenth generation great-grandson plays faster and
looser with this material in Gravity's Rainbow. A lot of that library
time OBA spent back in the stacks must have been devoted to
researching family history.
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0711&msg=122524&keywords=pynchon%20v%2e%20stearns
In the case of the William Pynchon story, TRP boiled it down to its
essence in Gravity's Rainbow. Instead of William Pynchon's "The
Meritorious Price of Our Redemption" we have William Slothrop's "On
Preterition" The issue of skin is of overwhelming importance in
Gravity's Rainbow, in particular the notion that election or
preterition is usually determined by skin color and other signifiers
of ethnic difference coming from the self-styled "Elect."
> Also, if it refutes Election, the idea of the Elect is more of a
> Calvinist forth-putting
William Pynchon apparently didn't have a problem with the election
issue, his real issue was with the notion of Christ's suffering in hell.
Of course, Thomas Pynchon's cultural filters included Norman O. Brown
& "Capitalism and Schizophrenia." As Vineland has a couple-two-three
feminist allusions I'll bet he's at the very least familiar with the
writings of Mary Daly:
. . . Daly has published a number of works, and is perhaps best
known for her second book, Beyond God the Father (1973).
Beyond God the Father is the last book in which Daly really
considers God a substantive subject. She lays out her
systematic theology, following Tillich’s example. It is often
regarded as a foundational work in feminist theology, Beyond
God the Father is her attempt to explain and overcome
androcentrism in Western religion. It is notable for its playful
writing style and its attempt to rehabilitate "God-talk" for the
women's liberation movement by critically building on the
writing of existentialist theologians such as Paul Tillich and
Martin Buber. While the former increasingly characterized her
writing,, she soon abandoned the latter. . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Daly
I don't know if Pynchon is familiar with Starhawk's "Dreaming the Dark."
http://books.google.com/books?id=HJPYwFTG5H0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=dreaming+the+dark
Starhawk deals out the biggest possible heresies by positing Goddess
as top of her non-hierachical heap 'o deities. Starhawk started out as
a Jungian psychotherapist [and Jew] prior to becoming a full-time
professional activist 'n author [and Witch.] Her notions of social
control were formed by the sorts of archetypes that Jung focused on.
Starhawk claims Robert Graves' "The White Goddess" as a primary
influence—didn't OBA name-check Graves in "V."? She's moved on since
then and has backed up her work with plenty of hard science as regards
ecology and permaculture.
In any case, Pynchon's writings often remind me of Starhawk—I take
Geli Tripping's role in Gravity's Rainbow as a sign of where OBA's
sympathies lie. Which brings me back to the concept of Post-Modern
Mysticism. Once one knows that "heresy" is an artificially imposed
notion that warps our ability to see what's really going on [Byron the
Lightbulb anyone?], then one starts to look at all these spiritual
concepts on a more level playing field. Folks that call themselves
pagan or new-age or wiccan are really more the product of postmodern
sensibility applied to the spiritual realms. Pull it all together and
it spells "Pynchon."
> In the broadest terms, is it fair to say that heresy is a divergence
> from consensus reality?
No, it seems that heresy is usually limited to a particular mind set
or a religious subset. Of course, it may just be that I'm just a pomo
dude, that previous generations mapped their realities according to
the orthodoxies of their tribe but right now we are beset with a swarm
of different and non-assimilable value systems, all the way from
deepest Islam to full-blown kosher Hippie, all attempting to live side-
by side in an ever shrinking world.
> . . . reminds me of the really excellent "scrying" point you made
> about Prairie looking in the mirror and seeing first her mother and
> then DL.
Thanks, I really ought to post a number of Pynchon's scrying scenes,
he's as familiar with the subject as any I've read so far—Hector
Zugina's zomokepsis being a case in point.
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