CoL49 (3) words she never wanted to hear [PC 40]

[Robin Landseadel]

There's any number of contemplations of the dark night of the soul in  
CoL49, and all sorts of church & religious references that pop up in  
myriad ways. It's easy for me to see any number of anti-life/entropic  
vistos in this book—dire scenes that would fit in with a Catholic  
viewpoint but just as easily fit into the world view of a nascent eco- 
feminist tree-hugger. I take Pynchon's view as more granola than  
wafer.  Pynchon does go out of his way in CoL49 to bring the subject up 
—Oedipa has no offspring and her marriage to Mucho is doomed. One gets  
the sense that Oedipa has somehow been invaded & taken by the  
tristero, become pregnant with it.
On May 19, 2009, at 1:22 PM, rich wrote:

> Of course Pynchon deals directly with the subject of abortion in V.
> And he seems to treat it as if it were a horror with Rachel Owlglass
> committing a terrible sin by getting one.  That segment of V. has
> always struck me as weird, extremely anti-liberal, and a leftover
> symptom of Pynchon's Roman Catholicism.
> ________
> not sure you have to be a RC to find something like abortion if not
> horrible at the least troubling
> There are a couple of scenes in the documentary Lake of Fire that  
> are pretty sad
> beyond all the politics and bullshit and religious nuts, the sight of
> a little ill-formed hand amongst the remains of the procedure is truly
> horrible
> i'm not making any judgements here just to be clear
> rich