V-2nd - Chapter V, Part I

[alice wellintown]

The book have a chapter on anti-catholicism and the gothic?

It has long been recognised that the Gothic genre sensationalised
beliefs and practices associated with Catholicism. Often, the
rhetorical tropes and narrative structures of the Gothic, with its
lurid and supernatural plots, were used to argue that both Catholicism
and sexual difference were fundamentally alien and threatening to
British Protestant culture. Ultimately, however, the Gothic also
provided an imaginative space in which unconventional writers from
John Henry Newman to Oscar Wilde could articulate an alternative
vision of British culture. Patrick O'Malley charts these developments
from the origins of the Gothic novel in the mid-eighteenth century,
through the mid-nineteenth-century sensation novel, toward the end of
the Victorian Gothic in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Thomas Hardy's Jude
the Obscure. O'Malley foregrounds the continuing importance of
Victorian Gothic as a genre through which British authors defined
their culture and what was outside it.

Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge
Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture) [Hardcover]
O'Malley Patrick R. (Author)

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From an annotation of a book on the Uncanny and the Gothic in European
> literature:
>
> It is clear, however, that the lower class and the emerging bourgeoisie were
> loath to discard their traditional beliefs. We can see their search for a sense
> of transcendent order and spiritual meaning in the continuing popularity of
> gothic performances that demonstrate that there was more than a residue of a
> religious calendar still operating in the public performative realm. Because
> this bourgeois culture could not turn away from God, it chose to be haunted, in
> its literature and drama, by God’s uncanny avatars: priests, corrupt monks,
> incestuous fathers and uncles. The gothic aesthetic emerged during this period
> as an ideologically contradictory and complex discourse system; a secularizing
> of the uncanny; a way of alternately valorizing and at the same time slandering
> the realms of the supernatural, the sacred, the maternal, and the primitive.
>
>
> I thought of this chapter in a loose associative way.
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Sent: Tue, August 10, 2010 2:32:03 PM
> Subject: Re: V-2nd - Chapter V, Part I
>
> I can see the Heart of Darkness reference (Father Fairing=Kurtz), though not
> sure there's any ivory-like prize hovering in the background.  Profane, like
> Marlow, takes the job (embarks on a quest) partly for adventure, partly for
> economic reasons.  What does Profane learn at the end?  That shooting alligators
> (militarism) is wrong?  But he does it anyway.  Then the light goes out.  He's
> forever tainted.  But why by this particular murder?  He's already bagged a
> number of other gators.  Somehow, passing through the hallowed ground of the
> Kurtz-like cannibal-priest gives him qualms about the whole thing.  Letting
> compassion, in any form, seep into a genocidal scenario ruins everything: it
> makes the colonialist feel guilty, without saving a single life.  This will all
> happen again in Chapter 9.
>
> The Moby Dick allusions seem weaker.  Maybe, Alice, you can expound on them a
> little more?
>
> LK
>
> -----Original Message-----
>>From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>
>>
>>certainly the colonialization and enocide theme is continued here with
>>the priest and the rats, but the inanimate theme is bound to it as,
>>although the chapter title sez Stencil goes West, Benny goes East,
>>carrying, from the West, the Light and the Gun. Africa, of course, is
>>East; so the Heart of Darkness Ivory theme here, and yes, Moby-Dick
>>parody--the sharkskin suits, the labor organizations, the bums. The
>>long description of the bum with a cadilac, another Jew, from Poland
>>is intersting.
>
>
>
>