AtD: Lew's experience of grace

[alice wellintown]

> Many tragic characters experience dismemberment or disintegration.

Some experience both.

Many scholars agree that from a purely structural point of view,
Oedipus The King is practically unrivaled in dramatic
literature. As noted previously, Sophocles demonstrates his remarkable
skill as a dramatist by allowing Oedipus to
become aquatinted with His story incrementally, while at the same time
exploiting the total range of possible ironies by
allowing the audience to know more of His story than Oedipus knows at
any given moment in the play. Moreover,  in Oedipus The King we find
perfect motivation for individual actions. This is one of the reasons
Aristotle turns to this drama more than any other Greek Tragedy to
illustrate his critical theories.

Pynchon writes parodies of cowboy, detective, love, picaresque, quests
in the Sacral (Kabbalist, Masonic,Gnostic etc), Mythic or Magical
(Grail, Tarot, Astrological, ), Scientific/Technological (psychology,
mathematsl, aerodynamics, rocket engineering, etc.), and in variations
of these assimilated. T

he Scentific/Technological quests (Faustian) are presented as Profane
or corrupt versions of the Sacred, Mythical, and Magical, while the
Sacred, Mythical, and Magical, are Carnivalized.

So, sometimes characters are not sure if they are on a quest or if
they are running for their lives (kinda like that Dorothy who is
runningaway from home and running back home to Kansas--"I'll get you
my little Tyrone and your magic Penis too!"). It's paradoxical, but,
that's why the scarecrow has two hands, so he can point in both
directions at the same time (maybe he goes both ways?).


And like Dorothy, the goal (spiritual and material) of the quest keep
multiplying ("some place where there isn't any trouble",
"get out of OZ", Emerald City, Home, Heart, Brains, Courage, OZ,
Wizard, WWW's broom, Kansas, and of course "the land of
E Pluribus Unum").

Stencil has far more in common with Dorothy than Sam Spade. So does
Slothrop, obviously.


Slothrop is on a quest for a whole bunch of things, like, Self or
Identity, lovers, relatives, ancestors, doubles, drugs,
information, money, technology (Imipolex G, S-Gerat), discharge from
the service ("ruptured duck" GR.61 and
GR.526), Jamf, and so on.

Itz not that P doesn't make Slothrop a Dick. That would be a pun and a
lot more missed. And P can't resist a pun. But the Detective is only
one of the genres, related of course, to the quest, that picaresque
pic-ah-roe and jack-ah-roe mo and jo that P-man got.

"Yeah! yeah what happened to Imipolex G, all that Jamf a-and that
S-Gerat, s'posed to be a hardboiled private eye here,
gonna go out all alone and beat the odds, avenge my friend that They
killed (Tantivy), get my ID back and find that
piece of mystery hardware but now aw it's JUST LIKE--LOOK-IN FAWR A
NEEDLE IN A HAAAAY-STACK...chances of ever
finding...determining your goals...concentrate...The S-Garat now--O.K.
if I can find that S-Garat 'n' how Jamf was hooked
in, if I can find that out, yeah yeah, Imipolex GR... --searchin' for
a (hmm) cellar full o' saffron..."
(GR.561-562).

Detectives try toget to the bottom of things, but P's characters are
more dick than detective and change their interests rather
haphazardly,abandoning one set of objects or goals and adopting new
ones as the story moves along, parody after fantastic parody.


I think that Frye stuff is useful. Mendelson, Hollander, others have
argued, Anatomy and M-Satire ....and P's novels have all 14 elements
of Bakhtin's formulation for Menippean Satire, including the quest
motif and parody of various genres that mock novelistic conventions
even as they make up large portions of the narratives.


P characters don't learn anything and those that do are not
transformed by their learning, but rather lapse back to their
conditioned selves after experiencing what would be a transforming
event or revelation of some sort in a more
"traditional" novel.

For example, in Ensign Morituri's Story (GR.474). "We are conditioned
to forget" GR.474, "So Ensign Moritori committed
then the only known act of heroism in his career....His conditioning,
his verbal, ranked and uniformed self took
over again." (GR.478)

See Fowler's 'A Reader's Guide to GR' where he notes that "human
motive as the most important fact in dramatic event"
(115) does not operate in GR.

However, although Pynchon subverts traditional character motivation,
thus subverting both the quests and questers,
characters are not where we will find the "traditional" maturation,
evolution, learning, etc. as we do in say,  Pip
of _Great Expectations_"  or _Jude of "Jude The Obscure_ or _Tom
Jones_ ; the protagonist's journey to maturation, bildungsroman, is
still represented, as is motivation, only what motivates characters
are various Forces. This is what Pynchon is concerned with, the forces
of consciousness, though consciousness is not individualized nor is it
separate from the forces "outside" consciousness.

In the Anubis chapters, we are told that Slothrop is to be counted
among the zone's lost and as individual character this is the case,
but at the level of force motivation, Slothrop is transformed and
transcends.

The single force motivation not change. All quests promise some sort
of redemption from an insufferable predicament and characters try
everything on Earth to "transcend" the human condition. Most fail
either because they cannot get to their goal or when they do, they
find annihilation.

What's interesting is that when questers succeed, they succeed only in
protecting or redeeming others, Geli, for example, prevents murder
with magic.

On the other hand, when questers fail, they fail for all sorts of
reasons: they are late, they are on the wrong track, the
wrong train, the wrong ship, moving in the wrong direction, they
forget, they are afraid (like Stencil is afraid to go
to Malta), etc.

Redeeming or Delivering others is called, by Cristians like Thomas R.
Pynchon, Grace.