AtD: Lew's experience of grace

[Mark Kohut]

In my reading Pychon is SAYING in the story with the text
what you are suggesting below......

Look at how Lew gets his epiphany, for example....
Look at Cyprian baffled at his new spiritual/mental state...he can't explain 
it...


----- Original Message ----
From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Cc: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>; pynchon -l 
<pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, December 3, 2010 11:53:32 AM
Subject: Re: AtD: Lew's experience of grace

Grace is just a word until you have subjective knowledge of it's
referent, sort of like sex. "People see those pictures in a magazine,"
as Elvis says, "but what's the use of looking if you don't know what
they mean?" It's a mystery dance. You can read all about it, practice
silence, practice prayer, practice logic--argue the rest of your life
for all o' that. If you don't know it, it don't mean nothin'. But the
experience of grace changes everything. Pynchon seems to know that.

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 4:50 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Alice writes:
> What's interesting is that when questers succeed, they succeed only in
> protecting or redeeming others, Geli, for example, prevents murder
> with magic.
>
> The bodhisattva, for-others, belief in TRP passim and everywhere.....After V. 
>at
> least.
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thu, December 2, 2010 7:30:54 PM
> Subject: Re: AtD: Lew's experience of grace
>
>> 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.
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."