AtD/VL-related: The Varieties of Religious Experience

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

When I first read Vineland, back in early 1990, I was kinda surprised to 
find the William James
book title dropped on page 369, since it did not exactly seem necessary 
to bring over Jess's
Emerson quote. I took this as a hint and, like perhaps the one or other 
of you too, read the
book later on in the 1990s. [My experience with philosophical pragmatism 
in general is: Dewey,
any time I try to read him, gives me narcoleptic seizures, but George 
Herbert Mead is a still
underrated genius!] As the title already suggests, one of the basic 
thesisses of William James is that
the religious needs of people do differ. They are not identical. In 
Jamesian terms (see the beginning
of lecture XX) we can observe the Vineland scene as 'religious' insofar 
as there is a new taste for
life, experienced as a gift plus manifested in forms of lyrical 
enchantment AND [James says: "or"]
in gestalt of a call for seriousness and heroism. Right on, right on!

In Pynchon's books one can find all kinds of religious bzw. magical 
practices; what interests me
here is: Can you find other explicit refs to the Jamesian phenomenology 
of the religious mind?

Maybe I did. Having started my regular AtD re-read, I had a good laugh 
last night. Please do note
the last sentence!

"An old aerostat hand by now, Pugnax had also learned, like the rest of 
the crew, to respond to 'calls
of nature' by proceeding to the downwind side of the gondola, resulting 
in surprises among the surface populations below, but not often enough, 
or even notably enough, for anyone to begin to try to record, much less 
coordinate reports of, these lavatorial assaults from the sky. They 
entered rather the realm of folklore, superstition, or perhaps, if one 
does not mind stretching the definitions, the
religious." (p. 5)

This is, of course, (also) satirical, but my association machine spat 
out the Vineland ref at once. And then we should remember what William 
[Pugnax reads rather Henry] James tells us in lecture XIV (am
back-translating, again, from the German edition, this time pp. 336-7):

"WE cannot distinguish between natural and supernatural effects, nor 
recognize among the supernatural effects the ones coming from the grace 
of God in contrast to those being falsifications
done by the devil."

Personally I think that taking into account to piss down on people is 
less problematic than Benny
Profane's wish to piss out the sun.


Happy Sunday!

Kai