AtD/VL-related: The Varieties of Religious Experience

[Mark Kohut]

Yeahp....there's the connective thread (or one of them) , it would seem....to 
satirize religion, religious experience is to be a heretic.....

>From that new Urtext, Varieties of RE, a digression: * Superior intellect, as 
Professor Bain has admirably shown, seems to consist in nothing so much as in a 
large development of the faculty of association by similarity. -

As Aristotle also said more succinctly 

A--and, which might be said of the quality of TRP's genius.............


----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sun, November 21, 2010 9:17:16 AM
Subject: Re: AtD/VL-related: The Varieties of Religious Experience

And don't forget that the focus on Religious Experience as a negative ultimately 

reinforces a focus on the heretical.

I see Pynchon embracing heresy, allsorts -- the darker, the nastier, the better. 

This reaches a hysterical peak in Gravity's Rainbow, but it is fully plowed up 
in "V." Again --  Alice -- this is a Chicken/Egg question. You point, correctly, 

to Melville and company, I point to Pynchon's personal heritage. I say that a 
lot of Pynchon's writing derives from William Pynchon's tales and his offspring 
and the shoots and leaves that sprang out of our Nation's first great heresy. 
There's enough particulars scattered and repeated throughout Pynchon's books 
that point to how personal and particular the author's concerns are. The witches 

are in his books not only because it ties in with the American Romantic 
tradition and the whole New England Transcendentalist thing, but also because he 

must have dated [briefly, they remained friends] a Sortilège. Or two. Whoever 
"Doc" is, that's more or less what happens, and if the young author is anywhere 
near Venice CA or the Ren Faire circa 1969/1970, he's gonna run into a reader or 

advisor or two, particularly if the circles he's running with regularly partake 
of "that useful substance." These subjects are all over all his books, they 
didn't get in there because of a class he took at Cornell, it clearly comes out 
of personal experience and interest.

On Nov 21, 2010, at 5:49 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> Fascinating....another must-read...
> 
> Do ya think that what you focus on in V of RE and V & AtD are part
> of a move on P's mind from, say, 'the spiritual', "the otherwrdly' in 
religious
> thinking to......................an embrace of some kind of pantheism or 
>whatever?