Pynchon & Religion

[Alex Colter]

I am going to assume that this began upon her reading that I was interested
in Frank Kermode's Genesis of Secrecy, which examines CoL49 alongside the
Book of Mark. It is important to stress the startling differences between
Mark's Gospel and Matthew's. In Mark the Apostles are hopelessly inept,
they are the Birds that devour the seed in Christ's Parable of the Sower,
and none of them know Christ's true Identity as the Son of God. It is
believed that the later Synoptic Gospels sought to amend these flaws, and
endowed the Apostles with a bit more understanding, but I am ever in
sympathy with Mark's Gospel (the earliest to be written) and do not
believe, as many Christians nowadays do, that we have a special vantage
point with which to see Mark's Christ, as if peering over the heads of his
apostles...

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 11:08 AM, Alex Colter <recoignishon at gmail.com>wrote:

> ahem, forgive me '*Madeleine'*
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 11:06 AM, Alex Colter <recoignishon at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Continued from Madeline's post in the Pynchon Lit. thread, cause I figure
>> it would be more appropriate to start a different one...
>> We can't escape it so let us try to keep the discussion focused on the
>> works of Pynchon and what they indicate, while keeping our own beliefs
>> along the margins.
>>
>> We know Pynchon was raised Catholic, and, inasmuch as anything Jules says
>> can be trusted, continued to go to Confession while at Cornell.
>> There we begin to loose him, biographically speaking, and must resort to
>> his Novels.
>> I am inclined to agree with Madeline that the greatest writers among us
>> have rarely been 'Christian' 'Jewish' or 'Muslim' in anything but
>> upbringing, such Institutions seem to be downright hostile towards anything
>> called imaginative thought.
>> I am inclined to draw the closest portrait of Pynchon's Religious Views
>> (a phrase that makes me bored just typing it) in Cherrycoke's wonderful
>> narration. One thing is obvious, that Cherrycoke, despite his own attempts
>> to make himself appear so, is anything but orthodox, and often waxes into
>> Gnostic Thought, which was experiencing a revival amidst the so-called Era
>> of Enlightenment.
>> I would include among the institutions of Christianity, Judaism, and
>> Islam, the institution of Deism, now known by its proper name Atheism, as
>> being downright hostile towards anything called imaginative thought.
>> I am inclined to believe Pynchon is something of an imaginative Skeptic
>> in his literature, and is careful to censor himself whenever he approaches
>> a sort of 'Gnosis' therein.
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120723/c359a613/attachment.html>