M & D from Joseph's post

[alice malice]

Mason is the baker's son but he is not a baker. This is not merely a
matter, for him or for Dixon, of mobility of the economic ladder. The
fathers and sons /  education and vocation theme, one that P explores
in greater depth in Against the Day, but one that we find is important
to most of his work, is never more poignant than in this book. The
generational gap or shift in M&D is not only away from the father's
work, but away from the father's calling. Mason's old man is not only
the bread winner or maker, or the Baker, but needer / kneader of Life,
of the Bread of Life. Mason is not, I think, in Love with Death. He is
not a Puritan, not an American. But he is trying to be a man of
science, of reason, and so he can't abide his father's cult; he is
haunting by this more than by his dead wife. He is not his father's
keeper. And his brother is hard to keep.

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 2:15 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> But the narrator, The Rev who no longer could be a reverend he has said,
> sez it Mason who could not bear the very odors of Blood-Sacrifice and Trans-
> substantiation"......??
>
> I have always thought that 'Transubstantiation' is a Catholic word and is not
> used --correctly anyway--to describe any Protestant denominations' body of
> JC devotions?
>
> I have thought that this whole dissing of JC lay behind, as contrast
> the embracing
> of life as food, sex, etc.
>
> No?
>
> On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 11:47 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Why are the pages dry? Because the book is dry reading? It is not
>> sensual but puritanical. Hardly. This is the common kick at the Bible
>> by those who've obviously never read it.
>>
>> Because the holy book, all holy books, sacred texts, European, Asian
>> ...indeed all the books they have there, will dry from the winds and
>> the heat, so they must be cared for, as the skin, but the book is
>> neglected and dries while the skin is oiled against the parching
>> clime.
>>
>> So why does the narrator put the emphasis on the Bible's dry leaves?
>> Contrast them with the oiled skin? If the narrator here is the Rev,
>> then we should look to the audience he is addressing. There is, at the
>> chapter's conclusion, a joak, or more than a joke, a derisive quip on
>> Christ and his Death and Resurrection, connecting these events with
>> all the blood that floods time in His wake. The pornographic episodes
>> and the moralizing, the sermonizing, the tale of bad girls and the
>> parents who compete with them, these may be targeted at the young in
>> the room, the Uncle, the cousins, and who can know how they may be
>> inspired by them. Some may be repulsed, others aroused, erotically,
>> others politically...
>>
>> An old Pynchon theme, the books that young people read, are influenced
>> by, from "The Secret Integration" to _Against the Day_, and how the
>> imagination is free, is entirely free to reject the intended moral or
>> immoral lesson, to find Grace and take flight, even from the parched
>> papers of the Bible.
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 6:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> "One metaphor of this juxtaposition that I found telling was the girls
>>> oiling Joanna's skin so that it won't be as the dry pages of the
>>> Bible."
>>>
>>> I also saw this as a metaphor for the sensual, the paganish embrace of
>>> the body vs. the way the Bible has created repression from its pages.
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l