BtZ42: p. 27-30

Fri Apr 8 08:37:05 CDT 2016

> The blasphemous and continued subverting of the Western Christian
tradition in GR

I don't disagree with that  -- certainly not with the linkage of "that
stone hand pointing out of the secular clouds" (27 Viking/Penguin), "the
great bright hand" (29) and Michelangelo's 'Creation of Adam". Pynchon will
certainly be getting around to  (and more) on his way to "There is a Hand
to turn the time" on p. 760.

But single up the lines and heave again, draw them tighter. How does the
book *get* from a GI out of the Berkshires to "the Western Christian
tradition"? What's the technique of blasphemy and subversion, taking the
first V-2 hammercrack as a starting point?

Within three lines, "God... God... revealed in the sky... a *hardon*". Is
Tyrone shocked? Is the narrator shocked? Are we shocked? Bananas, rockets,
now penises...where's he going with this?

The imagery Laura celebrates goes straight for the specifically American
jugular, via the Pilgrim-Thanksgiving-"city on a hill" fetish. These pages
hit every Calvinist -> Puritan -> Congregationalist -> transcendentalist
mark all the way down the Slothrop slide:

Nine or ten generations of ancestors "in a long gradient of rot," their
molecules assimilated like Osbie Feel's alkaloids (wherever their souls
might have flown)

Gravestone poetry dwindling from "straight-on and foursquare" to "sarcasm
and guile"

"shit, money, and the Word" -- profane, secular and sacred in jolting
juxtaposition. rather than decently segregated

Instead of prosperity as proof of Protestant grace, the Slothrops' "flooded
quarries and logged-off hillsides," the Harrimans' and Whitneys' country
retreats abandoned

And maybe a hint, in the pairing of the northern lights with the skyglow
and sparks of the Aspinwall Hotel fire, that with WWII coming up, we
wouldn't have to depend on God (or Nature) for our light shows much longer

By Tyrone's time, there wasn't much more than soothing nostalgia.  "White
steeples" on "autumn hillsides"... "rose windows taking in Sunday light,
elevating and washing the [ministers']' faces above the pulpits defining
grace"... aaaah yes, we are a Godly people in a Norman Rockwell devotional
image....

So why are those white steeples turning into blasphemous, subversive
banana-penis-*rockets*?

When Ted Cruz slides from "Let us revitalize our shared faith and values"
to "Let us make the sand glow" in ISIS territory, I remember why GR is
still so amazingly alive.

On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 7:44 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> p.27, that bright hand reaching out of the cloud has to remind of the most
> famous hand reaching out of a cloud in art, right?
> "The image of the near-touching hands of God and Adam has become iconic of
> humanity. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human>"
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_Adam
> Once again, I will narrow the annotation to one of my hobbyhorses--the
> inversion of the Great Chain of Being here, as elsewhere.
> The blasphemous and continued subverting of the Western Christian
> tradition in GR. The relentless naturalism, humanism, of the vision,
> (despite spiritual concerns up the kazoo (sic) all over the book) as one
> strain of interpretation has it. Weisenburger points out that there is
> heresy in Constant's epitaph since a Puritan knew that a death was owed to
> God, not nature, another in-our-face piece of vision.[ p 27 "Death is a
> debt to nature due, /Which I have paid, and so must you."]
>
> I also love the edges of the tombstone eroded by "season's fire and ice
> chisels' associatively linking to me with
> 'the impasto of the seasons' line and another compressedly-envisioned
> embrace of nature and all its life as our life. Dear Reader, just wait
> until I write Against the Day, you want fully-envisioned, Tom's thinking
> here.
>
> p. 28, Miller edition: "Mark Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the
> Sky,".....more and more allusions to what the rockets bring
> in GR....and not the music of the spheres from Shakespeare's (and earlier)
> time.
>
> Doncha just love the joke---Morris you love the jokes!---of Constant, very
> wittily Puritanic even in heresy and of course, his son
> Variable, another simple joke on heredity but also, maybe, a joke on the
> descent of Puritanism, on the entropic decline--'the money seeping its way
> out"--of the Slothrop family. 'Ruin is formal, devil's work,/Consecutive
> and slow---[notice the em dash, reader and remember the book's end]/ Fail
> in an instant no man did,/Slipping is crash's law,
>
> Such compression of prose, another of my current hobbyhorses during this
> reading. Why it is a 700 page poem. The compressed history of the Slothrop
> line is a kind of New England set Hawthorne- like story, The Decline and
> Fall of the House of the Seven Gables, so to joke. A shortcut US version of
> Buddenbrooks, so to so loosely speak. And I now see a kinship to
> the Traverse family, sea-changed (as well as land-and-meaning changed)
> from AtD. But I would and
>
> you all can reel me in.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 2:43 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> Just pausing to savor this sequence (one of my many favorites):
>>
>> Starting from: "On the old schist of a tombstone …" to the end of the
>> section (italicized in the book): this is how it does happen - yes the
>> great bright hand reaching out of the cloud …
>>
>> There are so many Pynchon passages that send us scurrying to Google (or
>> whatever the hell we used to do) an obscure reference. This one, though,
>> sends the brain a-sparkling with associations - death from the sky - hand
>> of God - V-2 rocket - differences, similarities - religion - terror -
>> inevitability - resignation - quaint acceptance - death from the sky has
>> always been with us, does it really matter what form it takes - take
>> comfort from treating it as old family history … etc. etc. No Googling
>> required!
>>
>> Laura
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
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