Grace again. Misc.

Sat Aug 5 13:05:01 CDT 2017

Nice review. 

" He understood that things were exactly what they were.” Along with this zen like reflection there is a contrast playng out in ATD , between Vibe’s  ultra-clavinist version of grace :  financial success, persecution of heretics, co-option of talent( all things work together for good for the those who love God …, unmerited but evident in wealth and power, children inheriting the kingdom,  aligned with western civilization's western movement, and alternately  the version of grace that plays out  with Lew B, the Traverse family, Cyprian and the Chums.  Lew freed from guilt of unknown crime takes on job of seeing things as they are( thus aligned with history of detectives , a recurrant structure in P’s writing),  The Traverses seem destined to struggle with search for love/truth/revolution  and to be changed by that, Cyprian moves from agent of empire to agent of revolution to contemplative from hypersexuality to ascetic,  the Chums( mythic fictional adventurers) move from working blindly for some unknown force of good to becoming self aware, asking questions,  crossing boundaries , hooking up with the feminine. Overall the movement of this non-Vibe grace is away from empire, away from trusting some benign flow of history, away from inherited authority and toward inner and personal change, toward the humanizing and almost unaable to bear exploration of freedom as lived experience. 
  Pynchon enjoins the necessity of this kind of movement by showing the calamity of western civilization with its confidence in divine grace, machine guns, experimental mathematics, electricity and oceans of oil producing trench warfare. A different version of grace seems called for.

>  They belong more to the preterite than the elect.
Here I have to respectfully disagree but only half disagree. This future  where things are what they are  is a future that belongs to everyone, not in some falsely reassuring sense but a future made from what is by who is. Preterite and elect are made evident as describing polarities no longer applicable as useful maps of the terrain. The schlemiels of V seem sadly to be little changed at the end of the novel, everyone a better illustration of Dantes hell than his paradise. The chums may be made up but they are in fux and flying.

 In my own attempt to reconcile with the world as it is, what I don’t know becomes larger, and what I know has to be approached more humbly. How broadly this applies I don’t know.  
> On Aug 5, 2017, at 10:37 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Echoes:
> 
> Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2007 13:28:28 -0500 (GMT-05:00) 
> From: kelber@[omitted] 
> To: pynchon-l@[omitted] 
> Subject: ATDTDA - grace 
> 
> TRP uses (and defines) the word "grace," on p.42.  It's also the final word of the novel.  Not sure if there are other references in between.
> 
> P. 42:
> "One mild and ordinary work-morning in Chicago, Lew happened to find himself on a public conveyance, head and eyes inclined nowhere in particular, when he entered, all too briefly, a condition he had no memory of having sought, which he later came to think of as grace."  Next paragraph:  "He understood that things were exactly what they were.  It seemed more than he could bear."
> 
> Right after this, he's hired by White City Investigations, after impressing Nate with his ability to observe things (just as they are?).
> 
> A couple of reviewers seemed to take the mention of grace at the end of the book in its religious sense.  The Inconvenience has become sort of a public conveyance, the world in microcosm, and it flies toward grace.  But if grace is understanding that things are exactly what they are, it seems that TRP has something other than the religious connotation in mind.  Things that are exactly what they are don't have any particular grace of god bestowed on them.  They belong more to the preterite than the elect.
> 
> On a totally different plane, maybe TRP had this in mind:
> 
> "The goal of the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) space mission is to obtain accurate global and high-resolution determination of both the static and the time-variable components of the Earth's gravity field."
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Recovery_and_Climate_Experiment
> 
> Laura
> 
> *
> [my reply]
> > TRP uses (and defines) the word "grace" on p.42...
> 
> That's a *very* nice connection to the GRACE experiment – utterly appropriate, whether TRP had it in mind or not.
> 
> A few more:
> 
> >From my segment coming up -- Merle in the herbal trade with "the silent women up in the foothills": "They lived for different futures, but they were each other's unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace." (70)
> 
> Reef trying to scale the towers in Jeshimon: "His attempts soon gathered an audience, mostly of children, from whom ordinarily he would have drawn grace, but his amiability had deserted him." (215)
> 
> Lake and Deuce in their wedding chapel: "Though scarcely any music ever came this way, the stray mouth-harpist or whistling drifter who did pass through the crooked doors found himself elevated into more grace than the acoustics of his way would have granted him so far." (236)
> 
> Dally returns to Chicago: "Somewhere in her head, she'd had this notion that because the White City had once existed beside the Lake, in Jackson Park, it would have acted somehow like yeast in bread and caused the entire city to bloom into some kind of grace." (336)
> 
> TRP practically kicks us in the shin with subteen chanteuse Angela (aka Angel o') Grace (399-401)
> 
> Tace on Lake's half-formed hope of changing Deuce: "You think he's so good," Tace went on, "just a boy that's lost, that it? and you can bring him back, all you need to do's love him enough, love your enemy into some kind of redeeming grace for the both of you? Applesauce, young lady." (482-483)
> 
> Quaternioneers out of favor: "Having been inseparable from the rise of the electromagnetic in human affairs, the Hamiltonian devotees had now, fallen from grace, come to embody, for the established scientific religion, a subversive, indeed heretical, faith for whom proscription and exile were too good." (526)
> 
> Lew on his way to investigate the Gas cult: "The first pale husbands of the evening stood waiting for suburban trains never meant to arrive at any destination on the rail map-as if, to be brought to any shelter this night, one would first have to step across into some region of grace hitherto undefined." (609)
> 
> That last one is *so* reminiscent of all the unmapped routes we came to know in the Zone.
> 
> Anyway, the G-word keeps popping up all along. I know I can be repetitive ("monomaniac"..? WHO SAID THAT?!) about the schemes of sin and preterition and just-maybe-redemption in all the books. I'm not even a Christian myself. But dammit (so to speak), he's been tugging at our sleeves about it ever since Christmas Eve 1955 on old East Main...
> 
> "Profane had figured at first that he was only the disembodied object of a corporal work of mercy. That, in the company of innumerable small and wounded animals, bums on the street, near-dying and lost to God, he was only another means to grace or indulgence for Fina..." (V p. 134 (Harper))
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Aug 5, 2017 at 9:54 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeahp. When Lew experiences Grace, immediately after that explosion, as if it sorta caused it almost, the narrator tells us this. 
> 
> Which--Jochen reminding us of Hemingway's "grace under pressure" line---hit me for the first time as another possible level of allusive 'ambiguity': a little Hemingway joke. 
> 
> On Sat, Aug 5, 2017 at 9:47 AM, Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> There’s a difference, sometimes huge but sometimes tiny, between caring about what an author’s views or ideas are and those of his narrator.   I think we do have to care about what all the narrator here means his use of the word “grace”  because it’s a fair part of the book and it’s an important word.   Pynchon may or may not be having his narrator use it in complete accord with what he sits down seriously and consciously believes himself.
> 
> So going into Pynchon’s background can be misleading but paying absolute attention to the context of the use in the narrator sections is vital.   Close reading time.
> 
> Becky
> https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com
> 
> > On Aug 5, 2017, at 6:48 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I  *really* don't care about what religion Pynchon was or is.  I prefer to read his works without him intruding.  His aversion to interviews indicates he feels the same way.
> >
> > David Morris
> >
> > On Sat, Aug 5, 2017 at 3:47 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Slothrop is, at least, an anti-Puritan.
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> > > On Aug 4, 2017, at 11:12 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > >
> > >          My intention was to bring some background to the word and its religious roots and changing use .  It is my sense that P has deep historic knowledge of such core words and concepts and this is one of the few areas where I have some knowledge and research to draw on  myself because of my own history.  As far as Pynchon’s beliefs, I wonder if we know that much. It is my memory that he expressed interested in Catholicism as a university student, but I have never heard anything to indicate  that this interest/faith continued through his life or writing career. Do you have something that supports the idea that he remained a Catholic?   He shapes some pretty intense satiric fables pointed at Catholicism and Puritanism in V and GR.  The chums of chance have Christian overtones.
> > >> On Aug 4, 2017, at 8:05 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> All interesting, of course.
> > >>
> > >> But Pynchon is Catholic, not Protestant, not Calvinist.
> > >>
> > >> "Puritan" perhaps, as America is/was in his formative years and beyond, and before-- as many have written about.  Roth, The Last Puritan or THE PURITAN MIND, Larzer Ziff for examples, Ziff who tries to subtilize all the paradoxes and their hidden places in America and our minds.
> > >>
> > >> In Weber, Catholic Spain was a Spirit of Capitalism failure, just misc.
> > >>
> > >> Sent from my iPad
> > >>
> > >>> On Aug 4, 2017, at 3:36 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>> The earliest appearance in the scriptures of the word has the usage of favor: Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. This use appears several times in Genesis and though some say it means mercy it seems to more specifically mean favor.( hence disgraced means shamed/lost from favor) So there is a Hebrew word( chen)meaning favor that is used  frequently in the Torah and is taken up in the new testament
> > >>> by both the gospel writer of the book of John ( the law came by Moses, but grace and truth through Jesus)  and by Paul, who dominates theological interpretation of the life of Jesus( whom he never met, and appeared to know little of his  teachings as presented in the Gospels) .  Paul was multi lingual as a preacher to Greeks, Syrians, Romans and was steeped in Hebrew, the scriptures,Phariseeism and probably Aramaic. It seems likely that he was taking the core concept and word from Genesis and giving it a particularly Christian mystical spin. Paul is the source of the concept of predetermination of the destiny of the individual to be either saved or lost.  That concept was challenged at the time by James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the early church in Jerusalem who did not care for Paul’s teachings, but again Paul dominates the churches interpretation  especially among the Protestants. For many protestants grace became the dividing line between salvation and damnation with this idea being most clearly enunciated by Calvin. The Puritans were Calvinists and P’s personal lineage though with an heretical streak..
> > >>>
> > >>> I agree with David Morris that despite this weighty background, Pynchon plays with the linguistic nuances that the word( grace of a dancer, graceful exit, graciuos host)  has acquired including letting  the Puritan heritage play out its role among the characters he creates. One must be careful to not overly connect the language of a pyncho character with his own beliefs or language.
> > >>>
> > >>> Luther and Calvin derive their concept of grace, Luther as a function of loving parental abundance and the" finished work of Christ “ and Calvin more mechanistically as a kind of prearranged divine mathematics, from Paul.
> > >>>
> > >>> I spent a lot of years with the Bible and came away with some knowledge but little love for its sway in human affairs or my own life. The Pauine concept of grace and its theological explication seems diseased to me, a way of giving up agency and justifying powerful bullies. I personally use the word only when it is clear I am talking about elegant flow in art or physical movement. That human experience of the transcendent includes mercy and the renewal that mercy brings seems natural and does not  require a lot of theological pyrotechnics.  We don’t need to spend our lives going back and forth on the same bus going one way then the other. Just get off the bus and live.
> > >>>
> > >>> I see Pynchon as a humane satirist, a chronicler of alternative history from an outsider perspective, and wildly liberated spinner of 3 dimensional stories that include mythos, conspracy theory,  colorful but credible fiction, and historic events in fairly equal measure.
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>> On Jul 29, 2017, at 3:28 PM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>>>
> > >>>> You are the native speaker, Mark, but I would say it's bullshit if you don't provide context. What kind of grace? You have disgrace, you have clumsiness, I'm sure you have more opposites of grace.
> > >>>>
> > >>>> 2017-07-29 21:11 GMT+02:00 Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com>:
> > >>>> I suggest "trump"
> > >>>> From: Mark Kohut
> > >>>> Sent: ‎7/‎29/‎2017 20:06
> > >>>> To: pynchon -l
> > >>>> Subject: Grace again. Misc.
> > >>>>
> > >>>> Gracelessness is an absence of grace, but the English language lacks a word for the opposite of grace.--Cass Sunstein, very recent essay.
> > >>>
> > >>> -
> > >>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> > >> -
> > >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
> > >
> > > -
> > > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> 
> 
> 

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