Pynchon and Catholicism

[Charles Albert]

*What these very different writers have in common, itseems, is a love of
baroque literacy, a willingness to tie theirsentences up in quite
sadomasochistic knots*


I was obliged to look up Gaddis' bio to see if he was a part of the sample,
but the info is indeterminate on the matter of his papism.

The Recognitions is a lexicon of Catholicism, but it's conceivable that he
leveraged a discreet number of sources...

With respect to the sentence structure, I always thought Bierce a
source....his stories are very uneven, but the sentence architecture is the
shit..

Eg..

HAVING murdered my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity, I was
arrested and put upon my trial, which lasted seven years. In charging the
jury, the judge of the Court of Acquittal remarked that it was one of the
most ghastly crimes that he had ever been called upon to explain away.

   At this, my attorney rose and said:

   "May it please your Honor, crimes are ghastly or agreeable only by
comparison. If you were familiar with the details of my client's previous
murder of his uncle you would discern in his later offense (if offense it
may be called) something in the nature of tender forbearance and filial
consideration for the feelings of the victim. The appalling ferocity of the
former assassination was indeed inconsistent with any hypothesis but that
of guilt; and had it not been for the fact that the honorable judge before
whom he was tried was the president of a life insurance company that took
risks on hanging, and in which my client held a policy, it is hard to see
how he could decently have been acquitted.


O. Henry does similar stuff...they're like discreet jokes..maybe the point
is a payoff for all the attention required to keep track of subject and
object through endless mazes of nested clauses...



love,


cfa



On Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 8:55 PM John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> I recently observed that several writers whose prose style I've been
> admiring were raised Catholic. First it was Gerald Murnane, then
> Rachel Cusk, and of course I recalled that Pynchon was raised (half)
> Catholic himself. What these very different writers have in common, it
> seems, is a love of baroque literacy, a willingness to tie their
> sentences up in quite sadomasochistic knots, a hovering weirdness that
> puts them at odds with much of the literary establishment, and a few
> other things I can't quite nail.
> Some quick searches and yep, other authors that spring to mind as
> sharing these qualities turn out to have been raised Catholic: Cormac
> McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, George Saunders. That's a
> diverse list! But speaking as someone who was raised Catholic (though
> long out of that club thanks) I find it relatively easy to predict if
> a writer has the same background.
> Obviously a lot has been written on the influence of Judaism on Jewish
> writers, but I wonder if other strains of Christianity also have a
> less obvious impact on the styles of writers raised therein.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>