Pynchon and Catholicism

[John Bailey]

YES! I thought of Gaddis too and I've barely read any of him. But he
does seem to share in that sensibility.
And I love me some Biercian sentence architecture...

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 11:31 AM Charles Albert <cfalbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
> 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