Pynchon and Catholicism

[Gary Webb]

You could argue that the Catholic v. Protestant dynamic is seminal to the development of the English language... Starting with the Lollards to Cramner’s Book of Common Prayer & the KJB... their influence on the English language has been immense, and then there is Shakespeare... I don’t know where I come down on his religion, and assuming the Sratfordian Shakespeare, he was born in the massive social upheaval of the English Reformation, and perhaps kept a covert Catholic faith throughout his life...This book by Clare Asquith  came out a few years ago, and gets a little crazy, but somewhere in the high drama & conspiracy, there might be a truth or two... (https://books.google.com/books/about/Shadowplay.html?id=t4BwDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button)... 

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> On Sep 24, 2020, at 11:50 AM, David Elliott via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> “She never was unCatholic.”
> 
> I know.
>    On Thursday, September 24, 2020, 11:36:55 AM EDT, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:  
> 
> She never was unCatholic. 
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 10:32 AM David Elliott <ellidavd at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>  Flannery O'Connor? I'd like to hear/read thoughts on her in this context.
> 
>    On Thursday, September 24, 2020, 06:34:11 AM EDT, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:  
> 
> "There is no being an Ex-Catholic, just an upracticing one"---Charles
> Simmons, *Powdered Eggs*,  a non-ex-Catholic.
> 
> Catholics do not have the Protestant self-justifications (re salvation) and
> the Reformation's creation
> of an individual relation to God.
> 
> Therefore Catholics lose EVERYTHING in their relations to their
> metaphysical selves and the universe when they lose
> Catholicism.
> 
> Some with great talent need to fill it all in again. With a new vision
> (sometimes a mirror of the old vision) and with a relentless
> style to try to match the incredible complexity of the world.
> 
>> On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 6:25 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> Am 24.09.20 um 02:54 schrieb John Bailey:
>>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> + World-opening Catholicism: Peter Handke receives the Nobel Prize in
>> Literature
>> 
>> Peter Handke belongs to the faction of 'ministrants' in German-language
>> literature who were socialized Catholically in premodern village
>> cultures after World War II ... +
>> 
>> https://ixtheo.de/Record/1686672594
>> 
>> "Vom Tod des Buddha, gab es da nicht jene Darstellungen, wo sämtliche
>> Tiere des Erdkreises den Mahatma beweinen, Tränenflüsse vom Elefanten,
>> Löwen, Tiger, Adler bis zu Maus, Regenwurm, vielleicht auch Mist-, Mai-
>> und Junikäfer: wie aber war der Umgang all dieser Tiere mit dem
>> Erleuchteten zu dessen Lebzeiten gewesen? Darstellungen: keine. Beweint,
>> beheult, beachtet allein im Tode?"
>> 
>> Peter Handke: Die Obstdiebin. Berlin 2017: Suhrkamp, p. 497.
>> 
>>> 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
>>> .
>> 
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>> 
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