Pynchon and Catholicism

[Charles Albert]

Does Asquith go anywhere Greenblatt didn't?

I got about 1/3 into "Will and the World" and abandoned as a bit too
contrived....sad, because I loved The Swerve...

love,

cfa

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 12:18 PM Gary Webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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)...
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > 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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> >
> >
> > --
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> --
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