COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

[Joseph Tracy]

I am re-considering Bortz’s idea that the uniqueness of the Vatican version of the Courier’s Tragedy is that it is a Scurvhamite version of Wharfingers play, because that makes little sense to me. Oedipa is also clearly skeptical. Hollander’s essay proposed that the reference to the Vatican was about how nazi treasure was routed through the Vatican with the help of Angleton and Dulles and ended up in the laundered US bank accounts of the German industrialists, just as many ex-nazi scientists and military leaders ended up in the CIA. I’m not willing to discount this particular Vatican angle entirely but it is a large gap away from the text.  I would suggest something simpler than what  Bortz and D’Amico came up with. I am thinking out loud here, The Vatican would by all logic favor the Thurn and Taxis postal control and their dependence on the Holy Roman Empire. They might simply be motivated to keep a copy of the original Wharfinger play both for their secret records and their porn collection, and change the words to place all the guilt in the story on the incestuous, priest-torturing Duke Angelo and  would also obscure the very existence of a competing postal system.  This seems a far more logical ( Occam’s razor)explanation.

The advantage of the Scurvhamites  is to have fun with the bizarre extremes of Calvinism,  and to shift focus to the universality of personal ambition and scheming within both religion  and secular aspirations to rule. Pynchon is pointing out that the same interdependence of church and state that passed from the Gods and Ceasars and then moved  to  the interdependence  of the Vatican  and the emperor Charlemagne ( beginning of Holy Roman Empire), had then passed  in the reformation to the interdependence of nationalism and various Protestant sects. There is no return  in this progression to the nonviolent healing and sharing of the Galilean except in non-state affiliated  religious communities  and independent thinkers( the anabaptists, Franciscans, Quakers, ). There is also a challenging  secular version of this pursuit in people like Tom Paine, Galileo, Copernicus, enlightenment figures etc.)

To look at this history from within the good guys v. bad guys culture wars of the 60s or now is startling in the arbitrariness and the  sheer violence of dueling doctrines, movements of people,  technological changes, intermarriage, language wars etc. How do we frame  our cultural and personal  struggles within this confused history and what is the role of communication systems, or what we now call media in that  conflicted landscape? Who should decide?

To be continued.