GRGR(2), Puritans

[Jeffrey Meikle]

The description of Tyrone's desk is a great example of TRP's obsessive
listing and cataloguing of minor details of everyday life.  As someone
said, it's his way of establishing verisimilitude.  It's also, as someone
else said, similar to the listing and cataloguing of Whitman and Ginsberg.
Here also think of Jack Kerouac, who regarded every insignificant detail,
every mundane experience, as so holy he had to record it to rescue it from
being irretrievably lost.  For TRP's indebtedness to Kerouac's cataloguing
rhetoric and desire to redeem all experience, compare the early sections of
"Visions of Cody," especially Kerouac's descriptions of "red-brick" urban
America and of the wondrous, heroic, epic abundance of foods spread out
along a cafeteria counter.  This is an *assimilative, digestive* strategy.
Pynchon incorporates everything (Edward Mendelson called GR an
"encyclopedic narrative" encompassing all the artifacts and ideas of its
culture, like Dante or Cervantes or Melville).  This is a *redemptive*
strategy, flying in the face of both the technocratic reductionism of Them
and the natural withering and fading of entropy.  If all these unique,
individual, quirky things in all their distinct particularities are not
recalled and recombined here, in a vast "plot...too elaborate for the dark
Angel to hold at once" (Lot 49, Bantam, 134), then they will fall away,
subject to death and gravity's ultimate squeeze.  GR itself, like the
multiform exfoliation of life (Pirate's bananas) in a declining entropic
heat-death universe, becomes an improbable dancing in the face of
probability.

All this fits well with the description of the decline of the Slothrop
family, TRP's riff on the Puritan falling away or declension from the
founding fathers' 1630 dream of a pure "city on a hill," a "beacon" for the
rest of the world.  It would be interesting to know which history courses
TRP took at Cornell.  Did he read Perry Miller on the declension of the
Puritans from the Word to Money?  Did he read Van Wyck Brooks on "New
England:  Indian Summer" with its characterization of in-grown families,
thinning populations, and rural decay so similar to what we get on p. 28?
Or did some professor read long evocative quotes from them?  The "progress"
from William to Constant to Variable Slothrop, a delicious parody on
symbolic Puritan names as well as an emblem of increasing entropy, reminds
me somewhat irrationally of the Mathers, a family of three generations of
ministers:  the upright Richard, Puritan founding father; his inwardly
soul-searching though outwardly prominent son Increase (whose
self-confessed falling away might have justified the name Decrease); and
his son Cotton (whose willingness to mix with Shit and Money might lead us
to conclude that he'd "cotton" to anything).

As negative as Pynchon is about his Puritan heritage (think of Nathaniel
Hawthorne's ambivalence about his ancestor William Hathorne, judge at the
witch trials), his work is squarely in the tradition of the Puritan
jeremiad sermon, in which ministers threatened the wrath of God if his
"chosen people" didn't follow the agenda he had laid out for them, as
individuals and as a society.  An inverted Puritan, Pynchon looks back to
that pig-herding Slothrop, the life-loving champion of the Preterite, as
the fork in the road that America never took, and calls us back, in his
jeremiads Lot 49 and GR, to that life-affirming vision that mainstream
Puritans abandoned almost from the beginning, when they crushed the
orgiastic merry-making 'round the May pole at Merrymount (as noted by
another poster).  Since there are so many parallels between Pynchon and
Hawthorne, I also wonder what effect it had on a young sensitive future
imaginative writer (young Tom) to encounter Hawthorne's fictional
"Pyncheon" family in "The House of the Seven Gables," with its fable of
moral, physical, biological decline and decay, its corpulent Judge
Pyncheon, oblivious to the Word and up to his neck in Shit and Money.  It
was several years into TRP's career before reviewers, critics, and their
proofreaders quit the frequent error of referring to him as "Thomas
Pyncheon", a momentary victory of the Word if there ever was one.

Wheww...sorry...got Puritans on the brain...I feel sorry for my poor students.

Cheers,
Jeff



Jeffrey Meikle
Director, American Studies Program
303 Garrison Hall, University of Texas at Austin 78712
512-471-7277; fax 512-471-3540