grgr (34): "the tower" (747)

[jbor]

That final hymn is "one They never taught anyone to sing", composed by 
Slothrop's first American ancestor, William, who "argued holiness" for the
Preterite and preached that, as Christians, "we have to love Judas too.
Right?". Like the Gnostic priests his teachings were suppressed (his book
*On Preterition* was burnt by the Puritans). Thus, the hymn is a textual
fragment from the "Slothropite heresy" (556.15), which was a variant cult
*within* the Puritan faith of the Founding Fathers: an interpretation of
Christianity which was not permitted to "consolidate and prosper", perhaps
even the "wrong ... fork" America took.

>From Tim Ware's Guide:

> Slothrop, William
> 21; Tyrone's first American ancestor; 27; 364; came to US in 1630 on
> Arabella, 554; On Preterition - published in England, burned in Boston,
> 555; returned to England and died there missing USA, 556; his hymn, 760.

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/gravity-f.html

In this final fragment in the novel the audience (i.e. the reader) is
waiting in the cinema, impatient, but the film (its continuation? its
beginning?) has been delayed, so the narrator/projectionist/tour guide
offers this hymn as a text on the page/screen/historical space of the novel
-- like the prologue to a silent movie to sing along with, bouncing ball and
all -- as a temporary distraction, a "comfort", in the same league as
physical contact or sexual self-arousal. There is an admixture of wry
facetiousness, sadness, contempt, bitterness, even despair, in the
narrator's tone in this passage imo.

Ware (following the lead of several critics) offers a very convincing
connection to Pynchon's own first American ancestor:

> William Pynchon was born in Springfield, Essex, England on 11 October 1590.
> He married Anne Agnes Andrew about 1623. The family emigrated to New
> England on Winthrop's fleet of 1630, Anne dying soon after their arrival. A
> few years later, William married Frances Sanford of Dorchester. William was
> the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts and one of the Bay Colony's
> leaders until his publication of a book about justification and redemption.
> He returned to England to enjoy greater religious freedom and died at
> Wraysbury, England on 10 October 1662.

So, this (suppressed) hymn has been passed down as an oral tradition through
the line of Slothrops/(Pynchons) to become part of the current text (cf that
self-conscious reference to "The Gospel of Thomas" earlier). Pynchon, like
his forefather, is of course a heretic within the current regime, and we are
well along that "wrong ... fork" in the road by now. And thus this hymn is
also a text within a text within a text ... (the palimpsest is the
predominant space of the postmodern novel, mise en abyme its archetypal
figure); for, as the narrative has shown us, sex, love and religious faith
are merely panaceas which distract us from that (suspended) apocalypse which
hovers above our heads.

Perhaps they are also the necessary illusions which keep it suspended there.

There is an "outside" the text which is also a part of the "text" of
life/our lives which *GR* engages: it is where Tyrone has gone also.

best

----------
>From: Paul Mackin <pmackin at clark.net>

snip
> By the way, did Otto ever clarify his translation? It seemed to me
> that the same word used in German to refer to 'the Mighty' was also
> used to refer to 'the Elect.' In English this would never work. Not in
> theology either where the mighty are not necessarily the elect (even
> though in Protestantism worldly success in sometimes taken as a
> sign of election)--because as everyone knows it is harder for a rich
> man to attain heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
>
> Just asking.
>
>    P.
>