Osmosis & P's Gnostic Cosmoses

[Dave Monroe]

Do agree that there is no small sympathy for the heretic, gnostic or
otherwise, if not necessarily the devil, throughout that Pynchonian
oeuvre.  But not much of anything, so far as I've noticed, goes, I don't
know, unproblematized, that's for sure, least of all, indeed, that
gnostic cosmology, that gnostic ontology, epistemology, ethics, even.
Or, perhaps, that Elect/preterite binary, which does not merely undergo
a reversal of polarity, which is dealt with very much in a
deconstructive fashion, decentered, put into play, whatever, but ...
well, will post some relevant notes when I get a chance.

Yes, generally, a generalized "small-g" gnosticism, but, no, not
synonymous with "secular" (think "protestant" leans more that way, a la
Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).  Rather,
as characterized by Hans Jonas (The Gnostic Religion), Eric Vogelin
(Science, Politics and Gnosticism), et al. (thinking recently of Peter
Brown's The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in
Early Christianity, or of "John Doe's" Speak into the Mirror: A Story of
Linguistic Anthropolgy, which mught well be set against more positive
characterizations of gnosticism as resistant, liberatory, and so forth,
such as Elaine Pagels' in Adam, Eve and the Serpent), as being
antisocially introspective, as positing a binarily fractured, framented
material world "fallen" from some sort of "higher" primordial, ideal
unity, fullness possibly recuperable through said inwardly-driven
renunciation of said "fallen" world (cf. those Pynchonian
"pornographies"), and as surviving as nigh unto a "divine spark" of its
own in, say, the Enlightenment, German Idealism, Romanticism, fascism,
perhaps, even, not to mention in modern science (see esp. Vogelin here).

Again, see Dwight Eddins' The Gnostic Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1990), V. and the short stories do indeed display a concern with
gnosticism as, at least, broadly conceived, and keep in mind that the
critique of gnosticism as such was, indeed, blowin' in the wind ca. that
early Pynchonian era, and then some.  Do agree that it's with The Crying
of Lot 49, and, esp., Gravity's Rainbow, however, that Pynchon really
delves historically, explicitly, meticulously into the subject.  And
Happy Birthday, Emil Rathenau, at least ...