The Gnostic Pynchon

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> I haven't gotten around to Dwight Eddins' The Gnostic Pynchon yet, but ... Eric
> Vogelin's Science, Politics and Gnosticism was, I believe first published ca.
> 1968, and could presumably have been a source for Pynchon, at least in time for
> Gravity's Rainbow.  However, I've not seen it come up much, if at all, in the
> critical literature.  I've just subscribed to this list, so I don't know if
> it's been mentioned, but I believe the general consensus has been that
> Pynchon's source for most things gnostic was likely Hans Jonas's seminal The
> Gnostic Religion, first published in English, I believe, in 1963--at any rate,
> that seems the source for most commentators, and I recall that I came by it via
> some bit of Pynchoniana or another.

Eddins makes brilliant use of Vogelin. Jonas, right, that's
the guy. A good introduction is Rudolph's GNOSIS, now
available in English. 
> 
> Now, my understanding is that Pynchon, indeed, came from a New England
> Protestant, even Puritan, background, although his Catholic mother raised him
> as a Catholic (hence perhaps the relationship between chronology in Gravity's
> Rainbow and the Liturgical calendar, as noted by Steven Weisenberger in his
> introduction to his A "Gravity's Rainbow" Companion).  And I've no doubt about
> his interest in, use (and abuse) of gnosticism--indeed, heterodox and/or
> heretical Christianities in general--in Gravity's Rainbow (and it seems to me
> his interest in Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies might be realted, but ...),

....but it would take a book to go into it. 



> but what I find interesting is his rather ... counter-gnostic emphasis on the
> body, on the corporeal, on the vulgar, on that "lower material bodily strata"
> (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World) which, in its kenotic (Bakhtin
> again?) emphasis on Incarnation vs. (as with the gnostics) Resurrection, on
> this vs. the other, an other world (see, for example, Peter Brown, The Body and
> Society: Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity), on, perhaps, the Preterite
> vs. the Elect.  Pynchon as, Pynchon a gnostic?  If not hardly, then, well, with
> difficulty, Pynchon's Christian background being complicated, indeed.  Indeed,
> perhaps Pynchon, like Vogelin, recognizes a certain gnosticism in modernity,
> postmodernity, even (see Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium, as well as Mark
> Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of
> Gothic), in contemporary (at least) science, and is making it a point of
> critique.  

YUP! 


Anybody recall if Alfred North Whitehead had anything to say
about
> this in Science and the Modern World, which was definitely a source for
> Pynchon?  Any comments?  Examples? Lines to follow?  Let me know ...

Yes, and this goes to my assertion that Pynchon is
sympathetic towards the early Puritans. The Greeks too, the
seven rivers, all those "primitives" that worship stones. 

Whitehead would fit in as a nice link, wouldn't he? From
Adams and the Mediaeval back to the Greeks. 

If you are going to try Eddins, you might try Hohmann too,
both are out of print, but you can get them.