The Gnostic Pynchon

[Dave Monroe]

... well, I'm taking--or, perhaps, I'm making--the issues at hand to be, on the one
hand, that gnostic devaluation (to say the least) of the world, the worldly, the
this-worldy (and do recall that phrase from Wittgenstein those "sferics" might or
might not have yielded, "the world is all the case there is"), of matter, the
material, the body, the corporeal, and so on and so forth (and, again, my sources
here are largely Hans Jonas' The Gnostic Religion and Peter Brown's The Body and
Society, the latter of which one might well set against Elaine Pagels' rather
different reading of gnosticism in re: the body, gender, sexuality, and so forth in
her Adam, Eve and the Serpent), and, on the other hand (though this point is no
doubt related, as perhaps a schematic of the aforementioned binaries), that
(predating Christian gnosticism, of course, but ...) gnostic Manicheism, that very
binary mentality indeed, "good" and "evil," if not perhaps quite relative, at least
on rather more equal ground than in Christianity, where evil is fallen from (an
ontologically prior, superior) good.  A fair characterization?  "excluded middles
are bad shit," I seem to recall reading somewhere ....  Am intrerested, by the way,
in where the Sloterdijk (all I have is The Critique of Cynical Reason) and Filoramo
quotes came from ... but, while Pynchon no doubt makes use of gnosticism,
gnosticisms--his interest in the Pentecost, the Holy Ghost, seems to me to exhibit a
certain tendency towards gnosticism, for example--it also seems to me that, again,
he, his texts, are largely countergnostic, precisely in their frequent, recurring
emphases on, precisely, the worldly, the material, the vulgar, the Preterite.
Indeed, he seems to suggest that Slothropian Preterition precisely as a sort of
counterheresy to gnosticism.  Transcendence thereof often seems problematized,
parodied, even, say, the Rocket, do note, for example, that that gravitic
rainbow--"light and gravity," indeed, about as immaterial as one can get (leaving
aside, for the moment, just what constitutes "the material" vs. "the immaterial" in
a quantum physical world)--is, indeed, parabolic, what goes up does indeed come
down, returns to the world, and, in the case of the Rocket, with decidedly material,
decidedly devastating results ...

Lorentzen / Nicklaus wrote:

> Dave Monroe schrieb:
>
> > 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.
>
>   "philosophy comes from the loving of being; it is the loving longing of human
>    beings, to recognize the order of being and to tune in to that. gnosis wants
>    domination over the being; to get command on the being the gnostic constructs
>    his system. the system is a gnostic thinking pattern, not a philosophical
>    one."
>                       (eric voegelin: science, politics and gnosticism)
>
>
>    well, at least he's got the guts to exclude a lot of modern german
>    philosophers - from hegel to schmitz - from his notion of philosophy. but
>    this does not make his concept of gnosticism true ... let's hear an expert or
>    two on that.
>
>    here comes peter "menschenpark" sloterdijk:
>
>    "... for decades this author (voegelin) has, with the manic energy of an
>    inaccurate inquisition, denunciated everything as "gnostic mass movement"
>    which tried to get along without the blessings of aristotle and aquinus:
>    'progressivism, positivism, marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism and
>    national socialism' (science, politics and gnosticism, p. 83). voegelin's
>    acquaitance of the authentic gnostic writings, however, can hardly be shown.
>    it seems that the twentieth century has brought to the charismatic political
>    scientist a general hysterical itching ..." (die wahre irrlehre)
>
>    and giovanni filoramo adds:
>
>    "indeed, there is a danger of losing all contact with the historical reality
>    of the object of research. the term 'gnosis', in many of these cases, instead
>    of evoking a concrete historical world with its fears and anxieties, hopes
>    and promises of salvation, conjures up rather the lifeless phantasm of gnosis
>    as a universal category of the human spirit, an 'eternal' form of knowledge,
>    a universal label, an empty box refilled with different contents hurriedly
>    pushed onto the intellectual market by cultural fashions." (a history of
>    gnosticism)
>
>
>    the last man i want to quote her now is not really an expert (- and his
>    books, as was mentioned on this list before, can be read best in times of
>    high school), but he nevertheless has a good observation to offer now and
>    then:
>
>    "anti-gnosticism was in the early 1960s among conservatives an almost
>     chronical theme, which once even appeared in a leading article in  t i m e.
>     (...) for an extrem chistian pessimist as voegelin is everybody who tries to
>     be happy - or to make other people happy - dangerously close to the
>     heterodoxy of gnosticism. in this sense i am completely for 'a
>     visible-making of the ultimate things', if possible already next tuesday!"
>
>                        (r.a. wilson: the illuminati papers)
>
>    & a final quote which brings us back to gr:
>
>           "two powers dominate the universe: light and gravity."
>
>  so sez simone weil.
>
>                                be seeing you next tuesday: kfl
>
> > 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 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.  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 ...