GRGR(22) - Jonah

[Doug Millison]

To call someone a "Jonah" means to call her a jinx, doesn't it?

Terrance's citation of the passage from Matthew in the New Testament brings
another perspective, too. Many scholars believe that "Matthew" and the
other synoptic gospel authors engaged in a practice that Dominic Crossan
has called "prophesy historicized" -- as they redacted texts and combined
oral traditions that referred to actual historical events these writers
also reached back to the Old Testament for passages that could be used to
foreshadow various events of Jesus'  life and ministry:  a very
self-conscious sort of manipulation of tradition and text to add depth and
cultural resonance as the gospel writers shaped their stories in accordance
with the development of early Christian tradition in the decades following
Jesus' execution by the Romans.

Pynchon seems, to me, to be doing something similar, as he pulls together
various stories he makes up of whole cloth plus historical threads,
overlaying the whole with very specific allusions (to past narratives) that
add depth and cultural resonance to his novel(s). Pynchon's allusion to the
Gospel of Thomas in GR, using the precise technical terminology that
Biblical scholars use, indicates, to me at least, that he's familiar with
the way that scholars see how human hands shaped the text -- the Bible, Old
and New Testatments -- that has served as perhaps the most important
cultural foundation for the West over the past few thousand years. I don't
think it's too grand to see Pynchon's own writing project in some ways on
par with the effort that shaped the Bible. That Pynchon's  canon reflects
the efforts of a single writer, playing with thousands of years of myth,
religious and secular history, literature and the other arts, makes his
accomplishment all the more impressive.

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