Eddins, "Depraved New World"

[Dave Monroe]

>From Dwight Eddins, The Gnostic Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000),
Chapter Three, "Depraved New World: Gnostic History in V.," pp. 50-88:

... we find V. in Florence, that center of Machiavellian virtu, i.e., of
political machination at its most cynical and cunning.  It is significan
that her nascent political convictions include a detestation of
socialists and anarchists.  The latter will come to symbolize, in
Gravity's Rainbow, a love of freedom and natural process at odds with
gnostic designs of control; and V. herself, within the next twenty
years, will be in the service of fascistic plots designed to suppress
freedom through the cynical and extremist exercise of virtu.  Fascism is
singled out by Voegelin as an example of the modern gnosticism that
preaches order while ultimately bringing chaos.  Virtu is a tool for
limited political objectives is not incompatable with metaxic order;
carried to hubristic extremnes, however, it results in the collapse of
this order and becomes the ally, often inadvertent, of entropy and
death. (63)

[In an endnote to the second-to-last sentence there, Eddins writes, "See
especially Chapter IV of The New Science of Politics ... where Voegelin
singles out National Socialism as an exmaple of 'Gnostic politics' ...";
The Gnostic Pynchon, p. 159, n. 14.  To continue ...]

This development in V.'s politics is an outgrowth of the imperialistic
brand of Catholicism that she had embraced as a child and that lends
itself to a process which conflates politics and religion into an
increasingly gnosticized whole.  Within the few months since her
"deflowering" by Goodfellow, this ex-virgin has slept with three other
men for payment, episodes taht she regards in her "outre brand" of
Catholicism as "outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual
grace belonging to Victoria alone" ([V.,] p. 167) and as a surrogate
consummation with Christ himself.  This peculiar sort of hubris, which
allows her to invert the normative values of the church for her benefit
in the name of a private and unique relationship to deity, is gnostic in
nature, as is the air of metaphysical aggressiveness implied by "a
nunlike temperament pushed to its most dangerous extreme."  By pointing
out that "in Paris similarly-mindewd ladies were attending Black
Masses," pynchon suggests V.'s association with the systematic
descration of sacred symbols and the reconsecration of them in the
service of demonic forces.  In the case of V.'s increasingly perverted
sacrality, such transvaluation will finally amount to the elevating of
teh entropic vortex over a vital spiritual order and of inhuman stasis
over human development.  (63-4)

... hm, maybe it's time to petition Indiana University Press to put
Eddins' book back into print--by far one of the most interesting and
useful pieces of Pynchoniana around.  Anyway, "Victoria is a Catholic,"
indeed, but hardly, er, orthodox ...