Eddins on Blicero

[jbor]

Eddins refers to the 

    ... Christian/pagan duality that Pynchon has ingeniously built into the
    novel's chronology, and that Steven Weisenburger has with corresponding
    ingenuity discovered. "_Gravity's Rainbow_," he points out, "is plotted
    like a mandala, its quadrants carefully marked by Christian feast days
    that happened to coincide, in 1944-45, with key historical dates and
    ancient pagan festivals." [Weisenburger's _Companion_, pp. 9-10] Part 3,
    for instance, "ends on the Feast of the Transfiguration, celebrated on
    August 6 to mark Christ's final earthly revelation of his divinity -- a
    blaze of illumination followed by a white cloud." But it is on this day,
    as Weisenburger observes, that Hiroshima is bombed and that Slothrop
    undertakes his Dionysian transformation into a crossroads. By the same
    token, the firing of Rocket 00000 takes place on Easter Sunday 1945,
    which coincides that year with the pagan April Fool's. (121-2)

Eddins resorts to odd notions such as "gnostic slippage", "immanent
ambivalence" and "Orphic Christianity" to interpret the coincidence of these
dates in the novel. However, no real "ingenuity" was needed on Pynchon's or
Weisenburger's part to note that Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, or that
Easter Sunday 1945 fell on April 1. Pynchon can use a calendar: big deal.
However, the date of Slothrop's crossroads revelation (624-5) is not
specified in the text and, as a connection between these two episodes is the
basis for his evaluation of Pynchon's "message" in the novel, Eddins'
convoluted reading again begins to unravel right here. Eddins and
Weisenburger both acknowledge that there is a deliberate connection made
between Gottfried's choice to sacrifice himself in the 00000 and Jesus's
crucifixion -- the date confirms this -- but Eddins says that it's a
"violation of Easter's spirit and significance ..., the ultimate April
foolery, a cosmic trick that does not so much negate the possibility of
resurrection as expose the religious basis of gnostic negation." (122) I
would have thought that the "religious basis" of gnosticism was
self-evident. But, obviously, Eddins argues from a Christian perspective,
and thus continually reiterates his bias against gnosticism (as aspiring to
"negation" of one sort or another). On the basis of the textual evidence
(both in the novel and elsewhere) I'm more inclined to think that Pynchon
would be critiquing rather than affirming Christian mythography "and
significance" by foregrounding such a juxtaposition.

Being Easter Sunday today (as well as the third day of the Cambodian, Thai,
Lao etc New Year festival), I thought this somewhat apt.

best wishes to all