Scurvhamites

[Dave Monroe]

"'You get the general idea.  [N]otice how often the
figure of Death hovers in the background.  The moral
rage, it's a throwback, it's medieval.  No Puritan
ever got that violent.  Except possibly the
Scurvhamites.'  D'Amico thinks this edition was a
Scurvhamite project'
   "'Scurvhamite?'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 155)

As much as I don't want to resort to this here, from
J. Kerry Grant, A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49
(Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994) ...

"H155.12 , B116.14  'Scurvhamites'  Newman likens the
'gaudy clockwork of the doomed' that is run by the
Scurvhamites' 'opposite principle' to 'the Calvinist
approach to enterprise,' which has led to 'an
industrial society fallen into inertia and
homogeneity' (75).
   "Eddins finds a parallel between the 'brute
automatism' of the Scurvhamite vision and the 'all to
pervading completeness' of the order imposed on the
universe by the 'demiurge' or early gnosticism (92).
   "There seems little doubt that this passage can be
read, in Hayles's terms, as a 'parable of cooptation'
(199), emblematic of the way in which contemporary
society has been able to absorb ven the most
disruptive of countercultural impulses and appropraite
them for its own ends,  The 'most pure' origins of the
great American experiment are invoked here." (p. 129)

Citing ...

Newman, Robert D.  Understanding Thomas Pynchon.
   Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1986.

Eddins, Dwight.  The Gnostic Pynchon.
   Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Hayles. N. Katherine. "'A Meatphor of God Knew
   How Many Parts': The Engine that Drives The
   Crying of Lot 49."  New Essays on The Crying
   of Lot 49.  Ed. Patrick O'Donnell.  New York:
   Cambridge UP, 1991.  97-125

I would have liked to have emphasized here the
similarities of Scurvhamism (?) not only to Newtonian
mechanism, but also to gnosticism, but I couldn't
locate my copy of Eddins' book.  Oh, Terrance ...? 
But note ...

"Robert Scurvham had founded, during the reign of
Charles I, a sect of most pure Puritans.  Their
central hangup had to do with predestination.  There
were two kinds.  Nothing for a Scurvhamite ever
happend by accident, Creation was a vast, intricate
machine.  But one part of it, the Scurvhamite part,
ran off the will of God, its prime mover.  The rest
ran off some opposite Principle, something blind,
oulless; a brute automatism that led to eternal
death...." (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 157)

"But the brute Other, that kept the non-Scurvhamite
univers running like clockwork, that ws something else
again.  Evidently they felt Trystero would symbolsize
the Other quite well." (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 156)

That "opposite Principle," that "brute Other," that
Demiurge.  And note ...

"If Tristero has managed to maintain even partial
secrecy, if Thurn and Taxis have no clear idea who
their adversary is, or how far its influence extends,
then many of them must come to believe in something
very like the Scurvhamite's blind, automatic
anti-God." (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 165)

Tis articulation of paranoia and gnosticism will, of
course, proliferate explosively throughout Gravity's
Rainbow (not to mention the Vietnam/Cold War/Space
Race/Nixon-era America it was written and published
in), as will the problmatization of it as a
source/type/point of resistance, cf. ...

Slavoj Zizek, On Belief.
   New York: Routledge, 2001.

Esp. again, Ch. 1, "Against the Digital Heresy," Sec.
i, "Gnosticism? No, Thanks!," pp. 6-15 ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=465&sort=date

On that "throwback," "medieval" "figure of Death
hover[ing] in the background," that memento mori, see
the very excellent ...

Neill, Michael.  Issues of Death: Mortality
   and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy.
   New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Esp. Part I, "'Within All Rotteness': Tragedy, Death,
and Apocalypse," Sec. 1, "'Peremptory Nullification':
Tragedy and Macabre Art" (pp. 51-101) and Sec. 2, "The
Stage of Death: Tragedy and Anatomy" (pp. 102-140). 
And, of course, note the articulation of sex 'n' death
here as well, might as well namecheck ...

Fiedler, Leslie.  Love and Death in the American
   Novel.  New York: Criterion, 1960.

Great thing about those Pynchonian texts, they always
provoke reading such interestiung intertexts ...

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