Winthrop Tremaine

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> Will get on it, give me a few days, though, and will
> elaborate on Eddins, just have to find the damn(ed)
> book, is all ...


>From Dwight Eddins, *THE GNOSTIC PYNCHON* Chapter Four,
Closure and Disclosure" 

Again, Eddins benefits from his Predecessors. Note that his
reading of the tensions and binaries are confirmed by
several essays in the OCLR (what I term, P's Agonistic
Paradox)

"The frequent associations of the Trystero
with the demonic do not contradict the Trystero's
potentially
sacred significance: the demonic is a subclass of the
sacred, and exists,  like the sacred, on a plane of meaning
different from the profane and
the secular." {p. 122}. My only quarrel with this is that it
fails to
recognize the dominance of the demonic in Tristero's
machinations, or at least what we know
of them. Mendelson asserts that "the foils to Trystero are
always associated with sacrality gone wrong" {p. 117), he
obscures
the important datum that Trystero itself has just this
association. It
practices assassination and mind control in the name of its
own self-righteous gnostic usurpations,  and is explicitly
identified by one group as
the demiurgic hierarchy responsible for a fallen cosmos. 
This identification provides the paradigm case for the
gnosticism of Tristero, not only because it fits the ancient
Gnostic
paradigm so well, but because it gives Tristero an
undeniably metaphysical
dimension. It is a precept  of the Scurvhamites, a
seventeenth-century sect of "most
pure Puritans" (CL49; P.116) who  have apparently gone to
the trouble to bring out a doctored edition of Wharfinger's
play The Courier's
Tragedy, mainly so they can modify one of the couplets to
read: "No hallowed
skein of stars can ward, I trow, /  Who's  once been  set
his tryst
with Trystero" (p. 52). According to Professor Bortz,
Wharfinger's editor,
"Nothing for a Scurvhamite ever happened 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, soulless; a brute automatism that led to
eternal death " (p.
116) It is with this "brute Other," the "clockwork"
principle {p. 117}  that
the Scurvhamites identify Tristero, a demonic conglomerate
so powerful that even "God's will" cannot save those who
have an "appointment"
with it.  Tony Tanner characterizes these Scurvhamite
beliefs as
"somewhat Manichaean,"  thus identifying them with one of
the
principal Gnostic sects. Certainly the division of universal
dominion between
good and evil deities corresponds to a central doctrine of
Manichaeism;
but the idea of a clockwork precision in the domain of evil
does not. 
According to Jonas,  Mani himself describes the movements of
matter in this
domain as "disorderly motion," and the Darkness that rules
the domain is seen as constantly "raging within itself" {The
Gnostic Religion pp. 211-212}. We can find a much
more accurate analogue in the doctrine of what might be
called orthodox Gnosticism of the Jewish and early Christian
varieties.
Here, in Jonas's words, the fallen cosmos is an "order with
a vengeance,
alien to man's aspirations. ...The blemish of nature lies
not in any
deficiency of order but in the all too pervading
completeness of it. Far from
being chaos, the creation of the demiurge, unenlightened as
it is, is still a
system of law" (p. 328).

It is impossible to miss the analogy between this aspect of
the Scurvhamite universe and the antipathetic universe
symbolized by the
clockwork eye of V. The "brute automatism" that is "blind"
and "soulless"
and leads to "eternal death " is another version of the
Inanimate, destroying
the metaxy where vision and soul define the human, and
expediting the
Kingdom of Death. Tanner, in effect, recognizes the perverse
gnostic 
consecration of natural decline when he speaks of the
Tristero as "the process
of entropy-turned-Manichaean, stealthily at work bringing
disorder and
death to the human community" (p. 43). In this demiurgic
capacity, Tristero parallels V. and her shadowy organization
as a complex of forces so profoundly life-negating that it 
appears to belong to a cosmic mythology.
The Manichaean can also turn entropic, however, which is to
say that
cabalistic terror can become existential despair-a principle
that Pynchon
demonstrates in the carefully tuned ambiguities of both
novels. The decline
 of what we might call the sense of the sacred in our
century may be
construed as the loss of a revealed truth about existence,
or else as the
loss of an obfuscating superstition-although the irony that
it is loss in
either case is one that we must explore. Just as Herbert
Stencil must face
the possibilities that the V. who anchors his myth is
nothing more than
a woman-or series of women-with a penchant for intrigue, and
that
history is merely random occurrence sprinkled with
coincidence, so 
Oedipa is forced to wonder whether Tristero is a spurious
revelation, a string
of clues planted by Pierce Inverarity as a hoax that
parodies revelation.
If this is the case, she would seem to be left with "just
the street" of San
Narciso, that part of the binary opposition that opens into
the wasteland
of existential gnosticism. But it is precisely at this point
that we come across an irony central
to Pynchon's epistemological ambiguity and, finally, to the
sense of the
religious that informs his work. A hoax set up to resemble
an elaborate
conspiracy is in itself an elaborate conspiracy; and insofar
as it aims to
control the whole sense of reality of its victims, it is
gnostic in design. If
Inverarity has indeed gone to the trouble to manipulate,
bribe, and suborn
so many coconspirators posthumously, then the Tristero
really does exist
as a reflection of his own power mania, the mania for
artifice and 
dehumanization  that has produced San Narciso, Yoyodyne,
Fangoso Lagoons, and other insults to the "tender flesh" of
the land. His vast, 	shadowy	enterprise would appear to be a
precursor of the gnostic Cartel, as would the Tiistero; in
fact, that enterprise may be an aspect of Tristero. The
notion of a gigantic, powerful conspiracy with its own laws
and morality, moving toward unguessable degrees of control,
begins to acquire a religious significance not dependent
upon a Scurvhamite cosmology or
even upon Tristero's autonomous existence.
Another way of putting this is to say that Oedipa's newfound
sense of
revelation and of a religious dimension to human existence
remains valid
even with the decline of Tristero to secular status, and
possibly even to
the status of a trick.