pynchon's religion

[Eric Rosenbloom]

I'm sorry to continue keeping this growing and useful discussion away
from V, but it's been a long time since I read that book, and Gravity's
Rainbow is freshly teeming . . .

The beautiful passage on pages 127-136 is one of the more overtly
"religious" parts of Gravity's Rainbow, so let's take a look . . . 

"Listen to this mock-angel singing ["the high voice of the black man
riding above the others" (p. 129)], let your communion be at least in
listening ... There must have been evensong here long before the news of
Christ ... something to raise the possibility of another night that
could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the
Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our
stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night leaving only the
clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw . . ." (p. 135)

You know he will be crushed by the world, but "on the way home tonight,
you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. ... As if it were you who
could, somehow, save him." (p. 136)

So this evensong -- "no counterfeit baby, no announcement of the
Kingdom, not even a try at warming or lighting this terrible night,
only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory little cry . . ." (p. 136)

That "damn us" is important. The beauty here is the singing, human
voices in human song, and it takes us right to the last page of the
book: There is no salvation, only death . . . "There is time, if you
need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between
your own cold legs . . ." (p. 760).

And the way "back" that has been a hot topic of late? Salvation here is
"only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw." Not
recreating a mythologic Eden or New Paradise gated community, but a
reminder of innocent harmony to take home with you. "My leaves have
drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To
remind me of. Lff!" (Finnegans Wake, page 628). [On second thought, that
Joyce quote doesn't quite fit, but leave it anyway.]

On pages 751-752, superheros arrive too late, are aging, get lost, fail
-- and are moved upstairs to watch new bright stars dismantle the old
systems. And so this religion thing, this messiah drug, this salvation
dream, with or without the State:

"What better place than Zürich to find vanity again? It's Reformation
country, Zwingli's town ... there are ex-young men ... who got initiated
at Harvard into the Puritan Mysteries: who took oaths in dead earnest to
respect and to act always in the name of _Vanitas_, Emptiness, their
ruler . . ." (p. 267-268)

"The only part of the epic [_Martin Fierro_] that really has von Göll
fascinated is a singing-duel between the white gaucho and the dark El
Moreno." (p. 387) (He will use Emulsion J to go under their skin . . .
and there is "_Return of Martin Fierro_, in which the Gaucho sells out:
assimilates back into Christian society, gives up his freedom ... A very
moral ending ..." (p. 387).)

"Eastern" religion:  Masonic magic finds Lyle Bland, who starts leaving
his body, finally going to join the astral IG (pp. 587-591).

"State" religion:  "You were never of the faith, Vaslav" (p. 704). The
Kirghiz light did nothing for him, either. And his hatred of his black
brother falls away when Geli's black magic, love, finds him.

Final words: I think these excerpts support the idea that Pynchon thinks
the State, the Firm, the System, the Faith are pretty much the same
thing, and Their whiteness is the whiteness of Death. The salvation they
promise crumbles even as They offer more, whiter, cleaner.

Forgive me,
Eric R



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