P & religion: some more resources

[Doug Millison]

A Google search sampling of some resources that indicate a spectrum of
interest in the way Pynchon deals with religion:

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/sixties-l/0569.html
Syncretism and Spirituality in the 1960s:=20
>
>Charting the Postmodern Crossing of U.S. Literature and Religious
>Studies
>
>This proposed special sesssion will chart the way in which texts of the
>1960s represented the emerging force of the postmodern religious
>aesthetic. As factions within the decade embraced syncretism and new
>ideas of spirituality, key pieces of literature documented, fueled, and
>created its movement away from organized religion towards more subjective
>practices. This new syncretism did not destroy the system of religion but
>altered it by expanding its own boundaries. As a result, the 1960s were a
>time when religion was not collapsed but transformed from within as the
>secular world both enhanced and devalued its power forever. Thus the
>distinction between secular and sacred texts blurred immeasurably.
>
>
>Panelists will look to postmodern religious studies and literature to
>analyze an important shift of a decade more often identified by its
>revolts for political and civil rights. The session seeks to find works
>created in the 1960s that both mirrored and acted as a catalyst for
>religious and spiritual trends. Although literature has
>attacked/critiqued organized religion for decades, and even centuries,
>the 1960s in the United States represents a time when literary ideals and
>the actions of the populace were synthesized in a capacity never seen
>before. Burgeoning ideas of spirituality evident in such disparate
>realms as Vatican II, the Civil Rights Movement, Death of God theology,=20
>and the counterculture discovered a foundation and support in works from
>Barth, Cox, Kerouac, Kesey, Pynchon, Reed, Vonnegut, etc. Furthermore,
>this crossing of literature and religion has been augmented by the rise
>of poststructuralist and postmodern theories. The panel will embrace the
>blurred lines between sacred and secular to question what is and what is
>not a 1960s religious text. In asking these questions the session
>seeks to chronicle the effects of these religious and spiritual
>transformations on the culture of both the 1960s and the decades that
>followed.


[...] It would be an oversimplification to label the contrast between Line
and Mound a contrast between modern and ancient ways of knowing, science and
religion. A more accurate way to state the contrast would be between
heaven-centered vs. earth-centered forms of knowledge, both ancient and
modern. [...] Like Mason, Dixon is a good and steady scientist, indisputably
a free-thinker, experimenter, and man of his age. But unlike Mason he is a
gregarious optimist delighting in heterogeneity and chance, always willing
to explore new foods, new adventures, and new cultures. Dixon is also a
Quaker deeply disturbed by inequities of power and by injustice and cruelty;
he too has a melancholic side and it is he, not Mason, who meditates most
thoroughly on the contradictions between slavery and the Enlightenment.
[...] continues at
http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/mason2.html


http://www.greatunpublished.com/PressReleases/pressrelease7_3.htm
[...] Mary Ann Kohli's book Cosmic Christ in a Quantum Universe [...] Cosmic
Christ is a lucid portrayal 
of the character of this nation's personal, inner debate on redemption 
and its price, through close readings of Pynchon, Bellow, Updike, Didion 
and Vollmann. [...]


http://www.fairfield.edu/collegiu/neary.htm
John M. Neary
Like and Unlike God: Religious Imaginations in Contemporary Fiction
(Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1999) 
[...] Neary uses this introductory, highly accessible account to help
understand the place of these theological themes in some major works of
modern literature. In his application of these imaginations to works by
Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Anne Tyler, John Updike, and Thomas Pynchon,
Neary shows the frequent interweave and mutual dependency of analogical and
dialectical themes. He also managed to examine the relevance of these
imaginations to both modernity and the postmodern "linguistic turn." [...]

http://titan.iwu.edu/~wchapman/pynchon.html
This article appeared in the May 1996 issue of Postmodern Culture and is
still archived at PMC. If you would like to know why I reposted it at this
site, go here.

Copyright © 1996 Wes Chapman

Male Pro-Feminism and the Masculinist Gigantism of Gravity's Rainbow
Wes Chapman
Illinois Wesleyan University
P.O. Box 2900
Bloomington, IL 61702-2900
wchapman at titan.iwu.edu

[...] .


The Buddha figure in the sky, too, is an ill omen within the novel's world.
Earlier in the novel Slothrop sees some figures in the sky, "hundreds of
miles tall," which stand impassive like the Buddha5; these are quickly
associated with the Angel that the narrator describes as standing over
Lubeck on the Palm Sunday raid, one of the massive bombing raids on Germany
which prompted the Germans to retaliate with the V-1 (214-215). This raid is
figured as a scene of willing submission to sexual violence: "sending the
RAF to make a terror raid against civilian Lubeck," says the narrator, "was
the unmistakable long look that said hurry up and fuck me, that brought the
rockets hard and screaming, the A4s" (215). The luminary smiling so
benevolently upon this scene, then, is one of the malignant cosmic entities
in the novel which look on with indifference as human energies are brought
into the service of death.


The Buddha has other disturbing connotations within the iconology of the
novel as well: the amoral unification of subject and object which is the aim
of Zen Buddhism becomes a metaphor for submission to the all-subsuming
technology of the rocket. When a problem arises in the design of the rocket,
Fahringer, one of the technicians at Peenemunde, takes his Zen bow into the
woods to practice drawing and loosing. [...]

That this politics of discourse may tend to decenter women as the subjects
of feminism is suggested by the one direct and I think suggestive reference
in the novel to a contemporary feminist, M. F. Beal.8 Felipe, one of the
Argentinian exiles, makes "noontime devotionals to the living presence of a
certain rock" which, he believes, "embodies . . . an intellectual system,
for [Felipe] believes (as do M.F. Beal and others) in a form of mineral
consciousness not too much different from that of plants and animals" (GR
612). M. F. Beal was (or is) a friend of Pynchon's, author of two novels,
Amazon One and Angel Dance, several stories, and Safe House: A Casebook of
Revolutionary Feminism in the 1970's. David Seed, who has written most about
the relationship of Pynchon and Beal, explains that the reference to Beal in
Gravity's Rainbow refers to a conversation that Pynchon and Beal had about
"the limits of sentience" (227): "Beal implicitly humanized the earth's
mantle (containing of course rocks and minerals) by drawing an analogy with
skin. . . . " (32) In effect, Beal was espousing what we would now call a
Gaia philosophy9; as Seed writes, "[i]f there is such a thing as mineral
consciousness then the earth's crust becomes a living mantle and man becomes
a part (a small part) of a living continuum instead of being defined against
an inert environment" (227). There is a version of this belief in "mineral
consciousness" in Safe House:


Only recently have a few modern men begun to learn anything about life and
what they are learning is that the only difference from the point of view of
chemistry between living and non-living substances is their ability to
reproduce themselves. (86) 
As in her discussions with Pynchon, Beal here minimizes the distinction
between plants and animals on the one hand and "non-living" beings like
minerals; if the "only difference" between them is the ability to reproduce,
then in other ways they are the same (so, perhaps, rocks are sentient, as
Beal had argued to Pynchon earlier).

One tenet of Gaia philosophy is that the Earth acts as a conscious organism
to protect itself. In Safe House, Beal speculates that one mechanism by
which the Earth might be trying to protect itself is what she calls a
"strategic retreat" -- the possibility that "adult women given the choice
will choose to live without [men] -- to eat, sleep, work, rear children and
dwell without them" (87) -- in other words, female separatism. Beal wonders
whether the contemporary urge toward separatism might be not just a
conscious choice by particular women but a manifestation of some larger
biological necessity: [...]

http://www.semcoop.com/categories/religion/article.asp?review=relwestphal.tx
t
Postmodern Philosophy & Christian Thought  
Edited by Merold Westphal (Indiana University Press, 291 pp., $19.95, Paper
(Orig.), 0253213363) 
As a recent article in Lingua Franca pointed out, the number of
postmodernist-related titles at traditional Christian publishers continues
to grow (winning both praise and criticism from religious Christians). [...]
Articles include: [...] 
"Is the Postmodern Post-Secular? The Parody of Religious Quests in Thomas
Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Don De Lillo's White Noise," Brian D.
Ingraffia [...]