who's Christian?

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Thanks, Michel,

Just a few, perhaps not too coherent, thoughts:

Religion in Pynchon's fictional world is certainly one of the systems his characters are constantly
building in their need for order and meaning. You put it the other way round: The need of the characters
for order is depicted as a religious longing. I agree with this (although I am not so sure about
Jessica), and have especially in mind the obsessive way Ahab projects everything and nothing onto the
white hump of the whale. Just like Terrance I am convinced that "Moby Dick" is a very important source
for P's symbolic structure. The question is: What is behind the mask of the visible world? God, or
nothing?

Melville, as I have tried to demonstrate a few times, seems to opt for something else: A concept of
nature as blind, deaf and dumb "weaver-god" who does and undoes, seamlessly interweaving life and death,
death and life. A pagan world-view, exemplified by Queequeg and his coffin. As for V.: Fausto is
definitely among those who would agree with Ahab's suspicion that there might be "naught beyond the
mask". When we meet him at the beginning of Chapter 11 he is on the anti-paranoia end of the scale
between "everything is connected" and "nothing is connected". The paranoid end would of course be "the
system is everywhere" or, indeed, and that is where this idea of paranoia has its roots in the history
of the Western mind, "God is everywhere", or, as far as Ahab is concerned, "That white whale has got it
in for me!" I don't believe anyone can produce any textual evidence that Pynchon endorses either the
anti-paranoid or the paranoid point-of-view without someone else pointing to passages counterbalancing
this view. The same probably is true for the closely related subject of religion in P's novels:
Institutionalized Christianity, be it RC or Puritanism, is one form of paranoid thinking, atheism or
agnosticism one form of anti-paranoid thinking. The implied author moves around somewhere in between
these two poles.

Thomas