John A. McClure on P's relgion

[Jane]

This predeliction for ecospiritual constructions of reality
is even more apparent in Vineland. According to Brian
McHale, "the space of Vineland is a multiple-world space, a
heterotopia or 'zone'" (137) characterized by "extreme
ontological incongruity and disjuncture" (136). Perhaps, but
it could also be argued that the space of Vineland more
closely resembles a postmodern version of the complexly
mapped and many-leveled worlds of pre-modern myth, religion,
and fairytale. The distinction is not trivial, for McHale's
description of the novel's space emphasizes the novelty and
playfulness of its ontological ordering, while mine
emphasizes the way in which this ordering recapitulates and
implicitly reinstates earlier modelings of a sacred or at
least enchanted universe. I would not want to promote one
reading to the exclusion of the other however. After all, if
Pynchon's universe does resemble the universes of pre-modern
systems in its multi-tiered and magical features, it is a
decidedly postmodern sacred universe that is here projected,
one produced by the frequently hilarious juxtaposition of
incongruous discourses and composed of elements taken not
only from Native American spirituality (the Yurok
underworld), Emersonian transcendentalism ("divine
justice"), and animism (the talking trees), but also from
Japanese and American horror movies (the Chipco monster and
the Thanatoids). The various esoteric domains and
"paranormal" phenomena projected in these very different
discourses are all present in the comically inclusive cosmos
of Vineland, so that it offers an exuberantly polyglot,
hybridized, and comic/serious version of the older spiritual
ontologies. But like them, it arguably asserts not so much a
discontinuous plurality of worlds as a single quotidian
world shot
through with mysterious forces and presences, and opening
onto esoteric domains above and below. Thus while McHale's
representation of the ontology of postmodern [End Page 151]
texts may work well in many cases, it does not do full
justice, I'd argue, to a range of postmodern texts whose
ontological affinities are also with pre-modern, or
marginalized modern sacred discourses. 

But while I am interested in arguing that Pynchon uses
ontological juxtaposition and other, more traditional,
rhetorical devices to advocate a non-secular view of things,
I do not want to suggest that his project is in any way
reducable to the definitive elaboration of some "new
paradigm" of the sacred. He invites us, in Gravity's
Rainbow, to imagine his work rather as a form of reaching.
"I don't know," sighs a character asked to state more
precisely how the world works if not in terms of cause and
effect; "She didn't know," confirms the narrator, "all she
was trying to do was reach" (159). Don DeLillo's work is
also full of characters who, dissatisfied with conventional
ontologies, reach in language towards more adequate
articulations: "There is still the element of shared
culture," muses an American character in The Names who is
trying to understand his profound reaction to Greece.
"Something beyond this is familiar as well," he continues,
"some mystery. Often I feel I'm on the edge of knowing what
it is. It's just beyond reach. . . . I can't quite get it
and hold it" (26). 

DeLillo's fictional reaching, unlike Pynchon's, is a
reaching out from within the ontological and narrative
horizons of realism, but these horizons are experienced, as
they are in Virginia Woolf's work for instance, or E. M.
Forster's, as impossibly confining, and they are
relentlessly questioned and subtlely violated. The
questioning is handled by the many characters who speak some
form of non-secular discourse and by DeLillo's narrators,
who almost always speak a creolized idiolect that
promiscuously blends secular and sacred terms. The
violations entail both subtle departures from realism's
conventions and the eruption, within the worlds of the
novels, of
uncanny or miraculous events. Thus one character in Players
(McKechnie) turns up both in the novel's "real" world and as
the protagonist of a television drama watched by another
character; and The Names draws the reader up into the domain
of language (its sounds, its history, the mysteries of
representation and self-referentiality) so emphatically that
the text loses the transparency essential to realism, begins
to produce effects of unworlding on its readers. Meanwhile,
back in the story-worlds themselves, DeLillo's characters
dematerialize, or survive deadly bicycle rides across
crowded highways, or participate in "coincidences" so
farfetched as to seem fated. These events [End Page 152]
constitute effects of ontological destabilization and
resacralization more tentative and less comic than
Pynchon's, but equally urgent.  
Yet it is inaccurate, I think, to cast Pynchon's fictions
(or DeLillo's) as conventional accounts of unfinished
religious reachings or spiritual quests. For both novelists
seem determined simultaneously to reach and to resist
grasping. In work after work, they sympathetically explore
certain non-secular constructions of reality while
repudiating others as forms of repression and control and
insisting on the inevitable partiality of all. Pynchon is
particularly insistent on the necessarily and even
redemptively unfinished nature of any ontological mapping,
the ever-present danger of confusing a particular
representation of reality for being itself, which must
always exceed any formulation. His work seems designed, in
other words, both to promote specific forms of
resacralization and to remind us that all formulation is
rhetorical-a matter of
probabilites and partialities. Hence his splendidly comic
(and chilling) deconstructions of secular/spiritual
binaries, his refusal, after all, to choose between "our
stories, all false, about who we are" (Gravity's Rainbow
135), his enactment of a creative exuberance that reminds us
of Harold Bloom's definition of "blessing" as "more life"
(44) and that always outpaces the impulse to containment.
Pynchon returns us to the domain of sacred experiences and
doctrines, then, but not to set us down in some safe zone of
putative certainty. This is why he remains, for me, the most
exciting religious novelist of our time. 





Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 41, number 1, Spring 1995,
141-163. 


Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and
Spirituality 

John A. McClure