SLSL "Plowboy" & Seed

Sun Dec 1 15:58:05 CST 2002

Why does Tom need a plowboy? 

...

Is Hollander on to something with that parable stuff?
Do all those names add up to something? Does Tom speak
in parables? No.  

...

Hollander sez, 
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But earlier in "The Small Rain," Pynchon writes:

            "Levine's trouble," said Rizzo, "is that
he is at least the laziest  bastard in the army. He
doesn't want to work and therefore he is afraid to let
down roots. He is a seed that casts himself on stony
places, with no deepness of earth."
            "And when the sun comes up," Levine
smiled, "it scorches me and I wither away. Why the
hell do you think I stay in the barracks so much?"    

      By alerting us to "Spot This Quote" after he had
already rephrased Jesus's parable of the sower of
seeds (Mark 4.1-9), Pynchon lures us to attend to the
accurate quotations from Pinafore, Sherman, Bradford,
Burrows, and to ignore the slightly altered quotation
from the Bible.
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But it's not a slightly altered quotation. 

http://www.bartleby.com/108/41/4.html#S20

(Also, The Parable of the Sower,  Mt. 13.1-23 · Lk.
8.4-15)
Mark: 
     Hearken; Behold, there went out a sower to sow:
4  and it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the
wayside, and the fowls of the air came and
devoured it up. 5  And some fell on stony ground,
where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang
up, because it had no depth of earth:  6  but when the
sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no
root, it withered away.

Rizzo's remark is not a slightly altered quotation.
It's not Pynchon's misdirection or a superficial play
on language. In the parable of the sower, in Mark,
Matt, Luke, the, "the seed is the WORD of God" (Luke
8:11). This is the Gospel for Sexagesima, the
beginning of Lent. 
   Rizzo and Levine have the Gospel all screwed
around. The irony is rich. These guys are wits with
Buttercup on passages from from G&S and other secular
tales. These two are intellectuals, college guys,
specialists (or at least the Army has named them
specialists for this operation) in communications. But
they don't  understand the parable of the sower. One
doesn't cast oneself. The seed is the Word of God and
not the self.  The skill of the sower and the quality
of the seed are not questioned. The only variable is
the nature of the soil; the results of communicating
(sowing) depend on the response of the listener
(soil). The parable has to do with communication and
grace. In Rizzo & Levine's version of the parable, man
is a seed and he casts himself about. Levine casts
himself onto arid soil because he doesn't want to
settle down or put down roots. The hot sun has been
withering his spirit so he simply lays in the barracks
to avoid the sun. In the parable told by Jesus, the
seed is the word of God and it cast into the soils of
men's spirits.  There is a prodigality about the sower
who must scatter widely if he is to ensure a good
crop. It is the prodigality of God's grace and the
uncertainty of man's response which is expounded in
the parable and the explanation Jesus provides. 

It is not a slightly altered quotation or a play on
words like in the title of one of Pynchon's essays-
"Nearer, My Couch (Lord),  to Thee." 

In 1993, the NYTBR ran a series in which various
authors were asked to write about one of the Seven
Deadly Sins. Thomas Pynchon's subject was "Sloth."

In the Sloth essay ("Nearer, my Couch, to Thee")
Pynchon talks about the labor of writing. He talks
about Melville's Bartelby The Scrivener: 

"By the time of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of
Wall-Street (1853), acedia had lost the last of its
religious reverberations and was now an offense
against the economy."

Pynchon traces Sloth (acedia) from its religious past
to the current century. By the time we get to
Melville's Bartelby, the religious reverberations are
washed away by the tide of modern economics, but for
literary purposes, Pynchon continues to associate, if
only with a secularized (i.e., Weber in GR, Eliade in
V. and CL49) cleverness, religion and labor. Benny in
the sewer, Oedipa a s executrix   waiting for the
Call, Slothrop picking up scraps of the rocket text…
The so called "new religions"of modern economics (Wall
Street in Bartleby or the War economy in A Farewell to
Arms or in GR), science and social science
(Electricity in Melville's Lightning Rod Man and
Moby-Dick, Rocket science in Hemingway's FWA, Pavlov
in GR), politics (Fordism in Huxley's BNW, National
Socialism in V.)  are invested with religious
reverberations and significance and the power and
function of these new religions is based on their
ability to Synthesize the sacred and Control the labor
of men and women. 

Gotta run, that we may obtain…I Cor. 

Billy Z. 

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