SLSL: mortality & mercy in vienna/: eddins

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 + in "the gnostic pynchon" (bloomington/indianapolis 1990: iup) dwight eddins  
 has on pp. 31-38 a very detailed interpretation of MMV with special reference  
 to conrad's "heart of darkness". here are some extracts that relate to current 
 list discussions:

 "since the introducion in Slow Learner is principally a humorous mea culpa for 
 the collection's contents, one has to wonder whether 'mortality and mercy in 
 vienna' lies outside the range of the repentable. pynchon omits it from the 
 collection without explanation or even mention, a mystery enhanced by the 
 conflict between Epoch's claim that this is pynchon's 'first published' story, 
 and pynchon's own claim that this priority belongs to 'the small rain'. at any 
 rate, the near-simulataneity of their appearance (spring 1959) makes it likely 
 that pynchon saw fit to let only one twin live because the same genetic defects 
 were grossly magnified in the other. the network of literary illusions that now 
 brings him chagrin in rereading 'the small rain' is vastly enhanced in 
 'mortality' by a metastructure explicitly drawn from conrad's Heart of Darkness 
 - a modernist classic of epistemological ambiguity - and buttressed with the  
 modernist likes of santayana, t.s. eliot (once more), hemingway, and lorca.  
 but here again, what can be condemned as artistic gaucherie can also be lauded 
 as the beginning writer's ambition to achieve a thematic dimension beyond 
 melodrama; and once again, this dimension reveals itself as a complex frame of 
 gnostic preoccupations.

                                                (...)

 .... this is a vision of spiritual entropy, of available psychic energies 
 dissipating to a 'whimper' like kurtz's final 'cry that was no more than a 
 breath'./ pynchon's dead souls are the party crew at lupescu's, the prototype 
 of the whole sick crew that sets the tone of cultural malaise in V. their 
 drunken boorishness and desperate hedonism, shot through with the 
 pseudointellectual chatter of dilettantes and 'freudian cant' (pp. 210-211), 
 are the symptoms of wretched lives that are little more than a gratuitous 
 series of petty betrayels and vendettas and resultant bouts of guilt. forced 
 to listen to their confessions in his role as lupescu's successor, siegal 
 realizes that lupescu was beginning to experience a kurtz-like contamination 
 from the living death around him. 

                                                (...) 

 .... the ojibwa was, if we can believe debby, 'happy back in ontario' (p. 207), 
 where a life of harvest festivals, 'puberty rituals', and other ceremonies   
 produced exactly the sort of cultural-religious communion lacking in the   
 isolate, egocentric 'temples' of the lupescu group. we have here an   
 anticipation of the herero tribal life described in Gravity's Rainbow --- a   
 life of (for pynchon) normative solidarity before the depredations of general  
 von trotha. that debby would see in this rich community life only 'wonderful   
 local color' for her notebooks is a symptom of the spiritual anemia to which   
 that life provides an alternative. 

                                                (...)

 .... the point in 'mortality and mercy' is that debby and her crew themselves 
 image the savage and amoral forces that oppress irving and starve him of his 
 spiritual sustenance - thus, the gnostic reversal by which the victim turns 
 avenger and oppressor, denying the humanity in whose name he had suffered. his 
 mass murder and cannibalism are a barbaric thrust from the heart of nature's 
 darkness against the artificial darkness fashioned by a decadent civilization./ 
 as 'father confessor' (p. 212) to these neurotic bacchanals, siegal grants 
 this carnage the status of ritual purification, compounding the religious 
 ironies already present with an admixture of christian heresy. the 'still small 
 jesuit voice' (p. 213) in his head - a voice that he associates with 
 machiavellian Realpolitik - urges him to go ahead with the 'miracle' that is 
 now 'in his hands' by acquiescing in the slaughter. through a grotesque - and 
 essentially gnostic - reversal of values, he will be bringing 'these 
 parishioners ... a very tangible salvation. a miracle involving a host, true, 
 but like no holy eucharist' (p. 212). this parody of christian terminology has 
 the same purport of moral confusion as will the parody in The Crying of Lot 49 
 where the descent of a 'malign, unholy ghost' inaugurates a ritualistic orgy of 
 torture and death. the consecration of the crew as 'host' is, of course, a 
 desecration in the name of a religion that unleashes savage forces rather than 
 containing them, and that locates 'salvation' in a kingdom of death. mercy, in 
 this realm of value distortion, consists of engineering mortality among those 
 who inhabit a living hell of compulsive, quasi-freudian self-analysis. it is 
 necessary to destroy the greenwich-type village in order to save it./ this 
 conceptual melange of opressor and oppressed, salvation and retribution, 
 compromises siegal's attempt to escape the barbarization that destroyed kurtz, 
 an earlier 'father confessor' in his own right." ... (pp. 31, 33, 36, 37) ---

 of course, eddins' voegelinesque notion of 'gnosticism' is not in touch with 
 the actual ancient sources (see, if you're interested, James M. Robinson, ed., 
 The Nag Hammadi Library) and also leaves the gnostic elements in christianity 
 itself - "my kingdom is not of this world" (the gospel of john) - completely 
 out. furthermore, the rather schematic distinction of 'gnostic' vs. 'orphic' is 
 highly problematic when seen in the late rilke's light. dwight eddins, however, 
 comes with his approach to presentable results, and he is among the very few 
 who seriously address the spiritual dimension in pynchon's work. 

 apropos voegelin: the foreign policy of the current us-government, with its 
 quasi-ontological distinction between 'good' & 'evil', has a certain 'gnostic' 
 smell, nicht wahr?! "mother, mother: there's too many of you crying/ brother, 
 brother, brother: there's far too many of you ..." 

                                               peace on earth! kai *