TPPM MMV The Gnostic Pynchon

Dave Monroe monropolitan at yahoo.com
Sat Aug 21 16:27:52 CDT 2004


Well, a little downtime here, figured I might as well
bat some clean-up.  Having moved this past January and
having vowed never to move the library again until I
actually own the damn place, and having moved some 120
boxes of books alone in the first trip out (I've no
idea what the grand total was), I didn't have ...

Eddins, Dwight.  The Gnostic Pynchon.
   Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

... at hand.  Of course,  MIGHT have made a trip up to
the university for their copy, but, well, just never
got 'round to it.  Fortunately, Kai posted this
(below) some time back.  A blast from the past ...

From: lorentzen-nicklaus@[omitted]
(lorentzen-nicklaus) 
To: pynchon-l@[omitted] 
Subject: SLSL: mortality & mercy in vienna/: eddins 
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 14:34:24 +0100

+ 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. 

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0303&msg=77343

So thanks again, Kai, not in the least for saving me
more than a little typing.  I'll see what I can do to
get back to this along the way ...


		
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