CoL49 (6) Scurvhamites

[Dave Monroe]

"'You get the general idea, notice how often the figure of Death
hovers in the background. The moral rage, it's a throwback, it's
mediaeval. No Puritan ever got that violent. Except possibly the
Scurvhamites. D'Amico thinks this edition was a Scurvhamite project.'
   "'Scurvhamite?'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 155)

http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/6/pynchon/lot6.htm


>From J. Kerry Grant, A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 (Athens: U of
Georgia P, 1994):

"H155.12 , B116.14  'Scurvhamites'  Newman likens the 'gaudy clockwork
of the doomed' that is run by the Scurvhamites' 'opposite principle'
to 'the Calvinist approach to enterprise,' which has led to 'an
industrial society fallen into inertia and homogeneity' (75).
   "Eddins finds a parallel between the 'brute automatism' of the
Scurvhamite vision and the 'all too pervading completeness' of the
order imposed on the universe by the 'demiurge' or early gnosticism
(92).
   "There seems little doubt that this passage can be read, in
Hayles's terms, as a 'parable of cooptation' (199), emblematic of the
way in which contemporary society has been able to absorb even the
most disruptive of countercultural impulses and appropriate them for
its own ends,  The 'most pure' origins of the great American
experiment are invoked here." (p. 129)

http://www.ugapress.org/0820332070.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=s3atiqlECBIC&pg=PR3

Citing ...

Newman, Robert D.  Understanding Thomas Pynchon.
   Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1986.

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

Hayles. N. Katherine. "'A Meatphor of God Knew How Many Parts':
   The Engine that Drives The  Crying of Lot 49."
   New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49.  Ed. Patrick O'Donnell.
   New York: Cambridge UP, 1991.  97-125

http://books.google.com/books?id=8AALiZY5XQoC

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=59009

"If Tristero has managed to maintain even partial secrecy, if Thurn
and Taxis have no clear idea who their adversary is, or how far its
influence extends, then many of them must come to believe in something
very like the Scurvhamite's blind, automatic anti-God." (Lot 49, Ch.
6, p. 165)