CoL49 (6) Scurvhamites

[Mark Kohut]

In a footnote in one of his essays, Mr. T(ough)S(hit) Eliot, influencer of OBA says of The Revenger's Tragedy, one of the models for The Courier's Tragedy that it fails because of "immaturity"---the over-the top, awful aesthetic/moral effects surpass their reasons for existing (in the play).

Is this part of the reason Driblette, who added three hooded assassins
although his interpretation was "very moral", had to die in C of L49?
I. E. such heavy-handed 'morality' left no room for a lightness of being, so to speak? Which Oedipa discovers later, the night-time semi-dream scenes; the "anarchist miracle"?

TRP commenting some on "V.", as he embodies a new way forward for his vision in C of L49? 



--- On Wed, 7/8/09, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Subject: CoL49 (6) Scurvhamites
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Wednesday, July 8, 2009, 6:33 PM
> "'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)
>