Determinism & Apocolypse: the Grim Irony of Our Fortunate Fall

[alice wellintown]

The American Calvinist and Puritan strains that Pynchon weaves into GR
continues to inform our literature.

Josh Schneiderman
"Pilgrim's blues": Puritan Anxiety in Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead
Journal of Modern Literature - Volume 31, Number 3, Spring 2008, pp. 58-80
Indiana University Press

Abstract:

Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead evinces an anxiety over Puritanism
that is bound to the sociological conditions of American Cold War
culture. His collection envisions an America in which the old
Calvinist binary of elect (the few chosen by God for salvation) and
preterite (those left behind—everybody else) has imploded under Cold
War threats of nuclear annihilation, thus reconfiguring the two
driving concepts behind the Puritans' "errand" into the New World: the
apocalypse and salvation. Lowell suggests that the Puritan desire for
salvation has developed into a secular pursuit of material wealth, and
that this pursuit, in turn, has led to a technocratic nuclear tension.
With grim irony, For the Union Dead claims that America's capitalist
pursuit of wealth and technology to enact its own election and
salvation has actually resulted in national preterition.

>From 'The Gnostic Pynchon' Dwight Eddins, (1990)

Pynchon specifically identifies Calvinism, and in particular
the Puritanism of Slothrop's New England forebears, as the
precursor of this modern religion of death--an
identification echoed by Voegelin's analysis of Puritanism
as a form of gnosticism. Citing Thomas Hobbes, a
contemporary of the militant Puritans of seventeenth century
England, Voegelin points out that "he [Hobbes] diagnosed the
efforts of the puritan sectarians to  set up the Kingdom of
God as an expression of the libido dominandi of the
revolutionary who wants to bend men to his will. The
'spirit' that he saw inspiring these armed prophets of the
new world was not the spirit of God, but human lust for
power.

After GR, P seems spent; his Romantic Satires of the West turn inward,
to America, and, although M&D, a novel we can assume he wrote much of
long before VLis brilliant, he stuggles to regain that strain, that
Blackness as Melville described it in his Hawthorne and His Mosses.
GR, an Anatomy, a Romantic Satire of the West that targets Western
rationalization, the ontological repression of mortality---symbolized
by the V-2, and analytical science and deterministic Calvinism, the
repression of death that is
also a repression of Life, a disdain for the Earth, for the Other,
expressed by psychological/cultural and political systems anal and
racist,  celebrates Earth, Murphy's Law, Love, Music, Spontaneity,
Comedy, Metaphor, Magic, Anarchy, Middles, Transformations, and of
course, paradoxically, and appropriately, it celebrates heresies of
Christianity.