Pynchon & Religion

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 23.07.2012 18:06, Alex Colter wrote:

> Continued from Madeline's post in the Pynchon Lit. thread, cause I 
> figure it would be more appropriate to start a different one...
> We can't escape it so let us try to keep the discussion focused on the 
> works of Pynchon and what they indicate, while keeping our own beliefs 
> along the margins.
>
> We know Pynchon was raised Catholic, and, inasmuch as anything Jules 
> says can be trusted, continued to go to Confession while at Cornell.
> There we begin to loose him, biographically speaking, and must resort 
> to his Novels.
> I am inclined to agree with Madeline that the greatest writers among 
> us have rarely been 'Christian' 'Jewish' or 'Muslim' in anything but 
> upbringing, such Institutions seem to be downright hostile towards 
> anything called imaginative thought.
> I am inclined to draw the closest portrait of Pynchon's Religious 
> Views (a phrase that makes me bored just typing it) in Cherrycoke's 
> wonderful narration. One thing is obvious, that Cherrycoke, despite 
> his own attempts to make himself appear so, is anything but orthodox, 
> and often waxes into Gnostic Thought, which was experiencing a revival 
> amidst the so-called Era of Enlightenment.
> I would include among the institutions of Christianity, Judaism, and 
> Islam, the institution of Deism, now known by its proper name Atheism, 
> as being downright hostile towards anything called imaginative thought.
> I am inclined to believe Pynchon is something of an imaginative 
> Skeptic in his literature, and is careful to censor himself whenever 
> he approaches a sort of 'Gnosis' therein.

I like your term "imaginative Skeptic" a lot! I think that's one of the 
best things to be in Western late-modernity. And for artists the 
skepticism - not only towards religion, yet also towards science and 
philosophy - is needed to make way for new artistic creations. A 
"Gnostic Thought" in Pynchon can be found in the recurring intuition 
that the whole universe is flawed. That some evil entity - the Demiurge? 
the Archons? - fucked things up right from the start. Some passages in 
Pynchon seem to link this gloomy feeling to the possibility of 
extra-terrestrial life. This, however, could be part of the SciFi 
elements the author tosses into the mix. And the thought itself can also 
be formulated in Christian terms which then puts the responsibility on 
the shoulders of the human being: "Inherent Vice" (--> Original Sin, 
Fall of Man). There also are - I'm thinking especially of the Pentecost 
motif in The Crying of Lot 49 - some protestant elements in Pynchon's 
work. And at times - not only in M&D - he scratches the zone of 
indistinctness between Christianity and Gnosis: "Dear Mom, I put a 
couple of people in Hell today.... --- Fragment, thought to be from the 
/Gospel of Thomas/" (GR, 537). Since Pynchon himself is putting a couple 
of his characters in hell in this episode, we can even speak of an 
/Imitatio Christi /here. A very heretical one, though.


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