Pynchon & Religion

[Madeleine Maudlin]

If you have five minutes to spare.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBabMxnFQsQ

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 7:09 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> 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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