Bookmarked The Far Invisible (The Hedgehog Review)

Pynchon diagnosed our idolatry of the inanimate.

Alan Jacobs explores Thomas Pynchon’s work from a theological perspective. It was a reminder of how deep and complex Pynchon can be and made me wonder if I have really “let down my shields or opened the valve” to really let him in?

Pynchon’s novels generally postulate other levels of reality…. Pynchon suggests that such realities can be glimpsed if we let down our shields or open our valve.

Source: “Mason & Dixon”, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon by Kathryn Hume quoted in The Far Invisible by Alan Jacobs

What matters here for my attempt to make sense of Pynchon as a theologian is that, to return to Eliade, the Christian model of time—“The Christian liturgy unfolds in a historical time sanctified by the incarnation of the Son of God”—effectively repudiates “the myth of indefinite progress, the faith in the aptitude and power of science and technology to establish widespread peace and social justice, the primacy of rationalism and the prestige of agnosticism.” Ibid., 72.To reassert the power and validity of hierophany is at least to begin to emancipate oneself from the claims of metaphysical capitalism to account for and then govern the whole of human behavior. Hierophany is ungovernable—and in this sense is the counterpart of the anarchic Brownian motion of the Whole Sick Crew in V. We could say that the Whole Sick Crew is living in a kind of permanent carnival—which means, as Mikhail Bakhtin never tires of explaining, it is not living a true carnival at all, because the healthy and vigorous carnivalesque never rejects and indeed is wholly dependent on the religious structures that prompt its laughter. Indeed, this is why the Crew is “sick” instead of vital. Its members evade their power/knowledge regime but have no other structure of meaning and value with which to replace it. They have the community but not the hierophany; Oedipa has the hierophany but not the community. The Crew and Oedipa alike enact signs of contradiction, but what they signify is partial, incomplete. Eliade would suggest that lived Christianity, especially in its liturgy, is the truly effectual sign of contradiction because it unites hierophany and community. Pynchon has not stated his views on this topic.

Source: The Far InvisibleBy Alan Jacobs

But this is hard. And the distinctive function of Thomas Pynchon as America’s theologian has been to produce an elaborate, raucous, anarchic, and terrifyingly accurate portrait of all the forces, prosaic and demonic, that in our technocratic regime militate against the restoration of our full humanity—and at the same time to show us how resilient and inextinguishable are the energies of hope, generated as they are by the belief that “secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice.” It requires great discipline, of the hope-against-hope kind, to keep us awake and alert and sensitive to any transmission from “the far invisible.” Whether he knows it or not, in tracing so profoundly these countervailing forces of spiritual totalitarianism and a dream of divine justice, Pynchon offers the essential theological account of our era, one unmatched in subtlety, range, and depth. It is not a fully Christian account, and though I am a Christian I do not deplore this. Theology must begin where we are, and where we are is in the fog, waiting and hoping for a hierophantic word from the far invisible

Source: The Far InvisibleBy Alan Jacobs

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