Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Just before publication of Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon wrote a review of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, in which he says that "to assert the resurrection of the body [is] today as throughout history an unavoidably revolutionary idea" ("Heart's Eternal Vow"). That this revolutionary idea is essentially a religious one is a fact that many Pynchon critics attempt to placate by identifying in his works a secularization of religious themes. Robert Hipkiss identifies, in place of religion, "a search for an operative spiritual force" in Pynchon's previous novels, which he assures us is "not to say that Pynchon finds no validity in religion," but that this "natural emanation of man's desire for transcendence, an extension of the life force" no less, is merely a setting for "ideals of conduct" (19,21) [1]. John Krafft blatantly asserts that Pynchon's religious "concepts...are almost exclusively secular [even "grossly secular" later on], retaining only the resonances of their formerly sacred significance," and leaving us only with "a desire of transcendence no longer quite believed in" (56, 63, 72). In Kathryn Hume's mythography of Pynchon, she finds that, though he "certainly leaves open the possibility of an afterlife," Pynchon faults religions for "try[ing] to make death palatable" (129). And Molly Hite suggests that "Gravity's Rainbow confronts its readers with the spectacle of a post-religious society committed to a vision of apocalypse" (157, my emphasis), a spectacle that, as we can see, is replicated in Pynchon scholarship [2].
Repository Citation
Coe, Justin S.. "Haunting and Hunting: Bodily Resurrection and the Occupation of History in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 2, no. 1, 2002, pp. 1–16. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol2/iss1/16