COMMON CALVINISM: ROBERT LOWELL, THOMAS PYNCHON, AND PURITAN
ANXIETY
by
JOSHUA SCHNEIDERMAN
(Under the Direction of Susan Rosenbaum)
ABSTRACT
Both Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
evince an anxiety over Puritanism that is ineluctably bound to the sociological conditions of
1960s’ American culture. Each work envisions an America where the old Calvinist binary of
elect (the few chosen by God for salvation) and preterite (those left behind—everybody else) has
collapsed 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. In an
uncannily similar fashion, Lowell and Pynchon suggest that the Puritan desire for salvation has
developed into a secular pursuit of material wealth, and that this pursuit, in turn, has led to this
technocratic nuclear tension. With grim irony, these works claim that America’s capitalist
pursuit of technology to save itself in a strained geopolitical environment has actually created a
nation of preterition.
INDEX WORDS:
Robert Lowell, Thomas Pynchon, Puritanism, Calvinism, Twentieth
Century, American Literature
COMMON CALVINISM: ROBERT LOWELL, THOMAS PYNCHON, AND PURITAN
ANXIETY
by
JOSHUA SCHNEIDERMAN
B.A., La Salle University, 2003
A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
ATHENS, GEORGIA
2005
© 2005
Joshua Schneiderman
All Rights Reserved
COMMON CALVINISM: ROBERT LOWELL, THOMAS PYNCHON, AND PURITAN
ANXIETY
by
JOSHUA SCHNEIDERMAN
Electronic Version Approved:
Maureen Grasso
Dean of the Graduate School
The University of Georgia
May 2005
Major Professor:
Susan Rosenbaum
Committee:
Jed Rasula
Hugh Ruppersburg
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
CHAPTER
1
PROLOGUE: COMMON CALVINISM...................................................................... 1
2
“PILGRIM’S BLUES”................................................................................................ 16
3
SALT OF THE EARTH.............................................................................................. 38
4
EPILOGUE: PURITAN ANXIETY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN
LITERATURE ........................................................................................................ 63
WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………..65
1
CHAPTER 1
PROLOGUE: COMMON CALVINISM
Now everybody—
Gravity’s Rainbow
On the map of postwar American literature, it is difficult to find two public personalities
more disparate than those of Robert Lowell and Thomas Pynchon. Artist Sidney Nolan
immortalized Lowell’s ponderous visage on the cover of the June 2, 1967 issue of Time, his
bodiless head adorned with a laurelled halo as if to announce the poet’s canonization as late
modernism’s patron saint. Pynchon’s last public image isn’t really a public image at all but a
Navy file photograph snapped at a Bainbridge, Maryland training facility in 1955. Unearthed by
David Cowart in 1990, the photo reveals a buck-toothed teenager in full seaman’s regalia,
perhaps as we might imagine one of Pig Bodine’s faceless, beer-tap-suckling cohorts at “Suck
Hour” in the opening scene of Pynchon’s V. Pynchon made a guest appearance on The Simpsons
in 2004—with a paper bag covering his cartoon head. For a less-abstract comparison, consider
the Pulitzer Prize. Lowell won it for Lord Weary’s Castle in 1947 at the age of thirty. Judges
unanimously chose Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, but that
decision was struck down by the Pulitzer’s advisory board, which found the novel “turgid,
overwritten, unreadable, obscene” (qtd. in Moore 1).
In Lowell and Pynchon we are ostensibly confronted with the opposition that defined the
literary world after 1945: Lowell, the poet of the establishment; Pynchon, the writer on the
fringe. The conformist-versus-nonconformist scenario would play itself out countless times in
the years following World War II as the literary establishment clashed with groups such as the
2
Beats, the New York School, and the Black Mountain writers, thus forming a mirror image of the
oppositional culture that pervaded American society at large throughout the sixties and into the
seventies. Jed Rasula provides useful terms in which to consider Lowell’s early career when he
describes Lowell as “the poet prepared, golem-like, by the founders of the New Criticism,
programmed as it were to produce the poems that would confirm for a contemporary audience
that their tastes (as honed by the curriculum of Understanding Poetry) could handle the new
poetry as readily as the old” (248). On the other hand, according to Edward Mendelson,
Pynchon’s fiction “proposes grotesquerie that governance can never acknowledge,” so the
novelist necessarily inhabits a territory “at the edge of a culture” (173, 178). Pynchon’s
aesthetic, which can contemplate coprophagia and the Kabbalah in the same breath, would
undoubtedly fall to the “raw” side of Lowell’s now-notorious “cooked”-versus-“raw” bisection
of postwar poetry.1
But when we turn to Lowell and Pynchon’s comparable Puritan lineages (both trace their
roots to American first families) and the ways in which they approach Puritanism, it becomes
evident that they aren’t so different at all. Both Lowell’s For the Union Dead (1964) and
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, published in 1973 but written throughout the latter half of the
sixties, evince an anxiety over Puritanism that is ineluctably bound to the sociological conditions
of 1960s American culture. Each work envisions an America where the old Calvinist binary of
elect (the few chosen by God for salvation) and preterite (those left behind—everybody else) has
collapsed under Cold War threats of nuclear annihilation, thus reconfiguring the two driving
concepts behind the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness”: the apocalypse and salvation. In an
1
Lowell made this declaration during his acceptance speech for the 1960 National Book Award: “Two poetries are
now competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be
tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are
dished up for midnight listeners. There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed,
a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal” (qtd. in Kunitz 100).
3
uncannily similar fashion, Lowell and Pynchon suggest 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, these works claim that America’s capitalist
pursuit of technology to save itself in a strained geopolitical environment has actually created a
nation of preterition. In the pages that follow, I consider the under-examined reemergence of
Puritan themes in postwar American literature and align Lowell and Pynchon as the twentieth
century’s two great inheritors of Puritan anxiety.
To get a sense of Lowell’s family history, one need only flip through his recently
published Collected Poems, which includes such titles as “In Memory of Arthur Winslow,”
“Mary Winslow,” “Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux
Winslow,” “Commander Lowell,” “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” and “The
Worst Sinner, Jonathan Edwards’ God.” As Elizabeth Bishop recognized, Lowell’s poems
conjure up a ghostly procession of names and figures associated with America’s founding. “I
feel I could write in as much detail about my uncle Artie,” Bishop marveled in a letter to Lowell,
“but what would be the significance? Nothing at all […] Whereas all you have to do is put down
the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American. […] In some ways you
are the luckiest poet I know!” (qtd. in Hamilton 233). Whether he himself felt so lucky is
another story altogether. Lowell’s ancestry provided ample raw material for his poetry and
undoubtedly added to his literary appeal, but Lowell often seems trampled beneath what he
called “the mob of ruling-class Bostonians” (Life Studies 66). The sheer amount of fetishized
Puritan history that Lowell packs into his work makes it seem like an impulsive gesture, as if he
had to write about it. Norman Mailer got this same feeling during the March on the Pentagon,
4
where he felt that Lowell “gave off at times the unwilling haunted saintliness of a man who was
repaying the moral debts of ten generations of ancestors” (83).
The first of these ancestors to reach America, Edward Winslow, stepped off the
Mayflower in 1620. Winslow makes several cameo appearances in the urtext of New England
consciousness, William Bradford’s narrative Of Plimmoth Plantation. After joining the Leyden
Congregation at the age of twenty-two, Winslow, “a man of essentially adventurous and
somewhat liberal outlook,” as Lowell’s English relative D. Kenelm Winslow describes him,
found himself among “a worried, introverted community, strongly critical of the faults of others
and none too sure of itself” (26). Nevertheless, Winslow made the Mayflower’s voyage to the
New World and was one of fifty two (out of one hundred and two) pilgrims to survive into the
summer of 1621 (Bradford 85). He spent his early years in Massachusetts engaged in Indian
diplomacy and was elected Plymouth’s governor in 1633, 1636, and 1644 (Mariani 28).
Edward’s brother, John Winslow, arrived on the Fortune in 1621 and soon after married Mary
Chilton, who—as Lowell noted in an unfinished autobiographical sketch—was “credited with
having been the first woman from the Mayflower to have stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock”
(qtd. in Hamilton 3). Grandfather Arthur Winslow of Lord Weary’s Castle and Life Studies fame
was directly descended from John and Mary Winslow. Lowell’s paternal genealogy comprises
an equally recognizable branch of the New England aristocracy, which made for an agreeable
match between Robert Traill Spence Lowell III and Arthur Winslow’s daughter, Charlotte. The
Somerset Lowles established themselves in eastern Massachusetts in 1639 when Percival Lowle
settled forty miles north of Boston at Newbury. Among his ancestors on that side, Robert Lowell
could claim James Russell Lowell (whom he called “a poet pedestalled for oblivion”), Amy
5
Lowell (“big and a scandal”), A. Lawrence Lowell (president of Harvard College), astronomer
Percival Lowell, and Civil-War hero Colonel Charles Russell Lowell (Mariani 28-29).
Though no less couched in the patrician microsphere of America’s first families,
Pynchon’s lineage fittingly tends toward scandal. The narrator of Gravity’s Rainbow describes
the Slothrop family, a fictional analog to the Pynchons, as “300 years of western swampYankees” (25), but the real Pynchons played a much greater role in colonial Massachusetts than
Gravity’s Rainbow admits. William Pynchon was one of twenty six patent holders committed to
the Massachusetts Bay Company and became one of eighteen assistants named in the
Massachusetts Bay Charter of 1629. In 1630, ten years after the Mayflower’s departure,
Pynchon and his family sailed to New England aboard the Jewell, a ship in John Winthrop’s
fleet, the flagship of which was the Arbella (where the fictional William Slothrop holds rank as a
cook). He founded the town of Roxbury upon his arrival, established a successful fur-trading
business, and like Edward Winslow, became an effective diplomat to the surrounding Native
American tribes (Madsen 30). As a direct result of his dealings with the Connecticut River
tribes, Pynchon was able to purchase a large tract of land upon which he would found the town
of Springfield (Madsen 35). From the start, Deborah Madsen explains, William Pynchon clashed
with Massachusetts Bay authorities over their restrictive policies and defended the Native
Americans’ sovereignty against colonial incursion on several occasions (30-31).
The tension came to a head in 1650 when Pynchon was charged with heresy for his tract
entitled The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption (Gura 475). Given its historical resonance in
Gravity’s Rainbow, this episode in William Pynchon’s life seems to have interested Thomas
Pynchon the most. William Slothrop, Pynchon’s narrator tells us, wrote a religious tract called
On Preterition:
6
It had to be published in England, and is among the first books to’ve been not
only banned but also ceremonially burned in Boston. Nobody wanted to hear
about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for
salvation. William argued holiness for these “second Sheep,” with whom there’d
be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it
got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for
the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart.
How can Jesus be an exception? (555)
The Meritorious Price was indeed ceremonially burned in Boston, but William Pynchon’s
infraction wasn’t nearly as grievous as William Slothrop’s apostasic exaltation of the preterite.
On that issue, Philip Storey points out, William Pynchon was in complete and explicit accord
with Calvinist doctrine. “Christ,” Pynchon unequivocally states, “did not shed his blood for the
whole world, but for the elect number only” (qtd. in Storey 64). The problem lay in Pynchon’s
radical claims as to the nature of Christ’s sacrifice. The Meritorious Price argues that Christ did
not, in fact, die as a result of the original sin committed at the Fall but that Christ’s exemplary
obedience perfectly atoned for Adam’s gross disobedience—a quibbling distinction but one that
defied a colonial law against heresies denying “that Christ gave himself as ransome for our sins”
(qtd. in Madsen 35). Further, as Philip Gura explains, Pynchon’s theological inquiry “linked its
author to the acrimonious debates within English Puritanism over the limits of free inquiry at a
time when the ‘contagion of corrupt opinions’ threatened to spread across the Atlantic.” In the
unstable and highly politicized environment of nascent New England, skepticism running
countercurrent to Puritan theology would not be tolerated, especially when it came from a
position as authoritative as Pynchon’s (477). Like William Slothrop, who sails back to England
7
“not in disgrace so much as despondency” (556), William Pynchon chose to return
surreptitiously to England rather than publicly recant his heresy, leaving his son John to carry on
the family’s affairs in America. Pynchon spent the last eleven years of his life writing tracts that
defended and elaborated on the claims set forth in The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption,
such as The Meritorious Price of Mans Redemption and The Jewes Synagogue (Gura 477).
As these biographical sketches suggest, the onerous weight of family history certainly
contributes to the Calvinist fixations evident in For the Union Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow. But
foregrounding these ancestral backdrops are larger sociological patterns that Lowell and
Pynchon discern, which helps explain why they operate on the same literary frequency. I use the
word “anxiety” to describe the general feeling toward Puritanism manifested in these two works
because Puritanism—especially the American brand espoused by Winthrop and company—was
itself full of anxiety. In perhaps the most cogent example of millenialism in intellectual history,
American Puritans engaged in an eschatological discourse at every turn. New England
separatists felt that the Church of England had fallen into corruption, turning from Christ to AntiChrist, and thus they “tended to regard their ‘errand into the wilderness’ (of the New World) in
terms of ‘the Gospel’s fleeting Westward’” ( Engler, Fichte, and Scheiding 14). “Puritan
emigration,” Bernard Capp asserts, “contained a defiant apocalyptic hope. In spreading the
Gospel to new lands and establishing new bastions of truth, the settlers felt they were preparing
the way for Christ’s coming” (107). This apocalyptic anxiety was the prime mover behind the
separatist venture into the New World. Widespread millennial rumblings, which pervaded
sixteenth-century Protestant movements, found their dramatic cathexis in the Puritans’ hasty
departure from England. Europe, spiritually bankrupt, was poised on the brink of apocalypse,
8
but America was a promised land created by God especially for the Puritans, salvation embodied
on a continental scale. Sacvan Bercovitch offers this succinct account of Puritan reasoning:
To all appearances, what they called America was just another plot of ground in a
fallen world. The essence of colonial Puritan historiography lay in the conviction
that it was not. Other countries, the argument went, had a double affiliation. In a
primal, absolutist sense they belonged to God, but insofar as they were “dead to
sin”—that is, temporally, legally, and providentially—they belonged to separate
federal constituencies. The New World, like Canaan of old, belonged wholly to
God. The remnant that fled Babylon in 1630 set sail for the new promised land,
especially reserved by God for them. Why else did He so long conceal it, but to
make its discovery the finale to His work of redemption? (Puritan Origins 100)
Bercovitch’s seminal studies of early-American rhetoric reveal an apocalyptic preoccupation at
every stage in America’s Puritan history.2 And while eschatology was, indeed, an overriding
Calvinist concern, the Puritan theocracy often politicized this concern to assuage fears and quell
dissidence, constantly reminding their “flock” that whatever setbacks they faced (starvation,
pestilence, skirmishes with the Native Americans) were part of God’s plan for their salvation
(Engler, Fichte, and Scheiding 14).
Underlying the Puritans’ millennial posture was a broader anxiety over salvational
hierarchy. “A Modell of Christian Charity,” Winthrop’s theocratic vision penned aboard the
Arbella, opens with an immediate pronouncement of social and spiritual stratification:
2
See The Puritan Origins of the American Self and American Jeremiad. Winthrop’s essay “Conclusions for the
Plantation” is a representative example: “All other Churches of Europe are brought to desolation… and it cannot be
but a like judgement is coming upon us… the Lord hath admonished, threatened, corrected, and astonished us, yet
we grow worse and worse, so as… he must needs give way to his fury at last: he hath smitten all the other Churches
before our eyes… ; we saw this,… but have provoked him more than all the other nations round about us: therefore
he is turning the cup towards us also…. I am verily persuaded, God will bring some heavy Affliction upon this land
and that speedily” (qtd. in Bercovitch 102; ellipses are Bercovitch’s).
9
“God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of
mankinde, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and
dignitie; others meane and in subjection” (190). The doctrines of predestined election and
limited atonement stood as central tenets of American Puritanism, which only magnified the
ever-present apocalyptic dread. Stressing mankind’s fundamental depravity as a result of
original sin, John Calvin dictated that man’s only hope for salvation lies in God’s mercy and
grace. As a wholly sovereign power, Charles Berryman explains, the Puritan God predetermined
election and damnation, rendering humankind impotent in affecting its own salvation (9). The
doctrine of limited atonement, which maintained that Christ’s sacrifice did not atone for all
mankind’s sins but only those of an elect few, was predestination’s logical outgrowth. As
Berryman puts it, “Only the ‘chosen few would be saved. Only the ‘invisible saints’ would be
accepted by God” (10). Even perfectly obedient Puritans might be denied salvation. American
Puritanism, then, hinged upon a clear distinction between the elect (chosen) and preterite (passed
over).3 As Berryman further explains, this belief drastically exacerbated the uncertainty and
tension already at hand: “The fear and anxiety created by not knowing whether you were
destined for eternal bliss or damnation was more than individual Puritans could tolerate” (11).
For the Union Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow reenact this apocalyptic anxiety in a Cold
War register. American Cold War literature endlessly rehearses motifs like the arms race and
nuclear holocaust.4 Ed Sanders’ recently published account of twentieth-century public
experience, America: A History in Verse, for example, constantly reminds its readers of the tense
3
Elect and preterite are ubiquitous terms in Gravity’s Rainbow. The word “preterite” actually shows up
infrequently in Calvinist tracts (William Pynchon uses “reprobate”), but for simplicity and specificity, I use
Pynchon’s terms.
4
Though as Edward Brunner shows, we might better classify the atomic bomb as an absent presence in American
poetry. See Cold War Poetry.
10
geopolitical conditions during the 1960s: “There were elements of i-yi-yi / in the time track /
such as the fact that nuclear bombs / were down to / three feet in length / & the fact that much of
the conservative officer corps seemed to view the President as / a gutless appeaser / in Cuba and
elsewhere” (4). But Lowell and Pynchon are unique insofar as they dramatize the Cold War in
Puritan terms. They are, above all, interested in examining history’s back pages to find out how
America ended up as it did. “History has to live with what was here,” Lowell writes in his poem
“History,” “clutching and close to fumbling all we had” (Selected Poems 159). And For the
Union Dead accordingly looks back to the Civil War and the nation’s origins for signs of
preterition. Gravity’s Rainbow isn’t about the ‘60s in the same way that, say, The Electric KoolAid Acid Test or even The Crying of Lot 49 are directly about the tumultuous decade that
reconfigured global culture. Pynchon’s novel takes place almost entirely in the months
following World War II and in its final pages, makes a chronological leap to Los Angeles’s
Orpheus Theater circa 1970 where the 00000 rocket launched by Blicero from Lüneburg Heath
in 1945, now presumably equipped with a nuclear warhead (“a bright angel of death”), closes in
on us, the theater’s audience (760). By starting with the German invention of supersonic
rocketry and ending on an apocalyptic note, Pynchon tacitly addresses American Cold War
paranoia. He traces this anxiety back to the Puritans via the family history of Tyrone Slothrop,
an avatar of Americanism. Slothrop’s ancestor, Constant Slothrop, “saw, and not only with his
heart, that stone hand pointing out of the secular clouds, pointing directly at him.” This
obsession with annihilation delivered from the sky continued, we are told, with Lt. Isaiah
Slothrop, whose memorial verse reads, “Mark, Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky, /
And in midst of prosperity, know thou may’st die” (27). Apocalyptic anxiety, Pynchon suggests,
was in the cards from the very beginning.
11
As we’ll see, Lowell also documents what he calls, in “Fall 1961,” “the chafe and jar / of
nuclear war” (105). For the Union Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow intersect most tellingly,
however, in their handling of the elect/preterite binary. Lowell and Pynchon identify Calvinist
thought as an ubiquitous element of our cultural history, but they also show how the threat of
nuclear apocalypse has collapsed the elect into the preterite in twentieth-century America,
resulting in a nation of “second Sheep.” This inauspicious leveling effect is a direct result of the
phenomenon that Berryman describes as “the substitution of mere worldly success for the
original Puritan ideal of salvation” (21). For the Union Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow partially
reimagine the process delineated more than half a century earlier by Max Weber in The
Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. According to Weber, the American emphasis on
“worldly success” that Berryman describes finds its origins in Puritan piety. The “melancholy
inhumanity” inherent in Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, the ever-present uncertainty as to
whether one was among the saved, “had one result above all: a feeling of unimaginable inner
loneliness of the solitary individual” (59). As the Puritans moved away from strict Calvinist
doctrine and into what Weber calls Ascetic Protestantism, they naturally had to revise and
redirect this fatalist outlook in order to maintain their membership, which resulted in the
“Protestant ethic.” Since God’s intentions could never be known, the only way to ameliorate
salvational anxiety was to actively search for signs of personal election and, in the process,
maintain total obedience to God’s commandments and laws. Humankind’s innate turpitude
obviously made utter conformity a near-impossible task. “Restless work in a vocational calling,”
Weber explains, “was recommended as the best possible means to acquire the self-confidence
that one belonged among the elect. Work, and work alone, banished religious doubt and gives
certainty of one’s status among the saved” (66). From this statement, it’s not difficult to see the
12
connection that Weber draws between Puritanism and capitalism. The “methodically organized
work” advocated by Puritan ideology evolved into a pursuit of material wealth: “the acquisition
of wealth, when it was the fruit of work in a vocational calling, as God’s blessing” (116). The
spirit of capitalism, then, rests in material wealth as tangible proof of one’s salvation.
Late capitalism transforms the conditioned impulse toward salvation into a secularized exaltation
of big business, forsaking any hope of election in the spiritual sense. For Lowell and Pynchon,
the threat of nuclear holocaust lies in war’s essentially corporate nature. “Don’t forget,”
Pynchon’s narrator instructs, “the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and
the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of
wartime death […] serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War” (105).
The implosion—to use Baudrillard’s term for the collapse of one category into another—of the
elect into the preterite serves as a harrowing reminder of capitalism’s dark side, and I would also
attribute its appearance in these two works to the swirling oppositional culture of the 1960s, the
civil rights movement and the clash of counterculture against conservatism. There is an obvious
populist aspect to the revocation of the Puritan binary, which flickers across the visual landscape
of “For the Union Dead”: “When I crouch to my television set, / the drained faces of Negro
school-children rise like balloons” (For the Union Dead 72). Lowell summed up all of these
concerns in one of the last essays he penned before his death:
We live in the sunset of Capitalism. We have thundered nobly against its record
all our years, yet we cling to its vestiges, not just out of greed and nostalgia, but
for our intelligible survival. Is this what makes our art so contradictory, muddled
and troubled? We are being proven in a sort of secular purgatory; there is no
earthly paradise on the horizon. War, nuclear bombs, civil gangsterism, race,
13
woman—the last has always been the writer’s most unavoidable, thought not
only, subject, one we are too seriously engaged in to be fair, or… salvationists.
(“After Reading” 289).
“War, nuclear bombs, civil gangsterism, race, woman”: Lowell’s commentary reads like short
list of major tropes in Gravity’s Rainbow.
These works not only observe the blurring of the preterite/elect as a cultural phenomenon
but also act it out on a textual level as a self-conscious deconstruction, breaching categorical
distinctions at every move. This act is, however, always ambivalent and conflicted. While these
descendants of Puritanism have little interest in stereotypically demonizing their ancestors as
repressed moral hypocrites, they do identify their forefather’s Calvinism as an oppressive
ideology. Lowell seems especially compelled to attack the beliefs of his forbearers, tearing
down their bifurcated religious vision while simultaneously bemoaning the nation’s preterition.
For both Lowell and Pynchon, the implosion of hierarchies and the loss of binary stabilities
resulting in a loss of moral balance are symptomatic woes of the twentieth century.
With the complex Calvinist matrices of these two texts in mind, I want to place For the
Union Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow in the tradition of the Puritan jeremiad. The American
jeremiad, Bercovitch explains, was a political sermon, “a state of the covenant address”
emphasizing societal declension and pointing out the perverse wrong doings of its intended
audience: “False dealing with God, betrayal of covenant promises, the degeneracy of the young,
the lure of profits and pleasures, the prospects of God’s just, swift and total revenge” (American
Jeremiad 4). Perry Miller sees the jeremiad as a Puritan lament for the failure of their errand
into the wilderness, “a literature of self-condemnation” (15). Bercovitch, on the other hand,
argues that the jeremiad coalesced lament with celebration, constantly reaffirming the Puritan’s
14
errand (American Jeremiad 11). He traces the jeremiad tradition into the nineteenth century,
pointing to Herman Melville, Henry Adams, and Ralph Waldo Emerson as a few of its late
practitioners. I regard For the Union Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow as new jeremiads for the
twentieth century, which turn the genre back on itself to show how the Puritan vision of America
as a “city upon a hill” has declined into a withered, secular capitalism. And like Bercovitch’s
take on the jeremiad, they offer a map of survival for the preterite soul in a world where election
has been exposed as a myth. I don’t want to linger on the jeremiad as a structural consideration
in either of these two works. Marcus Smith and Kachig Tololyan have already shown the
jeremiad’s presence in Gravity’s Rainbow, so it will not be a large part of my analysis. I raise
the issue here in order to place For the Union Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow in the long line of
literary works responding to America’s Puritan roots.
Along with texts like Arthur Miller’s McCarthyist allegory, The Crucible, and John
Berryman’s evocation of Anne Bradstreet in “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” For the Union
Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow signal a clear reemergence of Puritan themes in post-World War II
American literature, which is to say nothing of the renewed interest in early America carried out
in academia by Miller, Bercovitch, and others. But few have inquired as to what prompted this
reexamination of first principles. Critical studies of Puritanism’s influence on American
literature almost never move beyond the nineteenth century, tracing its genealogy no futher than
Hawthorne and Emerson. The case of Lowell and Pynchon further proves Bercovitch’s thesis
that Puritanism resides, above all else, in the American imagination.5 They are the postwar era’s
two major writers of New England consciousness and like Hawthorne, Melville, and Emerson
5
The sole exception is Barnstone, Manson, and Singley’s essay collection entitled The Calvinist Roots of the
Modern Era, which focuses on writers “influenced by Calvinism’s transformation from theological doctrine to
secular ideology.” In the twentieth century, the editors explain, “Calvinism appears as a psychological construct, a
cultural institution or artifact, a habit of mind, or a sociopolitical structure” (xiii).
15
before them, they bear the torch of Puritan anxiety.
16
CHAPTER 2
“PILGRIM’S BLUES”
Robert Lowell gave off at times the unwilling haunted
saintliness of a man who was repaying the moral debts
of ten generations of ancestors. So his guilt must have
been a tyrant of a chemical in his blood always ready
obliterate the best of his moods […] We may only be
certain that the moral debt of the Puritan is no mean
affair: agglutinations of incest, abominations upon God,
kissing the sub cauda of the midnight cat—Lowell’s
brain at its most painful must have been equal to an
overdose of LSD on Halloween.
Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
Most brief introductions to Robert Lowell’s poetry contain the requisite nod toward
Puritan themes in his work. While the Academy of American Poets’ website on Lowell tells us
that his poetry “explored the dark side of America’s Puritan legacy,” the editors of The Norton
Anthology of American Literature are perhaps a bit more coy when they explain that Lowell’s
early work “explored from within the nervous intensity which underlay Puritan revivalism”
(2499). Oddly enough, hardly any critics have actually attempted to show how Puritanism works
in Lowell’s poetry. Jerome Mazzaro was the first to acknowledge Calvinism’s immediate
presence in For the Union Dead, calling to attention “conditions which proclaim that modern
man like the predetermined man of Calvinist theology is powerless and foredoomed” (58).
Written in 1967, his essay understandably suffers from shortsightedness, failing to take into
account exactly what “conditions” compelled Lowell to write this way. As its title suggests, Paul
Mariani’s Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell limits itself to the biographical implications of
Lowell’s Puritan background. Selim Sarwar’s recent article “Robert Lowell: Scripting the Mid-
17
Century Eschatology” uses Lowell’s ancestry and upbringing as a basis for analyzing the poet’s
fascination with the apocalypse. As important as these investigations are, Lowell scholarship
still lacks a full-scale exegesis of Puritan themes and theology in Lowell’s poetry, possibly due
to the still-predominant critical tendency to read “confessional” poems as “a portrait of the artist
as a mental patient,” a longstanding problem that Marjorie Perloff recognized in 1973 (Robert
Lowell 164) and Michael Thurston reaffirmed in 2000 (81). Perhaps critics have shied away
from examining Puritan themes because the predominant tendency has been to read Lowell
biographically, and in an oeuvre larded with allusions to America’s separatist roots, Puritanism
seems an obvious a topic. Nevertheless, we have underestimated the importance and complexity
of Puritan themes in Robert Lowell’s poetry.
Beginning with his first collection, Lord Weary’s Castle, Puritanism figures importantly
throughout the body of Lowell’s work. Nowhere is it more significant and developed, however,
than in his meditative collection For the Union Dead. Interestingly, Lowell’s project very much
resembles a post-structuralist approach as he identifies and deconstructs the Puritan ideals at the
root of American culture. As Pynchon would later delineate it in Gravity’s Rainbow, the Puritan
system of belief operates on a principle of Calvinist predestination that divides the whole of
humanity into two groups: the elect, those chosen by God for salvation; and the preterite, those
passed over by God. Drawing on his personal Puritan ancestry, Lowell shows the pervasiveness
of this binary not only in Cold War America of the 1960s but also in American cultural history at
large. At the same time, Lowell deconstructs this binary in order to demonstrate how the elect
have imploded into the preterite as a result of the capitalist transformation that Weber describes.
But this collapsing of categories is not, as we might suspect, a good thing. Lowell himself called
For the Union Dead a “book about witheredness” (Collected Prose 286). “For the Union Dead,”
18
his most public poem and the clearest manifestation of the anxiety I’ve outlined, is about the
“witheredness” of the Union, which yields no clear division between elect and preterite. As I
suggested in the prologue, Lowell identifies capitalism and its attendant technologies as the
primary culprits. It is the innate Puritan desire for salvation—in twentieth century terms, the use
of technology to advance and save the state—that Lowell points to as the cause of America’s
self-inflicted preterition. America’s Puritan roots, Lowell suggests, were hegemonic to begin
with and have only grown significantly worse with this new trend.
The development of the elect/preterite polarity that Lowell explores so comprehensively
in For the Union Dead can actually be traced back to “Skunk Hour” at the end of Life Studies,
Lowell’s preceding book of poetry (Imitations not withstanding). Given the publishing history
of “For the Union Dead,” the poem makes sense as a logical extension of “Skunk Hour.”
Originally named “Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th,” Lowell first delivered the poem at
the Boston Fine Arts Festival in June 1960 under this title. “Colonel Shaw and the
Massachusetts 54th” was subsequently tipped into the Vintage paperback edition of Life Studies
and soon after appeared as “For the Union Dead” in The Atlantic Monthly’s November, 1960
issue. “For the Union Dead” assumed its final position as the capstone poem of 1964’s For the
Union Dead (McGill 144). Critics generally regard the Vintage paperback edition as an
oddity—a temporary point of rest for the onerous “For the Union Dead” before it assumed its
usual position, but the unexplored implications of this placement give rise to some interesting
points. First, “For the Union Dead” has, at one time or another, under one title or another, served
as the final poem in both of Lowell’s most celebrated collections. Second, although “For the
Union Dead” is positioned as the last poem of its eponymous work, it predates any other poem in
the book and sets the tone for the themes and tropes of the rest of For the Union Dead. Finally
19
and most importantly, there is a narrative thread of Puritanism that marches right out of “Skunk
Hour” and into “Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th.” The effect of reading the poems
back to back as they appear in the Vintage paperback is fascinating, and I would argue that this
placement isn’t incidental at all and much more significant than it first appears.
Topographically and thematically, “Skunk Hour” and “For the Union Dead” are
strikingly similar projects. Both poems deal with the New England consciousness and, in their
separate ways, offer indictments of the Puritan value system. The opening sequence of “Skunk
Hour,” which consists of four tonally subdued stanzas, describes the arrival of autumn in the
beach town of Castine, Maine, where Lowell spent the summer of 1957 (Life and Art 124). This
scene ostensibly comments on a particularly dispiriting ritual of desertion specific to east-coast
beach towns, especially in New England. Yet Lowell reads a great deal into the sudden
desolation enacted when the summer ends and the tourists have pulled up stake and taken their
commerce with them. As many critics have commented but Steven Gould Axelrod puts it best,
“[Lowell] is describing more than scenery, he is describing the rotting of a whole social
structure” (Life and Art 125). The figures left behind stand as conflicted or empty signifiers.
“Nautilus Island’s hermit / heiress” is a post-Puritan elect who, like the elect of “For the Union
Dead,” uses her wealth not as a tool of proliferation but as a weapon of desecration:
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
20
Elect and preterite immediately take on connotations of economic class in postwar Maine. These
lines suggest domination of the underclass preterite of Nautilus Island, and we can very well
imagine these “eyesores” as the former homes of the working-class “lobstermen” of the next
stanza. But the hermit heiress is herself on the brink of extinction. “She’s in her dotage,” and
the fact that her “son’s a bishop” suggests a sterile lineage (not to mention a weird, lighthearted
nod to Elizabeth Bishop). The “summer millionaire,” the capitalist successor to her aristocracy,
also proves to be less than he seems. While Axelrod suggests that the millionaire has somehow
lost his money, “[he’s] past his prime—his yawl has been auctioned off” (Life and Art 125), a
better explanation may be that he is simply finished with Castine since it has been just another
part of the false summer image along with his “L.L. Bean catalogue” facade. Either way, his
departure signals another reduction of the town’s wealth. His “nine-knot yawl” is recycled by
the village’s working-class lobstermen, which along with the heiress’s purchase of “eyesores,”
suggests a collapsing of the elect and preterite categories in the merging of upper and lower
class. The third figure of the opening sequence, Lowell’s “fairy decorator,” performs an
antithetical operation that amounts to the same thing: “And now our fairy / decorator brightens
his shop for fall; / his fishnet’s filled with orange cork, / orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl.”
By subsuming work implements into his shop to attract tourists and their money, the decorator
has collapsed preterite objects into the trappings of election, but as the speaker explains, “there is
no money in his work / he’d rather marry.” The decorator’s willingness to suppress his
homosexuality for the prospect of marginal pecuniary security further adds to the opening
sequence’s milieu of capitalism gone awry, a condition that even seems to have a detrimental
effect on the ecology: “The season’s ill—/ … A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.” It should be
21
noted that throughout these four stanzas Lowell consistently uses the all-inclusive “our,” a
narrative technique that evokes not solidarity but universal despondency (LS 83).
The final four stanzas, which are perhaps most commented-on of Lowell’s oeuvre, bring
this conflation of elect and preterite to the forefront of the poem. The “One dark night” of
“Skunk Hour” (LS 84) sonically penetrates “For the Union Dead,” modulating into “One
morning last March” (FTUD 72). Both lines have a haunting, quotidian quality. Lowell himself
has written at length on this “dark night”:
This is the dark night. I hoped my readers would remember John of the Cross’s
poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostical. An
Existential night. Somewhere in my mind was a passage from Sartre or Camus
about reaching some final darkness where the one free act is suicide. (Collected
Prose 226)
Of the three adjectives (“secular, puritan, and agnostical”) that Lowell uses to describe his night,
“puritan” is the most troublesome. “Secular” and “agnostical” make perfect sense in light of the
poem’s existential aura that Lowell acknowledges. But why include the word “puritan”? We are
speaking, of course, about “puritan” with a lowercase “p,” which can simply denote a rejection
of sinful pleasures, but this is a loaded word coming from Lowell. One explanation is that the
secularized Puritan struggle of the first half of the poem has been internalized by the speaker in
the second half of the poem. The collapsed “our” of the first half telescopes into an “I” in the
second half, culminating in the Satanic utterance “I myself am hell.” Carrying out the Puritan
impulse to look for signs of salvation in everyday life (Puritan Origins 16), albeit in a perversely
displaced manner, the speaker watches “love-cars” for signs of love (presumably a tonic to
existential life) but finds only mechanized tombs that seem to mechanically copulate: “they lay
22
together, hull to hull, / where the graveyard shelves on the town.” The speaker’s strange search
is closely allied to the Puritan quest to make the invisible visible, an inclination that Pynchon
calls the “Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also know as paranoia” (188).
Lowell offers at least a modicum of hope in the skunks “that search / in the moonlight for
a bite to eat,” which also helps explain Lowell’s use of the word “puritan.” Sandra M. Gilbert
identifies the skunks as representatives of hell, “fiery familiars who emerge from the shadows of
the graveyard to march, as if punning on Milton and Dante, ‘on their soles up Main Street,’
flaunting their demonic triumph ‘under the chalk-dry and spar spire / of the Trinitarian Church,’”
but of all the animals in the veritable bestiary of Life Studies, it is difficult to see the outcast,
malodorous, mustelid skunk as a demonic conqueror or “the militant brutish new order,
commanding the ruins of the former civilization” as Axelrod suggests (Life and Art 131).
Rather, the skunks are the preterite, Lowell’s paradigm of endurance in a secular existence where
elect and preterite have become indistinguishable from one another. What we have here is not an
affirmation of salvation as one might suspect but simply hope for survival. Outside the
“Trinitarian Church,” outside the domestic sphere of “our back steps,” the mother skunk fights
tooth and nail for continued existence, and unlike any other creature (or car) in “Skunk Hour,”
she has managed to reproduce and provide for her young (LS 84).
“I don’t think that anyone has to get themselves to go and watch lovers in a parking lot
necking in order to write a poem,” Frank O’Hara griped, “and I don’t see why it’s admirable if
they feel guilty about it. They should feel guilty.” O’Hara’s cutting yet humorous analysis
insightfully prods at “Skunk Hour”’s greater issues (“Return” 81):
Why are they snooping? What’s so wonderful about a Peeping Tom? And then if
you liken them to skunks putting their noses into garbage pails, you’ve just done
23
something perfectly revolting. No matter what the metrics are. And the metrics
aren’t all that unusual. Every other person in any university in the United States
could put that thing into metrics. (Lucie-Smith 13).
Lowell explained that the detail about watching lovers wasn’t from personal experience, “but
from an anecdote about Walt Whitman in his old age” (Collected Prose 228). The presence of
Whitman—the “bard of democracy”—is significant, especially when taken with the allusion to
Paradise Lost. David Lehman attributes O’Hara’s distaste to “the grandiose egoism of a speaker
who likens the welfare of the body politic to the state of his psyche and quotes Milton’s Satan,
‘Myself am Hell,’ without saving irony” (348). In light of the Calvinist drama that unfolds in the
first four stanzas, though, there is something rather ironic about Lowell identification with Satan.
Lowell transposes Milton’s great Puritan struggle between heaven and hell upon Whitman’s
democratic vision, “the prostitute, and the president” living in perfect accord, creating a
democracy of preterition where the “hermit heiress” suffers equally alongside the “lobstermen.”
Perhaps Perloff is correct when she contends that “Skunk Hour” falters when Lowell
attempts to “make his own malaise representative of the larger condition of an America in
decline” (“Return” 81). But one aspect of the poem that has gone strangely unnoticed is the way
in which the skunks’ march eerily presages the real preterite marches, the civil rights and
Vietnam War protests that would take place only a few years later. “Skunk Hour” is most
important to twenty-first century readers not necessarily as a confessional testament to “America
in decline” but as a mapping of the fault line between the “tranquilized fifties” and the volatile
sixties, where formalism ruptures into confessionalism and the obstinate skunks transmute into
Mailer’s Armies of the Night. Lowell himself, elect by most measures, took part in several
protests against the Vietnam War. Underlying his support of the anti-war movement, however,
24
is the deeply conflicted suspicion that distinctions between right and New Left, conservative and
liberal, and war apologist and anti-war protestor are insignificant in the depolarized twentieth
century. While “Skunk Hour” explores America’s Puritan legacy in allegorical terms, Lowell
would move towards more concrete expressions of this Puritan disaster in “For the Union Dead.”
In order to understand these expressions, it is best to work backwards, in a sense, by first
looking at some other poems in the collection For the Union Dead that come close to delineating
the elect-preterite binary and the causes of its demise, specifically “Fall 1961,” “July in
Washington” and “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts.” Remembering that “For the
Union Dead” predates any other poem in the collection, it is also useful to look at its epigraph in
relation to these other poems. For quite some time, this epigraph, “Relinquunt Omnia Servare
Rem Publicam,” was taken to mean “They relinquish everything to serve the state.” In fact,
since Lowell himself provided no footnotes, most anthology editors still use this translation in
their notes. But as William Nelles explains, the Latin word servare does not mean “to serve” but
“to save,” and as a classicist, Lowell would have been well aware of this crucial differentiation
(640). Thus, the epigraph reads, “They relinquish everything to save the state.” Lowell made
several remarks that support Nelles’ finding. In a 1964 interview with Stanley Kunitz he
explained, “My theme might be summed up in this paradox: we Americans might save the world
or blow it up: perhaps we should do neither.” He significantly expanded on this idea in an oftcited interview with A. Alvarez:
We were founded on a Declaration, on the Constitution, on Principles, and we’ve
always had the ideal of “saving the world.” And that comes close to perhaps
destroying the world. Suddenly it is as though this really terrible nightmare has
come true, that we are suddenly in a position where we might destroy the world,
25
and that is very closely allied to saving it. We might blow up Cuba to save
ourselves and then the whole world would blow up. Yet it would come in the
guise of an idealistic stroke. (qtd. in Nelles 640)
Lowell’s blurring of the distinction between “saving” and “destroying” reveals an undeniable
deconstructive inclination in For the Union Dead’s project. In addition, this statement pegs what
we can equate to the Puritan drive towards salvation as the cause of America’s debased national
condition. Sacvan Bercovitch historicizes this phenomenon in his introduction to The American
Puritan Imagination. The pietists who founded America saw themselves as members of a “new
Israel” on an “errand” to found a “city on a hill.” As Bercovitch explains, these terms carried
with them highly specialized meanings:
“Errand” implied the believer’s journey to God and the communal calling to the
New World; “new Israel” signified the elect, the theocracy as it was prefigured in
the Old Testament, and the blessed remnant which, according to prophecy, would
usher in the millennium; “city” meant a social order and the bonds of a true
visible church; the concept of “hill” opened into a series of scriptural landmarks
demarcating the march of redemptive history: Ararat, Sinai, Golgotha [a place
that figures importantly in “Skunk Hour”], and the Holy Mount of New
Jerusalem. (9)
For the Union Dead demonstrates how this “errand” to found a “new Israel” has essentially
miscarried to create its antithesis: a Union of preterition.
This idea of “saving the world” as a primary cause of American woe manifests itself
quite explicitly in “Fall 1961,” a poem replete with the Cold War rhetoric of imminent
26
annihilation.6 Set in the months following the U-2 incident, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the
beginning of the Space Race (alluded to by several references to the moon) and a rapidly
escalating nuclear arms race, “Fall 1961” depicts a nation of despondence: “We are like a lot of
wild / spiders crying together, / but without tears.” By using spiders as his creature of choice,
Lowell intertextually references his own “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” and “Jonathan Edwards
in Western Massachusetts,” but this metaphor is also important in and of itself since spiders are
solitary creatures. The image is one of Americans as an indistinguishable mass of preterites—as
Sarwar puts it, “a confused swarm of crawling insects too terrified to emote”—joined only by the
perceived threat of nuclear destruction (126). “Crying together, but without tears,” suggests
histrionics, and this is historically accurate since America was not actually under direct threat of
nuclear attack before or during the time of the poem. Nevertheless, Lowell blames this
psychologically “chafing” condition on technology, which in this case are nuclear devices meant
to provide salvation from a hostile international environment: “All autumn, the chafe and jar / of
nuclear war; / we have talked our extinction to death.” “Fall 1961” itself produces an unsettling
nuclear countdown effect by repeating the phrase “back and forth” and similar allusions to clocks
and ticking (FTUD 11).
The poem’s closing lines, “My one point of rest / is the orange and black / oriole’s
swinging nest,” have strangely been read as a recourse to nature. Patrick Cosgrave, one of the
first critics to write a book-length analysis of Lowell’s poetry, sees “the rhythms and routines of
nature” (172) as an offer of consolation and Axelrod similarly argues that the natural rhythm of
the oriole’s nest “belongs to the eternal cycle of life, and summons up comforting thoughts of
6
In “Robert Lowell and the Cold War,” one of the most balanced and sensitive articles to tackle Lowell’s political
alignments, Axelrod shows how “Fall 1961” and other poems pastiche the public discourse of the Cold War. The
line “[O]ur end drifts nearer,” for example, “is generated by and contributes to an obsessive public discourse about
the dangers of nuclear ‘drift,’ as in Time’s typical formulation: ‘Across the U.S., like a malevolent mist, drifted the
fallout from the Russian nuclear test shots’” (“Cold War” 351-352).
27
renewal” (Life and Art 150). But to accept this positive interpretation of one of Lowell’s
bleakest poems is to ignore two glaring issues: first, the general tone of the poems that surround
“Fall 1961” in For the Union Dead; and second, Lowell’s treatment of nature in the poem itself.
It would be wrong to suggest that For the Union Dead is an unredeemingly negative collection,
but the natural world is an all too easy answer here, especially in light of the way that it is treated
in poems such as “Middle Age,” “The Mouth of the Hudson,” and “Florence.” In these poems,
and more importantly in “Fall 1961,” nature is corrupted by pollution and unnatural occurrences,
and as Perloff notes, Lowell reads his sense of personal futility into the minutiae of the insect and
animal world (12). The spiders have already been mentioned, and the speaker also flatly
declares, “I swim like a minnow / behind my studio window.” All of these allusions to nature
suggest that natural hierarchies have been destroyed by the threat of nuclear war, a development
further expressed by the phrase, “A father’s no shield / for his child” (FTUD 12). The nest
functions in much the same way. No longer a shelter for the oriole, this nest is now an ironic
“point of rest” suggestive of the speaker’s unsheltered existence in a state where the distinction
between salvation and destruction is tenuous.
While many critics have dismissed “Fall 1961” as typical Lowellian histrionics, Bob
Dylan expressed the same apocalyptic anxiety in his 1963 protest song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna
Fall.” Hilene Flanzbaum sees Lowell’s political statements as nothing more than carefully
calculated marketing ploys, a disingenuous mastering of “the formula for media success” (173).
But I agree with Axelrod’s portrayal of Lowell as a deeply conflicted poet who carried out
“contingent political and textual acts,” some of which “were dubious, but others were genuinely
significant ethical interventions by poetry in the discourse of the polis” (“Cold War” 340). As
Axelrod describes him, Lowell isn’t at all different from Bob Dylan, the countercultural
28
opportunist that Lowell wrote off in an interview with Ian Hamilton.7 “Hard Rain,” which was
written during the Cuban Missile Crisis, is a fractured, Waste Land-like collection of allegorical
images. The song’s “blue-eyed son” sees “a new-born baby with wild wolves all around it” and
“a white man who walked a black dog.” “Every line in it,” Dylan professes in the liner notes to
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, “is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I
thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this
one.” I cite Dylan as a cultural analog to Lowell’s anti-Puritanical vision and to suggest that
Lowell’s ethos has more in common with the folk consciousness than has been previously
recognized, a connection that will be further clarified in the next chapter.
“July in Washington,” one of several poems that Lowell wrote after a tour of South
America with the Congress of Cultural Freedom (Life and Art 151), comes closest to explicitly
delineating the elect/preterite polarity. Here, Lowell identifies the elected politicians of
Washington with the Puritan elect: “The elect, the elected … they come here bright as dimes, /
and die disheveled and soft. / We cannot name their names, or number their dates— / circle on
circle, like rings on a tree” (FTUD 58). The ellipsis at the beginning of this passage signifies a
kind of meditative association between the “elect” and the “elected.” Lowell immediately
undercuts this association, however, by identifying the “elected” as gaudy yet essentially
insignificant “dimes” who remain subject to the same entropic decay as society at large. These
“elected” are not elect at all, but so ineffectual and unremarkable that they are easily forgotten by
the American cultural consciousness and quickly become preterite. “Dimes” also suggests the
7
Hamilton’s interview reveals Lowell’s sincere (if limited) engagement with sixties youth culture: “I was teaching
my students Stevens, I think it was, and I said to them, ‘What do you really like?’ and they said the Beatles and Rod
McKuen. So we read pop for a month. The Beatles are a cross between Noel Coward and Gilbert, more polished
and idiomatic than most poets. McKuen I get nothing out of. Bob Dylan is alloy; he is true folk and fake folk, and
has a Caruso voice. He has lines, but I doubt if he has written whole poems. He leans on the crutch of his guitar”
(Collected Prose 288).
29
same detrimental capitalism as the Mosler safe of “For the Union Dead” and the first half of
“Skunk Hour.” The poem continues with similar Puritan rhetoric by evoking that most
recognizable of Puritan tracts, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: “but we wish the river had
another shore, / some farther range of delectable mountains” (FTUD 59). Bunyan’s “delectable
mountains” of The Pilgrim’s Progress are, of course, the “Promised Land” that the elect could
look forward to as a reward for the tribulations of earthly existence. Lowell compares such a
belief to sixties idealism in order to show the idealistic hopelessness of both notions.
While “July in Washington” evokes the most recognizable of Puritan tracts, “Jonathan
Edwards in Western Massachusetts” summons forth one of the most recognizable figures of
American Puritanism. But Edwards is not portrayed as the brimstone-spewing sermonizer of
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God who promises a painful judgement for the preterite:
The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit is
prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the
flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them,
and the pit hath opened its mouth to them. (91-92)
Rather, much like the “hermit heiress” of “Skunk Hour,” Edwards is in his dotage—an outdated
relic who pins scraps of paper to himself and leads his “last flock, a dozen / Houssatonic Indian
children” (FTUD 43). The decline of Edwards, an exemplary member of the elect, analogously
represents the decline of the Elect Nation. Puritan rhetoric commonly refers to the elect as
“sheep,” but the houses that signify them stand “out in the cold / like sheep outside the fold.”
Using Thomas Hooker’s writing as an example, Bercovitch explains that the Elect Nation of
New England was to be a “‘means to save out of this generall callamitie,’ as the ark had saved
Noah from the flood, and as New Jerusalem would harbor the elect plucked out of the final
30
conflagration” (Puritan Origins 102). Lowell’s New England, where “Faith is trying to do
without / faith,” attests to the failure of this venture:
We know how the world will end,
but where is paradise, each day farther
from the Pilgrim’s blues for England
and the Promised Land (FTUD 40).
As the poem’s speaker, Lowell stands in postwar Western Massachusetts at the edge of
apocalypse, what Pynchon calls “the end of history” in Gravity’s Rainbow (56). What we have
here is a startling example of Lowell’s tendency to conflate historical time, the sort of viscous
temporal movement that marks “For the Union Dead.” Lowell’s Massachusetts is superimposed
upon Edwards’ Massachusetts with a knowing glance at the reader: we know how Edwards’
millennial prophecies will play out—in nuclear apocalypse.
Even though Lowell chronicles the failure of Puritanism, such an analysis, as Dwight
Eddins recognizes, always entails an indictment of Puritan hegemony, in this case the Pilgrim’s
radical departure from Catholicism’s humane tradition in their exploitation of the Native
Americans (“a dozen / Houssatonic Indian Children”) under the guise of their “Errand.” Eddins
explains, “Subsequent American history merely changed the targets and the rationale of
exploitation; wars fought in the seventeenth century under the banner of religious zeal are fought
in the twentieth century under the banner of the capitalistic system” (42).
But these poems seem like a warm-up when compared with “For the Union Dead,” a
poem that fully realizes the transition that Eddins outlines. While it should be clear that the other
poems in For the Union Dead are merely distillations of Lowell’s project—elect/preterite as
collapsed and the drive for salvation as the cause of the collapse—“For the Union Dead” stands
31
as the poet’s most intense scrutiny of Puritanism, a scathing jeremiad that problematizes the
elect-preterite relationship. Even the title ironically deconstructs itself. At the most literal level,
“For the Union Dead” suggests a commemorative ode for the fallen Northern soldiers of the
Civil War, but the title can also mean “For the State Dead” or “For America Dead.” The
epigraph, “Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam” or “They relinquish everything to save the
republic,” operates in much the same way. A deliberate appropriation of Augustus St. Gaudens’
inscription on the Shaw memorial (“He relinquishes everything to save the republic”), which is
actually the motto of Shaw’s Society of the Cincinnati (Nelles 639), Lowell has ostensibly
altered it to include the African American soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th. Yet the phrase’s
darker purpose usurps its initial appearances and provides a narrative framework in which the
poem can be read as an elegy for a postwar America of “second sheep.”8 In a series of
interconnected vignettes, all dealing with a relinquishment of some sort, Lowell deconstructs the
Puritan concept of elect and preterite by closely examining St.Gaudens’ monument to Colonel
Robert Gould Shaw and the various objects of technology that have caused America’s
preterition.
Colonel Shaw is both figuratively and literally foregrounded by a statement about
America’s Puritan heredity when Lowell describes the excavation taking place directly across the
street from St. Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial: “A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders /
braces the tingling Statehouse” (FTUD 70). The image is a powerful one of Puritan ideals
undergirding Boston’s government and, by extension, the American government as a whole. A
8
I mean “elegy” in Jahan’s Ramazani’s sense of the modern elegy, which turns to “‘melancholic’ mourning.”
“Unlike their literary forbearers,” Ramazani explains, modern elegists “attack the dead and themselves, their own
work and tradition; and they refuse such orthodox consolations as the rebirth of the dead in nature, in God, or in
poetry itself” (4). Ramazani specifically points to Lowell as a poet who “attacks the dead as unworthy, taunting and
teasing parents, grandparents, and their overly esteemed ancestors. He conflates the satiric invective and the oedipal
drama of the elegy, heightening both of them and turning them into the foundation of his elegiac art” (227).
32
peripheral member of Lowell’s rich Puritan ancestry and commander of the first black regiment
in the Civil War, Shaw is himself identified as a quasi-Puritan member of the elect. Decidedly
elect in both his ties to the Lowell legacy and his military status of Colonel, Shaw “Has an angry
wrenlike vigilance, / a greyhound’s gentle tautness; / he seems to wince at pleasure, / and
suffocate for privacy.” While Shaw is both intrinsically and visually defined as a Puritan elect,
his “niggers,” the black soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th, are undoubtedly preterite. America’s
long-standing treatment of African Americans as what Pynchon calls “second sheep,” especially
during the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, needs no recapitulation, and Lowell evokes the
attitude of dispensability that was historically directed towards the black soldiers: “Two months
after marching through Boston, / half the regiment was dead”
Yet Lowell keenly problematizes what seems like a clear-cut division between Shaw and
his black soldiers. Shaw rides high above his soldiers on St. Gaudens’ immortalizing monument,
but, as Lowell points out, “Shaw’s father wanted no monument / except the ditch, / where his
son’s body was thrown / and lost with his ‘niggers.’” In his abjection, Shaw is indistinguishable
from his preterite soldiers. Moreover, St. Gaudens’ monument, which Lowell’s vision renders
indistinguishable from the “real” Shaw, “sticks like a fishbone / in the city’s throat,” a reminder
not of the heroic wartime deeds of the Massachusetts 54th, but of the systematized
disenfranchisement of an entire race. The case of Colonel Shaw stands as a crucial aporia that
Lowell uses to deconstruct the relationship between elect and preterite (FTUD 71).
Inherent in Lowell’s deconstruction is a critique of the ideology of war, specifically
Colonel Robert Shaw’s Civil War and Robert Lowell’s virtually unnamable “last war.” It should
in no way be inferred that Lowell negatively represents Robert Shaw and his soldiers. Rather, he
inveighs against a particular perception of Shaw’s memorial. That is, that the Shaw memorial
33
was, as Axelrod tells us, “intended in part as a compliment by the Boston cultural elite to itself,”
not a difficult claim to make in light of the fact that the memorial is inscribed with the name of
every one of the slain white officers but not a single black soldier (Life and Art 166). For an
example of this perception, we can look at Peter Burchard’s One Gallant Rush, a biography of
Shaw that came out around the same time as For the Union Dead. In his introduction, Burchard
offers a well-meaning yet idealizingly dislocated reenactment of the same scene that St. Gaudens
chose for his memorial:
Shaw’s skin was pale above the faces of his men. His white officers were some
of the best battle-tempered youths of the day, and marching beside them were the
finest of Negroes—men who had drilled through the winter and who marched
proudly, holding their rifles in their strong brown hands. (1)
Burchard ironically uses a passage from “For the Union Dead” as one of his epigraphs, but this is
exactly the type of depiction that Lowell abhors. This passage reveals a highly dichotomous
division between Shaw and the African American soldiers. His “pale” face rides high about their
“strong brown hands,” and Burchard dehumanizes the soldiers as “the finest of Negroes.” One
Gallant Rush as a whole pays little attention to the black soldiers, instead devoting its pages to
reinforcing the idea of Shaw as the epitome of the elect. “For the Union Dead” exposes the way
in which the memorial itself as well as portraitures like Burchard’s have subjected the
Massachusetts 54th to a preterition of forgetfullness.
Consequently, a large part of “For the Union Dead”’s scenes deal with this forgetfulness.
While the implications of the physical abjection of St. Gaudens’ relief have already been
discussed, two other scenes illustrate this critique. In the first scene, returning to the present
from an analepsis that gives a visual and moral portrait of Shaw, Lowell describes “A thousand
34
small town New England greens” where “the old white churches hold their air / of sparse, sincere
rebellion; frayed flags / quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.” It seems
curious to describe New England churches as rebellious, especially in light of the “rebel” label
attached to the Confederate states during the Civil War. The next line clarifies: the “frayed
flags” rebel against the waning memory of the Union dead. And the next four lines provide us
with a highly palpable image of yet another set of immortalizations—“The stone statues of the
abstract Union Soldier”—physically disappearing as they erode away. While the ideology
behind the Civil War was, at least theoretically, one of anti-slavery, Lowell suggests that almost
one hundred years later, little has changed. The second scene, which refers to the civil rights
movement of the 1960’s and the desegregation of schools, expresses this exact sentiment: “When
I crouch to my television set, / the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.”
This brief yet effective scene questions whether the death and preterition of the Massachusetts
54th has accomplished anything at all.
Whereas the ideology behind the Civil War has been forgotten, the ideology behind
World War II is nothing less than horrific: “on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph /
shows Hiroshima boiling / over a Mosler Safe, the ‘Rock of Ages’ / that survived the blast.
Space is nearer.” This famous mention of the Mosler Safe Company’s use of a melted but
otherwise intact safe that survived the atom bomb at Hiroshima as advertising material is at once
a statement about the commercialization of war and the moral bankruptcy of America. The
atomic bombing of Hiroshima is a prime example of Lowell’s “saving the world” paradox, and
as Thurston notes, the internal assonance of “Boylston” and “boiling” suggests that “Boylston
Street is every bit as threatened by the bomb as Hiroshima.”
35
Herein lies the cause of America’s sorrows. In anxious pursuit of the innate Puritan
impulse to prove itself as the Elect Nation, America has actually inflicted preterition upon itself.
Call it salvational suicide: the thirst for technology to advance, protect, and provide salvation
actually separates us from our humanity. The Mosler Safe anecdote illustrates this idea through
a series of brutal analogies. Lowell calls the safe “the ‘Rock of Ages’ / that survived the blast,”
which refers, of course, to a Puritan hymn of the same name in which Christ/God is the “Rock of
Ages” (FTUD 72) In postwar America, Lowell suggests, God has been replaced by commerce
and technology. “For the Union Dead” contains a number of instances of living things becoming
mechanized and vice-versa (a process evident in the copulating cars of “Skunk Hour”),
signifying a kind of unnatural evolution. Lowell’s meditation on the Shaw memorial is triggered
by a technological image:
One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
The “yellow dinosaur steamshovels” are significant not only because they exemplify an
unnaturally mechanized organism but also because dinosaurs are extinct, thus lending a crucial
motif to this particular scene of relinquishment (Lowell evokes dinosaurs to a similar effect in
“Middle Age”). In addition, these objects of technology are responsible for what Lowell clearly
portrays as a desecration, the gouging of “their underworld garage,” quite literally an
undermining of the State. Perhaps the most important organic-turned-mechanical objects, and
36
certainly the most prevalent, are the “cowed, complaint fish” of the South Boston Aquarium.
They appear in various forms (“Their monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city’s throat”),
none more malevolent than in the final stanza. Very early in the poem, Lowell laments, “I often
sigh still / for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom / of the fish and reptile” (FTUD 70).
But over fifty lines later, the fish have evolved into mechanical sharks: “Everywhere, / giant
finned cars nose forward like fish; / a savage servility / slides by on grease.” Moreover, the fish
have gone from cowed compliance to savage servility, a line that resonantly returns to the
epigraph by echoing the word “Servare.” Knowing what we know about this troublesome word
makes this connection even more ironic than many critics have realized. The active “saving” of
the epigraph has been linguistically contorted into an imprisoned “servility,” which speaks to the
ultimate consequences of the Puritan salvational impulse.
“For the Union Dead,” a poem about public issues written for a public event, seems to be
anything but the confessional poetry associated with Robert Lowell. Lowell’s direct and farreaching ties to the American Puritan legacy, however, make a deconstruction of the
elect/preterite binary a deconstruction of himself, “a poet who still dwells in the shadow of his
New England family” (Perloff 163). It’s no secret that Lowell has suffered a decline in
popularity over the last twenty five years. In the wake of Ian Hamilton’s damaging biography,
Robert Lowell (1982), Lowell received little critical attention throughout the 1980s. Publishing
on Lowell experienced a modest upswing in the 1990s but seems to have leveled off in the early
21st century.9 As a result, much of the favorable criticism on Lowell has tended toward
9
Nevertheless, two of the most sensitive and compelling accounts of Lowell’s work have been published in the last
five years. Thomas Travisano’s Midcentury Quartet places Lowell, along with Bishop, Jarrell, and Berryman, in a
postmodern context. In a chapter on Lowell in his book Castings, Guy Rotella boldly and, I think, convincingly
presents “For the Union Dead” as “a kind of representational action painting, a gesturally rendered field of
competing, confirming, qualifying strands that actively drip and spill and stream, over- and underlap, collide and
intertwine, choir, quarrel, and converse in order to “transfer” to the reader Lowell’s irresolvably multiple and
37
monumentalization in an attempt to recover Irvin Ehrenpreis’s romanticized notion that the
1960s heralded “the Age of Lowell,” the idea that Lowell was the poetic figure of the ‘60s.
What’s been obscured by this hero worship—particularly Helen Vendler’s vehement
championing—is Lowell’s propensity for subversion. Ironically, the criticism that
monumentalizes Lowell presents as one dimensional a figure as the one that Joseph’s Epstein
presents in his essay “Mistah Lowell—He Dead,” an attack that pronounced Lowell
inconsequential for eternity. But Lowell was, as Rasula holds, “compelled in part to destroy the
terms of valuation that had canonized him in the first place” and on a larger scale, compelled to
destroy the Puritan values undergirding his own history and America’s history (247). “For the
Union Dead,” which, Moloch-like, devours and demolishes every father figure available to
Lowell from his Puritan forerunners to Allen Tate, is the prime example of this phenomenon.
“We no longer live in anything so comfortable, hierarchical, and contained as “the Age of
Lowell. We never really did,” Axelrod rightly asserts (“Robert Lowell” 26). The steady
deflation of this myth has actually had the beneficial effect of clearing room for many of
Lowell’s contemporaries such as Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Olson, and this is really the best
way to view him: one writer among many. As I’ve tried to show here, Lowell was far more
politically rebellious than his aesthetic-icon stereotype dictates and not the least bit manically
disconnected from public history, a proposition that will become clearer as he comes into
contrast with Pynchon.
competing feelings and thoughts about the political, aesthetic, and cultural heights and horrors monuments
condense” (54).
38
CHAPTER 3
SALT OF THE EARTH
Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the lowly of birth
Raise your glass to the good and the evil
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth
Say a prayer for the common foot soldier
Spare a thought for his back breaking work
Say a prayer for his wife and his children
Who burn the fires and who still till the earth
And when I search a faceless crowd
A swirling mass of gray and
Black and white
They don’t look real to me
In fact, they look so strange
Raise your glass to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the uncounted heads
Let’s think of the wavering millions
Who need leaders but get gamblers instead
The Rolling Stones, “Salt of the Earth”
Midway through one of the labyrinthine later sections of Gravity’s Rainbow, a lesser
character named Jeremiah “Merciful” Evans, “the well known political informer from
Pembroke,” launches into a pitch-perfect parody of The Rolling Stones’ “Salt of the Earth”:
Say a prayer for the common informer,
He came out of a quim, just like yoooou—
Yes be kind what you chortle,
For narks are as mortal
As any, Kilkenny to Kew …
39
And the next time you sigh in your comfort,
Ask yourself how he’s doing, today—
Is it worse being sold,
For those handfuls of gold,
Than to sigh all your real-life, away? (541)
Like so many of the ostensibly irrelevant or superfluous details that saturate Pynchon’s novel,
Merciful Evans’s song is like a DNA strand from which the core ideas of Gravity’s Rainbow can
be replicated. Evans appears only once in the narrative, one of four hundred named characters
that populate the encyclopedic novel, attesting to the enormity of Pynchon’s undertaking. His
bawdy song—positively dripping with Pynchon’s high-minded engagement with low culture—is
intentionally anachronistic. Evans exists, by all accounts, in 1945 but sings to the tune of a song
released in 1967, which speaks to the 1960s’ allusive presence in Gravity’s Rainbow.10 Most
significantly, however, he evokes a song of staggering thematic relevance. “The Salt of the
Earth” pays homage to the working class (“Say a prayer for the common foot solider”) but loses
them among “a faceless crowd,” just as Gravity’s Rainbow sympathetically exalts the preterite
and actively blurs divisions between elect and preterite. If Pynchon’s encyclopedic novel can be
said to have a thematic hub, it is the elect-preterite binary.
Unlike For the Union Dead (or any of Lowell’s work, for that matter), Gravity’s
Rainbow has drawn much critical attention for its conspicuous engagement with Puritan
tropes.11 My goal in this chapter is not to rehash what critics have already written about
10
The Rolling Stones appear once more after Slothrop’s disappearance: “There’s supposed to be one last photograph
of him on the only album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group—seven musicians posed, in the arrogant
style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River” (742).
11
For other analyses of Puritan themes in Gravity’s Rainbow see, Deborah Madsen’s “Family Legacies: Identifying
the Traces of William Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow,” John M. Krafft’s “‘And How Far-Fallen’: Puritan Themes in
Gravity’s Rainbow,” Thomas Moore’s The Style of Connectedness, and Smith and Tololyan’s “The New Jeremiad:
Gravity’s Rainbow.”
40
Pynchon’s use of Puritanism but to bring him into contrast alongside Robert Lowell as a kindred
spirit in subversion. A major pitfall in Pynchon scholarship has always been the desire to
totalize Gravity’s Rainbow, to synthesize every last feature of the novel in one critical pass. It’s
an understandable urge, since as the case of Merciful Evans illustrates, the novel continuously
replicates its whole narrative in the myriad sum of its parts. Gravity’s Rainbow is a text that
begs us to totalize, proffering “everything is connected” as its narrative mantra, yet
simultaneously conspires against us with a surfeit of deprioritized information (703). To
counteract this difficulty, I want to measure Gravity’s Rainbow against the Puritan anxiety that
I’ve already identified in For the Union Dead, which is not to suggest that Pynchon’s treatment
of Puritanism is identical to or less significant than Lowell’s. As we’ll see, Pynchon’s account is
in many respects far more developed and multifaceted than Lowell’s, offering a heteroglossic
reproach—intentional or unintentional—to Lowell’s comparatively parochial examination of
American Puritanism. By bracing Gravity’s Rainbow against the thematic template of For the
Union Dead, I will zero in on Puritanism as a narrative thread in Pynchon’s text and
contextualize the two writers as literary-historical counterparts. In particular, my analysis
focuses on three interrelated elements: American Puritanism’s historical decline, the electpreterite binary, and the complex relationship between capitalism, war, and nuclear apocalypse.
Much like Lowell, Pynchon enacts the collapse of elect and preterite to demonstrate how
secularized Puritanism has—like Kekulé’s benzene-ring serpent—inimically doubled back on
itself, bringing with it a new millennial dread.
While Lowell remains on Boston Common, never really venturing beyond American
sociopolitical structures, Pynchon elevates his meditation on elect and preterite to the global
scale. Yet Gravity’s Rainbow always maintains a pragmatic connection to American Puritanism
41
via Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, the novel’s “central” character. Slothrop, not unlike Lowell and
Pynchon, “hangs at the bottom of his blood’s avalanche, 300 years of western swamp-Yankees.”
Pynchon uses the word “avalanche” several times to describe Slothrop’s overburdened,
inescapable position beneath centuries of family history. An avatar of Americanism and, more
specifically, American Puritan consciousness, Slothrop can’t escape his ancestors’ inherent
psychological constructs. On his daily trips to investigate rocket bomb sites, “[he] can’t manage
but some nervous truce with their Providence […] Ruins he goes daily to look in are a sermon on
vanity. That he finds, as weeks wear on, no least fragment of any rocket, preaches how invisible
is the act of death … Slothrop’s progress” (25). “Slothrop’s progress,” his virtual abduction by
governmental powers and subsequent quest for the Schwarzgerät, turns out not to be a
Bunyanesque series of moral enlightenments but a decline. Over the course of his progress,
Thomas Moore notes, “Slothrop completely inverts the Bunyanesque model by wholly losing,
not validating, his faith in transcendental ideas of order” (133). Like so much of Gravity’s
Rainbow, it remains indeterminate as to whether or not Slothrop’s ultimate transformation into “a
crossroads” residing “at the edge of the ancient Plague towns” is one of Rilkean transcendence
(625). At the most basic level, however, Slothrop—hitherto a narrative linchpin—suffers a
process of disintegration, he begins “to thin, to scatter” (509). By “early Virgo” (August 1945),
the narrative voice tells us, “he has become one plucked albatross. Plucked, hell—stripped.
Scattered all over the Zone. It’s doubtful if he can ever be ‘found’ again, in the conventional
sense, of ‘positively identified and detained’” (712). Slothrop’s “plucked albatross” undoubtedly
alludes to what Moore calls “the Coleridgean albatross,” signifying “an explicit deflation” of the
Romantic self (199). But I would also add that a deflation of the Romantic self is, in this
context, a deflation of the Puritan self. We should recall Bercovitch’s thesis that the Puritan self
42
was predicated on a proto-Romantic “I-ness,” and that the Puritan identity was locked in a
constant struggle between self-repression (“humility”) and “personal assertion.” To attempt to
deny the self is to paradoxically reassert the self ad infinitum in “a consuming involvement with
‘me’ and ‘mine’ that resists disintegration” (Puritan Origins 18). We have to remember, though,
that Bercovitch never writes about anything other than strictly pre-modernist forms of
Puritanism. In Gravity’s Rainbow, we find the twentieth-century Puritan self so assailed by the
external forces of (post)modernity (created, ironically, by Puritan impulses in the first place) that
it cannot resist disintegration.12
As if pushing Bercovitch’s rhetorical analysis to the next teleological step, Pynchon
textually acts out what couldn’t be accomplished by refrains of self-abnegation,
self-abhorring, and self-denial. But it is inaccurate to say, as a surprising number of
critics do, that Slothrop completely drops out of the narrative. Members of the
Counterforce search for him, the narrator reports “stories” about him from the Zone, his name
(“Rocketman”) shows up scrawled as graffiti above a urinal, and interlocutors pop
into the narrative to spin theories about his existence (“Some called him a ‘pretext.’ Others felt
that he was a genuine point-for-point microcosm” [738]). Slothrop obliquely remains after his
dispersal, casting a preterite pall over all of part four. “Last of his line, and how far-fallen,”
Slothrop’s quasi-removal synecdochially reenacts his WASP family’s declension and, by
extension, the irrecoverable fracture of Puritan selfhood (569).
12
It is interesting to note the difference between Lowell and Pynchon on this point. In Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,”
Puritanism is progressively internalized. The Calvinist struggle of the poem’s first four stanzas becomes explicitly
integrated into the speaker: “I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat…. / I
myself am hell” (Life Studies 84). In Gravity’s Rainbow, on the other hand, the Puritan self thoroughly
disintegrates. By the end of the narrative, Seaman Bodine is “one of the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort
of integral creature at all” (740).
43
Scattered across the text like so many albatross feathers, we get a disassembled history of
Slothrop’s prototypical New England lineage. True to Weber’s paradigm, the Slothrops’ Puritan
piety undergoes a sea change into a secular pursuit of wealth, and Pynchon measures their
decline in pecuniary terms. William Slothrop, “the first transatlantic Slothrop,” journeys to
America in 1630 aboard Winthrop’s Arbella, “flagship of a great Puritan flotilla that year “ (21,
204). As I’ve already noted, the Slothrops are a parodic revision of Pynchon’s own family tree.
Far from the real William Pynchon, a colonial authority and founder of Springfield, William
Slothrop is “a mess cook or something.” In a fascinating sequence that I want to return to later,
the narrator provides a filmic reversal that sets Winthrop’s fleet sailing backwards to England,
“the nights stew of mess cooks like William collecting itself up out of the planks and off the
indignant shoes of the more elect […] as the servant himself staggers upright again and the vomit
he slipped on goes gushing back into the mouth that spilled it” (204). Here Pynchon depicts a
society already stratified by criteria other than spiritual election. The “more elect,” perhaps
echoing George Orwell’s “more equal,” enjoy an advanced social standing. That description,
John M. Krafft observes, “exhibits Pynchon’s skepticism regarding the coincidence of principle
and practice, official theory and social actuality. He shows declension as immediate, and here
locates the beginning of a process whereby theologically based categorization degenerated in
secular classification” (56-57). For Pynchon, Krafft rightly observes, the Puritan’s “holy
experiment” was not always already secular and corrupt, but he does locate this paradigm shift in
the midst of the pilgrimage aboard the Arbella. This journey that was supposed to deliver the
pilgrims from abjection to the promised land, Pynchon suggests, actually set in motion a much
more malevolent process, the result of which was the multinational business interests that drove
World War II.
44
The Slothrops aren’t immune to the Weberian drive to become one of the “more elect,”
what Weber terms “the Protestant work ethic”: “restless, continuous, and systematic work”
aimed at the accumulation of “investment capital,” which was “the highest of all ascetic means
for believers to testify to their elect status” (116-17). But by the late eighteenth century, they
have not completely succumbed to this impulse:
Back when the Shays fought the federal troops across Massachusetts, there were
Slothrop Regulators patrolling Berkshire for the rebels, wearing sprigs of hemlock
in their hats so you could tell them from the Government soldiers. Federals stuck
a tatter of white paper in theirs. Slothrops in those days were not yet so much
involved with paper, and the wholesale slaughter of trees. They were still for the
living green, against the dead white. Later they lost, or traded away, knowledge
of which side they’d been on. Tyrone here has inherited most of their bland
ignorance on the subject. (268)
This passage hints at the nature/technology, human/corporate, and life/death oppositions (or lack
thereof) that mark Pynchon’s reading of World War II. Nazi SS officer Captain Weissmann, or
“Dominus Blicero” as he is aptly codenamed, is Pynchon’s white god of death, “the Zone’s worst
specter,” who madly undertakes the final cybernetic merging of Gottfried and the V-2 rocket
(666). More immediately, though, we get a sense of the Slothrop family’s impending
corporatization, their movement away from the green and into the whiteness of death. Pynchon
is quite similar to Lowell in this respect inasmuch as they both represent the Puritan/capitalist
dialectic as inimical to nature. Recall, for example, the “yellow dinosaur steamshovels” of “For
the Union Dead,” “grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass / to gouge their
underworld garage” (FTUD 70). The Slothrops take up a series of professions—“They began as
45
fur traders, cordwainers, salters and smokers of bacon, went on into glassmaking, became
selectmen, builders of tanneries, quarriers of marble”—each one more lucrative, socially
prominent, and detrimental to nature than the last (27).
“[T]he wholesale slaughter of trees” to which the narrator alludes refers to the Slothrop
Paper Company, the Massachusetts paper mill that marks the final step in the Slothrop family’s
capitalist ascent and, at the same time, their descent into the realm of secular Puritanism:
[D]iminishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into paper—toilet
paper, banknote stock, newsprint—a medium or ground for shit, money and the
Word. […] Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the
American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s
fate. […] the Slothrops stayed east in Berkshire, perverse—close to the flooded
quarries and logged off hillsides they’d left like signed confessions across all that
thatchy-brown, moldering witch-country. (28)
The Slothrops are inextricably clasped to America’s fate in at least two ways. The first is the
secularization of Puritanism that I’ve described. The sly, omniscient narrator quite explicitly
acknowledges these Weberian overtones at one point, referring to Lyle Bland’s fortune as
“money in the Puritan sense—an outward and visible O.K. on their intentions” (652).13 While
Pynchon paradoxically portrays the Slothrops’ social ascent as a figurative decline into capitalist
corruption, they are, for all practical purposes, in a slow process of financial deterioration, “The
profits slackening, the family ever multiplying, Interest from various numbered trusts was still
turned, by family banks down in Boston every second or third generation, back into yet another
trust, in long rallentando, in infinite series just perceptibly, term by term, dying … but never
13
For more on Weber’s overt yet ghostly presence in Gravity’s Rainbow, see Moore’s The Style of Connectedness:
“Weber’s is one of those intellectual canons whose tag-terms Pynchon teasingly scatters around in Gravity’s
Rainbow” (119).
46
quite to the zero….” (28). David Seed argues that “The repeated linking of Slothrop to his
ancestors” exemplifies how “[t]he past exerts a constant and oppressive pressure throughout
Gravity’s Rainbow,” but this is an understatement. Past and present collapse at this historical
crossroads. Slothrop is trapped in the discursive zone of his family’s history, infected with a
characteristic Puritan paranoia and sent off into the post-World War II Zone to grotesquely
reenact their debasement.
The centrality of paper to the Slothrop enterprise is the second way in which they are
inextricably clasped to America’s fate. Toilet paper, currency, and print media—“Shit, money,
and the word”—are the three interrelated and distinctly American uses of Slothrop-Company
paper. As the material product of the already anti-organic logging industry, white toilet paper,
like the white porcelain toilet of Slothrop’s Roseland Ballroom hallucination, “bespeaks the
repression of ‘shit,’ of the organic” (Moore 125). The latter two uses—money and the word—
are, for Pynchon, fundamental institutions of modern warfare. Gravity’s Rainbow exposes the
horrific violence of war as “spectacle,” a mere front that diverts attention away from the
exchanges of paper currency that compose the “real movements of the war”: “mass death’s a
stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still
here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets […] Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks
continue to move, severe as a classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers” (105).
And while paper exchanges hands behind the scenes, another sort of paper directs the military
atrocities on the battlefield. London, Roger Mexico’s place of operation and the nerve center of
the European Theater of Operations, is “Death’s antechamber: where all the paperwork’s done,
the contracts signed, the days numbered” (40). Paperwork and other print media occupy a
special position in Gravity’s Rainbow as the precursor to the simulacra of the information age,
47
which John Johnston calls “the commodification of information as a new kind of raw material”
and thus a “larger reconfiguration and expansion of contemporary capitalism into a fully global
system of domination and exchange” (25). Slothrop’s identity, for example, depends entirely
upon the identification papers that he carries, and Gravity’s Rainbow is larded with references to
paper as a medium for the printed word. This narrative fixation on paper simultaneously locates
the nascent information age as the beginning of the postwar and, via the Slothrop Paper
Company, makes Puritanism highly complicit in World War II.
For now, though, I want to return to William Slothrop (who we last left reverse-vomiting
off of the Arbella’s wooden planks), the central figure in the Puritan family mythology that
Pynchon constructs and the logical point of entry into a discussion of the elect-preterite binary.
As much as Pynchon and Lowell ruthlessly dismantle the whole Puritan value system, they also
tend to sympathetically romanticize their predecessors when focusing in on single persons. Both
writers possess a tremendous capacity for humanism, which often goes unnoticed in the midst of
their Luddite jeremiads. “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts” putatively envisions the
Massachusetts frontier’s apocalyptic rupture while expounding on Edwards’ preterition. But
when Lowell begins to directly apostrophize Edwards, he suddenly shifts into a Wordsworthian
admiration of ruin:
On my pilgrimage to Northampton,
I found no relic,
Except the round slice of an oak
You are said to have planted.
It was flesh-colored, new,
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And a common piece of kindling,
Only fit for burning.
You too must have been green once.
[…………………………………]
I love you faded,
Old, exiled and afraid (FTUD 43)
Similarly, as Madsen recognizes, Pynchon’s William Slothrop is a “peculiar mix of historical
truth and fictional construction” resulting in a “romantic underrepresentation of Pynchon’s status
as patentee and member of the Massachussets Bay elite” (36).
The narrative cycles back to William Slothrop around “1634 or –5” when he departs for
western Massachusetts “in true Imperial style […] sick and tired of the Winthrop machine,
convinced he could preach as well as anybody in the hierarchy even if he hadn’t been officially
ordained” (554-555). The first American Slothrop, William actively resists the capitalist system
in which his progeny become imbricated, renouncing the increasingly bureaucratic New England
colonies for a pastoral life raising pigs in the Berkshires and driving them to market in Boston,
“but William wasn’t really in it for the money as just for the trip itself. He enjoyed the road, the
mobility, the chance encounters of the day […] and most of all just being with those pigs” (555).
Much like Lowell’s skunks, pigs are one of several animals in the symbolic economy of
Gravity’s Rainbow that serve as allegorical instantiations of the preterite.14 The skunks and the
pigs offer a model of existential persistence for a universe where preterition is the only spiritual
option. At one point in his picaresque journey across Europe, Slothrop adopts the persona of
Plechazunga, the Nordic pig hero, as an outward sign of his preterition. For William, the
14
The aardvark, the dodo bird, and the lemming are the others.
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dichotomy between the pigs’ “nobility and personal freedom” and the slaughter they face at the
end of journey is a perfectly binary parable on the elect and preterite: “the squealing bloody
horror at the end of the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untroubled pink
eyelashes and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in cross-country movement.” This “balance”
suggests to William a hegemonic relationship between humans and their porcine charges on the
Newtonian level of action and reaction. “William must’ve been waiting,” the narrator opines,
“for the one pig that wouldn’t die, that would validate all the ones who’d had to, all his Gadarene
swine who’d rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men
[…] by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift
of life” (555). Williams waits, in short, for a preterite Christ figure, which would necessarily
disrupt the hierarchical relationship between elect and preterite. In Puritan theology, Jesus died
to save the elect; in Slothropian theology, the preterite Christ will—like Lowell’s skunk or
Oberst Enzian, the Herero Christ figure of Gravity’s Rainbow—defiantly live to justify the
existence of those masses left behind. The allusion to Gadara, where Jesus exorcises a man of
demons named Legion that subsequently enter a herd of pigs, tightens the associative weld
between the swine and the preterite Christ.
This line of reasoning, the allegorical transposition of his swine with the human preterite,
inspires William Slothrop to write his religious tract entitled On Preterition:
William argued holiness for these “second Sheep,” without whom there’d be no
elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that.
And it got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot
was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite
counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but
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horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of
man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too.
Right? (555)
As I mentioned in the prologue, Pynchon’s account of On Preterition reimagines The
Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, a heretical work by his ancestor William Pynchon.
Controversial as it was, The Meritorious Price attempted only to “soften the doctrine of
predestination,” as Seed puts it, by emphasizing “Christ’s humanity” (180). It doesn’t begin to
approach the categorical implosion that William Slothrop enacts when he posits the preterite as
an “equal and opposite counterpart” to the elect. But Pynchon does pick up on that germ of
instability in his ancestor’s suggestion that Christ obedience perfectly atoned for man’s original
sin, magnifying it ten fold. On Preterition performs an essentially post-structuralist maneuver,
recognizing elect and preterite as a position/opposition binary in which one term is falsely
privileged over the other. The elect can’t exist without the preterite, William reasons, so how
can we possibly ascribe subordination to one or the other? If we love Jesus, we have to love
Judas too: elect and preterite become indistinguishable. In yet another action/reaction, William’s
proto-Derridian antics earn him a swift ejection from the colonies, pitching him out of the “city
upon a hill” and back among the preterite.
Centuries later, stranded in the Zone and well on his was to dispersal, Slothrop wonders:
Could [William Slothrop] have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point
she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had time to consolidate
and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the
name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back […] maybe
for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the
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Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it as single set of coordinates from
which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up (556).
The “Zone” literally refers to postwar Europe where, in the interregnum following VE Day,
geopolitical upheavals have erased cartographic boundaries—“Forget frontiers now. Forget
subdivisions. There aren’t any” (294). Tropologically, the Zone also refers to the novel’s mode
of discourse, which commits itself not only to blurring the distinction between elect and preterite
but between all binary pairs. In 1990, Alec McHoul and David Wills pointed out that most of the
existing secondary literature concerning Gravity’s Rainbow worked strictly in “Binary Pairs
which supposedly provide the dynamism of the novels—such things as order vs. chaos, paranoia
vs. anti-paranoia, the elect vs. the preterite, zero vs. one, and so on” (3). A good deal of the
recent criticism on Gravity’s Rainbow carries on in the same tick-tocking contrapuntal fashion,
recapitulating rhetorical pairings ad nauseam. But as the above passage suggests, Pynchon’s
project is one of depolarization. McHoul and Wills call this strategy “post-rhetorical,” and their
readings of Pynchon’s fiction alongside Derrida’s writings illuminate this leveling effect:
“Pynchon, like Derrida (and for want of a better word) deconstructs the difference between
positivities (such as humanism) and their opposites (in this case nihilism?)” (17). As if
inscribing “ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE” on Gravity’s Rainbow’s
linguistic entryway, the narrator announces on the very first page that “this is not a
disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into” (3), not a parsing out but a collapsing
into. The difficulty often attributed to Gravity’s Rainbow stems from this condition as the novel
enacts a sort of narrative preterition, refusing to distinguish between “important” and
“secondary” information as a traditional narrative does. 15 As several commentators have noted,
15
I am indebted to Jed Rasula for the term “narrative preterition.”
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Gravity’s Rainbow eschews traditional either/or thinking for a both/and configuration. In this
respect, Pynchon presents Edward Pointsman’s Pavlovian binarism as a dangerous manifestation
of scientific thinking. Pointsman, whose name derives from the switch thrower on a railroad
track, “can only possess the zero and the one […] Like his master I.P. Pavlov before him, he
imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements.” His near-pathological
binarism is assailed by Roger Mexico, who “belongs to the domain between zero and one,” and
is ultimately defeated by his inability to explain Slothrop’s rocket-dowsing penis in terms of
cause and effect (55). “In every pulse of experience,” Moore elucidates, “every moment of time,
both hope and despair, apocalypse and salvation, kindness and cruelty, are immanent in each
other” (10). One need only look to the ubiquitous V-2 rocket for proof of this phenomenon. The
supersonic weapon performs a sign switching by reversing Pointsman’s dogmatic notion of cause
and effect. The rocket hits before the tell-tale screaming comes. In much the same way,
Gravity’s Rainbow assiduously commits itself to deconstructing the difference between elect and
preterite.
While William Slothrop’s vision of sameness between elect and preterite does happen
here in the Zone, it is not the utopian “return to a fork in the road” that Tyrone Slothrop
imagines. Fences fall, polar extremities are depolarized, but the Zone, where “categories have
been badly blurred,” becomes a massive displaced-persons population (303). Most prominent
and intriguing among these preterites are the Schwarzkommando, a group of African excolonials from the Südwest. These Zone-Hereros, “in exile for two generations from South-West
Africa,” have survived General von Trotha’s early-twentieth-century campaign for racial
extermination and ended up in Germany as part of an involuntary diaspora: “Early Rhenish
missionaries began to bring them back to the Metropolis, that great dull zoo, as specimens of a
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possibly doomed race […] Others were taken back to Germany as servants, by soldiers who went
to put down the great Herero rising of 1904-1906.” This particular group has ended up “[i]n the
mountains around Nordhausen and Bleicheröde, down in abandoned mine shafts” as part of a
Nazi scheme to establish a sphere of cultural influence among the native peoples of black Africa
with the ultimate intention of capturing French and British colonies. In the Zone, the
Schwarzkommando are collectively known as the Erdschweinhöhle, a designation that
recapitulates the allegorical pig: “This is a Herero joke, a bitter one. Among the Ovatjimba, the
poorest of the Hereros, with no cattle or villages of their own, the totem animal was the
Erdschwein or aardvark. They took their name from him, never ate his flesh, dug their food from
the earth, just as he does. Considered outcasts, they lived on the veld, in the open” (315-16).
Quite literally the salt of the earth, the subterranean Erdschweinhöhle are divided into two
factions. Josef Ombindi leads a splinter group called “the Empty Ones,” whom Michael Bérubé
terms a “metametapreterite” (224). The Otukungura, as they are know in the Herero tongue,
remain intent on finishing what von Trotha started, “They want a negative birth rate. The
program is racial suicide” (317). Oberst Enzian, Blicero’s former protégé under the
aforementioned Nazi program, leads the rest of the Schwarzkommando in a quest to reassemble
and launch a V-2 rocket, a 00001 to counterbalance Blicero’s 00000. A religious deference to
the rocket’s assembly, Enzian reasons, will divert his followers from Ombindi’s tribal death
drive. The Schwarzkommando’s “faith,” like William Slothrop’s, depends upon an explicit
recognition of one’s preterition. As Enzian tells Slothrop:
We have a word that we whisper a mantra for times that threaten to be bad. Mbakayere […] It means “I am passed over.” To those of us who survived von
Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch
54
it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our
being. One reason we grew so close to the rocket, I think, was this sharp
awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be (362).
This recognition grants a certain amount of privilege to the preterite or, at the very least,
destabilizes the salvational hierarchy by suggesting that the disenfranchised preterite posses an
ability to move outside of history that the elect do not.
Critics often overemphasize the extent to which the Zone’s preterite find themselves
helplessly victimized by the elect. Margaret Lynd, for example, calls attention to “the seductions
of power that merely reverse (temporarily) the roles of oppressor and victim or, more
dangerously, that reproduce similar discourses that, in turn, produce new regulatory mechanisms
and a new set of victims (new, but always the same Preterite crowd)” (68). But I would again
argue that this viewpoint is misleading. I present the Schwarzkommando as a prime example of
the Zone’s preterite citizenry, but they are the rule rather than the exception. Despite the Zone’s
constant vicissitudes and “endless simulation” (489), the leveling process articulated by McHoul
and Willis leaves everyone in a state of terminal preterition. As in “Skunk Hour,” even
hierarchically elect characters reside in a democracy of preterition. Characters like Pointsman
and Blicero appear to be elect insofar as they control the fates of those below them but are
ultimately rendered preterite themselves. For all his machinations and sadistic experiments on
Slothrop, the narrative leaves the once-institutionally puissant Pointsman relegated to “one small
office at Twelfth House,” his career “officially in disgrace” as a result of Major Marvy’s
accidental castration (615). Pointsman and his ilk are simply the “creatures” of Pynchon’s first
paranoid proverb: “You may never get to touch the master, but you can tickle his creatures”
(237). The “master,” in this case, “the Firm,” never really manifests itself. Even Gerhardt von
55
Göll, who seems elect in his slick ability to navigate the Zone’s labyrinths, has learned to play
“Their” game. The Zone represents the absolute absence of election. Try as we might to
identify an elect individual in the Zone, there simply aren’t any.
Not simply preterition made flesh, Pynchon’s Hereros also establish a proleptic
connection to the racial tensions of the 60s. In a similar textual maneuver, Slothrop’s original
initiation into the White Visitation comes under the pretext that he will “undergo light narcosis to
help illuminate racial problems in his own country,” and he narrowly escapes being sodomized
by a young Malcolm X in his ensuing sodium-amytal hallucination (75). This is the way in
which Pynchon’s novel engages its own cultural context: by apposition, by allusion, and
ultimately by locating the seeds of Cold-War-cum-Vietnam culture in World War II. As Eric
Meyer explains, “The discourse of ‘blackness’ emplotted in Gravity’s Rainbow’s representation
of black culture is intimately connected with the cultural conflicts of its time, as emergent Black
Power groups attempted to redefine the terms of ‘black and white’ ideology to assert that, in the
now cliché phrase, black is indeed beautiful” (84). Through a tangled web of associations,
Pynchon posits the Zone’s universal preterition as an analog to 1960s America. The tumultuous
social and psychological structures of the 1960s, Pynchon tacitly argues, can be traced directly to
World War II. Gravity’s Rainbow identifies two inexorably linked developments as the cause of
this preterition: first, the corporations spawned by late capitalism; and second, its attendant
technologies, specifically the atomic bomb.
Multinational business corporations, which might be considered a remanifestation of
election, at least in the material sense, have taken on interests of their own beyond the control of
individual persons, a shadowy God of commerce—the hand of providence transfigured into
Adam Smith’s invisible hand. These powers make up the malevolent “They,” “the Firm,” or
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“the System” that pursues Slothrop across the Zone. As I’ve already mentioned, Pynchon
exposes the extent to which the business of war is business:
It means this war was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to
keep the people distracted … secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs
of technology … by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by
something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the
very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is
nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more…. The
real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only
staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics,
Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood by the ruling elite
(520)
Michel Foucault argues that “[e]ven when one writes the history of peace and its institutions, it is
always the history of this war that one is writing” (91). Peace, in other words, is always
politically shaped by the horrific wars that invariably frame it. Gravity’s Rainbow is a rather
unusual war novel insofar as the bulk of its narrative takes place in peacetime. But this
peacetime only ossifies the industrial processes begun in World War II. Business cartels form,
countless transactions occur, and nations are essentially corporatized. “The history that the novel
retrieves,” Johnston clarifies, “concerns the birth of a ‘rocket state’ that will unify as a ‘metacartel,’ an international network of new industries—plastics, electronics, aviation—growing out
of the ruins of World War II. In a tentacular expansion, this network will soon provide the
material basis for a new technopolitical world order" (62). The ghostly Walter Rathenau’s
political philosophy articulates this “cartelized state” as “neither Red communism nor an
57
unhindered Right, but a rational structure in which business would be the true, rightful authority”
(164-65). Gravity’s Rainbow traces the conception of the meta-cartel via IG Farben, the very
real chemical firm responsible for the development of the V-2 rocket (and, among other things,
Zyklon B). The actual IG Farben began as a consolidation of the German dye companies formed
to protect group business interests, but it quickly grew into a multinational industrial entity
imbricated in hundreds of businesses in dozens of countries. Its British and American
partnerships included Imperial Chemicals, Shell, Ford Motor Company, Sterling Drug, and
Standard Oil, which made its Nazi allegiance all the more disturbing (McLaughlin 90). Above
all, IG Farben signaled a merger of government and private business. The IG readily financed
Hitler in return for control of conquered countries’ industries (McLaughlin 92).16 Such cartels
are the result of humankind’s Weberian desire to, as Bilcero puts it, “leave this cycle of infection
and dead” (724), but because of their inhuman nature, they only reinforce “structures favoring
death” (167)
Despite Pynchon’s disconcertingly accurate revisionist history, Bérubé detects a tendency
on the part of critics to elide the political issues apparent in Gravity’s Rainbow. In response to
Raymond Olderman’s complaint that the first generation of Pynchon’s scholarly readers weren’t
at all “shocked” by “the accuracy of what Pynchon uncovers about Western world political
power distribution,” Bérubé writes, “If we ever were ‘shocked’ by anything in Pynchon at all—
and some readers do register disgust with scenes involving excreta—we have displaced that
shock almost entirely onto what we’ve been calling, for fifteen years or so, Pynchon’s
subversions of traditional narrative” (276-77). To depoliticize Pynchon’s inquiry into the
16
For an extended discussion of IG Farben’s importance in Gravity’s Rainbow, see Robert L. McLaughlin’s “IG
Farben’s Synthetic War Crimes and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.” Here McLaughlin argues that “for
Pynchon IG Farben (and, more importantly, the mindset it represents) is, even more than Hitler, the villain of World
War II” (85).
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emergence of a new global economy as postmodern narrative antics is to ignore the ways in
which his novel emerges so conspicuously from its own context, the fact that Gravity’s Rainbow
is “a novel of ‘The 60s’—not only because it is about that now mythic period, but because it is of
it as well,” as Meyer puts it (81). Gravity’s Rainbow locates the genesis of the Cold War’s
cultural climate in World War II. Lowell makes this same connection in “For the Union Dead”’s
allusive, off-hand manner: “There are no statues for the last war here; / on Boylston Street, a
commercial photograph / shows Hiroshima boiling” (FTUD 72). Pynchon is much more precise
in his assessment. His extensive history of the V-2 rocket points to rocketry’s development as
the inauguration of the nuclear age, which led to the intense paranoia and anxiety of the 1960s.
The Raketen-Stadt refers not simply to the “Rocket-City” constructed in the Mittelwerke by
Ernst Ölsch but to a politics rooted in weapons technology, which was eventually transferred to
America. This is historically accurate since the architect of Germany’s rocketry program,
Wernher von Braun (whose specter looms large in Gravity’s Rainbow), was captured by
American forces and went on to direct America’s space and defense programs. The RaketenStadt, the narrator tells us, “is set up deliberately To Avoid Symmetry, Allow Complexity,
Introduce Terror” (297). It stands as the paradigm for the social conditions of the 1960s.
We should not overlook, however, that Pynchon’s brilliant unraveling of the IG Farben
skein is a Janus-faced gesture, looking ahead from World War II to the resultant Vietnam War
era but also looking back upon the historical circumstances that made the cartelized state
possible. And not surprisingly, Pynchon implicates American Puritanism in the gambit. There
is, of course, the connection that I pointed out earlier between the Slothrop Paper Company and
the nascent information age. For Pynchon, paper or, more specifically, “the Word” printed on
paper represents the increasing commodification of information symptomatic of postwar culture.
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“Information,” Semyavin complains to Slothrop, “What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it
any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of
exchange?” (258). As paper manufacturers, the Slothrop family has an immediate hand in the
production of information, which would eventually be digitized into computer data. Pynchon
identifies World War II as the beginning of this dehumanizing process in which mass death is
scripted in the simulacrum of paper work, where “the real and only fucking is done on paper”
(616). We witness, in short, the birth of a global technocracy based on informational exchange.
Semyavin augurs the advent of “[i]nformation machines” and Slothrop himself becomes a sort of
information machine, processing reams of technical data on the V-2 (258).
These small connections are part of a larger trope in which Pynchon refigures America’s
entrance into World War II as a reversal of the Puritan’s original pilgrimage to the New World.
That reversal of Winthrop’s fleet provides this salient image: “there go that Arbella and its whole
fleet, sailing backwards in formation, the wind sucking them east again, the creatures leaning
from the margins of the unknown sucking in their cheeks […] as the old ships zoom out of
Boston Harbor, back across an Atlantic whose currents and swells go flowing and heaving in
reverse” (204). Gravity’s Rainbow is an American jeremiad in which virtually none of the
narrative actually takes place in America, which allows Pynchon to dramatize the dislocation of
the American self in a global technological network and, more importantly, what happens when
America returns to Europe. Originally a site of salvation, “a gift from the invisible powers, a
way of returning” (722), America has now succumbed to the same imperialistic desires that
corrupted the Old World. Toward the end of the narrative, Blicero spins a theory of American
destiny:
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In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of
Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the deathcolonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the
mission to propagate death, the structure of it kept on. Now we are in the last
phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned death from its
old metropolis. (722)
Blicero presents America’s role in the unfolding apocalyptic mythos as a fulfillment of its
national destiny. The imperialist overtones of this passage also point to Vietnam, the war of the
novel’s context. The “impulse to empire” is simply another form of the salvational impulse.
Colonizing with the use of military might becomes just another outward sign of national election.
Christina Jarvis calls this the “Vietnamization” of World War II. “Like a “second shadow” in
Gerhardt’s Alpdrücken,” she argues, “Vietnam serves as World War II’s double or surrogate in
the novel, complicating its narratives and reconfiguring its representations” (105). Above all,
this apposition attests to the moral failure of the Puritans mission in the New World, the new life
promised by continental election entropically run down to secular greed.
Through it all stands the rocket, the ubiquitous V-2 rocket that connects and consumes
every character in Gravity’s Rainbow. It represents the highest technological achievement in
Western culture and thus, in a symbolic universe where religion has been replaced by capitalism,
God. The complex mythology that builds up around the rocket reflects its Godlike stature.
Franz Pökler gives his life over to the V-2, Blicero gives Gottfried over to the V-2, and Slothrop
finds that he is ineluctably bound to the V-2 through a network of family history. The narrator
attests to the rocket’s religious following across the Zone:
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Gnostics who have been taken in a rush of wind and fire to chambers of the
Rocket throne … Kabbalists who study the Rocket as Torah, letter by letter—
rivets, burner cross and brass rose, its text is theirs to permute and combine into
new revelations, always unfolding … Manichaeans who see two Rockets, good
and evil, who speak together in the sacred idiolalia of the Primal Twins (some say
their names are Enzign and Blicero) of a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an
evil Rocket for the World’s suicide, the two perpetually in struggle. (727)
The “Manichaean” theory traces the V-2’s genealogy forward into the latter half of the twentieth
century, where its technological descendants are the space shuttle and the nuclear missile. But
the rocket’s position as a force of salvational suicide defeats the first purpose. The atomic bomb
maintains only an absent presence in Pynchon’s narrative. Lost in the Zone, Slothrop finds a
tattered newspaper clipping announcing “MB DRO ROSHI” or BOMB DROPPED ON
HIROSHIMA (693). The joining of rocketry with atomic weaponry remains, at any rate, a cruel
suggestion, most explicitly in the novel’s closing pages where we leap ahead to the 1970s to find
Richard M. Zhlubb (a caricature of Richard Nixon) and ourselves in the shadow of imminent
annihilation. Enzian best articulates the rocket’s cosmological fate: “It comes as the Revealer.
Showing that no society can protect, never could—they are as foolish as shields of paper” (728).
We are now back where we began: apocalypse. This is the point at which most
discussions of Gravity’s Rainbow must terminate, since the novel ends with our own apocalypse.
We, the audience, sit in a darkened theater shouting, “Come-on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Startthe-show!” The theatre is novel and the novel is a theatre: “[t]he screen is a dim page spread
before us, white and silent.” Nuclear annihilation hangs over our heads as “the Rocket”
launched from Lüneburg Heath, “falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without
62
sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t” (722).
But is it all theater? Derrida felt that since nuclear war “has not taken place: one can only talk
and write about it … some might call it a fable, then, a pure invention: in the sense in which it is
said that a myth, an image, a fiction, a utopia, a rhetorical figure, a fantasy, a phantasm, are
inventions” (qtd. in McHoul and Willis 211). Our traumatic exit from Gravity’s Rainbow leaves
nuclear apocalypse hanging over our head as an anxious fiction, but it is a very real threat caused
by our own Puritan desires for salvation. Commerce, war, and technology have conspired to
bring us to this preterite suspension.
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CHAPTER 4
EPILOGUE: PURITAN ANXIETY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN
LITERATURE
Providence, hey Providence, what’d you do, step
out for a beer or something?
Gravity’s Rainbow
For the Union Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow are the most salient examples of Calvinism’s
continued presence in the twentieth century. That Lowell and Pynchon emerge so prominently
from a distinct New England consciousness makes them especially intriguing counterparts. They
are by no means, however, the only writers of their era to have engaged Puritanism head on. In a
manner not at all different from Lowell and Pynchon, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible allegorically
situates McCarthyism in the genealogy of Puritan paranoia. John Berryman’s Homage to
Mistress Bradstreet channels the spirit of Anne Bradstreet, offering a dialectic between colonial
and modern subjectivities. To these four we might also add T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth
Bishop, and John Barth, rounding out a list that rivals the nineteenth century’s cadre of writers
influenced by Calvinism’s legacy. With so much attention paid to modernism and
postmodernism in contemporary literary studies, Puritanism as a theme has been oddly
overlooked. One can only hazard guesses at to why. Perhaps it’s just a case of critical myopia.
Or is Calvinism so engrained in the American consciousness that we can no longer see
Puritanism qua Puritanism?
It is often overlooked or forgotten that the study of American literature was all but
inaugurated in the 1950s with Perry Miller’s studies of early American literature such as Errand
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into the Wilderness and New England Mind. Sacvan Bercovitch expanded on and challenged
many of Miller’s original theses in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In retrospect, Miller’s project seems
obvious. If one is attempting to construct a canon of American literature to match that of British
and European literature, it makes sense to start at the very beginning. But I would also suggest
that along with Lowell’s and Pynchon’s jeremiads, Miller’s studies signal an examination of first
principles. After World War II, America suddenly found itself as a world superpower, affirming,
in some sense, the salvational aspirations of the first Puritan settlers. Concomitantly, though, the
Cold War brought forth a new threat of apocalypse predicated on the technological fruits of
Puritanism. For the Union Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow are attempts to historicize the 1960s—
the threat of nuclear annihilation, strained race relations, and American imperialism—in light of
America’s past. In the twenty first century, when America stands as the world’s only
superpower (thought perhaps not for long), the time is ripe for a reexamination of Puritanism
influence on the American literary imagination, both in criticism and in literature.
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