Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

Pynchon Takes the Fork in the Road
of the Ludlow strike to modernism that the tent colony “was
nicknamed White City, for the color of its tents and in homage to the
white buildings at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair” (Crain 78).
Just as modernism was less utopian than postmodernists believed,
so it was more spiritual. Whereas critics like John A. McClure and
Crystal L. Downing accentuate modernity’s secularism, the first Pynchon
uncovers a host of arcane but flourishing spiritualities in that
supposed heyday of secular humanism. The morphing of
mathematics and physics into spirituality is exemplified at the University
of Gőttingen where Leopold Kronecker “believed ‘the positive
integers were created by God’” and that “‘all else is the work of man’”
(Against 593). So intense was the mixture of mathematics and faith in
Göttingen that, when the brilliant “Yashmeen had to leave” the university,
it was like her being “expelled from the garden” (663). For
Pynchon, who writes of “invisibility [as] a sacred condition,” imagines
“the invisible taking on substance” and senses “affirmation from the
far invisible,” the very word “invisible” is a metaphor for
transcendence (Against 43, 164, 165). The modernist contradiction
between religion and rationality is resolved by buildings “solidly
constructed on the principles of Invisibilism, a school of modern
architecture which believed that the more ‘rationally’ a structure was
designed, the less visible would it appear” (Against 625). Pynchon’s use
of “invisibility” as a metaphor for spirituality appears to have been
inspired by Thomas Luckmann’s book, The Invisible Religion. Although
Luckmann admitted to statistical evidence of declining church populations,
he argued that “church-oriented religion is merely one and
perhaps not even the most important element […] that characterizes
religion in modern society” (28). The “[human] organism,” he
explains, “transcends its biological nature by developing a Self” in a
“fundamentally religious” process that is “mysterious” (50, 58).
Because “individual religiosity” is not as visible as “church-oriented
religiosity,” Luckmann calls it invisible religion (70, 76).
The intermixture of the sacred and the profane explains the brief
appearance of “the noted Uyghur troublemaker Al Mar-Fuad” in his
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