The Crying of Lot 49: Filling the God Shaped Hole

                Both Thomas Pynchon and Wallace Steven's works comment on the human need to find religion or meaning. This is not circumscribed to God on High, or karmic destiny. I’m referring to what philosophers now call ‘a God-shaped hole’, originally coined in the seventeenth century by Blaise Pascal. This term describes the spiritual vacuum inside every human being that yearns to be filled. Many people argue that the religious impulse, a deep-seated need to find a more profound meaning to existence, went hand in hand with the birth of human kind. Some scientists produced research to show that the human brain is predisposed or hard-wired for belief in God. British academics at Bristol University found that during the process of evolution, people with religious tendencies benefited from their beliefs (possibly by working in groups to ensure the future of their community?). As consequence, ‘supernatural beliefs’ became hard-wired into our brains from birth, leaving us receptive to the claims of religious organizations.

                With the Enlightenment and Scientific/Industrial Revolutions came a change in the definition. Theorists now believe that ‘God-Shaped Hole’ describes the consciousness where God has always been, but may be replaced with other things. For example, people find meaning in not only religion but poetry, art, and sports. God is no longer the go-to distraction for human beings. Other substances can ease our anxiety about mortality and answer cosmic questions. Stevens and Pynchon’s writings epitomize the post-modern search for meaning in a world where religion is not the only solution. Both The Idea of Order at Key West and The Crying of Lot 49 fill the God-Shaped hole with tools of modernity: poetry and drugs.

                As discussed in class, Wallace Steven’s poem centers on the speaker’s desire to order his chaotic, ostensibly meaningless world. In the opening stanza, Stevens distinguishes between the mind and external reality, as well as the singer and the sea. There is a sense that the woman’s song becomes wholly other; a divine incarnation of the eternal ineffable: “… and yet its mimic motion/ Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,/ That was not ours although we understood,/ Inhuman, of the veritable ocean” (4-7). He later goes on to say that the woman’s voice can represent not merely sound, but the universe as a whole: “But it was more than that,/ More than even her voice, and ours, among/ The meaningless plunging of water and the wind,/ Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped/ On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres/ Of sky and sea” (28-33). Like Brahmin, the woman sings the world into reality. She orders the chaos of the sea and wind into a conceivable whole which the speaker appreciates. He desperately needed to understand reality, and her song is a form of accommodation. As his apostrophe in the final stanza shows: “Oh! Blessed rage for order…/ The maker’s rage to order words of the sea, / Words of the fragrant portals…/ And of ourselves and of our origins, / In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds”. The narrator fills his God-shaped hole with the woman’s song and reconstructs a world of his own reality from the chaos of the “water (that) never formed to mind or voice” (2).

                Thomas Pynchon’s characters have a similar need to give life meaning and ease chaotic angst. Oedipa Maas fills her need for God with drugs, not song. She finds herself alone and alienated from her culture, attempts to uncover the mystery of the Tristero drug. She wants to turn the mystery of Tristero into a “constellation”, which is a façade of true order. This desire demonstrates that she is indeed looking for meaning, for a systemized view of the universe. Unlike the speaker in Steven’s poem, Oedipa never reconciles meaning with the enigmatic Tristeri. In fact, drugs play the Shiva role in Lot 49, destroying rather than creating. Tristero ultimately ruins Oedipa’s marriage; her hallucinations and detachment from reality produce chaos and isolation, rather than order and meaning. Oedipa’s never came to terms with her human condition. Perhaps this is a lesson to all that drugs will never fill the God-shaped hole.

Some Conservative Christians Believe Filling Your God-Shaped Hole with
Anything but Jesus is Heresy

Bailey's Cafe: Hell is Repetition

Bailey’s Café: Hell is Repetition

Dante's 9 Circles of Hell

                Dr. Hobby mentioned in class today that Gloria Naylor’s second novel, Linden Hills, is loosely based on Dante’s Inferno. Though I knew this when I read the Jesse Belle chapter in Bailey’s Café, I was nonetheless impressed. Naylor’s intertextual reference to the Inferno creates layers of meaning and develops characters.  In the chapter we are introduced to Jesse Bell: the down and out junkie whom Eve saves from addiction. Eve visited Jesse in jail and told her “if she’s sick of wallowing in her own shit” to come find her. Jesse’s punishment at Eve’s boardinghouse alludes to the Inferno with haunting transparency.

Liars in the 8th Circle

                Jesse was addicted to heroin before moving into Eve’s house. The moment she takes Jesse in, Eve tells her that they are in Hell. This first reference alone does not connote Dante. However, as the narrative progresses the allusions are discernible. As in the Inferno, Jesse’s Hell is repetition. Sinners are punished with a perverted form of the sins themselves. In Dante contrapasso is pervasive throughout the text: sorcerers’ heads are twisted backwards; liars converse with mud and slime; and Satan devolves into a grotesque caricature of Evil. The sinner eternally suffers their sin. (Had Jesse been in the Inferno, she likely would have been placed in the third circle of Hell. Here, Dante places the gluttons {or heroin addicts} who forever wallow in fetid garbage).

                Eve does not go full-Dante on Jesse, but her methods are contrapasso in nature. She forces the junkie to quit cold turkey. The experience was so horrific that Jesse describes it as this: “Imagine feeling that your body gets slammed into the same wall again and again. Red-hot bricks one time. Blocks of ice the next. Image it going on for four straight days” (Naylor 139). The subtle reference to repetition in this description of withdraw is amplified in the ensuing narrative. Once Jesse was completely clean, Eve knew the desire to use was still there. So instead of threatening expulsion or criminal charges, Eve gives Jesse just what she wants: Heroin on a silver platter (literally). The velvet case holding crystal droppers and sterling syringes was Eve’s way of exploiting Jesse’s sin. And it worked; Jesse was spoon fed China White for four days (the exact duration of her withdrawal). But to quote Ray Liotta in Blow: “When you’re up it’s never as good as it seems, and when you’re down you never think you’ll be up again.”

                 After those ethereal days Eve cut off the mainline and Jesse suffered an even worse withdraw than before. She described the second one to Bailey, saying: “I sincerely prayed for death” (Naylor 141).  Eve inflicted a punishment fit for Dante’s sinners. She used Jesse’s evil against her, condemning the junkie to yet another slow death brought on by her own doing. After Jesse becomes healthy Eve offers her another dose on a Golden platter, saying: “Remember where we are”. The contrapasso of Eve’s boarding house mirrors that in Dante’s Hell. The intertextuality adds sophistication to both Naylor’s text and characters.

Sometimes You're Flush Quote

"Sometimes you're flush and sometimes you're bust, and when you're up, it's never as good as it seems, and when you're down, you never think you'll be up again, but life goes on."

Blow