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