عنوان

The Gospel of Thomas (Pynchon):

LA125050

انگلیسی

The Gospel of Thomas (Pynchon):

[Article]

Abandoning Eschatology in Gravity's Rainbow

Joshua Pederson

Leiden

Brill

It is tempting to read Thomas Pynchon's sprawling masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow-with its shell-shocked refugees fleeing across a missile-pocked, post-war landscape-as an eschatological text that plays out religious end-times scenarios. However, an invented citation from the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas included as a chapter epigraph-"Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in hell today"-suggests that we should do otherwise. In grafting a playful fragment about Jesus, judgment, and hell onto Thomas, Pynchon parodies a common need to read eschatological themes back into non-eschatological texts. In doing so, he also provides a powerful heuristic for interpreting his own book. Ultimately, Pynchon's own rocket-gospel is likewise a non-eschatological text. Like Thomas, Gravity's Rainbow stymies readers' efforts to derive a clear eschatology from it-or to read one back into it. In this essay, I contend that Pynchon enacts a number of strategies to keep his audience from reading classic end-times scenarios into his own work, all of which are prefigured by the Gospel of Thomas.

2010

139-160

Religion and the Arts

14/1-2

1568-5292

apocalyptic literature

Art History

Comparative Religion & Religious Studies

eschatology

General

Gravity's Rainbow

History

Religious Studies

The Gospel of Thomas

Thomas Pynchon

Joshua Pederson

10.1163/107992610X12592913031865

p

[Article]

275578

a

Y