Gravity's Rainbow and a Postmodern St. Paul

In the year 1976, for reasons I do not remember, I bought and read "Gravity's Rainbow". I'd just completed my course work and qualifying exam for my degree and just getting started on my research. The book was interminably long, disjointed, with a cast of characters I couldn't keep up with and plots within plots, and short vignettes thrown in just for fun, and allusions to a great many things. Thomas Pynchon, the author, covered a lot of ground. But not only was he verbally gifted, he had some education in engineering physics, which it so happens was the degree I was pursuing. Science and technology references and inside jokes were a part of the narrative and it was fun to follow that aspect of the book.

I knew that my comphrehension of the book was greatly lacking. Occasionally through the years, (that was 1/3 of a century ago!), I'd think about getting back to it and re-reading.

When I ordered The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology and Cultural Studies at the end of the Third Millenium I was hoping to learn more about how the postmodern turn to things affects science and technology, after all, that is how I make my living and I'm trying to keep up. I discovered upon receiving the book that the authors devote quite a bit of space to a chapter called Thomas Pynchon and the Advent of Postmodernity. And Gravity's Rainbow is presented as something which "vividly illuminates a phase between the modern and the postmodern. ... In addition, Pynchon's texts exhibit the postmodern turn in the arts, science, and theory, as he cultivates a mode of postmodern writing, epistemology, and vision." p.23


The authors describe how Pynchon presents a character ,Mr. Pointsman, who represents the old "modern" way of thinking, those who condense the world down to a Pavlovian model of stimulus response and a character, Roger Mexico, who is counter to that (postmodern was not a term of use then.) Below is lifted from The Postmodern Adventure (blue) which also contains quotes from Gravity's Rainbow (GR)(in red). The pronoun "His" refers to Pointsman.

"His faith ultimately lay in a pure physiological basis for the life of the psyche. No effect without cause, and a clear train of linkages. Mexico answers that "there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less ... sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle" That "other angle" leads to a postmodern science that suspends the modern paradigm for less determinist models."... Thus, GR signals that randomness is a fundamental part of existence, and that underlying connections may not be perceivable or even accessible to the diligent investigator." p 41

Cause and Effect. That is what technology is based on isn't it? My technical training, in my Harding University physics classes and my U. of VA engineering classes directed us to model the world using deterministic equations. Can there be any effect if there is no cause? Can there be free will? What IS free will? This has always vexed me. Still don't have the answer to that. But, Mexico is right, randomness is not an accident, randomness is a fundamental part of reality. It is necessary to the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang and necessary to the evolution of life on this planet. It is necessary for our continuing lives. Randomness, interconnectedness, non-deterministic thinking. These are qualities of more importance to our everyday, postmodern story we are now living. And I'm glad. Breaking out of the cause/effect prison gives meaning/validation to the spiritual side of life.

And now, I know what your are thinking. This is clearly what the apostle Paul was writing about in what we know as the 2nd epistle to the Corinthians where we read:

He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter (binary 0/1, yes/no, unyielding sets of rules, instrumental rationalism, determinate physical law) kills, but the Spirit gives life. II Cor 3:6 NIV