Calvin's Preterition and Pynchon's Salvation

What is it about?

In the monster novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), one of Thomas Pynchon’s many disappearing characters prophetically announces: ‘somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom’ (p. 394). Then, if anything it is ‘the wasted’, ‘the passed over’, and ‘the preterite’ that hold Pynchon’s scattered narrative together. This essay focuses on the devastating proliferation of waste, the rise of technology in human affairs, and their relationship to the idea of salvation in Pynchon’s work. To reflect on this link, it investigates the Calvinist rhetoric of preterition (nonelection to salvation) and its influence on contemporary US culture through Pynchon’s work. First, it studies Calvin’s concept of preterition and how it becomes connected to the wasted (disregarded, passed over, or used up); and second, based on Calvin’s conception of preterition, it goes on to explore how the proliferation of waste in the contemporary America portrayed by Pynchon is the outcome of the capitalist economic system and its reliance on technology that converges with secularization and modernity.

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