"Spot this Mumbo Jumbo": Thomas Pynchon's Emblems for American Culture in "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna"

Abstract

Before World War I, as early as 1910, Bertrand Russell, one of founders of logical positivism, had characterised the world which science presents for our as and void of meaning. He claimed that Man is product of causes which had no prevision of end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but outcome of accidental atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond grave; … and that whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath debris of a universe in ruins. Such things are not beyond dispute, but so nearly certain that within scaffolding of these truths, only on firm foundation of despair, can soul's habitation be safely built (A Free Man's Worship). But worse was to come. After World War II, Gilbert Ryle claimed that even belief in soul was a logical error, a category mistake. The soul was insubstantial, not even the ghost in machine of human body (Concept of Mind [1949]). Following that lead, influential Norbert Wiener, in his The Human Use of Human Beings (1954), resolved to avoid all question-begging epithets as 'life,' 'soul,' 'vitalism,' and like, since such words as life, purpose and soul are grossly inadequate to precise scientific thinking. It was no longer even to be possible coherently to state Russell's original unyielding despair concerning soul's proper habitation in a purposeless life.