In times of geopolitical conflict, attempts to translate religion are often attempts to heal. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Muslims in Western nations, as well as U.S. President George W. Bush and other non-Muslim Westerners, engaged strenuously in an effort to translate: “Islam is peace,” or “Islam means peace.” This was not the first attempt to defuse crisis through religious translation. The rise of religious studies as a discipline is intertwined with the belief that this discipline itself could bring about peace through its acts of translation. But this is a myth scholars of religious studies ought to protest strenuously.

The notion that religious studies can avert or relieve social and cultural crises goes back to the early days of the organization of the field in the United States. In his 1949 lecture on “The History of Religion in the Universities,” for example, George F. Thomas, chair of Princeton's Department of Religion at the time, noted that religious studies is a difficult discipline to organize pedagogically, for “our students are now being moved to take our courses in religion not only by intellectual curiosity but also by religious need.” In the context of the Cold War, “the religious and moral confusion of our time and the threat of secularism to our civilization have made it necessary for us to find our way back to the wellsprings of faith that have given meanings to the lives of our fathers.”

Like other fields across the humanities and social sciences, religious studies grapples with the complex and often hidden relationships between descriptions and normative presuppositions and implications – roughly, between claims about what is and about what ought to be. For reasons concerning both its subject matter and the particular history of the field, however, debates about these issues in religious studies are particularly charged as well as particularly illuminating. Here, the issues have largely arisen in the context of larger debates over the appropriate substance, methods, and approaches in the academic study of religion. These debates, in turn, have often been framed in terms of the relation between religious studies and theology. Critics have repeatedly charged that the field remains tainted, that it has not yet escaped the die cast by its largely Protestant theological roots. For these critics, the field thus functions as a kind of liberal Protestant – or, at best, ecumenical – apologetics. Where earlier debates were concerned with obviously theological work being done in religious studies, recent scholarship has highlighted the more subtle endurance of Protestant presuppositions even in supposedly more pluralistic conceptions of the study of religion. From the other side, theologians decry an exclusion that they see as based in models of objectivity and rationality that are no longer defensible. Some of these theologians seek to transmute postmodern critiques of reason into tickets for readmission to the guild.

Given that religion, religious, and religions are Western folk concepts, that their meaning is unstable and contested, and that they cannot be defined so as to specify anything uniquely, we need to consider broader, more generic ways of characterizing the sorts of things that interest us as scholars of religion. Rather than relying on emically loaded first-order terms, such as sacred, magical, spiritual, mystical, or religious, we can seek ways to translate the disciplinary second-order discourse of religion, religious, and religions into broader, more generic terms when designing research. Instead of stipulating a definition for a key first-order term, such as “religious,” and, thus, defining in advance what exactly will count as such, I propose – to borrow a fishing metaphor – that we cast our nets more broadly and then sort through the variety of things that our nets pull in. Identifying a broader set of nets that we can use – singly or in combination – to specify what it is we want to study would not only eliminate the confusion between first- and second-order use of the term “religious,” it would also highlight the impossibility of uniquely specifying what is meant by the first-order terms and force us to specify what it is about this constellation of concepts that most interests us.

SPECIALNESS AS A GENERIC ATTRIBUTE OF THINGS CONSIDERED RELIGION-LIKE

The idea of specialness is one broader, more generic net that captures most of what people have in mind when they refer to sacred, magical, spiritual, mystical, or religious, and then some. We can consider specialness both behaviorally and substantively, asking whether there are behaviors that tend to mark things off as special and whether there are particular types of things are that are more likely to be considered special than others.

An overview

It is not widely known that Mario Vargas Llosa's literary career began with the theatre, a genre to which he is returning with increasing enthusiasm. As he has often stated in interview, ‘the theatre was my first love’, a love described picturesquely as ‘an ascesis, a slimming cure’.

‘La huida del Inca’ (‘The flight of the Inca’), a play in three acts, prologue and epilogue written at the age of 15 when still at school, marked his debut as a writer. It placed second in a national competition for schools run by the Ministry of Education, and was performed to great acclaim on 17 July 1952 in the Teatro Variedades in Piura, even being reviewed in the local press. It was never subsequently published.

Apart from this teenage effort, Vargas Llosa has published eight plays: The Young Lady from Tacna (La señorita de Tacna, 1981), Kathie and the Hippopotamus (Kathie y el hipopótamo, 1983), La Chunga (La Chunga, 1986), El loco de los balcones (‘The madman of the balconies’) (1993), Ojos bonitos, cuadros feos (‘Pretty eyes, ugly paintings’) (1996), Odiseo y Penélope (‘Odysseus and Penelope’) (2007), Al pie del Támesis (‘On the banks of the Thames’) (2008) and Las mil noches y una noche (‘The thousand nights and one night’) (2009).

Along with their encyclopedic scope and vast collective commentary upon modern history, Pynchon's novels also share Tyrone Slothrop's preoccupation with America, or, more precisely, two distinct Americas: one that embodies what Pynchon has called a “Christian Capitalist” dominant culture, and the other a subjunctive, communitarian America that could, or should, exist. The politics of his fiction play out in the space between as various forms of resistance, and if (to invert Von Clausewitz) politics is war waged by other means, then the locus of this battle is the individual self. This reading locates Pynchon's politics within, first, a broader Emersonian conversation about the presumption of America's singular dispensation; and, second, an oppositional discourse surrounding “Emersonian self-reliance” characterized either as the rugged individualism of laissez-faire capitalism, or as democratic communitarianism. The stark political differences between these two Emersonian selves, and how each in turn might come to define the nature of America's singularity, stand at the heart of Pynchon's politics.

Yet much of what is characterized as Emerson's politics – his American exceptionalism, resistance to authority, antipathy toward capital, and turn toward self as the seat of cultural rejuvenation – emerges out of an “Emerson” variously re-formulated and re-inscribed. It is thus useful to locate Pynchon's voice in this Emersonian conversation within an appropriate chronological and political context – one filtered through the 1960s American resistance movement whose politics embody ideals associated with that decade's counterculture.

Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral, 1969) is arguably the greatest novel about Peru, and a compelling literary statement about corruption in Latin America. It is also unsurpassed as a work of narrative fiction in its ability to explore how individuals, communities and even an entire social world can be undermined by the corrosive effects of corruption. As David Gallagher pointed out in a seminal essay published in 1973, Conversation is the culmination of Vargas Llosa's literary explorations of Peru of the 1960s, in as much as ‘it finds its way to the proper formal structure and the proper language’ to offer a damning picture of a nation in which every individual is compromised or corrupted in one way or another. Gallagher calls it a literary investigation of a nation's ‘original sin’, summed up in a question, in its opening paragraph, the most quoted line from any Peruvian novel: ‘¿En qué momento se había jodido el Perú?’ (politely: At what point was Peru ruined?)

The question is asked, in an interior monologue, by Santiago Zavala, the novel's protagonist, and Vargas Llosa's most complex and best-developed character. Santiago wonders when his own life was ruined as he ponders on the misery and degradation of Peru. In this novel, the ruin of a nation and the ruin of myriad individual destinies are one and the same. Conversation in The Cathedral is a series of concentric stories that encompass the experience of a nation whose epicentre is the story of Santiago.

Many critics would argue that Mario Vargas Llosa deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, when, at the age of forty-five, he published his ‘Tolstoyan’ epic, The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo). So precocious was Vargas Llosa's talent that the 1966 publication of The Green House (La casa verde), his second novel – and a fully-fledged classic – had already persuaded many readers that this thirty-year-old Peruvian was one of the twentieth century's great novelists. This essay looks back at The Green House, the first winner of the epoch-making Rómulo Gallegos Prize in Caracas in 1967, and its predecessor, The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963), winner of the 1962 Biblioteca Breve and Formentor Prizes in Spain. His first book, the short story collection Los jefes (‘The Leaders’), had also won a prize in Spain in 1958 – and Vargas Llosa's first two visits to Europe, Paris in 1958 and Spain in 1959, were also thanks to European prizes. Half a century later, he finally has the full collection.

In the end the great surprise was not that his two remarkable early novels could hardly be improved on – was Sentimental Education an improvement on Madame Bovary, or Anna Karenina on War and Peace? – but rather, in the first place, that the Nobel committee waited so long to honour him, and in the second place, that after waiting so long they unexpectedly changed their collective mind, belatedly giving him, at the age of seventy-four, the ultimate recognition he so obviously deserved.

Reading Pynchon, or, how to make sense of a notoriously difficult writer

The promotional video clip for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice (2009) opens up to a screaming guitar solo that catapults the viewer back into the 1960s. Pynchon, in the mildly self-ironic voice he reserves for his autobiographical texts, both introduces and endorses the book. To his mock-noir voice-over narrative, the video shows images of Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles, which is transformed in the novel into the fictional “Gordita Beach.” The video, which followed a number of earlier semi-public, mostly tongue-in-cheek appearances, is the latest indication that Pynchon has mellowed out some, become more laid back and less paranoid. Maybe the next time around, he will actually explain to us what it all means.

Critical flashback

Until then, however, we're left to wonder. In fact, since the publication of his first novel V. in 1963, word has been out that Pynchon is a notoriously difficult writer. What exactly does “difficult” mean in this context? First, Pynchon injects an incredible amount of often extremely arcane cultural knowledge into his novels. Second, Pynchon constantly modulates narrative voices and stylistic registers, which makes his texts eminently heteroglossic. Rhetorical modes move from his signature bad lyrics for imaginary songs to highly poetic descriptions, such as that of a Christmas Mass during World War II in Gravity's Rainbow (1973).

Sexual themes figure prominently in all of Vargas Llosa's novels. In many of his essays and in some of his creative writings, he has been influenced by Georges Bataille's views on the erotic. However, the erotic is not only of aesthetic interest to him; it also has moral and even political implications. As he indicates in an epigraph for an illustrated book, Erotic Drawings: ‘Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty.’ That being said, as a writer of erotic narrative fiction, he is primarily identified with two novels, In Praise of the Stepmother (Elogio de la madrastra, 1988) and its sequel, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto, 1997).

Differences and similarities

Although they are intended to be read as companion pieces, obvious differences separate the two works. The Stepmother consists of 149 pages divided into fourteen chapters and an epilogue, with six chapters each incorporating a colour reproduction of a famous painting. The novel operates on two principal levels of reality: the ‘actual’, which consists of an objective, third-person narration of episodes occurring in a household in contemporary Lima; and the ‘mythical’, in which the paintings seem to come alive and address the reader in the first person. The Notebooks consists of 304 pages divided into nine chapters and an epilogue, with each chapter structured symmetrically into four sections, except for Chapter 2, which includes a fifth section as a follow-up to its second section.

“A screaming …

… comes across the sky”: certainly the most celebrated opening sentence in twentieth-century US fiction, probably surpassed, in the whole of American literary history, only by its nineteenth-century counterpart, the opening of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1850) – “Call me Ishmael.” What screams across the sky in this signature sentence is a V-2 rocket – or a nightmare of one – falling on London in 1944, and the novel that it opens is of course Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), generally acknowledged to be a masterpiece of American and world literature. The author of seven novels to date – four of them of gigantic proportions, the other three more conventionally scaled – as well as a volume of short stories, Pynchon is a major figure of postwar American literature despite (or because of) his formidable difficulty, polymathic range of reference, personal elusiveness and reputation for outrage and obscenity.

It is impossible to conceive of postmodernism in literature without reference to Pynchon's fiction. Canonized in the 1980s as the foremost American postmodernist mainly on the strength of his two most celebrated novels – The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity's Rainbow – he has become a staple of academic reading lists dealing with the period. Indeed, while his works are all complex, and some of them are massive, his indispensable position in the literary canon has ensured that he is widely taught on all university levels in the US and Europe, and that he remains a popular topic of advanced research at colleges and universities around the world.

Carlos Fuentes famously noted that once the sombre complexities of Mario Vargas Llosa's second novel, The Green House (La casa verde, 1966), are shed to their bare bones, they can be boiled down to one of the standard plots of the Mexican cinematic melodrama: a housemaid ends up in a house of prostitution. Indeed, Vargas Llosa's narrative fiction, from his first novel through to his last, features cinematic techniques and themes; and his formal experimentation with spatial and temporal planes, flashbacks and cuts, draws significantly on cinematic montage, as well as an awareness of effective camera angles to suggest a particular point of view. Film also provides the cinematic inspiration for some of his most stunning literary moments. For instance, the opening of Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral, 1969), in which Santiago Zavala is searching for his dog, was probably inspired by a famous sequence from Vittorio de Sica's Umberto D (1952), in which a desperate Umberto pursues his dog Flike. While some other major Latin American writers, most notably Manuel Puig, have written skilful novels, which can be transformed into screenplays with ease (in some cases because the original draft was a screenplay), Vargas Llosa adapts some filmic techniques from a visual to a linguistic medium, to produce original literary effects that cannot be readily transferred back to the screen.

Cinema also features in the content of Vargas Llosa's novels, playing a crucial part in the novels themselves: in rites of socialisation and in the romances of his contemporary characters. In The Bad Girl (Travesuras de la niña mala, 2006), for example, a traumatised young woman (the bad girl of the title) eventually accepts the love of Ricardo Somocurcio, whose patience is tried in every chapter of the book. In the opening chapter, Ricardo declares his love to her during a Sunday matinee show in the more expensive orchestra seats of a movie theatre in Lima.

Period concepts are moving targets, elusive and malleable, none more so than “postmodernism.” When did postmodernism begin (if it ever did), and has it ended yet? Is there a postmodern period style, and if so, what are its features? Is it a specifically aesthetic category, or does it apply to culture and society generally? These and other questions remain literally debatable and unresolved, perhaps unresolvable. Postmodernism has been characterized a multitude of ways, some compatible with each other, others not. No matter how it is characterized, however, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon appears to be universally regarded as central to its canon. For instance, on the first page of his landmark essay on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson includes Pynchon – inevitably, it would seem – on his shortlist of exemplary postmodernists, alongside Andy Warhol, John Cage, Phillip Glass, William Burroughs, Ishmael Reed, the French nouveaux romanciers and others. Indeed, so ubiquitous is Pynchon in the discourses about postmodernism that we might go so far as to say, not that postmodern theory depends on Pynchon's fiction for exemplification, but that, without Pynchon's fiction, there might never have been such a pressing need to develop a theory of literary postmodernism in the first place.

Among the many theories of postmodernism, a few have come to seem indispensable, not because they are incontestable or uncontroversial, but because they empower us to frame useful working hypotheses about specific texts, genres and aesthetic or cultural practices. Adapting a distinction developed in modernist studies, we might differentiate between theories of postmodernism – the aesthetic forms and practices of the postmodern period – and theories of postmodernity – the historical and cultural conditions that presumably gave rise to those forms and practices.

Though the presence of both science and technology in his fiction is often considerable, Thomas Pynchon is rarely classified as a science fiction writer. This may prompt consideration of both the nature of his writing and workable definitions of the genre. There are certainly examples and elements of science fiction in his work, ranging from “Minstrel Island” (1958), his unpublished co-authored musical, to Against the Day (2006), with its time machine theme. Yet there are also Pynchon texts – among them several early short stories collected in Slow Learner (1984) and his latest novel, Inherent Vice (2009) – which scarcely concern themselves with science or technology at all, either as overall themes or as props. Such fictions may appear as exceptions to a body of work almost defined by its preoccupation with the parameters and paraphernalia of science and technology: from the way it relates to and defines the very nature of power structures, industrialization or capitalism to its occasional, seemingly self-indulgent, nerdish romps around the material and technical details of some imagined gadget or piece of electronic equipment or machinery. As this Companion shows, however, applying a label such as “science fiction” would be reductive when trying to describe the many layers, strategies and effects of Pynchon's writing. Instead, this chapter explores a variety of the ways in which science and technology appear, and suggests a few overall strategies useful in the interpretation of Pynchon's fiction.

As critics have noted, in the early 1970s Mario Vargas Llosa was a man in transition from one set of political beliefs to another, but he was also a novelist in search of a new complexity, and he found it for a while in a genre that was not his first choice: comedy. His achievements in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Pantaleón y las visitadoras, 1973) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor, 1977) are all the more remarkable because the writer was, in several respects, turning away from what he knew. At the same time he was anxious not to be disloyal to his past, and in comedy he discovered a means of expressing certain truths that continued to lurk in realms of encroaching falsehood. Captain Pantoja reminds us of the closeness of mania to certain kinds of virtue; and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter ironically celebrates an art that escapes madness, but only just.

In a 1999 prologue to Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Vargas Llosa tells us that the novel is based ‘on a fact’, ‘a real event … that I got to know well during two trips to the Amazon’, and that his early drafts were very different in tone from the final, and quite wonderful result. ‘As incredible as it seems … in the beginning I tried to tell this story seriously. I discovered that was impossible, that the story demanded farce and laughter’.

Thomas Pynchon has so carefully guarded his privacy that relatively little is known about his personal life. He evidently prefers to have readers focus on his fiction. His principled determination to avoid personal publicity has led to his routinely, and inaccurately, being described as a recluse, has sparked some bizarre rumors – that he was J. D. Salinger, or the Unabomber – and has provoked some spiteful and some self-serving revelations.Now in his seventies, Pynchon seems to have let down his guard a bit, perhaps as the effect of being a family man with a teenage son. In 2004, he mocked his own reputation as a “reclusive author” by allowing himself to be represented in two episodes of The Simpsons as a figure with a brown paper bag over his head, voicing the caricature himself. In 2009, he even narrated a short promotional video for his latest novel, Inherent Vice.

Pynchon’s ancestors can be traced back nearly a millennium, to the time of the Norman Conquest of England. His earliest ancestor in America, William Pynchon (1590–1662), born into the modestly landed English gentry, joined the Great Migration of Puritan s to New England in 1630. A member of the Massachusetts Bay Company and treasurer of the Bay Colony, William Pynchon was a founder of both Roxbury and Springfield in Massachusetts. He was a successful merchant and fur trader, a magistrate and an amateur theologian. But he returned to England in 1652 after stirring up controversy by writing The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption (1650), a book which Massachusetts authorities judged heretical and ordered burned in the Boston marketplace because of its subversive political, as well as theological, implications.

The Feast of the Goat is a novel in which the personal and the political seem to be inextricably intertwined because you focus on the consequences of a dictatorship in the lives of its victims, years and even decades after the regime has ceased to exist. To what extent did your own feelings about Latin American dictators, and not just Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, on which the novel is based, play a role in the conception of this novel?

I wrote The Feast of the Goat not only because of Trujillo, but also because of the dictatorships of my own country, those I had experience of in Peru, the Odría dictatorship, for example, and all the various military dictatorships that we experienced in Latin America since the 1950s. In a way, all these experiences come together in the novel, The Feast of the Goat. That being said, the most direct experience that compelled me to write this novel was a stay in the Dominican Republic of eight months in 1975.

Trujillo had been killed many years earlier, but he was still the main topic of conversation among Dominicans of every social class. He was still looming large over the country; sometimes they still spoke of Trujillo with fear. In other cases, they told all kinds of anecdotes, stories, and I heard such incredible things that I started to investigate a little bit, to read the testimonies. My fascination grew, because I think the Trujillo dictatorship was probably the emblematic expression of a phenomenon, of a political phenomenon, that almost all Latin America experienced in the twentieth century. Trujillo had all the characteristics of the dictator.