“The Zany Paraclete”: Seeking the Pentecostal Community in The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract: This essay builds on existing scholarship that emphasizes Pynchon’s use of Pentecostal imagery to create intimations of revelation and communication that transcend the quotidian. My reading focuses on the partial and incomplete nature of Pynchon’s Pentecostal revelation in terms of both communication and community. Drawing on the deconstructive notion of the messianic as articulated by Jacques Derrida and John Caputo, I argue that reading Pynchon’s Pentecostal imagery in a messianic mode serves to highlight the tension between solipsism and desire for community in the novel, and additionally illuminates Pynchon’s framing of the possibility for alternative community outside of the normative.