Very Nice Indeed: Cyprian Latewood's Masochistic Sublime, and the Religious Pluralism of Against the Day
Orbit June 19, 2024 Michael Jarvis
This paper argues that Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day uses the character Cyprian Latewood—a bisexual spy, Orpheus stand-in, and masochist—to weave together Orphic descent, Buddhist nirvana, Dionysian ekstasis, and Manichaean cosmology into a syncretic soteriology. Cyprian's final home at a Bogomil-Orphic monastery near Thrace ties together disparate religio-political strands, representing both retreat from the world and a move toward transcendence through gnostic ritual. The reading challenges Western Christian appropriations of counter-discourses, complicates assumptions about Pynchon's anti-metaphysical stance and homophobia in his work, and resists reducing the novel's postmodern playfulness to a singular narrative.