Tom's muse

[Paul Mackin]

My reading of CL49 will undoubtedly be the least perspicacious of any we're likely to run across,  but what the hell here goes.

Didn't read it as the work of a great author. Don't know if P. was generally seen in such terms in the late-mid 60s.  Rather I picked the book up as a cheap paperback lying around the house. Did recognize the author as someone I'd read something by already. And I thought from the start it was quite a bit more of a regular novel than V. had been. Both books were about people of the sort
I knew and knew about,  but Lot49 was not so strange and perverse as V. had seemed to be. At that point in time I would have said I preferred Lot49.

Everything has changed in retrospect. On rereading V. a number of times
in more recent years it strikes me as having made a rather profound first 
impression even though I was not aware of it at the time. Lot49 on the other hand has never seemed like something I wanted to go through again. I did think about the prospect a few years back and bought a spanking new copy
to replace that yellowing paperback with the pages all falling out. Maybe
I will pick it up sometime.

Liked John's ideas on Lot49 and those of other listers. Have actually read a good deal of commentary on the book and am truly puzzled at my ambiguous feelings for it.

				P.

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From: 	MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu[SMTP:MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]
Sent: 	Tuesday, March 04, 1997 9:43 PM
To: 	pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: 	Tom's muse

As we all try to chill, how about this for a discussion starter on CL49: 

 Pynchon is playing possum when he puts the book down in the intro to SLOW 
LEARNER (and guess why I didn't just use the initials?).  Anybody who reads that intro 
carefully can detect a whole lotta shuckin, jivin and some teasing of readers, who, as we 
may be sure TP is aware, fall too easily into categorical judgments and/or cultish fawning.
  Always keeping us on our toes, never letting us take the easy way out (and why else do
 we love the lug, depite his many feet of clay all neatly documented by the Jules ex-Files), 
Pynchon casually puts down a book that most readers of Pynchon (oh this list excepted of 
course) find head and shoulders more *accessible* (I am not saying* better*) than his *big* 
books.

Further, a book that  contains his major female character as well as his most explicit 
anlysis of the nature of  language (the great--thrust at truth and a lie--metaphor insight).

Why?

How about: we can see a direct thread linking V, GR and VINELAND.  The books tie 
together in theme, form, use of characters, etc ( note the density of V references we 
dug up during GRGR, down to those embedded hidden arches and Pirate's crotchet; 
further, compare the opening paragraph of VLAND to the opening par. of GR for some 
intereseting echoes).  We might speculate here that the new book, M & D, also apparently 
*big* will continue this line--who wants to bet that the novel opens in a dream or some 
other state of altered reality--oh,no, now lurker Tom will rewrite it again and delay 
publicatrion still longer!!)

If we accept this line, we see that CL49 stands beside it somehow.  Though Mucho 
shows up again in VLand, there is less linking together than we see in the V-GR 
connection and even in the GR-VLAND connection.

But it would be, IMO, a grave error to *discount* CL49, even on the grounds of agreeing
 w/ TP's apparent dismissal--which I am arguing is a ploy and not to be taken at face
 value.

What if we say instead that CL49 is in fact Pynchon's *handbook* on how to read a 
Thomas Pynchon novel?  It is Pynchon's meta-novel--the novel about his novels.  It is a
 Baedekker guide to the land of Pynch.

It is the book that tells us how his other books operate.

My strongest grounds for this particular stab come from my reading GR before I read CL49.  
I remember clearly how reading CL49 made a lot of GR come into focus for me, not exactly 
explaining, but educating me in the fundamental mode of P's writing.

I'll push this a litle further and say that CL49 is Pynchon's deliberate homage to his 
muse--his girl with a boy's name persona standing for the very art within his old corse.  
The image of the Remedios Varos painting--woman spinning the world out of her 
hair--is emblematic of  P's conception of his own writing.  A-and we wouldn't expect him 
to just come out and say that now, would we?  Hence the coy possum putdown.

Well, it's better than everybody insulting everybody and all quitting the list, I imagine.

john m