Col49 Ch. 3 The Tristero

[jbor]

    "Things then did not delay in turning curious." (29)

Once again the inanimate subject ("things") is given an active predicate,
even in spite of the odd circumlocution (a "ritual reluctance"?) of the verb
phrase.

But though "things" turn "curious" indeed, no resolution is ultimately
forthcoming. As Georgiana M.M. Colvile notes, in what is perhaps one of the
better critical monographs on the novel, the various mysteries remain
"questions which Pynchon never answers. Instead, he heralds the death of the
referent. A postmodern model may be about communication and postal messages
and yet deliver no message." (_Beyond and Beneath the Mantle: On Thomas
Pynchon's 'The Crying of Lot 49'_. Rodopi: 1988, p. 49)

Colvile has this to say about the mysterious Tristero, or "Trystero System":

    It seems to me that Trystero could be disseminated into Tryst [with]
    Ero[s] and Tristero into Trist[e] Ero[s] (in a triste era), which,
    like the paradoxical entropy metaphor applied to information, alludes
    to the huge tide of sexual exhibition and pornography leading to the
    sadness and/or death of Eros, reducing the phallus to a muted horn and
    the writer's pen to silence. (p. 45)

best