Something must have happened ...

[Dave Monroe]

   "'But the night I was there,' said Oedipa,
'Driblette did use the Vatican lines, he said the word
Trystero.'
   "'But would it be just,' she gestured in circles
with her hands, 'just some whim?  To use another
couple  lines like that, without telling anybody?'
   "'Randy,' recalled the third grad student, a stocky
kid with hornrims, 'what was bugging him inside,
usually, somehow or other, would have to come outside,
on stage.  He might have looked at a lot of versions,
to develop a feel for the spirit of the play, not
necessarily the words, and that's how he came across
your appaerback there, with the variation in it.'
   "'Then,' Oedipa concluded, 'something must have
happened in his personal life, something must have
changed drastically that night, and that's what made
him put the lines in.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 154)

Cf. ...

  "Beyond its origins, the libraries told her nothing
more about Tristero.  For all they knew, it had never
survived the struggle for Dutch independence.  To find
the rest, she had to approach from the Thurn and Taxis
side.  This had its perils.  For Emory Boirtz it
seemed to turn into a species of cute game.  He held,
for instance, to a mirror-image theory, by which any
period of instability for Thurn and Taxis must have
its reflection in Tristero's shadow-state.  He applied
this to the mystery of why the dread name should have
appeared in print only around the middle of the 17th
century.  How had the author of the pun on 'this
Trystero, dies irae' overcome his reluctance?  How had
half the Vatican couplet, with its suppression of the
'Trystero' line, found its way into the Folio?  Whence
had the daring of even hinting at a Thurn and Taxis
rival come?  Bortz maintianed there must have been
some crisis inside Tristero grave enough to keep them
from retaliating.  Perhaps the same that kept them
from taking the life of Dr. Blobb." (Lot 49, Ch. 6,
pp. 162-3)

And ...

"He trembles and cannot speak, only stutter, in what
may be the shortest line ever written in blank verse:
'T-t-t-t-t ...'" (Lot 49, Ch. 3, p. 73)

Vs. ...

"But Gennaro ends on a note most desperate, probably
for its original audience a real shock, because it
names at last the name Angelo did not and Niccolo
tried to:

He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew
Now recks no lord but the stiletto's Thorn,
And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.
No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,
Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero.

"Trystero.  The word hung in the air as the act ended
..."

(Lot 49, Ch. 3, pp. 74-5)

Not to mention ...

"And all these meditations were triggered by the
assassination of President Kennedy."
   "Pynchon published this political satire under his
own name during a dangerous time, raising most secret
secrets in public, albeit in code, warning,
statesmanlike, of a possible dire outcome.

[...]

"... the novel provides a means for us to uncovr the
secret mysteries of recent history ....  a body of
information that explains how we got to be in this
boat, this postwar America.  Pynchon guides us through
a history lesson....  if we are willing to endure the
chill shiver of paranoia, the eel in the bowel of fear
..."--I think I saw that movie, by the way, though
that girl didn't look all too afraid; the eel, on the
other hand ...--"We may wind up with words we never
wanted to hear, but we may become those who know."

Charles Hollander, "Pynchon, JFK andd the CIA: Magic
Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49," Pynchon Note 40-41
(Spring-Fall 1997), p. 101 ...





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