The Invisible Field

[Dave Monroe]

"'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 paperback 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)

"... 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)

   "'You don't understand,' getting mad.  'You guys,
you're like Puritans are about th Bible.  So hung up
with words, words.  You knoe where that play exists,
not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you're
looking for, but--' a hand emerged from the veil of
shower-steam to indicate his suspended head--'in here,
 That's what I'm for.  To give the spirit flesh.  The
words, who cares?  They're rote noises to hold line
bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an
actor's memory, right?  But the reality is in this
head.  Mine, I'm the projector at the planetarium, all
the closed little universe visible in the circle of
that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes
other orifices also.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 3, p. 79)

"Shall I project a world?" (Lot 49, Ch. 4, p. 82)

   "'Randy Driblette's production?  No, I thought it
was typically virtuous.'  He looked sadly past her
toward a stretch of sky.  'He was a peculiarly moral
man.  He felt hardly any responsibility toward the
word, really; but to the invisible field surrounding
the play, its spirit, he was always intensely
faithful.  If anyone could have called up for you that
historical Wharfinger you want, it'd've been Randy. 
Nobody else I ever knew was so close to the author, to
the microcom of that play as it must have surrounded
Wharfinger's living mind.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 152)

"... Oedipa found herself after five minutes sucked
utterly into the landscape of evil Richard Wharfinger
had fashioned for his 17th-century audiences, so
preapocalyptic, death-wishful, sensually fatigued,
unprpeared, a little poignantly, for that abyss of
civil war that had been waiting, cold and deep, only a
few years ahead of them." (Lot 49, Ch. 3, p. 65)

"'Trystero enjoyed counter-revolution in those days. 
Look at England, the king about to lose his head.  A
set-up.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 158)

"Offstage there is a sound of footpads.[...]  The
lights all go out" (Lot 49, Ch. 3, p. 73)

   "'You know, blokes,' remarked one of the girls, a
long-waisted, brown-haired lovely in a black knit
leotard and pointed sneakers, 'this all has a most
bizarre resemblance to that ill, ill Jacobean revenge
play we went to last week.'
   "'The Courier's Tragedy,' said Miles, 'she's right.
 The same kind of kinky thing, you know ....'" (Lot
49, Ch. 3, p. 63)

Note, of course, both the Shakespearean ...

"All the world's a stage ..." (As You Like It,
II.vii.139)

Briggs, Julia.  This Stage-Play World:
   Texts and Contexts, 1580-1625.  2nd ed.
   New York: Oxford UP, 1998 [1983].

And the Pauline references here ...

"... the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life
..." (2 Corinthians 3:7)

And, as always ...

"... Pynchon's meditation on the state of American
affairs in the mid-sixties .... And all these
meditations were triggered by the assassination of
President Kennedy.
   "Pynchon published his political satire under his
own name during a dangerous time, raising most secret
secrets in public, albeit in code, warning,
statesmanlike, of a dire outcome."

Charles Hollander, "Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic
Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49," Pynchon Notes
40-41 (Spring-Fall 1997), p.p. 100-1 ...


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