His constant theme ...

[Dave Monroe]

"His constant theme, disinheritance." (Lot 49, Ch. 6,
p. 160)

>From Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-Cognition of Her
Errand into the Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying
of Lot 49, Ed. Patrick O'Donnell (New York: Cambridge,
1991), pp. 127-70 ...

"... the whole concept of the Tristero seems to derive
linguistically from a reference in Eliot's The Waste
Land to 'le Prince d'Aquitaine a tour nobile' (line
430).  This line itself bears a cryptic reference to
Gerard de Nerval's poem 'El Deschidado,' in which most
of the major themes of the Tristero are sounded (the
exile into a shadowy, marginal world; the former
prince whose 'tower' has been 'abolished'; the 'black
sun of melancholia').  Nerval's poem, in turn, takes
its titles from the motto on the shield of the
mysterious Disinherited Knight who turns up at the
ebginning of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, and who will
eventually represent both the Saxons and the Jews
evicted from their estates by Norman chivalry.... 
Gravity's Rainbow will reveal how deeply interested in
such 'esoterica' Pynchon is: there the 'tour abolie'
of Nerval's poem--itself drawing on esoteric
lore--will be seen not only as a symbol of
disinheritnace, but also as the tower in the Tarot
pack, blown down by the Holy Ghost so that voices can
be heard--surely, in retrospect, a theme relevant to
The Crying of Lot 49...." (pp. 144-5)

http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Studio/3714/WasteLandNotes.html

http://eleves.mines.u-nancy.fr/~grangerf/huma/el%20deschidado.htm

http://cld.multimania.com/poesies_archives_nerval.htm

http://www.angelfire.com/ut/daikon/ivanhoetext.html

By the way, note the sequence of Eliot's endnotes ...

429. V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado. 

431. V. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. 

But also, see Charles Hollander, "Pynchon's Inferno,"
Cornell Alumni News (Nov. 1978): 24-30 ...

http://www.itap.de/homes/otto/pynchon/inferno.htm

And thanks again, Otto ...



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