pynchon-l-digest V2 #1610

[Dave Monroe]

I think one bit of Pynchon-list myth/misinformation that seems to keep
getting reproduced here is that I've somehow claimed that any of the
very specifically localized readings I've offered are intended or
otherwise implied to be generalizeable to whatever text is at hand, and
then some.  And Doug and Charles Hollander are again here dragged in on
similar, similarly unfounded "charges."  What we do share, in our own
various ways, and with others "here" and many elsewhere, is an interest
in the historical, political contexts of these texts ...

Hollander, for example, certainly doesn't make the Kennedy assassination
the be all and end all of The Crying of Lot 49, although he certainly is
right to insist that those black-bodysuited assassins in The Courier's
Tragedy cannot help but be read in relation to the Kennedy assasination,
given both the setting, the atmosphere of the text and of the contexts
of its writing and publication, and that this should well have been
obvious to Pynchon to the point that one might nigh unto collapse
reception and intention here.

Hollander might be unique in pointing that out in the critical
literature, but that possibility had come up virtually any time I'd
discussed the book with anybody in person (though I do seem to hang with
a circle of conspiracy aficianados, though I'm not much of one myself).
But my interest, and here's where Hollander's work is valuable as well,
is more generally in the entire culture of paranoia  enegndered in
particular during the Cold War.  Again, my inclination is to read as if
EVERYTHING is going on at once, "coherence," "intention," "vision," be
damned.  In fact, the more self-deconstructive, the better ...

And here's where I wish I would have had your post to respond to
yesterday, Jody (I just get the plain ol' digest these days).  I've long
read TCOL49, those Pynchonian texts in general, as posting certain
caveats about interpretation in general, conspiracy theories in
particular, with an eye (albeit not necessarily Hollander's "magic" one)
towards those "excluded middles."   With an eye toward, precisely, that
"need to find a conspiracy" (religions, of course, being the grandest of
such theories).  Either the Tristero or the earth below?  Maybe not
quite so binary ...

Pynchon seems to weave and unweave narratives, interpretations,
conspiracies, conspiracy theories, with nigh unto Penelopean vigor, no?
But my question is, what might be the implications of that in precisely
that increasingly cryptically, cryptographically, conspiratorially-not
to mention, as you already have, semiotically and cybernetically--thick
Cold War atmosphere?  An atmosphere in which "intelligence" means
espionage?  Ian Fleming, John LeCarre, and countless imitators on the
bookshelves, not to mention screens both big and small, not to mention
what's going on in "real" life ....

Esp. given how often Pynchon's seemingly outre elements and assertions
turn out to have some historical basis.  Reminds me, something I saw on
a newsstand the other day, Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader,
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/.  And for a recent critical work on
paranoia in U.S. culture and, esp., Am Lit, see ...

O'Donnell, Patrick.  Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and
    Contemporary U.S. Narrative.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.

Includes discussions of TCOL49 as well as of Don DeLillo's Libra and
Underworld, among many other works.

I'm not so confident that there IS some master theme, some Grand
Unifying Theory, in even any given text, much less across that
Pynchonian oeuvre, but there sure are an awful lot of transpynchonian
elements, interests, concerns.  And I'm not entirely sure that "we're"
somehow being told what we should do, no matter how cryptically, or even
what we should have done, those texts do seem a bit circumspect in that
regard, but paths both taken and not are certainly being noted, and I do
think that some Comments thereupon are being made.  Oh, hell, gotta run
(and,speak of the Devil), but ...