Col49 - on the number of 49

[Dave Monroe]

>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
UP, 1991), pp. 127-70 ...

"In historical terms, the '49' of the novel's title
might be construed to refer to 1849, when
('forty-niners' of sorts) the Tristero came to America
in the wake of the failure of the 1848 European
revolutions (and came at the wrong time, when the U.S.
government, as part of its 'headlong expansion' into
the West, was erecting legal fences in the newly
conquered 'silderness,' thus reenacting for this
incarnation of 'shadowy Tristero' the same pattern of
eviction the original had already gone through).  But
the '49' may also refer to 1649, the year that John 
Winthrop, governor of the 'Lord's Plantation of
Massachusetts Bay,' died, and the 'awful hieroglyph'
of The Scarlet Letter flashed on the New England sky
[Ch. 12, 'The Minister's Vigil'].  It was also the
peak year of the revolution in England; the year King
Charles I was led to the scaffold and beheaded; the
year the Levellers' manifesto [The True Levellers
Standard Advanced] was published; and the year Gerrard
Winstanley too the lead in establishing a Digger
colony in Sussex, to reclaim the 'waste' England had
become and return it to the poor and downtrodden." (p.
152)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0107&msg=46&sort=date

http://www.web.net/~smorton/Billy_Bragg/The_World_Turned_Upside_Down.html

http://www.diggers.org/english_diggers.htm

Along the way here, Petillon references ...

Simpson, Alan.  Puritanism in Old and New England.
   Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1956.

Rogers, P.G., The Fifth Monarchy Men.
   London: Oxford UP, 1966.

Okay, closing in on the end here, albeit far from
giving closure to it ...




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