If only she had looked ...

[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 ...

   "As The Crying of Lot 49 nears its end, the
Tristero, which has been looming up all along, comes
dangerously close to losing the teasing
epistemological uncertainty it has retained thus far
in the novel.  As Oedipa stumbles along a railroad
track ... she remembers things she would have seen 'if
only she had looked' (179) ....  She discovers, in
other words, an entire hobo jungle deeply hidden and
seeming to ahve survived from the thirties.  The
finale has been pointed out by such critics as Richard
Poirier as a major flaw in the novel, an attempt
through sheer rhetoric and lyrical oratory to express
much more than the novel can carry in its 'social'
context.

[Richard Poirier, "The Embattled Underground," New
York Times Book Review (1 May 1966), p. 42]

   "The Tristero underground has so far been implies
to be a motley crew of eccentrics and bohemian
drop-outs, an archipelago of 'isolatoes' having
'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in
tatters.  But suddenly, in this last rhetorical leap,
the Tristero broadens its scope to include, in a
grand, almost liturgical gesture, all the outcasts of
American history.  One could agree ... that Pynchon,
through his rhetoric, is trying to achieve in fiction
what, he regrets, failed to happen in contemporaneous
political life: the conjunction between 'the Movement'
... and the 'people.'  By the end of the novel the
Tristero, shadowy as it still remains, is no longer a
ghostly underground (perhaps entirely phantasmatic)
but a real, 'embattled' underground about to come out
of the shadows.  No longer hovering on the edge as a
cryptic plot, the 'Other' that the Tristero has thus
far represented is almost revealed as a version of
'the other America' that Michael Harrington described
....  This America is 'the America of poverty,'
'hidden today in a way it never was before,'
'dispossesed,' 'living on the fringes, the margin,' as
'internal exiles.'
   "Looking back on the novel from the perspective of
its finale, it coul almost be viewed as a New Deal
novel, concerned with gathering back into the American
fold a 'third world' previouly excluded...." (pp.
149-50)

See ...

Harrington, Michael.  The Other America:
   Poverty in the United States.  London:
   Penguin, 1963.  pp. 101-3.

And cf., of course ...

"It was not a case of either/or, but an expansion of
possibilities.  I don't think we were consciously
groping after any new synthesis, although perhaps we
should have been.  The success of the 'new left' later
in the '60's was to be limited by the failure of
college kids and blue-collar workers to get together
politically."

Thomas Pynchon, "Introduction," Slow Learner: Early
Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), p. 7.  Cf., of
all things ...

Rorty, Richard.  Achieving Our Country:
   Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America.
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

Wherein RR makes much the same point in a text which
practically begins with a denunciation of TRP's
political "pessimism" in Vineland ...  

But do also note the articulations of language 'n'
politics bookending Pynchon's passage.  At one end,
"at least two very distinct kinds of English could be
allowed in fiction to coexist.  Allowed!  It was
actually OK to write like this!  Who knew?  The effect
was exciting, liberating, strongly positive"; and at
the other, "One reason [for failure] was the presence
of real, invisible class force fields in the way of
communication between the two groups."  Okay, a little
more here to cover, but I need a moment's rest ...

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