If only she had looked ...

[Dave Monroe]

Actually, artculations of language 'm' lit'rachure 'n'
logic 'n' politics, now that I think of it.  But to
continue from Petillon ...

"What would vanish in such a reading is the 'other'
side of the Tristero.  For throughout the book the
Tristero is 'other' in another sense, carrying more
'awful' implications: like the Lord, in the Calvinist
view, it is perceived as 'wholly other' (totaliter
aliter) something human reason cannot possibly
encompass, and whose advent--whose irruption into our
world--would radically 'turn it upside down,' spelling
terror as well as redemption as the two faces of its
'awful' sovereignty.  This twofold aspect of the
Tristero in some ways reflects the twofold aspect of
the Movement during the sixties.... the Advent of the
Kingdom ... Or ... just an attempt to bring America
back to herself and reawaken the old native heritage
of the New deal, and further back of the Wobblies? ...
the book acutely registers the fascination exerted by
the other, 'religious' (as opposed to 'political')
interpretation of the Tristero's 'otherness.'  The two
alternatives are here kept open: the Tristero as an
utterly 'other' order whose intrusion into this world
will 'turn the world upside down' and spell sheer
terror, and the Tristero as a new tryst with a
long-forgotten America." (pp. 150-1)

Main Entry: tryst
Pronunciation: 'trist, esp British 'trIst
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French triste
watch post, probably of Scandinavian origin; akin to
Old Norse traust trust
Date: 14th century
1 : an agreement (as between lovers) to meet
2 : an appointed meeting or meeting place

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

That is, MalignD's fictionally historical Tristero vs.
my politically allegorical one?  I've no problem
maintaining both readings (and, I will admit, as a
reader, the first is more compelling, though I don't
see the irresolution as a problem).  Also reminds me
here of Edmund Burke, his valorization of the
aesthetic, "awful" Sublime, and his later horror at
the sublime, awful events of the French Revolution ...

http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/

http://www.bartleby.com/24/3/

Anyway, I'd forgotten just how much of Petillon's
reading I'd absorbed here ...

--- Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  
> "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. 
> 
> 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."


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