SLSL Intro "Centrifugal Lures"

[Dave Monroe]

"Against the undeniable power of tradition, we
were
attracted by such centrifugal lures as Norman Mailer's
essay 'The White Negro,' the wide availability of
recorded jazz, and a book I still believe is one of
the great American novels, On the Road, by Jack
Kerouac." (SL, "Intro," p. 7)

>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 ...

   "I would submit that the magical spell exerted
by The Crying of Lot 49 is due not to the Borges-like
intricacies of its craft as such, but to its
'topicality.'  By this, I do not so much refer to
topical references, though they are there ... but to a
more unobtrusive kind of topicality.  The Crying of
Lot 49 captures the particular 'mood' of the times
...  The achievement is all the more impressive
because the mood it captures is slightly off-key, the
mood of an 'awkward' transition between two epochs, a
transitional period....  The story does take place in
the summer of 1964 ... but it is in no way 'a novel of
1964'; rather, it is a novel moving from 1957 to 1964
which portrays how it felt to live through that period
of 'transition,' a novel about those seven years spent
brooding and 'waiting' for the new times to be born.
   "To make sense of that topicality, it seems
preferable to refer Pynchon's novel back to Kerouac's
On the Road than to the kinds of technical
experimentation practiced by Borges, Nabokov, or the
OULIPO group.  The novel's topicality, its sense of
transition, is conveyed by the very structure of the
book ...." (pp. 129-30)

   "Everything, in a way, started with Kerouac. 
The Crying of Lot 49 is haunted by reminiscences of
Kerouac's On the Road.  Both works convey the sense of
a world 'blooming,' as if awakening from a long sleep.
 Very much like Kerouac's, Oedipa's experience is one
of moving 'across the tracks' toward an invisible,
hidden America: a sad world of 'shacks and rags' whose
particular note of 'tristessa' (to quote the title of
another Kerouac book) is echoed in the Tristero. 
Largely from Kerouac as well (one feels) is derived
the sense that as one crosses over to the other side
of the tracks, one falls out of the official grid
superimposed on the land and into a sort of twilight
zone (what William Burroughs calls the Interzone)
where, emerging from time into 'timeless shadows,' one
becomes a 'ghost.'  Kerouac's 'beat time' in San
Francisco, where he walks around picking up butts from
the street and, with Marylou, visits 'some drunken
seaman in a flophouse on Mission street,' more than
foreshadows Oedipa's experience in in Embarcadero
where, like a mourning Pieta, she nurses a dying
sailor.  In On the Road, moving across the tracks
revives voices long past and forgotten .... 
Similarly, Oedipa, as she ventures deeper into
Tristero territory, increasingly feels she is 'meant
to remember' and to redeem from near-oblivion voices
that without her would fade past the threshold of
consciousness and be lost forever.... the sense of
becoming part of the 'waste' is evoked throughout
Kerouac's novel ....  Finally, On the Road contains
the eschatological suggestion that, hidden, invisible,
in the shadows across the tracks, a whole 'silent
empire,' that of the 'fellahin,' th 'people of the
earth' Kerouac read about in Spengler, are waiting for
their kingdom to come....  They are those who both
'walk in darkness' and 'wit i  darkness.'  And their
motto could already be: 'We Await Silent Tristero's
Empire.'
   "The mood of The Crying of Lot 49 is so close
to that of Kerouac's beat novel that one could easily
unearth further echoes and reminiscences, but more
crucial is the fact that Pynchon's central icon, the
Tristero 'horn,' should derive from the 'horn' or
saxophone that one hears blowing throughout Kerouac's
novel ....  Now, there are several critical
differences between the Kerouac 'horn' of 1951-57 and
Pynchon's of 1964-66, some of them obliquely
reflecting the drift of American culture through those
years....  A ... difference which conveys the
'topical' quality of the novel is that Pynchon's horn
has become muted: muted, 'as so many things in those
days,' Pynchon adds, referring to the climate of the
fifties.
   "In the late fifties, when he was about twenty
and starting to write, Pynchon appears to have been
more drawn to the ecstatic 'howl' or 'whoopee' of the
Beats than to the low-profile, sullen, sulking figure
of the 'hipster'--and 'muted' is a word that does crop
up fairly often in those days to describe that
cultural figure.  Thus, in a 1957 Harper's Bazaar
article that Norman Mailer drew upon for his depiction
of the 'White Negro,' the hipster is said to have
'that muted animal voice which shivered the national
attention when first used by Marlon Brando,' and to
'come out of the muted rebellion of the proletariat.' 
In The Crying of Lot 49, the 'muted horn' becomes an
emblem of the whole 'silent generation' which came of
age in the fifties ...." (pp. 130-2)

   "Whereas Kerouac and his crowd crisscrossing
the continent felt they were living in the eye of the
whirlwind, catching ecstatically what they called
'It,' Pynchon's keynote is that everything comes
through muffled, as if from afar." (p. 132)

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