SLSL: Thank Goodness

[Dave Monroe]

Kerouac's so-called "classic" is no fave rave of mine
either, but, again, 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
(NY: Cambridge UP, 1991), pp. 127-70 ...

"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 'wait in 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." (pp. 130-2)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72472&sort=date

--- Toby G Levy <tobylevy at juno.com> wrote:
> Thank Goodness the works of Pynchon are nothing like
> what he describes as "a book I still believe is one
> of the great American novels, On the Road by Jack
> Kerouac."
> 
> OTR was to me one of the most relentlessly
> monotonous and shallow books that have ever been
> included under the literature tent.  Truly, Gertrude
> Stein's criticism of Ernest Hemingway as a "typist"
> rather than a writer applies even better to Kerouac
> than to Papa himself.

See also Catcher in the Rye, Siddhartha, et al. ...
 
> This one line alone from the SL Intro is enough to
> convince me that his tongue was planted firmly in
> his cheek throughout the introduction.

But, again, see above.  Really oughtta reread OTR ...

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