Derrida and Pynchon

[Dave Monroe]

Note what's hidden in plain sight.  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 (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) ....

[...]
 
   "The Tristero underground has so far been implied
to be a motley crew of eccentrics and bohemian
drop-outs, an archipelago of 'isolates' 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'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in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....  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 could almost be viewed as a New Deal
novel, concerned with gathering back into the American
fold a 'third world' previouly excluded...." (pp.
149-50)

http://books.cambridge.org/0521388333.htm

Cf. ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59165

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70538

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72631

And see as well ...

http://www.vheissu.org/art/art_eng_49_hollander.htm

There are reasons why Oed was a Young Republican ...

--- Ghetta Life <ghetta_outta at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Oedipa's paranoia just grows and grows, ever
> finding more reasons to believe in some vast 
> conspiracy.  Is it all in her head?  Maybe, mabe
> not.  So what?  No real development beyond that
> simple obvious theme.  At least that's how I 
> remember it, but it has been a while ...


		
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