Atd : page 542---starts on page 524.Big Ass Spoiler

[Tore Rye Andersen]

>From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net

>I'm halfway through yet another reading of "The Crying
>of Lot 49", looking for key words and phrases. The link I'm seeing---
>been seeing it for some time, but the connection is getting clearer----
>is in calling down or summoning angels and attendant
>revelation/apocalypse. Throughout "49" you find the word
>'revelation' as in (pg 31) "As if (as she'd guessed that first minute in
>San Narcisco) there were revelation in progress all around her.", or
>(pg. 14) "There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could
>have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of
>San Narcisco, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of
>her understanding.". There's  dozens of others.

Yes, revelation - or rather: imminent revelation - is certainly a key theme 
in Lot 49, but that revelation never actually arrives, does it? In the 
phrase "a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her 
understanding" that "just past the threshold" seems the important part, and 
the only miracle to be found in the novel is "the secular miracle of 
communication." Pynchon - especially early Pynchon - seems to be all about 
intimations of revelations rather than the revelations themselves, and I 
doubt that any adept could crack the code and get beyond that threshold.

The following contains a couple of further spoilers, right up to page 1077, 
so approach with caution:

The theme of apocalypse is clearly important to both Lot 49 and AtD as well 
(and to GR and V. as well), but interestingly, Atd perhaps comes closer to 
giving us our apocalypse than any of Pynchon's previous novels. Both Lot 49 
and GR end on the brink of apocalypse, but in AtD Pynchon, or at least one 
of his characters, seems to argue that the apocalypse has already happened. 
As Policarpe says on page 1077: "We're in Hell, you know [...] The world 
came to an end in 1914."

The way in which this apocalypse is described in the novel is very 
interesting. Some reviewers have complained that World War I is over and 
done with in a couple of pages, but that’s really the poignant part for me. 
After a lot of ominous build-up, the war – the novel’s heart of darkness – 
is represented in a muted way, through The Chums of Chance’s distant 
airborne perspective, and from inside neutral Switzerland, as if the truth 
itself is too horrible to contemplate head-on. And after all, we know what 
happened from 1914-18 – it’s in the history books… It reminded me of the 
oblique way the holocaust and Hiroshima were represented in GR (dodoes, 
hereroes, a torn newspaper photo, and General Wivern’s dance on page 594). 
This time around, Pynchon even provides the recipe for how to read this 
non-representation of central horrors, namely the discussion of Hunter 
Penhallow’s paintings and their ”deliberate vacancies” (AtD, 897).

Read in the light (as it were) of AtD and its oblique representation of the 
apocalypse of WWI, Pynchon's preapocalyptic novels Lot 49 and GR may in fact 
turn out to have been post-apocalyptic all along...

Best,

Tore

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