Ratfucker

[Dave Monroe]

On 8/14/07, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:

> I know he's some kind of big shot but where is there any evidence that the Tristero has any anarchist qualities?

My take of choice on (the) Tristero ...

>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 ...

   "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) ....  She
discovers, in other words, an entire hobo jungle deeply hidden and
seeming to have survived from the thirties.  The finale has been
pointed out by such critics as Richard Poirier as a major flaw in the
novel, an attempt through sheer rhetoric and lyrical oratory to
express much more than the novel can carry in its 'social' context.

[Richard Poirier, "The Embattled Underground," New
York Times Book Review (1 May 1966), p. 42]

   "The Tristero underground has so far been implies 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'isolates' having 'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in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.  One could agree ... that
Pynchon, through his rhetoric, is trying to achieve in fiction
what, he regrets, failed to happen in contemporaneous political life:
the conjunction between 'the Movement' ... and the 'people.'  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,'
'dispossessed,' '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' previosuly excluded...."
(pp. 149-50)

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