Ratfucker

[Richard Fiero]

CoL49 seems about right to me with Oedipa being both somewhat limited 
and somewhat creative.  The claims of failure below seem 
excessive.  The Tristero and the Peter Pinguid Society are a lot like 
the real-life anarcho-capitalist cypherpunks and Blacknet which have 
vanished since the increased surveillance following 9/11 and did not 
exist in those incarnations at the time CoL49 was written.

Dave Monroe wrote:
>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'isolates' having 'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in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