Atdtda23: [46.1ii] Codes and traces, 654

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          David Payne
          Note that Dixon is soon to take the driver's whip & 
          frees his slaves. BTW, the quote p. 696, right by a 
          big honkin' star in my PB edition.

I pasted a chartreuse [the most anarchistic on the greens] tabs with a red [for 
blood and or life] star on my copy, along with a red tab with a purple star for 
314, purple tab with green star for 76, a purple tab with a yellow star for 266 
& another chartreuse tab with a yellow star for 275. You can take that passage 
all the way to the end on 288, it's probably my favorite single stretch of the 
book.

It's funny how the passage on AtD 654 turns out on 655---

". . . .sometimes a Tatzelwurm is only a Tatzelwurm. . . ."

Anytime you run up against some awful pun in Pynchon, alarm bells ought to be 
going off. He likes to encrypt homogeneous names that go off in multiple 
directions, pointing to people with very similar names. Like Jesus Arrabal. 
Fernando Arrabal wrote plays in the mode of Theater of Cruelty back in the 
fifties and sixties including a piece entitled "Automobile Graveyard", a setting 
of the passion play in an automobile junkyard. Of course, "The Courier's 
Tragedy" is a form of "Theater of Cruelty", so is Oed's seeming ritual hazing 
and the author's refusal to deliver the payoff in what was so far structured 
like a whodunnit. Perhaps the "Anarchist Miracle" consisted of Pynchon 
bumping into Arrabal about the time he started on The Crying of Lot 49.

The passage in M & D that comes just a little before 696, on 692, one frequently 
cited by Dave Monroe---

          "Ev'vrywhere they've sent us,---the Cape, St. Helena, 
          America,---what's the Element common to all?"

---that element happening to be slavery.  It seems submerged by all the other 
threads, but Pynchon always has a little room in the tapestry to mention slavery 
and wage slavery.