Pynchon's misdirection

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Thanks for this long and well-reasoned post. I really appreciate it, and I 
hear the friendly admonition at the end loud and clearly (even though it's 
encrypted!). I only wish our mystery correspondent would stand up. I like to 
know who I'm talking to, and this secrecy reminds me too much of that 
mysterious bidder at the end of 'The Crying of Lot 49' - but maybe that's 
just me making a tenuous connection ;-)
Anyway, I have some comments below:

>Tore Rye Anderson's facts are OK for 2007, but we
>must remember Varo the painter was relatively unknown
>in 1964.  There were no English books about her, no
>collections of reprints of her paintings in print.
>Anyone looking up her name in standard reference books
>would have had a hard time finding any mention of her
>at all.  Varro, on the other hand, was mentioned
>everywhere as a public intellectual and one of the
>great Roman men of letters.

A valid point. The name of the game is different today than it was in 1964 
(or should we say 1966, when Lot 49 was actually published, or even December 
1965, when the first chapter was published in Esquire). The Internet has 
changed a lot of things, as has become evident with the publication of 
'Against the Day'. In some ways it has made serendipitous findings such as 
the Varo/Varro-connection less likely (Google 'Varo' and you get just that), 
but on the other hand it has made the search for allusions and hidden 
meanings that much easier. And just for those of you who believe that I'm 
altogether too literal-minded in my approach to Pynchon, I'd like to remind 
you that I happily participated in that quest for Snow Lions and Tibetan 
Trade Agents (together with intrepid co-questers Ya Sam and Robin) long 
before AtD was actually published, and when the chapter headings surfaced, I 
was the first to point out the connection between Iceland Spar, double 
refraction and the dustjacket. I like the thrill of the chase as much as the 
next man, and I've never claimed that one should limit one's analysis of 
Pynchon to what is actually stated in his texts.

FWIW, however, I would have made exactly the same points about the 
Varo/Varro-connection back in 1994, when I first stumbled upon Pynchon. 
There was no Internet back then, at least not in my corner of the world, but 
information can be got to otherwise. For one thing, one could go the 
library, where one could find, among other things, David Cowart's wonderful 
study 'Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion'. That is in fact what I did, and 
there I first read about Remedios Varo and her haunting paintings. This is 
not as noble as discovering Varo on one's own, of course, but reading the 
works of other critics is still a sensible way of approaching Pynchon and 
getting to some of his complexities. In fact, when Hollander made his 
Varo/Varro-connection in 1978 (in Cornell Alumni News), Cowart had already 
written a great article about Pynchon and Remedios Varo (in Critique 18 #3, 
1977) where he argues, among other things, that Pynchon may have stumbled 
upon her paintings in Mexico, where he was known to've spent a lot of time. 
This sounded (and sounds) convincing to me: Pynchon may have fallen 
serendipitously upon her paintings and decided to include them in Lot 49 
simply because he liked them - obscure or not - and not because he wanted to 
make a veiled allusion to Varro.

>Why couldn't the name carry both functions -- to
>alert the reader to Varo's life and paintings, and to
>alert the reader to M.T. Varro, his life and writings?

It can. Based on the many arguments I've read and heard, I'm not convinced 
that it does, but Pynchon is certainly no stranger to allusions carrying 
double - heck, multiple - functions. My main point here is that Hollander 
moves too quickly from the 'Varo'-function to the 'Varro'-function. If he 
had spent as much time as e.g. David Cowart on figuring out the role of 
'Varo' in Lot 49, I would have been more ready to follow him as he leads us 
on to 'Varro', but for my taste, at least, he jumps altogether too quickly 
from the obvious to the hidden here. Paying attention to the encrypted 
meanings is fine, but one shouldn't pass over the obvious ones so quickly

>That is often how Pynchon works.  If you want the
>surface meaning, it is there: but if you want the
>allusive meaning, you have to do some work.

I know, as is hopefully obvious from my many posts to this forum, and I am 
perfectly willing to do the work (implying otherwise is a bit insulting 
IMO), but I'll repeat that an important part of this work is untangling the 
complex surface, figuring out the meaning of what is there on the surface, 
without moving too quickly to the hidden meanings.

>Her paintings are pretty interesting, and there are books
>about her now available, forty years after Lot 49 was
>published.  The lack of information about her, before
>Google, is a very telling void.  Pynchon would have
>known she was virtually invisible back then, while
>Varro was visible, that searching for the one would
>surely lead to the other.

I'll accept this argument. But does her invisibility back then make her less 
important to Lot 49? I still find the complex allusion to her painting to be 
more important to the overall structure of Lot 49 than a possible allusion 
to Menippean satires. As Doug pointed out in a previous post, this may be a 
subjective opinion, but I am willing and able to back it up with plenty of 
textual evidence.

>Pynchon is recognized as a literary riddle maker, a
>puzzle artist, as were many of the artists he values
>before him.

Sure, I'll not deny that there are many riddles, puzzles and codes in his 
work. To do so would be willfully blind, not to mention a bit stupid. The 
important thing, I guess, is what to make of all these riddles, complex 
puns, codes and hidden meanings. I know "the game's afoot" when Pynchon 
elaborately sets up that deMille-pun, but FWIW I don't consider this 
particular riddle to be much more than a joke - I love Pynchon for just this 
kind of elaborate joke, but ultimately this particular pun doesn't really 
lead us anywhere but to its own hilarious resolution.
As for codes: Sure, there are plenty of codes in a novel like GR, and like 
Katje I know a message when I see it (GR, 535). But what should we make of 
these codes? In the end, I guess, it comes down to readerly temperament, and 
I may err on the side of caution here, like Rocco in AtD (AtD, 529). When a 
creative reader like Hollander sees a passage like the one on GR 664-65 
(describing the encrypted monthly magazine 'A Nickel Saved') he sees an 
invitation to seek meanings beneath the obvious, to decrypt Pynchon's work 
(Hollander points to this very passage of GR in his essay "Pynchon's 
Inferno"). When I see such a passage, or when I see the hilarious encrypted 
movie Doper's Greed on GR 534-35, with its Midget Sheriff, I don't so much 
see an invitation to go hunting for secret meanings as a friendly warning 
against carrying on such an endeavour to excess. I see these two passages as 
clearly parodic, as Pynchon's way of telling us that his work may contain 
codes, but that we shouldn't take them too seriously, and that we should 
focus on what is right before our eyes, on the surface, as it were.
And this leads me on to my final point:

>Pynchon does use arcane words, at
>singular moments, to convey extra weight.  In Lot 49
>he has a character named Nefandis, and when we go to
>the O.E.D. we find there is no word "nefandis," but
>the word "nefarious" (and all its cognates) is on the
>page where Nefandis is supposed to be.

Pynchon does certainly use arcane words ("absquatulate" anyone?), but again, 
we shouldn't be so busy speculating what they might carry of hidden 
implications that we don't notice what's there. Case in point: There is in 
fact NO character in Lot 49 by the name of Nefandis. There is an inventor 
called John Nefastis (introduced on page 85 of the first edition), and you 
must be thinking of him. Charles Hollander also notices Nefastis in his 
"Inferno"-essay:

"Indeed, one character is named John Nefastis, “nefastus” meaning nefarious, 
and a cognate, “nefandous” meaning not to be spoken of."

Now, the connections Hollander makes here I find absolutely sound: He starts 
by focusing on the name itself, and after making a good point he goes on to 
additional meanings. This is good, this is as it should be. Sometimes, 
however, Hollander and other readers move on a bit to quickly for my taste 
from the surface to the hidden depths. This may prevent one from noticing 
what is actually there on the surface. Being too eager to decrypt the codes 
of Pynchon's fiction may be an obstacle to paying attention to what the 
texts actually say. It may, for instance, lead one to see characters that 
aren't really there (Nefandis) and ignore the ones that ARE there 
(Nefastis), right on the surface. Quests for hidden grails are fine, and I 
truly love to discover hidden meanings in Pynchon, but we shouldn't forget 
the obvious stuff. Otherwise it - and allow me to quote you here -  "will 
just fly by unnoticed.  All the better for the surface reader."

Best,

Tore

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