Pynchon's misdirection

[Tore Rye Andersen]

>From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net

[...]

>Trieste and that city's homonyms, are known.
>Trackable. Triestero is unknown. There is no
>true historcal correlate, no marker or
>encyclopedia entry for this "system", this
>collection of possibly related skeins. But there is
>a great, mysterious city. And there is sadness.

Right you are, Robin. Trieste and the Tristero both lead one's thoughts 
(mine and yours, at least) to tristesse, sadness, and the city and the 
organization may connect at that more or less homonymical level. But my 
point, again, is that we should pay attention to what the text actually says 
and shouldn't impose connections that the work can't properly bear. I'd like 
to point back to one of the posts where you first made the connection 
between the Tristero and Trieste:

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0612&msg=112415&sort=date

Here you point to a clearly important passage on p. 542 of AtD, and you 
argue that the passage is a veiled reference to the Tristero. Some of the 
textual evidence you cite for this interpretation is that the passage takes 
place in Trieste, and you refer the reader back to page 524, where the good 
ship Stupendica arrives at Trieste. The only thing wrong with this 
particular argument is that it is plain and demonstrably wrong. The 
Stupendica *does* arrive in Trieste on page 524, but Kit is no longer aboard 
the ship. He sailed on on the dreadnought Emperor Maximilian (in parallel, 
sort of), left the ship in Northern Africa, got a job on the Fomalhaut ("a 
steam trawler operating independently out of Ostend" (521)), and on page 522 
he arrives in Ostend. And this is where he is in the following chapter (see 
e.g. the first two lines on p. 525), this is also where Piet Woevre is, and 
this is where that important passage on p. 542 takes place. Ostend, not 
Trieste.

This is very easy to miss, and I'm not pointing my fingers at you for 
missing it. I did too, in our original discussion back in December. I'm 
currently rereading AtD, however (an extremely pleasurable experience), and 
just last night I got to the halfway mark and the passage in question, this 
time around noticing that it actually took place in Ostend. I guess this 
points back to my original point in this by now very long thread: The 
surfaces of Pynchon's novels are extremely dense and complex, and a very 
important part of reading Pynchon is untangling those dense surfaces and 
seeing what is actually there. If we move too quickly to the hidden stuff, 
we may miss important information on the surface (like you and me both did 
in this particular instance).

This doesn't detract from your overall theory of the presence of the 
Tristero in AtD, but it *does* detract significantly from your theory about 
the particular passage on p. 542 being an allusion to Tristero. Trieste and 
Tristero may be connected, but not in this passage, and I guess this is an 
instant where a literal-minded (and some would say dull) approach shows us 
that we have in fact gone too far. I love creative and imaginative 
interpretations, but we have to make sure that they have some support in the 
text itself.

Some would say that "anything goes" when interpreting Pynchon. I tend to 
believe that "most things go" when interpreting Pynchon, but it is still our 
duty as readers to entangle that complex surface before getting to the good 
stuff.

Best,

Tore

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