Pynchon's misdirection

[Dave Monroe]

--- Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:
 
> ... I firmly believe that the important stuff in
> Pynchon's work is right there on the surface for
> all to see - to quote Pynchon himself: His 
> novels are texts "that speak their entire meaning,
> all of it right out on the surface" (GR, 435).

Standard issue caveat about eliding The Author with
his narrators here, but ...

> ... I think that reading Pynchon is all about
> untangling the surface.

Standard issue ignoring that caveat nontheless ...

"... if only she'd looked.  She stopped a minute
between the steel rails, raising her head as if to
sniff the air.  Becoming conscious of the hard, strung
presence she stood on--knowing as if these maps had
been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks ran
into others, others, knowing they laced, deepened,
authenticated the great night around her.  If only
she'd looked." (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 179)

"'Ev'rywhere they've sent us,-- the Cape, St.
Helena, America,-- what's the Element common to all?'
   "'Long Voyages by Sea,' replies Mason, blinking in
Exhaustion by now chronick.  'Was there anything
else?'
   "'Slaves.  Ev'ry day at the Cape, we lived with
Slavery in our faces,-- more of it at St. Helena,--
and now here we are again, in another Colony, this
time having drawn them a Line bewteen their
Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom'd to
re-encounter thro' the World this Public Secret, this
shameful Core....  Pretending it to be ever somewhere
else, with the Turks, the Russians, the Companies,
[...] they're murdering and dispossessing thousands
untallied, the innocent of the World, passing daily
into the Hands of Slaveowners and Torturers, but oh,
never in Holland, nor in England, that Garden of
Fools...?  Christ, Mason.'
   "'Christ, what?  What did I do?'
   "'Huz.  Didn't we take the King's money, as here
we'retaking it again? whilst Slaves waited upon us,
and we neither one objected, as little a we have here,
in certain houses south of the Line,--  Where does it
end?  No matter where in it we go, shall we find all
teh World Tyrants and Slaves?  America was the one
place we shoud not have found them.'"  (M&D, Ch. 71,
pp. 692-3)

>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 (New York: 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) ....

[...]
 
   "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....  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,'
'dispossesed,' 'living on the fringes, the margin,' as
'internal exiles.'
   "Looking back on the novel from the perspective of
its finale, it coul almost be viewed as a New Deal
novel, concerned with gathering back into the American
fold a 'third world' previouly excluded...." (pp.
149-50)

>From Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to
the X-Files (New York: Routledge, 2000), Ch. 1,
"Conspiracy/Culture," Section II, "Vineland and
Visibility," pp. 57-75 ...

"The hidden depths and concelaed realms which might
encourage countercultural fantasies of a
conspiratorial 'We-system' (as Gravity's Rainbow
termed it) have thus all but disappeared in the world
of Vineland.  Everything has become exposed (to use a
film metaphor to which the novel itself is highly
attuned) ....  On this reading, then, the final
failure of the 1960s underground culture comes about
not through any of the conspiratorial fanstasies of
apocalypse which the counterculture predicted, but
because there is nowhere left to hide.  Everything is
visible, and everything is connected, producing a
situation in which a routine sense of paranoia is
paradoxically both no longer necessary, and more vital
than ever." (p. 73)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706
 
> Hollander apparently has "the magic" [...] its
> resemblance to that parody of paranoid reading in
> GR 664-65 is uncanny....

"That's him. He was constantly talking. He talked a
lot about the prices of things.... He was like a
little old lady. He talked on the phone for hours with
Candida Donadio, his agent. He liked to talk about how
paranoid he was."

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9610&msg=7406


 
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