Grand Cohen, orange tabs/pink tabs, tarot wandering

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Mike Bailey asked:

>Lot 49 is one of the 3 books envisioned in the Donadio letter?
>or, the plan changed to accommodate more books?

And Robin replied:

>I think that Against the Day probably, in some form, was on his mind all
>along. In an odd way, The Crying of Lot 49 can be regarded as a waste
>product of the realm explored in Against the Day. So far, I see Gravity's
>Rainbow, Mason and Dixon and Against the Day as those three books,
>but have to wonder if the author has a Civil War novel hidden away in
>some drawer.

Pynchon actually spoke of four novels in progress in his 1964 letter to 
Donadio. I think Robin is probably right to suggest that AtD was part of the 
plan all along. I also believe that GR and M&D were part of this original 
megalomaniac plan, and that Lot 49 wasn't: Remember that Pynchon doesn't 
even consider Lot 49 a novel (although he's wrong: it's a great novel, on a 
par with other great, short novels such as 'Heart of Darkness' and 'The 
Great Gatsby').

Robin's guess that there might be a Civil War novel hidden somewhere is a 
good one. There have been rumours of such a novel over the years, and it 
would seem to fill the 100-year gap between M&D and AtD's historical 
settings. My guess, however (which is certainly no better than Robin's), is 
that there won't be a Civil War novel for us. A Civil War novel would make 
perfect sense if one considered M&D, GR, and AtD to be primarily about 
American history. In that case, a novel about the Civil War certainly would 
seem to be lacking and its eventual publication would complete Pynchon's 
American Quartet.

If, however, one considers those three novels to be primarily concerned with 
global history, the lacuna is less obvious: M&D takes care of the historical 
period where the western world was on the brink of the Enlightenment, AtD 
deals with the historical cusp where it moved into Modernity, and GR 
completes this Global Trilogy with its investigation of the nodal point 
where Modernity began turning into Postmodernity. These three historical 
stages, incidentally, correspond quite nicely with Ernest Mandel/Fredric 
Jameson's three stages of capitalism:

1) Market capitalism (and its primarily mechanical technology)

2) The monopoly stage of capitalism or the stage of imperialism (and its 
attendant move towards electricity)

3) Late capitalism or multinational capitalism (a.k.a. postmodernity) with 
its electronical technology.

I'm not saying, of course, that Pynchon is deliberately trying to match 
Mandel's scheme, but the historical periods of Pynchon's Global Trilogy do 
seem to correspond, more or less, to those three historical stages (and 
their technologies), and in that perspective, we don't 'need' a Civil War 
novel to complete the scheme. FWIW, my guess is that the fourth novel in the 
Grand Plan was to have dealt with the future( and with late-late 
capitalism): I think that "The Japanese Insurance Adjustor" was to have been 
this novel, but that the historical novelist Pynchon in the end found such a 
novel untenable. In the end, a few scraps of this failed project were 
salvaged and made it into Vineland, and in a sense, Vineland does fit into 
the original conceptual scheme, dealing as it does with the end result of 
the colonialistic impulse described in the three big novels (in Vineland, 
that last pocket on the US map is finally coopted, tied into the 
Network/Grid, and the chances of freedom are over for good).

So I think that Vineland is as close to that fourth novel as we're gonna 
get, but I tend to regard it as an appendage to Pynchon's Global Trilogy 
rather than as the last leg on his American Quartet. GR, M&D and AtD do seem 
to stand out from the pack, not necessarily in quality, but certainly in the 
range of their ambitions. Structurally, they're also quite similar: They all 
have around 70 chapters, and they're all divided into a small number of 
named parts (4, 3 and 5 parts, respectively). This structural similarity, 
combined with the thematical similarities between the three novels (mapping 
moments of historical change in the Western world), makes it reasonable, I 
think, to consider them parts of the same conceptual framework, parts of the 
Grand Plan conceived by Pynchon back in the Sixties.

/Tore

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