VL-IV 1: L'amour est un oiseau rebelle

[Robin Landseadel]

	Laura : Anyone have any theories as to why the Narc is Hispanic?

	Given that the UFW was fighting to organize the mostly Hispanic
	farm-workers in the general region, it seems an odd choice to
	have The Man* portrayed as Hispanic.

Between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland something happened. I would say  
that maturity turned Pynchon into a deeper and more humane, more  
compassionate and more complex writer, Others feel like the Dude “lost  
it.”

Mulling over Laura’s question, and being the sort of obsessive record  
collector that has owned at least 12 complete copies of the Magic  
Flute [and 120 LPs, 20 78's and 5 EP's of Yardbird], I’d think I’d  
have stepped on this one by now. The opening line of the best known  
aria from Carmen [one of the best known operas] is : “Love is a rebel  
bird.” Certainly Frenesi qualifies, as [in her way] does Prairie. But  
I never even thought there may be a relation to the story of gypsy  
Carmen. There’s still plenty to mull over that bit of info, and I  
guess I’ll have to beg, borrow or otherwise scam a copy of Carmen. But  
the I.V. timeline question sends me back to 1968, first moving to  
Fresno from Altadena and listening to the Texaco Metropolitan  
Broadcast of “Carmen,” probably the very first opera I could really  
enjoy. Just a quick glance at a translation of the Opera shows  
Government Operatives, smugglers and a career officer with misplaced  
attentions for a super-hot rebel chick. Finally, there’s a very petty,  
hectoring officer [Zuniga], apparently bribable [thus made human] who  
seems to serve as a comic counterbalance to the overarching tragedy.

Hector’s an “American”, of course, and kind of a flipped image of  
Charlton Heston in the delicious “Touch of Evil”, an American actor  
playing a Mexican Narcotics officer, much like Hector Zuniga being a  
American Narcotics Officer playing a Mexican Actor. Hector has been  
working on his Ricardo Montalbán impersonation as long as Zoyd’s known  
him. Years after Charlton Heston got tricked into doing his best  
acting for the Kenosha Kid’s working over of the same Hollywood types  
and archetypes TRP takes on in Vineland, Heston said he wished he used  
more of an ethnic accent for the part, wishing he sounded more like  
Ricardo Montalbán. Which brings us back to San Narcisco:

. . . But Roseman had also spent a sleepless night, brooding over the  
Perry Mason television program the evening before, which his wife was  
fond of but toward which Roseman cherished a fierce ambivalence,  
wanting at once to be a successful trial lawyer like Perry Mason and,  
since this was impossible, to destroy Perry Mason by undermining him.  
Oedipa walked in more or less by surprise to catch her trusted family  
lawyer stuffing with guilty haste a wad of different-sized and colored  
papers into a desk drawer. She knew it was the rough draft of The  
Profession v. Perry Mason, A Not-so-hypothetical Indictment, and had  
been in progress for as long as the TV show had been on the air.

"You didn't use to look guilty, as I remember," Oedipa said. They  
often went to the same group therapy sessions, in a car pool with a  
photographer from Palo Alto who thought he was a volleyball. "That's a  
good sign, isn't it?"

"You might have been one of Perry Mason's spies," said Roseman. After  
thinking a moment he added, "Ha, ha."

The Crying of Lot 49 [page 9, First Perennial Classics edition]

Hey, solid citizen, we just pinched your boat . . . grabassing around,  
trying to push each other over the side. Oedipa cringed out of the way  
and watched Di Presso. If he had really played the part of Metzger in  
a TV pilot film as Metzger claimed, the casting had been typically  
Hollywood: they didn't look or act a bit alike.

"So," said Di Presso, "who's Tony Jaguar. Very big in Cosa Nostra, is  
who."

"You're an actor," said Metzger. "How are you in with them?"

"I'm a lawyer again," Di Presso said. "That pilot will never be  
bought, Metz, not unless you go out and do something really  
Darrowlike, spectacular. Arouse public interest, maybe with a  
sensational defense."

"Like what."

"Like win the litigation I'm bringing against the estate of Pierce  
Inverarity." Metzger, as much as cool Metzger could, goggled. Di  
Presso laughed and punched Metzger in the shoulder. "That's right,  
good buddy."
The Crying of Lot 49 [page 9, First Perennial Classics edition]

Between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland something happened. I would  
also say that Pynchon was probably as baffled by Lot 49 as anyone  
else, as baffled by its weird combination of interlocking puzzles and  
surreal jokes as anyone else. He seems to return to many of that  
“potboiler’s” topics in later works, Against the Day in particular but  
obviously Vineland as well.

Ah, but there's more. As we all know, for DeMille young fur-henchmen  
can't be rowing. More to the point, the Marquis de Sod is a lawn- 
savant who'll lop a tree. And as we all ought to know by now, "Carmen"  
is a French Opera. What do you want to know about le Mayonnaise?  'Aux  
armes, citoyens!' The real question is how far are these silly, weird  
French puns embedded into Pynchon's writing anyway?

"Just One More Thing", as Rachel Maddow would put it:

". . .In the mid-19th century, the habanera developed out of the  
contradanza which had arrived in Cuba from France via Haiti with  
refugees from the Haitian revolution in 1791. The earliest identified  
"contradanza habanera" is "La Pimienta", an anonymous song published  
in 1836. The main innovation from the contradanza was rhythmic, as the  
habanera incorporated Spanish and African influences into its  
repertoire. . ."

http://www.music.lv/opera/carmen/en.htm

*Hector's not "The Man", Brock is "The Man."
Hector is to Zoyd as Walter Sobchak is to Jeffrey Lebowski - The Dude.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20081205/9813a9ef/attachment.html>