AtD (37) pp.1040 ff. Thoughts on Lew Basnight, detective.

[Dave Monroe]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 9:18 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> TRPs sympathetic protagonists are NOT ego-driven, but receptive to things as they are?

"Merely train's hardware for any casual onlooker, Waldetar in private
life was exactly this mist of philosophy, imagination and continual
worry over his several relationships--not only with God, but also with
Nita, with their children, with his own history. There's no organized
effort about it but there remains a grand joke on all visitors to
Baedeker's world: the permanent residents are actually humans in
disguise." (V., Ch. 3, p. 78--thanks, Tore!)

"'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 between 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 the 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 implied 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
could almost be viewed as a New Deal novel, concerned with gathering
back into the American fold a 'third world' previouly excluded...."
(pp. 149-50)

And from Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files
(New York: Routledge, 2000), Chapter 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 fantasies of
apocalypse which the counterculture predicted, but were 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)

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   "'Perhaps its familiarity,' Randolph suggested plaintively,
'rendered it temporarily invisible to you.'"  (ATD Pt.I, p. 4)

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