CoL49 (6) Diocletian Blobb

[Dave Monroe]

"'Here,' producing one with a dark brown, peeling calf cover. 'I keep
my Wharfinger-iana locked in here so the kids can't get at it. Charles
could ask no end of questions I'm too young to cope with yet.' The
book was titled An Account of the Singular Peregrinations of Dr
Diocletian Blobb among the Italians, Illuminated with Exemplary Tales
from the True History of That Outlandish And Fantastical Race.
  "'Lucky for me,' said Bortz, 'Wharfinger, like Milton, kept a
commonplace book, where he jotted down quotes and things from his
reading. That's how we know about Blobb's Peregrinations.'"

[...]

  "'But why spare an insufferable ass like Diocletian Blobb?'
  "'You can spot a mouth like that a mile off,' Bortz said.  'Even in
the cold, even with your blood-lust up.  If I wanted word to get to
England, to sort of pave the way, I should think he's perfect.
Trystero enjoyed counter-evolution in those days.  Look at England,
the king about to lose his head.  A set-up.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 158)


>From Charles Hollander, "Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of
The Crying of Lot 49," Pynchon Notes 40-41 (Spring-Fall 1997): 61-106:

... Lot 49 itself suggests the analogy between the crisis in
mid-sixties America and a crisis in Roman history by giving us, late
in the novel, Dr. Diocletian Blobb.  Why bring in this name after all
that has gone on before?  Diocletian was a Roman emperor (284-305 CE)
whose reign marked a change in government.  Under Diocletian, local
autonomy disappeared, the taxing system compulsorily tied the country
people to the land, the Senate became weak and ineffective, the army
grew much larger and stronger, and the mercantile class was taxed to
the limit.  Diocletian established a military dictatorship.  With the
dissolution of any semblance of republican government, there were no
theoretical or practical checks on the emperor.  When Diocletian's
scheme for price stabilization failed, the empire went into a long
political and economic decline from which it never recovered.  Could
Pynchon see the gap between wealthy insiders and what used to be
called the American middle class ... (pp. 99-100)

>From Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal
System (Trans. Kevin Repp.  Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999), Ch. 1,
"An Epoch of the Postal System," pp. 4-19:

  It was in this form that the Persian Empire came to the Romans.
After Persian communications technology was adopted, first by the
Seleucids and then by Alexander the Great, its Egyptian version
finally provided Augustus with a model for the cursus publicus--that
is, for a postal system that served to transmit the imperiums of
imperial oraculums and military communications, as well as to
transport high-level functionaries.  As the name itself indicates, the
use of the cursus publicus was reserved exclusively for the emperor
and the provincial governors.  And even these officials had to present
a certificate issued by the emperor or the praetorian prefect (later
also by the magister officium) in order to gain access to the medium
of the empire.  'People' did not communicate through the postal
system; on the contrary, the postal system communicated through
people, who had to perform angarias, that is, compulsory services or
liturgies for the maintenance of the postal system.  In order to curb
extensive corruption in the imperial postal system, which always was
tantamount to conspiracy against the empire, Diocletian created an
imperial secret service, the scola agentum in rebus, and placed the
postal administration under its authority.  Eventually, under
Theodosius and Honorius, the use of the postal system by private
persons was even punished by death.  Since the network of the cursus
publicus was coextensive with the orbis terrarum, banishment to Pontus
meant being transported beyond the limes of the world for Ovid.  While
the Tristia are laments over the loss of postal connections, the
Epistulae ex Ponto use the medium of literature to decry the
catastrophe in the postal system.
  "Postal systems are instrumenta regni....."  (pp. 6-7)

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?isbn=0804732388
http://books.google.com/books?id=bz_1hEm_y84C

>From Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 vols.,
1776-88) ...

The nine Books of Pontical Epistles, which Ovid composed during the
seven first years of his melancholy exile, possess, besides the merit
of elegance, a double value. They exhibit a picture of the human mind
under very singular circumstances; and they contain many curious
observations, which no Roman, except Ovid, could have had an
opportunity of making.

Cited in ...

Richmond, John.  "The Latter Days of a Love Poet: Ovid in Exile."
   Classics Ireland, Vol. 2 (1995):  97-120.

http://www.ucd.ie/~classics/95/Richmond95.html

For Gibbon: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pcraddoc/dfgib/dfbutlis.htm

>From E.J. Kenney, "Introduction" to Ovid, Sorrows of an Exile (Trans.
A.D. Melville.  New York: Oxford UP, 1995), pp. xiii-xxix:

Ovid, banished in disgrace by his emperor at the age of 51 ....   The
duration of his exile was at the pleasure of Augustus, an ageing and
irritable autocrat whom he had somehow managed to give bitter personal
offence.  Hence, it would seem, the choice of a place of exile: ... a
barbarized Greek colony on the           farthest confines of the
Roman dominion.  Tomius, now Constanta in Romania ....  In one respect
Augustine's        sentence had been lenient: Ovid was not legally
exiled but 'relegated', hence not deprived in property or citizenship.
 Otherwise it meant the loss of everything that had made life worth
living, the brilliant cosmopolitan society of Rome.  Ahead lay nothing
but solitude, boredom, discomfort, and danger--a living death.

"What had Ovid done to deserve this?  The secret has been well kept,
and all we know is what he chose to tell us in his poetry.  It is
perhaps natural to assume that the real cause of the offence was what
he calls his indiscretion (error), an involuntary involvement in some
scandal intimately affecting the imperial house.  The other count
against him, a poem (carmen), the Ars Amatoria, looks at first sight
like a pretext ....  True, Ovid had in it administered more than one
pinprick to official Augustan myths, but can Augustine really thought
it so subversive of contemporary morals ... to deserve such draconian
punishment?" (p. xiv)

>From Ovid, Tristia (A.D. 9-11) ...

Parve--nec invideo--sine me, liber, ibis in urbem,
 ei mihi, quo domino non licet ire tuo!
vade, sed incultus, qualem decet exulis esse;
 infelix habitum temporis huius habe. (I.i.1-4)

[...]

cetera turba palam titulos ostendet apertos,
 et sua detecta nomina fronte geret;
tres procul obscura latitantes parte videbis,--
 sic quoque, quod nemo nescit, amare docent.
hos tu vel fugias, vel, si satis oris habebis,
 Oedipodas facito Telegonsque voces.
deque tribus, moneo, si qua est tibi cura parentis,
 ne quemquam, quamvis ipse docebit, ames.
(I.i.109-16)

That is ...

You'll go, my little book--I feel no envy--
 Without me to the City where, alas,
Your master may not go.  Go, but be shabby
 As suits an exile's book.

[...]

The others will display their titles clearly,
 Each name uncovered on the front above.
Three, you'll see, hide far-off in a dark corner--
 Even so they teach (what all know) how to love.
These you will shun, or call them Oedipus or
 Telegonus, if you can be so bold.
And of these three, I warn, if you respect your
 Parent, love none, though how to love he's told.

Latin courtesy of ...

Ovid. Tristia and Ex Ponto.  2nd ed., rev.
  Trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler.  Rev. G.P. Goold.
  Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996 [1988, 1924].

But I opted for the English trans. in ...

Ovid.  Sorrows of an Exile.  Trans.
  A.D. Melville.  New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Verse vs. prose.  See also online ...

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/fld/CLASSICS/ovid.tristia.html
http://www.fotomr.uni-marburg.de/ovidserv/Text/chp/ovid.tristia.html

But to continue ...

In the Loeb (Harvard) ed., it is noted of Oedipus and Telegonus (the
son of Odysseus by Circe) that "Both were parricides, and so, like
Ovid's book, destroyed the author of their being" (p. 11, n. 2).  The
Oxford further notes that they were "(unwitting) parricides,"
adding that, here, "Ovid's books are now figured as his children" (p.
118, n. 114).  And back to Hollander:

"Was Pynchon, too, on the list of the proscribed?  We may never know.
He did sign a full-page anti-war ad, along with hundreds of other
well-respected people opposed to the escalating war, in the New York
Review of Books (15 Feb. 1969: 9).  Natalie Robins has documented that
Thomas R. Pynchon, Jr., was on the FBI's Index, a list of people known
to be unfriendly to government policies on whom the FBI kept active
dossiers.  Pynchon's name appears among hundreds of 'Writers, Editors,
Agents, and Publishers Indexed by the FBI because they signed Civil
Rights and/or Anti-war Protests during the 1960s" ([Robins, p.] 411).
Enemies lists, Chaos, Cointelpro, Shamrock, Minaret; mail openings,
telephone taps, direct surveillance, breaking and entering, and
stealing files: it appeared American politics could get no worse.
Pynchon had already opted to live as a stranger in his own strange
land." (Hollander, p. 63)

Citing:

Robins, Natalie.  Alien Ink: The FBI's War on
  Freedom of Expression.  New York: Morrow, 1992.