CoL49 (6) His Constant Theme

[Dave Monroe]

"It may have been some vision of the continent-wide power structure
Hinckart could have taken over, now momentarily weakened and
tottering, that inspired Tristero to set up his own system. He seems
to have been highly unstable, apt at any time to appear at a public
function and begin a speech. His constant theme, disinheritance. The
postal monopoly belonged to Ohain by right of conquest, and Ohain
belonged to Tristero by right of blood. He styled himself El
Desheredado, The Disinherited, and fashioned a livery of black for his
followers, black to symbolize the only thing that truly belonged to
them in their exile: the night. Soon he had added to his iconography
the muted post horn and a dead badger with its four feet in the air
(some said that the name Taxis came from the Italian tasso, badger,
referring to hats of badger fur the early Bergamascan couriers wore).
He began a sub rosa campaign of obstruction, terror and depredation
along the Thurn and Taxis mail routes."

http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/6/pynchon/lot6.htm


"His constant theme, disinheitance"

>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
(NY: Cambridge UP, 1991), pp. 127-70:

"... the whole concept of the Tristero seems to derive linguistically
from a reference in Eliot's The Waste Land to 'le Prince d'Aquitaine a
tour nobile' (line 430 [sic--try line 429]).  This line itself bears a
cryptic reference to Gerard de Nerval's poem 'El Deschidado,' in which
most of the major themes of the Tristero are sounded (the exile into a
shadowy, marginal world; the former prince whose 'tower' has been
'abolished'; the 'black sun of melancholia').  Nerval's poem, in turn,
takes its titles from the motto on the shield of the mysterious
Disinherited Knight who turns up at the beginning of Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe, and who will eventually represent both the Saxons and the
Jews evicted from their estates by Norman chivalry...."

http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521388333
http://books.google.com/books?id=8AALiZY5XQoC

T.S. Eliot, The Waste-Land (1922)

http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html
http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/table/explore5.html

Gerard de Nerval, "El Deschidado"

http://eleves.mines.u-nancy.fr/~grangerf/huma/el%20deschidado.htm
http://cld.multimania.com/poesies_archives_nerval.htm

Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe ...

http://www.angelfire.com/ut/daikon/ivanhoetext.html

>From Charles Hollander, "Pynchon's Inferno," Cornell
Alumni News (Nov. 1978): 24-30 ...

   "In his apparent schema, paranoia should be preceded by feelings of
disinheritance. Actually Pynchon does feel somewhat disinherited.
Pynchon’s family is a clan of bluebloods who were misguided enough to
align themselves with the wrong side during
not one, but two American Revolutions, one in the eighteenth century
and one in the twentieth century, and who have suffered social and
economic reversals as a consequence."

http://www.itap.de/homes/otto/pynchon/inferno.htm

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=59035
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&msg=65233