CoL49 (6) If Only She'd Looked

[Dave Monroe]

    "She walked down a stretch of railroad track next the highway.
Spurs ran off here and there into factory property. Pierce may have
owned these factories too. But did it matter now if he'd owned all of
San Narciso? San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic
records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated
daylight, a moment's squall-line or tornado's touchdown among the
higher, more continental solemnities, storm-systems of group suffering
and need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true
continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw
them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what
Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was
America.

[...]

   "Yet she knew, head down, stumbling along over the cinderbed and
its old sleepers, there was still that other chance. That it was all
true. That Inverarity had only died, nothing else. Suppose, God, there
really was a Tristero then and that she had come on it by accident. If
San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other
town, any other estate, then by that continuity she might have found
The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred
lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she'd
looked. [...] ...
   "Were the squatters there in touch with others, through Tristero;
were they helping carry forward that 300 years of the house's
disinheritance? Surely they'd forgotten by now what it was the
Tristero were to have inherited; as perhaps Oedipa one day might have.
What was left to inherit? That America coded in Inverarity's
testament, whose was that?" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 178)

http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/6/pynchon/lot6.htm
http://www.innternet.de/~peter.patti/thomaspynchon-thecryingoflot49.htm

>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 implies 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,'
'dispossessed,' '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' previously
excluded...." (pp. 149-50)

http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?ISBN=9780521381635
http://books.google.com/books?id=8AALiZY5XQoC

Cf., e.g., ...

   "'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're taking 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 should not have
found them.'"  (M&D, Ch. 71,
pp. 692-3)

And from Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files
(NeY): Routledge, 2000), Ch. 1, "Conspiracy/Culture," Section II,
"Vineland and Visibility," pp. 57-75:

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 concealed 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 fanstasies of
apocalypse which the counterculture predicted, but because there is
nowhere 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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