CoL49 (6) Winthrop Tremaine

[Mark Kohut]

I'm giving my more patriotic July 4th-5th reding of this:

Yes, The Puritans could be Nazi-like....remember what we/I even learned in
that narrow fixed schooling we [most of us] had?: The English who came to America left England 
for religious 'freedom" then curtained that "freedom" for others when here? 

And Johnny Tremaine was about America before the Revolution. 

Then came 'the revolution" ----and things changed (in important ways)? 



----- Original Message ----
From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2009 4:04:46 PM
Subject: CoL49 (6) Winthrop Tremaine

"'I could've sold him two hundred of the swastika armbands too, only I
was short, dammit.'
  "'Government surplus swastikas?' Oedipa said. 'Hell no.'  He gave
her an insider's wink. 'Got this little factory down outside of San
Diego,' he told her, 'got a dozen of your niggers, say, they can sure
turn them old armbands out. You'd be amazed how that little number's
selling. I took some space in a couple of the girlie magazines, and I
had to hire two extra niggers last week just to take care of the
mail.'
  "What's your name?' Oedipa said.
  'Winthrop Tremaine,' replied the spirited entrepreneur, 'Winner,
for short....'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 149)


>From J. Kerry Grant, A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 (Athens: U of
Georgia P, 1994) ...

It is, of course, no accident that Winthrop Tremaine, the Swastika
salesman, should have as his first name the last name of one of the
oldest New England Mayflower families, the Winthrops.  Pynchon seems
to want to create a link between Nazism and the
fanatic early American Puritan persecution of Quakers, witches,
Indians, and other "heretics" and consequently the very foundation of
America, which seems and important element in the novel's "tapestry"'
(Colville 27).  Perhaps, too, Pynchon brings in the TV
show 'Johnny Tremaine' as a way of providing a further diminution of
the American past." (p. 122)

Citing ...

Colville, Georgiana M.  Beyond and Beneath the Mantle:
  On Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49."
  Ansterdam: Rodopi, 1983.

[...]

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