CoL49 (5) Round The Bend

[Robin Landseadel]

I've got three more posts [still percolating in my noggin] then will  
pass the Olympian's torch to Natalia/Dave Monday and wander off into  
the wilderness. Thanks for all your feedback, alternate views and  
general avoidance of fire-fights

I came in thinking mostly about the magical subtexts in CoL49 and left  
seeing much more of the novella's quotidian placement in the context  
of Southern & Bay Area California of the mid-sixties. Once again, a  
quote from "Journey Into the Mind of Watts":

	While the white culture is concerned with various forms of
	systematized folly--the economy of the area in fact depending
	on it--the black culture is stuck pretty much with basic realities
	like disease, like failure, violence and death, which the whites
	have mostly chosen--and can afford--to ignore. The two cultures
	do not understand each other, though white values are
	displayed without let-up on black people's TV screens, and
	though the panoramic sense of black impoverishment is hard to
	miss from atop the Harbor Freeway, which so many whites must
	drive at least twice every working day. Somehow it occurs to
	very few of them to leave at the Imperial Highway exit for a
	change, go east instead of west only a few blocks, and take a
	look at Watts. A quick look. The simplest kind of beginning. But
	Watts is country which lies, psychologically, uncounted miles
	further than most whites seem at present willing to travel.

While all those allusions to Revelation & Pentecost & various & sundry  
Heresies still float over and through the story, this time around I  
was struck by "The Two Americas" theme that runs through "The Crying  
of Lot 49":

	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. She stopped a minute between
	the steel rails, raising her head as if to sniff the air. Becoming
	conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood on knowing
	as if maps had been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks
	ran on into others, others, knowing they laced, deepened,
	authenticated the great night around her. If only she'd looked.
	She remembered now old Pullman cars, left where the money'd
	run out or the customers vanished, amid green farm flatnesses
	where clothes hung, smoke lazed out of jointed pipes.

	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?
	PC 148/149

To suggest the  inheritance is Waste itself seems much too obvious—so  
obvious that it must be the point. When Oedipa became aware of that  
"Other America", late one night in San Francisco, she became a witness  
to the waste generated by Inverarity's estate. Oftimes it appeared as  
human waste, poignantly so with the old sailor and his letter to his  
ex, dropped off by Oedipa into a W.A.S.T.E. receptacle.