CoL49 (5) Anarchist Miracles

[Mark Kohut]

I will betcha my bottom dollar that TRP read The Automobile Graveyard (at least) as you more than hint at....
He has a thing about automobiles, as we know.

And Arrabal's style is like his.....

Early readings of L49 for me always reminded of the Dublin nighttime section of Ulysses........which is still there
but now, getting my Jung juice, I notice two things........Jung believed in the truths--as memory!---of dreams more than
anybody, particularly over Siggy the Freud. 

and one of the earliest intellectual epiphanies of the young Jung, while still a student, was in registering the folk
traditions/truths that Swiss country foax lived inside of..........very like the fairy tale/rhyming games and old children's songs.
Like the natural miracle of rhymes, games and songs is part of what the Tristero IS.



----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 1:09:27 PM
Subject: CoL49 (5) Anarchist Miracles

Once Oedipa breaks free from the Greek Way she hurtles into a landscape full of the symbols of the Trystero. She finds it inscribed on the sidewalk in chalk, played by little girls as they skip rope late at night. This little section follows the logic of dreams, reflected in:

    "Later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into
    real and dreamed."
    PC 95

Oedipa seems to respond to the experience as a religious revelation, a gnostic experience:

    "The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as
    well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from
    her memory. She was meant to remember.    
    PC 95

Other clues proliferate as to the miraculous nature of this system that Oedipa is exploring. The Trystero/W.A.S.T.E. theme seems to be emerging from the fairy tale/old rhyming games we find in children's play:

        Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three,
        Turning taxi from across the sea ...

    "Thurn and Taxis, you mean?" They'd never heard it that way.
    Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to
    retaliate, stopped believing in them.
    PC 96

Coincidences pile up and culminate with Oedipa running into an old acquaintance from her days with Pierce, Jesus Arrabal. Arrabal sees Pierce as an archetype, perhaps The Archetype, of everything that is wrong about Capitalism.

    "You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But
    another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we
    coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm.
    Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another
    world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and
    leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allows the
    masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body
    itself. And yet, sena, if any of it should ever really happen that
    perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle.
    Like your friend. He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we
    fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage,
    redeemed one of the people. Unmiraculous. But your friend,
    unless he's joking, is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to
    an Indian."
    PC 97

Jbor [among others] noticed that Jesus Arrabal points to Fernando Arrabal:

    JBOR:
    Just noticed, by the way, that the term théâtre panique was
    invented in 1962 by Fernando Arrabal, a Spanish-born
    playwright (in the Artaud/Beckett mould), film director, actor and
    chess aficionado, who writes in French. He is very much a
    contemporary of TRP's, his work shows the influence of
    surrealism and magic realism, and in 1959 he visited the U.S. to
    receive a Ford Foundation award. In his plays he "sought to
    create a kind of ritualistic drama which combines elements of
    tragedy and buffoonery with religious (or quasi-religious)     
    ceremonial. It is intended to surprise and frighten as well as to
    arouse laughter."

    http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0804818.html

    That name certainly rings a bell (or, at least, stirs
    a clear soup with a chicken foot).

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=50737&keywords=fernando%20arrabal

http://tinyurl.com/2z2nms

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0807&msg=128066&keywords=fernando%20arrabal

    Something to note about that passage in "The Crying of Lot 49":
    I probably never noticed this before—having read "The
    Automobile Graveyard" for the first time this year—this scene in
    49—

        . . . .or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked
        Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole
        in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of
        telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and
        secular miracle of communication. . . .

    Sounds much like:

        The play takes place in front of an automobile graveyard. In
        the background, the carcasses of automobiles piled on top
        of each other. The automobles are all old, dirty and rusty.
        Those in the first row have burlap curtains instead of glass
        in the windows.
        Fernando Arrabal: "The Automobile Graveyard", page 9

    The characters in "The Automobile Graveyard" for the most part
    live in these junked cars, some are even lower—begging to get
    into one of these wrecks. This is the side of the tracks Oedipa
    never really was aware of before. Lew moving into acceptance
    of his preterite status might be the curtain-raiser for the actual
    final resolution of the novel's traditional "plot" with the final
    downfall of Deuce. And then into the unknown future and the
    novel's coda.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0807&msg=128066&keywords=fernando%20arrabal

This all strikes me as central to the workings of The Crying of Lot 49. Theater of Cruelty is such an important element of this work, but it is usually overlooked in favor of pursuing the clues placed in front of Oedipa. If you look long enough [perhaps looking using the same techniques involved in looking at a "magic eye" picture] you will see the clue-producing machine. Like Richard Poirer points out in "Embattled Underground" his review in the May 1, 1966 New York Times:

    . . . What is also noticeable here, and throughout the novel, is
    that the major character is really Pynchon himself, Pynchon's
    voice with its capacity to move from the elegy to the epic
    catalogue. The narrator sounds like a survivor looking through
    the massed wreckage of his civilization, "a salad of despair."
    That image, to suggest but one of the puns in the word Tristero,
    is typically full of sadness, terror, love, and flamboyance. But
    then, how else should one imagine a tryst with America? And
    that is what this novel is.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-lot49.html

It's all a bit like "Duck Amuck" if you think of it.

This is nearly a side note, but it's hard to imagine an Anarchist Miracle more intense than LSD. The substance found its way into America via the CIA, looking for more dangerous and interesting "Mickeys" to slip to the unsuspected. Instead, we either got the revolution of consciousness that led to the ecological conception of Gaia, or yet another tool of social control—the best excuse for a "war on drugs" that anyone's come up with so far:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3jru_antilsd-propiganda_fun