CoL49 (1) The Automobile Graveyard

[Robin Landseadel]

This is spoiler city, as if anybody cares.

A major theme in CoL49 is theater of cruelty. Mucho's nightmare of a  
used car lot illuminates a theme that will expand as the story  
progresses. A source/inspiration I have not seen cited elsewhere is  
Fernando Arrabal's "The Automobile Graveyard", a play first published   
in French back in 1958 and translated into English in 1960.

	Not for the squeamish or easily offended, Arrabal's work has
	Samuel Beckett beat when it comes to the depiction of pointless
	cruelty. Set in a junkyard that operates like it's a hotel (complete
	with an especially accommodating room service), "The
	Automobile Graveyard" is to some extent a Christian allegory,
	complete with betrayal, beatings and the crucifixion of a guitar-
	strumming pacifist. But Arrabal often admitted that he could
	never conceive of love without violence, and so the 80-minute
	play is a veritable orgy of jumbled images from myth, ritual and
	erotica. Tough and twisted, Arrabal makes Artaud's work feel
	like the theater of gentility.
	http://www.arrabal.org/new206.html

Note that "Emanu" [the "Jesus" character in "Graveyard"] is a trumpet  
player, not some guitar strumming pacifist.

See also: http://www.arrabal.org/new207.html

Guernica and other plays by Fernando Arrabal:

http://tinyurl.com/c7ozms

This situates "The Automobile Graveyard" among other works from the  
theater of the absurd/theater of cruelty movements of the post-war  
era. [Arrabal, alnog withJorodowsky, was one of the founders of the  
"Panic" movement— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_Movement —

Later [about 1/3 of the way in, page 48 in the Perennial Classics  
edition (hereafter PC ed.) ], we have our first mention of "The  
Courier's Tragedy", an example of theater of cruelty from Jacobean  
times:

	"You know, blokes," remarked one of the girls, a long-waisted,
	brown-haired lovely in a black knit leotard and pointed
	sneakers, "this all has a most bizarre resemblance to that ill, ill
	Jacobean revenge play we went to last week."

The girl's outfit and affect point to the left-bank beatnik look. In  
addition to setting time and place, it also points to a look  
associated with the French Beats.

In time Oedipa comes around to the paranoid notion that Pierce  
Inverarity has created  false evidence of the Tristero as a cruel joke  
on her—is Inverarity's  real legacy is this act of cruelty upon Oed?  
"Though she feels like she's in a play, she is anyway."

Portraying Mucho Maas as a used-car salesman manages to expand on  
themes laid out in "The Automobile Graveyard" This descriptive passage  
could be considered as set design for a mounting of "The Automobile  
Graveyard":

	Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how
	could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro,
	Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the
	most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of
	themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be
	like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to
	look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a
	shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho
	himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket
	booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers,
	or only of dust and when the cars were swept out you had to
	look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way
	of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he
	supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and
	kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost:
	clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 [cents], trading
	stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts,
	tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the
	phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already
	were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside
	of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie,
	a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just
	for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of
	despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust,
	body wastes—it made him sick to look, but he had to look.
	CoL 49, 4/5 PC ed.

Pynchon rarely uses a concept just once. The idea of a "lot" crying  
first enters in this scene. Later, Mucho speaks of the nightmare of  
the used car lot's "N.A.D.A." — http://www.nada.com/ —sign flashing.  
At the end of the book the lot that will be cried will be an auction  
lot of stamps. Arrabal will appear in the form of anarchist Jesus  
Arrabal:

	In an all-night Mexican greasy spoon off 24th, she found a
	piece of her past, in the form of one Jesus Arrabal, who was
	sitting in a corner under the TV set, idly stirring his bowl of
	opaque soup with the foot of a chicken. "Hey," he greeted
	Oedipa, "you were the lady in Mazatlan." He beckoned her to
	sit.

	"You remember everything," Oedipa said, "Jesus; even tourists.
	How is your CIA?" Standing not for the agency you think, but for
	a clandestine Mexican outfit known as the Conjuration de los
	Insurgentes Anarquis-tas, traceable back to the time of the
	Flores Magon brothers and later briefly allied with Zapata.
	CoL49, 96 PC ed.

. . . later we encounter exiles living in the waste the monied class  
leaves behind, in a passage that appears towards the end of the book:

	She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids
	sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever
	came over the mother's pocket radio; of other squatters who
	stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along
	all the highways, 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, untroubled by the dumb voltages
	flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of
	unheard messages.
	CoL49, 149 PC ed.