Pynchon/Hollander

[Ian Livingston]

>I would offer up that more likely than not, what ends up in Pynchon's books
> has a lot more to do with the quotidian details of the author's life than
> the author would ever want to have the public at large to know. And I
> suspect the man has good reasons for us not to know the reasons or details.
>

Bravo, Robin.  I am in full agreement with you on this.

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Charles Hollander's big essay on The Crying of Lot 49 — Pynchon, JFK and the
> CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49 — ties the novel to the
> assassination of JFK. Hollander's method often consists of teasing out
> meanings and cross-references from homophones, homographs & homonyms.
> Charles Hollander takes up Pynchon's location of "high magic in low puns"
> and runs with it:
>
>        The closeness of the name Rockefeller and the word rocket
>        allows Pynchon to construct many puns and combinations.
>        Indeed, the Rockefellers use their own name in like manner.
>        They own Rockefeller Center, where the Rockettes dance. They
>        also own Rockresorts, Greenrock Farms, Winrock Farms, Ven-
>        Rock Inc.
>
>        Pynchon is leading us to the Rockefellers throughout Rainbow
>        with combination words, puns, and corruptions, Numerous
>        characters call Slothrop Rocky and fella, though never Rocky,
>        fella. Just as the Tristero leads to Thurn and Taxis leads to the
>        Rothschilds leads to the Morgans leads to Pynchon & Co. and
>        to DISINHERITANCE; the Harrimans and the Whitneys (28),
>        Allen Dulles (268), Winthrop (630), Thomas E. Dewey (636),
>        Mark Hanna (664), Richard M. Zhlubb (754), and “Standard
>        Awl” (565) point to the DISINHERITORS. Though he never
>        names them, Those Who Know, know.
>
>        http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm
>
> This sort of exegesis lies at the heart of Charles Hollander's writings:
>
>        On the surface, The Crying of Lot 49 is so much a novel about
>        Oedipa Maas, her life, her loves, her thoughts, that it hardly
>        qualifies as what Irving Howe would describe as a political
>        novel. [1] Yet while this miniature masterpiece is not a
>        manifesto or a call to arms, some critics see reading it as a
>        "subversive experience" that could generate contempt for
>        power, a disrespect for the national leadership, because Lot 49
>        is a scathing history lesson, a look behind the political events
>        and historical figurations that led America into the mess that
>        was the mid-sixties ((Kolodny)). To study Lot 49 is to decrypt
>        Pynchon's encoded messages and enter split-level
>        consciousness, to read the narrative against the subtext of
>        historical allusions, to find how skepticism toward government
>        is central to Pynchon's work. When we do, we find Lot 49 to be
>        Pynchon's encrypted meditation on the assassination of
>        President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
>
>        In 1977, Jules Siegel recalled asking Pynchon a decade
>        earlier: "'What are you always so afraid of? … Don't you
>        understand that what you have written will get you out of almost
>        anything you might get yourself into?'" Siegel also recalled
>        recognizing Pynchon's unvoiced answer: "'You think that it is
>        what you have written that they will want to get you for'" (172-
>        74). "They?" Which they? "Get you," Pynchon the invisible
>        novelist? "Get you for" what? For writing, albeit in deep code,
>        about the Kennedy regicide.
>
>        Charles Hollander: Pynchon, JFK and the CIA:
>        Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49
>        Pynchon Notes 40-41, spring-fall 1997, pp. 61-106
>
>
> In part, I agree with Mr. Hollander in that Pynchon is using little
> encryptions everywhere in his books. While I can see the logic in the Dude's
> conclusions, there are other threads in Pynchon's writing that interest me
> more—right now— than the conspiratorial/paranoid threads that hypnotized me
> in the past, back when the sense of conspiracy and paranoia central to "The
> Crying of Lot 49" and "Gravity's Rainbow" was what pulled me along. The
> atmosphere of dread in the nocturnal scenes of those two novels seemed to be
> there as a backdrop for some dreadful, awful revelation. Now it seems that
> all that dreadful waiting is its own reward. While I still see Standard Oil
> & the Bush Crime family all through Pynchon's writings, there's lots of
> other stuff that I'm seeing now that has a lot more to do with writing qua
> writing, stuff that was always there, but that I ignored, off in search of
> what I thought was bigger game.
>
> Going on my own logical paths, much like those of Charles Hollander, I find
> that T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land has at least as big as place in CoL49 as
> JFK, if not bigger—when it comes to family history, the Pynchon clan is all
> over America's "Waste Doctrine", with T.S. Eliot's ancestors, the Sterns
> family, working as a counterforce to the Pynchons. Interesting to see the
> fall of the house of Stearns—the first big indicator of our current
> depression—as a counterpart to the Fall of the house of Pynchon back during
> the previous depression. Of course, both threads can be true at the same
> time. I would also wonder about MKULTRA in CoL49, feeling like there are
> more pointers in that particular direction than a JFK conspiracy—again,
> those two threads may be tied together.
>
> Of course, it is also possible that these themes find their way into
> Pynchon's writings for simpler reasons:
>
>        ". . . I just don't think you ought to be writing about me. The sad
>        truth is that you're giving me much too much credit. My own
>        research is nowhere near as deep or as conscientious as
>        yours. It is, in fact, as shallow as I think I can get away with,
>        because I don't write 'novels of ideas.' Plot and character come
>        first, just like with most other folks's stuff, and the heavy thotz
>        and capitalized references and shit are in there to advance
>        action, set scenes, fill in characters and so forth, and the less of
>        it I have to do, the better for me cause I'm lazy. . . .
>
> I would offer up that more likely than not, what ends up in Pynchon's books
> has a lot more to do with the quotidian details of the author's life than
> the author would ever want to have the public at large to know. And I
> suspect the man has good reasons for us not to know the reasons or details.
>