Pynchon's reply

[Robin Landseadel]

On May 19, 2009, at 7:41 AM, Heikki Raudaskoski wrote:

> Would just like to check if the article is as monoreductive as I
> recall; as E.D. Hirschian as I recall.

I think not:

	So The Crying of Lot 49 is about Oedipa, her life, her loves, her
	mental states, and her curious quest to decipher the estate of
	Pierce Inverarity. And, by allusion, it is also Pynchon's
	meditation on the state of American affairs in the mid-sixties,
	about Russo-American relations during the American Civil War,
	about the fate of Jan De Witt during the founding of the Dutch
	Republic. It is about the the acrimonious U.S. elections of 1940
	and 1944, and about the OSS in Italy during the Second World
	War. It is about Thurn and Taxis and its relation with the
	Rothschild, and about the relations of the Rothschilds and the
	Morgans. It is about how certain American corporations and
	banks were instrumental in preparing Germany for war, and (by
	implication) about how those same corporations and banks
	were instrumental in driving Pynchon & Co. into receivership. It
	is about how McCarthyism hounded lots of Yankees and Jews
	out of government, about how Germany rebounded from the
	Second World War to become one of the world's richest nations,
	about how so many former Nazi officials went on to rank among
	the world's elite. It is about how the CIA got to be superordinate
	to the presidency in American realpolitik. It is about how mid-
	sixties America resembled Nazi Germany, the Dutch republic
	and the Roman empire at their worst, about the fear that
	cessation of political and intellectual exchange would cause a
	new decline of the West. And all these meditations were
	triggered by the assassination of President Kennedy.
	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

One thing that's going on here is the Dude's [fairly reasonable]  
attempt to present GR and CoL49 as two works that are of a piece.  
There are plenty of connections between the two novels.