Pynchon's reply

[Joe Allonby]

How much of this is actually in the text? Near as I can tell, COL49 is
about a woman at a turning point in her life
(impending breakup, death of influential friend/lover/mentor)
stumbling upon an ancient postal fraud conspiracy that may have been
right under her nose all the time. Or she may be losing her mind. Or
both. Nothing will ever be the same regardless of what actually takes
place at that auction. Details of time and place establish the setting
and reinforce the feelings of dread and confusion. Anything beyond
that is speculation. Over-analysis seems to be the hobby of most
people on this list - myself included. I'll stand back and take my
lumps now.

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> 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.
>