Open letter to the P-List

[Joe Allonby]

This is awesome.

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> Open letter to the P-List:
>
> From The Dude.
>
> When I found how much richer reading Pynchon’s work became using the
> technique of tracking his allusions, I, as reader, found the words on
> the page were suddenly surrounded by resonant historical people,
> places, and things.  More than finding TRP was merely name-dropping
> (which would be O.K., displaying his erudition); I found that he was
> building a second structure, a “counter-narrative,” often related to
> the “narrative” in surprising ways.  Independent of me, a number of
> critics, especially in Europe (John Dugdale, for one), seemed to grasp
> this way of reading TRP, and took off on it.  They were often
> flabbergasted by where they wound up because they didn’t know enough
> American history.
>
> I was of the generation that came of age and voted in my first
> Presidential election in 1960.  By Thanksgiving of 1963 I was
> disillusioned and could no longer “believe” in the electoral process.
> I was not a Bolshevik, nor a Wobbly, nor a hippie.  I was an average
> kid who grew up in suburban Baltimore, went to a highly competitive
> public high-school that sent about 85% of its graduates on to college,
> and as a nice Jewish boy I was lucky enough to go to college at a time
> when my university (Johns Hopkins, then well known for its
> undergraduate science, pre-med, and engineering curricula) was
> emphasizing the humanities, balancing its course offerings by
> recruiting some Liberal Arts heavyweights.  I managed to study with
> some really world-class scholars, whose names are a generation out of
> the mainstream.  So I won’t bore you with them.
>
> The style in literary studies, at the time, was according to rules
> laid down by The University of Chicago New Critics, whose orthodoxy
> held that “only what’s in the text” mattered.  We were instructed in
> close readings of various works from Chaucer to Joyce, never to touch
> on their personal lives, the social issues of their eras, or the
> political struggles that were afoot in their lifetimes.  It seemed to
> me then, this was a capricious dogma, perhaps one that served the
> political climate of the McCarthy period, which corresponded to the
> period in which it came to be the norm.  It might have been Richard
> Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce (1959) that struck the death knell
> of The New Criticism.  I’m not sure of the ins and outs of it.  But
> relatively soon (in 1966) there was a Hopkins sponsored meeting on
> “Structuralism,” a week-long affair featuring many of the French
> scholars who seemed to have adopted and refined the goals and
> techniques of this school of criticism, that became known as “The
> Baltimore Conference.”  And Structuralism was loosed upon the land.
>
> When it came to Pynchon, certainly structuralism comes into play, and
> his insistence on his privacy, his aversion to the press, forces most
> critics into a New Criticism posture.  I felt I had to invent a new
> way of doing “Pynchon criticism,” as the old models were either
> somewhat out of touch, or out of date.  For example, I think there is
> reason to believe that genre studies, following Northrop Frye (who, it
> turns out, was in vogue when Pynchon was at Cornell), might be the
> most helpful, along with a handful of biographical research, and the
> tactic of tracking down and getting all the information one can about
> the names, or half-names, blithely dropped by Pynchon on his way.
>
> Taking these approaches in hand, I found (and might have been among
> the first to harp on) Menippean satire as Pynchon’s favorite genre,
> and this seems to have been the topic of a few doctoral dissertations
> that support that assertion.  Now, it is almost a given.  It was not
> the old Menippean satires of the Roman period that Pynchon used:
> rather, it was the Menippean satire that Northrop Frye describes in
> his revelatory and startling book, The Anatomy Of Criticism (1957).
> Recognizing how Pynchon writes, as a consequence of following the
> Menippean conventions,   clearly puts him in the category of the
> Satirists.  Few critics saw him as such upon the  release of Gravity’s
> Rainbow, probably the most successfully complex satire in the history
> of American letters.
>
> The next thing I found out was, I had to track down each proper noun
> in the text.  The most successful and applauded of my work is my essay
> on The Crying of Lot 49.  I’ve had the most flattering things said to
> me at Pynchon conferences by European academics about that one,
> despite what the P-List thinks of it.  It was by some subterfuge, I
> think, that the Belgian Website where it had been visible is no longer
> up.  I hesitate to think what that might mean.  But, nevertheless, I
> find that my methods, in that instance, lead to some remarkable
> insights.
>
>
> In particular, the business of the post Nov 23, 1963 cover-up
> conspiracy that I cite as where the allusions eventually lead, has
> become the subject matter of an investigatory book titled The Legacy
> of Secrecy by Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann, published by
> Counterpoint of Berkeley, (2008).  The first and last chapters are
> on-line and Dave Monroe has posted the URLs in a previous note to you.
> [It was through Dave that I became aware of the book, and I owe him a
> big thank you.  Good job, Dave, and thanks.]  The book presents a
> picture with which  I don’t entirely agree, but in which you will find
> a lot of things Pynchon was getting at in Lot 49: the usual suspects,
> same old institutions, many of the same names; on the whole a
> startling one-to-one mapping of the same general schema that Pynchon
> was courageous enough to publish in 1966, albeit in deep code.
> Whether the authors of Legacy are correct in each and every detail is
> no longer important in a matter of such large national concerns.  It
> is the overall picture of the cover-up that seems to match what Lot 49
> is about on the counter-narrative level.  I think Legacy more or less
> strengthens my Lot 49 essay, which, in turn corroborates my methods.
>
> Finally, I’d like to take another look at Pierce Inverarity.  I’m old
> enough to have tracked down a volume of scholarship that was still to
> be found in used book shops forty years ago.  I remember it was in
> 1969, in a New Jersey bookstore, one that had a lot of political books
> of all stripes.  This one was called America’s 60 Families, by
> Ferdinand Lundberg, and it was first printed in 1937 (the year Pynchon
> was born) and I would be surprised if it wasn’t to be found in
> Pynchon’s father’s library.  The book was much in vogue with the
> wealthy, as well as the working class, and all the classes in-between.
>  It enjoyed at least ten printings that I know of; maybe more.  It is
> now a 70 year old work, and it reports on lots of events that were
> important a generation before.  For example:
>
> “Percy N. Furber, president of Oil Fields of Mexico, Ltd., in 1918
> told C.W. Barron that “the [Mexican] revolution was really caused by
> Henry Clay Pierce,” who owned thirty-five per cent of the stock of the
> Pierce-Waters Oil Company, which Standard Oil controlled through a
> sixty-five per cent stock interest, and was a confidential Rockefeller
> henchman. [my italics] “He wanted to get my property,” said Furber,
> who continued: “H. Clay Pierce demanded of Diaz that he should take
> off the taxes on all imports” to enable Standard Oil to bring in
> products from the United States.  “Diaz refused ... Pierce put up the
> money behind Francisco Madero and started the revolution ... neither
> Clay Pierce or anybody else ever dreamed of what would follow.”
>
> “Standard Oil’s Francisco Madero was ousted on February 18, 1913, and
> was executed by Victoriano Huerta, pawn of British oil interests.  The
> revolutionary movement deepened.  To the north Carranza and his
> lieutenant, Pancho Villa, took the field against Huerta.  The
> Caranzistas soon obtained backing from Cleveland H. Dodge [a
> Rockefeller in-law] and his companion magnates. [President] Wilson
> from the outset refused to recognize Huerta’s government.” p. 124
>
> ... “On April 21, 1914, American warships, upon instructions from
> Washington, shelled Vera Cruz to prevent a German ship from landing
> munitions consigned to Huerta.  There was loss of life and great
> property damage.” p.125
>
> So we see the Inverarity mom and dad named little “Pierce” after a
> man, known as “the 4th richest man in America,” and as a “confidential
> Rockefeller henchman.”  And that he was no mere real estate
> manipulator in a California defense plant town.  Clay Pierce was a man
> who had impact upon hemisphere-wide politics, and with the involvement
> of “British oil interests” and “German munitions” ships, could be said
> to be a player on the global level.
>
> And it is by virtue of half-name allusions that Pynchon wants us to
> link Henry Clay Pierce and Jay Gould (another henchman whose Erie
> Railroad granted Standard Oil secret freight rebates to gain an edge
> over its competitors).  And Gould’s statuette appears in Inverarity’s
> bedroom, all in chapter one of Lot 49.
>
> I know only a few things for certain.  Death and taxes.  I also know
> if a bird walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, dives like a duck,
> chances are it’s not a bald eagle.  I mean, how many points in
> identity do two things have to have before we can say they are
> identical.  I mean, how many Standard Oil henchmen do we have to
> identify before we can say they likely play a large part in the
> counter-narrative to Lot 49?  Especially when the half-names of
> “Secretaries James and Foster and Senator Joseph” pop up in chapter
> five, standing for Standard Oil henchmen James V. Forrestal, John
> Foster Dulles, and Joseph McCarthy; and those counter-narrative names
> seem to corroborate understanding of Pierce Inverarity to mean H. Clay
> Pierce, as Jay Gould means to corroborate illegal freight rebates.  I
> mean how many people pointed to in the very first chapter have to have
> such connections before we think the counter-narrative is likely about
> something having to do with the Rockefellers?
>
> Hardly a geezer is now alive who remembers how vigorously old JDR was
> hated.  As John T. Flynn opened his biography, God’s Gold (1932); “For
> forty years–from 1872 to 1914–the name of John D. Rockefeller was the
> most execrated name in American life.  It was associated with greed,
> rapacity, cruelty, hypocrisy, and corruption.  Upon it was showered
> such odium as has stained the name of no other American.  Theodore
> Roosevelt denounced Rockefeller as a law-breaker.  William J. Bryan,
> his fellow Christian, went up and down the land demanding that he be
> put in jail.  The attorney-generals of a half a dozen states clamored
> for his imprisonment.  La Follette called him the greatest criminal of
> the age. [my italics] Tolstoi said no honest man should work for him.
> Ministers of the gospel called the money he showered upon churches and
> colleges ‘tainted.’  For years no man spoke a good word for John D.
> Rockefeller, save the sycophant and the time-server.”
>
> I think those attitudes were also shared by anyone who was associated
> in any way with the Old Dynasty (built on coal, steel, railroads, and
> shipping money), as opposed to the New Dynasty, (built on oil,
> aluminum, airlines, and defense contracts); the Old Dynasty whose
> financier was J.P. Morgan through his banks, and whose closely related
> ally was the brokerage Pynchon & Co.  And that’s the way I think we
> have to read Pynchon.  And, I forgot to mention, in real life
> Pynchon’s wife, Melanie Jackson, is the great-grand-daughter of
> Theodore Roosevelt.
>
>                       Charles Hollander
>
>                       Baltimore, MD
>
>