Pynchon's reply

[Dave Monroe]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I just reread Michael Harrington's The Other America about the invisible
> margin of American society, and many of Harrington's points (and even
> metaphors) are recycled in Lot 49. Looking too intently for hidden conspiracies
> does indeed prevent Oedipa from really noticing the human waste at the margins
> of society, under the freeway, just as chasing Kennedy's assassins and CIA may
> obscure this crucial theme of the novel. If only she'd looked....

>From Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the
Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O'Donnell
(New York: Cambridge UP, 1991), pp. 127-70:


   "As The Crying of Lot 49 nears its end, the Tristero, which has
been looming up all along, comes dangerously close to losing the
teasing epistemological uncertainty it has retained thus far in the
novel.  As Oedipa stumbles along a railroad track ... she remembers
things she would have seen 'if only she had looked' (179) ....  She
discovers, in other words, an entire hobo jungle deeply hidden and
seeming to have survived from the thirties.  The finale has been
pointed out by such critics as Richard Poirier as a major flaw in the
novel, an attempt through sheer rhetoric and lyrical oratory to
express much more than the novel can carry in its 'social'
context.
   "The Tristero underground has so far been implies to be a motley
crew of eccentrics and bohemian drop-outs, an archipelago of
'isolatoes' having 'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in
tatters.  The Tristero underground has so far been implies to be a
motley crew of eccentrics and bohemian drop-outs, an archipelago of
'isolates' having 'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in
tatters.  But suddenly, in this last rhetorical leap, the Tristero
broadens its scope to include, in a grand, almost liturgical gesture,
all the outcasts of American history....  By the end of the novel the
Tristero, shadowy as it still remains, is no longer a ghostly
underground (perhaps entirely phantasmatic) but a real, 'embattled'
underground about to come out of the shadows.  No longer hovering on
the edge as a cryptic plot, the 'Other' that the Tristero has thus far
represented is almost revealed as a version of 'the other America'
that Michael Harrington described ....  This America is 'the America
of poverty,' 'hidden today in a way it never was before,'
'dispossesed,' 'living on the fringes, the margin,' as 'internal
exiles.'" (pp. 149-50; Harrington quote in full @ p. 167)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59165
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70538
http://books.google.com/books?id=8AALiZY5XQoC
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521388333

And see as well ...

Richard Poirier, "The Embattled Underground," New York Times Book
Review (1 May 1966), p. 42

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-lot49.html