Embattled Underground

[rich]

a couple of missteps from a great review:

does he not forget Rachel Owlglass's love for her car's stick shift,
etc.--even she is drawn to the inanimate

does the book allude to Pierce's will being tampered with? I don't recall that

a depraved 15-yr old? one of the Paranoid chicks?

Pinguid not Fallopian is a speculator in CA real estate

rich

On 5/20/09, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> The New York Times Book Review
> May 1, 1966
> Embattled Underground
> By RICHARD POIRIER
> The Crying of Lot 49 By Thomas Pynchon
>
>
> Thomas Pynchon's second novel, "The Crying of Lot 49," reads like an
> episode withheld from his first, the much-acclaimed "V.," published
> three years ago. Pynchon's technical virtuosity, his adaptations of
> the apocalyptic-satiric modes of Melville, Conrad, and Joyce, of
> Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Nabokov, the saturnalian inventiveness
> he shares with contemporaries like John Barth and Joseph Heller, his
> security with philosophical and psychological concepts, his
> anthropological intimacy with the off-beat--these evidences of
> extraordinary talent in the first novel continue to display themselves
> in the second. And the uses to which he puts them are very much the
> same.
>
> The first novel, "V." was a designed indictment of its own comic
> elaborateness. The various quests for "V." all of them substitutes for
> the pursuit of love, are interwoven fantastically, and the coherence
> thus achieved is willfully fabricated and factitious. Pynchon's
> intricacies are meant to testify to the waste--a key word in "The
> Crying of Lot 49"--of imagination that first creates and is then
> enslaved by its own plottings, its machines, the products of its
> technology.
>
> Except for the heroin of "V.," Rachel Owlglass (she who can see wisely
> without being a voyeur), and the heroine of this novel, Oedipa
> Maas--lovable, hapless, decent, eager girls--both novels are populated
> by self-mystified people running from the responsibilities of love and
> compelled by phantoms, puzzles, the power of Things. No plot,
> political, novelistic, or personal, can issue from the circumstances
> of love, from the simple human needs, say, of a Rachel or an Oedipa,
> and Pynchon implicitly mocks this situation by the Byzantine
> complications of plots which do evolve from circumstances devoid of
> love.
>
> Gestures of warmth are the more touching in his novels for being
> terrifyingly intermittent, shy, and worried. The coda of the first
> novel, enunciated by the jazz player, McClintic Sphere, also serves
> the second: "Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass
> or publicizing it; keep cool but care." This is the stoical resolve of
> an embattled underground in a world increasingly governed by Ionesco's
> rhinoceri, to mention a vision markedly similar to Pynchon's. Efforts
> at human communication are lost among Pynchon's characters, nearly all
> of whom are obsessed with the presumed cryptography in the chance
> juxtaposition of Things, in the music and idiom of bars like the
> V-Note or The Scope, or merely in the "vast sprawl of houses" that
> Oedipa sees outside Los Angeles, reminding her of the printed circuit
> of a transistor radio, with its "intent to communicate."
>
> Even the title of "V." was cryptographic. It was available to all
> interpretations and answerable to none. Though "V." probably did not
> have Vietnam as one of its meanings in 1963, the novel so hauntingly
> evokes the preconditions of international disaster that Vietnam
> belongs in the long list of other V's. Roughly half the novel is an
> international melodrama of spying in the years since the Fashoda
> incident of 1898. It shows how international, like personal,
> complications accumulate from an interplay of fantasies constructed by
> opposing sides, each sustaining the other's dream of omnipotence, each
> justifying its excesses by evoking the cleverness of its opposition,
> each creating that opposition and, in some mysterious and crazy way,
> the moves and the successes of the other side as a provocation of its
> own further actions.
>
> "Plots" are an expression in Pynchon of the mad belief that some plot
> can ultimately take over the world, can ultimately control life to the
> point where it is manageably inanimate. And the ascription of "plots"
> to an opposition is a way of explaining why one's own have not
> achieved this ultimate control. Nearly from the outset, the people of
> Pynchon's novels are the instruments of the "plots" they help create.
>
> Their consequent dehumanization makes the prospect of an apocalypse
> and the destruction of self not a horror so much as the finally
> ecstasy of power. In international relations the ecstasy is war; in
> human relationships it can be sado-masochism, where skin itself is
> leather, leather a substitute for skin. The process is a party of
> daily news, and no other novelist predicts and records it with
> Pynchon's imaginative and stylist grasp of contemporary materials.
>
> In "V." private life (the story of Benny Profane, his girl Rachel, and
> the Whole Sick Crew) and international politics (involving the various
> European and African manifestations of "V." from the 1890's to 1939)
> are related only metaphorically. The characters in one plot take no
> direct part in the other. Of much shorter length and narrower focus,
> "The Crying of Lot 49" is located between Berkeley and Los Angeles,
> and its events, historical as well as private, are filtered through
> the career of one person, Oedipa Maas. Oedipa is introduced as a good
> suburban housewife in Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, making "the twilight's
> whiskey sours" against the arrival of her husband Wendell ("Mucho")
> Maas.
>
> At the outset her troubles are all manageable within the terms of
> ordinary daily living. She has a not always potent husband who suffers
> crises of conscience about his professions--formerly a used car
> salesman, he is now a disk jockey--and about his teen-age tastes and
> his taste for teen- agers. Also, she has a neurotic psychiatrist named
> Hilarius, who wants her to take LSD as an experiment, and a former
> lover, the tycoon Pierce Inverarity, who would sometimes call her,
> before his recent death, at one in the morning, using Slavic, comic
> Negro, or hostile Pachuco dialects.
>
> As the novel opens, Oedipa learns, on her return from a party whose
> "hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue," that she is
> an executor, along with a man named Metzger, formerly the child movie
> star known as Baby Igor, of Inverarity's will. The will was discovered
> some months after his death, a period during which it was perhaps
> tampered with in order to hide from Oedipa the revelations which his
> network of holdings, her "inheritance," seem to communicate: an
> America coded in Inverarity's testament. Before the novel closes,
> Oedipa loses her husband to LSD, her psychiatrist to madness, her one
> extra-marital lover, Metzger, to a depraved 15-year-old, and her one
> guide through the mazes of her inheritance, a Ralph Driblette, to
> suicide. In the final scene, accompanied by the famed philatelist,
> Genghis Cohen, she enters the "crying” of Lot 49, a collection of
> Inverarity's stamps.
>
> The "crying of Lot 49" refers to an auction, but the phrase evokes the
> recurrent suspicion on Oedipa's part that there is "revelation in
> progress all around her," that the stamps, "thousands of little
> colored windows into deep vistas of space and time," are themselves
> "crying" a message-- not above Pierce Inverarity necessarily, or even
> about Oedipa, but about "their Republic," about America, its
> inheritances and what we inherit from it, including things like used
> lots of stamps and used car lots. The "stamps" were often Inverarity's
> substitute for Oedipa, just as Mucho sought communication less with
> her than with his used cars or in the dancing of his teen-agers.
>
> Oedipa's fascination with the possibilities of "revelation," in
> inanimate things, and the curious patterns of connection among them,
> is induced, at least in party, by the fact that "things" have stolen
> from her the attention and love of both men. It is therefore possible
> that Inverarity became connected with the famous Tristero System, the
> central cryptograph of this novel as "V" was of the first, out of the
> impulse not to communicate with her, or to communicate with her only
> under cover of various disguises. It is also possible that the System,
> participation in which allows a "calculated withdrawal from the life
> of the Republic, from its machinery," from its forms of public
> communication, is an elaborate hoax, a teaser arranged by Inverarity
> to tantalize her away from home, love, and the open community, to
> seduce her into such subsidiary organizations as the "Inamorati
> Anonymous," an outfit she encounters in a queer bar in San Francisco.
>
> Alternatively, the hints about a Tristero System could have been
> planted in the will by interests anxious to prevent Oedipa from
> discovering the whole network of Inverarity's holdings, including
> those in Yoyodyne, an electronics and missile corporation, one
> executive of which, retired by automation, founded the Inamorati
> Anonymous. (Yo-yoing in "V." was the pointless, repetitive passage and
> return on any convenient ferry or subway, usually the Times
> Square-Grand Central run, for Benny Profane and his friends, and it is
> characteristic of Pynchon's metaphoric translations of personal into
> international idiosyncrasies that yo-yoing can also describe the
> horror of nuclear exchange.)
>
> Finally, Tristero may only be Oedipa's fantasy, an expression of her
> need to believe that there must be something to explain the drift of
> everyone she knows toward inhumanity. Otherwise she is either a
> paranoid or America is Tristero and she an alien.
>
> Between the opening scenes of domesticity and the closing scenes of
> the "crying" of Lot 49, Oedipa is like the hero in a book of "The
> Faerie Queene," tempted from her human virtues while on a quest that
> takes her through all manner of seemingly prearranged weirdness and
> monstrosity, all kinds of foreign "systems" thriving within an America
> which is itself "a grand and so intricate enigma." Only the Tristero,
> imagined as an intricate network of underground organizations, can
> encapsulate what she would otherwise have to see as the drift of the
> Republic itself toward "the glamorous prospect of annihilation."
>
> This novel is a patriotic lamentation, an elaborate effort not to
> believe the worst about the Republic. Patriotism for an ideal of
> America explains the otherwise yawning gap in Pynchon's comic shaping
> of his material. The Tristero System--it began in 1577 in Holland in
> opposition to the Thurn and Taxis Postal System and is active now in
> America trying to subvert the American postal system through an
> organization called W.A.S.T.E.--is a masterpiece of comic invention.
> It involves, among other things, one of the best parodies ever written
> of Jacobean drama, "The Courier's Tragedy," and a perhaps final parody
> of California right-wing organizations, Peter Pequid Society, named
> for the commanding officer of the Confederate man-of-war "Disgruntled"
> and opposed to industrial capitalism on the grounds that it has led
> inevitably to Marxism. Its leader, Mike Fallopian, speculates in
> California real estate.
>
> The exuberance of such comedy softens the portents of national
> calamity, but at the same time it makes it nearly impossible for
> Pynchon to persuade the reader, as he anxiously wants to do, that the
> whole System and the whole book have more meaning than a practical
> joke. The same difficulty was apparent in "V.", where the author's
> style at points of sincerity about love and youth was, by contrast to
> the vitality of his comic writing, platitudinously limp and
> sloganeering.
>
> In this second novel, the difficulty is if anything more acute.
> Pynchon chooses to have all the significance pass through the
> experience of only one comically named character, Oedipa Maas, as if
> he had chosen to have all of "V." assembled and assimilated by Benny
> Profane or by Rachel Owlglass. In "V." a structure of metaphor and
> cross-reference existed beyond the inquiry of many of the characters.
> The result was a dimension secured from comedy and within which the
> comedy could function as a form of what might be called local
> ignorance of the issues on which it was commenting. In "The Crying of
> Lot 49," however, the role given Oedipa makes it impossible to divorce
> from her limitations the large rhetoric about America at the end of
> the novel. This is unfortunately simply because Oedipa has not been
> given character enough to bear the weight of this rhetoric:
>
> "If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other
> town, any other estate, then by that continuity she might have found
> The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred
> lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she'd
> looked. She stopped a minute between the steel rails, raised her head
> as if to sniff the air. She became conscious of the hard, strung
> presence she stood on--knew as if maps had been flashed on her on the
> sky how these tracks ran on into others, and others, and others, knew
> they laced, deepened, authenticated the great American night, so wide
> and now so suddenly intense for her."
>
> What I think is happening at the end is that Pynchon desperately needs
> to magnify the consciousness of his heroine, if he is to validate her
> encounter with The Tristero System. Only by doing so can he maintain
> the possibility that the System is distinguishable from the mystery
> and enigma of America itself. To say that no distinction exists would
> be to sacrifice the very rationale of his comic reportage: that he is
> reporting not evidence about American so much as pockets of
> eccentricity in it, fragments dangerously close to forming a design
> but fragments nonetheless. Pynchon is reluctant to make all his people
> submit to the pervasive grotesqueness of American life, though he
> comes close to that, and he therefore exalts a character altogether
> too small for the large job given Oedipa at the end.
>
> In fact, Pynchon's best writing is often in his descriptions of
> American scenery, of objects rather than persons. He shows at such
> points a tenderness, largely missing from our literature since
> Dreiser, for the very physical waste of our yearnings, for the
> anonymous scrap heap of Things wherein our lives are finally joined.
> The Pynchon who can write with dashing metaphoric skill about the way
> humans have become Things, can also reveal a beautiful and
> heartbreaking reverence for the human penetration of the Thingness of
> this country, the signatures we make on the grossest evidences of our
> existence. Indeed we do leave codes and messages, seen by the likes of
> Mucho even in used cars:
>
> "Yet at least he had believed in the cars, maybe to excess: how could
> he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican,
> cracker, a parade seven days a week, bring with them the most godawful
> of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their
> families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked
> for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed,
> rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to
> depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopeless of
> children, of supermarket booze, or two, sometimes three generations of
> cigarette smokers, or only of dust--and when the cars were swept out
> you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no
> way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he
> supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept)
> and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons
> promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising
> specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads,
> Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or
> dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath
> off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was,
> a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over
> just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad
> of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body
> wastes--it nauseated him to look, but he had to look."
>
> Within this description is a haunting sequence of imagined human
> situations, typical and pathetic ones, fused with the particularized
> power that shows Pynchon's own obsession with the encoded messages of
> the American landscape. What is also noticeable here, and throughout
> the novel, is that the major character is really Pynchon himself,
> Pynchon's voice with its capacity to move from the elegy to the epic
> catalogue. The narrator sounds like a survivor looking through the
> massed wreckage of his civilization, "a salad of despair." That image,
> to suggest but one of the puns in the word Tristero, is typically full
> of sadness, terror, love, and flamboyance. But then, how else should
> one imagine a tryst with America? And that is what this novel is.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-lot49.html
>
>