Golden Fang

[Robin Landseadel]

On Sep 24, 2009, at 9:33 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Don Antenen <dantenen at yahoo.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> The idea I'm toying with right now, a week out from my first read  
>> of IV, is that the Golden Fang is mostly a distraction from what  
>> the LAPD is up to.
>
> If they can get you asking the wrong questions ...
>
> ... cf. V., Vheissu, Tristero, Them, et al.?  See, e.g., ...
>
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706
>
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114275

One of the quotes Dave linked to includes:

	  "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	'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in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.'
	  "Looking back on the novel from the perspective of
	its finale, it coul almost be viewed as a New Deal
	novel, concerned with gathering back into the American
	fold a 'third world' previouly excluded...." (pp.
	149-50)

The Tristero is the Golden Fang reversed, as if the Tristero/Golden  
Fang is a Tarot card. The Golden Fang represents the "haves" as the  
Trystero represents the "have-nots."