The Russian Fleet and the Civil War

[Dave Monroe]

The Russian Fleet and the Civil War
Author(s): F. A. Golder
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Jul., 1915), pp. 801-812
Published by: American Historical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1835544

Cf. ..

Eve, Martin Paul.  "'Historical Sources for Pynchon's Peter Pinguid Society."
   Pynchon Notes, 56-57 (Spring-Fall 2009 [2011]): 242-245

https://www.martineve.com/2011/12/12/publication-historical-sources-for-pynchon%E2%80%99s-peter-pinguid-society-pynchon-notes-56-57-spring-fall-2009-pp-242-245/

http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm/forthcom.html#varo

Hollander, Charles.  "Pynchon, JFK and the CIA:
   Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49."
   Pynchon Notes 40-41 (Spring-Fall 1997);  61-106.

The Russian–Confederate naval encounter may seem merely silly at
first, with its improbable–sounding names (Popov is, however,
genuinely historical) and its ambiguous and inconsequential actions.
Yet we know from "Entropy" and V. that The Education of Henry Adams is
an important source for Pynchon, and we see in The Education that
Secretary of State William H. Seward (1861–1870) sent new Minister
Cassius M. Clay to St. Petersburg on the same ship that carried
another new Minister, Charles Francis Adams (and his
twenty–three–year–old son Henry), to London. In hindsight, the
post–Civil War purchase of Alaska from Russia ("Seward’s Folly")
suggested that the Union had contracted with Russia to stir up the
global pot in the Crimea to keep the British Navy in the Mediterranean
and to keep England from intervening in the American Civil War on
behalf of the South. Intervention was a real possibility at the time.
Despite her anti–slavery rhetoric, England, or rather Palmerston,
"desired the severance [of the South] as a diminution of a dangerous
power" (Adams 115). That is, British statesmen realized the U.S. was
likely to become their competitor for world power if the Union
survived, and might have intervened in the war on behalf of the
Confederacy but for Russian sabre–rattling.

Lest we think that connection farfetched, such an allusion
unintentional, Pynchon provides the confirming datum when Di Presse
says Metzger will have to "'do something really Darrowlike'" (58) to
revive interest in the proposed TV series based on Metzger’s career as
an actor–turned–lawyer. Clarence Darrow (1857–1938), the foremost
lawyer of his generation—defender of labor leaders, evolutionists,
even thrill killers—had the middle name Seward. This is Pynchon’s way
of telling us decoders that, yes, it is Seward’s Folly he means to
evoke, with the implication that the Russians kept the heat on the
British in return for the U.S. purchase of a worthless–seeming tract
of land, a dicey–looking real–estate speculation called Alaska, for
about two cents an acre.

As still further confirmation that Seward’s Folly is the referent of
the Peter Pinguid story, Oedipa offhandedly mentions Fairbanks,
Alaska, while discussing Maxwell’s Demon with Stanley Koteks. The post
office could mis–sort and send Koteks out in a mailbag to Honolulu, or
Grand Forks, or anywhere else, but Pynchon highlights Alaska.

Pynchon might also be using the tale of Russian–Confederate conflict,
Dugdale argues, to parody "the events of 2–3 August 1964, the
so–called first and second Tonkin Gulf incidents (the latter entirely
fictive), which Lyndon Johnson used as a pretext to launch bombing
strikes and acquire new powers to conduct the [Vietnam] war in secret"
(155). So, on the underside of the joke narrative, we have one level
of allusion to the role of Russia in the American Civil War and
another to the way real or imaginary naval encounters provided the
pretext for increasing U.S. presidential powers during the Vietnam
War. Pynchon is zeroing in.

The Dutch statesman Jan De Witt favored local rather than
international priorities for the Low Countries, opposed William of
Orange and was killed—killed and dismembered, his limbs displayed
publicly on lamp posts as an example: dismembered, like many victims
in The Courier’s Tragedy. The PPS mail system may "'not [be] as
rebellious as it looks'" in challenging "'a government monopoly'"
(52); but Fallopian says the PPS mail carrier De Witt is '"the most
nervous one we’ve had all year'" (53). No wonder. The later reference
to Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, and the discussion of Dutch
history (158–60) confirm that we have the right De Witt (not, say, De
Witt Clinton).

Fallopian explains that PPS mail–delivery operates only in San
Narciso, but has pilot projects in "'Washington and l think Dallas'"
(53). Dallas might have raised red flags in the minds of characters in
1964, the time of the narrative, and would have raised red flags in
the minds of readers in 1966, when the novel was published. Dallas was
where, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was
assassinated. In 1964, the year of the Warren Commission’s report on
the assassination, Dallas was a buzzword, nearly synonymous with
assassination and coverup, as loaded with sinister implication for
Americans as the name Tristero was for the Jacobeans at the time of
The Courier’s Tragedy.

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/magiceye.htm

http://www.vheissu.net/art/art_eng_49_hollander.htm