That Revenge Drama in Lot 49.

[ish mailian]

Why did young Pynchon opt to place a play within his playful novella?
And why opt for a revenge tragedy? His audience, like the audience of
the Elizabethan/Jacobean must provide part of the answer. And the
playwright/novelist, young Pynchon , must provide part of the answer.
Why Seneca's tragedies were so influential in Elizabethan/Jacobean
drama, for authors and audiences, and what young Pynchon hoped to
convey, other than the fact that he can plot/knot into with skill and
humor, to his audience, and why at the Tank this play is performed
then, and what of himself, if anything he divulges to us.

Young Pynchon, longing for order, for return, ultimately embraces play
and indeterminacy. The revenge play has been linked to detective
fiction and the "evolving attitudes to retribution."  The Crying of
Lot 49 is planted in the military industrial complex of California, a
country, as Hamlet might describe it, tilted toward war, and out of
joint. A joint, joint, my country for a joint, a joint for my country,
for the whole lot.



 http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184515.001.0001/acprof-9780198184515


On Sun, Dec 23, 2018 at 6:05 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So bloody violent. Meanings? Is this History; is this the unverifiable
> text that is the transmission of History?  The inherent vice of Human
> Nature, which we must go beyond--if we can? History as Jacobean
> revenge drama, Hegelianism as Titus Andronicus: History as the Marquis
> de sade?
>
> Think of Lot 49, Pynchon and The Word. The religious, leaning
> Catholic, obsession thru the fiction to AGAINST THE DAY, w Mark's
> gospel. Think of the gnosticism
> reading(s), finds, allusions of Pynchon.
>
> I have recently learned this about the Nag Hammadi scroll finds of
> 1945. "One could hardly have scripted a more sensational story for the
> explosive reintroduction of Gnocticism than that of the rediscovery of
> the Nag Hammadi scrolls." Before those two brothers had gone out into
> the desert and dug up the three foot earthen jar containing them,
> their father had been brutally murdered by one Ahmed Ishmael.....While
> the scrolls were being stored at home, and some used as kindling by
> their mom, they had a chance to get even with Ahmed. They seized him
> and "hacked off his limbs, ripped out his heart and devoured it among
> them, as the ultimate act of good revenge".
> This act is what led to the saving of the scrolls as they fled with
> them fearing that they would be discovered as authorities looked for
> them.
>
> The Word or words survived.
>
> Good times.
>
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l