The Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

[Mark Kohut]

Ok, we all know of the card Teacher Baxter Hathaway
sent to creative writing student Thomas Pynchon when he
was very late to turning in any writing per the class assignments:

"Shit or Get Off" or suchlike of a man straining on the toilet....

So, this longer threatened piece of mine on the end of Crying of Lot 49,
riffing/"analysing",
will be broken into shorter turds.....

Here are some words on, contra Mr Van Nort, the sublime beauty,
cohesive thematic widening embracive meaning of the ending of Lot 49. IMO

First here is James Wood on the ending of Richard Linklater's* Before
Sunset:*
What most interested me, however, was that it was a film improved by a
beautiful ending, so that as soon as it was over it began to seem a better
film than it had seemed while it was running. (And this wasn't just because
it was over...) Jesse has agreed to go to Celine's apartment. She puts on a
particularly lovely Nina Simone song, "Just in Time", and dances along to
it. Suddenly she turns to Jesse and says, "Baby, you're going to miss that
plane." Jesse shrugs, says: "I know," and then gives a foolish smile....

Chekhov-like, Wood avers....MK: all open endedness able to expand into so
many possibilities
that all the real and not-so in Lot 49, i.e. all those dropped religious
allusions along with the full gamut of
mysteries re the Trystero and all the words on America means......

Pychon has ended this novel about America in the mid-sixties capturing
--with such compact
writing density (as Joseph implied)--the incredible possibilities America
was in 1966.....

This is what Oedipa is pregnant with.

This is why the Trystero is both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary;
violent and a force for
communicative peace in history. That is, that history is not ruled by the
'logic' of the excluded middle;
that so much anarchic reality is beyond the binary; beyond all the known
either-or rules....

That history lets in what is not determined, unknown as we await the
crying.