CoL49 - Zachary All Suit

[Joseph Tracy]

Could someone let me know the starting and  ending  sentence of this week's read? My pagination does not align. 

> On Jul 5, 2024, at 5:08 PM, J K Van Nort via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> 
> The quote from Hollander:"Mixing lightweight allusions with more heavily weighted ones, this overt/covert, public, yet secret integration creates distinct levels of meaning, like the overside and underside of a tapestry or the two distinct patterns the eye must focus on in a Magic Eye print."
> and...
> "Pynchon sometimes uses seemingly casual names, like Peter Pinguid" "Then later in the text, Pynchon might frame the causal name or character in a context that allows it to be understood."He offers examples of this with Pierce Inverarity and Wendell "Mucho" Maas.
> 
> Just so my bad paraphrase doesn't negate his argument, which is that there are multiple ways to perceive the story. It reminds me of a literary criticism of Blake as a poet against empire, which he does with allusion and allegory.
> 
> In solidarity,
> James
> 
> Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l

Each  modern American  Pynchon novel works on one basic level as a detective inquiry, a mystery. Same with GR and V.  (The other motif  he uses is the quest: for knowledge, to accomplish a task, follow one’s talent, get revenge, but mysterious doings inevitably crop up and are pursued) . The mystery is often multilayered or multi dimensional, the digression, the fanning out, the disappearing and reappearing thread is part of good writing in this mode and to be expected. Why would a novelist of ideas use this format? Seems pretty evident to me that part of the reason for a  sophisticated mystery of ideas like this  is an invitation to the reader to follow both the leads in the story and the ideas those leads evoke.  There  is often little in the way of a solution to the crimes, or a resolution of the questions, because much of the intention is satirical, that is to question , poke fun at, and expose the folly of accepted narratives and myths. He seems intent to shock his audience awake and compel them to explain why these stories shake us, intrigue us, and challenge us.

Names and historic references abound in every P work, often with layered possible meanings. Wendell Mucho Maas. Wendell in Dutch  usually has one ‘l’ and means wanderer derived from vandal, the 2 llls imply a dell or low place and at the start wendell seems a wanderer in some internal low places, very unsatisfied and unable to feel his work is meaningful. It is hard to see the Mucho in Mucho Mas (Spanish for much more, a familiar phrase in southern Cal.) Much more what? But they are definitely affluent and abundance seems easy for him. Later we see he grows or wanders into a rich interior life through his LSD enhanced  connection to the nuances of sound and music. The Mucho Mas  seems mostly  a joke but the Maas dutch name means web or mesh, or opening in a weave, which is where Hollander got the metaphor of a tapestry which has a different appearance from the back. It is also an implication of being embedded or woven into a larger pattern, or of an opening or window or door into another world, like Inverarity’s stamps.  It also reminds  of the famous Walter Scott  line, O what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. Deception appears early with Metzger and OMs questions and everything she takes for granted  seems to be enmeshed in deception.  Finally her Tristero  inquiry dead-ends in the sale of the stamps. The evidence sold off to the highest bidder. Like a loony tunes cartoon, That’s all folks.

Meanwhile her inquiry has pointed to some very mysterious and violent power struggles stretching into the distant past and secretive communication networks which are” apparently still very active” as Cohen notes.  This abrupt ending of a dangerous inquiry, written when it is, is more than a little reminiscent of the unsatisfying Warren Commission  inquiry into the JFK assassination with its evident conflict of interest represented in Alan Dulles. 

Another Hollander  contribution to understanding COL 49 and the styles used by TP  is again drawn from a name in Col 49, the name of Remedios Varro where her art may well have been chosen with dual roles, 1 vector being her last name, referring to a famed Roman writer who popularized the Mennipean satire as a form that fits rather perfectly with that of Thomas Pynchon. Who first proposed this stylistic  comparison I do not know but I will not be surprised if it is Hollander. 

"Menippean satires seek to reveal readers to themselves enabling them to see themselves and their world(s) more clearly. “ quote from Janet Sayers essay”King Consumer: …”