COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

[Joseph Tracy]

Arrabal

When OM stops believing in the children dreaming the gathering, she enters a Mexican restauraunt and meets  acqaintance Jesus Arrabal, an anarchist she met at a beach in Mazatlan. This is Pynchon’s way of doing a  multilayererd dive into anarchist history revolutionary power struggles of the past , and associating it with the muted posthorn. 

layers

1) The reverse CIA: Conjuración de los Insurgentes Anarquistas, conjuracion means conjuring or plot as in secret plan. This obviously moves both ways. The real CIA at that time is operationally led by James Jesus Angleton who has a very dark history including recruiting ex axis fascists who killed many civilians and blamed the terrorism on leftists. Many think he was involved in the plot to kill JFK.
2) Arrabal’s Conjuracion is described as” traceable back to the time of the Flores Magon brothers” . There were 3 Magon brothers: Ricardo Flores, Enrique, and Jesus. Flores became a key intellectual voice of Mexican Anarchism and a revolutionary against dictator Porfirio Diaz, publishing for the IWW and editing the Regeneracion that seems to have arrived from 1904 at the same time as OM, with no stamp but a muted horn. In 1904 Flores Magon fled to the LA area when his writing was banned in Mexico. He was arrested in the US and died at 48 in Leavenworth. He regarded Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread as a kind of Anarchist bible.
3) Fernando Arrabal is a famous Spanish playwright , screenwriter, film director, writer, poet known for radical critiques of civilization, fascism, and  as exponent of anarchism. The arts are given a key part of social transformation. 

What OM and Arraball  have in common is Pierce Inverarity, and for both the meeting was a turning point. He renews his dedication to anarchism by seeing how shallow this real specimen of the rich obnoxious gringo was, so perfect a stereotype that “Arrabal asked her if he was real, or a spy, or making fun of him. Oedipa didn’t understand.” For Oediapa this is when she leaves Pierce and later  realizes that Jesus had seen and characterized  the basic nature of PI that she, until then, had not clearly seen.

The mysterious arrival of the 1904 edition of Magon’s Regeneracion has Arrabal say I am a foot soldier. The higher levels have their reasons. OM carries the thought with her.

This is one part of her night which P. Inverarity cannot have arranged and it marks out an underlying power struggle that comes from recent history and includes the dangers of revolutionary communication. It also carries a warmth of personal contact, and coffee and sympathy. 

So in this episode Pynchon has conjured up the CIA, Indigenous people’s struggle for liberation, mostly opposed by the US, the power of the arts and artists to expose the nature of oppression,  further confirmed that there is resistance and an underground network of communication, and summoned the cost and dangers of that resistance. Yet far from being  didactic or contrived it feels like one of the more human and natural episodes so far. She leaves feeling there may be a higher level guiding her quest.