COL 49 Ch 5 Arrabal

[Mark Kohut]

I don't think TRP put all of that into his Arrabal...it kills the story; it
adds meaning that distorts the story. It buries his
narrational meanings....

On Thu, Jul 11, 2024 at 1:37 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
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>