Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

[Mark Kohut]

Backfilling. Mine.

Someone asked "What about that text of (The Courier's Tragedy)?" or close.

I have always thought this about that text. The major Western 'text' is the
Bible
and since that book's revelations are shown to be ambiguously missing in
the usual signalling way
in Crying  what TRP gives us instead is a new, secular text.

First, reflect on Courier and its thematic connection to The Trystero. Then
tragedy.

Think of this text as an artsy presentation of the meaning of history, as
textual art does....(as we read novels and drama, from Shakespeare (and all
the Jacobeans) thru *Middlemarch* and *Magic Mountain* and *Gravity's
Rainbow and more, more) *
As text capturing history the meaning is that history is brutal,
torturing and murdering and Revenge---the major theme of Jacobean
theater---the cycle of history as reaction and counter-reaction, attack and
attack back, even JUSTLY but still the cycle of suffering and death.
As we read though, we see what Historians say: the text of history is
corrupted; we aren't sure of what exactly happened in lots of history; our
reading of it changes; stuff we thought we saw is gone, there is new text,
new missing text.....how do we see

History?

Is The Trystero responsible for the alternate readings of history in some
ways. They do give us an alternative way of communicating; an alternative
text ON PAPER, via universal alternative communication (and some actions) .
.....Later in this story we are going to actually read about another
alternative communication. And we are going to read about a perfect
anarchist's dance......

Anarchism as bits of something---grace?--alternative ways of being, yes,
are elsewhere in all of Pynchon from this to *Against the Day (*and *Inherent
Vice*? )

is he Trystero, a self-organizing mail service, an anarchist force in
history? The anarchist force?...