Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

[Joseph Tracy]

I like this reflection. It seems astutely insightful.  I have even suggested in earlier writings that Pynchon is ambitious enough to have supplied an alternate text to the Biblical one that shapes so much western culture..  The difference is that he does not tell his audience what to think about the actions and ideas even of his nastiest characters. History and and myth and human behavior and beliefs become the text. This wide open, interconnected musical  form allows in experiences and stories as impossible as those from  the Bible , talking lightning, time machines, a hollow earth, worlds in sewers. The effect for me is to abandon safe roadmaps and connect dots for myself, always subject to new information. In this mode of processing language  and truth claims, deepest convictions get challenged and live or die only with profound inner change and genuine research. 

 The place where I question one aspect of your presented interpretation of the trystero/tristero  is something I have wondered about and part of why I wanted to re-read the novel. It is the transition from Tristero to W.A.S.T.E. The question is whether these are really the same or rather distinct  branches of the original phenomena and metaphorically represent very different historic or social  tendencies. The history  as Bortz outlines it shows a divergence within Tristero between those who see it as a tool to control any incursions into the privilege and power of the elite, but by using it in populist causes it has led to a more anarchistic branch and that is what Oedipa witnesses in the W.A.S.T.E  mail system . Bortz’s overview includes a lot of real history. Only the Tristero itself  and its key players are purely fictional. The question of what the initials stand for is only given one explanation which is ambiguous . We await silent Tristero’s Empire. 

I would also say that Pynchon’s text is much more than the Courier’s Revenge but it is true that he is identifying a core pattern of political history and the pursuit of power. 





> On Jun 10, 2024, at 8:01 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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?...
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>