The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

[Joseph Tracy]

"Angelo flies into an apoplectic rage, and orders Niccolò’s pursuit and destruction. But not by his own men."

There is a hush, everyone knows who will be sent, "Angelo knows but does not say,”  What he does is,

"Enlist the poniards swift of those who, sworn To punctual vendetta never sleep, Lest at the palest whisper of the name Sweet Niccolò hath stol’n, one trice be lost In bringing down a fell and soulless doom Unutterable. . . ."

Then we see the 3 assassins dressed in black approaching Niccolo who is left dead and mutilated.  And the key line is spoken about Tristero.

In short the 3 tristero agents were hired by Duke Angelo to murder Niccolo , the rightful heir. 

The attention in the novel then turns to who the hell is the Tristero and we begin to build a sense of their role in a long history of power struggles, postal and political, and while the Tristero and WASTE are fictions,  much of that history of violent machiavellian  power struggles is accepted history.

As to what Pynchon thinks about who killed Kennedy and how it was done,( The congressional committee to investigate assassinations said it was a conspiracy in the late 70s,)   those exact details are not critical to COL 49. The 3 bums as gunmen was one theory which was widely held, which Pynchon could have chosen to use in his Courier’s Revenge play as a question mark  and dramatic scene supplied by Driblette , and  which in relation to JFK  points out that  there were many reasons and witnesses putting doubt on the lone gunman theory. I see other ways Pynchon points to the Kennedy assassination and leaves a large gap in the novel that is best filled by that event and those who investigated it. 

I know I am not going to convince you but your pronouncement about what Pynchon or Dylan mean strike me as only having a basis in your own beliefs since you are not any more privy to their thoughts than anyone else.  Nobody can stop you from making your pronouncements of definitive truth about Pynchon’s work , and maybe you think you have somehow proven your expertise and all will yield before your words but I truly doubt that is a valid premise.  

> On Jun 21, 2024, at 1:45 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Joseph sez
> 
> The black tristero agents are hired killers, not anarchists. You are
>> conflating The Waste of Oedipa’s SanFramcisco experience with the hired
>> murderers of Angelo. The bums in the Dylan song were also hired killers
> who
>> had a remarkable likeness to CIA agents.
> 
> The text calls them assassins. nothing about being "hired"...in fact,
> Oedipa asks this look:
> "Was it written in as a stage direction?"....in this deeply uncertain,
> willfully uncertain text,
> all we know is they are assassins.....lots of historical movements, even
> those abusing the
> anarchist tradition had assassins who did not need to be hired and weren't.
> 
> I'm not wasting my time on the great Dylan song, where bums supposedly
> don't mean what they always mean in Dylan, and/ but 'bearing a remarkable
> likeness to CIA agents' is another
> Tracy---and Huebschrauber's---dustbin of history fantasies.....
> 
> Pynchon would not have bothered with such cheap conspiracy theories and
> didn't. The text shows it.