ST ch 37 Business Plot

[Joseph Tracy]

In the p-lists last reading of COL 49 I decided to explore the idea ( 
most forcefully developed by Charles Hollander) that the/Courier's 
Tragedy /play and the tristero was an indirect reference to the 
assassination of JFK and the battle for control of the media  and of 
private thought life of citizens  which is part of CIA/deepstate 
history, but is a concept and practice of statecraft reaching far back 
in history, in COL49 the history focusing  on the reformation  era. I 
did not refer much to Hollander's work, trying to see the patterns  and 
references for myself but the results had some overlap and I found the 
basic premise to be hard wired into the novel. Of course there is much 
more there concerning this time -period in California, the role of the 
Aerospace and fledgling digital industries,  the ongoing battle to shape 
the mental landscape,  and the hidden legacy of fascism evident in MK 
ultra, the postwar movement of axis wealth, the Vietnam war.  I don't 
understand what  Pynchon felt he had unlearned with the Crying of Lot 
49.  Guesses won't do and he seems to have little else to say.

Since the 60s some very powerful books and research into the CIA, MK 
Ultra, and the JFK assassination have been published. For me the most 
telling is David Talbot's book the Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the 
CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. Talbot did lots of 
interviews with people who knew Dulles and other players and obviously 
had the advantage of having been educated in the elite schools and had 
family familiarity with the upper classes. He has since written about 
Smedley Butler, the Kennedy brothers, and radicals from the 60s.



On 5/10/26 10:41 AM, Robin Landseadel via Pynchon-l wrote:
> Joseph Tracy:
>   
> “ . . . Unfortunately Eisenhower did not have the courage or good sense to resist
> the complete takeover of US foreign policy by Allen Dulles and his CIA cohorts, who
> included several ex Nazi officers. How he accomplished this with little resistance from
> Ike is documented very well in David Talbot's very readable book The Devil's Chessboard:
> Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. The author also details
> how Dulles and Angleton, while in the OSS, defied FDR policies by favoring friendly relations
> with ex Nazis and helping German industrialists protect their financial assets. . . “
>
> Check and Double Check (see pages 8, 97 & 103 of ST).
>   
> I don’t know how “complete” the takeover of US foreign policy by the Dulles Brothers was,
> though I’ll take your word for it. I’ve read The Crying of Lot 49 more than any other book in my
> life. I notice the name-dropping because it seems to be a regular feature of Pynchon to bury the
> lede. Charles Hollander writes about this in his Magic Eye views of The Crying of Lot 49:
>
> “ . . . Second, by using familiar names like Perry Mason and playful names like Mucho Maas
> (a pun on the Spanish for "Much More"), Pynchon creates cover for the more heavily
> freighted names, allusions that carry historical–political meaning: Bartók, Jay Gould,
> Kubitschek, Wendell [Wilkie], [St.] Hilarius [of Poitiers], Gestapo, Var[r]o. The allusive
> names are offered blandly, as if they were equal in value, meant as little, as Tupperware,
> Fort Wayne or Jack Lemmon. Mixing lightweight allusions with more heavily weighted ones,
> this overt/covert, public yet secret integration creates distinct levels of meaning, like the
> overside and underside of a tapestry or the two distinct patterns the eye must focus on in a
> Magic Eye print . . . “
>
> Oedipa is doing some library research, finds herself at UC Berkeley:
>
> “ . . . But it was English she was hearing as she crossed Bancroft Way among the blonde
> children and the muttering Hondas and Suzukis; American English. Where were Secretaries
> James and Foster and Senator Joseph, those dear daft numina who'd mothered over Oedipa's
> so temperate youth?"
>
> " . . . Who are these half–named Secretaries and Senator? U.S. Secretary of the Navy (1944-
> 1947) and Secretary of Defense (1947-1949) James V. Forrestal; U.S. Secretary of State
>   (1953-1959) John Foster Dulles; and U.S. Senator (R., Wisconsin, 1947-1957) Joseph R.
>   McCarthy. While the public–sector careers of Forrestal and Dulles have been extensively
> documented, their private–sector careers are less widely discussed. . . "
>   
> " . . . In another world. Along another pattern of track, another string of decisions taken, switches
> closed, the faceless points men who'd thrown them now all transferred, deserted, in stir, fleeing
> the skip-tracers, out of their skull, on horse, alcoholic, fanatic, under aliases, dead, impossible to
> find ever again. Among them they had managed to turn the young Oedipa into a rare creature
> indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and sit-ins, but just a whiz at pursuing strange words in
> Jacobean texts . . . “
>   
> CoL 49 90/91
>
> Numina: Plural form of Latin term for divinity, divine will or divine presence.
>
> Oedipa Maas: Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49https://thurnundtaxis.blogspot.com/2012/10/pynchon-jfk-and-cia-magic-eye-views-of.html
>   
> (Allow me to digress—I am about to offer a bonehead reading of CoL49:
> Oed, library researcher, the author. Subject researched, family history,
> Pynchon and Company. Pierce Inverarity, E. A. Pierce. Ritual reluctance,
> nobody wants to talk about it, historical documentation is dodgy. The
> stamps: tax stamps. And so on, with the rise of empire roaring in
> background of the smoggy summer of Stanford, San Narcisco, and
> San Francisco California, 1964, said empire being the real estate, the real legacy
> of Pierce, as it later folded into Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith,
> which kinda/sorta rhymes with Warpe, Wist-full, Kubitscheck and McMingus.
>
> Thank you for your attention to this matter.)
>   
> This is a post I made at the Pynchon Wiki for Inherent Vice:
>
> Pynchon's California Trilogy and the CIA - Thomas Pynchon Wikihttps://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pynchon%27s_California_Trilogy_and_the_CIA
>
> “ . . . Pynchon's "California Trilogy"—The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, & Inherent Vice—all
> cite the CIA in the context of drugs.
>   
> The Crying of Lot 49 does so covertly—the only time we encounter the name CIA is during
> Oedipa’s hallucinogenic night in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley:
>
>   
> "You remember everything," Oedipa said, "Jesus; even tourists. How is your CIA?"
> Standing not for the agency you think, but for a clandestine Mexican outfit known as
> the Conjuration de los Insurgentes Anarquis-tas, traceable back to the time of the
> Flores Magon brothers and later briefly allied with Zapata. . ."
>   
> . . .So her eyes did fall presently onto an ancient rolled copy of the anarcho-syndicalist
> paper Regeneracion. The date was 1904 and there was no stamp next to the
> cancellation, only the handstruck image of the post horn.
>   
> "They arrive," said Arrabal*. "Have they been in the mails that long? Has my name been
> substituted for that of a member who's died? Has it really taken sixty years? Is it a
> reprint? Idle questions, I am a footsoldier. The higher levels have their reasons." She
> carried this thought back out into the night with her.
>
> This might constitute Pynchon’s most blatant act of misdirection . . . “
>   
> Once one connects the dots one can see the fingerprints of the CIA and the Miitary-
> Industrial complex all over the Crying of Lot 49.
>
> *Arrabal—love this:
>   
> Fernando Arrabal Terán; born August 11, 1932) is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film
> director, novelist, and poet. He was born in Melilla and settled in France in 1955. Regarding his
> nationality, Arrabal describes himself as "desterrado", or "half-expatriate. Half-exiled.”
>
> In 1962, Arrabal co-founded the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland
> Topor, inspired by the god Pan.
>
> Fernando Arrabal - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Arrabal
>
> Arrabal’s play “The Automobile Graveyard” has obvious associations with the contents
> Of CoL49:
>
> the automobile graveyard : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archivehttps://archive.org/details/automobilegravey0000unse
>
> “ . . . If only she'd looked. She remembered now old Pullman cars, left where the moneyed
> run out or the customers vanished, amid green farm flat nesses where clothes hung,
> smoke lazed out of jointed pipes. Were the squatters there in touch with others, through
> Tristero; were they helping carry forward that 300 years of the house's disinheritance?
> Surely they'd forgotten by now what it was the Tristero were to have inherited; as perhaps
> Oedipa one day might have. What was left to inherit? That America coded in Inveracity’s
> testament, whose was that? She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids
> sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's
> pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling
> billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked
> Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like
> caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and
> secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles,
> the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages.
> 159/160
>
> Also:
>
> “Arrabal” is a Spanish noun that refers to a suburb or outlying part of a city. In a broader
> sense, it can denote areas that are typically considered to be economically or socially less
> developed compared to the main urban center. It can also carry connotations of being on
> the fringes of society or marginalized.
>
> The Meaning of arrabal | Goong.com - New Generation Dictionaryhttps://goong.com/spanish/the_meaning_of_arrabal/
>   
> "There must be a pony in here somewhere."
> --
> Pynchon-L:https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l