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2 / The Crying of Lot 49, circa 1642; or, Pynchon, Periodicity, and Total War A third of the way through Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the mystery deepens. Oedipa Maas’s quest to untangle the confusion surrounding a dead lover’s estate has sent her to see The Courier’s Tragedy, a barely known (and in reality nonexistent) Jacobean revenge tragedy. The play initially sounds exactly as you would expect if Pynchon decided to do revenge tragedy: absurd, unbelievably complex, over-thetop , a “Road Runner cartoon in blank verse.”1 There are land mines, a falcon with envenomed talons, an exploding goat, a lye pit, and a scene in which a character’s tongue is ripped out with pincers before being impaled on a rapier, lit on fire, and waved across the stage by a madman reciting an almost unreadable send-up of apocalyptic rhetoric. So the play reads much like a Pynchon novel as a whole, pushing the limits of good taste and generic form, and the audience’s reaction to the play within the novel echoes the frustration and anger many readers have experienced upon finishing the novel itself. However, in spite of the play’s relentless escalation of revenge tragedy’s famous intensity, and for all its unbelievably complex plotting, Pynchon, through Oedipa’s viewing experience, offers a crystalline vision of the play’s significance: “though the words were all spoken in Transplanted Middle Western Stage British, Oedipa found herself after five minutes sucked utterly into the landscape of evil Richard Wharfinger had fashioned for his 17th-century audiences, so preapocalyptic, death-wishful, sensually fatigued, unprepared, a little poignantly, for that abyss of civil war that had been waiting, cold and deep, only a few years ahead of them” THE CRYING OF LOT 49, CIRCA 1642 / 43 (49). In an instant, the seemingly pastiche-driven and metageneric play becomes proleptically representational: the play’s power comes into being only when it is viewed from a certain historical distance, and what seems at first the over-the-top satirizing of a genre can look—from the right distance—like the beginning of a historical chain that links the aesthetic with the political. It is the contention of this chapter that the novel rewards a reading that remembers this account of the play, and that asks us to consider what future event might stabilize, as anticipatory symptom, the novel’s famous indeterminacy. Pynchon’s crucial gesture toward the play’s imaginative power suggests a certain talent for literary history. Jonathan Dollimore has written extensively about how Jacobean revenge tragedy was transformed across the twentieth century: a genre that was all about the limits of humanist self-knowledge in 1961 was politicized by the 1970s, and in 1982 seen by Franco Moretti as a possible cause of the English Civil War.2 So Pynchon’s sense of the genre’s forward-looking importance itself looks forward, coming as it does in a novel published in 1966. I’m not out to establish the political significance of revenge tragedy, though, or to describe the ability of texts to generate real-world events (Moretti’s reading of revenge tragedy).3 Rather, the understanding of the play’s historical imagination that Pynchon offers is at once deeply familiar and oddly unsettling, and suggests one way in which the novel’s own historical imagination might be rethought. The historicizing gesture is familiar to the extent that many readers of Pynchon’s expansive career will recall that his novels are filled with amateur historians (Stencil and Fallopian come immediately to mind) who reveal how the passage of time allows us retrospectively to understand the spectral foreshadowings of the future in various past events. So, for instance, Pynchon’s novels often return to how the grisly events of colonialism forecast the inevitable slide into the total wars of the twentieth century. Pynchon’s novels often look backward like this in order to imagine the links between the narrative’s present setting and an expansive past; though they certainly flirt with—and even at times embrace—paranoia and conspiracy, their historiographic negotiations are never entirely reducible to either. But the novels also frequently cut in another direction, exploiting the distinction between their historical setting and the time of their publication and reading. Just as Pynchon’s characters use their knowledge of the past to recognize the significance of events in ways unavailable to any contemporary observer of them, so too is the reader...

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