I have finally read some Thomas Pynchon. I finished The Crying of Lot 49 a few days ago. The book was published in 1966, and it is easy to see how it might have influenced Illuminatus! The plot concerns a woman stumbling upon the centuries-old machinations of a secret group. Is it real, or is she just paranoid and succumbing to conspiracy theories? There's even an element involving bodies at the bottom of a Euroopean lake, in this case a lake in Italy and the bodies of American soldiers.
As I have mentioned, I keep a copy of Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson on my phone for easy reference, and so I searched for "Pynchon" in the text and discovered that RAW has an entry for The Crying of Lot 49 in Everything Is Under Control. In that entry, Wilson asserts that the book's plot includes "a web spinning around the Bavarian Illuminati (which is never mentioned by name)," but he doesn't offer any evidence, and when I asked Eric he didn't know what RAW was referring to. Can anyone help?
In any case, I have noticed something else which seems to strengthen the case that Lot 49 might have influenced Illuminatus! The front of the Harper Perennial Deluxe Modern Classics edition I checked out from the library mentions that parts of the novel were published in Esquire and Cavalier magazines.
The Cavalier bit stunned me, as Robert Shea was editor of the magazine from 1965 to 1967, before he went on to Playboy, where he met Wilson. A little rooting around on the Internet reveals that the Pynchon excerpt was published in the March 1966 issue, in about the middle of Shea's tenure.
Retired English professor J. Kerry Grant, who wrote A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49, confirmed in an email, " 'The Shrink Flips' appeared in the March, 1966 issue, so it seems likely that Shea oversaw the publication of the extract." I asked Professor Grant if his book would give me details about how "The Shrink Flips" was placed in Cavalier, and he said, "I'm afraid not."
Shea was interviewed twice by Neal Wilgus, and in an interview published in 1985 in Science Fiction Review, there's the following exchange:
SFR: What contemporary authors do you get the most out of reading?
SHEA: The list is continually undergoing revision as my taste changes and my reasons for reading change, but John Fowles, Romain Gary, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Penn Warren seem to have taken up permanent residence in my literary pantheon.
Don't forget the Vineland online reading group, which starts in June.
6 comments:
Great post. I love The Crying of Lot 49. I hope to finish rereading it today or tomorrow.
Pynchon shows up in the Homing Pigeons book of RAW's Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy except he appears a woman in that alternate universe. It references Silent Tristero's Empire which comes from The Crying of Lot 49. Tristero possibly seems a reference to Jack Kerouac's Tristessa. Pynchon ackowledge's Kerouac's influence in his introduction to Slow Learner.
Some real hidden gems in those smut magazines back in the day. I bought a few off eBay for the RAW content "back in the day" and I remember one had an excellent Alan Watts piece.
The Thurn and Taxis family has strong connections to Bavaria?
From Illuminatus!:
"We accept Bugs Bunny as an exemplar of Mummu here, too, but otherwise we have little in common with the SSS. That's the Satanist, Surrealists and Sadists— the crew who began your illuminization in Chicago. All we share with them actually is use of the Tristero anarchist postal system, to evade the government's postal inspectors, and a financial agreement whereby we accept their DMM script—Divine Marquis Memorial script— and they accept our hempscript and the flaxscript of the Legion of Dynamic Discord."
Thanks, Jesse!
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