In a recent post I mentioned that I had recently read Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and that it seemed to be an obvious influence on Illuminatus!, and I also mentioned a connection between Robert Shea and Pynchon.
In a comment, Jesse Walker notes that Illuminatus! actually has a passage that cites Lot 49:
"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."
The "Tristero anarchist postal system" is from The Crying of Lot 49. Dr. Ignotum P. Ignotius is apparently talking (one of the Discordian names of Greg Hill), and the passage is found on page 275 of the original 1975 Dell mass market paperback -- I don't know the page number of the omnibus edition most people have.
UPDATE: Please see the interesting comments! Thanks, Jesse, thanks Dr. Johnson!
6 comments:
You'll note that ILLUMINATUS! spelled "Trystero" incorrectly. Well, it wouldn't be a proper ancient conspiracy if it didn't have many masks.
Earlier in that Accursed Thing: a stewardess finds a note left on the seat of "John Mason", who took a flight from Madison, Wisconsin to Mexico City one week after the "last SDS convention of all time": a ton of disparate notes about Weishaupt, Dillinger, Law of Fives, "Kick Out the Jams", allusions to Lovecraft, mention of
"Simon" and (probably) Hagbard, etc: this item was scribbled:
"D.E.A.T.H. - Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn. Does Pynchon know?"
-p.123 of the omnibus ed.
@Michael, thank you, appreciate that comment!
@Jesse, I didn't even notice that until you called my attention to it.
The excerpt Michael provided recalls the story of the Time magazine photographer who flew to Mexico City to take a picture of Pynchon after the publication of his first novel, V. Pynchon heard about this and hopped on a bus to a coastal city hours away to avoid the photographer. Pynchon lived on and off in Mexico City in the 60s and 70s. He wrote V and may have written some or all of The Crying of Lot 49 there, I don't know.
Regarding D.E.A.T.H. and "does Pynchon know?", my guess would be definitely yes.
One of my favorite Pynchon stories: In 2013 I asked Mike Godwin to review Pynchon's latest novel, BLEEDING EDGE. He emailed me in the midst of reading the book to report a most curious experience—it mentioned him. Specifically: "By a corollary of Godwin’s law valid only on the Upper West Side, Stalin’s name, like Hitler’s, is 100% certain to enter a discussion of any length."
As Mike wrote in the review: "Pynchon describes the atmosphere of the New York City I once lived in with such acute accuracy that I practically expected to find myself in a walk-on role. (A few pages after this passage I actually do appear, sort of...)"
There's a few places, from the late 1970s, until early 1990s, where interviewers note that Illuminatus! resembled Mumbo Jumbo and Gravity's Rainbow. RAW always emphasized that he and Shea read GR after Illuminatus! came out, and that he loves Ishmael Reed.
In this 1991 interview with James Wallis,
https://rawilsonfans.de/en/cosmic-trickster-interview-robert-anton-wilson/
RAW thinks he and Pynchon are a convergence, "like Darwin and Wallace, when the time is right a couple of people are going to be saying pretty much the same thing." Then he says that when he and Shea were finished with Illuminatus! and were doing "the rewrite we deliberately threw in a couple of references to it, but we had worked out the structure on our own, mostly on the basis of the nut mail that Playboy gets."
But aren't the references from Crying of Lot 49 (1966)? What are the references to GR? Someone school me on this. I suspect RAW is thinking "Pynchon references" and forgetting which book they were referring to.
Also: I may have dreamed this, but I "remember" reading an interview where someone asks RAW about Pynchon and RAW says he's very impressed with Pynchon's writing and then wondered if he had ever met Pynchon at a literary cocktail party and didn't know it. Does anyone know where this is?
Post a Comment