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Richard Nixon (public domain photo).
From Illuminatus!:
The real bread was in the Colossus of Yorba Linda Foundation, which had been successfully raising money for several years to erect a heroic monument, in solid gold and ten feet taller than the statue of Liberty, honoring the martyred former president Richard Milhous Nixon. This monument, paid for entirely by the twenty million Americans who still loved and revered Nixon despite the damnable lies of the Congress, the Justice Department, the press, the TV, the law courts,met al., would stand outside Yorba Linda, Tricky Dicky's boyhood home, and scowl menacinglymtoward Asia, warning those gooks not to try to get the jump on Uncle Sammie. (Page 120, The Golden Apple).
From Vineland:
... the new Nixon Monument, a hundred-foot colossus in black and white marble at the edge of the cliff, gazing not out to sea, but inland, towering above the campus architecture ... (Page 205, Chapter 11).
12 comments:
Very cool.
Ha! I only half caught that! I glazed over it like, well of course there's a giant statue of Richard Nixon, I already knew that :)))
It seems to me that as we spot more and more possible references to RAW or "Illuminatus!" in Pynchon's writings, it seems less and less likely that we are talking about coincidences.
Agreed! I think this one is really solid too. If it was just both having a giant Richard Nixon statue I'd lean towards coincidence, but the specificity of the word "colossus" seems pretty suggestive to me.
i'd give it a maybe, but more because both writers had a similar mindset around conspiracy and paranoia, with Nixon providing plenty of raw material to work with.
I posted this over on the Pynchon subreddit to see what they thought, and got a great comment outlining a connection from Gravity's Rainbow -> Illuminatus! -> Cryptonomicon. Worth checking out!
https://www.reddit.com/r/ThomasPynchon/comments/1nrcmsg/an_illuminatus_reference_in_vineland/
I believe this is what Mr. Campbell is referring to:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ThomasPynchon/comments/1nrcmsg/an_illuminatus_reference_in_vineland/
Yes indeed! I tried to add the html code to make it a clickable link, but it made it disappear instead. So it goes!
Great seeing this come to light. I rate it a probability of 80 - 90% that it's not a coincidence. "Colossus" doesn't seem a common word to describe a statue, that kind of gives it away. Both authors communicate with Cabala masterfully. Pynchon likes to flip things. Illuminatus! has the Nixon statue facing the ocean, Pynchon reverses that to have him face inland. It also seems uncommon to describe the facial expression of a statue as both authors do. Again Pynchon reverses Illuminatu! giving Nixon a quizzacal look different than the grimace they give it in Illuminatus!.
The word "colossus" = 364. Looking that up in the dictionary gives correspondences both for how Nixon was considered, and the inner nature of both Vineland and Illuminatus!
Tom: as RAW was interested in Opus Dei ( among many other things) this interview might be of interest. https://podcasts.taxjustice.net/episode/157-banking-on-opus-dei/
The guy has a book out on Opus Dei which has very good reviews.
Thanks, Tony, will check it out.
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