ATD 81-96

Page 81

Feast of St. Barbara. External link

Page 82

Skinner
A person who drives mules.

Chinaman
This is the latest of many allusions to China or Chinese in an exotic, oriental way. This may simply be imitating Gilded Age and early 20th century American fiction and films, which often featured mystical Chinese as characters and villains. It also recalls the use of Feng Shui in Mason & Dixon.

Cripple Creek
Cripple Creek was the location of a miner's strike in 1894. It was a significant labor event and it was the first time that a state Militia was called out in support of the miners. Wikipedia entry

Page 85

Innocent Victims...Monsters That Did the Deed
Use of capitals seems to emphasize the fact that these persons are simply convenient stock characters in the forwarding of the owners'/government's agenda.

Page 87

Rev. Moss Gatlin's rhetorical question "How can anyone set off a bomb that will take innocent lives?" and its wisecrack response, "Long fuse" seems a calculated echo of Kubrick's 'Full Metal Jacket.' ("How can you shoot women and children?" "Easy -- don't lead 'em so much.")

Emile Henry, Vaillant
Emile Henry (1872 - May 21, 1894) was a French anarchist who on February 12, 1894 detonated a bomb at the Café Terminus in the Parisian Gare Saint-Lazare killing one person and wounding twenty. Henry was angered over the execution of another Anarchist, Auguste Vaillant, for the destruction of a government building that hurt no one, and took it upon himself to strike back to avenge his fellow revolutionary's death. He saw the Cafe as a representation of the bourgeois itself and his intent was to kill as many people as possible in the bombing. Wikipedia entry.

Mason-Dixon line
We learn that the Traverse family had been "an old ridegerunning caln from southern Pennsylvania, close to the Mason-Dixon." No Traverses appear, however, in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, but one can speculate that had they been, the Traverse ancestors may have been victims of the Line's bad Feng Shui. From this, one could infer a connection between the Line and Colorado Anarchism.

Page 89

Repeal of the Silver Act of 1893

Prior to 1893, both Silver and Gold were used as a metallic standard for currency in the United States. The Sherman Act authorized the treasury to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver per month. This inflated the price of silver, causing eastern investors to start hoarding gold as a hedge. The unrest this caused in the Colorado mines resulted in the repeal of the Act. When this happened, the mining of silver began to rapidly decline, causing further destabilization in the silver mining industry.

Page 93

plutes
plutocrats: members of the wealthy class controlling a government

Page 95

a radius of annhilation that, if it could not include the ones who deserved it, might as well include himself

Hair-raising to see Pynchon put the suicide bomber/terrorists back in the US where they also have a home; the effect also to make them (the suicide bombers over there somewhere - Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) a bit less foreign, and to make ourselves, good US citizens, appear foreign to ourselves: how could we, civilized Americans interested only in democracy and freedom for all, have these feelings and desires?

September 11, 2001 and its consequences seem obvious on this novel, at least in these first 95 pages.

The author of this note acknowledges that some ATD readers do not agree that this passage refers to contemporary suicde bombers. But, arguably, Pynchon gets to have his cake and eat it too. By writing about a remote historical period, he's removed himself a considerable authorial distance, but he also gets the benefit of resonance with current events by choosing which facts to highlight from the period, by choosing the diction with which to present them, all building on the reverberations inherent in the subject matter. Strict constructionists may point to the text and say, There's no mention of September 11, 2001, or President Bush, or suicide bombers in Afghanistan specifically on the page here, such an interpretation can't be supported by the text & etc. - and that's a reasonable point to make. The result is, so far in ATD, the frequent evocation of US post-September 11 in terms that will be difficult to nail down, but which are, at the same time, obvious to most readers if not all. Nothing new in Pynchon, of course, this sort of displacement makes his texts notoriously slippery.