Less is More...

[Chris Stolz]

> I don't think this is true.  I haven't got a copy of Lot 49 in front of me, 
> but the late pages where Oedipa is staggering thru the San Narciso night, 
> seeing maps flashing in the sky, tracks running into others, and finally 
> holds the wino on the mattress in her arms and sketches out, in her 
> imagination, her possibilities of (middle-class, Californian) action, and 
> realises she can/will do nothing, these are the scenes where the clues to 
> "what [Lot49] is all about" are provided.

	Well, I'm not sure Oedipa realises that she can or will
do nothing-- the book I think takes pains to avoid committing its
protagonist to either of a number of pairs of options.  For
example, the final epiphanic railroad-track scene says that
oedipa thought

	"there either was some tristero [...] or there was just
America, and if there was just America then it seemed that the
only way she could continue  [...] was as an alien, unfurrowed,
assumed full circle into some paranoia."  (p. 182)

I take this to mean roughly that, whether or not Oedipa finds
proof of the Tristero's existence, she will need to believe in
its existence.  Why?  Because this is a way for her to avoid
dealing with the implications of actually thinkingbout why the
members of the Tristero have organised themselves into it.
Focussing on the T. allows oedipa to see that community
(imaginary) as a kind of self-sustaining and autonomous
organisation of the dispossessed without rreflecting on the social
contexts and U.S. politics which produced it.  Essentially,
oedipa's job in the text would be to link her middle-class world
with the world of the marginal and dispossessed, but she chooses
instead to use her systematisinnt tot to use the T. symbols as a
way of walling thsi community off from her own.  There are
numeroussuggestions in the text which follow freud's essay on the
uncanny and its contention thatathe repressed (in the novel, the
underside of middle-class America) will return.  The underbelly
does swell, but Oedipa inscribes fanciful tatoos on it instead of
linking her world's actions to the other world's existence. 
I think that the novel's final thrust is to refuse to do the
linking for us, making its theme the reader's potential action
outside the reading of the text.



> In my reading of Pynchon's work, Lot49 is a Journey Into The Mind Of 
> America, and absolutely a fictional companion to the Watts piece.  So for 
> me, the reason he has voiced doubts about Lot 49 is because these San 
> Narciso passages are actually inferior to just about every comparable piece 
> in Gravity's Rainbow.
> 
> And I absolutely concur with Ron's comments that, in GR, "the prose is often 
> hauntingly beautiful and the radical and dizzying rapid-shifting of 
> point-of-view and temporal sequence are marvelous to behold.  As a reader. I 
> feel I'm always scrambling to keep up and am often left sitting in the dust 
> going "wha?""  There is almost none of this in Lot49.
> 
	Yeah...but this may be a matter of personal taste.  To
me, the prose of GR is top-heavy, purple and overweight, not to
mention often hideously portentiouand grasping at mythological
Modernist straws to make its points.  Lot 49's prose is spare,
elegant and immensely suggestive.  Reading GR is like trekking
through a rainforest filled with a steaming variety of plant
life; reading Lot 49 is watching a Borgesian rose exfoliate.



> Borges too; for me, the pleasure of Borges is in the perfect structures and 
> the vertiginous swoops that reading the ficciones produces...  And when I 
> read Kafka, I read him thru perspectives opened for me by Borges.

I'm not a fan of kermode on Borges either, because I think that
kermode plays up the metafictional aspects of Borges' w (a (a
process that turns his complex stories in air-headed Barthesianan
exercises in reflexivity) without looking in enough depths at the
very complex ways in which this metafictional speculation
interacts with the politics and history of Argentina.  A good
example of this would be "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius," which is,
among other things, a fable about the creation of the
(fictional? in what sens(s)?) third world (orbius tertius) and
its Argentinian speficicity).

  (Much as,
for example, McHoul and Wills on Pynchon say absolutely nothing
about Pynchon's works' relations with history/politics/social
concerns in their endlessly self-referential talk about
"language" and "discourse").)  I would be curious to hear how
Borges makes you think of Kafka.  I've only read Kafka's short
stories, most of which amaze me endlessly (my favorites being
"Blumfeld, eine alter Jungesselle" and "In der Strafkolonie".