Less is More...

[Jan KLIMKOWSKI]

Chris writes:

>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.

And continues:

> 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.

I pretty much agree with this.  Lot49 has been compared, in structure and 
postponement of epiphany, to Borges' "Approach to Al-Mutasim" (sp?).  I 
think, at the plot/structural level,  it's a useful comparison.  However, 
maybe the Ones and Zeroes within which Pynchon places Oedipa are not a real 
Tristero/Waste versus "just America", but rather the fantasy of a Tristero 
versus the consensual hallucination of just America.  Ie the Ones and Zeroes 
of Lot49 are both fantasies from which Oedipa strives but never succeeds in 
escaping.  Thus, given Oedipa's entrapment, epiphany can only be the 
reader's.

I would just say again that I think Lot49 is a Journey Into The Mind Of 
America.  This leads to another thought, which may be pure tosh, but Lot49 
does sometimes remind me, viscerally, of Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher", 
in the sense of entering a cavernous and diseased mind.  I'm not trying to 
claim any grand influences here, although Pynchon clearly has read and 
enjoyed a lot of dear Edgar, but rather am suggesting that the novella 
itself is a mind space.


Chris also writes:

>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.

Again, I agree.  Politically, Borges is of course a conservative, patrician, 
europhile (for which read lover of old culture), despite having, famously 
and briefly, been made a chicken inspector for some indiscreet remarks.  But 
his works do comment satirically on Argentina, bureaucracy etc, (and more 
honestly and emotionally attempt to comprehend the Nazi horror) and thus are 
not the pure, reflexive exercises sometimes described by LitCrit.  I also 
think he's more metaphysical than metafictional, but then I would....


Chris asks:

> I would be curious to hear how Borges makes you think of Kafka.

Borges wrote an amazing, and for me, illuminating essay on Kafka.   But, 
more than this, as an artist Borges is saturated with the work of Melville, 
Conrad, Chesterton, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, HG Wells, Kafka, Schopenhauer, 
Nietzche, etc.  I think some of the ficciones are perfect Kafka tales. 
 Indeed, for me, Borges did it better than Kafka!