Less is More...

[Jan KLIMKOWSKI]

Andrew writes:

>This seems to me rather too `mentalist' a reading of what is at stake,
>albeit a reading which is indeed affirmed by the text - which I take
>to be Pynchon's reason for downrating the book. I don't agree that the
>Tristero and WASTE are manifestations of Oedipa's mind which may or
>may not connect with one of many possible actualities.

This is kinda the point, isn't it????

As a text, Lot49 does sustain an infinite, Chinese box within box, 
postponement of epiphany reading.  As a literary artefact, a novella built 
along those lines, it's actually pretty good.  And - without making snide 
comments about creative writing classes -  I agree with Chris' comment that 
"reading Lot 49 is watching a Borgesian rose exfoliate".  As a reader, I've 
always found something inherently, artistically beautiful about these kinds 
of tales or novels, when that is they're sculpted with the skill of a 
Borges.

My problem with Lot49 is that I don't think Pynchon's artistic project is as 
coolly, symetrically beautiful as Borges.  Last time I said what I'm about 
to say, I got asked to define my terms, but once again: Pynchon is 
political, and GR is a work of revolutionary poetry.  Besides which,  you 
sure wouldn't catch ol' Jorge Luis hoboing from country to town to country, 
sleeping under bridges, baiting JohnBirchers at country fayres, let alone 
dressing as RocketMan with a sizeable stash secreted beneath a billowing 
cape...


Andrew adds:

>Oedipa asks herself 'Shall I project a world?' Unfortunately, she has
>no such choice and nor do you nor I nor TRP. The question assumes that
>reality is (self-)consciously constructed, chosen from alternatives,
>equally possible in theory but ultimately found not to be actual
>possibilities because *unreal* - hence not really possible.

Again - this is kinda the point, isn't it?

Borges once wrote that Schopenhauer was his favourite philosopher, the one 
whose description of reality came closest to the Argentine's own sense.  For 
me, Borges' art is at its strongest when he's playing with this sense of 
life as a lucid dream, dreamed by me? you? God?....  And, on a personal 
level, whilst not subscribing to the Idealist position,  I often sense that 
I create a lot of my reality and in this sense am projecting a world.

But the case of Oedipa is somewhat different in that she isn't, say, a 
Conradian archetypal figure in a jungle.  Oedipa is a middle-class American 
woman, trying to escape tupperware tedium, and a sister of any of numerous 
characters in Vineland whose emotional responses have been conditioned and 
shaped by, for instance,  years hunched before the flickering Tube.

Here's a snatch from Vineland about Hector (p345 UK edition):
"It was disheartening to see how much he depended on these Tubal fantasies 
about his profession, relentlessly pushing their propaganda message of 
cops-are-only-human-got-to-do-their-job, turning agents of government 
repression into sympathetic heroes."

This "just America" thing is a construction which Oedipa will never break 
free of.  Equally, the notion of an ubiquitously connected, alternative 
Underground is, at its worst, a Romantic, Robin Hood writ large, jerkoff 
fantasy.  There is however a reality of pockets of resistance which Oedipa 
will never find, but which the reader may stumble across, if they go looking 
outside the text (or even inside another, such as GR, heh-heh)....

Brotherly
jan


PS cops over here have just had a field day, getting - in the spirit of our 
notorious Criminal Justice Bill - to arrest loads of people at Glastonbury 
festival for wandering about in the sun and the mud in unauthorised, if not 
actually proscribed, states of mind....