Oedipa?

[Andrew Dinn]

LOT64 at aol.com writes:

> Don,
>     I agree that Lot49 does not hold up well upon re-reading after many
> years.  But don't forget, Kurt Mondaugen, as well as Bloody Chiclitz, appears
> in V,49,&GR.  He's an engineer at Yoydyne.  I'm starting to see him as quite
> an important character.  He's on the other side but some of the things he
> goes through in the three books make him an ambiguous character.  I have to
> do more reading on this before I can come up with something more specific.
>  Any ideas, anyone?

I love the wonderful ambiguity in the pun on Mond/Monde Augen. Is it
World Eye or Moon Eye? Is he projecting a world or a lunatic delusion.

I mused some time ago about the connection between the Khirgiz Light
and the Khirgiz tale in Nabokov's the gift, a folk story about a king
who promises to fill a small bag given to him by a peasant girl with
riches. After filling it with a king's ransom and seeing no end to the
task he takes a handy old crone's advise (how come crones only appear
after you've already wasted half a kingdom?) and advises him to pitch
in a handful of earth at which point the bag closes. The crone
explains that the bag was a human eye which wants to encompass the
whole world.

Well, one other possible connection with this and with Mondaugen is
the rejection of solipsism given by LudWit in the Tractatus. He
presents a picture of the solipsist using an image of the eye and it's
visual field with an I sitting behind it. In LudWit's account the
eye's visual field expands to embrace the whole world and the I
shrinks to a dimensionless point with the identity it presumes to
enclose leaking out into the outside and with nothing left on the
inside (LudWit's argument is that if one takes the premise of
solipsism to its logical conclusion one has no different or better
knowledge of oneself than one has of anything else in the world - I am
just as much a public phenomenon as you, him/her or any other object).

Of course, Mondaugen, being a scientist, is bound to be tarred with a
certain amount of ambiguity. As a scientist he has to come up with
accounts of why things happen. But his success as a scientist requires
that he maintain a certain level of disbelief in any of the
explanations he gives. Pynchon's favoured scientists - Mondaugen,
Mexico, Pokler, even Stencil - all exhibit this ambiguity towards
their beliefs at the same time as displaying a dogged earnestness in
their attempts to provide an adequate explanation. His objects of
derision are the true believers like Pointsman who already know the
one answer they are willing to accept and are merely busy trying to
explain how the phenomena support it. The crisis which all the good
guys (apart from Stencil) go through is the recognition that this
semi-sceptical ambivalence may (or may not) be scientifically sound
but is personally inadequate.


Andrew Dinn
-----------
O alter Duft aus Maerchenzeit / Berauschest wieder meine Sinne
Ein naerrisch Heer aus Schelmerein / Durchschwirrt die leichte Luft