Will's Students -- Kelley
WillL at fieldschool.com
WillL at fieldschool.com
Thu May 16 17:53:24 CDT 1996
Date 5/16/96
Subject Will's Students -- Kelley
>From WillL
To Pynchon List, Wallace List
Will's Students -- Kelley
Here's number three from Rick Kelley, which deals directly with "Lot 49,"
Auster's "Leviathan" and some pretty sophisticated notions of chance. As usual,
thanks for your great input. The students are really loving this exercise!
-- Will Layman
***************
To start, let's clarify the fact that I don't know how much Will has told you
about his honors class and its curriculum. If I over-explain various things
(works, writers, topics etc...) -- my apologies.
In several of the works we've read this year, the idea of chance (coincidence,
happenstance, "accidents," and then by extension the opposed concept of destiny)
seems to be of paramount importance. In The Crying of Lot 49, it is Oedipa's
"discovery" as it were of the Tristero that initiates the discussion of Fate vs.
Chance. Paul Auster, of course, is mildly obsessed with the topic, and it is
perhaps the central focus of his novel Leviathan.
However, in my view there seems to be a somewhat sharp delineation between
Pynchon and Auster's outlooks on "chance," what it means and how it seems into
play in people's lives. In Lot 49, Pynchon seems to exert a great effort
retaining some sort of supreme ambivalence towards coincidence in general. Like
Oedipa and the "symmetry of choices" she is left to grapple with near the
story's close, we the readers are never given any definitive answer to the
central question raised in the text: namely, "Does the Tristero exist, and
would it have existed anyway (for Oedipa) if Pierce Inverarity had never died?"
Pynchon adamantly refuses to solve the puzzle in any way, refuses to give any
clues even, which perhaps is a greater clue than any other insofar as it relates
his own shadowy point of view -- that it is ultimately a Zen riddle without an
answer. If you buy that.
On the other hand, Auster, if we are to align him with the central character of
Leviathan and not its narrator (which lands us in questionable territory
already, I guess), seems to believe rather firmly in the reality of what someone
once dubbed "synchronicity." The fervor with which Ben, the focal character of
the novel, associates his desire for Maria Turner and his fall from the balcony,
resisting the comfort of believing that one influenced the other and instead
insisting that they were the "same thing," seems to eliminate the possibility of
"chance." If every event produces a countless litter of subsequent events so
closely bound to its parent that there is no real distinction, how can there be
any such thing as "chance?"
That is the first of my barrage of questions. The rest are as follows:
- Does Pynchon's refusal to answer the question he poses really indicate a
belief in the non-existence of that answer?
- Are "synchronicity" and "destiny" the same idea, or are they separated by the
theological aspect (as in the first implies the inter-connectedness of things
and the second the inter-connectedness of things as a result of someone's
pre-dictated itinerary)?
- If you have read both Pynchon and Auster, am I way off the mark in my
supposition that there is a sharp distinction between the two along these lines
(ie. chance ...), or do you think that they are more alike than I have given
them credit for?
I guess that's quite enough already. I want to thank you in advance for any
feedback you give and for reading a few literary ideas of a high school senior,
which, in other forums (believe me), are often immediately discredited.
-- Rick Kelley
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