Will's Students -- Kelley

[Jeffrey Reid]

On Thu, 16 May 1996 WillL at fieldschool.com wrote:
> 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.
>
I think Pynchon views chance and coincidence very differently,  from
Gravity's Rainbow (Viking PB p.208) "The ball drops in a compartment whose
number they never see.  Seeing the number is supposed to be the point.
But in the game behind the game, it is not the point."  There is an answer
to the question, but the answer isn't important.  We're playing the game
behind the game now and the spin of the roulette wheel or the roll of the
dice don't matter here.  What we should be concerned with is what's behind
it all.  The deeper question of why we're spinning the wheel, or who's
rolling the dice.

Later on the same page of GR TRP gives us another clue:
"The odds They played here belonged to the past, the past only.  Their
odds were never probabilites, but frequencies already observed.  It's the
past that makes demands here.  It whispers, and reaches after, and
sneering disagreeably, gooses its victims.
 When They chose numbers, red, black, odd, even, what did They mean by it?
What Wheel did They set in motion?"

I think that since They (in GR) and Tristero (in COL49) are the ones
setting up the questions and setting the wheels in motion we are supposed
to examine their motives rather then try to answer the questions raised.
We ought to be more interested in why the Tristero chooses to present
Oedipa with the puzzle of its existence through the death of Pierce and
her role as executrix, rather then asking if they did/would have existed.
For Pynchon there is no coincidence, no destiny, and no probability, just
a conspiracy with questionable motives pulling the strings from behind the
curtain and we are left to ask why, but he urges us to ask the more useful
question of why those particular strings?

> 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?
>
I think it's an ambivalence towards the answer since we shouldn't be
trying to find an answer.  We should be questioning the question.

> - 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)?
>
I think they are different ideas, but both are tangential to the main
point at hand.  It's all about Them and us.  We're left to try to figure
out why They are doing what they're doing, and if we allow ourselves to be
distracted by the symptoms of the conspiracy (an unnatural recurrance of
the number 23, or the strange omnipresence of a muted post horn, or a
bizarre octopus attack at the hotel/casino Hermann Goering) then we'll
miss what's really going on.  We need to ask whay are they spinning that
wheel, not what number will come up when it's done.

> - 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?
>
Haven't read Auster...

Jeff

---------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffrey G Reid       			jgreid at u.washington.edu
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"O holy mathematics, may I for the rest of my days be consoled
 by perpetual intercourse with you, consoled for the wickedness
 of man and the injustice of the Almighty!"  -- Isidore Ducasse