Oedipa as Detective
LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU
LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU
Tue Mar 18 11:37:51 CST 1997
I've lost track of who has been claiming or not that COL49 is (choose your
term) a parody/pastiche/homage/whatever of a detective story, but (at the
risk of sounding so old-fashioned) here is the Text Itself:
". . . Where was the Odeipa who'd driven so bravely up here from San Narciso?
That optimistic baby had come on so like the private eye in any long-ago
radio drama, believing all you needed was grit, resourcefulness, exemption from
hidebound cops' rules, to solve any great mystery.
"But the private eye sooner or later has to get beat up on. This
night's profusion of post horns, this malignant deliberate replication, was
their way of beating up. They knew her pressure points, and the ganglia of
her optimism, and one by one, pinch by precision pinch, they were
immobilizing her."
(COL49, Bantam ed., pp. 91-92)
Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)
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