col49 2 pt2

[Tim Strzechowski]

Nice, and I like how this chapter seems to gradually expose the reader
*even more* into a world of conspiracy and paranoia, especially with the
passage you noted.  Things are more frequently having "concealed
meanings," and just as Oedipa enters San Narciso, "a revelation also
trembled just past the threshold of her understanding" (HP, p. 24).
Later, after "Baby Igor's Song," Oedipa muses, "Either [Metzger] made up
the whole thing . . . or he bribed the engineer over at the local
station to run this, it's all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction,
_plot_.  O Metzger" (31).

Additionally, when Metzger later tells Oedipa, "But our beauty lies in
its extended capacity for convolution . . ." (33), he purports a theory
of metatheatricality (i.e. theater within theater) that relates
essentially to lawyers as actors, actors as lawyers.  This will, of
course, foreshadow the Jacobean play later in the novel, but I think all
of this together heightens the reader's increasing sense of parania,
conspiacy, and meaning just beyond understanding --- more than the first
chapter.

cj hurtt wrote:

> Also there is the in/organic imagery, The "vast sprawl of houses which
> had grown up all together, like a well tended crop", the "outward
> patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to
> communicate." she sees in the circuit card looking city, and "the
> singing blacktop" she drives away on after she and her Chevy have a
> little religious moment on the mount. The city itself is likened to a
> junky. She, a single melted crystal of urban horse.