COLGR part 2 Oedipus anyone?

[jbor]

on 8/5/01 6:21 PM, Saioued Al-Zaioued at chicagoist at hotmail.com wrote:

> a strange thought
> 
> -Did anyone consider that Pierce is Oedipa's father? Would it not make
> sense, having a reverse Oedipus, in the form of a girl, and the bureaucracy
> gods of WASTE are punishing her for her sins? She doesnt exactly go blind,
> but she totally looses persective.

    Pierce, she happened to know, had owned a large block of shares, had
    been somehow involved in negotiating an understanding with the county
    tax assessor to lure Yoyodyne here in the first place. It was part, he
    explained, of being a founding father. (15-16)

So, not so much Oedipa's father literally as figuratively perhaps. If Oedipa
(as a "Young Republican") allegorises America to be, then the legacy which
she is to inherit is perhaps Pierce's. Of course, Pierce was probably being
ironic when he nominated himself as a "founding father".

I guess we should also mention Yoyodyne = Boeing right about now. The
company's name first crops up in _V._, and recurs in _GR_. It brilliantly
captures the onomatopoeic cartoon caption bounce of the original name; it
takes a mischievous but unsueable poke at the place where Pynchon worked in
Seattle in the early 60s; and it also points to the physics (and futility,
cf. Benny yoyoing in _V._ also) of it all.

dyne n. the cgs unit of force: the force that imparts an acceleration of 1
centimetre per second per second to a mass of 1 gram. 1 dyne is equivalent
to 10 to the power of negative five newton or 7.233 x 10 to the power of
negative five poundal [C19: from French, from Greek *dunamis* power, force]

Double dutch to me but certainly resonant.

best

> I dunno, drunken thoughts on a saturday
> night, back to bed, mon cherie.
>