col49 2 pt2

[jbor]

on 8/4/01 6:27 PM, cj hurtt at cj6 at casco.net wrote:

> she drives away on after she and her Chevy have a little religious moment on
> the mount. 

When Metzger arrives at Echo Courts Oedipa "thought at first They, somebody
up there, was putting her on. It had to be an actor." (p.17) I don't think
that Oedipa's "They" is quite the same as the "They" in _GR_, if only for
the fact that she looks up, heavenward I assume. Secular common-sense and a
vague agnosticism combine for Oedipa to equate, perhaps ironically or
mock-seriously, some supernatural force with bad luck, malevolent intent or
illogic. I think this is the "superstition" she referred to back at the end
of Ch 1, and it includes all those "religious instants" she
almost-but-doesn't-quite have in this chapter. The fact that the phrase
"'religious instant'" is apostrophised like that in the text (p.15) confirms
Oedipa's scepticism about "God" and gods in general I think. Each time she
is about to have one of these instants or "revelations" it is interrupted or
witheld from her, and this is ongoing. I think the same thing applies to the
reader as well. Mucho's vortex ring and the endless reflections desfribed in
and (semantic) reflexivenesses of the text pre-empt the typically postmodern
trope of *mise en abyme*, or infinite regress. "One of your endless
repetitions", (p.21) says Metzger, and he's right on the money.

What is really amusing in this chapter is the way that Metzger talks about
the movie as if it was the real war, which serves to unnerve Oedipa (and the
reader) subtly. At the bottom of p.20 he talks about the gate in the
submarine net which the Germans had built for their U-boats to go through,
while the father on the movie is suggesting that they try to go under the
net in the 'Justine'. "Wasn't I there?" he says to Oedipa when she questions
him, and you can almost see the little animated twinkle in his eye that Mel
Brooks might have got his FX crew to insert in the final rushes at this
point. Metzger talks as if he was "there" in the real war again halfway down
p.23 when he closes his eyes and says that for "fifty yards out the sea was
red with blood. They don't show that." What he's saying is that the movie
doesn't show it but that was what it was like at Gallipoli (and it was,
apparently).

best