col49 2 pt2

[Karen Hudes]

cj hurtt:
"Since hitting SN, the only music Oed has heard has been by The Paranoids,
the only movie she has watched starred Metzger, and all the commercials on
t.v. are for stuff that Inverarity had stock in. Any significance?" 

Definitely trips off little alarms that something is being communicated to
Oedipa--lots of "pointed," seemingly calculated signals. What's really
ingenious is the way it absorbs the reader into her world. 

"The blown fuse that causes the dramatically timed blackout, reminds me of
the end of a scene. You know, curtain down, or fade to black. When the
lights come back on we get a snippet of epilogue. The magic is over. We get
some tears and are left with a feeling that remains for the rest of the
book, (for me anyway) the feeling of 'Now What.'"

To me, the sex scene with Metzger is like a boundary-crossing, one of many
sort-of boundary-crossings in the book. She puts on lots of clothing, lots
of buffers, then they drop off, and the line between what she's willing and
what's happening to her gets blurred--she wakes up getting banged. they
probably didn't throw around terms like "consent" as much back in the
sixties, though that's basically out of the picture in this scenario.

Her name in the book starts out with buffers around it--Mrs. Oedipa Maas.
She's just returned from a tupperware party--a celebration of containment? A
lot of the journey of the book is an unbuffering, though some of the layers
she loses (her male acquaintances, her previous world view) might also
represent conduits.

btw--says about Mucho and honey, "like all things viscous it distressed
him." sex problems (along with used-car guilt), maybe? what about that
fondue...

----------
From: "cj hurtt" <cj6 at casco.net>
To: "pynchon list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: col49 2 pt2
Date: Sat, Aug 4, 2001, 4:27 AM


Second thing I thought of was this: 

Since hitting SN, the only music Oed has heard has been by The Paranoids,
the only movie she has watched starred Metzger, and all the commercials on
t.v. are for stuff that Inverarity had stock in. Any significance? 


The blown fuse that causes the dramatically timed blackout, reminds me of
the end of a scene. You know, curtain down, or fade to black. When the
lights come back on we get a snippet of epilogue. The magic is over. We get
some tears and are left with a feeling that remains for the rest of the
book, (for me anyway) the feeling of "Now What." 

I know that a lot of deep shit can be read into this story, but I just dig
the surface story. 


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