Chapter V: There are millions of stories...

[jbor]

on 8/20/01 3:59 PM, John Bailey at johnbonbailey at hotmail.com wrote:

> As for the various characters and situations which Oed comes across
Any posts
> on any of them are welcome! Briefly, I’m interested in the way that they are
> not shown to be part of a large united conspiracy or cabal, are not a They in
> that GR sense, but are disparate, diverse, disenfranchised groups with little
> or no knowledge of each other’s existence, who each reinterpret the post-horn
> symbol and other Trystero trappings to their own uses (for instance the DEATH
> acronym on the back of the bus, the children’s rhyming game). There’s no sense
> of a unified Underworld that Oedipa encounters, just an increasing
> proliferation of underworlds. This is, in a way, the direct opposite of the
> circuit board imagery she thought of upon arrival at San Narciso.

    It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was
    a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its
    machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference
    to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal
    was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have
    withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate,
    silent, unsuspected world. (86.8)

This for me is perhaps the most vivid encapsulation of what "the Trystero"
is meant to represent. I can see in this "calculated withdrawal" a
reflection of Gandhi's passive resistance, conscientious objectors to
enlistment in the U.S. forces to serve in Vietnam. Most of all I can see a
celebrated author who has chosen to abjure "the life of the Republic, ...
its machinery," whose "withdrawal" is his "own, unpublicized, private."

Bartleby: "I would prefer not to."

The disinherited in this novel become the Preterite in _GR_, but the vision
that is beginning to bloom in Pynchon's work is that the "They" is actually
a non-human system which dispossesses *all* individuals, a sum of parts
where the parts don't matter at all, just as Koteks describes "teamwork" in
the brave new corporatised workplace which serves to "stifle" individuality
and invention, just like the vocal unison of the Yoyodyne stockholders (sad
interchangeable old men), just like the false "consensus" of democratic
election ("indifference to the power of their vote"). What Oedipa witnesses
are communities beyond and beneath the mantle, a "separate, silent,
unsuspected world." There is an ambivalence about the various
manifestations: they range from the black marketeers of the Cosa Nostra to
Death Cults to lunatic dolphin-worshippers; just as there is an ambivalence
about "The Counterforce" in _GR_ and counterforces and counter-cultures in
general throughout all the texts. But the common feature which brings them
together is this conscious "withdrawal" ("calculated" has an even stronger
resonance) from the workings of The System.

best