If only she'd looked ...

[Nicole Slagter]

The passage from CoL49 which Dave Monroe quoted in order to compare it to
one in _The Scarlet Letter_:

"She stopped a minute between the steel rails, raising her head as if to
sniff the air.  Becoming conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood
on--knowing as if these maps
had been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks ran into others,
others, knowing they laced, deepened, authenticated the great night around
her. If only she'd looked." (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 179)

reminds me of these lines of Wallace Stevens ...

        Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
        Why, when the singing ended and we turned
        Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, 
        The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
        As the night descended, tilting in the air,
        Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
        Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
        Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

... which form the penultimate stanza of `The Idea of Order in Key West'.
The rest of 
the poem also yields some surprising correspondences--to me, at least.
Consider the 
lines just previous to the ones I quoted above:

        ... And when she sang, the sea,
        Whatever self it had, became the self 
        That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
        As we beheld her striding there alone,
        Knew that there never was a world for her 
        Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Is Oedipa the maker of this world after all? Is she projecting it? She did
identify 
with the girls in the Remedios Varo painting after all, who embroidered
their world 
"seeking hopelessly to fill the void". Actually, this is not the reading to
which I 
am most attracted. I agree with Brian McHale that "the evidence is so finely
balanced 
that one hesitates between the epistemological [i.e. Oedipa is mad] and the
ontological 
[Tristero exists] lines of explanation, without finally resolving the
hesitation; hence 
the `fantastic' effect." (Brian McHale, _Postmodernist Fiction_, p. 24.) McHale 
discusses Nabokov's _Pale Fire_ in much the same terms, but in that
case--for this 
reader at least--the evidence seems to point much more strongly towards the
reading 
that Kinbote/Botkin is simply mad. Not that that makes it a lesser novel (to
say that would be to contradict MalignD, and I'd rather submit to <insert
favourite torture> 
than knowingly cross MalignD). These closing pages of Lot49 work for me--in
fact, I 
thing they're great, but I wonder what the consensus is on them. I can see
Poirier's 
point (also brought up by Dave Monroe, thanks Dave) that these pages maybe
have to 
bear too much weight, haven't been adequately prepared for; for Poirier the
sticking 
point is the limitations of Oedipa's character. I don't find that myself.
I'd like 
to hear what others think, of the novel as a whole, now that the summing up
stage 
has arrived. 

Remains to thank all of you for your input on CoL49,

Nicole Slagter