MDDM World-as-text

[Terrance]

Otto wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 5:16 PM
> Subject: Re: MDDM World-as-text
> >
> > So why not say the world is a painting or a dance?
> >
> 
> "In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the
> beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central paintings of a
> triptych, titled 'Bordando el Manto Terrestre', were a number of frail girls
> with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top
> room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out
> the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for
> all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of
> the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world."
> Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49


Texere, to weave, fabricate. The frail girls are prisoners. Oedipa
cries. Why? She too imagines herself a prisoner, a frail girl in a tower
waiting to be liberated. Even her tears become trapped. Oh, she needs a
good cry! She forms a fixation; become attached in a neurotic way to a
text. She becomes like a Puritan, obsessed with the WORDS in the BOOK.
We might say that Oedipa thinks of the world as text. But, despite her
scholarly obsession with texts, Oedipa discovers all sorts of things
about America and about Americans that are not part of this text. She
chooses to ignore these. I'd say, the idea that the world is a text and
the idea that we read or write it, is satirized in TCL49.