Tony Tanner's take on P & D

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

tess marek schrieb:

> And there is the poignant figure of Oedipa Maas at the end of The Crying of
> Lot 49: "Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real
> Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the
> legacy of  America, or there was just America and if there was
> just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be 
> at all relevant, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some
> paranoia." Pynchon is a truly brilliant and richly imaginative historian and
> diagnostic analyst of binary, either--or thinking, and its attendant        
> dangers.

  + correspondingly, but then again "ass backwards", the end of CoL49 can be 
  read in two ways: either it's - like in finnegans wake - cyclical, and the 
  last sentence leads us again to the first (there is just america), or there's 
  - perhaps enforced by an epileptic attack - the revelation of a real tristero 
  to come --- kai (reading "shipping out/a supposedly fun thing i'll never do   
  again"; dtsch: david foster wallace: schrecklich amüsant - aber in zukunft   
  ohne mich, hamburg 2002: mare)*