NPPF: preliminary: Shall I Project A World?

[Burns, Erik]

Foax:

I'm thinking a bit about the relationship between Oedipa and Kinbote,
perhaps the "evolution" from one to the other. Kinbote, as a reader and
interpreter of the world, is a solipsist; he's looking in the text (of the
world and of the poem) for himself. It seems to me Oedipa is the exact
opposite; in her quest she is looking in the text of herself for the world.
She becomes "sensitive," seeing the The Tristero everywhere, and suddenly
the mysterious links that connect the world jump into stark relief. For the
madman Kinbote, he stares at the world in stark relief already ... and sees
things nobody else can, because they aren't really there.

I'm not sure where to go from here with this idea. It's just that _The
Crying of Lot 49_, in addition to its various Nabokovian allusions ("those
Humbert Humbert cats" being the most Hodgelike of them all, though obviously
a reference to _Lolita_, not that my inner Kinbote would agree), is also
full of images of Oedipa (and others) trying to come to grips with the fact
of an interconnected conspiratorial world, in Oed's case this project mapped
on to her search for identity, too (the Remedios Varo image of the sewing
woman in the tower, "shall I project a world," Maxwell's Demon - these are
all efforts to impose order and logic on a disordered and illogical world,
and the discovery of the Tristero tale, and its place in history, cements
that order and logic.)

to wit: "...owing to this, what you might have to call, growing obsession,
with 'bringing something of herself' -- even if that something was just her
presence -- to the scatter of business interests that had survived
Inverarity. She would give them order, she would create constellations;..."
(_Lot 49_, pp 62-63, Vintage UK edition 2000)

while Kinbote is more "...the true paranoid for whom all is organized in
spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the
dreamer whose puns probe ancient foetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act
in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is
there, buffering, to protect us from." (_Lot 49_, page 89, same edition -
(am kind of cheating on the quote as it lists 4 types, saint, clairvoyant,
paranoid and dreamer, and I've cut off the first two, making it look like
the second two are the same person.))

On another note, I also think that Kinbote, were you to meet him, would be a
crashing bore. (Shade seems to think so too, and Mrs. Shade certainly).
Oedipa, I fear, would probably also become one, a pusher of conspiracy
theories like Stephen Lightfoot
(http://www.lennonmurdertruth.com/index.asp), eventually cornering me at a
cocktail party 20 years later, her muted posthorn pin in full display, to
explain all about the mysterious black caped men delivering unfranked mail
through the W.A.S.T.E.cans of California while I looked over her shoulder
for the bartender or some other convenient escape. "Oh! Look at the time!"
(Thank you, Thomas Pynchon, for freezing beautiful Oed for time immemorial
long before she got there and at a cusp where the possibilities of the
conspiracy remain chilling as all get out...)

Just a thought.

etb