Two Encyclopedias, Fat and Thin Spoiler AtD 1045

Fri Jan 12 18:19:13 CST 2007

OK. It¹s easy for speculation regarding Pynchon¹s meaning(s) to veer from
the well grounded to the unlikely to the...well...paranoid. Maybe it¹s a
matter of taste, but I can¹t get down with counting words and then reading
them like tea-leaves.

What DOES seem to make sense is to turn to Pynchon¹s character names for
clues. His names are typically more than odd and/or humorousyes? So it
makes sense that the ending of CoL49 might be illuminated by checking out
the names of those involved.

I don¹t have time at the moment to cover them allthe three, I mean, that
seem to me the most important at the end: Oedipa Maas, Genghis Cohen, and
Loren Passerine. But to suggest my approach, let me consider Oedipa Maas.

Oedipa shares with her earliest namesake, Oedipus, an overwhelming desire
for the Truth. Oedipus is punished for his quest in the process of
fulfilling it, of course, and Sophocles seems to suggest that Oedipus¹
efforts are a prideful transgression of Divine Law. Oedipa, at the end of
CoL49, is clearly fearful that her own quest will be punishing as wellbut
Pynchon leaves her on the threshold of the revelation (a real revelation? a
false one?), fearful but obsessed: exactly where we all are in the modern
world, where Divine Law has disintegrated and been replaced by Them.

The name ³Oedipa² also seems unavoidably linked to the Oedipus Complex, the
dissolution of which Freud saw as crucial to the development of the
super-ego, the ³conscience² that serves within the individual as the voice
of society and whose key function is to control desire and aggression.
Pynchon seems to be using the idea ironically: the voice Oedipa internalizes
is not society¹s as Freud described it but the voice of the Otherthe
alternative society with its alternative structures, protocols,  and
history.

As for Maas...oh, what a tangled web! Touch one thread and the whole thing
vibrates. Here are a couple of  a summary, not of alternatives (I think),
but simultaneities:
 Maas: Dutch & German for The Meuse river, which arises in France and flows
through Belgium and the Netherlands before draining into the North Sea. The
Meuse was the site of an operation in WWI (1918) whereby American troops led
by Pershing drove back the German armies, who were saved from destruction
only by the Armistice.
 Maas: Dutch for ³mesh,² which is SUCH a Pynchonian word in that it means
both the threads of the net AND the spaces created by those threads. In
computing specifically, it means ³a set of finite elements used to represent
a geometric object for modeling or analysis.² As a verb, it means literally
³to become entangled or entwined,² but figuratively ³to be in or bring into
harmony.²
 Maas: Dutch short form of (drum roll...) THOMAS. Not only our dear author,
of course, but the apostle who in the New Testament doubted the
resurrection. Thomas is the Greek form of the Aramaic Te¹oma, meaning
³twin.²

All of these notes, and probably more, are part of the imaginative chord
that is the ending of CofL49.....

Joe H
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Art Degraded,
Imagination Denied,
War Governed the Nations.
William Blake
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joe at jhwriter.com
http://www.jhwriter.com
http://jhwriter.blogspot.com
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on 1/12/07 12:29 PM, Tore Rye Andersen at torerye at hotmail.com wrote:

> Thanks for that elaborate, nuanced and well-reasoned reply! I couldn't agree
> more with the following thoughts from your post:
> 
>> >I guess one of the things I'm trying to say is that Pynchon most likely is
>> >an adept, if only as a true amature who's keen on old Jacobian texts
>> >and matrices, and that the elements of the occult are in his books for a
>> >reason. The notion that what is being called down at the estate sale
>> >is the apocalypse strikes me as one of a number of possible readings
>> >to be gleaned from "The Crying of Lot 49". 1966 was a time when
>> >Yoyodyne was working on the delivery system for the apocalypse,
>> >and the end of all things just might have been one of the booby prizes to
>> >be unearthed from Pierce Inverarity's estate.
> 
> An apocalyptic reading of Lot 49 is not only "one of a number of possible
> readings" of that book, it is one of the most valid possible readings of it.
> The only thing I pointed out in my post was that the singling out of 49
> words in a longer paragraph seems to be a less convincing way of gleaning an
> apocalyptic reading than some of the many other options in the book. The
> singling out of those 49 words does seem to project a world, but that
> particular world (the imminent apocalypse) doesn't have to be projected: It
> is there to be discovered in so many more, less 'creative' ways.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Tore
> 
> _________________________________________________________________
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