Pynchon's endings

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Daniel Harper wrote:

>While the "meaning" of Lot 49 is buried in the meaning of Trystero, etc., I 
>think it's entirely >possible to read the novel as a series of set pieces 
>without any real overall meaning. And the book >is meaningful and wonderful 
>even on those terms.

>1.) The Oedipa/Metzger meeting/love affair from chapter two. It's an 
>amazing sequence [...]. By the end of the chapter the reader feels shaken, 
>with huge volumes of plot that might fill a lesser novel to the brim 
>whizzing past. And it has very little to do with the "meaning" of the novel 
>-- it exists almost just to introduce and ancillary character.

Welcome aboard, Daniel!

You're certainly right that the seduction scene from chapter two is a 
fabulous set piece, and plotwise it doesn't do much else than introduce 
Metzger, as you point out, but I still think that this chapter has very much 
to do with the "meaning" of the novel. While functioning perfectly well is 
an independent set piece, the scene is knitted closely into the complex 
symbolic network of Lot 49, where much of the novel's meaning is to be 
found.
When Oedipa puts on all her clothes in preparation for a brisk game of Strip 
Botticelli, on one level she's just a funny "beach ball with feet", but on 
another, symbolic, level all these clothes tie into the description from 
chapter 1 of Oedipa as "insulated" and "buffered." Her existence in 
Kinneret-Among-The-Pines is a lonely, isolated one, and as she recalls 
seeing the picture by Remedios Varo she wishes that someone would come and 
liberate her from her imprisonment in the tower of the suburbs, from her 
buffered/insulated life (Oedipa is even so insulated that she doesn't feel 
it as Roseman tries to play footsie with her under the table - as a contrast 
to Oedipa, we hear that Mucho is "thin-skinned").
The game of Strip Botticelli (which ties into an extended metaphor of 
"stripping") constitutes a metaphorical removal of some of the insulation 
that separates her from the reality around her. Her isolation, her 
solipsistic little system, is gradually broken, which becomes even clearer 
when the mirror in the bathroom (one of many mirrors in the novel) breaks: 
Oedipa can't see her own reflection anymore, so she has to face the world. 
The whole scene, BTW, takes place in Echo Courts: Echo was the nymph who 
tried to break into the solipsistic little system of Narcissus' love for 
himself, by throwing fragments of his speech back at him.
.....and one could continue (with a discussion of the flying can of hair 
spray as an example of entropy in action, with the eerie blurring of 
reality/fiction that takes place as Oedipa and Metzger watch Cashiered 
("Wasn't I there?"), with Oedipa's burgeoning paranoia, with the beginning 
focus on "indeterminate sex" (as in gender), with the prefiguring of the 
novel's own anticlimactic ending, etc. etc.). Most of Pynchon's set pieces 
are extremely enjoyable in themselves, but most of them are also part of a 
"gigantic net" (like the one the midget submarine has to slip through) of 
complex interconnections which carry very much meaning indeed.

Happy reading! With Gravity's Rainbow ahead of you, the best is yet to come.

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