C of L49...trot thru, redux

[Mark Kohut]

I have recently reread L49. (I do not have a life and Pynchon is too much of it. But it could be worse.)
   
  I also speedread some essays about it in New Essays on C of Lot 49. The indispensable one in that book, imho, if the one by Pierre-Yves Petillon. It is entitled Her Errand into the Widlerness--an allusion to a famous American historian (Perry Miller)'s book. Which is titled
  after a Puritan tract about the meaning of going and settling in the new country (that was America)......
   
  He sees the book this way. He gives us the well-known---to French readers---poem which the magazine title of L49 was published under. "the World(one world), the Flesh, Etc.".....
   
  He gives us the Nerval poem alluded to by T.S. Eliot that is a source of the Tristero.
   
  Yes, Robin (and others) have written of 'waiting for the Word, the Paraclete in L 49. Lotsa religious meanings to number 49.....
   
  This time I was lead to these thoughts: the Tristero could not, surely, be, as some say, 'set up" by Pierce Inverarity. There are elements he could not have set up....(when Oedipa acted on things, therefore when to have others interact with her....e.g. the letter carrier she follows.) So, what Oedipa sees re "an underground communication system" is real enough.
  I kind of see this as Pynchon writing out one of his lifelong themes---the existence of those 'off the grid', so to simplify. (Nothing too original here, I know).
   
  I was much more aware of Oedipa's past: Suburban, young republican, unhappily? married, wanting, coming to realize it, more but not knowing what that might be. ??  She was a product of those uptight fifties TRP wrote about in Slow Learner....
   
  So much is second-hand experience or miscommunicated experience.....from the forgeries
  thru everything, I felt many of the themes of the Recognitions more than ever. Anyone?
   
  So, "shall I project a world?"...."the tower is everywhere"........can the long story [I prefer Pynchon's way of calling it a story marketed as a novel] be a Portrait of the Artist Waiting 
  for Her Voice?   
   
  my new questions. Why was the door locked for the auction?  Why does it matter whether a Tristero representative bids? or how will she know anything about who buys the lot anyway? does that matter?
   
  We know from Vineland that she sems to have gotten out of that locked room ok and has had an amicable divorce from Mucho. So, what does that mean for the meanings of L 49?
  Anything?
   
  For What It is Worth,
  MK
   
   
   
   
   

       
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