CoL49 (6) Either ... or ...

[Dave Monroe]

"Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist." (Lot 49, Ch 6, p. 162)


Cf. ...

   "Change your name to Miles, Dean, Serge, and /or Leonard, baby, she
advised her reflection in the hall; light of that afternoon's vanity
mirror. Either way, they'll call it paranoia. They. Either you have
stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids,
onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network
by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst
reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of
spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe
even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of
surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you
know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has
been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items
like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of
your movements, planting of post horn images all over San Francisco,
bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors and Pierce
Inverarity only knows what-all besides, all financed out of the estate
in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to
know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that it
must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying
some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your
skull.
   " Those, now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the
alternatives. Those symmetrical four...." (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 170)

"Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent
meaning, or only the earth. In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and
Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth's numinous beauty
(as Mucho now believed) or only a power spectrum. Tremaine the
Swastika Salesman's reprieve from holocaust was either an injustice,
or the absence of a wind; the bones of the GI's at the bottom of Lake
In-verarity were there either for a reason that mattered to the world,
or for skin divers and cigarette smokers. Ones and zeroes. So did the
couples arrange themselves. At Vesperhaven House either an
accommodation reached, in some kind of dignity, with the Angel of
Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparations for it.
Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. 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 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 to
it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some
paranoia.". (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 174)

However ...

" The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to
replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso
among its most tender flesh without a reflex or cry, then at least, at
very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go
skew. She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to
be avoided." (ibid.)


"Those symmetrical four"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotic_square
http://www.signosemio.com/greimas/a_carresemiotique.asp
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/narratology/modules/greimassquare.html


Recommended reading, ...

Serpell, C. Namwali.  "Mutual exclusion, oscillation,
   and ethical projection in The Crying of Lot 49
   and The Turn of the Screw"  Narrative, Vol,16, No. 3
   (October 2008): 223-55.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/narrative/summary/v016/16.3.serpell.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb1455/is_3_16/ai_n31586484/?tag=content;col1