C of L49 continuity error?

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jul 10, 2009, at 3:06 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:

>
> a: 132, b: ? - Oedipa checked out of the hotel and drove down the  
> peninsula
> This may be a continuity goof by Pynchon. "in chapter 5, Oedipa  
> parks her car in San Francisco's North Beach, then spends the night  
> wandering through the Bay Area on foot and by bus, ending up the  
> next morning at her hotel in Berkeley; after a short sleep she  
> "check out of the hotel and drove down the peninsula." How did her  
> car get from San Francisco to Berkeley?" Edward Mendelson,  
> "Gravity's Encyclopedia"
>
> just posted on the wiki....

I also thought about the same thing when reading the passage:

	At length he climbed on a Berkeley bus. Oedipa followed.
	Halfway up Telegraph the carrier got off and led her down the
	street to a pseudo-Mexican apartment house. Not once had he
	looked behind him. John Nefastis lived here. She was back
	where she'd started, and could not believe 24 hours had
	passed. Should it have been more or less?

	Back in the hotel . . .

Then there's the dance without sound in the hotel's ballroom and then  
a fade out [essentially] followed by:

	Next day, after twelve hours of sleep and no dreams to speak
	of, Oedipa checked out of the hotel and drove down the
	peninsula to Kinneret. . . .

There is a discontinuity here. Is it an indication of slipshod work?  
Or is it an indication that Oedipa's perception of  "reality" has  
become unreliable? Again, if what happened at night in San Francisco  
is more an allegory of an acid trip than a variation on a detective  
novel—consider all that is so very unlikely & possibly projected by  
Oedipa in the "Nighttown" sequence—this unmarked ellipsis is like one  
of the posts holding up Oedipa's constructed reality. That one post  
has has given way, and it's a short matter of time before the building  
falls over.

At the same time, there's a lot that might have happened between  
Oedipa getting out of the hotel's bed and getting back into her Impala.

But most likely, Pynchon wrote the book in a hurry and overlooked this  
detail.