C ofL49. Overarching.

[Michael Bailey]

Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> like the trio in Sam Johnson's "Rasselas"---a paper on the (unusual in its time; "The Conclusion in Which Nothing is Concluded") ending of, TRP wrote at Cornell, which we know M.H. Abrams, his teacher, used as an example of a great paper to later students.
>

interesting...conclusion in which nothing is concluded...

kind of a risk, in that your reader might not realize that the book in
its entirety can be savored bit by bit without the pat ending he or
she has been conditioned to wait for.
it was off-putting to me when I first read it anyway.

GR was such a long book that you have to savor it bit by bit anyway,
same with V...so you get to the no-payoff ending of V. ("I haven't
learned a *o**a**** thing", and the poem about the 20th century, and
the waterspout) or the quickie exhortation to sing along at the end of
GR, and you can still feel good about having read it without bothering
to try to tie up the loose ends very much, without deciding if you
really want to sing along with that particular hymn...

But a book as slim as CofL49 even a duffer like me feels a little bad
about not trying to figure out what the guy was driving at... though I
managed to avoid such thoughts pretty much since I first read the book
in '73, till now...

> So, Oedipa the tower-entrapped Rapunzel has adventures. Like all the innocents above?

 yeah, that is something I think I want to agree with.
Though I want to big her up a little: she's doughty, resourceful,
there's a bit of brave Ulysses in her, isn't there?


-- 
"...no matter what you did to its edges the true Pacific stayed
inviolate and integrated or assumed the ugliness at any edge into some
more general truth."