CoL 49

[Joseph Tracy]

How is it known that TRP is a devout Catholic, as some suggest? I  
have never read the Jules Siegel piece but don't know where this idea  
comes from or what other biographical sources I am missing.. If  TRP  
was catholic at Cornell  that would be interesting but not convincing  
to me, I was raised in Irish Catholic family and have no association  
or interest with it now. Very few people I know retain the religious  
faith of their College years. Anyway further info on this would be  
welcome. The roles of Catholics seem mixed in the 49 text:  Seemingly  
innocent King of Faggio's devotion used against  him by evil Duke  
Angelo, tristero seems to align with catholicism and holy Roman  
empire but also to engage in murder, Catholic integration into  
Fascism is ugly and alluded to in the novel. Any way I see no clear  
religious sympathies.

Sorry for skipping out on most of the CoL 49 discussion.  Have been  
reading the list  from time to time and finished another reading of  
the novel, but have been spending a lot of time expanding my  
vegetable garden. I also just re-read C Hollanders Magic Eye essay.    
One thing that has come to trouble me about the story is the dual  
role of the tristero/trystero.  In one sense they seem to stand for  
an alternative to the official state controlled lines of  
communication, and to connect the dispossessed in a community of the  
preterite.  On the other hand they seem to simply represent the  
bitterness and violent revenge and  self interests of an out of power  
empire as nasty and murderous as any other.    Maybe this is the  
journey that everyone follows who wants to understand what is going  
on.  One starts from a particular identity and sense of moral  
injustice and finds that what ever that group identity is it is  
implicated in some of the very behavior one despises. In some sense  
every successful nation, culture, religion is a kind of power  
conspiracy with some ugly stuff lurking in the shadows or in the open  
like knocking off Kings  or tribes  or religious and political  
scapegoats and getting away with it.   This confronts one with a  
lonely choice, particularly if one is unwilling to abandon core  
ethical values or reasoned ethical equanimity.   In Oedipa's case she  
has moved from the arms of a good looking actor/lawyer/firmly rooted  
in the upperclass and despite his Jewish name not too concerned about  
looting graves for profit, to the arms of a dying drunk , from the  
Suburban Gallilee of the ruling class to the metaphoric Gallilee of  
the lost , weak, pathetic, poor. To resolve the disposition of the  
imperial estates of her time  she has plunged deep into the  
political, religious and intellectual culture wars that led to that  
moment  and traced them back as far as the end of the Holy Roman  
Empire, but still has no sense of having discoered what she set out  
to find.

If we take this, as Hollander argues rather convincingly,  as an  
indirect portrait of the behind the scenes political and economic  
forces that led to the  assassination of JFK by power players in the  
CIA, Oil barons, etc. , then Oedipa becomes every American who,  
freaked by this bizarre event and its discordant and unsatisfying  
public explication, probed deeply enough to find a world that looked  
nothing like the  sanctified history of school or TV land. If true,   
The implications make a mockery of all our public discourse and  
reveal a society stunned into catatonic denial  and doomed to an  
endless round of  greedy incestuous power players pretending to be  
patriotic princes . One thing I found in rereading about the Kennedy  
Killing with the aid of Wikipedia and the web is  that the world of  
spooks, Mafiosi, Drugs, and the very rich and politically powerful  
are a lot more intertwined than has ever been shown in popular  
media.  The story of Mary Pinchot/Meyer is particularly poignant and  
Pyncho nesque involving an affair with Pres Kennedy and LSD, James  
Jesus Angleton,  her unsolved murder, and the deathbed statement of  
Her ex husband Cord Meyer that she was killed by the same bastards  
that killed Kennnedy.

What all of this  darkening intrigue plays ou against is the  
continual insertion of comic relief. You laugh at the ridiculous and   
get a little of the individual freedom and comic distance that  
earnest and serious information alone fails to supply.  Watching fake  
news is now one of the last ways to look honestly at the news of the  
day on a mainstream outlet without bowing and scraping before the  
sacred cows and their sacred cowshit.  Of course there's also the  
aspect of laughing just to keep from crying.  How do we know, and how  
do we know that what we"know" is real. Oedipa looks for the truth,  
then looks for a reason to discount what she finds, hoping the mad  
Doctor will tell her she is  delusional. There was also a fascinating  
phone call between Pinchot and T. Leary)What is valid empirical  
evidence and who decides. CoL 49 looks backward and forward in time  
at  the medium of information as the key point of social  
transformation, decisions .   The simple truth appears in the  
courier's tragedy as a miracle.