CoL49 (5) Transbay Terminal

[Robin Landseadel]

Q&A: Robert Goolrick on Searching for Thomas Pynchon:	

	I think I personalized it because everywhere I went I ran into
	these dead ends.

	http://americanfiction.wordpress.com/category/thomas-pynchon/

I picked up my first copy of The Crying of Lot 49 out of the [now- 
defunct] Campus Textbook Exchange trash bin, a textbook store on  
Bancroft Way directly across from the Southern entrance to U.C.  
Berkeley. The Crying of Lot 49 was a much-taught text for English  
classes at the campus in 1979. By the time that year rolled around  
[probably much earlier than that] mass-market paperbacks were  
"stripped"—tear off the cover, send the cover back to the book  
distributor for credit, throw out the book. I asked the store manager  
could I take a stripped book home, he said fine, just know that you  
can't sell it. That job at the bookstore—pretty much to cover the fall  
rush—lasted only a few months. I wound up looking for work at a temp.  
agency. Got a job at the Union 76 building in San Francisco [also now  
defunct], just a few blocks from the Transbay terminal. This timeframe  
overlaps my first three or four readings of the novella. Thirteen  
years after the book's first appearance, those strange flows of energy  
mapped in CoL49 were all still there.

On Jun 26, 2009, at 1:25 AM, Tore Rye Andersen wrote:
> In the end, Oedipa doesn't follow up on her fantasy of really
> helping the old sailor. She's on a quest, after all, a quest for
> Blinding Truth, so she slips him a tenner and promises him to
> deliver an old, crumpled letter both she and he know will never
> reach its intended target. She had the chance for a real
> apotheosis here, but IMO she blew it, and I think we are meant
> to recognize this; not necessarily to condemn Oedipa, but to
> realize that we would in all likelihood have done the same.

Oedipa is, after, on a quest for truth with a capital "T", and seems  
to have taken on some of the tics of a private investigator.

	"Just mail the letter," he said, "the stamp is on it." She looked
	and saw the familiar carmine 8 cent airmail, with a jet flying by
	 the Capitol dome. But at the top of the dome stood a tiny figure
	in deep black, with its arms outstretched. Oedipa wasn't sure 	
	what exactly was supposed to be on top of the Capitol, but
	knew it wasn't anything like that.
	PC 103

In the transition from inside to back out on the street that follows,  
we spend a little time in Oedipa's head for her DT/Delta T meditation,  
a musing that finally leads to :

	She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had
	seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns,
	because DT's must give access to dt's of spectra beyond the
	known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and
	fright. But nothing she knew of would preserve them, or him.
	PC 105

So the quest continues, "among the sunless, concrete underpinnings of  
the freeway, finding drunks, bums, pedestrians, pederasts, hookers,  
walking psychotic," until she fines a can—much like any other trash can 
—marked "W.A.S.T.E." instead of "waste."

She waits until she sees someone dropping off mail in the trash can,  
then drops in the sailor's letter and then [like a P.I.] waits in the  
shadows. A Courier finally arrives— "Oedipa gave him half a block's  
start, then began to tail him. Congratulating herself on having  
thought to wear flats, at least," Oed continues to follow the courier,  
& she sees him eventually handing off the mail to another carrier.  
Oedipa decides to stick to the one she was following, which leads her  
back to Berkeley and the home of John Nefastis. 24 hours later, and  
she's right back where she started. We are not informed of Oedipa's  
journey to find her Impala, theoretically still parked near North  
Beach, hidden among the warehouses. But we do find ourselves back at  
the Hotel [Claremont], where Oedipa finds herself swept up in yet  
another "anarchist miracle":

	. . .Back in the hotel she found the lobby full of deaf-mute
	delegates in party hats, copied in crepe paper after the fur
	Chinese communist jobs made popular during the Korean
	conflict. They were every one of them drunk, and a few of the
	men grabbed her, thinking to bring her along to a party in the
	grand ballroom. She tried to struggle out of the silent, gesturing
	swarm, but was too weak. Her legs ached, her mouth tasted
	horrible. They swept her on into the ballroom, where she was
	seized about the waist by a handsome young man in a Harris
	tweed coat and waltzed round and round, through the rustling,
	shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier. Each couple on
	the floor danced whatever was in the fellow's head: tango, two-
	step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could it
	go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There
	would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some
	unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a
	choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined.
	PC 106/107

 From Terry Fairchild's "Infinite Correlation in Pynchon's Crying of  
Lot 49":

	This is Pynchon’s dual vision. It is not a question of
	meaningless versus meaningfulness.  It is a matter of endless
	possibilities that can accommodate both extremes.

	ttp://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/ 
current/fairchild2009.html

	Jesus Arrabal would have called it an anarchist miracle.
	Oedipa, with no name for it, was only demoralized. She
	curtsied and fled.
	PC 107

Here we have a novel about a recent college graduate who is in the  
process of "wising up" and winds up heading underground, written by  a  
recent college graduate who is in the process of "wising up" and  
heading underground. It is written partially in the form of a mystery.  
The protagonist fancies herself a detective who is a whiz at decoding  
Jacobean Texts:

Q&A: Robert Goolrick on Searching for Thomas Pynchon:

     	. . .Which begs the question: How was the story received?
	
	Well, it made me kind of notorious for about three weeks, the
	way things do. And the ultimate end of the story was, I
	happened to be home one day—it happened to be my birthday.
	And I come home from work, and I was changing to go out for
	dinner, and the phone rang. I picked it up and said hello, and
	this guy said, “My name is…” I can’t remember his name. He
	said, “You don’t know me, but I’m a private investigator in San
	Francisco. And I happened to read your article about Thomas
	Pynchon. And he said, “In connection with some other case I’m
	investigating, I happened to find out where Thomas Pynchon
	lives. I found out everything about him, and I just thought you
	might want the information.” I said OK, so he gave me
	Pynchon’s address, Pynchon’s phone number, Pynchon’s
	driver’s license number. He was in California, apparently. The
	conversation went on for a long time. I hung up the phone, went
	out to dinner, and after a while I thought, “Who was that on the
	phone?” And it occurred to me that maybe it was Pynchon
	himself who called. Why would a strange private investigator
	call me a year later? But I was—by that time, I was so aware of
	Pynchon’s sensitivities that I never pursued it.

http://americanfiction.wordpress.com/category/thomas-pynchon/

	What is also noticeable here, and throughout the novel, is that
	the major character is really Pynchon himself, Pynchon's voice
	with its capacity to move from the elegy to the epic catalogue.
	The narrator sounds like a survivor looking through the massed
	wreckage of his civilization, "a salad of despair."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-lot49.html