COL49 - THEY?

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jun 2, 2009, at 12:30 PM, ;@mindspring.com wrote:

> Any other views of who THEY might be in COL49?  The THEY who hold  
> Oedipa in her tower?  Mark says societal forces.  Hollander would  
> identify them as the CIA?  What about the THEY who reveal the  
> Tristero to her?  I say some sort of analog for Maxwell's Demon --  
> all going on in Oedipa's mind as she stays locked in her tower.  ANy  
> other takes on either out there?

My sense for many years was that the  "They" of CoL49 in some way  
connotes black magic burrowing deep inside our country's history—a  
subject OBA references quite specifically in GR with further  
documentation of the roots and stems of western occult tradition in AtD 
—the weeds and old-growth are in "Vineland"—& a few Jesuits on the  
side in "Mason & Dixon". That "Black Magic" points to the general  
theme of heresy that OBA scatters through his oeuvre.

The "questing" & noirish nature of CoL49 makes the critical industry  
attached to the novel[la] constantly attempting to hammer out the  
"real" sources and meaning[s] of who they" are in CoL49—Kennedy  
Assassination, Manchurian Candidate, MKULTRA, the second law of  
thermodynamics, the LSD explosion [great band name, eh?], wholesale  
philatelic phreak-out—but the text's sources and citations are  
scattered enough and varied enough to resist a single definition. Who  
could "they" be? "They" could be anyone!

Save for its obvious etymological skew towards words denoting sadness,  
the realm of the "Tristero" includes nearly as much as it excludes*.  
Poetic, artistic and technological ideas are casually cited, producing  
an overabundance of "clews" for the high-minded to decode that are  
littered throughout the text. There is nothing definite or settled  
about the adversary in CoL49 save its inherent slipperiness, its  
failure to expose itself, to define and restrict itself as any one  
thing. But in the process there are numerous ways for the author to  
cite W.A.S.T.E. while we are witness to the wasting of America,  
Oedipa's journey into old, discarded, weird & preterite America  
happens while she's busy making other plans—looking up references to  
her paranoid "system" in old Jacobean texts and stamp collections.  
There are scenes in CoL49 like a pop-art installation of an oversized  
neon sign flashing the word "Waste" over a diorama of the discarded.  
"Nada, Nada . . ."

Not knowing who "they" are is the point. It's built into the book's  
design that we never find out who "they" are. Thus the over-the-top  
paranoia of the book.

What happens in CoL49 reminds me a great deal of Antonioni's "Blowup",  
where the protagonist gets caught up in a maze of clues that lead to a  
murder only to find all traces of evidence of the crime disappearing.  
By film's end the protagonist himself fades out.

*Though "Tristero" is never cited in AtD, the size of its realm is  
significantly enlarged in OBA's massive door-stopper.