Cof L49

[Michael Bailey]

Laura wrote:
>> The satirical poems and songs that crop up in Alice In Wonderland seem like an inspiration.
and I replied:
>
>  Pynchon, though, often aims for lyricism rather than satire, in the
> songs and I think it's also fruitful to place that production value
> higher on an imputed scale of values in his prose than many people
> seem to do.
>

which sounds ever so slightly rude, though the sentiment is quite innocent.

Alice's adventures are analogous to Oedipa's in several ways.
First, Alice's trip down the rabbit hole interrupts a sweet summer
afternoon, and young Alice is obviously well-born, young and healthy.
Although Oedipa's angst is inarguably real, the circumstances of her
life are what many people would call idyllic.  We know from _Vineland_
that the divorce she's heading toward is going to be "unusually
amiable"; she's not lacking for material well-being, she's the good
fortune to be attractive and orgasmic.  A-and although she correctly
senses conspiracy (or at least, something piscine), she herself is not
directly threatened.

Like Alice (who faces the various bogies of Wonderland with direct
questions, applies her own standards of behavior to them, and finally
puts them in their place definitively) Oedipa has a brave heart: not
quailing before the hazards in any environment (instanced by her
willingness to pinch a boat with the Paranoids, have sex with a
stranger, introduce herself to various and sundry, walk the streets of
San Francisco without either Michael Douglas or Karl Malden), and
daring - in the current chapter - to detach herself from a guided tour
in a defense facility, an environment many of us might find daunting,
and strike up a conversation with Koteks.

Delving a little deeper, the situations and characters Alice meets are
distortions of recognizable types in Victorian England, which in many
cases are still recognizable today.  In some avuncular way, Carroll
may have been preparing the young dear with his tale for experiences
she could expect in her future.  Unwind a little bit of the kinky age
difference and CofL49 might be a sort of Baedeker OBA compiled for
young female Republicans.

Specifically, as the Mad Hatter referred to mercury-poisoned
craftsmen, the Red Queen to power-mad aristocrats, "nothing drier than
a caucus race" to the predictability of politics, etc etc etc, a young
lady worth her salt in California would probably encounter the land
speculators, the disgruntled techies, the New Agers (what is the
Nefastis Machine but an attempt to graft psychism with an overcoat of
Science?), the wingnuts, and - if she actually looks - the
disenfranchised.

I think Carroll's songs are tighter, in general, and more loony...
(We went to see the Dali museum in St Petersburg yesterday, and in the
context of those works a little light went on in my mind and tonight
I'm thinking of Lewis Carroll as maybe the first surrealist.)
if he were in charge of the songs in CofL49, Baby Igor's song would be
3 or 4 stanzas.  The Serenade would not change much, it reminds me in
some ways of the Mock Turtle's Song.  Serge's song is the least
Carrollian and reminds me that Pynchon's purposes are not the same as
Carroll's.
But after all this Wonderland aspect is but one of the many layers,
only a fraction of the surplus value.



-- 
"...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."