C of L49..'woven into the Tristero'

[Michael Bailey]

no matter how much I like the prose itself, and there's no question
that I do, in fact I keep resolving to concentrate on what's actually
on the pages instead of posting the thoughts that come to mind when I
read it...

my flyaway mind ("just washed my brain, and I can't do a thing with
it") keeps spinning theories.  In this respect, I'm akin to Oedipa...

presented with a will (and, yes, she does reread the will - p. 64,
"For one thing, she read over the will more closely." - so, she must
have read the will in the first place, or there may have been a
reading at Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus that is elided),
she really doesn't seem to focus in on it at all.  It's too complex,
for one thing.  For another, it's couched in legalese.  Third, her
thing with Pierce was and is over.  So why should she care?

But I become curious about it anyway, thus leaving the text myself in
search of something that isn't there and what its absence might mean,
not to mention what its intentions might be.

again, first a feminist objection: rather than elucidate the will for
Oedipa, Metzger treats her like a sex object and abandons her for a
scandalously younger woman.

But it's also reminiscent of "la conditione humaine" in which there is
presumably an understandable logical next action, but we find
ourselves following clues which interest us.
We relate them to a larger plan (the will) that we don't fully
understand, and we wonder if those clues tie into a larger plan, not
to mention whether the larger plan was crafted with our best interests
in mind (and harboring serious doubts about that at times)

as Mark pointed out, Pynchon isn't Eliot - but what is Lot 49 but an
exploration of fragments?  Shored against some ruin, perhaps?

the connections are tenuous, the trails are cold or even imaginary...

maybe the link between the Wells Fargo slayers and "The Courier's
Tragedy" is flimsy.

Maybe that's on purpose?
Other links are equally gossamer, as if a diaphanous cloth were being woven
:
her interest in Driblette, her happening upon Mr Thoth and Stanley Koteks,
the triggering of an odd and intense mental state upon Genghis Cohen's
mention of the East San Narciso Freeway
- which, DiPresso had explained, was NOT where HIS disputed bones came
from, although Metzger had tipped his hand to THAT batch of bones,
which "we" had gleefully exhumed in roadbuilding - and he doesn't know
where those ended up...

Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> p.89 Oedipa: "A cross or the initial T?" Linking these Wells Fargo slayers with "The Courier's Tragedy"......as Laura has observed, another pretty flimsy cause and effect relationship, in fact, might remind us of TRPs wilful
> cry agin cause and effect in GR...Oedipa's associative mind is in full evidence, all being "woven into the Tristero" now.....and/or her connective paranoia working overtime......that 'underground of the unbalanced', the creative types, as Mike F. has called them.....

these gossamer likenesses, this willingness to see patterns, this
opening of the mind, surely these are creative wellsprings...
something is awakening in her: not just an awareness of what is (or
may be) outside, but the ability within herself to perceive that
reality, make comparisons & working hypotheses, to follow clues and/or
to refuse to follow them...
a growing awareness of her own individual Will as distinct from
Inverarity's (and by extension, society's) mortmain


-- 
"...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."