C of L49..'woven into the Tristero'

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Bailey" <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 06, 2009 11:07 PM
Subject: Re: C of L49..'woven into the Tristero'


> 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...

Well, I suppose, if you're a good enough multi-tasker you can do both at 
once.

There are also the amusing puns and jokes to savor and the literary 
allusions that are fun to recognize, some obvious and some not-so depending 
on the reader's past reading.

There's no law against speculating about "connections" between various 
things and trying to draw further meanings out of the text.

Personally, I like it  when the "meanings"  are something unusual and 
unexpected. I don't like having my brain cluttered up with overly familier 
truths and even banal ones any more than it already is.

If I can think of any such tidbits I'll post them but what the hell  keep up 
the good work.

P.





>
> 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."
>