C of L49: again, the one who cannot be named.

[Michael Bailey]

Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> p. 92 "as if she had been trapped at the centre of some intricate crystal" and said, "My God"...as she did on page one...that near "religious instant". .........Thoth feels close to "My God"....(Thoth embodies American Exceptionalism?)
>

Thoth is different from his grandfather.
He remarked on the latter's bloodthirstiness, in fact, without seeming
to share it.
Who knows what he himself has done with his life?  True, he hasn't
rejected the grandfather by getting rid of the ring...

The Indians weren't really Indians, either.  (ie, he is privy to a
different narrative than the American exceptional one, and he knows
it; but yet old Thoth does call them heathens for not wanting to be
killed in the dark (that's how he knows these guys weren't
Indians)...although he himself feels close to God in the
light...almost as if he shares their feelings)

Just as Thoth isn't his grandfather...and the Indians weren't Indians...
his grandfather isn't God...and Thoth - surely not blind to the same
beauty of the light ("what is it that is born of light?") in the room
that Oedipa sees - at this point in his life's journey is more
interested in God than in his grandfather...

actually he's kind of a cool old buzzard (or maybe Oedipa brings out
the best in him)
and maybe his words on Indians and anarchists and TV are relevant to
Oedipa's quest, as much so as the information about the massacre(e)





-- 
"...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."