CoL49 (5) A Metaphor of God knows how many parts

[Ian Livingston]

Robin Landseadel said:

>As we re-trace our steps through San Narciso & San Francisco [over
> & over again, the reader seriously looking for clues, a guide post, a
> center] we reach the stage where we realize that all the clues are pointing
> away from the center....

>        Here in San Francisco, away from all tangible assets of that estate, there
>        might still be a chance of getting the whole thing to go away
>        and disintegrate quietly. She had only to drift tonight, at random,
>        and watch nothing happen, to be convinced it was purely
>        nervous, a little something for her shrink to fix....

>Oedipa is blind to the center of the riddle because she is the
> center of the riddle.

>On one level or another Oedipa is cracking up, losing her boundaries,
> becoming permeable.

A soul might conclude that it is undesirable to be at the center of an
expanding universe.  Is it?

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Robin
Landseadel<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> I have kept going back to this novel—more, much more, than any other
> book—due a defective response to all the "detective mystery" elements of the
> story. It's positively Pavlovian, the way I kept seeking resolution of the
> "mystery" of the book, as if there were something important at the bottom of
> it all, a riddle that must be solved.
>
> In CoL49 we are presented with a veritable Cluster-Fuck of mysteries, all
> centered around the fictive word/signifier "Trystero"/muted posthorn and
> Oedipa Maas, the personified fictive center of the tale.  These mysteries
> are set in two well-known sites for the classic noir fictions of the first
> half of the twentieth century—San Francisco & Los Angeles. The parallels
> between classic noir fiction and Oedipa's quest become particularly explicit
> in this chapter:
>
>        She busrode and walked on into the lightening morning, giving
>        herself up to a fatalism rare for her. Where was the Oedipa
>        who'd driven so bravely up here from San Narciso? That
>        optimistic baby had come on so like the private eye in any long-
>        ago radio drama, believing all you needed was grit,
>        resourcefulness, exemption from hidebound cops' rules, to
>        solve any great mystery.
>
>        But the private eye sooner or later has to get beat up on. This
>        night's profusion of post horns, this malignant, deliberate
>        replication, was their way of beating up. They‡ knew her
>        pressure points, and the ganglia of her optimism, and one by
>        one, pinch by precision pinch, they were immobilizing her.
>        PC 100/101
>
> It looks as if we are trapped without exit in an endless Perry Mason
> episode. As we re-trace our steps through San Narciso & San Francisco [over
> & over again, the reader seriously looking for clues, a guide post, a
> center] we reach the stage where we realize that all the clues are pointing
> away from the center:
>
>        Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine
>        chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike
>        "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make
>        up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that
>        might abolish the night.
>        PC 95
>
>        Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being
>        presumed, perhaps fantasied by Oedipa, so hung up on and
>        interpenetrated with the dead man's estate. Here in San
>        Francisco, away from all tangible assets of that estate, there
>        might still be a chance of getting the whole thing to go away
>        and disintegrate quietly. She had only to drift tonight, at random,
>        and watch nothing happen, to be convinced it was purely
>        nervous, a little something for her shrink to fix. She got off the
>        freeway at North Beach, drove around, parked finally in a steep
>        side-street among warehouses. Then walked along Broadway,
>        into the first crowds of evening.
>
>        But it took her no more than an hour to catch sight of a muted
>        post horn. . .
>        PC 88
>
> . . . and from this point on, things really do get curious.  John Johnson*
> points out how ". . . Oedipa encounters not only a series of signs she is
> obliged to decipher, but also a series of men whose role in the novel is
> hardly less important." Oedipa will encounter an anonymous agent of "IA" or
> Inamorti Anonymous who offers up the tale of the founder of IA, a Yoyodyne
> Executive who was replaced by a computer. This is followed by the scene of
> Oedipa's encounter with CIA member Jesus Arrabal before herself becoming a
> carrier/spy for the Trystero. The plot of the novel is branching outward. .
> .
>
>        Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of God knew how
>        many parts; more than two, anyway. With coincidences
>        blossoming these days wherever she looked, she had nothing
>        but a sound, a word, Trystero, a to hold them together.
>        PC 87
>
> This is full of a sense of spycraft, the auras of secret disclosures
> embedded in the story's language as it shifts between a spy's or private
> eye's revelation of "plots" and the religious language that surrounds
> revelation. The reader [hopefully] realizes that we have entered a semantic
> trap, that the projector at the center of the planetarium has already
> started to malfunction,  projecting mythical and previously unknown
> constellations, perhaps made up of the same old stars in the same old
> places, perhaps not.  Resolution of the mystery at the center of the story
> is not possible because the central mystery of Trystero is its very lack of
> a center, its constant branching outward towards the unverifiable detail.
> Trystero is a fiction related in part to such fictions as Borges · and Italo
> Calvino. Like Borges' endless [or nearly endless] Library of Babel, Oedipa
> has entered into a mystery without end, a labyrinth without exit.
>
> Strange to note how many echos of "Trystero" there are in Against the Day.
> Particularly notable is the presence and historical importance of the town
> of Trieste in that book. I suspect the historical trails Pynchon was
> pursuing in CoL49 are continued in AtD. I cannot explain why our beloved
> author puts so much energy into such arcane historical pursuits as philately
> or the anarchist activities of the turn of the century°—though it should be
> pretty obvious by now that the nominal "good guys" in his books are usually
> from the fringes and central control is usually demonstrated as fascistic
> and frowned upon in some way. Without pigeonholing the dude, i'd say it's
> safe to say that OBA rode in on the same bus as Kerouac, Ginsburg and Dylan
> even if he ended up tearing out of town in his own, now untraceable, mode of
> transport. In any case, the hallmarks of Trystero's enterprise—an alternate
> mode of communication that "they" can't get to and tales of the sort of
> folks in need of this alternate mode of communication—proliferates and
> expands and gets rather refined, detailed and specific in Against the Day.
>
> Moving as far away as possible from quests for potentially relevant and
> specific historical conspiracies in The Crying of Lot 49 and sliding over to
> po-mo country, we return to John Johnson's "Toward the Schizo-Text: Paranoia
> as a Semiotic Regime in The Crying of Lot 49." This essay [anthologized in
> "New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49*] demonstrates the how and why of
> CoL49's enduring resistance to interpretation:
>
>        As a text, however, The Crying of Lot 49 must keep open a set
>        of logically disjunctive possibilities, which means that it must
>        behave as if they were all simultaneously true: all the
>        interpreter-priests are "right" about the nature of the reality they
>        interpret; Tristero is, at once, a practical joke, an historically
>        verifiable conspiracy, and a figment of Oedipa's imagination; it
>        is both the underground system that opposes the capitalistic
>        one which Pierce's empire represents, and it structurally mimes
>        the dominant order. In this sense, Pynchon's novel is a schizo-
>        text, and presents a disjunctive synthesis of diverse and
>        incompatible views. It can do this, finally, because of its
>        underlying coherence as a specific regime of signs, or a
>        structure not dependent upon any particular point of view, but
>        on the endless proliferation of signs calling for endlessly
>        repeatable acts of interpretation.
>
> It is the riddle of the Sphinx,  the Greek Way to paradox—away from the
> comfort and security of the psychologists couch and on to Oedipus' road of
> no return. Oedipa is blind to the center of the riddle because she is the
> center of the riddle.
>
> Oedipa will wander into the night world of San Francisco, summer of '64, in
> search of Trystero, a metaphor of God knows how many parts, members, secret
> admirers. Thoughts of conspiracy boil in her head, full tilt mania looms:
>
>        She knew a few things about it: it had opposed the Thurn and
>        Taxis postal system in Europe; its symbol was a muted post
>        horn; sometime before 1853 it had appeared in America and
>        fought the Pony Express and Wells, Fargo, either as outlaws in
>        black, or disguised as Indians; and it survived today, in
>        California, serving as a channel of communication for those of
>        unorthodox sexual persuasion, inventors who believed in the
>        reality of Maxwell's Demon, possibly her own husband, Mucho
>        Maas (but she'd thrown Mucho's letter long away, there was no
>        way for Genghis Cohen to check the stamp, so if she wanted to
>        find out for sure she'd have to ask Mucho himself).
>        PC 88
>
> In a few hours, Oedipa will be seeing the sign of the Trystero—the muted
> posthorn—nearly everywhere.
>
>        So she got up after awhile and left The Greek Way, and entered
>        the city again, the infected city.
>
>        And spent the rest of the night finding the image of the Trystero
>        post horn. In Chinatown, in the dark window of a herbalist, she
>        thought she saw it on a sign among ideographs. But the
>        streetlight was dim. Later, on a sidewalk, she saw two of them in
>        chalk, 20 feet apart. Between them a complicated array of
>        boxes, some with letters, some with numbers. A kids' game?
>        Places on a. map, dates from a secret history? She copied the
>        diagram in her memo book. When she looked up, a man,
>        perhaps a man, in a black suit, was standing in a doorway half
>        a block away, watching her. She thought she saw a turned-
>        around collar but took no chances; headed back the way she'd
>        come, pulse thundering. A bus stopped at the next corner, and
>        she ran to catch it.
>
>        She stayed with buses after that, getting off only now and then
>        to walk so she'd keep awake. What fragments of dreams came
>        had to do with the post horn. Later, possibly, she would have
>        trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed.
>        PC 94/95
>
> Sorting is a lot more work than it's generally cracked up to be. Not being
> sure of what is real and what is being imagined starts up a particular mode
> of insanity, the manic mode—one whole hell of a lot of work, let me tell
> you. On one level or another Oedipa is cracking up, losing her boundaries,
> becoming permeable.
>
> I'm reminded of the work of Iannis Xenakis, whose electronic assemblages
> often isolate and sample industrial noises, train-yard sounds, the grindings
> of heavy gears, brakes seizing, in an anti-musical sonic collage of
> post-industrial melancholy. Each sound, in its temporal isolation and
> constant repetition becomes a sign, signs that are then manically repeated:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTlKINcSTBE
>
> Xenakis 's early musique concrete is among the first sampled musics. He said
> of one of his works that it was the attempt to musically demonstrate an
> onset of madness. What we are witnessing here is Oedipa's onset of madness,
> presented as an overload of signs, one sign in particular, the glyph of a
> sound-maker being silenced, a symbol that circles back to a central tenant
> of serious magic, one that our beloved author notes in his introduction to
> "Stone Junction":
>
>        . . . by this point, all of these possibilities have become equally
>        true, for we have been along on one of those indispensable
>        literary journeys, taken nearly as far as Daniel -- through it is for
>        him to slip along across the last borderline, into what
>        Wittgenstein once supposed cannot be spoken of, and upon
>        which, as Eliphaz Levi advised us -- after "To know, to will, to
>        dare" as the last and greatest of the rules of Magic -- we must
>        keep silent.
>
> http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_essays_stone.html
>
> ====================================================
>
> * http://tinyurl.com/l459mt
>
> ‡ Next post
>
> ° Though I find plenty of correspondences from Pynchon family history.
> Some—like William Slothrop/Pynchon—are relatively obvious, others—like the
> revolutionary era William Pynchon's diaries or the older Thomas Ruggles
> Pynchon of Trinity College might not be so easy to track.
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=H9ifxr5vvBIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=william+pynchon
>
> http://tinyurl.com/ksc2xs
>
> ·Helpfully noted in "Borges and Pynchon: The Tenuous Symmetries of Art" by
> Debra A. Castillo, & included in "New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49",
> Patrick O'Donnell ed. , along with John Johnson's "Toward the Schizo-Text:
> Paranoia as Semiotic Regime in The Crying of Lot 49." See *, as above.
>