CoL49 (5)

[Joseph Tracy]

  Oedipus is clearly shaken and seriously concerned about the  
veracity of her observations ; the likeness to the slipped mickey or  
beating is apt. .However while her experience that evening is  
dreamlike or halucinatory, the levels of her reaction are logical and  
are considered logically by her.  Is this a large set-up orchestrated  
by Pierce, psyhchological  delusions,   an organization or  
organizations with historical roots that has taken new forms? These  
are the same questions that came to my mind. BUT  the stamps are one  
solid piece of evidence that  she has stumbled into something that is  
quite real and of a significant scale, and as the chapter unfolds the  
stamps clue the reader that Oedipa is still anchored in the  reality  
of emperical experience.

There is another way of looking at her SF, leaving the Greek Way  
experiences. Many scientists, writers, mathematicians speak of a  
process of letting go of a given problem , relaxing and refocusing  
the consciousness and finding a lucid answer to the given problem,  
often mediated by dreams , "signs",  or a visual or mental metaphor.   
Similarly helpful and enlightening or emotionally needed"  
coincidences" seem to appear out of a kind of drift state.  I  
personally think it unwise either  to mysticize or pathologize these  
things.  The way reality is mediated to us is fundamentally  
multidimensional and Oedipa's inner story of leaving the tower is  
about escaping the stifling monodimensional logic of her life .   It  
may be that Oedipa's final state of numbed insecurity has to do with  
the difference between her and Mucho, her inabiliy to fully escape  
the logical boundaries of the tower. She cleaves to a kind of mental  
control, individuality, logic,   and retains these things at the  
expense of the kind of  healing and openness that Mucho  has entered,  
not without  some loss on his part which she is wary of.

In a sense this choosing, illustrated by  the different choices of  
Cohen, Metzger,  Oedipus,  Mucho ,  and the other characters provide  
a good range of the cultural choices put forth by the events of the  
60s.  1) ignore moral issues and truth issues , work the system, live  
for personal ambition  2) yo yo between fantasies of escape , sex,  
and working the system 3)  Try to adjust yourself and your definition  
of sanity to an insane world  marked by the actual and real paranoias  
of the cold war and the greed of corporate predation  4) music, play  
acting, drugs , rock and roll, enlightenment, find your own  
definition of sanity, normal, love.   What is not on the table is a  
life that is benign and sane, humane and free, happily normal and  
American. In Pynchon's worlds that is still in the realm of  
aspiration or contrast.  It is interesting that Mucho is the one  
character that I am aware of who Pynchon carries into another book.  
He seems to embody a kind of American version of the Buddhist path  
characterized by nonviolence and a kind of not this , not this  
passing through and leaving behind of what is nonessential. His great  
gift is his hearing which generates contemplation an action. He looks  
from the outside like a caricature but his inner life is wild and  
once liberated from his troubled ego  wonderfully fearless and  
directed outwardly as much as inwardly.

Some of the choices lead to insanity and death, the demise of DR  
Hilarius bears remarkable resemblance to the insanity and (probably?)  
suicide of George de Morhenschildt, friend of Oswald. Suicide,  
insanity, and murder are the dark side of the American dream and they  
appear at the end of the story like the dark theater the author mimics.

I think the Crying of Lot 49 remains mysterious and relevant because  
it wraps itself around mythic inner dimensions of the Oedipus story,   
played out in a world as strange and tragically horrific as the world  
of the ancients, but recognizable as our own.




On Jun 23, 2009, at 5:52 AM, Robin Landseadel wrote:

> On Jun 22, 2009, at 11:00 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>
>> One thing I disagree with is the notion that Oedipa is going insane 
>> ( cracking up....), though that may not be exactly what Robin means..
>
> Robin is seeing LSD as more important than JFK in this story.
>
> The JFK assassination subtext for this story—CIA involvement, the  
> ascent of the military-industrial complex, the "Manchurian  
> Candidate" paranoia of the mid-sixties—passes through the LSD  
> thread first. The insanity Oedipa is  suffering from may be  
> temporary, but her pursuit of the Trystero during her dark night of  
> the soul in San Francisco reaches a point where lack of sleep and  
> disorientation leads to an inability to sort out that which is  
> dreamed from the real. Oedipa's concern that she might be  
> projecting this world does display self-awareness of her  
> deteriorating mental state, her increasing isolation. While  
> Oedipa's self-concern indicates awareness of her mental condition,  
> the manner in which her human contacts disappear or change beyond  
> recognition gives the reader reason to be concerned for her mental  
> health. When Oedipa leaves "The Greek Way" she finds herself  
> wandering [yo-yo-ing?] into a mental state reminiscent of LSD, if  
> only metaphorically. At a certain point, the sheer repetition of  
> the image of the muted posthorn becomes oppressive. The author [at  
> this point] points to the noir convention of the private eye being  
> beaten up:
>
> 	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.
>
> In Raymond Chandler's stories [and private eye movies influenced by  
> Chandler]* it often happens at this point that the PI is slipped a  
> mickey—drugged into a more pliable state.
>
> And CIA's interest in LSD in the fifties and early sixties had  
> everything to do with the psychomimetic potential of this   
> colorless & odorless substance. Oedipa's self-concern for her own  
> mental health reaches a peak in chapter five, where Oedipa's first  
> move after her trip through nighttown in San Francisco is to see  
> Dr. Hilarius—who turns out to have gone insane himself. Mucho Mass,  
> after having taken LSD [from Dr. Hilarius] appears to have been  
> cured of his neurotic fears—something that appears to terrify  
> Oedipa. Of course, having a "shrink" who uses LSD in a thereputic  
> context take up as much space as he does in a story rife with  
> references to a psychomimetic compound puts issues of consensus  
> reality & personal insanity directly on the table.

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