CoL49 (5)

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Good insight into The Greek Way: not just a snarky name for a gay bar, but the starting point for a night of contemplation.  I don't really get the feeling that Pierce has guided Oedipa towards Tristero and W.A.S.T.E.  She seems to have found them by the act of questioning Pierce's investments, the source of his wealth, starting with the bones-into-charcoal dealings.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
>Sent: Jun 23, 2009 1:49 PM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: CoL49 (5)
>
>  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.
>