C of L49 questioning the Tower structure

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jun 25, 2009, at 6:43 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

>> Laura sez:
>>
>>> 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.
>
> Same for me. Seems the paranoid possibility of this fades with a  
> close reading.

When Oedipa searches for Pierce's legacy of W.A.S.T.E. we find  
Inverarity's legacy of Waste, particularly in this section of the  
novel. Oedipa's late night journey through the land of the  
dispossessed leads her to the same questions that Dixon's travels  
through Colonial America produced: How could this be happening, in  
this place, of all places? 1966 is the year after the riots in Watts.  
Pynchon's other work from around the time he was writing The Crying of  
Lot 49 is "A Journey Into The Mind of Watts":

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/watts.html

The subtext here late at night in San Francisco 1964 could be Watts  
1965.

	Oedipa played the voyeur and listener. Among her other
	encounters were a facially-deformed welder, who cherished his
	ugliness; a child roaming the night who missed the death
	before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling blankness of
	the community; a Negro woman with an intricately-marbled scar
	along the baby-fat of one cheek who kept going through rituals
	of miscarriage each for a different reason, deliberately as others
	might the ritual of birth, dedicated not to continuity but to some
	kind of interregnum; an aging night-watchman, nibbling at a bar
	of Ivory Soap, who had trained his virtuoso stomach to accept
	also lotions, air-fresheners, fabrics, tobaccoes and waxes in a
	hopeless attempt to assimilate it all, all the promise,
	productivity, betrayal, ulcers, before it was too late; and even
	another voyeur, who hung outside one of the city's still-lighted
	windows, searching for who knew what specific image.
	Decorating each alienation, each species of withdrawal, as
	cufflink, decal, aimless doodling, there was somehow always
	the post horn. She grew so to expect it that perhaps she did not
	see it quite as often as she later was to remember seeing it. A
	couple-three times would really have been enough. Or too
	much.
	PC 100

I spent a lot of time in South Central LA in the mid-sixties. One of  
my big takeaways was a toothless alcoholic at the corner liquor store,  
reeking of Sen-Sen and talking about "The Saucers". Left a deep  
impression. His sound was weird and wobbly, like a tape machine with  
bad flutter. Communications systems start to distort naturally as you  
reach the performance limits of the communicating devices. Oedipa's at  
her personal limits, lacking sleep, pounded upon by too many [Real?  
Imagined?] posthorns in the night. There's a hallucinated, exaggerated  
quality to what Oedipa is witnessing. Previously she had no knowledge  
of this world, necessary in it's Scurvhamite way as long as it keeps  
the machine running. Now it seems she already knows too much.

The best, the brightest, those with real knowledge—Byron the  
Lightbulb, anybody?— stand helpless before the machinations of "them",  
whoever "they" may be. Leastaways that's how in goes in the paranoid  
realms of CoL49 & GR.

Oedipa is drawn towards what has been cast off, the machine's waste.  
As it turns out she will become some of that machine's waste in the  
process, and very soon as well. If fact, one might say the machine ate  
her up and spat her out about the time she exited the Greek Way. Don't  
forget how she hooks up to a psychic machine just before entering the  
Greek Way.

This reminds me a lot of Slothrop, who enters quite naive—young, dumb  
and full of erotic urges that end in destruction—and ultimately goes  
off-map, untraceable, with no direction home.