CoL49 (5) Cammed Out

[Robin Landseadel]

While searching online for the spelling of "Scurvhamite" I ran across  
this excellent essay—"Infinite Correlation in Pynchon's Crying of Lot  
49" by Terry Fairchild. Terry Fairchild gets deeper into the physics  
of The Crying of Lot 49 than anyone else, but this passage is  
particularly striking and on point:

	The culmination of Oedipa's night in San Francisco significantly
	takes place at dawn.  Walking past a rooming house she sees
	an old man sitting on the stairs in an open doorway.  The man is
	an alcoholic presumably on the last day of his life, a sailor, an
	Odysseus whose long odyssey has come to an end.  Like all of
	Pynchon's marginalized citizenry who communicate through the
	WASTE system, the old sailor bears the mark of the post horn,
	appropriately enough a tattoo on his hand.  Transformed by her
	portentous night, Oedipa greets the man with the simplest and
	most poignant words of the novel:  "Can I help?" (125) More
	than compassion, Oedipa is overcome by a need to touch this
	ancient mariner, to take him in her arms, and in an image of the
	Pietà or Mother Teressa she "actually held him" (126).  This is
	the novel's apotheosis when the distance between the skid row
	dipsomaniac and the suburban housewife disappears.  It is at
	this moment that Oedipa fulfills her spiritual journey, escapes
	from her self erected tower never to return.  At this moment
	when she selflessly reaches out to embrace the deep suffering
	of another human being in her a terrible beauty is born.  It is a
	selfless act that allows her to rediscover her genuine Self free
	from narcissistic absorption and technological detachment.

http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/current/fairchild2009.html