CoL49 (5) Cammed Out

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Great quote.  This is a moving moment in the book, but I also particularly love what follows:  the vintage Pynchon stream of consciousness relating the alcoholic's DTs to his /dt.

And as long as I'm raving over his writing, I've always loved the sentence about "vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys."

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
>Sent: Jun 25, 2009 11:05 AM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: CoL49 (5) Cammed Out
>
>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