COL49 - Chap 1: Who is Pierce Inverarity?

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Does everyone have their copies of The Crying of Lot 49 handy?

1.  There may be more editions of this than the other books, due to its use in college lit survey courses (just guessing. Can anyone confirm or deny this?).  I'm using the Bantam paperback edition with a psychedelic depiction of Oedipa dancing to, presumably, the Paranoids' music (138 pages).  I'll try to avoid page references.

The Pynchon Wiki has lots of good definitions and explanations, leaving us free to get beyond the word by word parsing.

2.  Coming fresh from the Vineland read, one thing immediately stands out:  the writing.  VL had a number of great sentences, but it also had some dead spots (similar to ATD).  Those long, evocative, mind-expanding sentences, taking you in so many directions simultaneously, hit you from the first page of COL49 and just keep coming.

"She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan ..."

"Through the rest of the afternoon ..."

and the incredible:

"Maybe to excess: ..."

3.  What do we learn about Pierce Inverarity?  Pierce the untruthfulness?  Get right to the point?  Inverarity's a Scottish name, like Carnegie.  Pierce is something of a wannabe Robber Baron; Jay Gould's bust hovers over him, threatening (or maybe it's only Oedipa who's threatened by the robber baron image).

The description of him in the opening sentence isn't very appealing:  "A California real estate mogul who had once lost two million in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough ..."  Then we get a laundry list of four memories (presumably about time Oedipa spent with Piece).  Of course, Oedipa's memories are likely to be Pynchon's own memories:

a.  "... a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby..."

A memory of a sexual encounter?  A door slamming on a hotel room in a romantic setting evokes a certain level of passion or at least lust.

b.  "... a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west ..."

At face value, this is Pynchon's memory.  One gets the feeling that Pierce is older than Oedipa, but maybe not?  Were they students together at Cornell?  They were spending the night on the slope with little interest in watching the sun rise.  More lust and passion.  If they were bothering to look at all, they were looking west, where both of them would end up living.

c.   "...a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartok Concerto for orchestra ..."

Unfortunately, as I type this the Pynchon wiki is experiencing technical difficulties, but I do recall that someone wrote that the fourth movement is anything but dry and disconsolate.  Was this what they were listening to when they broke up?

d.   "...a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she always had the hovering fear it would someday topple on them."

Pierce liked to flaunt, perhaps tease Oedipa with his robber baron tendencies.  They made her uncomfortable, possibly leading to their final brak?

These four memories, seemingly out of order, chart the course of their short relationship.  They met at Cornell, had a wonderful trip to Mexico (which we'll hear a little more of in the next chapter), their relationship got contentious, and they broke up.  All pretty prosaic.  Oedipa moved on but Pierce nursed a grudge (inflicting the executrix position on Oedipa) or still loved her (bestowing the position on her) or harbored complicated love/hate for her -- assuming that his passive-aggressive comical phone call came when he decided to make her executrix.

We can ferret out that he was intelligent, wacky and conventional, on the one hand, which must have been his initial attraction for Oedipa.  But he was a rich, manipulative power broker (the type that Pynchon dislikes) which drove her away.  This is Oedipa's story.  It's not a Citizen Kane style story about discovering Pierce's true nature.  Pierce acts as the classic MacGuffin, setting the story in motion, then disappearing.

Laura