CoL49 - chap 1 CoI

[Michael Bailey]

Confession of ignorance:
I always thought Oedipa was married to Pierce, but from a closer
reading it seems they only had an affair


I've also envisioned him (perhaps equally unjustifiably) as a good
deal older than she, giving him that much more time to acquire wealth
and augment his stamp collection

and it seems to me that on page 1, rather than remembering having met
Pierce at Cornell, she was flashing back to moments of feelings of
loss or missing something, such as the sunrise where they were facing
the other way - a cognate experience to having lost Pierce without
really knowing him because she was wrapped up  in her own trip

and this is somewhat borne out by page 10, where she seems to have
been already encumbered by the prisoner-in-the-tower fantasy    and
living in Kinneret-in-the-Pines BEFORE meeting Pierce (and well before
meeting Mucho) - she might have grown up in Kinneret, gone to school
at Cornell, and returned to Kinneret which would have constricted her
horizons and given her that Bell Jar feeling...

...so that when he appeared as a speaker at, say, her Young
Republicans meeting, there'd have been the urge to rotate 90 degrees






-- 
"For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as.
For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are." - GR, p
136