CoL 49 (1) love, anyway [PC 6]

[Mark Kohut]

Oedipa feels guilty for thinking he maybe 'should' have been in a war---but there was none for him. The car lot is like 'the moral equivalent of war"--Wm James---' for Mucho(?), where he had a kind of shellshock he has not recovered from....He believed in the lot; those poor dispossed lives.....The unbearableness of whom now kept him from believing in his new job/ any new job?.....Like some PTSD vets.....[I ain't looking it up 'cause irrelevant but I believe PTSD only earned that label after Vietnam]

A kind of depession leading to a sad nihilism in Mucho?  Like some fictionalized post WW1, lost generation unbelievers? 

In the fiction that is Cof L49, Mucho's suffering sadness makes him unable to believe in his job-----DJ.   Maybe, in the novel, a small metaphor for P's belief that such overfeeling, so to speak, disables one from commenting on it? If too overwhelming, all one has is tears-----which is what TRP has Oedipa realize is insufficient: "She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry."
But she wants to know if she can escape from that.

Mark



----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tuesday, May 5, 2009 2:36:52 PM
Subject: Re: CoL 49 (1) love, anyway [PC 6]

I read this sentence not so much as a commentary on Oedipa's compassion as a commentary on Mucho as suffering virtual combat fatigue from his time on the Lot.  An oblique Vietnam reference?

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
>Sent: May 5, 2009 1:35 PM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: CoL 49 (1) love, anyway [PC 6]
>
>Oedipa is empathetic:
>
>    You comfort them when they wake pouring sweat or crying out
>    in the language of bad dreams, yes, you hold them, they calm
>    down, one day they lose it:  she knew that.
>
>. . . this innate tenderness makes it very easy to like Oedipa & her  
>reflexive acts of kindness. The way she is always present in the novel  
>makes her unique in Pynchon's writing.