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

[Michael Bailey]

Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> 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]
>

as a replacement for "shellshocked", right?

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

how about this, that it's both a commentary on the relative ease of
their lives (even compared with the lot's customers, but poignantly
easier than veterans', yet they are to some extent palpably miserable
even so) and also some kind of notional imputation of Oedipa's
acceptance of the nurturing, comforting role. (Her belief in some kind
of universal male nightmare that needs comforting? growing out of?
surcease of sorrow? or an ironic commentary on how she has chosen
troubled men and universalizes their issues?)

Backstory on O & M? Where did they meet, how?  Is there anything in
the text about how she hooked up with Wendell?  I can't remember.

She on the rebound from PI, yet for some reason she had not availed
herself of a lucrative settlement -- or had she?  Not having to talk
or worry about money, which she doesn't, does she? - is a sign of
having some...

Also, the sensibilities that make the car lot a torture for Mucho are
college-educated sensibilities; though he's not rich like Pierce,
still he comes from the right side of the tracks.

And too, the interesting convergence of Pierce becoming "voices" to
Oedipa, while Wendell in terms of his career, becomes a "voice"...and
later in the book I think there is some kind of blending of voices (e
pluribus unum...)

If there is a feminist perspective in this book, maybe it is more of
an historical awareness that with women's suffrage and pervasive
education there would (will) be interesting changes and new roles for
everybody - with Oedipa wandering around utilizing her literary
training on Pierce's fortune, seeing what he's made of the world, just
beginning to get a sense of things and him out of the picture - does
the phrase "merry widow" have a place in thinking about the text here?



-- 
"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