COL49 - Chap 1: Roseman

[Robin Landseadel]

On May 6, 2009, at 11:28 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> Isn't she safer in the tower?

Or in the Tupperware?

I find the mirroring theme here, themes repeated throughout out the  
novel—which is real?, which is the simulacrum?, how much does  
distortion alter the simulacrum? How much do people prefer the  
distorted [TV character] to the real [day-to-day life], drawn to it  
like moths to flame? This theme expands in Vineland.

  	. . . Roseman had also spent a sleepless night, brooding over
	the Perry Mason television program the evening before, which
	his wife was fond of but toward which Roseman cherished a
	fierce ambivalence, wanting at once to be a successful trial
	lawyer like Perry Mason and, since this was impossible, to
	destroy Perry Mason by undermining him. Oedipa walked in
	more or less by surprise to catch her trusted family lawyer
	stuffing with guilty haste a wad of different-sized and colored
	papers into a desk drawer. She knew it was the rough draft of
	The Profession v. Perry Mason, A Not-so-hypothetical
	Indictment, and had been in progress for as long as the TV
	show had been on the air.

	"You didn't use to look guilty, as I remember," Oedipa said. They
	often went to the same group therapy sessions, in a car pool
	with a photographer from Palo Alto who thought he was a
	volleyball. "That's a good sign, isn't it?"

	"You might have been one of Perry Mason's spies," said
	Roseman. After thinking a moment he added, "Ha, ha."

	"Ha, ha," said Oedipa.

On May 6, 2009, at 11:28 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> By the way, it's interesting that there are few (not one? - correct  
> me, someone) named female characters outside of Oedipa (and Remedios  
> Varo)in the book.  She journeys from man to man looking for  
> answers.  Is there a reason for this, other than Pynchon falling  
> into the easy sexism of the pre-feminist '60s?

Good question. Note how Oedipa is increasing cut-off from family,  
acquaintances & other cars as the novel "progresses." People & things  
become increasingly alien as we move through the novel. We start in  
the wake of a Tupperware Party, presumably involving females & alcohol  
& fondue—I think of a Tupperware as a nesting activity, sounds all  
cosy and homey & suburban—we end in an auction in "perhaps the oldest  
building in San Narciso, dating from before World War II." In the  
context of CoL49 that makes it only thirty years old. We are left with  
a sense of "no direction home" for Oedipa.

  I do recall the dark-haired girl in the left-bank existentialist get- 
up speaking of that "ill, ill play", sitting close to the Paranoids.

	"You know, blokes," remarked one of the girls, a long-waisted,
	brown-haired lovely in a black knit leotard and pointed
	sneakers, "this all has a most bizarre resemblance to that ill, ill
	Jacobean revenge play we went to last week."

Her classically "Beat" get-up should synch us to Theater of Cruelty  
and Theater of the Absurd in her capsule review of "The Courier's  
Tragedy."

Then there is Grace Bortz, combining "Grace" and "Abortion" into a  
heretical stew.