Lot 49 Ch 3 Random Notes & Shit

[Tore Rye Andersen]

rich:
 
> criticize freely
 
Nothing much to criticize. Lens-brother: brilliant obs all around. 
A few additional obs:

> "Things then...turning curious"--rather standard detective novel boilerplate?

Yep. Pynchon does have a lot of fun with the conventions of the genre. We see Oedipa
disguising herself ("wrapp[ing] her hair in a studentlike twist", 148), tailing
people ("Congratulating herself on having thought to wear flats, at least", 130),
and doing everything she can to live up to the folklore about detectives, just like
Mucho does everything he can to ESCAPE the folklore about used car salesmen (12-13).
The narrator rewards her efforts by calling her a "private eye" (124), but of course 
she is a miserable private eye, reluctant to follow up on promising leads (166) - 
approach and avoid. Oedipa's incarnation of the private eye is too private, and not much 
of an eye ("If only she had looked" - 179). Like her namesake, the first detective in 
all of literature, she ends up blind.
 
> "that's what would haunt her"--there's lots of these looking back on
> references in this chapter--reminds me of some comments that maybe the
> end of the book is not the end of the book--as if Oedipa is reviewing
> how she got to be where she is (back in her tower or within some other
> mysterious dispensation?)

The whole book is also filled with teasing references to a lack of proper endings 
and exits. On the first couple-three readings they may seem innocent enough, but 
they really do pile up like those posthorns in San Francisco: "should there be a 
happy ending" (32), "endless repetitions" (34), "She could imagine no end to it" (37), 
"Patrols looked for routes out, but those few that returned had found nothing" (62), 
"entirely an anticlimax" (75), "exitlessness" (170) usw. The exitlessness is of course 
Oedipa's - trapped in her solipsistic tower - but it is also the reader's, who is not 
allowed any traditional exit from this novel in the form of a proper resolution, but 
remains "trapped at the centre of some intricate crystal" 92.
 
If we want release from the perfect arrest of Lot 49's non-ending, we have to look 
elsewhere, to Vineland, where we meet Mucho in 1967 "after a divorce remarkable even 
in that more innocent time for its geniality" (VL, 309) - which would seem to imply 
that Oedipa somehow managed to get out of that locked auction room. Good for Oedipa, 
I suppose, but I've always felt a bid sad that Pynchon broke that perfect sense of 
arrest and released Oedipa (and the reader) from the intricate crystal.
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