'No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow'

[Rob Jackson]

>> Janos Szekely

>
>> [...] the couplet turns
>> out to be taken from a pornographic version in the Vatican Library,
>> unknown to Bortz the Scholar before 1961, but that is _not_ the
>> edition Driblette used. So Driblette learned about the couplet from  
>> an
>> unidentifiable source, or somebody else planted the lines in the  
>> typed
>> copies, or (and) the Vatican version had been faked in modern times
>> (of course by the Tristero). Anyway, Driblette, whose production is
>> "particularly virtuous", found the couplet relevant and a means of
>> "speaking out" to an unaware present-day public. Whatever the source
>> is, he uses it as a topical comment [...]
>> I mean, _for Driblette_, either by coincidence or by deliberate
>> fakery, the "hallowed skein of stars" means the stars in the upper
>> left corner of the flag, that is, the United States, and this is a
>> deliberately anachronistic "aside", whose message is "if you accept
>> the existence of Tristero, the 'real' America cannot protect you".
>
> Tore Rye Andersen
>
> Just nitpicking here, but the first line in the couplet, "No hallowed
> skein of stars can ward, I trow" appears in all the variants of the  
> play -
> it's only the second line that has been changed.


Ah, but it's a rhyming couplet, coming at the end of a scene, and the  
convention is that such a couplet is (or comprises) an intact semantic  
unit in itself (like the rhyming couplet that ends a sonnet). Change  
the last line and you change the meaning and significance of the  
entire couplet.

Bortz makes much the same point:

	He scratched his head. 'It fits, surely? The
	"hallowed skein of stars" is God's will. But
	even that can't ward, or guard, somebody
	who has an appointment with the Trystero.
	I mean, say you only talked about crossing
	the lusts of Angelo, hell, there'd be any
	number of ways to get out of that. Leave the
	country. Angelo's only a man. But the brute
	Other, that kept the non-Scurvhamite universe
	running like clockwork, that was something
	else again. Evidently they felt Trystero would
	symbolize the Other quite well.' (107-8)

Whatever Driblette might have been doing by adding in the lines from  
the 'pornographic' Vatican version (which is hilariously ironic ...  
what sometimes gets overlooked in the urge to unravel the plots and  
rejoin the dots in the text is just how laugh-out-loud funny this  
novel is), and however Oedipa might be interpreting that addition,  
you've also got the author to reckon with. Note how the blacked-out  
stars in Driblette's version of the couplet are taken up again in a  
simile as his mourners drink Napa Valley muscatel on his grave:

	There was no moon, smog covered the stars,
	all black as a Tristero rider. (111)

That's L.A. smog blacking out American stars.

Like Janos says, it's absolutely a case of "it's either real or it's  
not, you can't decide". Like the good postmodernist text that it is  
these things are deliberately indeterminate in Lot 49 ( ... of course,  
you could say the same about the questions of Hamlet's madness or the  
Ghost's existence in Shakespeare's Hamlet). Ultimately, though, it's  
not a question of either/or. Both possibilities (coincidence,  
deliberate allusion) are valid, and are meant to be valid.

The flip side of this, for the reader (and for Oedipa), is to adopt a  
strategy of 'cognitive dissonance' to let both possibilities, mutually  
exclusive though they are, co-exist ... 'to be able to believe two  
contradictory truths at the same time ... a way to transcend opposites  
- as if some aberrant form of Zen Buddhism.' (1984 'Intro' x).

best regards