CofL49, this reading

[kelber at mindspring.com]

There are a lot of these constructions suggesting that everything that's happening is somehow fated to be.  

"She left, Kinneret, then, with no idea she was moving toward anything new." This, plus Mark's examples 1) and 2) could be statements made by we the readers by the end of the book, though they could be made later with additional information that Oedipa has after the book ends.  Example 3) sounds like it refers to a later time, after the book ends, in that we don't get a scene (at least I don't think so -- correct me here) where she's thinking of that night and pondering whether it was real or dreamed.

Example 2) is followed by the statement:  "Much of the revelation was to come through the stamp collection Pierce had left ..."   That seems to refer to post-auction revelations.

Gratuitously have to throw in one of TRP's many great sentences (mute stamps being the question's subject):  "Yet if she hadn't been set up or sensitized, first by her peculiar seduction, then by the other, almost offhand things, what after all could the mute stamps have told her, remaining then as they would've only ex-rivals, cheated as she by death, about to be broken up into lots, on route to any number of new masters?"

This sounds as if Oedipa's in the hands of some higher fate, as opposed to being guided along by some shadowy conspiracy or posthumous plot engineered by Pierce.  One very frail link in the human conspiracy theory:  One of the Paranoid chicks makes an offhand reference (one of the offhand things sensitizing Oedipa) to The Courier's Tragedy.  Oedipa immediately decides she must see it and also talk to the director.  That's a big leap in causality.  What higher fate's in control? Surely not God. Maxwell's Demon?

Laura



-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>

>
>
>I am noticing the grammatical tense shifts, so barely, subtly
>indicating different time periods...esp. a just ahead future (from within the time of the sentence)......................
>Examples:
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>1) "as things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations".........
>
>2) "That's what would come to haunt her most, perhaps, the way it fitted, logically, together"
>
>3) p. 117 "Later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed."
> 
>All of these future times sometime before the locked room end? 
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