CofL49, this reading

[Mark Kohut]

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> Yes, all sounds fated ala Oedipa's name...
> That leap in causality has bothered me.....TRP nodding?....or just showing how everything is connected---logically.

Paul macklin writes:
Fate would mean Oedipa wasn't responsible for her actions (like Oedipus wasn't). but can we really assume this about her?

In this style of narration, part of what we learn is what Oedipa knows and part is what the author knows, and we can't always be sure which is which. (we can often guess)

I think that with this story the causality is more analagous to the Christian idea of Free Will than the Greek idea that it's all the responsibility of the Gods.

God (Pynchon) knows from all eternity what will transpire but still the characters' actions have a lot of bearing on the outcome.

This theology may not make sense, but the conventions of story telling don't always either.

The test is in what works.



How about this? Yes, Oedipa 'chooses' in CofL49, like any character with free will. Yet, she worries that she is caught in
an omniscient plot....she worries that she is being manipulated from the beyond................

Sartre once wrote [about a Catholic writer, Nobelist I think, Francois Mauriac] that there can no longer be an omniscient narrator
in fiction unless one is a true believer. 

So, TRP presents Oedipa's future 'understandings' in order to show the universal truths she learns--as she goes. It has been oft-observed
that the novel ends with the book's title, which might, logically, send us back to the beginning of the book again. All the new Tristero contingency Oedipa
discovers IS a constant......so, she now understands it that way. Allusion to Nietzsche's, or more likely, Eliade's concept of The Eternal Return.?
 
wikipedia: "The "Eternal return" is, according to the theories of religious historian Mircea Eliade, a belief, expressed (sometimes implicitly but often explicitly) in religious behavior, in the ability to return to the mythical age, to become contemporary with the events described in one's myths.[1] 
 
"to become contemporary----O's future (in the book) is her constant present!---with the events described in one's myths" seems like it might apply to CofL49, yes?









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> ----- Original Message ----
> From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 1:31:59 PM
> Subject: Re: CofL49, this reading
> 
> There are a lot of these constructions suggesting that everything that's happening is somehow fated to be.
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> "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.
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> 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.
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> 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?"
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> 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?
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> Laura
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> -----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".........
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>> 2) "That's what would come to haunt her most, perhaps, the way it fitted, logically, together"
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>> 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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