V2nd - chapter 11 - more examples - Bastardized?

[Ian Livingston]

Right. Thank you, Laura. I was beginning to feel a little lonely on this one.

Isn't Oedipus sometimes referred to as "the first detective"? Robert
Fagles in his introduction to Oedipus Rex in my Penguin edition says
of him, "he is investigator, prosecutor  and judge of a murderer" who,
of course turns out to be none other than himself. Is Stencil Oedipal?
Well, his father dies in absentia, Herbert never really knew Sidney,
as Oedipus never knew Creon; then, he sets as his life's guiding
passion the search to discover who V. is to the exclusion of marriage
and procreation, such that one can say he marries the idea of V., who
may or may not be his mother. Sounds pretty Freudian to me.

Regarding the need for conclusive resolution to the search, Jung
argues that "the mother archetype appears under an almost infinite
variety of aspects," and lists among those aspects, "things
representing the goal of our longing for redemption" (The Archetypes
and the Collective Unconscious 81).  Perhaps this is what drives
Stencil. He cannot imagine life without the search, without that
longing. Maybe it is representative, at some level, of the alienation
of the "enlightened" westerner following the death of God (Nietzsche)
and the proclamation that "I have become as God" (Oppenheimer). The
mystery of V., you might be tempted to say, is Stencil's Lacanian
"other" and Stencil derives his jouissance from his desire for that
other. Thus, to solve the mystery would destroy the other and there
would be no more joy in life for Stencil. So, even if he finds her, he
must continue to search for V.

Now, is Herbert Sam Spade? No. Not exclusively. But there are some
lively jibes in that direction, I think.


On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 7:42 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Mark:
>
> Oedipa is the female form of classic Oedipus...
> Which Oedipus had to solve the riddle to heal the land
>
> So too his female counterpart, Oedipa, had to solve the mystery/riddle
> in order to heal the patriarchal land which tower was everywhere....
>
> Alice:
>  It is certainly the case that young Pynchon has a
>>certain penchant for pastiche, as [Ian] noted, and of the detective
>>writers in particular. Though the quest narrative and the modern and
>>postmodern detective story (say, from Poe's early works to Pynchon's
>>latest, _Inherent Vice_) are related, in that, for example, both are
>>driven by an Aristotelian cause and effect or in the case of Pynchon's
>>parodies the conventional expectation of causality and the deliberate
>>suspension of result or completion. How does one keep an audience
>>interested if the link of cause and effect is broken? If completion is
>>never allowed? Perhaps completion is of qualities. That is, the reader
>>is satisfied with the cognitive or perhaps didactic speculations the
>>text engenders. Romantics, like Christ, speak in parables and
>>paradoxes. A Koan is a good example. The powerful subjunctive resists
>>any definite facts gathering or detective work. So, the journey or
>>quest, not the detective soft boiled but rather the great fall from
>>the wall down the rabbit's hole.
>
>
> Me:
>
> Working on a puzzle (Oedipa) is different than investigating a mystery (Sam Spade), isn't it?  The latter requires some sort of final answer, but there's satisfaction to be found in working on a (jigsaw, crossword, rebus, secret code)puzzle, apart from whether it's ever solved.  It's the satisfaction in putting two pieces together, and finding their relationship to each other, rather than their separate relationships to the big picture (solution).
>
> Stencil wants to know who or what V. is.  Is he only concerned with the answer to that question (is he a detective?) or is finding the connections, from The Great Game to World War II and beyond enough?  I think Pynchon wanted to focus on the connections (which he certainly does with characters like Oedipa, Slothrop and Doc Sportello), but, maybe, he didn't do such a good job of it here.  Stencil's still mostly driven by his search for that final answer.  So I agree with Ian that there's something of the detective about Stencil.
>
> Laura
>
> (Mercifully free at last from the horrific tedium and forced merriment involved in celebrating that mythical feast that supposedly happened before the onset of the genocide)
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."