Once More Around the Oedipa Tangle

[Mark Kohut]

YES.....Pynchon sees the middle term in the communication system......

Gotta digest more on TR..........



----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sat, July 2, 2011 8:28:01 AM
Subject: Re: Once More Around the Oedipa Tangle

The darkest, mysterious, inexhorable force is the beast at the heart
of darkness. Nevertheless, "tis better to be lord of men than of
WASTE: since neither walled town nor ship is anything, if it is void
and no men
dwell with thee therein.”
-Priest of Zeus to Oedipus


“Sophocles implies that incest and exile, too much unity and
too much diversity, are not opposites but are, literally,
two sides of the same coin. He also suggests, what the
audience believed, that incest and parricide are acts that
obliterate the distinction between man and beast, inside and
outside, the wild and civilization. What Oedipus lacks (and
Thebes as well) is some middle term, an Aristotelian Polis
that mediates between our divinity and animality, making us
whole in a community constituted by diversity.” 287
So says,  J. Peter Euben in  The Road Home: Pynchon’s The
Crying of Lot 49, the concluding chapter of his The Tragedy
of Political Theory. [1990]

This is connected to the Peter vs. Paul theme in TR. No Paul is
shipwrecked on the Island in The Lord of the Flies, but Simon, who
discovers, through his reverence for Nature, the Beast that is within,
is a direct discendnet of Peter & Paul, the question of purity and the
sacred, opposed to the profane, is at the heart of darkness, but
Christ is keen to touch the untouchables. It is better to live with
men, than in wastelands.

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Lionel Trilling has an essay on Oedipus Rex in his Prefaces
> to Literature that might be described as Back to Basics 101.
>
> He focuses on the horror of it as Oedipus ends tragically even
> though he tried like hell to AVOID doing anything to tempt fate.
> Trilling sees this as Sophocles understanding of the darkest, uncontrollable
> forces in life which
>
> led me to think of Oedius' descendant down the agaes, Oedipa, who spends
> her book learning of the existence of the darkest, mysterious, unstoppable
> forces in history?
>