Pynchon commentary, like pizza and sex...

[Michael Bailey]

it's a metaphor built up by 3 more-or-less throwaway references...

- seems to me like the book's a Cook's tour and Oedipa's various
options she has for viewing the world, also is confronted with the
fact that many haven't got any options, let alone the nice options she
has, and after some confusion and angst, decides to go with what she's
good at and trained for...


Arrabal's maybe a catalyst in Mexico for Oedipa to reject Pierce,
someone who by being who he is confirms her sneaking suspicion of
Pierce's toxicity...

so that by her acting on the sadness she feels, and leaving him
(rather than acting on cupidity, marrying him and finding herself
complicit in all his schemes)
-- she finds herself in an unique position of being able to examine
his affairs and have somewhat of a hand in dealing with their
disposition....

but the development of the metaphor...
a) anarchist, oh yeah, we've been exposed to that, a scary-eyed shadow
with a bomb...in a Porky Pig cartoon...

b) and then, meeting and talking with the actual anarchist Arrabal,
without adopting his frame of reference while still allowing he may
have got some things right...but hearing him embrace violence (deal
killer for me...dunno about Oedipa) while his sources of news are from
1904 and his mentors aren't clearly present...

--- as has often been said (by me, and I'll probably say it some
more), even if a violent revolutionary isn't actually an agent
provocateur, he or she might as well be -- and Arrabal might as well
be working for Dulles's CIA if he's going to blow up people and make
with the scary eyes...

even though he is spot-on about the target-worthiness of a guy like
Pierce or Henry Clay Frick (I mean if there were ever a guy that
deserved...)


c) and finally, the metaphor itself -- dance of the deaf - is a
bricolage or detournement of the anarchist paradigm.
Where Arrabal sees outbreaks of revolution as intrusions (protrusions?
 epiphanies?) from another world,
Oedipa's anarchist miracle involves people *unable* to sense a cue the
normal way, responding to it anyway...
equating anarchism with a disability...

the ability to "hear" the music of society that is palpably missing
from anarchists, Oedipa seems to be suggesting, is due to more than
having an ear cocked at the distant drummer, so that she won't accept
the limitations of that dogma...

but, disability notwithstanding...she does lend him an ear, so to speak...