CoL49 Emotionality

[Steven Koteff]

I think I generally underestimated the complexity, nuance, deftness of OM's character. You get different things on every read, I guess, but it's that nuance--I'm seeing--that makes the portrayal of her Sensitivity so moving and, I submit, so personal to the writer. 

Caring about what writers say about writing makes the whole enterprise feel sort of like an echo chamber but for someone like Pynchon, who is, yeah, writing, but writing as a Sensitive, as a lightning rod and, y'know, prophet, when he talks about the process, or about Inspiration, or--now that I keep getting older and ever more fucking confused, entangled--revelation, my antennae sharpen a little. 

"She had caught sight of the historical marker only because she'd gone back, deliberately, to Lake Inverarity one day, owing to this, what you might have to call, growing obsession, with 'bringing something if herself'--even if that something was just her presence--to the scatter or business interests that had survived Inverarity. She would give them order, she would create constellations[...]"

Constellations referring back to Driblette's internal sort of meta description of his own such process, using the metaphor of himself as the projecting/luminating source at the center of the planetarium. 


> On Feb 6, 2016, at 9:43 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> and the huge-selling, generational-changing, cultural conversational tsunami The Feminine Mystique was 1963.....
> 
>> On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 9:26 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Lots of "Neglected" books that P may have read or browsed circa 1965.
>> Sue Kaufman is a good example, methinks.
>> 
>> A link to the neglected books page:
>> 
>> http://neglectedbooks.com/
>> 
>> On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 6:36 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Steve points to:
>> > "She wondered then if worrying affected his performance. Having once been
>> > seventeen and ready to laugh at almost anything, she found herself overcome
>> > by, call it a tenderness she'd never quite go to the back of lest she get
>> > bogged. It kept her from asking him and more questions. Like all their
>> > inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive."
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > yes, markedly..sensitive? (Remember Oedipa thought she might be a
>> > 'sensitive' as P adds his resonances.) Pynchon's feminism,
>> > perhaps, as we talked of before on this List? One might write an essay on
>> > the old-fashioned 19th century-like, shortened-Jamesian. psychological
>> > movements of Oedipa's mind, right?, hidden amidst her overt quest. We get
>> > this after she has been self-unwrapped with Metzger---too obviously a
>> > hidebound California Young Repub woman now loosening up? She cries after
>> > Metzger says, that  Pierce said "She wouldn't be easy?" Why did she cry?
>> > This is adultery she commits, against the man she is going to think about
>> > very soon in the way we see below ---has it happened before? but not like
>> > this time?
>> > Adultery was--is--usually a central act with the most far-reaching
>> > consequences, esp for women maybe, especially then and times before
>> > then---and esp in fiction!
>> > Brian Moore's fine The Doctor's Wife of the 70s or so was, as Anthony
>> > Burgess said,  a quietly revolutionary novel since it showed full bourgeois
>> > Anna Karenina-like real love adultery leading to a new self, a completely
>> > new emotional life and HAPPINESS beyond the wife's imagining. Madame Bovary,
>> > she dead. Perhaps as emotionally liberating in its fictional way as Fear of
>> > Flying was sexually liberating for many woman, all the good girls, on the
>> > page but in the life beyond that page too.
>> >
>> > Discuss and connect.
>> > Second post to come.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Steven Koteff <steviekoteff at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> In advance of the BtZ read, I am just starting a slow and hopefully deep,
>> >> experiential reread of this book. Haven't read it in several years.
>> >>
>> >> The book is so much more emotionally complicated, and smart than I ever
>> >> realized. I think as a reader accustomed to normaler fiction you have a hard
>> >> time A) getting the emotion behind the uniqueness and occasional density of
>> >> the prose, and B) processing a book that just doesn't spend its time working
>> >> in scene/plot in conventional ways or at a conventional pace. Maybe you
>> >> could call this a shortcoming of the book--GR and M&D, in my opinion,
>> >> operate with much more immersive scenery.
>> >>
>> >> But still, this book is just really smart about human pain and loneliness.
>> >> This is something TRP does not get enough credit for from
>> >> non-Pynchontoligists.
>> >>
>> >> Here's Oedipa, contemplating sympathy for Mucho and his difficulty
>> >> overcoming the fear of statutory rape prosecution with regards to his
>> >> attraction to high schoolers (this is pp 32-3 of the HPMC paperback):
>> >>
>> >> "She wondered then if worrying affected his performance. Having once been
>> >> seventeen and ready to laugh at almost anything, she found herself overcome
>> >> by, call it a tenderness she'd never quite go to the back of lest she get
>> >> bogged. It kept her from asking him and more questions. Like all their
>> >> inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive."
>> >>
>> >> I mean I know he gets certain elements of relationship dynamics,
>> >> especially sexual power maybe, very right. And that's on display here. But
>> >> the other insights and complexities are not necessarily ones I was
>> >> expecting. -
>> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>> >
>> >
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> 
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