Oedipa's Nighttown. Goes out to The Mexican Girl in second last para, so to speak.

[Monte Davis]

I'm sure you're right that Nighttown was an inspiration. Maybe Don't Ever
Antagonize... (D.E.A.T.H.) recalls Stephen D. confronting his mother's
ghost in Bella Cohen's whorehouse?

OTOH, there's no stark Non Serviam! smash-the-chandelier moment that I
recall... and Oedipa travels alone, while much of Nighttown seems designed
to bring Stephen & Bloom closer together. (Or maybe she is being brought
closer to preterite America, finding connections and roots the way Stephen
adopts Bloom as second father?)



On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:09 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Been thinking on Oedipa's all night busride in Lot 49. pp 98ff
>
> I do think it might be intellectually inspired by Joyce's Nighttown
> section in Ulysses, where we encounter the brothels and lots of
> the underclass worlds so to oversimplify. You can look it up.
>
> In Lot 49, this scene is analogous, not a dream but an all night
> [darkness] experience---
> easy to forget Oedipa's total immersion since she's been driving back and
> forth, seemingly
> intellectually baffled by the overt events yet getting more and more
> emotionally distraught too-- and it Is, perhaps as with the list-shorthand
> poignancy of the human detritus Mucho tells us he finds in used cars,
> (h/t to Monte, maybe also Dave M.), the most extendedly "human" look
> in the novel? By human here I mean a look at the poor, the suffering, the
> preterites
> in their world not intellectually
> who are key to Pynchon's compassionate view, underground view, of America
> in Lot 49, yes?
>
> "Exhausted busfulls of Negroes going on the graveyard shifts.....a
> laudromat,
> the necessary place for those without washers and dryers,,,,where "the
> odor of chlorine bleach
> rose heavenward, like an incense"....another of the religious allusions
> here,
> about a substance that purifies, that honors the Godhead.....I get
> preterite
> allusions to that Saved, Damned Puritanism so foundational in America, in
> Pynchon's insight into it.
>
> Fluorescent bulbs 'shrieking whiteness"...cf. his perspective in V. and
> esp Against the Day on man-made light vs. natural.
>
> p.99 And "playing songs in the lower stretches of the Top 200, that would
> never become
> popular---songs for preterites---whose melodies and lyrics would perish as
> if they had never been sung---preterite lives?---YET one [non-American]
> "girl hummed along as if she would remember it always".....TRP gets his
> counterforce feelings even here....this ob that although preterites would
> be lost, it wouldn't  be all the way as long as some are alive to remember.
>
> This is the longest statement on Trystero meanings in the book, amirite?
> "It was a Negro neighborhood. Was The Horn so dedicated?" ....it is where
> she sees DON'T EVER ANTAGONIZE
> THE HORN......where the Trystero is some melding of preterite suffering
> and impending
> uprising, "revolution". Right?
>
>
>
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