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

[Mark Kohut]

Never noticed D.E.A.T.H much less the rest and I would bet heavily on P
consciously---looks like 'obviously' now---choosing
that as acronymic.....don't remember the rest [of Nighttown] clearly enough
to judge....

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 9:19 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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