Tentative Theory of CoL49

[peterthooper at juno.com]

Not Huckleberry Hound.
Quick Draw McGraw. 

https://youtu.be/fxBOlLFz6NU

Sheesh!


---------- Original Message ----------
From: Raphael Saltwood <PlainMrBotanyB at outlook.com>
To: "Pynchon-l at waste.org" <Pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Tentative Theory of CoL49
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 04:59:34 +0000

When written in as a metaphor in the mid-sixties, it might say the US post
office now had an alternative communication system..
Come @ me.

https://twitter.com/PoliticsReid/status/1179199569592274944?s=20
--


V. written around 1960 and took place in mid50s, the biggest thing going on still WWII and aftermath, Profane Depression baby achieved some upward mobility from the Navy...somehow his Mom (no word of his Dad) got to a nice Brooklyn (?) apartment from Hoovertown where Benny began...nice venue with a fridge full of food, the attaining of which would be another great tale...but anyway, Slothrop fresh out of military, examining habitat for niches as a PFC, pore forlorn civilian, may be emblematic of American demobilization and prospects/prosperity/wants and needs - he's the fresh face, Stencil the guy that knows all the backstories, the sweet spot in the tale being Paola's optimism and Miraculous Medal (later the MM was mentioned in GR worn by a number of casualties, which someone, maybe jbor, reminded cometman of back in 2005, taking on a more somber note fitting in a later work)(though Josefina's religion in V. while extending grace to Slothrop at a crucial moment didn't bulwark her su
 fficiently to matrimonize her to him - which in turn could be emblematic of NYC's failure to commit to the Nuyoricans instead razing their habitat - nor protect her from the juvenile delinquents)


Whereas a new catastrophe has occurred in Dallas by the writing of, and, one guesses, the events in Lot 49...the alternative messaging system itself has a long backstory, Oedipa as proto-feminist (part of the V. optimism also being the possibility of feminine influence in successive abortive attempts by V. to attain personal agency and in the war-torn world becoming mineralized but she keeps trying...and Rachel as a successor to V., inhabiting a social position where she not only has some personal agency but is perhaps the only positive influence for Benny) where the passing of Inverarity leaves her not heir but executor - do we learn of any beneficiaries? Very mysterious, but that is the kind of enigma posed by the legacy of war, fought, when sincerely fought, to protect children and empower women.

Her investigation comes to center around the alternative postal system, rather than asking as you or I (well definitely I) would, who gets the bequests? Meet these people, write some checks. Maybe she's the beneficiary - time to do some re-orgs.

It's gotta be a bit of magical realism relating to the educational and media heritage and the foci that joker Pierce chose for her attention. Like in the Huckleberry Hound cartoon intro where the carriage is rolling along and the road splits and of a sudden he is sitting in the carriage while the axles telescope so the wheels on one side are on one road and the wheels on the other side on another, and he's riding along over the abyss.

So if one views the left wheels as the legit educational and governmental apparati, the right wheels as the alternate comms of WASTE and other refurbished acronyms, or vice versa...and the abyss is filled with the poor schmoes like the guy living up a phone pole. She's rolling along above this societal bifurcation in the carriage of her relatively privileged upbringing and, like Huckleberry Hound, relatively oblivious (inured because it happened on every episode? privileged? on a cockamamie adventure that occupies her full attention? All the above?) to the precarity and illogic - now obviously the embedded base at all these companies is like the nearly-dead hands of the geezers at the Yoyodyne meeting, which, though decrepit and so forth, grope her (which is assault, even just touching, but how does that ever get enforced?) - nothing they would enjoy more (as Pig Bodine said, "Nothing I love -" (and Rachel or somebody goes, "I believe that!") "- than good shit-kickin' music") than ou
 sting a newcomer with ideas, and female at that! - so, wisely, she eschews a corporate power struggle which would wake these somnolent hounds of war, and focuses on the aspects in which her Berkeley training in lit-crit has empowered her.

At the end, when Passerine begins the auction, she has gravitated to a situation that makes sense to her, and when the door clicks shut, it's closing the rest of the world out - not jailing her Ugolino-like - centering her in a room where she will be somewhat empowered but, one hopes, not a threat to other bidders, and will learn more.

Is this theory Manichaean, or like Michael Moorcock's chaos and order dichotomy where the balance constantly shuttles? Maybe her quest acknowledges a dichotomy but improbably rides above it like Huckleberry Hound, and in attending to her evolving theories, places her in a suggestive exploratory mode.

Also, and I think somebody mentioned this in _Pynchon Notes_, the old Pony Express rider interview has intertextual overtones with one of the stories in _Dandelion Wine_ - the story like all good historical fiction has a savoring of all these events that continue to take place as time passes, and inevitably for her to eventually learn something, which will be more than Benny Profane would admit.
--
Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l

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