CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

[David Morris]

What summary?  Did something get posted to the list?  If so, somehow it
didn’t get posted to me

On Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 1:50 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Good summary with one disagreement over whether the thoughts of the last
> paragraph are really Oed’s. You seem to have doubt on this point also. I
> think there is a distinct change of voice, starting  with the line "Such a
> captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her
> tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that
> what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant,
> visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.     …...
> In my reading Pynchon is drawing back from her internal processing and
> memory to an authorial POV.
>
>
> These were really good questions IMO and provoked me to dig into them.
> Some think I  say too much but this is how my Pynchon mind works..
>
>
>
> If naming the main character Oedipa alludes to Oedipus Rex, what is the
> plague that drives her to solve the riddle/case?
>
> Her name seems more related to a very general aspect of the Oedipus
> complex and the forces of fate in a particular time and place than a
> one-to-one correspondence to the Greek Tragedy. But there is a sense in
> which the Play( both the Couriers’s revenge, and  her investigation into
> the mystery of Pierce Inverarity, leading to the ancient  postal war) is
> the thing by which we catch at least a glimpse of the ultimate emptiness of
> the missing King. Oedipa wants to escape from a world where every day and
> every place is the same( Mexico not an escape just an accidental name of a
> world where everything is rootless colonized, another tourist
> destination).  ( similarly Kinaret is not in her life the scene of Jesus
> ministry and confrontation with the powers of priests and empire,  but a
> California suburb with Muzak ), but she is also afraid of losing control (
> LSD, tranquilizers, hallucinations that are anything more than her active
> imagination like the bust of Jay Gould, Uncle Sam poster).She is ok with
> alcohol and never seems to consider that her use may well be leading to
> alcoholism.  That space between boredom and fear  is the plague and curse
> of her starting point and that is where she stumbles and remains trapped
> as  the story implied in her name unfolds a battleground  and tragic
> destiny in which she is a kind of accountant rather than an agent of
> change.  She attracts every man who sees her but wants some kind of prince
> to enable a realization of a deeper role, of a life of the soul? She is
> Rapunzel whose hair , (feminine creativity) has no root in her being or her
> relationships. She sees that women may weave the world, while she feels
> destined to barrenness. Her very tears hidden behind dark glasses.
>
>   My feeling is that her feminized Oedipus pattern which would be killing
> her mother and marrying her father,  takes the form of not pursuing her
> moving vision in the tower, but abandoning her own creativity in exchange
> for sex, submission, and “marrying” one man after another  from the masked
> omnivorous prince Inverarity to the sensitive Mucho, to the amoral greed
> head lawyer Metzger to the theater director Driblet, while looking for an
> explanation of the dark forces at play: fascism, greed, power struggles,
> creativity and freedom constrained by corporate hierarchies.  I like her
> and identify with her search for what’s  going on, and that makes her
> tragic inability to penetrate the limits of her destiny all the more
> painful even while I laugh with the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto and the Hymn to
> Yoyodyne.
>
>   We want her to be the magic truth-telling revelation  of Angelo’s doings
> but watch her most solid  documentation of that story sold off in a stamp
> auction. All in all she seems to have a strong correspondence to the life
> of Remedios Varo, escaping fascism and the church and the male dominance of
> the surrealists only to be somewhat trapped in the psychological trauma of
> her past and the forces of history. We do not know if Oedipa , like Varo
> will insistently bear witness to her inner and outer life, tell her truth.
>
> OK, too big of an answer but it just spun out as I was trying to give
> myself some tools to think about this novella. Oedipa is us, another soul
> who has seen the machinery of domination, has experienced its damage, has
> desired a better destiny and despairs of any real reconciliation with the
> human condition.
>
>
> How do Mucho Maas' self-recriminations reflect an alternative to Oedipa's
> Tupperware world?
>
> Mostly he goes inward into his need for meaning and ethical consistency
> and sensual discernment while Oedipa goes outward into curious evidence:
> human bones in a fake lake, bar talk near Yoyodyne, P.I.’s stamp
> collections, a mysterious war between information sources, ancient plays.
> Both Oed, and Mucho are  well suited to their methods. Each is looking into
> the shadows.(  a turn of events  proceeding from within and from the
> promised visit from Lamont Cranston aka PI aka???. Her shadow is a fear
> that she will appear to be hysterical, crazy, unworthy to be taken
> seriously. His shadow is that he will lose his compassion, his desire to
> have authentic connection to music, to others, that he will instead accept
> an easy and meaningless life.
>
> How are we to interpret the three( actually 4) images that come to Oedipa
> when she first receives the letter (Mazatlan hotel door, Bartok Concerto,
> Jay Gould bust)? Don’t forget the missed sunrise.
>
> The Bartok Concerto starts off somber but strong and assertively
> directional. The  solo oboe has a darker lonelier tone that feels to me
> like the individual caught in larger( social, historic, energetic?)
> movements who feels that something within is getting lost. By the 4th
> movement it is more overtly crying against the overt cheeriness of the
> orchestra; disconsolate is the perfect word. Oedipa’s sense with Inverarity
> is not so much being invited in to the action at last but assigned to
> exquisitely self -aware exclusion, mocked from beyond the grave. She mocks
> back with memories of a sunset others missed, birds awakened, PI’s icon
> having crushed him. A young republican housewife and dutiful executor of
> the tycoons will, she has within a wild feminist disdain for this whole
> set-up, and we can only admire her for that.
>
> Mazatlan was an indigenous culture center before the Aztecs, before the
> Spanish colonizers, before the various Mexican revolutions, before the
> lighthouse tower marking an international port, before the German mining
> enterprises we will visit later in ATD, before Hollywood and jet set
> tourism, Mazatlan retains Its ancient indigenous name meaning a center
> teeming with life, specifically with sacred deer. We do not know the
> geographic range of pre-conquest of Huichol spirituality, centered
> currently in north central high country, but we do know the centrality of
> deer and peyote to their ceremonial practices of renewal and reconnection,
> and to my mind it hints at what Oed is seeking or needing as she slips the
> constraints of 50s republican safety.
> From abstract of article by Barbara Meyerhoff USC
> The interpretation is offered that the fusion of Deer, Maize, and Peyote,
> particularly as achieved during the Peyote Hunt resolves a series of
> contradictions in Huichol life-societal, historical, and ideological. It is
> suggested that the Peyote Hunt represents a historical and mystical return
> to the original Huichol homeland and way of life, and a symbolic
> re-creation of "original times" before the present separation occurred
> between man, gods, plants, and animals; between life and death, between the
> natural and supernatural; and between the sexes. On the Peyote Hunt, men
> become gods and at the most dramatic moment of the event, when the first
> peyote is "slain" and eaten, the important social distinctions of age, sex,
> ritual status, regional differences and family affiliations, are
> eliminated. A state of unity and continuity, which epitomizes the Huichol
> view of "the good," is reached and this continuity is between man, nature,
> society, and the supernatural. The "retrieval" of this unity is seen as
> perhaps the most important function of the ceremony, and of the entire
> symbol complex.
>
> But the original indigenous and truly other Mazatlan is for Oed a closed
> door, her closest glimpse through the visionary art of Remedios Varo. With
> PI it is is a tourist town for the likes of John Wayne and the jet set he
> is part of, a trophy experience, a colonial hotel, the mysterious Pacific
> reduced to a  beautiful tamed wildness, a  place to catch Marlin in in an
> expensive boat with sate of the art fishing gear, a confirmation of
> ownership, dominance, a fancy brothel like Cuba before the revolution, a
> scenic place to drink Mescal and Mexican Beer and walk on the beach, a part
> of America’s backyard, a potential investors paradise.
>
> Is there a pattern to Pierce Inverarity's various voices in his cryptic
> phone call? If so, how does that pattern connect to the quest? Pattern:
> 1)Vampire voice, 2) comic Negro (Step& Fetchit? Amos & Andy?) 3)hostile
> Pachuco (cultural rebellion through style, dangerousness)   4)
> interrogating Gestapo Officer.5) Lamont Cranston (seemingly his primary
> mask ) ??? Secretive preserver of  a certain law and order?
>
> I want to go further with this question but will hold off for now.
>
> I would like to introduce another question that haunts me in COL49. Why do
> we find out so little about Pierce Inverarity whose will and testament and
> estate is being examined and who was the Main character’s former lover? Is
> he the murderous aspirant to the throne of the American Dream?
>
> Is Pierce Inverarity best mapped onto Howard Hughes( Hollywood playboy and
> actor bought RKO radio, original fortune from oil mining bit that could
> ‘pierce’ hard strata like nothing before, real estate and casino
> speculator, linked to CIA, the founder of aerospace research at El Segundo
> later acquired by Boeing and located very close to Manhattan Beach where TP
> wrote the book, far right wacko accused by his lawyer on deathbed of being
> involved in Kennedy assassinations? Pynchon definitely has a fascination
> with Hughes (Inherent Vice) and real estate. Is Pierce I. not so entirely
> fictional?
> --
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>