CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

[Joseph Tracy]

Laura
So your picture of Oedipa is very close to how I went into this my 3rd or 4th  read and the whole novel struck me differently this time, with the funnier and frivolous parts seeming funnier and the shadows feeling much darker, and  left me with this feeling that Oedipa had not really seized her own path of liberation or confronted the violence that was being covered up by greed or more violence. She is braver as we see in her confrontation with Hilarius, but also numbed into questioning her own experiences and accepting a passive role in the resolution of the estate and the mysteries she has uncovered.. My  current feeling is that this novel is as close to allegory as Pynchon gets and Oedipa is too human to fit into her allegorical role. This may be part of the unresolved tension that produced disquiet and P.’s feeling of having missed the mark. 
  We both seem to agree that her path is outward, and Mucho’s more inward but Hilarius and Driblet are reminders that the inward leads to the outward and vice versa. If the mind or soul manifesting nature implied in the word psychedelic is accurate, and I happen to think it is , Hilarius manifests the violence of his use of psychological manipulation and his affiliation with fascism, whereas Oedipa keeps returning through travels, questions, research to her inner life and the question of what she actually wants to do with her life, what does the information she is uncovering mean for her. One of the things that has changed in her is a greater empathy for those on the margins, the preterite. This empathy  is something we see in Mucho earlier also. Perhaps the abrupt ending was needed to leave her future more open than my thoughts indicate.
   

> On Apr 29, 2024, at 3:20 PM, Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 1. If naming the main character Oedipa alludes to Oedipus Rex, what is the plague that drives her to solve the riddle/case?
> 
> Joseph, I agree with you that Oedipa is named after the Complex and not the tragic Rex. But I disagree that the female version of the Oedipus Complex is Oedipa killing her mother and marrying her father. If that were the case, Pynchon would have named her Electra. So, in fact, Oedipa's latent obsession (need? destiny?) is to, like Oedipus, kill her father and marry her mother. What does that mean? Is Pierce (already dead as the story starts) the Daddy and is she herself the Mommy? 
> 
> My take: Oedipa, when we first meet her, is trapped in the nightmare of suburban housewife non-existence. She's put herself in her own Rapunzel-castle. She needs to climb up there and rescue herself. She had wasted too much time hoping that Pierce would be the one to carry her away from her drab existence. Now that he's dead, she has to be her own Prince Charming - to marry herself. She's not a tragic, doomed figure. The book is the story of how she gets out of that confined head-space she's in. She literally leaves, embarking on a quest. It doesn't matter what she learns from Lot 49. She's self-actualized by asking questions, following the breadcrumbs out of captivity. Hilarius wants to draw her back, inviting her to join the LSD bridge inward, but she wants none of it. Good for her.
> 
> I certainly don't want to posit Pynchon as some sort of you-go-girl  feminist. But he was definitely reading the ethos, creating the rebellious housewife character (filtered through the male gaze) that also cropped up in The Graduate (1967) and Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970). As opposed to channeling the actual women's movement, which he may have viewed with some alarm or hidden hostility. Actually, Oedipa reminds me very much of the Mad Housewife. Young, highly intelligent and educated, but unutterably bored and stuck, by virtue of marriage.
> 
> 
> 2. Is there a pattern to Pierce Inverarity's various voices in his cryptic phone call?
> 
> Reading up on The Shadow (specifically the radio show), it seems clear that by voice-switching, Pierce is staying solidly in that persona, as the Shadow has all sorts of alter egos and work partners. Chinese alter-egos were prominent, but perhaps Pynchon thought those were way too cringy to mimic? The Comical Negro is pretty egregious, even if it was a staple of radio at the time. Pierce addresses Oedipa as Margo, the Shadow's love interest created for the radio show. 
> 
> It's kind of interesting that Pierce talks as a radio character, and Mucho is a radio DJ. Later, isn't there a moment where Mucho distorts his name and/or Oedipa's name to compensate for the radio distortions? Meanwhile, the producers of The Shadow radio show, created Margo as a character, because they were afraid the male voices would all sound too much the same (unless reduced to ethnic caricatures). So there's a sense that both these men speak to Oedipa in coded or distorted  language, as a means of expressing (or hiding?) the truth.
> 
> 3. Rapunzel/Remedios Varo
> 
> The thing that struck me about the young women in Varo's painting is that, though trapped and insignificant (like Oedipa), they've found a way to code their messages and get them out into the world. Which is what the W.A.S.T.E. alternative postal system is doing. Real communication by the marginalized. So it's a good image for Oedipa to have in mind as she starts her journey. It's a life-changing journey, but it's not of self-discovery, it's outward, towards discovery. Of what? The reality behind the distorted coded messages that Pierce, Mucho and ... everyone in power employ. 
> 
> 4.  Who is speaking in the last paragraph? Is this the narrator, or is it a monologue inside Oedipa’s miind?
> 
> I vote for it being Oedipa's internal monologue. We're making the journey with her, not watching her make it from afar. If Stencil can think of himself in third person, so can Oedipa.
> 
> LK
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 1:50 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net <mailto: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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