More ch 5 COL 49 group reading

[Joseph Tracy]

The muted posthorn CH 5 notes

 Why the divergent post-horn  usage by Inamorati Anonymnous? Does this confirm that what OM sees are just random connections? Could the account of the IA founder be another deception? Or is it just the nature of any organization or expression of social/political discontent to morph and branch, or even be adopted by random accident?  Similarly what is the connection between the Tristero history unfolded by Bortz and the Waste postal system  or post-horn image? Is it a random side shoot, a side shoot of a side shoot?  

Dream or searing memory? She is first afraid, runs from man in black who may be priest, but then the City becomes hers , she goes where she will, enters a dream gathering, sends sailor’s letter by waste and follows delivery person.  In the following passage “She was meant to remember” appears in italics like a compelling truth.   

“The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity’s pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike “clues” were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.”

What I think a close reading reveals is that she is conflicted over both the meaning and the very reality of these clues. She  feels compelled to remember what she sees, but faces that urge  as an internal death wish, or descent into madness, but also “lovely beyond dreams to submit to it;...”

 For me that seems over-dramatic for a suspicion of alternate postal system competition. On the other hand, If I look at this in allegorical mode, where OM represents a nation jarred into a nightmare of confusion over the JFK murder, followed by the Oswald murder, and the subsequent confusion over changing stories including the “laws of ballistics”, I see a reasonable parallel to the choice facing the American public, particularly skeptics who see a story with many clues pointing away from the Warren Commission narrative, and dubious about a commission led by fired political enemy Allen Dulles.   

The public doubts were in many ways confirmed by the Magruder film, and over 10 yers later by the Congressional investigation which concludes that the killing was not by a lone gunman but part of a conspiracy , but then proceeded to put off a complete disclosure of documents which continues to this day. 

My point here is that a public faced with an event of such enormous impact had a similarly intense and conflicted  reaction comparable to  Oedipa’s feelings being describe in this paragraph, and faced with such doubts people long  for the direct soul-seizing Word, the cry that might abolish the night and tell the truth. This  public cry was far more relevant at the time of publication than the crying of a stamp sale. 

That question of relevance and authorial intent  was part of critical reception.  Was the novel a critique of the search for meaning,  a parody of post-modern literature,  a satire of California narcissism. Or did it fall short of Pynhcon’’s intent on some other basis, as in not being more direct, too elusively allusive. Why did Pynchon discredit it? 
 Wikipedia: Pynchon described, in the prologue to his 1984 collection Slow Learner <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Learner>, an "up-and-down shape of my learning curve" as a writer and specifically does not believe he maintained a "positive or professional direction" in the writing of The Crying of Lot 49, "which was marketed as a 'novel', and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then".[7]

How would Pynchon have marketed it  or changed it? What did he forget as a writer?