COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

[Joseph Tracy]

The dead man, like Maxwell’s Demon, was the linking feature in a coincidence. Without him neither she nor Jesús would be exactly here, exactly now.
Fangoso-murky, muddy, covered up    The golden Fang- the ship of state powered by Nixon bucks, racist real estate practices, a rentier society, and global extraction 

The only thing that is clearly being said is that Maxwell’s Demon is a linking feature in a coincidence. What that coincidence is and whether it has to do with PI is not implicit. The role of coincidence could be the emphasis of this thought rather than a link to PI. . The problem time-wise is that a coincidence is not yet evident . Later we find that the waste mail carrier ends his route at the apt. of Nefastis and that is the only coincidence linking Maxwell's Demon to Tristero strong enough to grab my attention as a reader. I do not know about the Tristero per se because the only thing that clearly carries over to WASTE from the European Tristero is the posthorn. But it puts the narrator  both outside of the time of the events ( “was the linking feature”)  and inside the time of the events ( exactly here, exactly now.”    

I tend to think it is a way of cluing us to the contingencies which are growing in OM’s mind and which the reader should consider: Is PI behind the whole experience?, Waste looks real and operative, is it?  And if so, is it part of the still active Tristero? Why is PI obsessed with this postal system power struggle as evident in his stamps? These questions become clearer in her mind as the story progresses.

Many of these contingencies  are refrains which relate to PI’s voices in the phone call. Who was this dude? It is almost as though he is not a person but an entity possessed by several ’spirits’,   Vigilantism, fascism,  the shadow self, racism, power struggles, competing threat, lurker in the dark of night.

To  continue this thought and get really speculative I think we have to consider that PI was an early silicon valley type spook, set up through his own affinities and paranoia to consolidate power on behalf of larger organizations. And one distinct possibility is that Michael Bailey was right, that Yoyodyne was failing to get contracts, that his empire was in trouble, possibly at the  direction of somebody more powerful, and that he was always disposable, especially if he knew something that was considered unspeakable. Perhaps his middle of the  night call to OM  was something like her call to  the IA person , for whom it was too late, that PI knew this and his appointment of OM as executor  was a hope she might expose the kind of power plays taking place in very high places.   Unfortunately , to my thinking, such basic plot questions seem to be implied in several directions but unresolved. 

Possibly this unresolvable murkiness is deliberate.

Another way of looking at these questions and the unresolved murkiness might relate to a kind of comparison of imperial patterns of implosion and realignment. P has in V. just finished a novel about the spooks, and power games of Europe and the dark trend toward a kind of mechanized simulated woman, an anti-Beatrice,  which seems to draw the powers and players of the time with powerful allure. Her machine fecundity  promises endless growth, everything organized by battles over resources and  infrastructural systems of control. GR brings this struggle forward even further as the pursuit of rockets, atomic weapons, war profits  and behavior control coalesce and do battle with the last remnants of the human. Again, secret police take a central role, as do pockets of resistance.  So if phenomena in the US like the CIA power struggle with Kennedy, or the growth of the Military industrial complex, or the advertising for suburban heaven have reached an existential question mark( as many think they did with the killing of Kennedy) and nobody can safely look into this secretive power struggle and the presumptions that drive the quickly  growing  US empire, Pynchon is in my mind making a powerful comparison to earlier empires, marked by machiavellian power games, grids  and secret police, but always at odds with nature and the wisdom of the human, the tribal and the geographic  scale.  



> On Jul 21, 2024, at 7:19 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Let me ask my question more open-endedly......premise, every metaphor,
> analogy etc a writer uses....could have been made another way.
> Why did TRP link dead Pierce with Maxwell's Demon?
> 
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2024 at 8:20 AM J K Van Nort via Pynchon-l <
> pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> 
>> Mark sez:
>> The dead man, Pierce...   "Like" (equals?).....Maxwell's Demon....????
>> Rather than equals, perhaps more simile, comparing unlike things. They
>> both manipulate information but for different reasons. Maxwell's demon to
>> create energy, Pierce to create wealth. Again the coincidence of seeing
>> Jesus after having learned about entropy and Maxwell's demon, Oed begins to
>> relate how Pierce has used money to create power with how an idea can
>> create energy or lead to entropy. The demon can no more escape entropy than
>> the wealthy man can escape death.
>> On another note, since we are discussing Pierce's ability to curate
>> Oedipa's experiences, it is worth asking to what extent Pierce knew about
>> his death. Was it a surprise or was it expected? In order to curate on any
>> level we're discussing means that he must have known his death was
>> imminent. Is there any textual evidence to answer this?
>> In solidarity,James
>> 
>> Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone
>> 
>> 
>> On Tuesday, July 16, 2024, 02:45, Michael Bailey <
>> michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Nice breakdown. Respectful response:
>> 
>> My theory of the novel is not to take it too seriously.
>> 
>> Primary goal of CoL49: to be a novel, in the  novelistic tradition. An
>> entertainment.
>> 
>> Everything between the covers serves that end.
>> 
>> For me, it was entertaining earlier to speculate that the estate might be
>> broke & try to prove it (came up pretty short but it was a learning
>> experience.)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Jul 15, 2024 at 1:37 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> I guess I just don’t see how anyone could predict or stay ahead of her
>>> enough to know what bus she would take or where she would sit on the bus.
>>> Her pattern of movement was crazily erratic or arbitrary.
>> 
>> 
>> Exactly when people are easiest to manipulate.
>> 
>> 
>> Also what would be PI’s motive in all this?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> The hypothetical Harlequinish novel that I was projecting would have Pierce
>> intensely loving her, and putting her thru all this so she would go to the
>> auction, where he would have his hand-picked new love interest for her
>> declare himself and Oedipa find him acceptable.
>> 
>> I wouldn’t necessarily prefer, after reflection, such a plot, but I did
>> like that episode of (Cumberbatch) Sherlock, where one watches as Watson
>> enacts every single thing just as Sherlock had planned, unlikely as it
>> seems - that’s part of the enjoyment.
>> 
>> I see this whole line of thought as the kind of paranoia that is desperate
>>> and illogical and ascribes an impossible level of power and manipulative
>>> skill to the presumed controller of events. Once a person sees any such
>>> deception in a powerful person or organization it is hard not to wonder
>> how
>>> much of that is directed at you.  It seems rather to me that Pynchon is
>>> carefully presenting a story where the protagonist is stirred to
>>> investigate something that looks highly unlikely but is found to be so
>> real
>>> and troubling that she can barely cope, and looks for any possible
>>> explanation.
>>> 
>> 
>> Yes, but is that fun?
>> 
>> I agree that both the “broke PI” and the “lovelorn puppet master” aren’t
>> very satisfying theories
>> 
>> But bouncing around, using those now proven-wrong deviations to get off the
>> beaten path - because I’m not enchanted by the sort of grim conclusions we
>> seem to be heading for - I like the idea that Oedipa uses the executrix gig
>> to skive off from Wendell’s pointless drama and infidelities - then uses
>> the Tristero as an excuse to skive off from boring estate duty -
>> then skives off from diligent sleuthing - to a stamp auction where maybe
>> Genghis (or maybe even Pierce himself, in rags or a sari & turban, behind a
>> Bertie Wooster kind of glue-on beard, having faked his death) will show up
>> & turn out to be a gratifyingly adept hair-climber.
>> 
>> Because I’m yes, earnestly reading and not rejecting other interpretations,
>> but essentially I dip into a novel in the first place as a way to skive off
>> from grimness, to receive both “sentens and solas” - and never stop looking
>> for that.
>> 
>> There’s a tension between the desire to be responsive to the text as it is,
>> and the desire to find the specific things I want to read about, which is
>> enjoyable.
>> 
>> The many quite good comments here I’ve been reading are undoubtedly more
>> responsive to the text than the ideas I’ve been floating!
>> 
>> But I keep wanting to read this as a fun book without completely ignoring
>> its contents.
>> 
>> 
>>> Also if we assume that PI did set all this up and also made sure that the
>>> evidence of this large secret network  would be made to disappear early
>> in
>>> the disposition of the will, I would argue that this leads to something
>>> very much resembling the course of events following the Kennedy killing
>> and
>>> the scope of the efforts to prevent contrary evidence and testimony to
>> the
>>> magic bullet riddled narrative of the Warren commission, including the
>> high
>>> likelihood the Dorothy Kilgallen was murdered and her files stole. Maybe
>> a
>>> plausible for-instance  type explanation of what PI could have been up to
>>> and why he would have set up this elaborate and expensive illusion, would
>>> give more credibility to this idea.
>> 
>> 
>> Love; crazy love
>> 
>> I honestly can’t think of how that would work to explain the events of the
>>> story. P does not have human villains without human motives. Is it
>> really a
>>> parable where PI is the Devil( Ala the world the flesh and the devil)?
>> What
>>> is his goal as a devil? I’m really trying to think this through with
>>> everything on the table so far.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> I think - I hope - that positing PI as a devil is tongue-in-cheek, he’s
>> just a rich dude with his flaws, nobody’s perfect
>> 
>> And although Oedipa’s anguish is real, her situation within the spectrum of
>> human experience is enviable - she’s a modern embodiment of one of the
>> Aristotelian ideas about having the characters be of high social status or
>> something like that…she’s got internal class to move in many circles &
>> think worthy thoughts even in her confusion while she keeps moving (and
>> skiving)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> --
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>> 
>> 
>> 
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>> 
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