CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1

[Joseph Tracy]

Chapter 6

The scene and story with the Paranoids seems pretty loaded , considering the possible influences of Nabokov on Pynchon, and the idea of Lolita justifying or creating allure around sexual predation. The lyrics of the song feels deliberately cruder than others  and needs reader’s  sarcasm to be funny. I don’t get Nabokov at all and find his writing very dull and obsessive, whereas it was high alert and delight  from the first paragraph I read of Pynchon( no warning that he was a big shot writer, just I might like it because I had lived in Arcata near Trinidad)
   Humbert Humbert reminds me of A. Eichmann, a colorless functionary obsessed with following the commands of a consuming eroticism of control.  Ok, probably way too heavy for the way the reference is being used , but how lightly can we pass off Serge’s claims to be hanging around playgrounds.  Interesting that he has a Russian name and some see Humbert as an incarnation of Stalinism.
  The net effect for Oedipa is practically nothing, Metzger is simply dismissed from her mind, and the reader left with a picture in Metzger of a manipulator who can’t handle any real human emotion that might inhibit his control. Who and what aim he was serving as executor remains inscrutable. We only know he was extremely defensive against her questions . Perhaps OM would find out more  concerning the larger picture if she looked into that question. But Pynchon seems to be narrowing our options for any trustworthy voice. 
    
   She already seems more intent to check in with Randolph Driblette than Metzger in  what seems a constant succession of potential male princes to free her from her malign captivity.. In my proposed understanding of her as allegorically representing a nation confused by the killing of a leader and looking for answers, this  succession of men seems like the nation’s attempt to find some narrative to break the spell and reveal what has happened, why, how. ( The coercively assembled Warren commission, The Magruder Film, Oliver Stone, Dorothy Kilgallen and Ruby, the magic bullet)
 Even with out this historic question her search  takes on a gnostic quality; is there a way past the demigod to revelation  and would that revelation change anything? 

 There was a question about what Maxwells Demon was linked to as coincidence. The funeral gives another link , though not a coincidence, in OM’s desire to contact the dead Driblette, similar to her desire to contact Maxwell’s Demon. She wants a  transcendent break in entropic limits, a Claudius type ghost to clue her in, but again Pynchon does not open this door. 

Returning to allegory it seems as though Pynchon at the start of the chapter has OM looking to the arts, the muses: the Paranoids music, Nabokov’s novel,  Driblette the director of a play about the killing of a king and the kings heir. Together with Varro, a full range of muses has been summoned. All speak to the situation. All affect her.  

The menace represented in Winthrop Tremaine,  Hilarius, the Peter Pinguid aka JohnBirch Society, Yoyodyne , the nazi psychiatrist,    and the IA story are still fresh in her mind and to my mind Pynchon is using these dark  forces to cast her quest in stark and highly consequential terms. 

As options close she returns to research into  the stamps  and history of the Tristero  and Wharfingerania. Everything that might be solid evidence is  soon to be auctioned off,  the  windows into a colliding universe slammed shut.

> On Jul 22, 2024, at 3:03 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The Nook edition had the “b” pagination for the part of Ch3 I hosted,
> but chapter 6 is quite different.
> 
> The “b” pagination division James suggests is from 120 to 152, or 33 pages
> inclusive, with each host working on 11 pages.
> 
> The Nook edition I have puts chapter 6 from page 109 to 136: 28 pages
> inclusive.
> 
> A third that would be 9 pages & a skosh: thru 117 & a third of 118.
> 
> 109 is a short page, so to even it up I’d like to go more than 1/3 into
> page 118, and end my tenure after
> “…Oedipa was able to fit together this account of how the organization
> began:”
> 
> If I’m shirking or hogging, I'm sure someone will let me know, and I’ll be
> happy to change (within reason)
> 
> 
> 
> brief summary:
> 
> The Paranoids burst into song with a lament - Metzger has stolen one of
> their “chicks”
> 
> Metzger breaks up with Oedipa with no notice, just a fair accompli
> 
> She learns, via a note on top of the TV set in the room at Echo Court, of
> his quitting as co-executor
> 
> She tries to call Driblette but his mother answers & tells her that their
> attorney will be reading a statement the next day at noon
> 
> She calls Emory Bortz at home, reaching his wife Grace, who invites Oedipa
> over
> 
> On the way to Bortz’s, she passes the charred remnants of Zapf’s Used Books.
> 
> She inquires of the neighboring surplus-store’s owner, and learns that Zapf
> had torched the place for the insurance. She also gets an earful of racist
> and opportunistic Nazi-sympathizing.
> 
> Remonstrates with herself for not assaulting that person for his
> contemptible views and actions.
> 
> At Bortz’s she takes in a lovely domestic scene with Grace and some
> children on her way to the backyard, where Emory and some of his graduate
> students are drinking a lot of beer.
> 
> She joins in the drinking, bandying words with the grad students,
> especially w/r/t different versions of the “Courier’s Tragedy” text.
> 
> During the course of the conversation, she also learns that at least part
> of the drinking is by way of a wake for Driblette, who’d walked into the
> Pacific (and drowned)
> 
> Bortz shows Oedipa into his study to view some slides  of the pornographic
> illustrations in one of the variant texts.
> 
> They lapse into near-scholarly discourse. Oedipa inevitably introduces the
> topic of The Tristero, whereupon Bortz unlocks a bookcase containing his
> “Wharfingeriana.”
> 
> Evidently Bortz had found in Wharfinger’s “commonplace book” (which is
> apparently a fancy term for “diary”, and which he does not show her, at
> least not in this scene) a reference to yet another text: the
> wonderfully-named Diocletian Blobb’s travel journal, wherein Blobb
> describes an encounter with The Tristero.
> 
> He gives her a copy of the travel journal printed in antique style to read.
> 
> Sure enough, Blobb and his companions, while passengers in a Thurn and
> Taxis mail coach, witnessed the theft of the mail and a massacre of all the
> T&T personnel at the hands of The Tristero.
> 
> Blobb et al loudly proclaimed their English citizenship, dissociating
> themselves from Thurn & Taxis, and even singing hymns - The Tristero spared
> them.
> 
> A gap of several days is noted but not described, before Oedipa and Bortz
> discuss the passage.
> 
> Oedipa wonders why spare Blobb; Bortz reads the passage where the Tristero
> leader “in perfect English” exhorted Blobb to spread the word of The
> Tristero in England, speculating that part of their plan may have been to
> lay the groundwork for expanding their organization there.
> 
> Oedipa collects some more fragments. From these sources she pieces together
> a rough chronological narrative of The Tristero, beginning in 1577.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l