CoL49 group reading ch6 part1

[Michael Bailey]

Thanks for that - it’s a more rational and detailed explanation of the
points I was trying to get at.

A few light brushstrokes it makes me want to add -

Oedipa is having a bit of an Odyssey, touching on many sectors of
society…feelingly and also thinkingly having what seem to me to be the
reactions of the prototype “reasonable person”

Not explicitly homing in on Bortz and Cohen as bastions of rationality, but
it’s clear she takes comfort from them. Rather than rushing into battle,
taking sides with or against Fallopian, Koteks, and Tremaine, her
continuing emphasis - like theirs - is on learning more.

 They’ve found niches for themselves, so they don’t fall prey to accidie or
second-guessing themselves the way she does. When with them, she's less
plagued with that. Tho’ it never completely goes away, their company
enlivens her and helps her focus.

She’s examining the heck out of her life. Socrates would be pleased with
her.

Tremaine with all his racist talk still is comfortable enough with black
folk to hire them - maybe more comfortable face to face than people with
more exemplary liberal notions. He still upsets Oedipa; obviously his
motives and the trends he’s riding incite deep abhorrence, and one cannot
really endorse the pride he might feel at being a “job creator.”


Also, I tried to conflate the contradiction in Scurvhamite thinking with
Goedel and with Original Sin; going for the trifecta, it also reminds me of
Maxwell’s Demon in that division of the world into 2 parts and choosing
one, with Entropy finally winning, one believer after another ceasing to
choose the preferred chamber.



On Thu, Jul 25, 2024 at 10:58 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

>
>
> > On Jul 25, 2024, at 7:14 AM, J K Van Nort via Pynchon-l <
> pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> >
> > The sexualization of young girls has been an obsession in the United
> States for some time. Nabakov's Lolita brought it to light, as did
> Kubrick's movie version, and Pynchon takes it to another level of
> absurdity. Still this end of her relationship (superficial as it was)
> brings up another aspect of the patriarchal society that Pynchon continues
> to expose with his use of a female main character. Now we see that her
> "freedom" or "escape" leads to other limitations, as she ages, she becomes
> less desirable in a patriarchal society, where men leave their wives for
> trophy wives, and boys compete with grown men for the affections of their
> female peers.
>
> I also see the infantilization of adults into a controllable means of
> satisfaction for the predatory and powerful. Both the control and the
> passion are hugely fantasy, paranoia, ego.  When the predator begins to
> lose control, violence  against a rival is likely, as with Humbert.
> >
> > The TV brought Metzger and Oedipa together, as they watched his child
> star movie, and the further away from it they get, the less he seems
> interested in her interests.
> >
> > I find the scene with Winthrop Tremaine to touch on another American
> negative social ill, racism. He uses the N word with alacrity and has
> blacks making swastika bands for him to sell. They are both essential to
> his business plan and worthy only of contempt from him. The name is
> interesting because Winthrop is a name associated with colonial America and
> Tremaine, minus the e, alludes to Johnny Tremain,
> Agree
> > the novel about a boy during the American Revolution. Again hinting at
> the deep-seated social ill of racism and treatment of blacks in America. It
> also points to the California that has a racist history often belied by its
> supposed liberal status.
> >
> > Two of America's social ills brought forward with two short scenes. Why
> is this brought up now?
> As I said earlier I think the menace represented in Winthrop Tremaine,
> Hilarius, the Peter Pinguid aka JohnBirch Society, Yoyodyne , the nazi
> psychiatrist,    and the IA story, ( all of.which point toward a loveless,
> violent and repressive vision) 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. The implications grow  larger than the resolution of a
> will. Something is happening all around her which is not on TV, and
> following her inquiry into PI’s will has exposed it.
> >
> > Children and raising children get a brief play with Grace Bortz and her
> brood of malicious imps. A vision of what Oedipa might have become? Why
> does Grace recognize "a certain harassed style" in Oedipa?
>
> The whole house is structured around a kind of indulgence of the male
> “intellectual” as he competes in a probably not widely followed area of
> research.The household responsibilities fall to Grace. The children’s
> misbehavior reflects that indulgence; they are not too different in their
> competition for attention and dominance from many of the adults in the
> story.
> >
> > More later.
> >
> > In solidarity,
> > James
> >
> > Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>