COL 49 end of Chapter 3

[Joseph Tracy]

What happens after the play, as CHAPTER  3 draws to a close, marks  a break between Metzger and Oedipa, and raises questions about Driblette’s nervous evasiveness, and  his passionate portrayal of the play as merely entertainment. 

HERE IS A not very condensed SUMMARY  with comments

OM wants to go backstage with Metzger to question the director Randolph Driblette who also played Gennaro.

“Oh, about the bones.” He had a brooding look. 
Oedipa said, “I don’t know. It just has me uneasy. The two things, so close.”

It now becomes obvious that Metz’s urgent desire to leave is more than distaste for the play, In recent events Oedipa has found out that Pierce Inveraritiy’s holdings are quite vast and that there is very dark aspect to some of his business affairs including the purchase of human bones of american GIs from  an ex fascist mafioso,  aerospace weapons investments,  and the ability to run freeways through cemetaries.   The author has foreshadowed the way these shadows will come from Trystero and now in the play the Trystero  has begun to be named and identified in the center of a bloody power struggle. Metz himself may be the legal side of settling the estate but he is also an actor  who has already deceived Oedipa and must understand her “easy”ness may be in doubt. He turns to acting the macho lawyer scolding a ridiculous softheaded witness.

“Fine,” Metzger said, “and what next, picket the V.A.? March on Washington? God protect me,” he addressed the ceiling of the little theater, causing a few heads among those leaving to swivel, “from these lib, overeducated broads with the soft heads and bleeding hearts. I am 35 years old, and I should know better.
” “Metzger,” Oedipa whispered, embarrassed, “I’m a Young Republican.”
 “Hap Harrigan comics,” Metzger now even louder, “which she is hardly old enough to read, John Wayne on Saturday afternoon slaughtering ten thousand Japs with his teeth, this is Oedipa Maas’s World War II, man. Some people today can drive VW’s, carry a Sony radio in their shirt pocket. Not this one, folks, she wants to right wrongs, 20 years after it’s all over. Raise ghosts. All from a drunken hassle with Manny Di Presso. Forgetting her first loyalty, legal and moral, is to the estate she represents. Not to our boys in uniform, however gallant, whenever they died.”

This is obviously more about fears in Metzger’s mind about where her questions might lead than the wildly overgeneralized  tough guy put down of her as an idealistic youthful female, which then  leads up to his dubious legal and moral argument over her required loyalty to what is quite likely a criminally acquired estate.

“It isn’t that,” she protested. “I don’t care what Beaconsfield uses in its filter. I don’t care what Pierce bought from the Cosa Nostra. I don’t want to think about them. Or about what happened at Lago di Pietà, or cancer . . .” She looked around for words, feeling helpless. “What then?” Metzger challenged, getting to his feet, looming. “What?” “I don’t know,” she said, a little desperate. “Metzger, don’t harass me. Be on my side.” 
“Against whom?” inquired Metzger, putting on shades. 
“I want to see if there’s a connection. I’m curious.”
 “Yes, you’re curious,” Metzger said. “I’ll wait in the car, OK?”

In this exchange I am seeing the oft-noted pattern in Pynchon’s characters of the divided loyalties of a woman attracted in 2 directions- both toward the authority figure of the state (or estate), and toward truth that might question and undermine such loyalty( Frenesi, Shasta Fey, Katje, Maxine Tarnow). Her curiosity has been met with  insults. Her request for support can only be understood by Metzger as being “against” someone.  As we have seen earlier, the instincts of this lawyer are to close his eyes to the truth if he thinks it will serve even a potential client. 

OM makes a beautifully written entry backstage to where Driblette stands .”She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn’t.” He discourages her from asking about the play elaborating an argument that it is a cheap horror flick with no meaning, but also, later,  that the words are not the important part but the life-giving vision of the director. She asks about a copy of the text.
“Why,” Driblette said at last, “is everybody so interested in texts?” 
“Who else?” Too quickly. Maybe he had only been talking in general. 
Driblette’s head wagged back and forth. “Don’t drag me into your scholarly disputes,” adding “whoever you all are,”
She asks about the chill silence in the 4th act and finds they weren’t in the original nor were the 3 assassins seen.
He goes on, under the assumption she is a scholar , saying you guys are like puritans about the Bible, hung up with words  and perhaps goes  a bit too far in dismissing the importance of words. His arguments much better crafted than Metzger describing himself as the projector in the planetarium procecting a world. 
He tells her “ you could could fall in love, talk to my shrink….
“Driblette?” Oedipa called, after awhile. His face appeared briefly. “We could do that.” 
He wasn’t smiling. His eyes waited, at the centers of their webs.
 “I’ll call,” said Oedipa. She left, and was all the way outside before thinking, I went in there to ask about bones and instead we talked about the Trystero thing. She stood in a nearly deserted parking lot, watching the headlights of Metzger’s car come at her, and wondered how accidental it had been. Metzger had been listening to the car radio. She got in and rode with him for two miles before realizing that the whimsies of nighttime reception were bringing them KCUF down from Kinneret, and that the disk jockey talking was her husband, Mucho.


Open to questions, theories, rants, whatever.
? “like a lab maze for studying intelligence in tears” ?

? we could do that?
Insolid  verity  and pierced arity. About the best I can do. JT