COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

Tue Jun 4 11:52:44 UTC 2024

Thanks for the summary!

Some not completely unrelated thoughts:

Zapf’s Used Books - Hermann Zapf was the designer of the Dingbat font, but
also a bunch of other stuff, including the Palatino font and automated
justification.

Also a calligrapher, in 1960 he did the Preamble to the United Nations
Charter in 4 languages for the Morgan Museum.

https://www.themorgan.org/literary-historical/116614

He also was a consultant for Hallmark Cards in the 1960s and ‘70s,
developing a style manual for their lettering artists.

—- regarding the anthology Driblette can’t lend her because somebody took
it -

“There was another copy there. Zapf might still have it. Can you find the
place?” Something came to her viscera, danced briefly, and went. “Are you
putting me on?”

— does she say, “Are you putting me on?” in response to “can you find the
place?”
(Like, of course I can find the place?)

- but that seems too mundane to follow a feeling of something dancing in
her viscera.

— so do all the other proximate possible meanings I can think of:

 a) she’s incredulous that he loaned out his copy to party unknown & didn’t
get it back?

b) you’re putting me on - his name is Zapf?

c) it’s just a throwaway remark to a showering man?

d) an example of the “bad ear” Pynchon deprecated in the _Slow Learner_
intro?

- slowly it dawns on me that the dancing in her viscera is connected to the
dance mentioned earlier in that bit about the languid, sinister blooming of
The Tristero:
 “something a little extra for whoever’d stayed this late”
Which she has.

Maybe the reason Driblette can’t just ask one of the cast for the book back
is because whoever he gave the book to is, like, a Man in Black.

Maybe they’ve put the frighteners on him and took his original copy,
although that would seem an ineffective way of impeding him.

He seems loath to reveal anything about other interested parties - and
imputes an unlikely “scholarly dispute” to explain her and their interest.

On Sun, Jun 2, 2024 at 4:35 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> 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,
> ? “like a lab maze for studying intelligence in tears” ?
>
> ? we could do that?
>
> Insolid verity and pierced parity…. About the best I can do JT
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>