COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

[Joseph Tracy]

Sometimes The glass in shower doors is not see-through but highly textured. I can see it either way,  backstage culture being indeed boundary porous.

I think it is pretty obvious that she stirred up some anxiety with her question, “who else”, and that Driblette’s answer about texts is evasive. The copies of the play he has for the actors don’t have the line about Tristero and the theatrical chill around the unnamed assassins is his dramatic interpretation.  Somehow he had gotten hold of a very obscure version of the play which named the Tristero  and likely inspired these effects but also brought some threatening questions and not about his creativity as a director. I personally find his arguments dismissing the importance of texts overblown. It’s all important and more than entertainment alone, we process life experience in art media, lose depth of thought and  humane values without it. 

  The Man in the grey flannel suit seems to me a good catch and  likely intended  as a reference to the theme of functionary  corporate culture  displacing individuality, undermining  moral considerations  and obscuring unresolved struggles.  

         CORE SIMILARITIES OF COURIER’S REVENGE TO JFK ASSASSINATION.:

Clandestine European style assassination of  rightful leader.
 1). Angelo’s pursuit of power has poisoned a neighboring royal and lured a company of  Faggian soldiers to their death. He has made 1 attempt to kill the heir and place another of his agents on the throne. When he finds the rightful ruler knows what’s up and  is on his way to bring him down he orders a hit. 1)  The CIA has hired Nazis  to gain US ascendance in Italy  and Cold War. .They planned to provoke a war with Cuba that would have regained it with Mafia help, but were stopped by Kennedy. It becomes clear that Kennedy is after Dulles and Angleton, and they hire their agents to kill him. 

The cover-up, emergence of grey functionary, continued slaughter. 
 2) In  Courier’s Revenge the actual assassins are never caught , the slaughter continues under Gennaro,  and the mere use of the name Tristero causes trouble for Driblette, who along with several others ends up buried underwater. 2) LBJ, a powerful political force in the congress and VP, master of compromise but not charismatic becomes President places Warren against his will as nominal head for his credibility of Investigating committee which ends up managed by Kennedy’s enemy Allen Dulles.   Problems abound in credibility of proceeding from conflicting eyewitnesses, Oswald claiming to be patsy , then getting shot on live TV in Dallas police station by mob associate Jack Ruby( Rubinstein). Transfer of body to be autoppsied by Dr with no such experience. Multiple indices that Oswald was CIA from way back.   (Later in 77-79) Congressional investigation  admits all signs point to a multi-party conspiracy. ) Lyndon Johnson continues CIA plans for expanded war in Vietnam and cancel’s other Kennedy actions.  

3) The core power struggle over control of  communication systems: This is the most prophetic aspect of COL 49. The CIA’s greatest success has been  to achieve compliance  from the global media and limit , discredit or ignore  dissident voices.They use this power to minimize  and excuse atrocities no matter how horrifying or blatantly illegal, unconstitutional, murderous  etc. This was screamingly obvious with McCarthy and Kennedy marked a change. That change that showed up in the Vietnam war which the CIA, FBI and Johnson tried to stifle. Now we have massive government and press efforts to impose control of “misinformation” which amounts to claims of  a monopoly on truth. 

4) Other “coincidences”: The operation that kicked the Vietnam war into high gear in AUG 1964 was called Operation Pierce Arrow.( the Shadow was an aviator) Operational head of CIA JJ ANGLEtOn .  Angleton recruited fascists ( including Klaus barbie)who were  involved in fighting the partisans (who were often Communists) as key to the new war on communism. Angleton was extremely paranoiac. ( Paranoids  chorus) Governments and especially left leaning leaders not informed of Gladio, so became secret with only connection to CIA . Angleton had small group of trusted CIA leaders called SIG. They were who opened Oswald CIA Files.Here are 3 lines from Wikipedia profile of Sydney Gottlieb( Hilarius?); 1) Dulles( head of CIA) and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery. They also wanted a "truth serum <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum>", something that had been investigated during the days of the OSS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services> but never fully realized. Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol>, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mescaline> before realizing LSD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide> had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency.
2)Gottlieb was the liaison to the military subcontractor Lockheed <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Corporation>, then working for the CIA on Project AQUATONE <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AQUATONE>, later known as the U-2 spy plane <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2>. In 1953, he arranged a safe house <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_house> for the Lockheed Aeronautics Services Division (LASD) with an easy and exclusive egress. 3)Gottlieb administered LSD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD> and other hallucinogenic drugs <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen> to unwitting subjects and financed psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything". He was named as the person who gave Army bacteriologist Frank Olson <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson> LSD at an MK-ULTRA retreat, leading to Olson's mental spiral and death a week later. Hilarius is also the name of a saint from Arles who was demoted in a power struggle with the pope. 

















> On 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
> --
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