CoL49 Chapter 4

[Joseph Tracy]

> On Jun 10, 2024, at 10:38 AM, J K Van Nort via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> 
> Summary:
> 
> Chapter 4 begins with Oepdipa feeling that revelations pile on each other, each connecting more with the Tristero. She rereads Pierce's testament, trying to unify his life's work into meaning. She attends a Yoyodyne stockholders meeting ..

Pynchon has been telling us this ( about Tristero) instead of showing it by action.  It is a lot of foreshadowing  with only the stamps  as we move forward and the coincidences in the play to go onThe connection to Pierce Inverarity, his will ,or the nature of his business is never clear apart from the purchase of soldier’s bones  from the Mafia for personal profit and an interest in a secretive postal system with their own stamps,  until Bortz enters the scene with a more complete history of the Tristero. 
> 
> Questions:
> 
> Why does Oedipa connect understanding Tristero to finding Meaning in Pierce's testament? 
That for me is the proverbial 50 thousand dollar question.  Because it is so hard to imagine making that connection from what we know. I begin to think the entire narrative is not meant to be read  as an unfolding event but something looked at in retrospect from the endpoint . Over the course of the novel she gets as far as the first major clue, goes paranoid with doubt despite being presented as the most level headed witness in the narrative,( also a  passionate human prone to lose it when she drinks  too much or is attracted to a man). But before she can move her inquiry further her most substantive lead is sold off in an auction. 
It seems to me that the only thing that makes sense of her passion is the unstated intuition that  PI was part of the new aristocracy who had first developed the Tristero; part of those  who inherited and kept alive a clandestine war over control of the global communication system. Maybe this can be seen in psychological or spiritual terms by returning to her role as Venus rising from the foam, at first perhaps bewildered and entranced by the Olympus scene but finding some some quirky mental diseases and intriguing if troubling  dominance games. You know, wickedly funny, as the critics like to say. Maybe, but for now, aloha.

> 
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