CoL49 group reading chapter 4 - the mute
Michael Bailey
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sun Jun 16 05:59:59 UTC 2024
All that historical stuff is pretty factual:
https://stampaday.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/thurn-und-taxis-northern-district-18-1863/
“If she’d thought to check a couple lines back in the Wharfinger play,
Oedipa might have made the next connection by herself.”
Trying to unpack that. Back from what?
The “next connection” is probably the mute in the post horn, right? And all
the Thurn and Taxis stuff.
In her meeting with Genghis Cohen, after he mentions dandelion wine, she
has one of those pre-epileptiform moments which precede revelation.
The meeting wraps up chapter 4, it’s a pretty big deal.
Until then the couplet she’s been concerned with is
“No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,
Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.”
Like, what is Trystero (with its languid, sinister blooming) is the
question that drew her in.
So with Genghis Cohen she learns (or, confirms the exposition in the
Courier’s Tragedy”) it was like a Counterforce to the Thurn and Taxis
postal monopoly.
And how it relates to the meaning of the odd symbol, which is what she was
leading up to asking Stanley Koteks after she saw him doodling it.
“It sounds ridiculous,” Cohen said, “but my guess is it’s a mute.”
Going back just a couple (three) lines, conveniently provided in Chapter 3:
“He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew
Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn,
And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.”
She’d have to be pretty sharp to’ve gotten that from the play - but this is
one of many “it was foretold” moments. And it did stick in her mind, which
is pretty sharp after all. But it’s nice to have Cohen line it all out,
adding historical perspective, in his comfortable, many-roomed
domicile/office.
Even much earlier, there’s a teaser, not quite a hint: w/r/t Pierce’s stamp
collection - “what after all could the *mute* stamps have told her?”
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list