CoL 49 group reading ch 4 Cohen, Dandelion Wine

[Joseph Tracy]

Ghenghis Cohen  seems pretty harmless and sincerely interested in the  muted posthorn and other forgeries related to WASTE/ Tristero.  Could hardly be more unthreatening 
Oedipa feels “motherly” toward him. But why does he have so many rooms , this long train of doorways soaked in rainlight? Classic dream imagery reminiscent of PIs stamp collection: thousands of little colored windows into deep vistas of space and time: savannahs teeming with elands and gazelles, galleons sailing west into the void, Hitler heads, sunsets, cedars of Lebanon, allegorical faces that never were. Is his house a museum of stamps, tiny images of wonders quickly disappearing? He offers her dandelion wine, flowers gathered from the cemetary conveniently made to vanish for the Aren’t I Beautiful free way.  The name Cohen derives from temple priests giving the wine a sacred touch. Ghenghis puts a question mark of whose temple. 
  At the end of the open informative conversation there is a turn in Cohen’s demeanor, particulalry when she asks “Do we tell the government, or what?” 

“I’m sure they know more than we do.” He sounded nervous, or suddenly in retreat. “No, I wouldn’t. It isn’t our business, is it?”   

   It is hard here not to imagine that Cohen knows more than he is letting on, knows this is dangerous terrain. He may be more interested in those valuable forgeries and finishing his work for the Inverarity estate than wading deeper into this mystery. 

 He says of the wine,

“It’s clearer now,” he said, rather formal. “A few months ago it got quite cloudy. You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through a fermentation. As if they remembered.” 

No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

Oedipa  is asking the uncomfortable question of  what is lost in the accelerating pursuit of fortune, whether this trail of sacrificial bones foretells a good future? Do the  quickly forgotten dead have anything to tell us? Should we be listening?


 One of the mysterious lines in their conversation  is  Cohen’s  rhetorical answer/question “An 800 year tradition of postal fraud?”  What is Pynchon getting at? Perhaps no less than the ancient struggle over who is shaping our histories, our information, our logos. What is reliable as public truth? Who is monitoring our private truth? Who can we trust when some questions are off limits?

This novel is taking place after a war presented then and now as preserving the rule of law, saving our traditions of open debate on public issues, freedom of thought and speech. In truth the war was far from over, the fascistic addiction to power and wealth, using anti- communist rhetoric was tearing at  fundamentals of constitutional rights and also  opposing aspirations of former European and US controlled colonies. The increasingly secretive federal agencies  engaged in everything from the FBI’s cointelpro to operation Gladio or its variants in Europe which recruited fascists for political assassinations and false flag killings of civilians to be blamed on leftists. The leaders of  the CIA tried to sucker Kennedy into a war with Cuba, Both Dulles Brothers and JJ Angleton had large financial investments in US economic colonialism; they helped former fascists retain their wealth. When Kennedy set out to end their power he generated a great deal of hatred. 

 Journalists dedicated to historic truth have uncovered much of this history, but the mainstream press avoids it or couches it as the necessities of fighting communism or as ancient history, now reformed. To think that these men who hired nazi intelligence officers,  killed elected foreign leaders and innocent civilians would stop at a US president is naive.  Pynchon knew enough about the history and details of the historic and political situation to think twice before directly writing a novel that would be easily interpreted as questioning the official story of the Kennedy assassination or pointing to secretive intelligence commanders and Mafia figures. The dangers were hardly imaginary, with several mysterious deaths of investigators and witnesses. 

  Wine is usually best as  a shared pleasure. It can summon memories, can carry the smell  and taste of sunlit vines, the blood of transforming love, but mostly it is a celebration of the moment we are in. What keeps seeming to prevent such moments of human connection for Oedipa is her search to know what the tristero of the muted horn is all about. It is like asking about the shadow self, seeing it lurking beneath our comforts and securities, our identity is at stake, it is dangerous ground. A chill comes, sadness, the connection is broken, healing becomes more distant as the distance between us grows.