COL 49 CH5 notes

[Joseph Tracy]

Notes from the first part of Chapter 5 with other ruminations on novel as a whole

In the 1st line of ch 5,
who is saying what her next move “should have been”,  and why,  and how can she or the narrator know this and from what place in time? Again we have an indication that the entire novel  is a reflective review of either OM or the narrator or both . It’s almost all past tense and we have this and other insights or value judgements which come as truth statements without clarity of where they came from. 

Do we eventually find out ”where Richard Wharfinger had got his information about Trystero.” ( We have to wait for her time with  Bortz to answer that)  Why is the tristero reference only to be found in a  secret Vatican porn text of Wharfinger’s play and is there some indication of how it came to Driblette. Is that why he is dead? Also one wonders how the vatican version could have been much  more pornographic ? The play seems as pornographic as the director and society would tolerate.   “  Incest is a favorite theme of pornography. It is not elaborated in the Driblette play , but  is prominent enough in the play to make one wonder if P probing at something about the political incest that would have been necessary to organize the murder of Kennedy . 
She does find out how the inventor Nefastis picked up his mail, or at least that Nefastis is on the Waste mail route even though she at this time had only the potsmaster letter to indicate that such a mail system might still be active. The false stamps and postmark seem different from the WASTE mail which does not mention such details.

Adjective
nefāstus (feminine nefāsta, neuter nefāstum); first/second-declension adjective
	1	(of a day) on which judgment could not be pronounced or assemblies of the people be held
	2	(figuratively) contrary to the sacred rites or to religion; irreligious, impious; wicked, profane, abandoned; unlucky, inauspicious; hurtful quotations 

Why/How is the beach she where she dreams of making love with Mucho not part of any California she knew?  There is every kind of beach imaginable along the long coast of California, and Carmel has the softest , whitest sand i’ve ever known. 

tristero - latinate  ero as spanish suffix = holder of, manager of  , yielder of , which leads to begetter of sorrow, or  begetter of secret meetings/joinings
tryst-ing president has tryst with death, becomes sadness of nation and turning point of coup against the people.
tryst-eros

Black clad= black operative Mafia or CIA



Is Maxwell’s Demon in fact  Clerk Maxwell’s  joke science to suggest our dependence on a divine creative life force ?

False promises based on false premises. OM has moved through a series of relationships based on an internal myth of  princely rescue, and an external sense that her entrapment is large, malign and impersonal. She bares her soul in peeled back layers, but is still not free, not the naked Venus risen from Pacific foam into a joyous new world unable to constrain her. The layers are reviewed in semi- allegorical characters as she follows that life principle of curiosity like Alice in Wonderland.  ( to be continued)

 Every plot, every character, every allegorical claim of princely promise  and manly assertiveness that  she puts on, she seems destined to shed starting with P.Inverarity representing the Gouldian American dream of material acquisition and conquest at any cost, but he is so confused and  un-appealing in his multiple personality masks it is like making love with someone who isn’t  real. She leaves

Her failing connection to Mucho Maas is more ambiguous, both contributing to the lack of genuine attention to building an authentic relationship.  The isolation involves  personal choices as well as social pressures.

Next the peeling back is ritualized and involves the magic potions of liquor, fame, war heroics, and law- law both incarnate in Metz and broken in adultery , she wins the bet but has not bargained for any prize,  she  weeps , perhaps at how easy she has been or perhaps that she is naked but still not free. Metzger+Butcher Butchers separate the meat from the bones. 

The paranoids become a muse-like chorus observing her affair , serenading,  direct her attention to the odd similarity between the Couriers Revenge and the story of bones bought from fascist mobsters. They seem to bring out a feistiness in her that shows up in her questioning of Metzger , just as the play they recommend brings out his inner control freak and determination not to look where she is looking. We know the  Metzger relationship won’t last and another separation is coming.  

 Another layer gets peeled away by the play in an encounter with an artful projection whose more than entertaining power cannot be negated by Driblette’s arguments agains the importance of text. She needs to know some things, sees something he is anxious to negate. 

For my thinking the only satisfying explanation to the mystery in the play that draws her like a moth to the flame is that it conjures the recent un-named murder of the President. She lives in the real world of her time, the growth of the MIC, she  passes through real student groups in Berkeley in 1965,  she once revered  James Forrestal, John Foster Dulles, Senator Joe McCarthy and clearly would have been affected by and wondered about the horrifying assassination in Dallas, site of one of Fallopian’s PPS mail systems. Nixon goes unmentioned but makes a major connection to Southern California and the characters in 49. ( 49ers) 

The recall of the Ike-era figures in Chapter 5 seems another shedding: she asks where were ”those dear daft numina who’d mothered over Oedipa’s so temperate youth? In another world. Along another pattern of track, another string of decisions taken, switches closed, the faceless pointsmen who’d thrown them now all transferred, deserted, in stir, fleeing the skip-tracers, out of their skull, on horse, alcoholic, fanatic, under aliases, dead, impossible to find ever again.”  It was Kennedy, youthful artists, a more open media  but Kennedy as much as anything  who swept the McCarthy out of favor, Kennedy, now “ dead, impossible to find ever again”. 

Fallopian is another driven, success oriented male working in the MIC that Ike warned about. He wants to hook into the right wing sentiments which are an inherent part of militarism and his green-light-catching eyes point, as does his Peter Pinguid society to a jealousy of those who have succeeded in this goal, like his prime competitor, founder of the Birchers, candy magnate Robert Welch. Fallopian’s ideas and his hero, PP, are laughable but his confidence invites her to stay in touch and  later to …confide. He encourages her most paranoid interpretation of her experiences and sends her to buy guns from a man who sells Nazi armbands..  Again she cannot wear what he offers and she remains in limbo, evidence of the findings of her quest about to be sold off.

Hilarius is another layer of the culture of the time, in this case with a hidden ‘face’ . Freudian psychiatry was a new secular religion among the middle and upper classes with a promise of liberation from past traumas, from false social constraints, bad relationships, and anything blocking personal ‘fulfillment’.  It was also of high interest to those wanting to go further with Edward Bernays’s work in mass psychology to shape desired social attitudes, and had entered very dark terrain in the mind-control work of Sydney Gottlieb and MK Ultra.  Pynchon has been interpreted as a Freudian  but in Hilarius  he is pointing toward the potentials for abuse reminiscent of similar themes in GR.  Oddly Bernays went( much earlier) to the same high school and college as Pynchon. When OM seeks his help sorting out real from unreal, the old nazi has gone batshit crazy and she gets him into the hands of the police. One more layer discarded.


There are characters who don’t seem to so easily fit this pattern, particularly Mr Thoth, Genghis Cohen, Mucho Maas, Driblette the artist, the alcoholic sailor seeking forgiveness,   and Emory Bortz.  They are all non-aggressive, though affected by varying degrees of fear. Bortz is the least fearful,  perhaps because his focus is on the history of disagreements and power struggles with all its juicy stories safely behind. He has an interesting cult of student followers which echoes the 60’s academic re-consideration of historic forces like patriarchy, racism, revolutions  and empire building ( Kirpatrick Sale, a friend of TP, is an example of that trend and is slyly mentioned in Bortz’s notes found in the copy bought in Berkeley).



FSM= Free Speech Movement- 1964-65 Berkeley  
YAF= Young Americans for Freedom- Conservative group founded 1960
VDC= Vietnam Day Committee Formed Berkeley 1965