CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

[David Morris]

On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 9:57 AM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote

*“But making a leap from obscurity to metaphor seems unwarranted.”*

Ah! You have fallen unintentionally upon the central metaphor of this
novel!  It is almost a perfect restating of the metaphor of Oedepa’s
journey:  Conspiracy is a key metaphor for the search for existential or
spiritual or realistic or ANY kind of significance in one’s everyday
experience.

Trust me: Pynchon was only licking his chops with this one. He is quoted as
aiming for GR to keep the scholars stroking their chins like they did for
Ulysses.


His gift to the readers of his pre-internet books, read in pre-internet
times, was to give them a nodding acquaintance with the obscure and the
hidden, and to point them ( as he did for Oedipa) towards unseen
connections.

I don't believe that he was trying to become his own obscure material;


Yes, I know, he was a student (i. e. he sat in his
lectures for one course) of Nabokov.