CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

[Mark Kohut]

I second this heartily and without irony.

Just look at all the hints of other meanings....that don't connect......
that dead TV is a real communication device, so to speak.

On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 10:29 AM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
>