CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

[Joseph Tracy]

Just how obscure or metaphorical of a writer is Pynchon? I mean, in terms of the "COL49 is really about the JFK  assassination" theory. 

One of the delights of Pynchon, pre-internet, was the tremendous research he put in, using resources such as old Baedeker's guides and the Boeing archives, among others, which would be hard or impossible for his readers to access. This richness of obscurity was his signature. It's why Bleeding Edge, written about and amidst the Internet, didn't have that Pynchon aura about it (for me, anyway). 

But making a leap from obscurity to metaphor seems unwarranted. 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; that he was playing Pierce to a future Oedipa who would point out: COL49 is a metaphor for the JFK assassination. I think he wanted to connect with his readers, not dodge them. Joseph, do you actively disagree with this, or are you on the fence? Yes, I know, he was a student (i. e. he sat in his lectures for one course) of Nabokov. But Nabokov wanted his readers to fully participate in his jokes and games. 

LK


The book holds the reader’s attention because in looking into PIs story Oedipa tugs at certain threads and among other mysteries comes across a hidden history of an alternate postal system and turf wars between that system and the historically recognized postal systems. This leads her to personally witness that system while wandering in the Bay Area. Along the way she also comes across a murder mystery play that mentions the alternate postal system by name and has other elements that reflect PIs activities like buying bones of murdered GIs for profit. 

Neither the postal discovery nor PI himself, nor the murder play are real. Can we agree on that? If they are not real, are they referential in any meaningful way to actual concerns and history and people? Why are we interested almost 60 years later? To be honest it is not writing style or characterization or jokes  or the deceptiveness of paranoia that  drew me back, but life in a war zone, in a war that never ends, and that only a few writers are imaginative and comprehensively informed enough think about in fictional form  . I am not the first person to wonder about the connection to JFK, or the battle over control of communication media, or secretive  coups. The book was written within a few years of the Kennedy killing, with global CIA coups playing out in many places, and the early stages of attempts to infiltrate global media by the CIA. This was a fresh wound in the american psyche at the release of COL49 with many books being written and an investigation headed by one of the most likely suspects in the assassination. Yes these were the kinds  of things that would have and did concern Pynchon along with many others. It is my understanding that some who knew him say he went to Mexico to lay low because of concern he might be targeted for his writing. He was suspicious about the death of Richard Farina.That probably was unwarranted paranoia if true, but he was already at work or just finished 2 books that touch on what the US became after WW2, the cult of war and engineered  social control and political fear mongering and 1 that touches on the same subject matter mostly in British and European history.  Yes he uses satire, alternate myths drawn from many sources,  and there is a lot of paranoia. Much of that paranioia is justified and some is not. But I do  think he is trying to use fiction as a tool to explore and to  lead the reader into a picture of reality that is bigger more complex and often more sinister than the normal fare. He uses satire and jokes to ease the tension, but there is great deal of reality here that leaves us unsettled as to the implications. That is a role fiction and writing in general has always played.  

For me COL49 is meaningless without metaphoric reference to real historic events. In that sense it is almost like Pilgrims Progress or something equally if inadvertently  allegorical like Beowulf; allegory is  a form basically untenable in modern literature but it may be one of the only formal structures that can come from a short novel  dealing with something like the Kennedy assassination, because of the huge shift implied if it was done by coordinated secretive powers.  There is much  evidence for the involvement of powerful forces and the shift in direction from his killing. That is what allegory does. It deals with the largest forces of perceived reality.  The KFK killing  is another part of US history  that is still unresolved 60 years later with documents still withheld past several due dates. An old Italian murder mystery  among nobles seems oddly appropriate as a form to outline the event as power struggle..  One thing TP seems to me determined to not allow is the idea that Oedipa is going mad, she is the most sane person in the novel, though Driblet is as sane as one could be considering his situation as a creative.. She knows the difference between an imagined mental picture and what she has seen or the words and stories she has heard. Even knowing that difference she asks herself could her experiences in San Francisco have been engineered by PI.  She is in every way,  cognitively and metacognitavely astute. Most of us , like Oedipa,  try to explain what we see and experience both personally and on a larger social and historical and spiritual scale  as a coherent reality that we have some agency within, and we are all faced with some very dark doings in the world.  If it is all a meaningless shadow play projected from the minds of the talking monkeys I guess reading Pynchon is one way to while away our hours. If we are also participants in shaping our world and the world to be inherited by other humans , and if there are those whose projections threaten us,  then sorting some off these questions out  and learning to live in harmony rather than constant state of war would be a handy survival tool. I am the first to admit that Pynchon is skeptical that that can happen. I am too, but  I feel the commonest of common sense to be held in basic moral concerns and the attempt to free oneself from bad habits and false stories, and again,  I find that in Pynchon too.

Please everyone, I am not saying  COL49 is intentional allegory, just that in its brevity and references it is more like allegory than anything else TP has written.  I am not interested in making a major defense of this idea, it is just my own best approximation of how I see the peculiar nature of the smallest of Pynchon books and a possible reason that it fails to represent his work as a whole. It would be very interesting to see a comprehensive collection of his own references to the book. Of corse I realize that human psychology, greed, power trips, rock and roll, lawyers and awomen trying to free themselves from patriarchal patterns are all important to the book. Hard to find a more multivalent author than Pynchon. I am interested in all those aspects too and think them worth thinking about as I will inevitably do along with others.  But there is weird core to this story and I see a murderous  power struggle there.  Unfortunately things have not changed much.

  




   
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