CoL49 Group reading - more responsive responses

[Michael Bailey]

1) How do Mucho Maas' self-recriminations reflect an alternative to
Oedipa's Tupperware world?


If she’s able to sincerely make a layered lasagna, while also sympathizing
with his problems, she has embraced her part of a “breadwinner/homemaker”
partnership more successfully than Mucho has been able to prosecute his.

This disparity reverses Pierce’s superabundant provider abilities versus
her ability to be satisfied and find a fulfilling stance in that
partnership.

If she has found a normalcy in being Mrs Maas, he hasn’t found a
corresponding satisfaction in going out for employment. His earnest efforts
don’t find the mark at either the used car job or the radio station - his
distress being compounded by a natural feeling of suffering by comparison
with her ex-. Even though that seems to be what she likes about Maas - he’s
not automatically boss of all he surveys.

Are Mucho’s struggles an alternative to Oedipa’s adaptation? It seems more
that their division of labor is working for her but not for him. That his
striving in an increasingly complex and sometimes hostile work environment
isn’t buttressed by being married to Oedipa despite her efforts.




2) How are we to interpret the four images that come to Oedipa when she
first receives the letter (Mazatlan hotel door, sunrise over Cornell
western-facing slope, Bartok Concerto, Jay Gould bust)?

The Cornell image is the one which interests me most.

If they were watching the sun rise (on a western-facing slope?) together,
then it seems plausible that they were students together, fell in love
there, whereupon he embarked upon his mogul course of action with her (at
first)

(This seems to harken forward to Mr and Mrs Ice in _Bleeding Edge_ and the
growing rift between that couple.)

In which case it’s a short hop to Dickens: Scrooge, Fezziwig’s party, and
Belle’s disappointment

 I always wonder about the time frame - in this scenario, she must have
spent at least a few years with Pierce as he grew fabulously wealthy,
before leaving him and finding Mucho (these things take time)

At least Scrooge had the decency to leave Belle alone with her new partner.





3) Is there a pattern to Pierce Inverarity's various voices in his cryptic
phone call?

I’m impressed & contented with what’s already been contributed on this.

(If i were going to add anything it might be something about drunk-dialing
an ex-, which may be a pattern,
but your question - & the existing answers about a relationship among the
different voices - is more interesting)


4) Who is speaking in the last paragraph? Is this the narrator, or is it a
monologue inside Oedipa’s miind?

I like the existing answers


5) Why does the Rapunzel allusion appear here?


By delving into the story, you made the interesting connection with the
parents trading Rapunzel for salad greens.

Like Rachel Owlglass in _V._, she’s acting with a freedom relatively new
for women  - presumably her parents didn’t sell her to Cornell,

but urging her (as parents do) to go to a definite not-home place and
undergo education culminating in a ceremony of adulthood could feel like a
form of abandonment-

Turning her over to this process changed her - at the time people spoke of
an “Mrs degree” but her thought process shows acculturation beyond
spouse-readiness.

There’s a paucity of parenting & family in this story; if Oedipa wants to
fulfill a biological imperative to bear offspring, she’s decided against
Pierce, and Mucho isn’t working out either. Neither her parents nor either
of her husbands’ make an appearance - (do they?)
I think there’s a brief encounter with some children in the book, but not
one that fascinates her the way that WASTE does.

One way to interpret this would be expanding the role of a woman beyond the
Suzy Homemaker idea - using her education to try to revise the effects of
Pierce - what she objected to in him, she will presumably work against as
executor? Or - he might hope - now she will begin to understand his vision?

Or it could almost be a tract against that idea - just when she thinks
she’s gotten out of the “trophy bride complicit in the sins of wealth but
allowed a pet project or two” business (like, say, Laura Bush and
libraries, which, say what you will, is a point of light)

- trying instead to set up a “could you coo, could you care, for a little
love nest we could share?” scenario as Mrs Maas -

Pierce drags her back in.


Does it seem more reasonable to approve and sympathize with her course of
action, and relate to it as to what a reasonable person of goodwill, with a
good mind, might think and do vis a vis “the world (this one), the flesh
(Mrs Oedipa Maas), and the testament of Pierce Inverarity” -

(Which was the title of an early version of the novel published in
Esquire’s December 1965 issue as a short story.)

- or to see a cautionary tale against being lured into the tangled
spiderweb of Mammon-worship represented by Pierce’s estate, and away from
the sweetness and light of domesticity & marital fidelity?



Interesting tangent (imho)
Found this in Reddit -

https://www.reddit.com/r/ThomasPynchon/comments/eaoz86/the_world_this_one_the_flesh_mrs_oedipa_maas_and/

“This is the early version published as a short story referenced in that
Jungian paper I brought up in the reading group threads:


*"In December 1965 Esquire published a preliminary version of the novel as
a short story titled “The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas),
and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity.” By resorting to the Catholic
dogma, the title clearly indicates that the figure of Pierce Inverarity may
be understood as the Devil who, combined with World and Flesh, conform the
Three Enemies of the Soul and give readers an early hint that Christian
religion is going to play an important part in the story."*


The poster gave a link to this interesting paper -
http://typh.unizar.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/F.-Collado-Crying-in-Critique-2015-Postscript.pdf


The quote above is from the Reddit post, not the paper - the abstract for
the paper is

“Abstract: In Pynchon’s second novel, after having fallen in a complex net
of uncertain signification, protagonist Oedipa Maas finally realizes that
she should escape categorical binary thinking. This article contends that
Oedipa’s portrait is also informed by Jungian symbolism—an underestimated
source of Pynchon’s fiction—and by the author’s literary quest for V., two
factors that merge in the novel with other interpretations to develop a
dense search for meaning that eventually announces the coming of social
change.”