CoL49 Group reading - more responsive responses

[Joseph Tracy]

> On May 6, 2024, at 12:04 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.
I like this sympathetic view of Mucho. I think we find out as the story unfolds there is more to depth to their relationship than is initially obvious. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 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)
OK I really don’t get how you face west and see the sunrise. Is it a joke I’m not getting? We live in a north south valley, so when the sun rises , if you are looking west you see the light slide down from the treetops to the uphilll neighbor’s slope  to closer trees and down to the grass or snow. It can be quite beautiful but I probably would probably not call it  watching the sun rise  even though it actually is a way of watching a sunrise.
> 
> (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.
But not Pierce alone, she still wants escape, she is not miserable as housewife but bored and perhaps feeling inadequate to Mucho’s needs. Also Roseman may have sparked greater curiosity. Who was this guy?How many chances does anyone get to try to understand such a driven person up close, without them around to bother you. On a larger scale, where am I, who shaped this world, what exactly does the money and power get you? And how does it work?
> 
> 
> 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."*

So I think I posted a bit on Pierce Inverarity’s name. One  bit was a rearrangement of the letters that came out with these words:
Prince aire verity.   The devil is called the prince of the power of the air. Aire( archaic with e) could also be pronounced Heir, Verity of course is truth. Near the end of the Couriers Tragedy the bloody parchment from Niccolo's( heir) body is transformed miraculously( and I suppose ridiculously) from lies to 'verity’  in a truth-telling confession of the crimes of Angelo and a revealing of the murderous Trystero.



> 
> 
> 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.”
> --
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