Since it's Showtime for me this week

[Mark Kohut]

I must talk about 'the tower". ( So, the challenges to my interpretation
can begin--or maybe some agreements with more nuances?).

I hold with those who find it to allude--and it is all over modernism, from
Eliot to Yeats to Dylan
and scores in between--to Frazier's Bough studies and Eliade ( we know
young Tom read the latter and Eliot) wherein anthropologically the
church tower, the spire,---see Golding--the steeple
is everywhere. Villages, towns, cities in all of history usually have the
church building, with its "tower"
as the highest part of the town. Reaching to the heavens, to God, of
course, acknowledging and paying homage.

The tower in Lot 49---like the twin towers in NYC---are the opposite of
Frazier's findings. Show how the culture has lost that
religious/spiritual meaning, of course shown everywhere in the first
chapter of this novella, that is, the loss is shown
everywhere.

TRP throws down:
"if the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against
its magic, what else?"

PS: early sociologists like Weber (and others), ---And Weber was a great
influence on TRP--trying to characterize
the structures of societal beliefs--the tacit dimensions everyone felt,
well, tacitly, spoke of the holding together, the coherence
as 'magic"....(well, at least one of them did)

What or who is the Knight of deliverance?   Does Oedipa go thru some
challengers to Knighthood on her quest? Starting with Roseman
and Metzger?

PS. A whole good recent-enough novel was called *The Tower is Everywhere. *