Oedipa

[Joseph Tracy]

 "She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

Oedipa by her tearful connection to this painting sees it as a painful description of her own situation as a woman or even a description of  the begetting, nurturing, weaving of the unacknowledged feminine face of creation, whose creative abundance she realized as the very place she stood. She wants to carry this way of seeing with her as a lens to see past the naming and engineering  and fighting for turf that she has mistaken for her landscape and her proper labor.  She sees that the limits she wishes to escape are not the boundaries of her own ability or self assertion or her appeal to a magic prince of deliverance, but  a malignant external “magic” visited on her and by extension on everyone who has seen the sheer beauty that is possible. That power and wealth have not freed but abducted and enslaved.  This is the real point of departure for her journey, where she leaves Inverarity in “gut fear” . But so far, observes the author and herself now that PI is dead, she has been guided by that gut fear, the superstitious aspects of marriage, and female cunning, but still feels trapped, so we are asked, “what else”. In some ways she is a reverse of the Oedpus story because she does not blind herself  when she sees and confronts where she is what she has done, but seems to have gained a second sight, like the weeping prophet Jeremiah.

Often the hero’s journey involves going into the stronghold of darkness and malign power ”to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force,” perhaps to probe for weakness. In V this metaphor was modeled on Dante’s journey , but instead of Beatrice, the divine feminine, the journey leads to a kind of mechanized seductress/vagina/machine bride. And it is questionable  whether an emergence into the light is possible. Neither the whole sick crew nor anyone else seems to be going anywhere, the colonialist conversion of the rats has failed. Only the experience of seeing the world more as it really works seems to remain after the journey as any possible guide away from the endless loop. It isn’t much, but...

Will Oedipa fare any better? Will female cunning and her cleansed vision carry her further? Or is it just stay tuned, for another exciting episode of”THE SHADOW”. Even when we  are awakened in the middle of the night  by the cartoon voices of an insane culture, whether it is capitalist stereotypes or fascist dreams of rewiring the souls of restless women, for the most part all we can do is hang up . Agency in the face of these things is limited and building an army of lovers no easy task, some would say doomed. If as Michael suggests through the original title referring to the world flesh and devil,  there is a strong Christian component to the framing of this dilemma, do we see any redemption, any transcendence? 

Well, maybe. I am most impressed by Oedipa’s  persistent courage even as malign forces and her own doubts plague her search, even as those who help her are killed or die mysteriously. 
Even as her search connects her not to a powerful movement for change, but the weak and poor and their persistent means of communicating, a faint hope of healing and reconciliation.