CoL49 Group Read

[Joseph Tracy]

I like the reference to the Prince being healed by Rapunzel's tears at their reunion. But  who and where is Oedipa’s prince? Who holds her captive and why do her first tears stay in her own eyes? Is Inverarity both witch and prince, is Oedipa both Rapunzel and witch and prince? And who are the twins Rapunzel gives birth to? One poignant scene for me is when Oed after her long night in the Bay Area helps the old sailor up the stairs, hugs him,  listens to him and takes his letter to the w.a.s.t.e. post system . The healing of compassion opens many doors on her quest, but cannot seem to stop a tragic pattern of untimely death, of wasted lives. To my mind these are too universal as dilemmas, too large in their implications to be restricted to a fictional character. I can’t accept that we are destined to frightened blind searching in societies In which power struggles define everything, and creep into more and more of our inner and outer lives. 

 Context is critical. I think it is a good idea to look at all of Pynchon’s contemporary novels to get a sense of what this first of that series of novels is all about. They all concern the internalization of external American  power struggles, the tendency of great powers to betray the revolutionary appetite for freedom, to murder their forefathers and then become the same thing: Police powers vs youthful assertions of play, of music,  of non-violent new possibilities for culture; working families versus corporate overlords and the FBI.,Secrecy versus transparency. Life in a TV addicted nether world versus life as connection to family, lovemaking, Redwood groves, pacific waves, change. Life as an instrument of colonial violence directed by hypocrites vs life doing an honest job of using minimal force  to keep american business honest. 

There is a tendency in recent American culture to ascribe paranoia to those with little power but honestly looking for truth, and to negate the more classical and sociopathic  paranoia  of the powerful.   What we are looking at in Pynchon is not just the psychology of individuals and our common delusions, but "the psychology of power*" and its far more dangerous delusions. This appears in the phrase “magic, anonymous and malignant.

* a phrase borrowed with permission from my daughter Rebekah.




> On May 10, 2024, at 11:38 AM, J K Van Nort via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> 
> While Oedipa has some alignment with Rex, especially the detective/problem and riddle solver, I think that the Rapunzel tale has far more analogies. The tower and her confinement and escape, the patriarchal rescue and happy ending of the tale contrast with her suburban housewife marriage. In Rapunzel, the girl unwittingly discloses her relationship to the witch. The witch abandons her in a wilderness, Kinneret-Among-the-Pines? Rapunzel’s tears heal the prince’s blinded eyes, while Oed’s tears are hidden by her bubble glasses, which she imagines will capture the tears and provide her with a sad vision that refracts the world through those tears. Her prince/Pierce has returned via his will, but she cannot heal him and won’t live happily ever after in the patriarchal world.
> In solidarity,
> James
> 
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