CoL49 Group Read

Sat May 11 13:27:44 UTC 2024

Oops I wanted to change some mistakes and expand this post a bit.
> On May 10, 2024, at 9:04 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 
> 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 an I
Individual fictional character.   We seem to be asked whether we are
> destined to frightened blind searching in societies In which ruthless 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 oppressors and then become the same thing:
Going to war with the values espoused
> 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
structures” and their 

>  far more dangerous delusions. This appears in the phrase “magic, anonymous and malignant. 

Ovid’s metamorphosis is rife with the malignancy and venality of the Gods. Nymphs and less powerful local spirit beings are frequently the ones injured by the whims and ego battles of the Gods, their wild places with ancient natural wholeness are disrupted, the trees cut down.  This seems best interpreted as the practical pattern of rape and destruction of dominance-based power arrangements. In COL 49 even gravesites, normally seen as sacred, are seen by lawyers and developers as having no right to be where the freeway is planned. 

The political underpinnings of the suburban landscape  is not far in the background in COL 49. Missile factory,  Hidden Bones, Nazi scientists, a Mafia mob boss with fascist history and a bone chilling murder story involving a war over basic communication and facts, and a question of who will be heir. What about the will of the people in who they choose? What happened to the rightful elected leader who refused the will of the Military Industrial Complex, who refused the plans to go to war to take back Cuba for the mob bosses and CIA, who turned from wars for dominance? JFK was shot and neither the implications of murder by a lone communist agent, nor the implications of other gunmen, nor Oswald’s involvement with the FBI and CIA were followed through to a full reckoning with the facts. Shadowy figures seen by witnesses, the eyewitness Zapruder film, the medical autopsy , the murder surrounded by cops of Oswald I watched on live TV, all danced in a choreography of obfuscation before the nation, while the dead presidents enemy who he had just fired from the CIA presided over the investigating commission.  An unlikely trail of dead bodies accompanied the independent investigators who sought witnesses and evidence. In a Congressional Committee on assassinations the chief counsel Robert Blakely said the CIA lied and withheld information which made all findings invalid.
In many obvious ways the Cold War and the coming hot war in Vietnam of this time were not about preventing authoritarian structures but retaining and expanding authoritarian structure favored by the most powerful  western corporate and government  forces and alliances to emerge from WW2.   In Vietnam, in  Aug1964, a year after Kennedy’s murder, the military carried out “Operation Pierce Arrow” where aircraft carriers started bombing North Vietnam in a response to an exchange of fire in the Gulf of Tonkin in which the question of who was aggressor and what happened is still  in serious dispute. Pierce Arrow.

> 
> * a phrase borrowed with permission from my daughter Rebekah.
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>> 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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