CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

[Michael Bailey]

1954 - Pierce begins his career

1957-59
1959 - Maas starts at KCUF
1960 - Oedipa/Pierce split
1961 - Maas-Oedipa (nee ?) nups
1964 - Pierce kicks the bucket*

Right?

* https://youtu.be/h57UR-oIE_g?si=lr-EZFCWxhsaVYFx


( fuller clip from “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” which premiered
 November 9, 1963 -
https://youtu.be/w00Kab17aeI?si=Q-2f9rk9XnTuPDDn )


I also misquoted:

- What the text says is “her lovely hair turned, through some sinister
sorcery, into a great uncharted wig”

Unanchored wig, rather.



To tenaciously develop the trope or whatever it is -
“letting down her hair” would mean inviting him to “meditate in her
direction” as Sandra Dee says in “Grease”

Suppose that climbing the hair is the legitimate way to woo - dealing
directly with something that grows out of her, and entering her imprisoning
environment via Oedipa herself, whereupon they bond and escape that
environment.

But some type of “sinister sorcery” (or “technology indistinguishable from
magic”) - one thing that would break the spell might be a rudimentary
knowledge of weights and measures - makes it impossible for her to believe
that she can continue supporting his climb, so her imagination morphs the
hair into an unanchored wig to avoid having to imagine her neck breaking
under Pierce’s full weight, which even if he’s not that big a guy would
either break her neck or pull her down into the window frame, with
disastrous effects on her larynx. Or pull her out the window entirely so
they both fell?

Or maybe he’s the one who loses the sense of enchantment and thereby evokes
the wig.

Something interferes with the fairy tale - but Pierce is still attracted:

“…down he fell, on his ass. But dauntless, perhaps using one of his many
credit cards for a shim, he’d slipped the lock on her tower door and come
up the conchlike stairs, which, had true guile come more naturally to him,
he’d have done to begin with. But all that had then gone on between them
had really never escaped the confinement of that tower.”

Thanks to JK, I now know that there are many complications to the full
Rapunzel tale, and as Shakespeare wrote, “the course of true love never did
run smooth”

But does Oedipa know the whole myth?
Those gnarly details seem like they would come from
one of the unexpurgated Grimm books, whereas wouldn’t Oedipa (like me) have
been more likely to be exposed to bowdlerized versions -

So that in her Rapunzel fantasy, the prince would shinny up those locks,
and then (“it is intuitively obvious”) happily ever after?



Or - the sinister sorcery could simply be Oedipa realizing that she’s just
not that into the guy.

 She really likes the Rapunzel fantasy, just doesn’t care for Pierce. All
his credit cards &c can’t buy her love, but she is willing to hang with him
on a temporary basis,

—- and was open to that already:
“ he’d slipped the lock on her tower door and come up the conchlike stairs,
which, had true guile come more naturally to him, he’d have done to begin
with.”
- I think that’s what that means, that she never saw him as a life-changing
magical suitor. She tried but it just wasn’t her - faking it, not really
making it

https://youtu.be/IkFBOd4YN60?si=tinLOk933zPpYGDq

(Simon & Garfunkel, 1967)


 though she still wants the real thing (er, the Rapunzel illusion, that is)
& becomes more & more unhappy with Pierce.

https://youtu.be/srwxJUXPHvE?si=an8qShBx1h08ilKX