CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

[David Morris]

On Sat, May 18, 2024 at 5:00 AM Michael

>
“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. […]

[***]Something[***] interferes with the fairytale”

SOMETHING? It’s identities as:
“some sinister sorcery”
And:
“ having no apparatus except gut, fear and female, cunning to examine the
formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field
strength, count its lines of force”

But a more precise, deeper look by Oed reveals that the fairy tale is not
so easily understood.  The Tower is seemingly inescapable, because it
FOLLOWS HER, as in, “Wherever you go, There you are!”

“ such a captive maiden [Oed] Soon realizes *the tower [is]* like her
ego, *only
incidental*.”

The tower, like her ego, are fictional, constructs, artificial devices,
which are symptoms of an invisible and ubiquitous “Magic, anonymous and
malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.”  One’s
Ego is an attempt to meditate a fatally wounded inner psyche with the
slave’s fate once finds thwarting the desires of the Id (Pynch was deeply
into Freud at the time. It’s an ever-frustrating inescapable task.

So there was no way that she could be rescued by a man.  The Counter-magic
escapes her right now. But that’s what she’s looking for on her quest.