CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

[Mark Kohut]

The guy who wrote/edited the Companion to Lot 49 book, does the politically
correct questioning of
the phrase "female cunning".....

That phrase seems to me easily understood whether one is a feminist or
not.....

Females, esp in the time of Oedipa's time, needed a kind of cleverness
[cunning] that could not be
the cleverness of males in a patriarchal society, men freer to do
adventurous things to "find themselves"...
Women naturally learning how to become themselves against men's desires, in
general, a cunny cunning,
to not overlook the pun.

On Sat, May 18, 2024 at 9:18 AM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>