CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

[Joseph Tracy]

Yes. This is pretty much  how I am reading Oed’s psychological terrain seen through the Rapunzel story.. My sense is that she can lo longer play the role of maiden saved by Prince because a) PI is 3/4ths asshole and b) he has not brought true escape but a realization about the deeper nature of her entrapment. 

Her tower length hair as  genuine outgrowth of feminine identity is severed by that realization and what remains is no longer a sustainable connection to herself or  PI.

> On May 18, 2024, at 9:17 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.
> --
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