CoL49 group reading - Rapunzel musings

[O G]

Maybe she is lacking/searching for self-love, maybe without even realizing
it.

On Sat, May 18, 2024, 2:24 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

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