CoL49 Group Reading ch 3 part 1, 40

[Michael Bailey]

“So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero.”

And so begins a florid paragraph of narratorial comparison between Oedipa’s
unpacking of The Tristero, (or rather, should one say, its gradual
self-revelation?) and her glacially-slow disrobing & seduction at the hands
of Metzger.

Like said seduction, will it take, the narrator wonders, a heap of
desultory (so desultory as to send her to sleep), yet elaborate & involved,
foreplay
“before The Tristero could be revealed in its terrible nakedness”?

This incremental repetition of murky foreshadowing echoes the beginning of
the chapter; one might suspect one’s leg being pulled, or even one’s nose
being slightly tweaked* - there’s a part of at least some readers (<coff
coff - me>) which is just reading to get to the sexy parts & is going “yeah
yeah some kind of conspiracy but meanwhile Metzger with his beautiful eyes
and Oedipa dreamily drunk and obviously long-deprived of good lovin’ are
about to Make Out!” and the dilemma of ethics of sex with an asleep person
(I mean, obviously I wouldn’t…that rascal Metzger though…) only heightens
the interest, making it easy to skip over other points being made -

But maybe that’s the point - as Pierce’s proxy, Metzger is introducing her
to, well, his stuff, “manufacturing consent” as Chomsky might say;

And the paragraph continues to draw the parallel between that sort of
objectionable sex & the “revelations” to be foisted upon the mostly?
partly? feignedly? ambivalently? unwilling - & sometimes unconscious -
Oedipa by Pierce and his damnable will -

-  o-or are they wrought by The Tristero itself, a greater force just using
Pierce?


* quite irreverently this image comes to mind
https://www.thirdmindbooks.com/pages/books/2226/robert-crumb/mr-natural-no-2




Finally we transition out of that speculative metaphor although there’s
still a little left in the pipes to start the next paragraph:

“The beginning of that performance was clear enough. [wait a minute, I
thought the beginning was “that night’s infidelity with Metzger” way back
at the beginning of the chapter?!]

“It was while she and Metzger were waiting for ancillary letters to be
granted representatives in Arizona, Texas, New York and Florida, where
Inverarity had developed real estate, and in Delaware, where he’d been
incorporated.”


- which seems like it’s starting to take awhile…
So they decide to take a gander at Fangoso Estates.

There’s a tiny bit of “longhair” humor in one of the Paranoids not being to
drive properly because he couldn’t see thru his hair - I remember jokes
like this in the ‘60s. Lots of them. The Beatles kind of started that
trend. The hair, that is. The jokes maybe originated in a lot of
barbershops independently.

(Sigh - good times!)