"They gave it to her then in prose."

So, being my last post exclusively concerning Lot 49, still not entirely sure that I can say anything truly comprehensive or sweeping about the novel (hopefully the subsequent novels can abet with that), I'm just going to stick to Chapter 6 and hope those notes can work as synecdoche.

-- Early last week, you had posted something about Pynchon's treatment of sentimentality, to be cognizant of the types of novel Pynchon was addressing in Lot 49. Although perhaps not to any grand effect, I did begin to notice certain elements of the seduction novel -- in the way that the men in Oedipa's life gradually recede from her (Mucho, Metzger, Driblette, etc.), all as a result of Pierce's will, "will" being a fairly obvious double entendre. Pierce's baleful plot, like those of villainous 19th century seducers, leaves Oedipa fragile, alone, and feeling pregnant, only one step removed from the classic repercussion, death. "She should have felt more classically scorned, but had other things on her mind." There seems to be a division being illustrated here, that something Oedipa possesses, or chases, or whatever, keeps her from that 19th century death.

-- The sentimental novel, Romanticism, etc. It took me longer than it should have to start making these connections, but what I began to feel as I approached the close of the novel was that the crying, the human emotion that is all over the place -- simultaneously comical/out-of-place, and so perfectly reasonable a response -- is not some kind of cynical, "look-at-the-horror-of-the-modern-age" whining, but far closer to an exhibition of the ideals of the Romantics. I forget where/what I was reading, but it essentially argued that there can be no argument as to whether or not something is sublime: the experience of an overwhelming emotional response to that thing is irrefutable proof. Truth, of the grand metaphysical variety, has no scale or measure other than our reaction to it, a belief which seems to be very much at work in Lot 49. It's not Montblanc, or Tintern Abbey anymore, it's constellations of words and language that appear to us out of chaos.

-- Chapter 6 has a lot of references to/puns on/images of tabernacles, and I think it's because this is a word/image that is actually very central to understanding of the novel. Firstly, because of the way in Christian tradition, Jesus, the seat of all truth, is referred to in the Gospel of John as "The Word become flesh." Jesus -- the Word -- resides in each church's tabernacle. At Randolph Driblette's burial (161), Oedipa envisions a "transient, winged shape" rising out of Driblette's grave, "needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark." Driblette, as director and actor, could embody both the spirit and the flesh of The Courier's Tragedy when he performed. Oedipa, as the host, recognizes she must lack the spirit of these words and symbols (or words-in-symbols, hieroglyphics). The other option is that the spirit of this system will vanish into the night, the territory of the exiled, to which Oedipa belonged momentarily. On 162, we get this passage: "Perhaps -- she felt briefly penetrated (pierce-d?), as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary (tabernacle image) of her heart -- perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away in that vast sink of the primal blood, the Pacific." I feel like this scene points to a possibility that Pynchon believes people, Oedipa, in their reality as human flesh, can become the "direct, epileptic Word" at the center of these systems of symbols.

"Behind the hieroglyphic streets, there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only earth." (181)

"...and if there was just America, then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia." (182)

-- These two quotes from the final pages of the novel scream "big reveal," but although I feel confident in my comprehension of the first, I'm not sure I really have the second one. I'll try to trace my train of thought here. Option 1: transcendent meaning. Easy enough, this would mean Oedipa is not paranoid, has actually become privy to a nefarious underground system, set off on her quest by Pierce's will/will. Option 2: these impressions of systems are like veins and arteries of information without a heart, chaotic and meaningless in and of themselves. But Pynchon says that in the face of this meaningless, if America is a name and not a word, the only way to continue is to live outside it, embrace paranoia as a way of life.

I don't know where this leaves me in terms of some kind of final, over-arching statement. Honestly, it just leaves me without one. But I've been reading some essays on JSTOR and elsewhere, took a couple books out of the library, prepping for Gravity's Rainbow over the last few days. My plan is to continue to think of Oedipa in relation to Slothrop, marking similarities and differences, etc. to see if that helps.

Matt

p.s. -- as a sort of administrative note, I was thinking of -- instead of giving GR 2 weeks and Vineland 3 -- giving both books 2 and a half to lighten the reading load. Thoughts?

"Tattooed in old ink, now beginning to blur and spread"

"'catastrophe: 1530s, reversal of what is expected' (especially a fatal turning point in a drama)"

----- etymonline.com

I spent chapters 4 and 5 thinking about what you said, about history-as-catastrophe for Pynchon, and about determining Pynchon's place on the spectrum of Romanticism. I remember seeing something on JSTOR about Gravity's Rainbow and a "new sublime" or something like that, so I'm going to try and recover that real soon. I was also turned on by a friend to Marx's article "18 Brumaire..." with the [apparently] famous opening line about history appearing twice, "the first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce" which I can't help but see as super relevant to Pynchon's interests. He also alerted me to the root of "katastrophe" in the Greek tragedy, as the moment when the Chorus appears to sing the tragic change, which calls to mind all of those bizarre, Vaudevillian poppings-up of songs in Pynchon. Are these catastrophes-in-miniature to foreshadow the grander historic catastrophes?

With regard to the Marx quote, the only problem is that I'm having trouble determining whether Lot 49 is depicting first instances (tragedies) or seconds (farces). Possibly, that's quite intentional, like the way Oedipa ends up in tears in response to a ridiculous stripping game.

So at this point, we've got the encounter with John Nefastis and the whole Maxwell's Demon thing, which sets up the explorations later in the chapter of the "miraculous" nature of colliding systems. Jesus Arrabal tells Oedipa that a "miracle" is "another world's intrusion into this one." Jesus describes Pierce as a miracle in the perfection of his opposition to the revolutionaries, something not of this world. This gives the dead man's name a new significance, in that Pierce pierces the membrane of "this" world, and that Oedipa acts as the "Maxwell's Demon" between the two, the point where two unrelated systems come into contact -- Pierce names her the executor of the will, thereby introducing the muted post horn, symbol of Pierce's [constructed? digital?] world.

But all of this high, abstract stuff about information and systems and universes is offset almost immediately in the second half of the chapter, outside the rooming house, when Oedipa encounters the old man with the post horn tattoo on the back of his hand, his "wrecked" face a vision of her potential future. For the first time, a character other than Oedipa is crying, and she sort of plays mother to him. The scene is one of the most memorable in the book, but what struck me this time is the way that Oedipa whispers to the sailor, "I can't help" repeatedly as she calms him. This man, marked by the post horn, breaks down and curls into the bosom of his makeshift mother, who cannot help. There are a bunch of role-reversals, age-reversals, etc here, that must be significant: the way Oedipa, of the younger generation, becomes the mother/nurse/consoler of the old generation, who in all his pursuit of the system, has forgotten his wife (the way Oedipa loses Mucho (and "mucho")). But Oedipa is not the youngest generation, having just arrived from her own series of rejected admissions. It is Marx's the tragedy and farce at once, poised to begin again.

Oedipa wonders if her clues "were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night." I think this illustrates the meeting point of these two worlds [entropy is involved, but I'm not articulate enough] well: the logocentric, maybe impersonal or impregnable conspiracy, and the organic human reaction to this world, the crying. "Abolish the night" still bothers me though, and I'd appreciate some direction as to what that might stand for.

The scene with the new Mucho (who "digs") is disturbing too. I haven't really begun yet to consider what LSD might mean to Pynchon, because I can only imagine it as representative.

Matt

Guerilla Pynchon

So maybe it's not "better" than your image per se, but I do like how this one embodies the sort of underground yet omnipresent cipher. Also, there's a sneaky camera sitting above the concrete wall that I'm sure would make the hair on any real paranoid's neck stand up.

Reviewing the calendar, I'm seeing that I actually have till Thursday with Lot 49, so I'll post again tomorrow through Chapter 6, incorporating more of your directives, with a more comprehensive post on Friday, including a lead-in to GR. I like that phrase "history-as-catastrophe" and I've been thinking about that a lot.

Wilco soon.

Matt

We Await Silent Tristero's Empire

Can you find a better one?

Apocalypse, and the internet

Two things to think about for the next week or two --

1.  Your comment about the English Civil War vis a vis that great parody of Jacobean drama -- btw, you might enjoy watching Alex Cox's film of *The Revengers Tragedy* as a semi-version of what old Tom's thinking about -- makes me think of how invested almost all the novels are in an apocalyptic view of history.  It's all about the come undone, as we wait just-before at the end of at least the first three novels.  (Something may change with *Vineland* in this regard.)  Worth trying to work through, esp for *GR*.

2.  I also think you should spend a little time each week on the web, starting with thomaspynchon.com, & thinking about how these novels lend themselves to cyberculture.  Oedipa's vision of the circuit always strikes me as a prophetic dream of the post-90s internet.


I also want you to find a good web image of the post-horn & add it to this site somewhere.

"She Looked Around for Words"

I'm going to try here to just summarize my notes through Chapter 4.

-- Oedipa, after leaving with Metzger for San Narciso, recalls the "time she'd opened a transistor radio to...find her first printed circuit." She compares both experiences as having a "hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning." The operative word reappears in Chapter 3 when she first spies the muted post horn on a stall wall in the ladies' room of The Scope under the WASTE address: "God, hieroglyphics." The first difference that strikes me between the 2 instances is that in the first, it is the voice of the 3rd person narrator who invokes the reference, whereas by Chapter 3, it comes directly from Oedipa. This maybe speaks to a plurality of "hieroglyphic" systems at work in the novel: one that is internal with regard to the text, that is, one for Oedipa to be the detective, and another that is distanced from the text and includes Oedipa as a symbol herself, wherein the reader is responsible for decoding. I guess in this train of thought, the question to follow is whether or not either of these systems is actually closed, able to be coherently deciphered. If one and not the other, which one and why? I'm getting some very John Barth vibes from this investigation.

-- The first instance of "cry" is in Chapter 2, page 42. Oedipa returns from the hotel bathroom to find Metzger undressed, asleep. "With a cry, [she] rushed to him, fell on him, began kissing him to wake him up." It's a sort of confusing scene when you consider that it immediately follows the denouement of the clothing game, when Metzger is really just rattling off Inverarity's assets. This cry denotes the moment when Oedipa "consents" to sex with Metzger. But what has changed in their situation? The only thing I can really find is that Metzger is down to his boxers, perhaps more human to Oedipa here than he had been as the wily lawyer who sweet-talked her into a drunken strip game. Maybe it has something to do with his pseudo-alter-ego as Baby Igor which only confuses me further. The word comes in again on the next page after Metzger tells Oedipa that Pierce had told him "[she] wouldn't be easy." Again it leads to sex. But this time, I get the distinct impression that it is a response to Oedipa's witnessing of Metzger deciphering her "system." More on that to follow.

-- To jump ahead a bit to the Wharfinger play, the narrator says of the "landscape of evil Richard Wharfinger had fashioned for his 17th century audiences" that is "unprepared...for that abyss of civil war...only a few years ahead of them." It struck me during my reading to underline that last part, and I'm still not really sure entirely why. But maybe that's just the nature of this text: to be struck by sinister shadows of things when the things themselves aren't there to cast those shadows. When Duke Angelo makes his very al-/elusive speech in Act 4 to Vittorio, choosing to omit certain names of those who will pursue Niccolo, it is said that "the audiences of the time knew." I want to connect these two things, but I'm not sure how. I think it ties in to the use of the word "hieroglyphics" to describe the paranoid systems at play in the novel, as if it is not because of a fault in the system can we not comprehend it, but because of our unfortunate place in history, a sinister chronology. Lot 49 is, as I said in my first post, weirdly contemporary for Pynchon. Perhaps he chose here to give the end-product of all the complex, malicious webs created by global society. Perhaps that's too vague and self-important. I don't know. Read on, I guess.

-- Pronouns. Paranoids work in pronouns. "They" with a capital T, "Us" as more than just the people in the room, "Cosa Nostra" as the Italian mob stand-in, etc. Maybe Pynchon, by including the British Invasion mock-ups "The Paranoids," was even picking up on an overwhelming abundance of pronouns in pop music, all the he's, she's, I's, and you's that propel 99% of the Beatles pre-'65 catalogue. Pronouns without a noun to replace, like a picture of a horn that means too many things to too many people to stand in for anything really.

-- "She looked around for words." (pg 76) I was talking about this sentence with my roommate the other night, the way "around" is so deliberately placed in that otherwise trite phrase. It's like Oedipa, aware of how words are what make compose these systems of paranoia, thinks she can look around and see words living physically alongside her. [That's not articulated well, but hopefully you'll get the gist.] This is probably an offshoot of the pronouns thing. Maybe Pynchon was just getting a little more "traditionally" postmodern then usual and, by creating word-centric webs of hinted meaning, illustrating that fundamental flaw in language to communicate meaning definitively.

I'll have Chapter 4 through the end of the novel on Tuesday.

Matt

"He had believed too much in the lot"

I've been backspacing away fluffy opening remarks continuously for the last 10-12 minutes now, so I guess I'll just jump right into The Crying of Lot 49 and get the big moment out of the way without too much performance.

Technically, this is a rereading of Lot 49; but by chapter 2, I was well aware how unprepared I was to read something like this back in high school, how little I remembered of what seems overt and fundamental this time. Back then, having read virtually nothing outside of various conservative curricula, finally striking out on my own, I found the book grand and sinister, meanly subversive anid often frightening. I'm not sure I allowed myself to laugh. I'm still reluctant to call anything by Old Tom -- which is what I've been calling Pynchon recently, an unexpected but I think fertile association of the author with Tolkien's Tom Bombadil -- "light-hearted." But his tongue is pressed pretty firmly against his cheek throughout this one, and my involuntary snickering is practically perpetual.

It's weird to begin this course with a book that seems like a sort of interim piece in the context of the man's oeuvre: it's like, sandwiched between two sprawling European epics, Lot 49 -- this distinctly American, very contemporary (being set in the era of its publication) short novel -- pokes up for a moment or two. Sort of like America is where Pynchon can stop and catch his breath (his spiraling, Technicolor breath that tastes a bit like pot, of course). Which is distressing.

So to climb out of that confusion, I took your post about "crying" as a way of grounding my reading. But the word in any form, I'm 99% sure, does not occur in Chapter 1. What I did notice is that, in a related...thing, the word "lot" actually has an interesting function. It is used with regard to Mucho Maas's time as a used car salesman. Mucho, the "hyperaware" oversensitive husband of Oedipa attaches too much to his used car lot, seeing it as a place where poor hopeless people come with their poor hopeless cars to trade them in for poor hopeless replacements, only caring that these "new" used cars were not their own -- essentially trading "lots" with someone else. Mucho acts as a minister to this trading of lots, burdening himself with unbounded pity, and I guess can almost be seen, in his unfiltered receipt of sadness/pain, as preempting the "crying" that pops up throughout Oedipa's subsequent adventure.

Having read for today through page 80 or so, I've got a bunch more notes I want to get to, but being pressed a bit for time, I think I'll just make a second meaty post tomorrow or Sunday to get it out of the way before Tuesday's final thoughts.

And they're off!

Matt

"crying"

It's worth thinking about this word as you re-read Lot 49, not just b/c of the punchline ending but also b/c of the way it gestures toward a whole history of the sentimental novel -- the novel of deep, weepy emotionalism -- that Pynchon sets his aesthetic project up against.  "Too much kirsch in the fondue" might be another way for P. to think through, in the amazing madcap opening sentence, his own relationship to 1950s America & its sentimental images of itself.

Quick Update

So after taking a look at my day-to-day schedule for the semester, factoring in work at the Writing Center and a couple of radio shows on campus, I think I'll be posting my "significant" updates on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the calendar I put together for the semester facilitates this.

That said, I'm beginning work with Lot 49 today, and I'll be on schedule to make my first thoughtful meaty post this Friday (probably in the evening).

Anything less than peachy about this set-up for you?

Matt Z

Schedule of Events?

November seems years ago, but this is what I remember i/r/t the calendar we had sketched out for the [fast-]approaching semester:

1/20 to 1/27 -- Crying of Lot 49

1/28 to 2/10 -- Gravity's Rainbow

2/11 to 3/3 -- Vineland

3/4 to 3/13 -- SPRING BREAK

3/14 to 4/10 -- Mason & Dixon

4/11 to 5/3 -- Inherent Vice*

*[includes 6-day Easter Vacation]

The last week of instruction is, according to the calendar on St. John's website, May 4th to 10th, so I figure this time can be used to get my work together and finish the final paper.

I tried to stick to the 1-2-3-4-2 approach in terms of weeks-per-book as we had discussed, but if anything looks superfluous/insufficient, just let me know and I'll revise this. Otherwise, I'll look forward to getting started in a couple weeks.

MZ

A Pynchonist vision for the New Year

 

From a Nasa satellite in Norway...