-- 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
The second half of this post, about webs of words, points to what seems like the clearest & most explicable reading of *Lot 49*: that it's about information theory / language theory and its discontents. I think that's more or less right, or at least I think TP wants to ruffle those feathers, but I also think he's too wayward & chaotic a thinking to stay put for long.
ReplyDeleteIn the first half of the post you've already noted at least two things that muddy this informantics reading: first, an emotional / sexual "crying" reading, which is exactly what traditional novelists & critics don't find in Pynchon (no "real characters," etc). Second, and I think this is probably the stronger anti-skeptical impulse in his work, his tragic focus on history-as-catastrophe. The flash-forward to the English Civil War from the pov of Wharfinger's revenge tragedy parallels so much in Pynchon: telling the story of the great tragedy -- the Cold War in GR, the Reagan Rev in Lot 49 and Vineland, the consolidation of the USA in M&D -- by way of uncovering lost possibilities from the moment just *before* that historical current came to be inevitable.
The important question, I think, is whether that makes TP a dewy-eyed Romantic who thinks another way is possible -- the last of the Beat writers, in some ways? -- or a cynic who won't open that utopian doorway. Worth thinking about as we move into the end of Lot 48 & turn to GR.