Thomas Pynchon, Lecture Two:The Crying of Lot 49 as diatribe of a mad housewife.

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Thomas Pynchon, Lecture TwoThe Crying of Lot 49
as diatribe of a mad housewife.

• Cult Pynchon Hypertexted, Hotlinked, and
  otherwise (Dis)Assembled Pynchonalia.

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On Reading Pynchon

• Reading Pynchon can be a transforming
  experience. At first, we are wanderers in a
  dream. We follow the voyages of his many
  characters as if we are tracing the threads in a
  tapestry. Symmetries emerge and are broken,
  perspectives intertwine and merge, and patterns
  are revealed as the fabric is slowly woven
  together. Soon we begin to sense the purpose of
  the tapestry, and by doing so we are warped in.
• Spermatikos Logos, m/pynchon/pynchon_works.html

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Soon we begin to sense the purpose of the
tapestry, and by doing so we are warped in.

• Fallopian twinkled. They accuse us of being
  paranoids.
• They? inquired Metzger, twinkling also.
• Us? asked Oedipa.

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Plots, coherence, wills

• Oedipa as the executrix, charged with the
  unanticipated duty of executing Pierces will
• Pierce a corporation, conglomerate, made of many
  parts, and where to find his will?
• Oedipa discharging the will of modernism.
• From meanings to workings.

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• Pynchon's fiction is structured around the
  tension between a desire for the textual unity of
  modernism--a text that makes sense--and the
  proliferation of signs. The Crying of Lot 49 is
  built around a set of codes that gives the
  appearance of unity but in fact could simply be a
  random collection of signs, the posthumous
  pulsing of Inverarity's game.
• Rosenfeld, The scanty plot Orwell, Pynchon,
  and the poetics of paranoia Twentieth Century
  Literature,  Winter 2004 pp24-5

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• Oedipa, in turn, struggles mightily to replace a
  narrative coherence that has been lost to the
  multiple connections. Driving to San Narciso,
  Oedipa resolves "to pull in at the next motel she
  saw, however ugly, stillness and four walls
  having become preferable at this point to this
  illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair,
  unreeling landscapes" (26).
• Rosenfeld, The scanty plot Orwell, Pynchon,
  and the poetics of paranoia Twentieth Century
  Literature,  Winter 2004 pp24-5

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Rosenfeld, The scanty plot Orwell, Pynchon,
and the poetics of paranoia Twentieth Century
Literature,  Winter 2004 pp24-5

• . for Oedipa the "scanty plot" of the four
  walls represents a blessed relief from the
  proliferation of signs. Pynchon imagines the
  hotel room not as a source of the aesthetic
  sublime but as an escape, a fixing of untrammeled
  possibilities. What is to be contained is Oedipa
  herself, the motel room functioning like the
  tupperware that opens the novel.

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Bestow life, give meaning

• Oedipas task to bestow life on what had
  persisted, to try to be what Driblette was, the
  dark machine in the center of the planetarium, to
  bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous
  Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her.

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plot becomes a mode of incarceration and/or
protection Shall I project a world?

• The proliferation of containers which emplot,
  direct, contain narratives
• Tupperware
• Hotel room
• Aerosol can
• Submarine
• Bordando el Manto Terrestre
• Will and Testament, the will in the form of
  information
• A plot has been mounted against you
• Sunglasses

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OedipaShall I project a world?

• To be a work means to set up a world, and hold
  truth Truth, as the clearing and concealing of
  beings, happens in being composed. Heidegger,
  The Origin of the Work of Art.

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Sunglasses, again

• She could carry the sadness of the moment with
  her that way forever, see the world refracted
  through those tears, those specific tears, as if
  indices as yet unfound varies in important ways
  from cry to cry. 
• Indices as yet unfound the sensitive?

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Oedipa, the reader, as sensitives?

• Nefastis
• The sensitive must receive that staggering set
  of energies, and feed back something like the
  same quantity of information.
• (or is the sensitive a metaphor?)
• Transformation energy, intensity, into
  information (Maxwells Demon)

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Hidden in Plain View

• CH 5 Trystero everywhere
• Cf The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe
• Cf Thomas Pynchon on the Simpsons
• James Bone the Crime they styl'd 'Anonymity'
  (Mason Dixon) (online at http//www.suntimes.c
  o.za/1998/06/07/lifestyle/life01.htm) "Every
  weirdo in the world is on my wavelength," Pynchon
  once complained to a friend.

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Who or what is hidden, embedded in these weavings?

• Thomas Pynchon, (dead) author
• the reader as singular, comprehending subject
• character as truthful
• The nation, all tangled in a secret anti-monopoly
  as the basis of their forms of communication/infor
  mation sorting (Trystero)
• the certainty of the rational, capable of
  calibration, in face of experience, understood as
  a kind of distinct, immersive intensity

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Diatribe of a Mad Housewife(Pynchon and his
blurbs)
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• Some Pynchon links
• The Modern Words Spermatikos Logos
  http//www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_intro
  .html
• Pynchon Portal www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/tpportal.
  html
• Pomona Pynchon Page http//www.pynchon.pomona.edu
  /
• HyperArts Pynchon Page http//www.hyperarts.com/
  pynchon