12. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Before launching
into Pynchon today, I thought I would just take a
few moments to look back over the books that we've read and
talk about the visions of language that they have offered
us, and also just to reflect for a
moment on the relationship imagined between those visions
of language and what is happening outside of fiction in
what we might call the real world.
We started this course talking about Black Boy and the
way that a whole world of pressure--political pressure,
racial tension--pushed on the borders of that work and
actually changed its very material form.
After that, I began a series of readings of novels that
emphasized more what you might call the history of literature,
the history of literature's forms and ambitions.
And so, beginning that series we had O'Connor embodying a new
critical craft of fiction that comes out of modernism,
imagining nevertheless that the craft is reflective of a
transcendental order in the world,
a religious order. When we moved on to Nabokov,
we had an author trying to imagine a work of art so
autonomous from the world that it could be something like an
autonomous form of life. That, of course,
I argued in those lectures, opened it up for the threat of
mortality. If you imagine your artwork is
living, it can also die. It's a kind of hauntedness that
surrounds Nabokov's vision of aesthetic bliss as one's
response to that autonomous artwork.
Kerouac represents a whole group of writers,
the Beats, who reject the formalism embodied by both
O'Connor and Nabokov. They reject that formalism as
an impediment to language's access to the real,
and to our access to the real through language.
They dream of an unmediated relationship between experience
and the word. They don't think so much of
language as a mediating force as an expressive force.
I argued in my second lecture on On the Road that,
in the end, that dream looks quite deflated when Dean can't
even speak in a coherent sentence,
and he has to be rejected by Sal as Sal drives off to the
jazz concert at Carnegie Hall. Nevertheless,
that dream is spiritualized. It's a way of becoming not just
close to the real, but also part of some mystical
unity. That thread of the mystical
quality of language at its extreme of literary power is
what I drew out of Franny and Zooey. So,
Salinger, too, has the dream that the artifice
of literature, of literary language,
the performance of language in the style of his novels,
can somehow be the essence of the human soul,
that it can somehow communicate the truth of the universe just
through its form: its human,
distinctive form. It's a way of thinking about
form that has more to do with individuality than it does with
convention. Remember that way that Franny
can identify the timbre of her brother's voice very
specifically: it's like no other.
So, Salinger imagines that the literary art imitates that kind
of voice, and in that way it is a sacred practice,
a sacred art. Barth rejects the idea that
language is an unmediated form of access to the real:
absolutely impossible for Barth to countenance that idea.
He sees life as continually, always already mediated by
language. Now, I should say,
as someone from the class who came up to me after lecture and
asked me about this, that Barth's understanding of
language as preceding human understanding,
preceding any sense of ourselves,
in a sense always slipping out of our control,
is very much in concert with what was going on at very
high-level language theory at that time.
So, the work of Jacques Lacan in France in the 1950s and '60s
and of Jacques Derrida who brought deconstruction to the
United States, actually to Johns Hopkins first
of all in the 1960s where Barth was teaching.
He presented that work in a very famous lecture in the late
'60s. This is all part of a way of
thinking about language that became very powerful through the
next decade and a half, and we're going to see it some
too next week when we read Morrison and Maxine Hong
Kingston. So, this is part of a larger
intellectual trajectory. Barth is not alone in thinking
these things about language. I argued that Barth tried
to counter that sense of helplessness at the hands of
language by imagining that the human effort at connecting with
another person through the mechanisms of love and desire
always renewed the possibility for language to do new kinds of
work in the world. So, if language seems exhausted
because it's always preceding you, everything has always
already been said, there's no new plot to be had,
the world is full of stock phrases, how do you use them to
embody an experience that seems fresh to you?
How do those stock phrases alienate you from the very
experience you hope that they can describe?
He thinks that following out desire can renew language,
and Menelaiad, I think, is his attempt at doing
that. So, now we arrive at that
tension, and I want to suggest that Barth was still dreaming of
a pretty autonomous version of the literary art,
even though in his 1987 preface to Lost in the
Funhouse--I don't know if any of you read it--he says
about these stories, which were published throughout
the '60s: The high '60s,
like the roaring '20s, was a time of more than usual
ferment in American social, political, and artistic life.
Our unpopular war in Vietnam, political assassinations,
race riots, the hippie counterculture,
pop art, mass poetry reading, street theater,
vigorous avant-gardism in all the arts together with dire
predictions not only of the death of the novel but of the
moribundity of the print medium in the electronic global
village: those flavored the air we breathed then,
along with occasional tear gas and other contaminants.
One may sniff traces of that air in the Funhouse.
I myself found it more invigorating than disturbing.
May the reader find these stories likewise.
It's a very interesting little comparison he makes at the end.
He takes that whole foment of 1960s politics and
counterculture, and essentially he says,
"I found that invigorating as I hope you will find these stories
invigorating," as if the stories in this
very--almost, seemingly, hermetically--sealed
literary world that he offers us are somehow meant to have the
effects of a whole decade of foment,
social foment. If Barth only gestures
towards that world, the politics of that decade,
Pynchon actually lets us see it.
And if you look on page 83, this is just one of many,
many examples. But I choose this one just
because it's so obvious.
Oedipa is going to Berkeley looking for Emory Bortz,
and she comes on a summer weekday in the mid afternoon.
No time for any campus Oedipa knew of to be jumping,
yet this one was. She came down the slope from
Wheeler Hall through Sather Gate into a plaza teeming with
corduroy, denim, bare legs,
blond hair, horn rims, bicycle spokes in the sun,
book bags swaying, card tables,
long paper petitions dangling to earth, posters for
undecipherable FSMs, YAFs, VDCs, suds in the
fountain, students nose to nose in dialog.
She moved through it carrying her fat book,
attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel
relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternative
universes it would take for she had undergone her own educating
at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat not only
among her fellow students but also most of the visible
structure around and ahead of them [that whole world of
government and social life].
Oedipa is in a different generation, of a different
generation, but we can see the social foment just in that
little snapshot of the Berkeley campus.
I don't know all of the acronyms.
I don't know what the FSMs are, but the YAFs are the Young
Americans for Freedom. The VDCs are the Vietnam Day
Committees. The Vietnam Day Committee
organized a 24-hour teach-in in 1965 against the Vietnam War.
There is a little anecdote from that teach-in that I want to
share with you, that I think embodies some of
the tensions in this novel. They invited Ken Kesey to come
and speak at the convention, at the teach-in.
Now, Ken Kesey, some of you probably know,
was a sort of performer, writer, not really an activist.
He was a purveyor of street theater and most famously the
advocate of LSD, and he and his Merry Pranksters
would ride around the country doing street theater,
advocating the use of LSD and marijuana.
Who, in 1964, do you think drove their bus,
which was called Further? Who do you think drove their
bus? Neal Cassady drove their bus.
When they came to the Vietnam Day at the Berkeley campus,
Kesey addressed the assembled people saying,
"Turn your back on the war. Look at the war,
turn your back on the war and say 'fuck it.'"
This is a group of people he was addressing who were intent
on doing something to stop the war, and this was Kesey's
response. That moment,
for me, embodies this tension right at the center of the
1960s, a tension between
countercultural self-development and an ethos of play,
"drop out,
tune in," and (I can't remember Kesey's little motto).
Essentially, leave the institutional life of
America--that means schools, government,
politics, all those traditional sources of order--and create
disorder. And do that as a way of finding
what's true about yourself; do it in the company of others.
It had this communal aspect, for sure.
On the other side, you have a growing political
movement among young people, and of course it's legendary.
By 1964, the Civil Rights movement had accomplished
amazing things. As a result of the Freedom
Rides, they had integrated interstate transportation,
at great cost to the volunteers who rode those buses.
They were beaten. Some were killed.
Civil Rights workers were murdered in various states.
It had come to a kind of crescendo with voter
registration drives and the Voting Rights Act of 1964.
At the same time, Lyndon B.
Johnson was ratcheting up the Vietnam War, so the Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution was passed in 1964, which authorized bombing
raids on Cambodia. This was a new turn in the war,
and it promised to escalate it, and this really
galvanized--especially student--resistance.
So, this was a time of major political stakes,
and young people at universities--primarily at
universities, but also people out doing the
March on Washington, in the South,
in small towns--were really changing the face of America and
its role in the world. So, Ken Kesey,
on the one hand, is looking for that internally
directed, playful response to the oppressive order of the
world. And then there is this very
political response. Pynchon lets us see both.
And he's parodying both kinds of response in this novel,
so in that sense, the novel is very much of its
time. Now, I want to pause for a
moment there and ask you a question.
I want you to think about what kind of protagonist Pynchon
sends out into this world. What do you think of Oedipa
Maas? How does she strike you as a
character? How would you describe her?
Yeah. Student:
Desperate.Professor Amy Hungerford:
Desperate. Okay.
How else? Yeah.Student:
Powerless.Professor Amy Hungerford:
Powerless. Uh huh.Student:
Very confused.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Confused. What else?
Those are all pretty negative adjectives.
Does she bring any resources? Yes.Student:
She's especially attractive.Professor Amy
Hungerford: She's attractive.
Yes, she is. What else?
What other resources does she bring?
Yeah.Student: She's
curious.Professor Amy Hungerford: She's curious.
Yeah. What else?
Anything else? Student:
She's determined.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Determined. Uh huh.
When this book first came out, critics called her a
lightweight. Was that a word that ever
occurred to you? Did anyone think,
"this is just a fluff character"?
I would suggest to you that the difference in your response and
the critics' is the difference that feminism in the '70s made.
In the 1960s, to have a protagonist go into
the world and discover this incredibly complex set of
patterns, and to have that protagonist be
a housewife, was very much playing against type.
So, Pynchon took a certain kind of risk by choosing to make his
protagonist a housewife. So, the question is,
why did he do that? I want to suggest to you that
he did that because a woman is expected to occupy certain
conventional roles at this moment,
and we see her in one at the very beginning of the novel.
She has just come back from a Tupperware party where the
hostess put too much kirsch in the punch, so she's a little
drunk. So you get this image of her as
this stereotypical '50s housewife going to Tupperware
parties. And then she makes salad,
she does the shopping, she picks herbs from the
garden, she makes lasagna,
she mixes drinks so that they'll be ready when Mucho
comes home, when her husband comes home:
very typical. So, this is the moment in
which she discovers that she's been chosen, or named,
as the executrix of Pierce's will.
It's that conventionality that then allows her to occupy
multiple roles. And let me just detail some of
those. You see it almost in language
of aside. This is when she first meets
Genghis Cohen. Yes.
Now the names in here, we have to think about them at
some point. One thing you can say about
them is that they are funny. A second thing you can say
about them is that they seem redolent of meaning.
I can't tell you how many scholars have come up with
different readings of what Oedipa's name means.
That's just Oedipa, and then there are so many
hundreds of others. They are redolent of meaning.
What are we to do with that fact?
It's a question for you. Three: they declare that
language is always mediated, always mediating,
that your experience of people is never clear of some set of
meanings that someone else has assigned to it.
Your encounter with the world is always mediated.
So, these names drag associations with them,
and one question I want to ask is: what to do with those?
But I'm going to set that question aside for a moment,
and note that, at meeting Genghis,
"Oedipa felt at once motherly."
Now, this may seem like a small aside, but if we look also on
73, when she meets Mr. Thoth, she says (on the very
top; he's telling Oedipa his dream,
and she sees in it clues to the Thurn and Taxis mystery):
Oedipa, sensitized, thinking of the
bronze marker, smiled at him as
granddaughterly as she knew how and asked,
"Did he ever have to fight off desperados?"
And then, of course, she gets a major clue for
figuring out what the whole story is behind the Tristero and
the post horn. "Granddaughterly."
It's a role she occupies with great ease.
A last example, on 122.
This is when she's going to meet Emory Bortz:
Oedipa showered, put on a sweater,
skirt and sneakers, wrapped her hair in a
student-like twist, went easy on the makeup.
These are her resources: makeup, clothes,
hair. With them she can occupy all
these different roles, and in doing so she has access
to certain kinds of knowledge. Her roles are as fluid,
in some ways, as Pierce's were.
Remember that when Pierce calls her, he's always impersonating
someone. So, he was speaking with his
Lamont Cranston voice the last time that she spoke to him.
The difference between the way Oedipa occupies these various
roles, and Pierce did it, is that Oedipa's roles have a
kind of traction in the world with other people that Pierce's
voices--or even Dr. Hilarius's voices--simply don't
have. These male versions of it are
all so apparently performances that they can't get much out of
them, except to annoy Oedipa. But Oedipa jumps right into
these conventional roles, and in that act comes to know
more about the world in a way that these men cannot.
Oedipa is--even from the time she was a child--a reader,
and we find that out on page 14 when she has her religious
instant. And I hope you remembered that
scene of Sal looking down on Salt Lake City,
the birthplace of Dean, from On the Road,
very similar structure. He looks down,
and he sees the little city laid out below him.
So, this is Oedipa in one of the first instances of her
becoming a reader:
She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the
sunlight [this is when she first sees San Narciso],
onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together
like a well-tended crop from the dull,
brown earth, and she thought of the time
she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen
her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and
streets from this high angle sprang at her now with the same
unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.
Though she knew even less about radios than about southern
Californians, there were to both outward
patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning,
of an intent to communicate. There had seemed no limit to
what the printed circuit could have told her if she had tried
to find out. So, in her first minute of San
Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold
of her understanding. Smog hung all around the
horizon. The sun on the bright,
beige countryside was painful. She and the Chevy seemed parked
at the center of an odd religious instant,
as if on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some
whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the
centrifugal coolness of words were being spoken.
She suspected that much. She thought of Mucho,
her husband, trying to believe in his job.
Was it something like this he felt looking through the
soundproof glass at one of his colleagues with a headset
clamped on and cueing the next record with movements stylized
as the handling of chrism, censer, chalice might be for a
holy man yet really tuned in to the voice, voices,
the music, its message, surrounded by it,
digging it, as were all the faithful it went out to?
Did Mucho stand outside Studio A looking in knowing that even
if he could hear it he couldn't believe in it?
She gave up presently as if a cloud had approached the sun or
the smog thickened and so broken the religious instant,
whatever it might have been.
Here, the cloud becomes the obscuring of this sense of
intent to communicate or a sense of meaning's pattern.
But it still retains--as it did in Flannery O'Connor--that
spiritual sense that the divine is always shrouded around by
some Cloud of Unknowing. But here we see her with the
desire to know. And the difference between her
as a child and her in this moment is that she had not
bothered to find out. If she had tried to find out
about the radio circuit, she would have learned
something. She did not try.
This time she will try. So, she's a reader who notices
patterns even from a young age. And at this moment she is
called upon--and she rises to the occasion--to figure out what
the pattern will mean. And, of course,
she progresses through a kind of education as a reader.
She goes from being a reader who can listen,
for example, to the ambiguities in the
Wharfinger play. She can hear when the ambiguity
creeps in between the words, and that tells her that she
needs to find something out. That's what causes her to have
the curiosity to go backstage. She becomes a critic.
She moves from interpretation to actually finding the history,
and the intertextuality, and the variations of these
editions of the play. She learns history, of the U.S.
and of Europe, about the mail systems.
She learns the history of Inverarity's enterprises.
So, she becomes a scholar in a certain way, an amateur scholar.
She's not just a reader; she's someone who actually
performs research. Where does all of this get
her? Well, I think,
what we're led to believe, is precisely nowhere,
in terms of revelation. Does a revelation ever happen?
Of course, the book ends with her waiting for the anonymous
bidder to reveal himself. Whether that would ever happen,
if Pynchon had decided to let us in on the secret,
I don't know. Pynchon, instead,
chooses to end the novel before that moment, and so we're left
with a kind of emptiness. We're left with the multiple
options that she laments. If you look on 146-147,
she rehearses all the possibilities of meaning,
and her conclusion, finally, is this:
San Narciso was a name, an incident among our climatic
records of dreams and what dreams became among our
accumulated daylight, a moment's squall line or
tornado's touchdown among the higher, more continental
solemnities, storm systems of group
suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence.
There was the true continuity. San Narciso had no boundaries.
No one knew yet how to draw them.
She had dedicated herself weeks ago to making sense of what
Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the
legacy was America. And then, I'm going to skip
down a little bit: Though she never again
called back any image of the dead man to dress up,
pose, talk to and make answer, neither would she lose a new
compassion for the cul-de-sac he'd tried to find a way out of,
for the enigma his efforts had created.
What we don't get here is a sense of whether there really is
an alternate secret postal system that serves a sort of
underground of private networks. We don't ever get a sense of
whether these stamps and the signs that she sees everywhere
in San Francisco when she travels through the city in the
night, whether these things are a
coherent meaning, or whether they are her
fabrication. We don't really know and she
never really can say. All she has is the sense that
there is this pattern. Now, there are two things
that she is left with, in the passage I just read:
that sense of San Narciso being all of America,
and, moreover, of it being constituted of
"storm systems of group suffering and need."
So, remember all of the little subcommunities that she
interacts with have some sort of pain or loss associated with
them: the Inamorati Anonymous for example,
people who don't want to love. It's all comedy,
but then there is a heart, a kernel.
And if we look on page 101-102, we can begin to see what that
heart or kernel is that recuperates what I would call
the sentimental.
So, this is when she's in San Francisco, looking around the
city. She's come there hoping to
escape the network of symbols that she has seen--all those
post horns--and instead she's immersed with a new network of
them. We're told:
Just before the morning rush hour she got out of a
jitney whose ancient driver ended each day in the red
downtown on Howard Street, began to walk toward the
Embarcadero. She knew she looked terrible,
knuckles black with eyeliner and mascara from where she had
rubbed, mouth tasting of old booze and
coffee, through an open doorway. On the stair leading up into
the disinfectant-smelling twilight of a rooming house,
she saw an old man huddled, shaking with grief she couldn't
hear. Both hands, smoke white,
covered his face. On the back of the left hand
she made out the post horn tattooed in old ink now
beginning to blur and spread. Fascinated, she came into the
shadows and ascended creaking steps, hesitating on each one.
When she was three steps from him the hands flew apart and his
wrecked face and the terror of eyes gloried in burst veins
stopped her. "Can I help?"
She was shaking, tired. "My wife's in Fresno," he said.
He wore an old double-breasted suit, frayed gray shirt,
wide tie, no hat. "I left her so long ago I don't
remember. This is for her."
He gave Oedipa a letter that looked like he'd been carrying
it around for years. And he tells her to drop it in
the "W.A.S.T.E., lady," can.
W.A.S.T.E. We're not allowed to say
"waste," remember. And then she is gripped
with--as she says, "overcome all at once"--by a
need to touch him, as if she could not believe in
him or would not remember him. And she reflects,
just above that, on the mattress that he must
sleep in, and this is one of those great Pynchon sentences.
This is a question, but it comes in the declarative
form, too. What voices overheard,
flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper's
stained foliage, candle stubs lit to rotate in
the air over him prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must
fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming,
secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing
of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare
sweat, helpless overflowing bladder,
viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream like the
memory bank to a computer of the lost.
It's a sort of aria of description, and Pynchon can
string those clauses together like no one else.
There are even longer examples in the book, and I'm sure you
noticed them. Oedipa needs to actually touch
the man, and when she finally, sort of, takes him in her arms,
the position she assumes looks like that of a mother with her
broken son. And the image is much more
specifically of Michelangelo's Pieta.
And remember the Lago di Pieta figures prominently in the
novel, both as the site of the rout of GIs in Italy,
and the lake from which their bones are taken to make charcoal
filters for cigarettes. So, the Pieta,
the image of Mary with Jesus' body broken from the cross on
her lap, is repeated,
and here Oedipa comes to inhabit that position.
It's not a social role in the way that she could be
granddaughterly or motherly on those other occasions.
It's a religious image. It's also a gendered religious
image; it's also an aesthetic image.
But here, it's infused with her compassionate approach to this
man. And remember,
in the passage that I read about Inverarity's escape,
what she left with, as her final understanding.
She has a kind of compassion for Pierce and the way that he
had surrounded himself with this network of holdings that he had
tried to escape from in some way.
So, if you cannot, finally, have a pattern resolve
into a clarity of truth or meaning,
what you can do instead is inhabit a role where you will be
in contact with the very material of social life.
And that's what that mattress is: totally imbued with the
bodily detritus of a human life, actually of many human lives.
She reflects, later, on the set of all men
who had slept on that mattress.
Pynchon wants to imagine a very physical repository for the
social, and especially for the human, affective dimensions of
the social. That's why Oedipa has all
these men stripped away from her.
Remember, she says that, as she is growing more and more
desperate at the end, that her men were being
stripped away from her one by one.
And so, when she comes to be isolated in this way,
she can finally see and meditate upon,
in a new way, all those systems of
communication. And she has that vision of the
telephone wires, and she looks up at them as she
has just doubted all of the possibilities for making sense
of the post horn and the Tristero.
She looks up at the telephone wires, and she thinks about all
the messages, unintelligible,
full of human longing, going back and forth across
those wires. So, if Pynchon gives us the
pattern of meaning, rather than meaning itself in
this novel, he also gives us a vision of
what it means to embody that pattern.
This is very different from Nabokov's idea of embodiment as
a kind of alternate or rival creativity.
Remember, I argued that Lolita has a dead child,
and she dies in childbirth, in a way, because it's a kind
of creativity that Nabokov wants to cancel, or that Humbert wants
to cancel. In this novel,
it's not a rival creativity. It's what creativity has to be,
in the literary sense. Now, Pynchon was a student of
Nabokov for a couple of years at Cornell University in the early
'60s, so he took courses with Nabokov.
I don't know how close they were, but he certainly learned a
few things from Nabokov. This is something he revises
from that old teacher. He is imagining a literary form
that is soaked in the stuff of social life.
So, if you only get a sniff of the tear gas in Barth,
here you get a whole draught full of it.
And what I think he is rejecting: if you look on page
95 (oops. That's not the one I want.
Yes, it is 95. If you look on page 95…)
there is a different vision of what the artwork could look like
that I think we're meant to put next to that vision of Oedipa
with the suffering sailor. This is when it first occurs to
her that the whole world is being organized around her:
Nothing of the night's could touch her.
Nothing did. The repetition of symbols was
to be enough, without trauma,
as well, perhaps, to attenuate it,
or even jar it altogether loose from her memory.
She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as
she might the toy street from a high balcony,
roller-coaster ride, feeding time among the beasts
in a zoo, any death wish that can be consummated by some
minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its
voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely
beyond dreams, simply to submit to it,
that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics,
feral ravening promised more delight.
She tested it, shivering. I am meant to remember.
Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own
clarity, its fine chances for permanence,
but then she wondered if the gemlike 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.
This is a meditation on both the joy and the loss of literary
substitution for the real or for the truth,
the substitution of abstract pattern for something like
comprehensible meaning. So here, she's kind of
enthralled with the idea that these gemlike clues--that's a
very Nabokovian moment--the gemlike clues that are gathering
around her would be a compensation for the loss of
that real access to revelation. And this has this religious
sense to it. It's not just the religious
instant of looking down at San Narciso;
it's the religious sense of the capitalized Word that comes back
a couple of times towards the end of the novel,
the epileptic Word. The "Word," capitalized,
always refers back to the beginning of the Gospel of John,
where John describes Christ as the Word made flesh:
"The Word was with God and the Word was God and the Word was
made flesh and came to dwell among us."
So, Pynchon is using that religious vocabulary:
not just the religious imagery of the Pieta,
but the religious vocabulary of the capitalized Word.
So, you can have a kind of system of symbols that's gemlike
and pleasurable and that calls you to submit to it as it does
here for Oedipa, but in the end there is
something more that her search will produce,
and that is the moment of compassion.
And, I would submit to you that tears are just all over this
novel. I don't know if you noticed it,
but there are many, many examples.
I'll just give you a few.
First of all, there are the tears that
accumulate in her bubble shades when she's in Mexico looking at
Remedios Varo"s painting of the women in the tower embroidering
the long tapestries that become the world.
So, that sense of isolation in the tower makes her weep.
On 117 you can see another example.
This is Mucho talking about the Muzak:
"Oedipa, the human voice,
you know, it's a flipping miracle."
His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of
beer. 113, this is Dr.
Hilarius, crying: "Tears sprang to Hilarius'
eyes. 'You aren't going to shoot,'"
he says. 146, in her moment of
desperation when she loses her connection to the Inamorato
Anonymous, or when she's about to talk to
him: "She waited, inexplicable tears beginning to
build up pressure around her eyes."
Back on 108.
This is the nurse who has just escaped from Dr.
Hilarius: "'He thinks someone's after him.'
Tear streaks had meandered down over the nurse's cheekbones."
It's not just that we could explain any of these moments of
tears. It's that Pynchon describes
them all, notes them all. So, this is a novel that's full
of people crying, which is an odd thing to think
about when you think back to Pynchon's reputation as a
metafictional novelist, as someone preeminently
preoccupied with the formal aspects of fiction.
What you find when you actually open up Pynchon's novels is an
incredibly rich world of human detritus, of history.
In Gravity's Rainbow he did enormous amounts of research
in newspapers from the Second World War in London where some
of the novel is set, so that you can go to
newspapers and find the ads that he talks about in the novels.
So, he combines this very attentive set of details,
which are not always, and often are not at all,
the aesthetic details with which Nabokov filled
Lolita. Remember,
when I asked you about the specificity of America in On
the Road, and I asked you to think about whether there
was anything there at all? In On the Road,
there isn't anything. In Nabokov there is,
but it's usually aesthetic: how things look,
the look of a hotel, the look of a field,
the look of a child, the look of a woman.
In Pynchon, often, these are somehow social
details about people talking to other people,
political things, places, and how houses are
arranged. But there is a sense that these
are social worlds, not just patterns,
even though at the beginning that's how Oedipa sees them.
As she goes further and further in to her search for
knowledge--and finally her abandonment of that search of
knowledge--she sees more and more that this is not just
pattern, that it's these storm systems
of suffering and need. So, I think this is what
Pynchon brings to the string of meditations on what language can
do, and what the novel is for,
that I began my lecture today with, just recapping for you.
He's trying to imagine a novel that meditates both on these
structures of meaning that imbue the real world,
such that there is no name that isn't already saturated with
associations, and that within such a world,
if you enter into it, you can come to encounter the
real. And the real is that sense of
suffering, and that the novel can make you feel things,
both the pleasure of humor or the pleasure of beauty,
but also that sense of compassion.
And I don't know about you, but I feel compassion for
Oedipa. I feel like she's a real
character. I think she is a character that
you can--if not identify with--at least,
you can understand and be interested in.
So, Pynchon offers us that, and in our next reading,
when we start with Toni Morrison and also Maxine Hong
Kingston, what you're going to see is a
kind of shift. So all these meditations on
language, these different ways of thinking about how language
interacts with the real, and what you can do by messing
with language, are almost, I would say,
taken as read, taken as the starting point
from which a writer like Morrison or Kingston will begin
to rethink how those things can be used in relation to the real
world. So, that's where we'll start
when we think about Morrison next week.
Let me just also say there are a thousand things to talk about
in this novel, so I hope you'll get to some of
them in section. And if you want to write about
this, it's a very rich novel for writing your papers.