Monday, January 30, 2012
Old Age vs. Youth in White Noise
Saturday, January 28, 2012
White Noise - Don DeLillo
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Russian Nesting Doll
As we talked about in class, The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel that parallels Oedipa’s search for meaning within her life with the reader’s search for meaning within the novel itself. One important way in which Oedipa searches for meaning within her monotonous life is to relate it to aspects of the media. There are several notable occasions in which the plot progression is ingrained in some aspect of the media, and the actual plot progression can only be explained and understood through the lens of the media. The first example of this is during her tryst with Metzger. Not only is their entire love affair played out alongside one of Metzger’s movies, in which he is Baby Igor, but “The Paranoids” provide a soundtrack to their love-making that is so influential and involved that their twosome becomes a group affair. Oedipa’s feelings during her time with Metzger is explained as a, “sexual crescendo in progress” (42), and during the love making Oedipa is focused more on counting the number of guitars within the band than the person she is sleeping with, though ironically, moments earlier she was too drunk to even realize that she was having sex, “She awoke at last to find herself getting laid” (42).
In order for the reader to interpret this scene, the reader also has to interpret the Baby Igor film and “The Paranoids” music, which just contributes to the image of the slowly unraveling yarn ball that was mentioned in class. Though, in this situation and the other situations in which plot is set up alongside aspects of the media: The Courier’s Tragedy, and Mucho’s interview of Oedipa for his radio show immediately following her interactions with the crazed Dr. Hilarious; a mental image of a Russian Nesting Doll might just be more appropriate. Thinking about this novel as a small doll within a bigger doll within a bigger doll reflects the deconstructionist movement during which this postmodern novel was written. Something can only be explained in terms of something else, eventually resulting in the inability to explain anything at all.
Rachel Jordan
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Oedipa and attention (or inattention) to her name
Oedipus, as one of the most iconic tragic heroes (and one of the first) to ever come across literature and storytelling within ancient worlds. Any reference to Oedipus and his story almost seemed like a cop-out, or an overstepped boundary in comparing a woman with such a non-subtle adaptation of the protagonist's name. After gaining a sense of Pynchon's dry-humored style and the ways in which he contorted modern literature into a game of symbols and expected outcomes, it became clear that Oedipa's name was purposefully gimmicky.
I imagine Pynchon wanted invasive, over-analyzing readers like me to look at Oedipa and say, Oh she's a tragic hero. I bet she's going to kill her dad, or lose all her status, or gouge out her eyes. The obviousness of it, however, would have been too, well, obvious.
As the novel started out, I was beginning to gain the sense of Oedipa's paranoia as a mirrored construction of the reader's paranoia, as we're looking for meaning, hoping to grasp an important theme out of a mundane detail, or throwing ourselves in the wrong direction with no one else to stop us. The dramatic irony within her actions was one of few comparisons I saw to Oedipus the King. The audience's anticipation of Oedipa's doom, as well as our own doom, was an intended outcome to her name.
What does not match up is her denouement. There is no climax nor realization within the tragic hero in which she realizes every mistake she has made thus far, and then plummets into her doom. The nonresolute ending of "The Crying of Lot 49" is supposed to be unsatisfactory in contrast to Oedipus Rex. In Greek tragedy, that witness of everything tumbling down on the hero may not be pleasant for an audience, but at least the satisfaction of everything being ruined after all that anticipation would be fulfilled. Pynchon's rejection of that resolution pokes at the author further, just as he has the whole novel.
To end with the comparison between Oedipa's journeys and a "tunnel" of truth, the symbol is an embodiment of the reader and Oedipa as well. Where we stumble through the darkness with no hint of an outside world, nor no guarantee of an end, we carry on through the novel as a tunnel promises an end, conventionally, just as Oedipus Rex promises tragedy. What's unfortunate about a tunnel is that where our preconceived notions about tunnels (and comparatively, novels), yield an end to the darkness. Though, there is no real way knowing. The reality lies within the darkness, not the light at the end, which is unavailable to us.
Francisco Tirado
The Crying of Lot 49 Post
The Housewife and Her Demons
Pick Some Words. Them, We Can Talk About
The Failed Escape of the Suburban Housewife
A Quest for Meaning? No, just a WASTE of time
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
Likewise, Oedipa is unable to form a connection or basic truth to the series of events unfolding around her; feeding her paranoia and frustration. From the beginning of the story, it is evident that Oedipa analyzes things frequently, from her distrust of the pills Dr. Hilarius prescribes her to her attempt at recalling anything unusual about her last interactions with Pierce. Her overanalysis of situations then turns into a more paranoid feeling when she is with Metzger, "Either he made up the whole things, Oedipa thought suddenly, or he bribed the engineer over at the local station to run this, it's all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot. O Metzger," (Pynchon 20). She clearly distrusts those around her and is very self-centered in her approach to the events of her life. However, Pynchon shows Oedipa is not the only character who struggles with paranoia. Metzger comments, "I live inside my looks and I'm never sure. The possibility haunts me," (Pynchon 18). While his paranoia is not near the level of Oedipa, the reader does see characters such as Miles and his band ironically called The Paranoids, Mike Fallopian who is part of a right-wing, anti-government organization, Manny Di Presso who becomes paranoid when he realizes "the kids" have overheard him, and Dr. Halarius who loses it completely and starts shooting at people he believes are after him; all of whom struggle with their own analysis of life events that leads to a connection of paranoia. These multiple instances of paranoia further leads the reader to a state of confusion because if everyone is paranoid it leads one to wonder if maybe everyone is on to something...
Through Pynchon's use of paranoia in a variety of characters and situations, he almost mocks how people search to find meaning in things he seems to suggest hold no purpose or truth to be found. This belief is best summed up in Randolph Driblette's comment, "You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth. Wharfinger supplied words and a yarn. I gave them life. That's it," (Pynchon 63). In other words, Pynchon has made it near impossible for the reader to make meaning without giving into Oedipa's paranoia and belief in a larger conspiracy, forcing them to instead chalk it up to coincidence.
Pynchon's Satire: Crying of Lot 49
Pynchon's Collision with Meaning
Near the middle of The Crying of Lot 49, after watching the performance of The Courier’s Tragedy, our heroine(?) Oedipa encounters the director of the play, Randolph Driblette, who tells her: “I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also” (62). This is the same kind of playful act Pynchon performs when he projects us, the readers, into the closed system of the world he has created. In this world he, like Pierce Inverarity to Oedipa, has agency to pull and tug readers in whatever direction he so chooses. Pynchon seems to use this ability, this freedom, with absolute glee. With this kind of overlordship of the narrative, he discards normal elements like continuity, coherency, and resolution and replaces them with pastiche, allusion to real and fictional cultural phenomena, and a general playfulness and close alliance to humor. All of this in an effort to reach a state of “pulsing stelliferous Meaning” (64). That kind of phrasing, taken along with the overall cartoony feeling of the narrative (Oedipa’s sexcapade with Metzger, Dr. Hilarius going insane, the poor imitation of The Beatles with The Paranoids), makes me think that what Pynchon is really trying to do with Lot 49 is collide himself, through his characters, with this strange entity called Meaning and attempt to prove to himself and to the reader that it doesn’t really exist. Like the other master narratives presented in the book, Meaning is just another construction waiting to be deconstructed by a Pynchon who is perceptive and contrarian to ways of creating meaning.
Lot 49 presents master narratives such as religion, science, gender, and history as avenues through which meaning can be created. People can move toward this end point of meaning by subscribing to the “truths” these narratives teach. This is where entropy fits into the book. Entropy states that energy of an isolated system (like this very book) tends to move in a particular direction, eventually culminating in a “heat death” in which the universe will cease being able to sustain life or movement. In Lot 49 entropy metaphorically takes the form of Oedipa as she moves through the narrative in search of a supposed end point, the discovery of meaning. Tristero takes the place of a combination of all master narratives: “as if the more [Oedipa] collected the more would come to her, until everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero” (64). Tristero becomes the end point of Oedipa’s narrative arc and it becomes her sole motivation. Here Pynchon pulls his trick—in becoming invested in Oedipa’s quest for meaning, we too start to believe that Tristero (and, thus, master narratives in general) has some deep secret to tell us, that it weaves some path the end of which will be life-fulfilling. Along with Oedipa, we slowly come to realize that the whole game might be rigged. What if everything that happened was planned, controlled by Pierce to give Oedipa something, anything, in the world to do? Will we spin in endless, meaningless circles awaiting the heat death of the universe? Maxwell’s demon may be able to sort out things into binary systems, but then what—where do the atoms go from there? The false story of meaning—and then order—that master narratives tell us is simply an act of dressing up chaos in a suit, a little less ugly to look at.
Pynchon-- Feminist?
Satire on religion?
Oedipa's Fate
Fantasy and Coping with the Middles
Oedipa and Other Women
The Value of Meaning-Making (or Lack Thereof)
As established in class, it seems as though one of the major issues Pynchon is dealing with in The Crying of Lot 49 is our search for meaning in the world around us, specifically within literature. Throughout the novel Oedipa is on a quest for a meaning in her life; this quest is mirrored in the reader’s expectation that the novel itself will provide them with sorts of answers. But within the text, Pynchon suggests that that sort of meaning and that sort of concluding statement do not exist.
Oedipa’s quest for meaning is centered on the Trystero and along her journey she encounters the director Driblette, someone she thinks can provide her with direction. His response, however, is not quite what Oedipa is hoping for: “You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several…You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth” (62). Rather than giving Oedipa the direction in her quest that she is looking for, he suggests that what she is doing is worthless and could all end up being for no reason. Through this character, Pynchon seems to be saying that we, as readers, should not read into things so much, look for a specific answer.
This critique seems to specifically apply to literature and literary studies. We discussed this in class, but we did not spend a whole lot of time talking about the irony of the fact that Pynchon is making this point in a novel. I find this especially funny as well as frustrating because of how complicated and, at times, convoluted The Crying of Lot 49 is. It’s like he’s saying, “I know you’re going to try and find a connection between what you’re reading and your life, so I’m going to make this as unclear and nonsensical as possible.” Today in class a point was made about Pynchon being an engineer and therefore a very logical person who would not necessarily believe in a search for meaning. This to me speaks more to his personality than it does to the “truth” of his work. Just because he does not see the point in searching for meaning in literature, does not mean that there isn’t any. But I can see value in his perspective on “meaning-making”: It seems to me that what Pynchon is saying is not that there is not meaning in life, but that in searching for that meaning we tend to miss the bigger picture, life as an experience.
-Sydney Weaver