“The next story I wrote was The Crying of Lot 49,
which was marketed as a ‘novel,’ and in which I seem
to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up until then.”
– Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner, 1984.
| M 16-Nov Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (through Chapter 3) Pynchon Wiki: Annotations (Laura Navia & Audrey Bannon) |
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W 18-Nov Crying of Lot 49 (Chp. 4-5) (Anna Bernstein) |
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F 20-Nov Crying of Lot 49 (Chapter 6) plus Lot 49 Short Film (Maria Tamayo) |
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M 23-Nov Due: Response 6
Resp 6: Narrative Interface and Crying of Lot 49
Part I: Creative Writing Entry; 400-500 words; due M 23-Nov ( 1:55pm)
Part II: Analysis of Classmate’s Entry; ~200 words; due M 23-Nov ( 11:59pm)
Review assignment criteria below; — also remember extra credit opportunity…
note: read prompt closely — three main instructions.
Part I Prompt
Creative writing entry; structural role: put yourself in Oedipa’s position, “detective” seeking “the Truth” of…(?) (Note: can be composed in first- or third-person perspective).
Key task: express one specific affect of this experience, indirectly through vignettes with original narratives and Pynchon’s figures.
- e.g. uncertainty, disorientation, “groundless,” lack of reference, hopelessness, disinheritance, disposession, lack of agency, “undocumented person,” persona non grata, in vino veritas…
* not “paranoia,” “schizophrenic,” etc. (psychiatric diagnoses)
Composition method (all required):
Compose several (3 min.) vignettes (brief narrative fragments), with each of the following three components, in the style of Pynchon — “faithful” (accurate) to each type of discourse.
(Clarification notes below / here.)
In your entry, use:
1) original narrative (fragment/s)
within Oedipa’s 1960s social network (diegetic characters, settings, “rules,” etc);
you are Oedipa, (inter-)acting within her situation in “seeking” but not “finding” truth — of?
(Choose one “target/goal,” as motivated by a question: “what is ___?”) Describe how you would proceed, as if you were Oedipa, but withhold “reaching goal” — remember, narrative has constituent and supplementary events (review notes/Abbott).
- Notes below (click here)
2) historical reference (factual details, event, etc.) — specific, from Pynchon (essential to research)
- Notes below (click here)
3) an “interface,” from:
- myth/belief
science/reason (including history)
or your disciplinary knowledge, set within novel’s context
(N.B. Pynchon was first an engineering major at Cornell)
Exceptions:
muted post-horn; circuit-board; “Bordando el Manto Terrestre” (painting)
More notes below (click here)
Note: none of these three are “allegories” or “symbolic” of the others, and one does not “explain” other(s); rather, expression through resonance between them.
– we’re composing an “assemblage” or network of narratives and figures; result is not a homogeneous composite product…
Composition mode = Indirection:
Remember, Experience of Lethe = “secret” (Blanchot), concealed; never appears, unlike truth as “illuminated” or “unconcealed” (Aletheia).
- “The philosophical genealogy of divination begins with Heraclitus declaring that the oracle at Delphi does not reveal or conceal, but intimates.” — Ulmer
Part II: Analysis of Classmate’s Entry; ~200 words; due M 23-Nov ( 11:59pm)
Choose one classmate’s entry to analyze;
ASAP, post a comment on their blog, for equal distribution (i.e. everyone’s should be read, without duplicate readings) — even if to let them know you’ll post your analysis later.
On your blog (required, so I can include as part of Response 6):
in a paragraph (~200 words), describe the affect that you intuit from your reading, and how the author expresses it; on the latter, discuss their poetics, specifically techniques and unconventional (”novel”?) discourse.
Feel free also to describe the extent to which the entry demonstrates the aesthetic apparatus of expression (or either mode of judgment, for that matter: belief/myth or reason/science; review chart).
“preterition“ n.
1. the act of passing over or omitting
2. (Law) Roman law the failure of a testator to name one of his children in his will, thus invalidating it
3. (Christian Religious Writings / Theology)
(in Calvinist theology) the doctrine that God passed over or left unpredestined those not elected to final salvation
//
Paralipsis,
also known as praeteritio, preterition, cataphasis, antiphrasis, or parasiopesis,
is a rhetorical figure of speech wherein the speaker or writer invokes a subject by denying that it should be invoked.
clarification, reminders, and suggestions — from an email reply tonight
First, need to choose what you are searching for, to have a specific affect of the experience. The “target” comes from something in the novel, something that motivates a question: possibly not just “what” but “why.”
The creative entry will be composed of several vignettes, original scenes within the novel’s setting and interacting with the characters. Consider how Oedipa finds out most of her information — from dialogue with various characters in her search, going from place to place asking questions, and from documents that these characters provide her. Need specific details from Pynchon, using his figures and related ones for your own purposes.
key clarification: the “vignettes” or “narrative fragments” will include one to three of the required components, in each original scene. Probably not necessary to include every one, either (in an entry this brief); however, consider: in narrative, one instance might go unnoticed; three occurrences is a pattern; two references of something could be chance (”coincidence”) or could be the start of a pattern…
Besides the “contemporary” narrative (Oedipa’s setting and story, within which you are operating),
two other required elements are A) Historical Reference and B) an Interface.
A) The historical reference or information should appear in at least one of your fragments, naturally as Pynchon would have done (e.g. a knowledgeable character, a book…). Might need to research online beyond the novel; for example: Thurn and Taxis.
Important to choose the historical info. deliberately — shouldn’t obviously connect, as explanation, but resonate through the interface metaphor…
B) Interface:
In the novel, the “Inverarity conspiracy” is in the myth/belief category, as Oedipa believes in it (without “hard evidence” for rational thinking) — just like Tayo believes in the Laguna stories in Ceremony.
Likewise, all of the scientific and technological information in the novel is an interface linking certain narratives to binary or reductive way of thinking with only reason — which Pynchon shows does not always work.
The interface can be anything that you think tacitly links your disparate elements and narratives, indirectly producing resonance (not necessarily “faith” or “hard evidence” of connections).
“And tacit lies the once gold-knotted horn.” — “discord” or “dissonance” via the muted post-horn between Trystero and Thurn and Taxis, yes? (Conversely, any “harmony” in the novel?)
reminder: consult Pynchon Wiki: Annotations
Notes on Oedipa’s Contemporary Setting
(Northern and Southern California, mid-1960s)
Character List
Suburbia, Kinneret-Among-the-Pines, Tupperware; “absence of intensity” & “Rapunzel-like” (10)
California real estate:
L.A. (”Orange County”), San Narciso, Echo Courts, Fangaso Lagoon, Lake Inverarity;
East San Narciso Freeway; suburban sprawl
San Fran Bay Bridge, Airport; Oakland
Tank Theatre; Zapf’s Used Books; Tremaine’s swastikas and weapons shop
Law firm (”Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus”); Metzger (lawyer); legal jargon
Mucho Maas, used cars, (Oedipa’s car = Chevy Impala)
– radio/music (”KCUF”):
- the Paranoids; Sick Dick and the Volkswagens;
– Karlheinz Stockhausen, German electro. composer
psychotherapy, Dr. Hilarius; “Die Brücke,” experiment through psychoactive drugs (LSD-25)
Alcohol (e.g. kirsch, tequila, wine); drugs (i.e. marijuana)
bars: “The Scope,” “The Greek Way”
Pop culture, television; Perry Mason; advertising (Beaconsfield Cigarettes)
“strip Botticelli” (60s guessing game)
Yoyodyne, Inc.; aerospace technology,
“giants of the aerospace industry” (i.e. Boeing)
Yoyodyne’s “DOD contracts” (Department of Defense)
W.A.S.T.E. / D.E.A.T.H.
notes on historical references in Crying/Lot 49
William Pynchon, Calvinist theologian and
“original patentee of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
He led the 1635 settlement of Springfield, Hampden County, Massachusetts” (Wiki)
Historical referent: the house of Thurn und Taxis
Battle of Gallipoli (WWI)
Myth of Narcissus (Greek)
Myth of Echo (Greek)
Book of the Dead (Egyptian)
Inventors: Thomas Edison, James Clerk Maxwell, John Nefastis
Peter Pinguid (Confederacy ships vs. Russian fleet — true?)
“Aura Lee” (American Civil War song)
Wells Fargo (banking and express/transport)
Pony Express
Jay Gould (”Mephistopheles of Wall Street,” 1869)
“The Shadow” (1930s radio drama)
Nazi Germany: SS (Schutzstaffel); Gestapo (secret police)
Buchenwald, Auschwitz
Karl Adolf Eichmann
Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung
– Rorschach inkblot test
Wolfgang Metzger: a German psychologist;
– note “Metzger” = German for “butcher”
Dr. Hilarius (Roman Catholic Pope, Saint Hilarious?)
Harry S. Truman
John Birch Society (anti-Communist organization)
Senator McCarthy (”McCarthyism”)
Zapata: Mexican revolutionary (1879-1919)
Bakunin: Russian anarchist (1814-1876)
“C.I.A.” (anarchists)
“Porky Pig and the anarchist” (cartoon)
“FSM” (Free Speech Movement) / “YAF” (Young American’s for Freedom)
“VDC” (Vietnam Day Committee)
(Italy)
Cosa Nostra
Lago di Pieta; Tyrrhenian Coast, 1943 (true?)
Holy Roman Empire (Catholic)
“the Vatican”
Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge
Thurn and Taxis Postal System (imperal and private, 19th-C Europe)
“Low Countries”
Calvanism, preterition; “Scurvhamites”;
Blobb’s Peregrinations
William of Orange (Protestant)
Jan Hinckart (”hereditary Grand Master of the Post” and executor)
Alexandrine of Rye (countess of Thurn and Taxis)
French Revolution (1789-99)
Battle of Austerlitz (1805)
U.S. Postal Act of 1845
Philatelic auction in Dresden, 1923 (142)
Stamp Forgeries:
1893 Columbian Exposition
1934 Mother’s Day
1947 Centenary Issue
1954 Statue of Liberty
1958 Bussels Exhibition
“Interface Metaphor“:
— that by which we gain access to the unfamiliar, by means of something familiar.
— e.g. city as “grid”: “interface between the sensible and the intelligible” (Ulmer, Heuretics 198)
Task: use an interface to create resonance between two seemingly unrelated or disparate elements, such as narratives.
(regarding Inverarity, Oedipa thinks)
“The dead man, like Maxwell’s Demon, was the linking feature in a coincidence.” (Pynchon 98)
third element required in creative entry — an interface as a “linking feature,” but in the mode of indirection. Remember, one does not explain the other; readers can intuit the resonance between them, via the interface. Choose a “feature” from the mode of belief/myth, from science/history (reason), or from your personal area of expertise (as Pynchon has done) — just be sure to situate within the novel’s diegesis, appropriate to your original vignettes.
potential figures (?)
— not necessarily what you should choose, but examples to see the mode of linking at work in the novel.
Use similar logic, working in the aesthetic mode (apparatus) — be creative and intuitive, perhaps also needing to research (as Thomas Ruggles does!).
Oedipa and Mucho Maas
“Maas Translates from Dutch & German into Web or Network and is also an alternative spelling for the Meuse river in Belgium and the Netherlands.” (PynchonWiki)
“I don’t believe in any of it, Oed” (4)
— “Oed” means “boring” in German. (PynchonWiki)
Cornell University (Engineering, then English major); Ithaca, NY
— Pynchon took a course with Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell
— “Humbert Humbert” (120) = main character/narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita (1955)
— the (fictitious) character Clare Quilty is from my (real) hometown.
Berkeley (Univ. California at Berkeley) — connections?
Maxwell’s Demon / Entropy
The Courier’s Tragedy
More here
Stamp Collection (philatelist = stamp expert)
Art Nouveau (Fin de siècle)
dandelions / cemetery, wine
“IA” / “AA”
“Epileptic Word,” signal; Direct communication (from?) // “transcendent meaning”
“DTs” (delirum // calculus)
V-2 missiles
Mucho: LSD, attunement / frequencies:
“monaural” vs. “spectrum analysis”
Oedipa’s “Republic”
“Inverarity’s testament” or legacy
— executor, dis/inheritence?
railroad tracks, freight cars
“web of telephone wires”
roads, freeways
IBM 7094 computer (1965)
City seen as “printed circuit” // “hieroglyphic streets”
“matrices of a great digital computer” (”zeroes and ones”)
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