Oedipa Maas Death D(é)rive
Remedios Varo, "Bordando el Manto Terrestre" [ Embroidering the Earth's Mantle ] (1961)
Some Thoughts on Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
As the end is a beginning, if not the beginning, though why not, there’s this Loren Passerine, “the finest auctioneer in the west,” who is the final actor in this plot, if you don’t count Oedipa sitting back waiting for Passerine to cry the lot 49. (Or anyway he’s the final actor to arrive on the scene.) Oedipa sits toward the back of the room, which to this reader puts her stage right, that is, to our left, toward the verso page, which puts Passerine recto, as is appropriate for a character at the end of the action, forthcoming (if not so forthcoming), holding the imminent word, the unnamed and unnamable, as this is the last page.
In this orientation, Passerine (note the root Passer) has his back to the future, only novels don’t have futures, not written ones (novels that is). In that sense, as well as his bearing (a spread-armed gesture that evokes a “descending angel”), he might be likened to Benjamin’s Angel of History, who stands facing the ruin of collected catastrophes (history through the present) as he backs into the future buffeted by the winds of progress coming all the way from the Garden of Eden.
What is Pierce’s will? A death that drives the novel? We might also read the novel as the will, or a projection based on the embedded (and hidden from us) text of the will. (See also Oedipa at the end of chapter 2: "I will.") We have a play within a novel and that is only one sub-text. Others include the will, mail, graffiti, doodles, Tristero scholarship. Cf Cetology (Moby Dick), Solaris scholarship. The book is a body (of research).
Randolph Driblette on literary criticism:
“Why … is everybody so interested in texts?”
“You guys, you’re like Puritans with the Bible. So hung up with words, words, words.”
“You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Trystero possibility the way they did, why the assassins came on, why the black costumes. You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth.”
Now let’s hear from Gilles Deleuze, which might also put us in mind of Maxwell’s Demon.
There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is “Does it work, and how does it work?” How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging in to an electric circuit.
—Gilles Deleuze, from Negotiations
Might our Demon box (and the novel that contains it, another box), or Nefastis Machine, be just such a non-signifying machine, even if Oedipa Maas’s Death D(é)rive sets her off after signifiers?
Returning to Lem’s Solaris, the only English translation available from 1970-2011 came via a French translation of the 1961 Polish version Lem wrote. It’s appropriate to credit Lem with a version of Solaris because most of us have read only an English version, but also because the novel embeds several other versions of Solaris: Solaris may refer to the planet, the space station, the body of research about the planet collected at the station, popular hearsay about the planet, the related mental image(s) of the planet, and the astronauts’ altered states of consciousness (if Solaris is a synonym for fried, which appears to be the case), not to mention the visitors, who may be projections by Solaris the oceanic planetary entity as it reads its own visitors (“The ocean has ‘read’ us,” Snow tells Kelvin).
Another English version appeared in 2011, this one translated from the Polish (no third intermediary language, it seems, though one wonders if the new translator conferred with the previous English translation, which might make the new version something of a hypertranslation). Visitors become guests, Rheya becomes Harey, and Snaut (née Snow) tells Kelvin “So it took from us, made a note of it.”
“The words, who cares?” cries Driblette, back in TCOL49. Or maybe, like Trystero (or Tristero), Solaris is in the mind of the beholder, or totally outside of it, so far outside (or inside, for that matter), we can’t reach it. Maybe it’s something else, something outside Polish or French or English text. Something we catch hold of, or that catches hold of us, temporarily. Maybe it lets us go, as Trystero spared Blobb trusting he’d blab, so we too can tell its tale, thereby multiplying its versions, so in its renown it can remain safely other, outside our grasp.
If life is what happens, and what happens in a novel is the life of its characters, the end of a novel is a kind of death for its characters. This is plot’s mortal curse. But if a novel is more than a plot, if it’s a world rather than just what happens in a world, then an open-ended novel invites other experiences, other lives. If there’s too much to absorb in TCOL49 (or the ideas in Solaris are bigger than the story), we might return to read it, and reanimate it, another time, and that time the world might be different, since we bring meaning to it at least as much as it provides meaning for us, and we bring more (and different) information (experiences, insights, etc.) to subsequent readings. So Oedipa lives again, but as she is also our projection (as we collaborate with the Pynchon who wrote the base version of the text), she is not the same Oed we met during our last visit. If the novel is rich enough, and unstable enough, we can re-vision it, experience a new version. This could also be a way out of eternal recurrence for Oedipa Maas—a way for her to be reincarnated as herself, but also a different (another) self.
