Is This Kind of What Mambrino's Helmet Means?
I'm re-reading Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 for next week's reading group meeting. I had forgotten how lean and funny it is. I'm really enjoying it--and I've found it to be remarkably relevant at the moment. It's fascinating how much a book can change depending on your frame of mind when you read it. I'd remembered it as an elegant exploration of paranoia, and I'd remembered the basic idea of Tristero which served as the focus of Oedipa's paranoia, but I'd forgotten how explicit it was about the theological basis of paranoia ("Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist," "Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth," and so on) and how well it described, in the person of Dr. Hilarius, the way in which psychotherapy, by curing us of our paranoia, leaves us incapable of faith.
There was still more that I had forgotten. Despite the narrative agnosticism about the reality behind the characters' conspiracy theories, there's a strong intuitive, emotional, and even logical appeal to those fantasies--they're convincing. Tristero, which Oedipa believes she has discovered, for instance, appears to be an alternative to the governmentally sanctioned postal system:
...For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by US Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world.
Is this what Mambrino's Helmet means when she contemplates "refusing to participate" in response to the "indifference to the power of [her] vote"? Is this unsuspected world into which the preterite withdraw any better for being their own? Is this Tristero, which is still a system, inherently better than the system from which they've withdrawn? Does anyone have any ideas to offer?
7:51:20 AM 
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