In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas’ development as a reader represents the historical transformation from a traditional, transparent and factual way of understanding the world (typical of the 1950s and the Cold War period) towards a reading related to the possibility of multiple meanings and the metaphor (characteristic of the 1960s). In particular, the paranoid perception of reality, questioning the appearance of the things and looking for their transcendental meaning, allows the acceptance of that and endless net of textuality exists. The selected passage for the analysis encapsulates the idea of how do we read and understand reality through Oedipa’s experience after seeing a work of art. When Oedipa contemplates Remedios Varo’s painting
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She evolves as a reader through the novel not because she understands what she investigates (she does not witness a revelation nor a transcendental signified; at the end she does not know the meaning of Tristero); but because she experiences the world: she is aware (has a projection) of the patterns of the world. Through the paranoid perception, she projects a world, a new textuality for her to live in. By means of seeing what seems ordered as chaotic (this is, being paranoid), she creates order out of chaos. In Mathews’ words, Oedipa “questions her faith in the transparency and transcendence of such “clues,” recognizing a difference between what she was told clues are “supposed” to do, and their actual function.” …show more content…
The fact that they remain unadvised by Oedipa remarks that neither she sees them nor she is aware of their power. Indeed, she is not conscious of the role of the government and its politics. As a result, she only identifies herself with the oppressed and substitutes the pattern of oppression by her own self-situation, without trying to delete this grand narrative of oppression. On the contrary, although Pynchon does not mention them when Oedipa is observing the painting, not-mentioning them demonstrates that he is aware of the existence of power structures above human beings that control the discourses of
She evolves as a reader through the novel not because she understands what she investigates (she does not witness a revelation nor a transcendental signified; at the end she does not know the meaning of Tristero); but because she experiences the world: she is aware (has a projection) of the patterns of the world. Through the paranoid perception, she projects a world, a new textuality for her to live in. By means of seeing what seems ordered as chaotic (this is, being paranoid), she creates order out of chaos. In Mathews’ words, Oedipa “questions her faith in the transparency and transcendence of such “clues,” recognizing a difference between what she was told clues are “supposed” to do, and their actual function.” …show more content…
The fact that they remain unadvised by Oedipa remarks that neither she sees them nor she is aware of their power. Indeed, she is not conscious of the role of the government and its politics. As a result, she only identifies herself with the oppressed and substitutes the pattern of oppression by her own self-situation, without trying to delete this grand narrative of oppression. On the contrary, although Pynchon does not mention them when Oedipa is observing the painting, not-mentioning them demonstrates that he is aware of the existence of power structures above human beings that control the discourses of