What Happens in San Narciso, Stays in San Narciso

It can be debated whether anything that Oedipa encounters within Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 really happens. LSD, alcohol, and boredom are all prevalent throughout the novel and all could be blamed for some of the unbelievable events that transpire throughout the story. However regardless of these factors, there is one section of the story that seems to surpass their influences. The city of San Narciso is a hazy dream completely unto itself. Throughout his description of this location, Pynchon endows it with a number of different qualities all of which heighten its ambiguity and ephemeral nature.

Pynchon first describes San Narciso as a location “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts,” and this description is certainly proven true. She later observes that the city seems in some way “unnatural,” and yet she can find nothing to distinguish “any vital difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was invisible at first glance.” Nothing in San Narciso, including the city itself, seems is a concrete or permanent image. Its nondescript appearance makes it invisible. Everything Oedipa encounters there is in some way either false or passing, as if the city or the events passing there are not even real, but imagined.

The most obvious example of illusion in San Narciso comes from the character Metzger. Obviously his loveless sex with Oedipa is ephemeral. The two get lost in a brief moment of passion, but by the end of the novel he has completely disappeared. It is as if he were a briefly imagined fascination, for whom Oedipa quickly looses interest. Pynchon heightens the ambiguity of Metzger’s character by making him a lawyer as well as a former actor. Metzger is conscious of the illusions that both these professions present. He comments that the “beauty [of these jobs] lies…in the extended capacity for convolution.” Both lawyers and actors make a living by convincing other people of things that aren’t true. And in the context of The Crying of Lot 49, there is no more fitting for a man who convinces people of things that aren’t true than in a place that may be an illusion unto itself.

Further lies and illusion in San Narciso can be seen in the Paranoids as well as the cheap motel in which Oedipa stays. The Paranoids are told by their manager to affect their voices with British accents in order to fit in better with the trends of the musical world, but really they’re just lying to the public. The hotel’s symbol is a nymph, a mythical creature that never really existed. Like The Paranoids’ British accents the nymph is imagined.

All these components combine to make Pynchon’s San Narciso a world of illusion, isolated from the rest of the world but very much in alignment with the novel’s overarching theme of illusion.

H.D. Needs To Give Some Mad Props

H.D.’s poem “Oread,” though small in length, is full of meaning. H.D. would not be able to fill her poem with purpose without the influence of a number of cultures and writers from all across the globe as well as through time.

The poem takes its title from a mountain nymph of Greek mythology. In its title alone “Oread” shows H.D.’s appreciation for classical texts. By writing about a 2000 year old creature in the year 1914, H.D. advocates for the importance of literary heritage in a modern world. Also, in “Oread,” H.D. directly addresses the ancient mountain nymph Oread by using imperative commands like “Whirl up,” “splash,” “hurl,” or “cover.” These imperative commands carry the ancient character into the present where the narrator is able to speak to them and where their actions still take an effect. It is clear that H.D. feels that ancient works are still prevalent today.

“Oread”’s influences extend beyond ancient Greece though. Its compact structure is very similar to that of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” or the other very condensed imagist poetry that he inspired. Susan Stanford Friedman observes in H.D.’s biographical note that she almost married Pound, so it’s almost unavoidable that he would have had a dramatic effect on her poetry.

Friedman also cites H.D. as having been influenced by the Japanese haiku. “Oread” in particular seems to draw upon this Japanese tradition. While it doesn’t follow the five-seven-five rule of a traditional haiku, it maintains short, concise lines. Also, most haiku are themed around very natural phenomena, like a frog jumping into a lake, or Mount Fuji. Oread’s description of the “pointed pines,” the “great pines,” and the “pools of fir” coincide with this natural theme. Furthermore, in Japanese literature, especially Zen writings, the river has been a constant symbol for both change and power throughout history. When H.D. compares the forest to the sea she may also be alluding to this Japanese symbol. The time period in which H.D. wrote was wrought with change, and the ocean, like the river may be a poetic representation of the time. The strong language that H.D. uses to describe the ocean of trees as “splash[ing]” against the rocks and “hurl[ing]” the green trees mirrors the harsh world surrounding H.D. and the violent changes pervading it.

H.D. needs to thank the classic Greeks, Ezra Pound and the Imagists, and Haiku and Zen culture, because she couldn’t have done it without them.

Brotherly Advice

If the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” could see the speaker of William Carlos Williams’ “Portrait of a Lady,” he would laugh, but it would be a brotherly laugh. Both of these poems are dialogue between a man and a perspective lover. In Marvell’s this lover is the “Mistress” from the title; in Williams’, it is the “Lady.” It seems that both speakers have the same goal of seducing their respective women but Marvell does so with ancient grace and eloquence while Williams falls flat on his face, stumbling for words and ultimately making no progress.
Marvell’s compliments grow as the poem progresses. He would adore his mistress’ eyes for “an hundred years,” each breast for “two hundred,” and finally “thirty thousand to the rest.” He takes the mistress, and the reader, on a visual journey starting in India, traveling back in time to the great Biblical flood, and through “the iron gates of life.” Contrarily, Williams’ poem is unable to progress past the initial image that he presents: “Your thighs are appletrees / whose blossoms touch the sky.” He does make his way down the body of his lady addressing her thighs, knees, and ankles, but once he’s gotten to the bottom, the lady, again, interrupts his description asking “Whose shore? Whose shore?” causing the narrator return to the beginning of the poem reiterating in frustration, “I said petals from an appletree.” Thomas R. Whitaker pinpoints the reason for Williams’ stumbling as “the sequence of initial composition and sardonic question or retort.” He notes that it is this distraction that “carries the speaker beneath such decorative surfaces [the decorative surfaces that Marvell is able to achieve] toward an inarticulate contact.” The speaker’s goals of seduction with beautiful rhetoric are distracted and he is forced to resort to “defend[ing] himself.”
Critic, Mordecai Marcus, claims that “far as I can determine no one has noted the particular nature and function of the overlapping references to [Fragonard and Watteau}.” However, the answer may lie in Whitaker’s observations from the poem. The narrator’s initial path has become misaligned. He may have planned on rolling through his compliments and straight into his lady’s arms, like Marvell’s narrator, but instead he is thrown off his track. The confusion the narrator concerning the two painters may be one of Williams’ ways of showing the reader how misaligned the narrator has become. The constant questions and other interruptions make it impossible for the narrator to compliment the lady in the same manner as Marvell’s narrator.
Marvell’s narrator’s laughter and Williams’ narrator would be the laughter of an older brother, watching his younger, less experienced brother try to ask a girl out on a date. Marvell’s narrator knows the way to get what he wants. He is able to flee “time’s winged chariot” and run for safety in the bedroom. Williams’ narrator can’t quite even seem to take his lady to a metaphorical beach without getting tripped up in questions like “Whose shore?” Marvell’s narrator, as well as Thomas Whitaker, would have one piece of brotherly advice for Williams’ narrator: Don’t let the woman speak, she will only distract you from your true goal.
And, possibly also, don’t start with her thighs.