“Nothing was happening.”

From Oedipa’s first encounter with Metzger, she was setting herself up for an affair. She was surprised by the lawyer’s looks: “[h]e turned out to be so good-looking that Oedipa thought at first They, somebody up there, were putting here on.” She was persuaded by the idea that “somebody up there,” perhaps a God-like figure, was in control on this situation and therefore waved a sign of approval to act upon her feelings. Her encounter with Metzger is far less formal than a client-lawyer relationship; their games blur the line between business and flirtation. After making a bet, Metzger takes “her hand as if to shake on the bet and kissing its palm instead, sending the dry end of his tongue to graze briefly among her fate’s furrows…” This daring move on the part of Metzger reaffirms Oedipa’s “fate” set up by “somebody up there.”

Later, Metzger asks is Oedipa was close to Pierce and she quickly responds “No.” Metzger cannot claim innocence on with this question - it’s obvious he’s Oedipa’s lawyer to help her claim Pierce’s “domicile and headquarters”. What kind of relationship would one have to have in order to be granted such a large piece of property? Perhaps Metzger knows that power seduces Oedipa.

Contrary to the powerhouses Oedipa is attracted to, her husband, Mucho, is just “trying to believe in his job.” He was sad to see his wife leave town at the beginning of the second chapter, “but not desperate.” Such a feeling would require the level of emotion expressed only by a lover. Oedipa’s actual affair with Pierce and Metzger and flirtatious nature with others (such as the Paranoid band member and hotel manager, Miles) signal her own desperation to have “something happen” in life. As she drove into San Narciso, she claimed “nothing was happening” at the time. Wanting to stir this up a bit, she eagerly fell into the arms of Metzger.

At the end of the second chapter, as she looked into the broken mirror, Oedipa saw herself shattered and broken into many fragments. These fragments represented the many layers and pieces of Oedipa. Even as she layered on clothing for the inappropriate “strip” game with Metzger, she hid deeper from her own fragmented reality.

The Crying of Lot 49

Oedipa Maas finds herself, in the first chapter, in a mess of memories triggered by the receipt of a letter claiming she had been named executor of the estate of her former boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. She “stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible” in order to escape the reality and of the situation. A present theme so far in this chapter is the process of mental thoughts disrupted by other influences, in this case: TV, God, and alcohol. Later in the chapter, other characters experience or prescribe something that disturbs the mind. Mucho Maas’ former job as a used-car salesman was noted in the novel with hints to psychological malfunctioning: “…he could never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody’s else’s life.” Oedipa suggests that her husband was not quite right in the head and has since left the lot. He is currently working at the west coast radio station KCUF, reversed to spell fuck.

Pychon’s interplay with words in this chapter cleverly disguises the intent of the original word. Was the novel named after the used-car lot Maas worked at and was confused by his own reality? The latter word play suggests the tone of sexuality that is pervasive throughout the book. The first chapter hits on many of Oedipa’s relationships she’s had and continues to thwart advances from Roseman, her lawyer on the estate case. The relationship with the psychiatrist Dr. Hilarious (an odd name, perhaps a state induced by the drugs he prescribes), is not healthy in that he reaches out to her needs. Instead he recommends the use of illicit drugs to further distant herself from needs. “I’m having a hallucination now, I don’t need drugs for that,” she tells him. This first chapter seems to create scenarios in which reality is confused with many different memories, interrupted by bouts of drunkenness or drug-use, influenced by God and the TV tube, and internally corrupted by mental illness.

One particular image that confuses Oedipa is the painting of a triptych with “prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void” and hung in an exhibition of paintings by Remedios Varo in Mexico City. Oedipa’s reaction to this painting is tearful and full of sorrow. She recognizes that, like the frail girls trapped as prisoners in a tower, she too finds the want to escape her own life and does so engaging in relationships with other men and tampering in reality with influences that separate her further from her situation.

There Was a Queen

"She had not wondered where they were going, nor why, as a white woman would have wondered. But she was half-black, and she just watched the white woman..."

Faulkner inserts this line in There Was a Queen to either a) make a point regarding historical notions of the assumed capabilities of women or b) explicitly mark how untrue such beliefs of these women were. Elnora, a black servant portrayed in this short story, is anything but non-judgmental. She does claim on page 729 that “…it’s her business where she going,” in reference to Narcissa. “Same as it is her business how come she went off to Memphis, leaving Miss Jenny setting yonder in her chair without nobody buy niggers to look after her.” This statement questions indirectly Narcissa’s purpose to visit Memphis, although Elnora conceals this by claiming it’s not her business. Elnora does not like Narcissa and thinks that the family is better off without her since she will never be a Sartoris and doesn’t contribute much to the care of her dead husband’s great-aunt.

The concept of roles, beyond that of color roles (as in a white woman should behave like this or a black woman can’t think like this), permeates into the family. Caring for an older relative, even the great-aunt of your deceased husband, is preferred over leaving them with another care-taker (especially from that of another race). It is used to measure the worth and integrity of the younger relative. Yet, in this story, Narcissa sought after her own integrity. She was hiding from letters in the past that would dishonor her integrity today. Narcissa felt that she would be vulnerable to every man whose eyes read the words in the letters. She tried to protect her name and was not so much invested in protecting the name of her husband’s family, thus abandoning her role at home. In doing so, she was judged harshly by Elnora, a woman who also suffers from many doubts of her capacity. The truth of one’s capacity or role in a situation is hardly truthful from an outside perspective. Historical notions of women and their roles were often threatened by the reality of the situation.

Loveliness Lost in Anticipation

Williams, a physician-poet from the modern period 1910-1945 demonstrates in two poems the power of the mind. In Portrait of a Lady, Williams portrays a conversation between a man and a woman in praise of her loveliness and sexual appeal to the man. Williams embraces descriptions of her thighs, knees, and ankles, as if the man’s eyes descend down her body. The essayist Mordecai Marcus comments on their playful conversation, jumping from the man’s initial rejection in conversation with the woman to her inquisitive nature which propels their discussion. “With “the sand clings to my lips” the man accepts a tentative and self-mocking defeat, the sand representing her success at warding off his incipient physical gesture.” Williams values the man’s need to find composure in their exchange in “ah, yes” or simple hints at frustration in sounds like “agh.” The reality of his portrayal of initial attraction and sexual appeal generates feelings of the ascent and the occasional descent of this relationship as it seems to have a loveliness associated with Williams’ style.

The Descent, a visual expression of Williams’ later grasp on gaining something from losing is a jagged representation of loving in the anticipation of something great. The connection of Portrait of a Lady with the (perhaps evitable) descent of their relationship is expressed in this later poem. Was the man in the first poem is challenged with the love he once sought after and is later portrayed as recovering from “what [was] lost in the anticipation?” Essayist Carl Rapp claims that “Williams finds a similar way of looking at defeat and loss that enables him to see those negative experiences as positive ones with implications not yet “realized.” Perhaps the relationship formed in Portrait of a Lady was short-lived and later visualized in The Descent. Though what was gained in memory was lost in desire: “grow[s] sleepy now and drop[s] away from desire.” Sexually, an ‘ascent’ is naturally met with a ‘descent’ from pleasure and Williams captures, if anything, the memory of a lady whose “thighs [were] appletrees” with an “endless and indestructible” feeling.

Tainted Love

Kate Chopin’s Désirée’s Baby superficially portrays the protagonist Désirée as woman who seems to measure her worth by the love and acceptance of her husband. “When he frowned, she trembled, but loved him. When he smiled, she asked no greater blessing of God. But Armand’s dark, handsome face had not often been disfigured by frowns since the day he fell in love with her.” Armand Aubigny, Désirée’s husband, rejects his wife and their child for their ‘color’ as a result of hatred of his own darkened skin. Désirée is gravely offended when Armand claims “that the child is not white; it means that you are not white.”

By the end of this short story, the audience is aware that it actually means Armand is not white. As a plantation owner set above slaves, Armand himself unknowingly “belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.” This truth was never revealed to Armand since he did not know his black mother. His own reality falsely projected onto his wife leaves her with no reason to believe his accusation. “It is a lie; it is not true, I am white! Look at my hair, it is brown; and my eyes are gray, Armand, you know they are gray.” Then drawing an empirical comparison to that of her husband’s skin claims, “Look at my hand; whiter than yours Armand,” and then “laughed hysterically.” Her whiteness juxtaposed against his darkness made him more aware of his color by her comparison. The mockery of his own wife perpetuates Armand’s embarrassment, fulfilled by the birth of his son. The child of Armand and Désirée was the realization of their love and their genes mixed together, producing the mulatto child which Armand despised.

Désirée, in the end, seems to have felt Armand’s rejection of his own skin in the form of unrequited love. But Chopin strongly indicates that Désirée’s own happiness was threatened the greatest by Armand’s accusation that she was black. “My mother, they tell me I am not white. Armand has told me that I am not white. For God’s sake tell them it is not true. You must know it is not true. I shall die. I must die. I cannot be so unhappy, and live.” This reveals the sad truth that the threat of darkness in Désirée’s skin is more disturbing to her than the failure of her own marriage.

Tracing Freedom

In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the main character Huck is juxtaposed with a slave named Jim. Their pursuit for freedom differs from their motivation and experience. The great Mississippi River is a powerful force of water that represents much of the freedom both Jim and Huck jointly feel as they float down the river. It doesn’t divide their experiences but reinforces the power the water has over them in controlling their movements and final designation. But away from the water left unguarded by civilized forces, the two find themselves facing differing motivations for seeking freedom. Huck seeks freedom from the ‘sivilzation’ attempt by Miss Watson who would say, “Don’t put your feet up there, Huckleberry;” and “don’t scrunch up like that, Huckleberry – set up straight!” Much of Huck’s reason for jumping at the chance of an adventure stems from his desire to be free from the constraints of a society that placed him in the care of Miss Watson.

Jim’s freedom is from a traditional of slavery that marks the man by the color of his skin and the amount of labor he’s capable of. Jim’s price for freedom comes at a higher cost than Huck’s boyish flee from Miss Watson. In Chapter 37, Tom Sawyer, the adventurous and imaginative friend of Huck Finn, speaks to Jim: “Every animal is grateful for kindness and petting, and they wouldn’t think of hurting another person that pets them.” Tom continues later on about the importance of prisoners having rats: “But, Jim, you got to have ‘em – they all do. So don’t make no more fuss about it. Prisoners ain’t ever without rats. There ain’t on instance of it. And they train them, and pet them, and learn them tricks, and they get to be as sociable as flies.” This conversation tends to 1) promote the image of man as superior to animal, 2) animals cared for would never hurt their owner, and 3) humans can teach animals, even rats, to go against their nature and become that which the human demands and trains of it.

Slavery, in its rough nature, takes a grown man and forces him against his nature to serve others before himself. Is Jim being compared to the very rat Tom Sawyer suggests he trains and “learn them tricks?” Jim seeks freedom from a world of servitude to others with a price sticker on his head. Huck, feeling imprisoned like a rat having to learn new tricks, despises the world of rules and etiquette. His real imprisonment was with his father kept him in the cabin. “He always locked the door and put the key under his head, nights.” Despite this cruelty, Huck describes “laying comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study.” The very freedom Huck sought after was a state of his own imprisonment.

The freedoms sought after in the Adventure of Huckleberry Finn demonstrate the motivation and experience in the characters Huck and Jim.

This is the Hour of Lead - Remembered, if outlived!

Dickinson’s words describe the body’s response to a shocking, emotionally painful event. This event could be anything humans find to be the cause of great suffering. The timeless portrayal of pain response is likened to that of Christ’s suffering in the first stanza, the ultimate suffering which bore the since the sins of the world. The first stanza writes “The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, and Yesterday, or Centuries before?” The pain in which the authors writes happened the day before and is questioned to have been one of the sins of the world that Christ died for, just as the sins/pain of centuries before. This reaffirms the timelessness of pain, in that it is blind to each generation and spares none. The readers understand the pain which Dickinson describes which will be remembered, only “if outlived.” The survivorship seems unlikely at the time of a painful event, but eventually the pain subsides and the “great pain” becomes a memory.

In psychology, we learn that the body’s response to a painful loss is depression, which removes your ability to function normally, often limiting your mobility. It is for this that we protect ourselves. If, after a painful event, we continue to carry out our daily tasks, we are more of a danger to ourselves because of an intense distraction and our reduced ability to reason. Dickson gives a somber detailed look at the body’s own reaction to the pain. “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.” Biologically, our nerves synapse at a rate that gives us the ability to move, think, and feel. If the nerves, cold and awaiting death like “tombs,” react in this manner to an emotional pain, how do nerves function after a physical blow – pain which uses the sympathetic system to alert the body to flee from a dangerous situation and more importantly, requires the body the heal itself. The parasympathetic system controls the restful states of the body, perhaps the one in which Dickinson describes in the first stanza.