Oedipa's mess

Pynchon neglects to mention a crucial part of the scene portrayed in “Bordando el Manto Terrestre.” Although the existence of an imprisoning force is implied in his vague description of the tapestry-embroidering girls as “prisoners in the top room of a circular tower” [emphasis my own], Pynchon makes no explicit reference to the robed, partially veiled (and not slightly nefarious) sorcerer, the apparent agent of their imprisonment, who stands in the middle of the room, nonchalantly stirring his smoking potion, while the girls weave away. The second robed figure, sitting behind the sorcerer, is depicted less clearly; however, his (or her) generally creepy nature and complicity in the girls’ imprisonment seem clear enough. The sorcerer reads from his book of spells, as his shrouded companion looks on with folded hands; the captive girls, unquestionably subject to his control, perhaps even entranced by a spell, continue to sew mindlessly, their uninformed fingers stitching square after square of the vast, chaotic fabric of history. And it is in the windswept unfurling of this billowing fabric which Oedipa finds herself helplessly caught up, every circumstance of her existence having been dictated by a robed sorcerer, who lords silently over four flaxen-haired maidens, in a tower that looms oppressively over her consciousness, but whose shadow is always just outside her field of view.

Oedipa’s problem, her mess, is twofold. First, she has grown up under a delusion of the inevitability of her own salvation, contingent only upon her own patience. Second, she has unconsciously ceded the sole agency of this salvation to forces which lie wholly outside of herself- and beyond the reach of her understanding. This evokes a central theme in The Crying of Lot 49, one which could be described as a delusive belief in an eternal, proverbial They. They are picking up mail from trash bins, unbeknownst to all the passersby. Unless, of course, you happen to notice them doing so, in which case they are demoted to a normal 3rd Pers. Pl. pronoun, and They become black-clad assassins from antiquity, the United States government and the dark, secret rooms inside of which its actions are really decided, the workings of a dead man’s brain, which may have conceived an elaborate practical joke shortly before its extinction, or an anonymous bidder at a stamp auction. Behind all of these vulgar, accidental manifestations, of course, lies the true They: a robed sorcerer whose mysterious whims decide the course of history, and whose tower can never be assailed, for it can never be found. Oedipa’s confused belief in They follows naturally from the disillusionment she experiences upon realizing that her salvation may not be so inevitable, after all. Even Pierce Inverarity, despite having appeared to be the knight who would finally free Oedipa from her own little Rapunzel’s tower, did not carry any key, by the turning of which he could singlehandedly produce her salvation. And the man she ended up marrying couldn't even begin to save himself. Having already so thoroughly divested herself of any sense of control over her own destiny, her erstwhile belief in the inevitable approach of a saving knight soon gave way to an equally strong belief in a sorcerer, with a conscripted army of young spinsters, and of whose tower she was constantly just missing that elucidating glimpse which would be her salvation.