Lot 49, chapter 2: I left my heart in San Narciso

This is, for me, the funniest chapter in the book. I love that everyone is pretending to be something else, but there seems to be no substance underneath any of it. Metzger is a former child-actor, turned lawyer, who believes he becomes an actor before a jury. The Paranoids are clearly Southern Californians who are pretending to be British for the sake of their careers. Manny Di Presso is an actor, formerly a lawyer, who is playing Metzger, the actor-lawyer-actor in a pilot about Metzger's life. Where does it end? Everything is simulacra, pretend. But there's nothing real under it all.

Also, what I want to know is this. What is "San Narciso" really? I get that it's the Southern California suburbs. Is it really Orange County? That's what I want to know.

Narciso, I suppose, is a fictional city, pretending to be a real city, named after a saint who doesn't really exist. Except, it's clearly a pun on Narcissus / Narcissism, which is what saints are NOT supposed to be.

Could all of this happen anywhere but California?

The other thing that strikes me about this chapter is the movie that is running on the TV, the "Baby Igor"/Metzger movie. Apparently the reels are mixed up, so Oedipa isn't even getting the narrative in the correct order. And then it ends with the child and his dog drowning, when Oedipa expects a happy ending: "All those movies had happy endings," Oedipa says. What, here, is Pynchon implying about the possibility of narrative? Not only does the narrative defy and subvert Oedipa's expectations, but also it seems that meaningful narrative isn't even possible--the film isn't in the right order. . .or maybe it is. Oedipa never knows, and consequently, we never know.

Once, when I was maybe 10 years old, and we didn't have cable TV, the local independent station was showing the movie where Godzilla meets Mothra (a giant moth), and the reels were out of order. So, first we see the epic battle between the two; later we see native peoples calling up Mothra. Have you ever noticed that sometimes Godzilla is the good guy, sometimes the bad guy. I want to believe in a redemptive power of narrative, but it doesn't always work. We cannot, apparently, count on narratives to do what they are supposed to do. The world is less predictable than we might like, I suppose.