The Crying of Lot 49

English 3000 Fall 2006 R. Eberle

Definitions of the Postmodern

Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the countertraditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist high art by recourse to the models of mass culture in film, television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music. Many of the works of postmodern literature by Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, and many others so blend literary genres, cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful, that they resist classification according to traditional literary rubrics (Glossary 176).

And more
Postmodern texts "employ the absurd in order to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience (176). Postmodernism in literature and the arts has parallels with the movement known as poststructuralism in linguistic and literary theory; poststructuralists undertake to subvert the foundations of language in order to show that its seeming meaningfulness dissipates, for a rigorous inquirer, into a play of conflicting indeterminacies . . . (177).

Oedipa may be:

deluded: she may be constructing a fantasy the victim of a hoax led by the playful unto death Pierce Inverarity an insightful detective who has discovered the truth about Trystero/Tristero

Thomas Pynchon
Born in 1937 Attends Cornell where he begins as an engineering major before switching to English Works with Vladimir Nabokov and publishes short fiction Joins the Navy and works for Boeing Begins publishing novels in the 1960s
V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravitys Rainbow (1975), Vineland (1990) and Mason &Dixon (1997)

Speculating about Pynchon

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/index.html http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/ http://www.cnn.com/US/9706/05/pynchon/

The Modern and the Postmodern

Unlike modernism, postmodernism rejects the power of the symbol to construct order William Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow (1923) so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

Postmodernism extends itself beyond the literary texts, into architecture, cyberculture, and film Frank Gehry and Michael Graves Patchwork Girl Memento, Kill Bill, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Running with Scissors, and Marie Antoinette

Frank Gehry, Weisman Art Museum

Michael Graves, Humana Building

Mrs. Oedipa Maas

Oedipa and Freuds Oedipus Complex Maas is more in Spanish So, more Oedipus? Freuds Oedipus The OED The Oedipus of Sophocles

The beginning One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity . . . Oedipa 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. (1)

But arent you even interested . . . in what you might find out?

As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations. Hardly about Pierce Inverarity, or herself; but about what remained yet had some how, before this, stayed away. There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for someone to say hey, let down your hair. (10)

Remedios Varo and Thomas Pynchon

In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central triptych, titled Bordando el Manto Terrestre, were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces . . . Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. (11)

If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, What else? (12)

The beginning of Chapter Two

The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.

hieroglyphic
1. orig. in pl. = Gr. ta i eroglufika . The characters or mode of writing used by the ancient Egyptians (or by transference, other peoples), consisting of figures of objects directly or figuratively representing words (picture-writing), or, in certain circumstances, syllables or letters. The sing. is rarely used: see hieroglyph. 2. a. A picture standing for a word or notion, esp. one symbolizing something which it does not directly figure (like many of the Egyptian hieroglyphs); hence, a figure, device, or sign, having some hidden meaning; a secret or enigmatical symbol, an emblem; a hieroglyph. b. pl. humorously. Characters or writing difficult to make out.

some promise of hierophany (20)

Thered seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was Painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant [. . . ] She gave it up presently, as if a cloud had approached the sun or the smog thickened, and so broken the religious instant, whatever it mightve been . . . (14-15).

hieorphany
hiero-, before a vowel hier-, combining form of Gr. i ero j sacred, holy. -phany appearance, manifestation, f. stem fan- of fai n-ein to show, appear; as in angelophany, epiphany, theophany.

Pierce Inverarity
a California real estate mogul who had lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary (1) His ikon is a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould (1) He wanted to be a founding father (15): he makes San Narciso, owns stock in Yoyodyne, and develops Fangoso Lagoon (20) Owns a stamp collection that will be broken into lots; one of the lots is the Tristero lot #49

The can, hissing malignantly, bounced off the toilet and whizzed by Metzgers right ear, missing by maybe a Quarter of an inch. Metzger hit the deck and cowered with Oedipa as the can continued its high-speed caroming. . . She was scared but nowhere near sober. The can knew where it was going, she sensed, or something fast enough, God or a digital machine, might have computed in advance the complex web of its travel . . . (25)

Plots
Cashiered
Wasnt I there? (21) All these movies had happy endings. (22) Golly . . . They must have got the reels screwed up. (23) Maybe its a flashback, Metzger said. Or maybe he gets it twice. (28) They didnt make it! she yelled, You bastard, I won You won me, Metzger smiled. What did Inverarity tell you about me, she asked finally. That you wouldnt be easy. (30)

Cashiered
One meaning from the OED: To dismiss from a position of command or authority; to depose. (In the army and navy involving disgrace and permanent exclusion from the service.) Is Oedipa in Pierces service or not? Has she been cashiered or conscripted? Is she an active agent in constructing meaning or a dupe? Is there any difference? Throughout the Cashiered scene, Metzger fills Oedipa in on all of Pierces interests (28)

Things then did not delay in turning curious (31).

The Tristero System
As if . . . there was revelation in progress all around her(31) sensitizing (32) Report all Obscene Mail to your Potsmaster (33) W.A.S.T.E. (38) She found a pen in her purse and copied the address and symbol in her memo book, thinking: God, hieroglyphics. (38)

So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero (39-40)
Peter Pinguid Society (35-36): Mike Fallopian The story of Lago di Pieta (46-47): Manny di Presso The Couriers Tragedy (55): Ralph Driblette

Shall I project a world?

I want to see if theres a connection. Im curious (59) . . . shed gone back, deliberately, to Lake Inverarity one day, owing to this, what you might have to call, growing obsession with bringing something of herself even if that something was just her presence to the scatter of business interests that had survived Inverarity. She would give them order, she would create constellations (72).

You guys, youre like the Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback youre looking for, but -- . . . In here. Thats what Im for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares . . . But the reality is in this head. Mine. Im the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also. (62)

Project
Of mental operations. 2. intr. To form a plan, design, scheme, or project; to scheme. Obs. 3. trans. To put forth, set forth, exhibit; to present to expectation. Obs. 1606 Shaks. Ant. & Cl; v. ii. 121, I cannot proiect mine owne cause so well To make it cleare. 4. To put before oneself in thought; to conceive, imagine. Obs.

Project
II. Of physical operations. 6. a. To cast, throw, hurl, shoot, impel, or cause to move forward, or onward in any direction. 1596 Spenser F.Q. vi. i. 45 Before his feet her selfe she did project. 1806 Hutton Course Math. (1807) II. 151 If a body be projected upward, with the velocity it acquired in any time by descending freely, it will lose all its velocity in an equal time. b. To throw or cast (a substance) in, into, on, upon something. (Chiefly in Alchemy and Chem.) 9. a. trans. To throw or cause to fall (light or shadow) upon a surface or into space.

Project
b. To cause (a figure or image) to appear or `stand out' on or against a background. c. To cause (an image) to be visible on a screen situated at a distance. Also absol. 1865 Rep. Brit. Assoc. Adv. Sci. 1864 ii. 98 The impressive character of the image projected [by a magic lantern], being often stereoscopic in aspect. d. To cause the image(s) on (a photograph, film, or slide) to be visible on a screen.

Freudian projection

Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold . . . It came to her that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again. (76)

Peter Pinguid Society (35-36): Mike Fallopian

Links the Civil War to the postal reform movement (39) a parable of power, its feeding, growth and systematic abuse (39)

The story of Lago di Piet (46-47): Manny di Presso

Story of American GIs who hold out against the Germans becoming bones at the bottom of an Italian lake Before being harvested for cigarette filters and scuba divers (46) Could have been bones harvested by Pierce himself: freeways and subdivisions must go through cemeteries (46)

The Couriers Tragedy (55): Ralph Driblette

The Paranoids notice the connection between Mannys story and Driblettes adaptation of Wharfingers Jacobean revenge tragedy (48) Links back to the Peter Pinguid Society through allusions to a postal monopoly (50): Whos once been set his tryst with Trystero (58)

Molly Hite, Purity as Parody in The Crying of Lot 49 from Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (1983)
According to Hite, Oedipa experiences the world of the novel as bifurcated by the polarized alternatives of order and chaos; meaning and non-meaning (70) Oedipa will know a transfigured world, rendered wholly other than the world she now perceives; either that, or she will find herself in a world stripped of all values and meanings and reduced to absolute fragmentation. Within the covers of The Crying of Lot 49, however, she never achieves the culminating insight into the nature of her world, and thus neither interpretation receives authorial sanction. (70)
Support in the text for Hites reading: Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth . . . (150)

You guys, youre like the Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback youre looking for, but -- . . . In here. Thats what Im for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares . . . But the reality is in this head. Mine. Im the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also. (Pynchon 62)

If it was really Pierces attempt to leave an organized something behind after his own annihilation, then it was part of her duty, wasn't it, to bestow life on what had persisted, to try to be what Driblette was, the dark machine in the center of the planetarium, to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her? (64) . . . shed gone back, deliberately, to Lake Inverarity one day, owing to this, what you might have to call, growing obsession with bringing something of herself even if that something was just her presence to the scatter of business interests that had survived Inverarity. She would give them order, she would create constellations (72).

Shall I project a world? she asks herself near the novels midpoint, and the question has ominous implications . . . as Oedipa comes to suspect, such projection is equivalent to paranoia and at her stage amounts to cosmic error. If she has projected meaning and value onto her world merely because she wants her world to have meaning and value, she is hallucinating, and worse, the world is wholly alien: only the earth. It communicates nothing. As she sees it, if her project, the Tristero, does not exist, the codes break down. The signs point to nothing at all. (Hite 77)

Metzger characterizes Oedipa as a revolutionary but she objects: . . . she wants to right wrongs, 20 years after its all over. Raise ghosts . . . Forgetting her first loyalty, legal and moral to the estate she represents. Not to our boys in uniform, however gallant, whenever they died. It isnt that, she protested. I dont care what Beaconsfield uses in its filter. I dont care what Pierce bought from the Costa Nostra. I dont want to think about them. Or about what happened at Lago di Piet, or cancer . . . She looked around for words, feeling helpless. (Pynchon 59)

Im a young Republican (59)

She came downslope from Wheeler Hall, through Sather Gate into a plaza teeming with corduroy, denim, bare legs, blonde hair . . . Long paper petitions dangling to earth, posters for undecipherable FSMs, YAFs, VDCs, suds in the fountain, students in nose-to nose dialogue. She moved through it carrying her fat book attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much a search among alternate universities it would take. For she had undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness, and retreat . . . they had managed to turn the young Oedipa into a rare creature indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and sit-ins, but just a whiz at pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts. (83)

John Nefastis // Ralph Driblette; another interpreter of the past; wants to make love while watching the news (86) IA (Inamorati Anonymous): linking the postal service, WWII, Yoyodyne, suicide and infidelity (93) Dr. Hilariuss self-proclaimed past as a Nazi (109)
He chooses Freudian analysis as his penance because he wants to believe that therapy can tame the unconscious (110) He advises her to hold on to her fantasy (113)

Mucho Maas, LSD, and his immersion in sound (118) Metzgers elopement with a teenage bride (121) The fire at Zapfs Used Books means that instead of selling used books, the mini-mall sells used swastikas and guns (122-123)
Oedipa cannot respond to Winthrop Tremaines casual racism: Youre chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl. (123)

Randolph Driblettes suicide (125)

And part of me must have really wanted to believe like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in. That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame it after all, bring it into society with no fear of its someday reverting. I wanted to believe, despite everything my life had been. Can you imagine? (Pynchon 110)

Hite points out that Oedipas narrative works as a classic quest story: one hero, one goal, one obstacle [i.e. Oedipa; desire to prove the existence of Tristero; Tristero may not exist] (73-74). Oedipa embarks on a quest in a world of signs that must be interpreted. Hite argues that Oedipa functions parodically in the text because she so closely follows the conventions of the quest that she misses the true revelation.
The Crying of Lot 49 is thus not only the story of Oedipas quest but the story of what Oedipa misses or discounts because she is on a quest (80).

The Tristero does not reveal itself during Oedipas dark night on the streets of San Francisco . . . In essence, she gets a guided tour of the human condition, and finds it too vast, too diverse, and to familiar to comprehend (Hite 86). Like all questing heroes, Oedipa has traveled through a wasteland, but her commitment to the quest has prevented her from grasping the fact central to the novel, that waste is precisely what is most valuable (Hite 90).

The idea of a community of isolates is a paradox. Oedipa cannot deal with it: either the isolation is so complete that people can take no notice of one another, or a superior force coordinates individual realities so that solipsists move unknowingly and unwillingly toward a common goal in accordance with a preestablished harmony . . . The fact of communication, not some coming Tristero system, links the disparate elements of Oedipas world and guarantees that no one is really alone in a tower. (Hite 92)
Reading of dance of deaf-mutes (Hite 92).

Maureen Whitebrook, excerpt from Identity, Narrative, and Politics (2001) For Hite, then, Oedipa has the opportunity to create an emancipatory identity in which being one of the excluded middle makes her not alien or outcast, but in communication with others like herself. Maureen Whitebrook reads the novel more skeptically (taking respectful exception to Hites argument). She suggests the novels refusal to enact closure precludes Oedipa from constructing any identity at all.

Whitebrook reads the protagonist and the narrative not as at odds with each other (as does Hite) but as mutually reinforcing each other
The traditional bildungsroman usually concludes with conclusive narrative panache: the novel ends with the protagonists attainment of a stable identity The postmodern bildungsroman ends without an ending and with a protagonist without a stable identity

Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike clues were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night (Pynchon 95)

. . . the legacy was America (Pynchon 147)

The Tristero stamps (144) She stood between the public booth and the rented car, in the night, her isolation complete, and tried to face toward the sea. But shed lost her bearings . . . Pierce Inverarity was really dead (147) Though she could never again call back any image of the dead man to dress up, pose, talk to and make answer, neither would she lose a new compassion for the cul-de-sac hed tried to find a way out of, for the enigma his efforts had created. (147)

John Nefastis and theories of entropy

She did gather that there were two distinct kinds of this entropy. One having to do with heat-engines, the other to do with communication. The equation for one, back in the 30s, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence. The two fields were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwells Demon. As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where (Pynchon 84).

Thermodynamics and Entropy

The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that for a spontaneous process, there is a net increase in entropy . . . Through thermodynamics, you can show that as the entropy of a system increases, you can get less and less useful work out of that system. If you seal a "perpetual motion" machine inside a box which insulates it from the rest of the universe and only extract energy from that machine, the system inside the box will continue to gain in entropy until no useful work can be extracted, and then the machine stops (www.chem.vt.edu/tutorials/entropy).

the measure of a system's energy that is unavailable for work. Since work is obtained from order, the amount of entropy is also a measure of the disorder, or randomness, of a system (entropy Encyclopdia Britannica Online)

Information Theory and Entropy

Pynchon's definition of entropy from "Entropy" (1984): "Callisto had learned a mnemonic device for remembering the Laws of Thermodynamics: you can't win, things are going to get worse before they get better, who says they're going to get better" (from The Norton Anthology of American Literature 2360). Entropy is analogous in most communication to audio or visual static--that is, to outside influences that diminish the integrity of the communication and, possibly, distort the message for the receiver. Negative entropy may also occur in instances in which incomplete or blurred messages are nevertheless received intact, either because of the ability of the receiver to fill in missing details or to recognize, despite distortion or a paucity of information, both the intent and content of the communication ("communication" Encyclopdia Britannica Online.

Did the true sensitive see more? In her colon now she was afraid, growing more so, that nothing would happen. Why worry, she worried; Nefastis is a nut, forget it, a sincere nut. The true sensitive is one that can share in the mans hallucinations, thats all. How wonderful they might be to share. . . (Pynchon 86)

She was not sure what shed do when the bidder revealed himself . . . She stood in a patch of sun, among brilliant rising and falling points of dust, trying to get a little warm, wondering if shed go through with it (Pynchon 151) The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49 (Pynchon 152)

She stood between the public booth and the rented car, in the night, her isolation complete, and tried to face toward the sea. But shed lost her bearings . . . Pierce Inverarity was really dead (147) Though she could never again call back any image of the dead man to dress up, pose, talk to and make answer, neither would she lose a new compassion for the cul-de-sac hed tried to find a way out of, for the enigma his efforts had created. (147)

Echo and Narcissus

A representation in painted sheet metal of a nymph holding a white blossom towered thirty feet into the air; the sign, lit up despite the sun, said Echo Courts. The face of the nymph was much like Oedipas. . . (16)