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disinherited of society, as symbolized by the amount of underground networks who have felt

unrepresented by the official postal system. These are the people, the lives, the core of humanity

disregarded and dispossessed. Mucho Maas is haunted by nightmares of these grey ash leftoversof humanity and so, in its way, is the entire novel.

Man versus modernity/consumerism/consumption

At the start of the novel, Oedipa is not working. She attends a Tupperware gathering, a clear

symbol of mid-twentieth century American housewifery. As some critics have noted, the fact

that the host of the party had likely put too much kirsch in the fondue shows that the party

signifies superficial consumership in material America more than any type of sincere communal

bonding as the hostess felt the need to get her attendees drunk in order to entertain them.

Oedipa's search for information and cohesion within the world at large is symbolized by her

entrapment by commercial society. Parallels have been constructed between the green bubble

glasses that Oedipa wears when crying as she views the painting in Mexico City and the lone

green eye that is a metaphor for the television screen. Furthermore, expanding the theme of

disillusioning modern commercialism, Oedipa notes that in her vision, Pierce only reaches the

top of her tower when he uses a credit card to shimmy his way up. In the mass consumer society

in which Oedipa lives, the individual is in dire need of revelation, another term which is used

often by Pynchon.

About the novella

It says something about Thomas Pynchon that The Crying of Lot 49, by all reports a

straightforward book, is, by Pynchonian standards, an oddity. For a writer who has built areputation on constructing labyrinthine tomes that endlessly branch off for pages and pages until

the reader wearily abandons any attempt at deciphering a plot,Lot 49is, well, linear. By far the

most accessible of Pynchons works The Crying of Lot 49is also probably his most concentrated.So short that it is often referred to as novella,Lot 49manages to get at Pynchons big ideas andeven contain some of his delightfully controlled chaos.

It is the story of Oedipa Maas, summoned to Californias San Narcisco to fulfill a duty to left her

by some shady inheritance, namely to oversee the execution of a rather large estate left by the

newly deceased Pierce Inverarity. Immediately Oedipa finds herself overwhelmed by the sizeand complexity of Inveraritys estate, and hopelessly imagines that she will never get Inveraritys

affairsstraightneed out. No sooner does she lose hope than Oedipa meets an odd man who seems to

have some ideas to help her. As the two look into the estate, coincidence after coincidence piles

up until Oedipa finds herself enmeshed in what may or may not be a global conspiracy wherealmost every person, place, and thing she meets up with can, given enough time, be plausibly fit.

The central question to this story, does the conspiracy exist or is Oedipa making it all up, is a

metaphor which Pynchon pursues over many divergent paths, each leading to a different idea. On

one

level, Oedipas quest is a microcosm of each of our own lives: using the available informationshe (and we) creates a story about the way things really are and continually tests and refines it.

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That Oedipa finds substantial clues in the oddest and most coincidental places is part of the

mystery: is it really that life is so capricious that random encounters can have profound impacts,

or is life much more banal, leaving Oedipa to simply imagine connections amidst a sea ofinformation?

On another level, Pynchon uses Opedipas quest to get at the concept of entropy. Pynchon likesto apply terms and ideas from the realm of physics to psychological and sociological phenomena,

and his

invocation of entropy may be the most famous instance of this. Just as in a closed systemindividual particles will tend toward greater disorder so in Pynchons universe do the people and

information in

our society tend toward entropy. Fighting against this decay is Oedipa, who tries to create some

order out of the randomness that she encounters. Again we are met with a similar question, doOedipas

actions counter entropy and point toward some transcendent truth or is she simply fighting an

impossible battle and unable to create order in the world?

Once youve accepted that these questions are valid theres nothing to do but follow Pynchons

ideas to their inevitable conclusion: inLot 49there is no truth other than that which wecreate. In a sense, all of the characters are like Oedipa; although they arent questing to ferret out

a conspiracy, they are attempting to fit everything they come across into some kind of rational

framework. And so do we. Cause and effect only exists insofar as we pick out one certain

moment to be the cause and once certain moment to be the effect (even though we could havepicked out any two points on the chain of causation), things only become important once we say

they are. Each of us is at the center of our own self-ordered universe.

But how do we know that the universe is really ours? Every day we are bombarded by thousands

of stimuli outside of our control, each of which seeks to order our life for us. Does Oedipa seetheconspiracy as she wants to or as the system wants her to? It is here, where Pynchon examines the

limits of freedom in modern life that he makes his most substantial points.

Clearly, despiteLot 49sbrevity, there is a lot at stake, and in its own way this fact makes the

book appealing. Lacking the heft of Pynchons tomes (notably V.and

Gravitys Rainbow)Lot 49is pure, distilled Pynchon. This means that if you readLot 49youdont exactly get the Pynchon experience, but you also dont have to wade through miles and

miles of intricate, yet beautiful, prose to see what Pynchon is trying to say. As such, think ofLot

49as an introduction. If you like what you see, then acquire another Pynchon book and read on.

If you dont like it, then perhaps Pynchon isnt your flavor.

The heroine, Oedipa Maas, has a similar question. A former lover, Pierce Inverarity

named her the executor of his considerable estate. Rather than bequeathing her money

or property, he has saddled her with a long, legal process that she does not understand.

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As she is not a lawyer and has had little contact with Inverarity for many years, the

naming of her Executor is puzzling. Was Inverarity trying to tell her something, or was it

just one of his bizarre whims? Was he playing a practical joke on her, or was he hinting

at a secret society?

And what about those strange namesOedipa Maas and Pierce Inverarity? They are

too odd to pass over. Pynchon obviously wants us to notice them. Oedipa is the feminine

version of the Oedipus of Greek legend, more specifically of the Oedipus complex

described by Freud, in which the son wants to kill the father and marry his mother.

Message or Madness?Thomas Pychons The Crying of

Lot 49

Except Oedipa is a woman. Does Oedipa want to kill her mother and marry her father? We dont

hear much about her parents. There is a female counterpart to the Oedipus Complex, but the

Electra Complex is not as well known. The Freudian subtext here will not let us overlook the

name Pierce, especially for a former lover. But what about Inverarity? At first look, it means

not veritas, or not truth, so his name means to pierce the lie. In which case, Inverarity is

leading her to a secret truth, a conspiracy. Maybe his surname means no variety, so his full

name could be interpreted as resist conformity. The last name could refer to inveterate as

well, describing a person with bad habits that are so ingrained they can not or will not stop.

Inverarity did have some strange habits, but does the Pierce means he wanted to break them?

How? By dying? The question is: do the names mean anything or is Pynchon just playing with

us? Is there intent behind the names or are they just distractions? This is our central question: do

things have meaning or are we just over interpreting the noise?

Throughout the novel we have to think about communication. How is it happening and what isthe message, if any? As Oedipa is examining rare stamps in Inveriaritys collection, she finds the

symbol of looped horn with a mute. She learns the looped horn was the symbol of an early postal

service. The German family Thurn and Taxis began delivering mail in an organized fashion in

the 16th century. But why the mute? She learns that there may be a shadowy postal service that

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has opposed the official mail system for more than four hundred years, the Tristero. The mute is

because they want to silence the official mode of communication.

Oedipa begins to notice referents to the organization everywhere. One very long, delusional

night in San Francisco, she sees the symbol everywhere and finally follows someone to a waste

paper box under the freeway. The acronym, W.A.S.T.E. is written along side the postal horn.

(Later she learns that this stands for, We Await Silent Tristeros Example. She sees people

drop off letters. The only way to mail the letters is apparently to throw them away. Silence exists

on both sides. Either the letters disappear in the city disposal system or they are picked up by

silent Tristero. Eventually an old wino picks up the letters carries them across town and

switches bags with another carrier in Civic Center.

Or is she just paranoid? Maybe the old man was just savaging in the trash. To find out, she goes

to her psychiatrist. Unfortunately, Dr. Hilarius (what a name!) has flipped his top and is shooting

at people. He thinks the Jews are coming to get him. Oedipa calms him enough to talk to him and

he confesses that he had worked in a concentration camp, conducting psychiatric experiments to

drive inmates insane in order to study identity. However, he swears he repented, which is why he

chose Freud over Jung, the Jew over the Austrian.

But he has lost his faith in Freud. If Freud was right then all the concentration camps would have

turned into fields of flowers with a bit of treatment. Tell a story, and poof! the nightmare goes

away. Freud believed in a narrative cure, the healing of trauma through the telling of story. Only

it doesnt work. Dr. Hilarius has realized that bad things do not go away so easily, just by talking

about them. Oedipa manages to get the gun away from him. She leaves the clinic walks without

knowing the answer of whether or not she is crazy. And Dr. Hilarius? Was he paranoid or were

the Jews really catching up with him?

After more bizarre adventures, she finds no definite answer. The book ends anti-climatically

without resolution. In the final pages, Oedipa takes apart the dilemma: there was either

[a]nother mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none . . . Either Oedipa in the orbiting

ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the

appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then

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it seemed the only was she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien,

unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia (Pynchon 150 151).

The ending of this line gets tricky. First of all, whats up with the was in the only wasshe

could continue? My friend Ians edition, which is older, has the word way sensibly in place,

the only way she should continue. My friend Katies edition, a reprint of mine, has the same

mistake. Our editions are both more recent than Ians, so maybe the mistake was deliberately put

in or reinstated from an early version, meaning the onlypast form of beingshe could manage.

Or maybe it was just a mistake.

Either way, the ending of the line is odd. When we read was as an alien, unfurrowed , we

may not know what unfurrowed means, but we expect a noun, like person or being or even

paranoic. Instead the line wanders out of convention syntax: an alien, unfurrowed, assumed

full circle into some paranoia. Does the odd twist at the end mean anything or was it just sloppy

writing?

And what does the novel mean, if anything? Either it makes sense, although no questions are

resolved, or it doesnt. In this regard, the book is no different than life. For either the world

makes some kind of sense, or we are crazy to try and make sense of it: Behind the hieroglyphic

streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth (Pynchon 150). What

does Pynchon think? He leaves the book open-ended, but the very act of writing implies that

meaning can be found. In The Crying of Lot 49, the question of whether or not there is meaning,

though unresolved, is the meaning of the book. In other words, Pynchon must believe in the

conspiracy of the secret message. If not, why write at all?

I tend to think we are crazy, as crazy as Don Quixote, who thought he could make sense of the

world through chivalry. We all have different answers for the worldMormonism, Marxism,

Perverse Polymorphism, Taoism, the Tristerobut we are seeing narratives where there is

nothing but noise, a great deal of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We make the meaning, but

the meaning exists because we made it. Therefore, to the question message or madness, I answer,

both! Madness makes the message, and the message, although insane, is how we make sense of a

senseless world.

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