The crying of lot 49 door Thomas Pynchon

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Boek
Auteur
Thomas Pynchon
Taal
Engels
Vak
Eerste uitgave
1966
Pagina's
288
Oorspronkelijke taal
Engels

Boekcover The crying of lot 49
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The crying of lot 49 door Thomas Pynchon
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1. Introduction

Thomas Pynchon’s second novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) won the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The novel is set in California during the sixties. The heroin, Oedipa Maas, discovers that she has been named executrix of the estate of her former lover, Pierce Inverarity. Oedipa’s inquiry into this estate puts her onto the trail of the Tristero, a bizarre underground courier and postal system, which has been operating in opposition to State-sanctioned postal monopolies since 1577. The question the novel now immediately poses is this: does the Tristero exist, or is it merely a product of the psychosis into which Oedipa fears she is slipping? The novel never answers this question.

2. Narrative structure

The story is told by an impersonal third person narrator. He doesn’t seem to be omniscient, rather limited to what Oedipa sees, but sometimes (rather rare) the narrator gets an omniscient tone, e.g.: “If she’d thought to check a couple lines back in the Wharfinger play, Oedipa might have made the connection by herself.” The narrator is always around Oedipa Maas, like an always-present ghost. You could almost expect the narrator to be her former lover Pierce Inverarity, who died and puts Oedipa on her quest.
Like Peter L. Cooper points out: “[n]one of Oedipa’s fears is finally proved justified, as she never learns for sure if the Tristero is a real conspiracy, a hallucination, an elaborate hoax directed at her, or a paranoid fantasy.” The reader also doesn’t know, because the narrator doesn’t elaborate outside Oedipa’s universe (about the plot), but we get the feeling something out there does exist and it’s probably more than just a practical joke played on Oedipa. It is however true that “Oedipa’s subjective processes, like those of a scientist examining submicroscopic behaviour, distort to an indeterminable degree the phenomena she is trying to observe; she partially creates the patterns she sees.”
The reader is left dangling like Oedipa. Patrick O’Donnel therefore states that “[b]ecause the narrator refuses the reader any view superior to Oedipa’s, many readers will assume that Oedipa internalizes [sic.] to a certain extent their own roles as readers. Thus her quest to uncover the reality and meaning of the Tristero dramatizes the reader’s attempt to decipher and make sense of the various signs that proliferate through the novel[.] […] [T]he reader […] must assume the position of interpreter.”
Throughout the novel Oedipa encounters a lot of male characters (15 to be correct: from Mucho Maas to Emory Bortz – chronologically). What is important here is that each of these men position themselves as an interpreter of some kind of semiotic material and thereby throw some light on Oedipa’s search. These characters function as what Henry James termed reflectors, but not completely. “[U]nlike a typically Jamesian narrative situation in which the reflectors clarify the centralized vision of the protagonist by providing more limited and contrasting viewpoints, here the reflectors provide only decentered [sic.] and displaced perspectives that cannot be brought back into any centralized alignment.” James’s reflectors are the means of modelling a view that includes a normative view. Pynchon’s characters however perform in an opposite manner: they are (as reflectors) actually refractors – “they project a series of wholly divergent views and preclude the possibility of a normative vision” . The Crying of Lot 49 refuses to resolve itself into a single view that the bulk of minor characters could endorse or support.

3. Elements from the detective novel and deviating elements

Detective fiction consists out of certain phases, which will be summed up now, and tested to The Crying of Lot 49 (Lot 49):
a. Introduction of the detective: According to the conventions in detective novels, the detective is introduced with the start of the novel. With Lot 49 this is similar: Oedipa, who can be called the investigator (detective) of this story, is introduced starting from the first line of the novel. Just like a detective Oedipa has the tendency to see patterns. The downhill view of San Narcisco and the map of the Fangoso Lagoons promise her structure at the beginning of her adventure. It seems to introduce her to the idea of some hidden order of meaning (Oedipa has a tendency towards seeing conspiracies). However, when she descends from the overview of the mountain (or the blueprint) into the grotesque jumble of events, she senses only single objects (no patterns). Oedipa seems to be driven by the space between the actuality of chaos and the possibility of order.
b. Crime: Here Lot 49 deviates largely from conventions, because the reader doesn’t know if there has really been a crime: does the Tristero exist and is there really such a secret organisation, or is it all just a hallucination by Oedipa (projecting a pattern onto various signs), or is Oedipa the victim of a hoax set up by Inverarity (perpetuating himself beyond death), or is Oedipa hallucinating such a hoax?
c. Investigation: There is no real investigation in Lot 49. Oedipa meets new men who all contribute clues or possibilities: each clue makes “it possible to trace the novel’s plot as a series of encounters Oedipa has with different male characters, each of whom bears a sign of Tristero’s existence, or embodies an interpretive stance with direct implications about its existence.” This however brings no clarity in Oedipa’s search for the truth, it only confuses her more.
d. Announcement of the solution (elimination): At the beginning of page 116 the announcement of the solution is starting with Fallopian saying out loud what Oedipa also had thought: “That this is all a hoax, maybe something Inverarity set up before he died?” Oedipa’s process of reasoning isn’t very schematic, but she is going to try to solve the puzzle. Although the puzzle is not solved in the novel, there is one clue that would suggest that everything is set up by Inverarity: after having sex with Metzger Oedipa asks him what Pierce had told him about her, to what he replies that Inverarity told him that she wouldn’t be easy. This suggests that Metzger’s seduction of Oedipa was always assumed by both men. This then lends weight to the possibility that the execution of Inverarity’s will is part of a large seduction planned by the dead man.
e. Explanation of the solution: In Lot 49 there is no solution: the four possibilities already mentioned in B remain intact as Oedipa awaits the revelation of the auctioneer’s cry and the novel ends.
f. Dénouement: Nobody is unmasked and we don’t know if the Tristero is something that really exists. The person coming to bid on lot 49 (the stamps) could give us some sort of clarity, but Pynchon lets the novel end at the auctioneer’s crying of lot 49. Hereby the question of the Tristero remains open beyond the termination of the text.
The openness of Lot 49 is based on the fact that it’s impossible to decode America as Oedipa knew it until Inverarity’s personal motives can be decoded. This is impossible because we don’t know his motives, but if Inverarity had only died and nothing else, there exists an America that didn’t belong to him: “What was left to inherit? That America coded in Inverarity’s testament, whose was that?”

4. Uncanny elements of the text

There are many uncanny elements in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and the first is of course the title: Pynchon ends his novel with the exact same words as we start reading it – with the title. In this way he creates a cycle and resists a closure of the text on a post-modern level.
The names in Lot 49 are of course very important. Especially Oedipa Maas has been analysed by many critics. “Catherine Davidson notes that maas is the Afrikaans [sic.] [and of course Dutch] word for web or net[.]” This perfectly describes Oedipa’s situation, being trapped in a lot of mazes. Oedipa itself evokes the famous riddle-solver of Greek tragedy Oedipus, whose quest to discover what caused the Theban plague leads to the revelation that he himself is the culprit he seeks. Oedipus is forced to make choices, but he never achieves control over his destiny. With none of the problems resolved at the end of the play he, as Oedipa, must go on seeking.
St. Narcissus also has an important part in Lot 49. Most of the action in the novel occurs at San Narcisco – an obvious clue. To continue the motif, Oedipa resides in the Echo Courts motel with Metzger (the motel bears a Narcissus motif on its sign). The wonderfully grotesque thirty foot painted metal nymph outside has a face that resembles Oedipa’s. The motel is managed by a sixteen-year-old who is an echo of his three chums. In this motel Metzger also sings a duet with his own image in a television re-run of one of the movies he starred in as a child. All these echo’s are similar to what Freud calls the doppelganger-effect (something so much like you, but not you, so an uncanny feeling pops up – Unheimlich). This will also return when Oedipa sleeps under a Remedios Varo reproduction in Berkeley and has a nightmare about something in the mirror. “Based on the nature of the episode, David Cowart surmises that the painting in the room is one entitled Encuentro, in which a woman opens one of a number of small caskets in a room, only to find her own face staring back at her.” Finally, St. Narcissus is also mentioned in the play.
C. S. Peirce, the American founder of semiotics seems to stand behind one of the central motifs in the novel: the dead never really go away, but persist as signs. There is of course the obvious resemblance with the dead man in this text, Pierce, but this theme also occurs when Genghis Cohen notes that in spring the dandelion wine gets cloudy. This is a sign as if the wine remembered its former existence as flowers.
The most grotesque and also uncanny scene (in my eyes) is the story about the bones: the bones of the American Lost Guard at the bottom of Lago di Pietà were made into charcoal, so America ends up (via a lot of steps) smoking its own soldiers.
The end scene of the book, which triggers an immense expectation of revelation with readers, leaves them dangling and is a similarly immense letdown. “The apocalypse [- the entropy -] is not a final cataclysm, it is inherent in every sign. It is not their destruction that is apocalyptic, but their growth and continuation. Although Oedipa expects further revelations from the buyer of the lot, it becomes clear that revelation will again be suspended and deferred by language[:]” the agent who represents the mysterious bidder of lot 49 is called Schrift, which is German and Dutch for writing. This implies “that the future developments will involve further disseminations of texts, significations, and interpretations.”

5. Combination between detective and uncanny

The reader wants to know to solution: he is invited to take part in the detection (solve a puzzle). There could be some great evil in society, which creates a certain tension in the text. When the puzzle isn’t solved, there’s no relief and an uncanny feeling starts to pop up. The reader has to put his trust in the detective’s mental capacities. When this is very difficult with Oedipa – because she starts wishing she were insane (when going to Dr. Hilarius) and has doubts about herself (when Fallopian annoys her) – this disturbs the reader.
What first starts of as a lot of signs (a flawed U.S. postage stamp, the muted postal horn scrawled on a bathroom wall, human bones made to charcoal, mysterious lines from a 17th century revenge tragedy traced to a corrupt text, the W.A.S.T.E.-mailbox, etcetera) referring to the Tristero, soon becomes the armature of the novel’s detective plot: are these signs evidence of existence of the Tristero, and if not, what do these signs mean?

6. Conclusion

This text is not genre fiction because it doesn’t resemble any sort of detective genre. There is no actual outspoken crime and no solution given. Like Oedipa, the reader encounters a lot of signs and a concealed density of dream, but nothing more concrete and verifiable – there is no infallible proof.
Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is a schizo-text: a text that “presents a disjunctive synthesis of diverse and incompatible views. It can do this, finally, because of its underlying coherence as a specific regime of signs, or a structure not dependent upon any particular point of view, but on the endless proliferation of signs calling for endlessly repeatable acts of interpretation.”

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