First off, let me say that if you haven’t read Thomas Pynchon’sThe Crying of Lot 49 more than once, you’re not in a good position to be talking about it. This has nothing to do with how intelligent you are and has everything to do with how Pynchon’s prose operates. The book is full of noise. By that I mean non-sequiturs, irrelevant information, plot threads that are abruptly dropped and re-appear almost randomly at unpredictable times, disorienting grammar and all kinds of other things. This is appropriate because a major theme of the book is communications theory and the entropy that interferes with the transmission of information. This may be hard to grasp the first time through, but once you see the broad outline of the novel, you can begin to sort out the noise from the message and maybe even begin to consider what message Pynchon is attempting to convey.
My personal take on the story is that it is not simply about one thing; it is about many things and the reader has to evaluate the bombardment of information thrown their way on their own terms to get a sense of what it all adds up to. But while it may be about many things, communications theory being one of them, the easiest theme to grasp ahold of is the identity crisis of Oedipa Maas and what her exodus out of the shallow suburban lifestyle says about America.
So who is Oedipa Maas? She is a housewife in Southern California, married to a disc jockey named Mucho Maas (you have to know Spanish to get the joke and even then it isn’t funny). Her ex-husband, Pierce Inverarity, has just died and named her as co-executor of his will, something that sends Oedipa down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories that causes her to re-evaluate what her life in America really means. “Inverarity”, by the way, is Scottish vocabulary meaning “a clever or knowledgeable person”; this is the type of Pynchonian fascination for obscurity that makes the writing so intriguing. She heads off to San Narciso, a town built around Inverarity’s factory and then goes up to Oakland and San Francisco on a journey to learn as much as she can about a secret society. Along the way, she encounters a string of men who each provide her with a piece of a puzzle she tries to solve. The dilemma is that there is no certainty that the pieces, when assembled, will add up to a coherent picture. They may actually be pieces of different puzzles, accidentally assembled to make a confusing conclusion. They may not even be pieces of a puzzle at all, instead being unconnected bits of information that Oedipa is sticking together to form her own story. Oedipa may very well be a paranoic, a person who makes connections between things that are not connected. She may be delusional or she may be having a psychotic breakdown. In the end, the novel does not provide any definite answers so the reader has to decide for themselves.
For the sake of brevity, I will leave out a lot of information and list some of the high points in the plot and what I believe they represent in terms of constructing a statement about Oedipa’s journey. Oedipa visits San Narciso and meets up with her lawyer who takes her to a bar where they witness a ceremonial distribution of mail. After finding a mysterious symbol on the bathroom wall, a trumpet with a mute in it signifying “silence”, she realizes she has stumbled into the domain of a secret society called W.A.S.T.E. which is run by an underground mail service called “Tristero”. In Italian, “tristero” can mean a holding room like a storage closet, a warehouse, or the room in a post office where the mail waits to be taken away; it can also mean “a sad man”, a meaning which ties in directly to the final scene of the novel, an auction where lot 49 is “cried”. Lot 49 is a collection of counterfeit stamps in Inverarity’s collection that appear to have been issued by Tristero.
After a day’s outing at a beach, a chance encounter with an acquaintance of her lawyer’s, Oedpipa learns that Inverarity purchased the bones of a military platoon that had been drowned in an Italian lake; he bought the bones from the Mafia and used them as material for manufacturing cigarette filters. This further leads Oedpa to attend a play at night, vaguely reminiscent of Titus Andronicus, about an Italian prince who gets unjustly disinherited from the king’s throne when his father dies. A secret organization named Trystero comes to his defence and goes to battle against Thurn and Taxis, the people who are in power. Trystero loses and the dead soldiers are dumped into a lake. Their bones are later harvested and made into black ink for use in the illegitimate king’s pens.
This detail of the play may seem obscure, but I think it is deliberately buried under a ton of noise in the prose to make it difficult to locate. The named “Tristero” changes to “Trystero”, the importance of which is that “tryst” means “a secret meeting” with a “trystero” being a man who engages in such meetings, usually for the sake of secretive sexual practices. The name “Thurn and Taxis” also bears significance since it refers to a real aristocratic family in southern Germany who extended their power by building the first trans-European mail system, believing that controlling long-distance communication is the key to controlling the continent (and now we have the World Wide Web, to whose benefit?) The words “thurn” and “taxis” in German also have a vague connection to ideas of surveillance and control. But the real meaning I am getting at here regarding communications theory is related to the bones in the lake. Inverarity uses the harvested bones for cigarette filters while the king in the play uses them to make ink; here we have a contrast between the transitory, ephemeral smoke of spoken words and the permanence of the written word. The entropy in the system is that spoken words, like smoke, disappear immediately, fading into nothingness as people forget them while the written word can, theoretically transmit information across long periods of time. However, the entropy herein is that lies, distortions, misinterpretations, or misinformation can be transmitted and mistakenly regarded as truth. One hundred percent accuracy can not be guaranteed. Everything we think we know about the past could be wrong.
After the play’s finale, Oedipa approaches the director, Driblette, in the dressing room and confronts him about the existence of Trystero. He dismisses the idea of their existence, telling her that as a director, he is like a film projector, projecting his inner mind onto the play’s actors and controlling their movements as he sees fit. He has no interest in conspiracies or secret societies, but he does send Oedipa on her way to seek out alternate copies of a book that anthologizes dramas; the book contains the original script for the play and alternate editions of it each have their own omissions hat Oedipa interprets as clues to solving her mystery. The idea of projecting reality onto the world also corresponds to two passages involving Oedipa, one in the beginning where she is interpreting a painting by Remedios Varo, and one near the end where she is considering the possibility that she is delusional.
Then Oedipa travels up to San Francisco to find a scientist named John Nefastis who has invented a Maxwell’s Demon box, a contraption in which positively and negatively charged molecules circulate in equilibrium by sorting out the strong ones from the weak. Nefastis explains that there is no connection between the entropy in the second law of thermodynamics and the entropy in communications theory except for the fact that the same algebraic formula is used to explain both laws. Hence, it is only through a symbol that a link can be formed between the materiality of physical motion and the non-materiality of contents in the coding, transmission, and decoding of information in communications, the meeting ground of form and content, the vessel that moves information from transmitter to receiver. The balance between positive and negative molecules in Maxwell’s Demon is a state in which there is no noise in the system so that perpetual motion is inevitable and certainty can be expressed in language. Oedipa tries to determine if she is a “sensitive”, a person who can communicate with the demon in the box, but there is too much noise in her system; she is disconnected from ultimate truth and certainty.
So she spends all day and night traveling around San Francisco in search of more information about Trystero and encounters the symbol, seemingly everywhere she goes. She finds the symbol wherever society’s outcasts, riffraff, and unwanted are located, alongside the the mentally or physically disabled, the ugly people, the unhappy, the homeless, the lonely, the unloved, the lumpenproletariat more or less. As the sun rises, she encounters a drunken sailor on the verge of death who gives her an envelope marked with the W.A.S.T.E. symbol, explaining his letter is a love letter written to his lost wife; he tells Oedipa that his dream of reuniting with her is the only thing that has kept him alive for so many years. He asks her to drop it in a secret mailbox under a freeway which resembles a garbage can ( a waste container?) from which she follows the postman who collects the mail and delivers it, then returns her to the apartment of John Nefastis.
The sailor’s fantasy of reunion directly links to what Oedipa’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarius advises her while in the throws of a psychotic breakdown. She approaches him to sort out whether or not she is going crazy in her pursuit of Trystero. She suspects it could all be a fantasy, but he advises her to hold onto her fantasies because, like the sailor, our lives have no meaning without them. There is no ultimate truth and there is no destiny for each individual. This realization is what led to the shattering of Dr. Hilarius’s illusions resulting in his nervous breakdown. Oedipa may be having delusions, but those delusions are the only thing giving meaning to her empty life. After randomly encountering some anarchists and fascists who all appear to be linked to Trystero, ready to start a revolution and overthrow the government, she decides her sympathies lie with Thurn and Taxis and the rest of the book is about how she pursues what she believes to be her rightful inheritance of her ex-husband’s estate. But wasn’t the prince in Driblette’s play wrongly disinhertied from the throne? Maybe she is one of the losers of America like all the lonely people she saw in San Francisco. Is Trystero closing in on her? She wants to believe she is destined for something great, but there is no way she can know what is true. And neither can the reader; there is too much noise in the system, too much going on, too much information, too many patterns that may be imaginary so that we can never know with any certainty or clarity what it is all about. But if we clear out all the interference in the prose, there are messages there, or are we, as readers, creating patterns, misinterpreting words, finding order where there is none? Is America a nation of people like Oedipa? A nation of people who think they are destined to be rich, famous, powerful, special in some way when the reality is that we are all a bunch of nobodies? Are we a nation that fantasizes about greatness to protect ourselves from the truth that we aren’t anything special? Or are we a nation of haves and have-nots where the haves have everything and the have-nots have nothing but dreams?
Who Knows. In the Greek drama Oedipus was prophecized to kill his father and marry his mother, but he set out to prove the prophecy wrong. But circumstances drove him unwittingly to do what he did not want to do; he had a destiny and the destiny caused him to be blind in the end. Oedipa Maas, in the context of the narrative, has no mother or father that ever gets mentioned. Could that mean she has no destiny? No prophecy to fulfill? Does that liberate her or cause her to be blind despite it all? There can be no answer to these questions, no conclusions, no certainty, no truth, no closure. The communication system doesn’t allow for it. The deconstructionists have won. The Socratic phenomena has no noumena. Maybe you can contact Thomas Pynchon and ask him what it all means. Haha, then again, maybe not.
Reading Pynchon novels takes commitment. This is no literary one night stand. If you do not come back again and again to his writings they will never mean anything to you. But if you choose to build up that relationship, it will clarify and become a lot stronger. Now go read the book again before you try explaining it any more.
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