Book Review

Slow Lreaner

by Thomas Pynchon

     When I was on the cusp of adolescence, I had a smart but deviant group of friends. We weren’t the kind of kids who got straight A’s in math class or anything like that. We were smart in other ways, sneaky ways, like we knew how to pick the lock on the janitor’s closet, hoswto steal excuse notes and forge a teacher’s signature, how to throw food in the lunchroom and convince the monitors that the kids at the table behind us did it, and how to steal cookies in the cafeteria by sliding them under our hamburgers. We also learned how to dial a pay phone without getting charged, what neighbors dumped their old porn magazines in the trash so we could take them and look at them in the woods, as well as what supermarkets were best for shoplifting cigarettes. We had an extensive knowledge of obscene words in three languages , and we were often seen popping out of the forest to moon cards passing by in the moonlit night. Oh yeah, and we hated school. We conspired to blow it up because one of my friends heard from his cousin’s best friend who had a girlfriend in St. Louis or Evanston or something that told a story about a gang of students who wadded up paper towels and flushed them down the school toilets all at the same time. This cause the pipes to burst and the building blew up so the students had to stay at home for two months while construction workers repaired the whole mess.

That was our grand conspiracy. We made our plans and almost got around to doing this once, but only two of us showed up at the meeting place, the boys room at the corner of halls and 2. We decided to try anyways, but a teacher was in there and we decided to try for another time. Hey Kris, Tom, Mark, Pat, Phil, Keith, Tommy, and Mike, if you’re out there somewhere I just want to say you guys were the greatest even if our conspiracy was a total flop.

But this is why I could relate so much to the boys in “The Secret Integration” in Thomas Pynchon’s Slow Learner. This volume collects five stories and an essay, the stories all being early works written and published before any of Pynchon’s novels. This isn’t the best of Pynchon’s writings, the introductory essay was written to say as much, but fans of this author should find it interesting because it predates the themes, characters, and Pynchonisms to be found in the more developed later works.

The last and best story in this collection is “The Secret Integration” about a secret club of boys in the fictional town of Mingeville. Here we are introduced to the kind of word and name play that Pynchon is famous for as “minge” is a British obscenity roughly equivalent to how “cunt” is used in America as a reference to the vagina or as an insult. The club is led by a precociousand morose, but sometimes trouble-making, boy named Grover. Another member of the group is an African-American boy which is significant in terms of the club’s reasoning and purpose. The boys have plans to sabotage the town’s development as it sprawls like a soulless suburban cancer through the wilderness areas they love. Part of their plan is to blow up their school. As Mingeville continues to grow, the adults are faced with integration; when an African-American family moves into a track house, the white people of the town harass them and try to chase them out. This is the crux of the conflict as the boys, on the verge of adolescence, want the town integrated and the racist adults, including their parents, don’t. Here we are introduced to a major theme in Pynchon’s novels: the conflict between the sick-minded corruption of the powerful ruling classes and the innocence of the oppressed underclasses. Despite this story’s dark humor and amusing look at youth, there is a simmering undercurrent of rage at the establishment and the world of adults that stayed with me long after I finished reading. “The Secret Integration” is the most powerful story here and also the clearest and most direct expression of Pynchon’s world view that I know of so far.

The second best story is definitely “Lowlands”. Dennis Flange is having a party with his friends, some wine-drinking bohemians and mischievous sailors, the kind of people a husband’s wife hates to have around the house. When Flange’s old friend, Pig Bodine, shows up ready for a day of debauchery while on shore leave from the navy, Flange’s wife ends the party and kick everyone, husband included, out of the house. Their friend who owns a garbage dump agrees to let them stay at his shack. First they need to get mattresses to sleep on, so they descend into the garbage dump, located inside a massive pit, to find what they need. All the while, their friend tells them to be careful because his shack is being watched. After they all fall asleep, Flange learns what this is all about as he gets led away in the night by a three foot tall Romani woman who wants to marry him. She takes him through secret tunnels in the garbage pit to her bedroom, explaining that a community of Romani people live in the dump, but only come out at night. The story ends abruptly there.

It has the feel of a novel’s beginning, but unfortunately it is a novel that never got written. It reads like magical realism with realistic characters in surreal situations. It also has some important Pynchonian themes with the secret underground tunnels, conspiracies among the underprivileged, paranoia, and a highly intelligent but highly unmotivated protagonist. Flange’s friends are also a prototype of the Whole Sick Crew in his first novel V. The execution of this story is vivid and brilliant, even if it doesn’t get around to actually saying anything.

The other three stories are less spectacular. “Entropy”, the third story in Slow Learner, examines another major theme in the works of Thomas Pynchon, the balance between order and chaos that is necessary to keep a system functioning. While a party takes place in a house on Long Island, a man lies in bed with a woman while holding a dying bird against his chest. He tries to keep it alive by having the woman monitor the temperature in the room in relation to the temperature outside the window in the cold winter weather. Meanwhile, the party continues downstairs while people talk, play music, argue, play chess, and get sick until a group of sailors show up, thinking the house is a bordello. The house is a transmission ground for the exchange of energies and the party is symbolic of the ebb and flow of order and chaos. This isn’t really a story so much as it is an illustration of Pynchon’s understanding of entropy in thermodynamics and communications theory. In the introductory essay, Pynchon criticized “Entropy” as a mistaken attempt at starting with an abstract idea and dressing up characters as representations of aspects of that idea. His self-assessment is accurate.

In “The Small Rain”. Nathan “Lardass” Levine is a soldier in the army who gets sent on a mission to clean up dead bodies in a lagoon after a hurricane hit a farming island in Louisiana. Lardass is another progenitor of Pynchon’s later characters being equal parts intellectual and lazy. He wants to make a career out of being an army officer because it allows him to spend a lot of time doing nothing. As Lardass goes with his crew to clean up the dead bodies, it starts to rain. While waiting for a work assignment to be given, he drinks beer at a bar and picks up a coed from the nearby university for a one night stand. The story has no definite plot and it is more of a character study of Lardass than anything else. It is fair to call it style over substance, but is is interesting to see how the style foreshadows an element in the first section of Gravity’s Rainbow. The encroaching rain and the entry of Lardass into the territory filled with dead bodies is a lot like the encroaching winter storms and V2 rockets in Gravity’s Rainbow that bring mass death into the city of London.

The least exciting story is “Under the Rose”. Set in Egypt during World War II, a British spy named Porpentine is in pursuit of his nemesis, a German master spy named Moldweorp. He circles around Egypt in search of the other while his colleagues and the compatriots of Moldweorp interact with each other. The writing is labored and dull. It just felt like a chore to read it. This story would later be rewritten as a passage in V.

Slow Learner is far from being the best of Pynchon’s work, but it should be of interest to those who want to see the rudiments of his later genius. A lot of the prose is clumsy and obviously written by an author with little experience. It isn’t amateurish though. I’m sure that Pynchon’s college professors could see in these writings the germination of a literary giant. Aside from being early experiments with prominent themes that would reappear in his later writings, some of his most significant characters are also brought to life, most specifically Pig Bodine and Tyrone Solthrop. These characters in Slow Learner bear little resemblance to the characters they are in Pynchon’s classic works, Tyrone Slothrop is a doctor in this book, but it is interesting to see how Pynchon is beginning to play around with them, later to resurrect them in new forms for his masterpieces.

Slow Learner is not a good book for everyone and certainly not an appropriate introduction to Thomas Pynchon. It was probably published as contract filler during Pynchon’s dry spell from the early 1970s to the 1990s when he didn’t produce anything new. But that was a good time to release this volume after he had found success as a novelist with his first three early classics. Slow Learner gives readers a chance to go back and see where Thomas Pynchon was coming from before he got famous. These are his most stripped down, raw, and direct writings. It’s definitely a good read if you take it for what it is.

 

Book Review

Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

     I will say the same thing about Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow that I said about another of his novels, The Crying of Lot 49. You need to read this book a minimum of three times before you can really start to get it. The first time is just to see what’s there and to familiarize yourself with the text. The second time is to identify the narrative structure and the scheme of the story. The third time is when all the fine details emerge and the book really comes to life.

What eventually does emerge, after the third time through, is a loosely-structured, picaresque story that takes place at the end of World War II. It involves an ordinary and unremarkable man named Tyrone Slothrop, who is under surveillance. The reader gets introduced into a work with a countless number of characters, subplots, situations, symbols, show tunes, and commentaries, most of which may or may not add up to a complete and comprehensible picture. If it sounds like an overwhelming mess, that’s because it is and that is also why the novel is brilliant.

As it all begins, Tyrone Slothrop’s presence is barely noticeable. He doesn’t actually show up until three quarters through the first of the four sections. What does show up is his map of London covered with stars like the ones you get in kindergarten for getting all the answers right on your homework. As we a re led to believe, Slothrop puts each star on a place where he had sex with a woman. The stars multiply rapidly and the British secret service take notice because they have a similar map with stars located in the exact same places. But the spies’ map marks all the places where German bombs fell on London. These just happen to coincide with the places where Slothrop got laid. As they monitor his map, they feed the information to a team of researchers in a former mental hospital called “The White Visitation”. The team is managed by a bitter, sexually frustrated control freak named Pointsman, a Skinnerian behaviorist psychiatric researcher who also overseas a team of psychics and mediums whose seances are used to coordinate information with the statisticians and scientists in the vicinity. They are attempting to figure out how Slothrop is able to predict, through his sexual behavior, where each German bomb will fall.

Take note of a few things in this first section. The heavy snowfall introduces the color white as a symbol of death that persists through the whole book. BDSM is introduced as a symbol of colonial domination. Behavioral psychology experiments are also used to raise the question of whether humans can be controlled or not. Connections are made between science, technology, and multinational corporations. Also, the secret service and their colleagues at the White Visitation are involved in making a movie of some sort. Other themes that are introduced are the proximate relation of opposites that never correspond in full and the circularity of life. As one scientist points out, the stars on the maps of London are supposedly a record of Slothrop’s lovemaking, the place where bombs fall, and also the places where births are given. Then of course, there is the Rocket.

One of the great things about Pynchon’s writing is that he always states his main ideas in ways that are loud and clear. That is why his novels need to be read more than once; you can not identify what is being said loudly and clearly unless you are able to recognize how this is being done and familiarity with the text is what makes this possible. In the Case of Gravity’s Rainbow, there is a scene towards the end of the first section in which the captains of German industry attend a séance. The message they get from the medium, who later dies and makes contact with the psychics at the White Visitation, is that they need to learn about synthesis and control. This is also a message to the reader that these are the main themes of the novel.

But going back to Slothrop, we learn, if his memory serves him correctly, that during his childhood a behaviorist psychologist named Laszlo Jamf conducted Pavlovian experiments on him. But instead of conditioning a dog to drool, Jamf experimented with conditioning Slothrop to get an erection in the absence of sexual stimulation. As Slothrop progressed through life, ending up at Harvard studying rocket engineering, he always had a suspicion that he was being watched by people who were keeping records of when he got aroused. Then when World War II broke out, the American military stationed him in London for an undisclosed reason. It is there that we learn the private thoughts of Pointsman, a man who is obsessed with control but impotent and unpopular with women. Pointsman, being jealous of Slothrop’s sexual prowess, assigns himself the task of destroying the bumbling American soldier.

This first section is the most clearly written part of the novel. This is significant because it is here that all the major themes and characters get introduced, later to reemerge as the narrative moves on. The writing really does follow a narrative arc, like a rainbow or the trajectory of a rocket. As this arc climbs upwards, the literary threads all begin to intertwine as a clear picture of interconnections come into view, but as it descends, the details become less clear, the characters less distinct, details become fuzzy, the themes and interconnections less certain. Slothrop comes closer and closer to solving his own riddle and then the entropy sets in full force.

What is Slothrop’s riddle? He is searching for the Nazi-manufactured V2 rocket S-Gerat with the serial number of 00000. He thinks that finding this rocket will help him solve the mystery of what happened to him when he was a child and why there always seem to be people following him and arranging the events in his life. This plot comes into sharper focus when the secret service move him, again for some undisclosed reason, to the Hermann Goering Casino on beaches of the French Riviera. Notice that Slothrop, in his quest to find the source of the V2 rockets, moves below and counter to the route they take to London; the rockets are manufactured in Peenemunde, Germany, and shipped to Holland where they are launched to land in London while Slothrop moves from London to the Mediterranean coast, then up to Zurich and onward to the northern seacoast of Germany.

While on the beach, Slothrop rescues the Dutch prostitute and spy named Katje from an attacking octopus and becomes suspicious that the situation was staged so the secret service could film a movie of it. After that, other events at the casino appear to be staged for the same reason and Slothrop’s paranoia increases. What also happens in France is Slothrop’s frequent changing of costumes begins. It should be noted that Slothrop’s behavior and personality remain constant throughout the book no matter what outfit he is wearing. In his case, the clothes do not make the man. They are only superficial differences. The surface appearance does not synthesize with Slothrop. They are two parallel lines that come close to each other but never truly connect. This is a postmodern theme that runs through the whole book.

At a party, Slothrop meets up with a black marketeer who sends him on an errand to find a smuggler named Springer in Switzerland. At this point, the scientists and spies at the White Visitation can no longer control Slothrop because they do not know where he went. Slothrop becomes a hero because he has proven, through his own individuality and initiative, that a single person can resist and even break free from control by corporate and governmental powers. Furthermore, Pynchon is possibly telling us that Slothrop achieves freedom through hedonism; his constant pursuit of sex and drugs is what leads him out of the prison of modern technocratic domination. But something else is also pulling Slothrop along the road to freedom. While in Switzerland, he obtains a file from another espionage agent that gives details about Laszlo Jamf, the S-Gerat V2 rocket 00000, and an industrially produced material called Imipolex-G. This last detail rings a bell and Slothrop thinks that if he can learn more about it, he will know everything he needs to know about himself. He leaves for Germany in search of the rocket.

Germany, in the third section of the novel, is dubbed the Zone. The Nazis have lost and the war is coming to an end. The country is in chaos as barriers and boundary lines are breaking down. Slothrop is not the only one pursuing the S-Gerat rocket. Enzian is the leader of the Zone Hereros, a group of German colonial subjects from Namibia that were saved from genocide and brought to Germany by Weissmann, the Nazi general overseeing the building of the V2 rockets in Peenemunde. Enzian has a vision that if he can get ahold of the 00000 rocket, he can start a new religion to correct and replace the false beliefs of Christianity, thereby allowing the Black Hereros to colonize Germany. Enzian also has a Russian half-brother named Tchitcherine who was sent as a Soviet linguist to develop a written alphabet for the Kirghiz languageas part of a colonialist prject. While at a ceremonial poetry reading with the Kirghiz tribesman, he hears a poem about the Kirghiz Light, a mystical flash that caused the poet who witnessed it to go blind. Was it a flash from an atomic bomb? We can never know, but Tchitcherine gets sent to Germany and he also goes in pursuit of the V2 rocket, which he believes to be the source of the Kirghiz Light, while also nurturing plans to kill his half-brother Enzian.

There is also the story of Pokler, a rocket scientist who cares nothing about Nazi politics or anti-Semitism, but also wants to help develop the rocket because he believes it to be a means of transcendence. For him, Nazism is a means to a higher end. He believes the future of the world lies in rocket science which will allow the human race to leave the planet, reaching a higher stage of civilization in outer space. But Pokler has a sexual fetish and Weissman uses it to control him; Pokler is a pedophile who molests his daughter. Weissman lets him spend time with her whenever he wants something done, but as the years go on, Pokler realizes that each time a different girl is brought to him, probably because his real daughter was killed in a concentration camp. As this realization dawns on Pokler, the novel’s arc begins its descent and things begin falling apart.

Sexual fetishism is a theme that plays out throughout the whole book. Whether it be BDSM, sex toys, incest, pedophilia, coprophagia, or any other paraphilia, the behaviorist psychologists have caught on that people can be controlled by limiting their exposure to their fetishes. The more specific the fetish, the more control can be exerted over an individual. In contrast, Slothrop is liberated because he has no specific turn ons; he simply takes whatever sexual partners come his way, therefore his sexuality is a means of liberation rather than a mechanism of control.

As Slothrop continues on a series of misadventures, all involving sex and drugs, one character criticizes him for being paranoid, meaning he sees connections between things that are not connected. Slothrop goes into reverse and starts to think that there are no connections between anything. Furthermore, he also loses interest in his pursuit of the S-Gerat rocket. Despite his waning interest, Slothrop picks up some more information from an aging, mentally unstable German actress named Margherita Erdmann. From her he learns that Imipolex-G is a plastic invented by Laszlo Jamf and used as a binding unit in the S-Gerat rocket. Jamf wanted to invent something that transcends and dominates life, so he synthesized the material without the use of carbon which is the building block of all organic life on Earth. Not only does this plastic transcend life, it also can be shaped and molded into any form you please. For this reason, Jamf gets sent to America where he conducts experiments trying to shape and mold Slothrop, and human society as well, using behaviorist psychology, turning people into plastic to be manipulated by the technocrats who control the world. Do all the references to film and cinema have something to do with this? The passage about Imipolex-G ties together all the previous references to science, technology, and industrialization from the previous parts of the book. Here we learn that World War II is all a performance being put on to make it possible for the military industrial complex to take control of the world behind the scenes. A cabal of leaders from chemical, military, energy, transportation, and pharmaceutical companies have conspired to control the rest of us who are unfortunate enough to have no access to the realms of corporate power. Governments are just a smokescreen and World War II is just a way for the multinational corporations to make money. In fact, because of this cabal, the rockets being used to bomb London were made with materials manufactured by a British corporation.

But then one character explains that Laszlo Jamf never existed; he was created in the paranoid mind of Tyrone Slothrop to help him make sense of the world he lives in. But what if that character was lying about Slothrop’s delusions? What if that character was the one who was delusional? In the works of Thomas Pynchon there are no final answers. Weren’t they really out to get Slothrop anyways? When a couple of British doctors go searching for Slothrop in a German whorehouse, they find Marvy, the fat racist redneck idiot from Texas, and castrate him thinking he is Slothrop. This was done on orders from Pointsman. If that isn’t certain enough, we at least get a sense of what sector of the American population Pynchon isn’t proud of as Marvy is the butt end of cruel jokes throughout the whole story as he deserves to be.

In the final section of the book, Slothrop has faded away out of the narrative. There are suggestions that he has turned into the Horned God Pan as he lives in the woods without clothes and plays his harmonica rather than panpipes, which he almost loses in a creek. This refers us back to the beginning when Slothrop drops his harmonica in a toilet while attending Harvard while Red and Charlie, references to Malcolm X and Charlie Parker stand by and watch as he tries to get it out in one of the grossest passages of the book. There is one further mention of Pan in later pages. Perhaps Pynchon is suggesting that freedom from the military industrial complex can be achieved by a return to nature. The 1960s counter-culture makes an anachronistic intrusion into the latter half of the text.

The final section of the book also ties back to the first section in other ways too. Slothrop is first introduced as he eats some disgusting candies with an elderly woman in her London apartment and at the end the statistician Roger Mexico deliberately ruins a dinner party by describing the most disgusting foods he can think of. This is one of the most hilarious passages and I can not describe it any way that can do it justice. Are these passages connected? Kind of, not really, but maybe. That is how the book operates. There is also the final scene where an audience is watching Hansel and Gretel being performed in a London theater, but the end of this scene takes place closer to the beginning of the book. The scheme of the book is circular, turning back in on itself in Joycean fashion.

The themes of the book are also fuzzy. We learn towards the end that Slothrop’s map may not mark places where he got laid after all. The scientists at the White Visitation try to locate all the women he slept with and are unable to do so. The only one they can find is the old lady who gave him the disgusting candy. It is possible they were misreading the situation all along. And how would that explain the parallels between Slothrop’s map and the secret service’s map? Is there something they overlooked? Again, two parallel lines that never actually join together.

Then of course, there is the story of Benny the Bulb, a seemingly randomly inserted non-sequitur of a story that explains a lot of what Gravity’s Rainbowis about. Benny is a disobedient light bulb who tries to lead a conspiracy against the company that manufactured him. But the other bulbs aren’t too bright. Haha, get it? That’s Pynchonian humor right there. They refuse to go along with him. Still, he insists on rebelling by switching off at times of his own choosing. He is the bulb that sees the truth of the world and how the industrial corporations control everything, but he is powerless to do something about it so he spend his lifetime, if light bulbs actually have life times, simmering in impotent anger. Just like so many people in the world who have reached the same place as him. But wait a minute...weren’t there other bulbs in the narrative that went out at random times? Or am I remembering something that wasn’t there? If it’s true, then were all those bulbs part of Benny’s conspiracy? If it’s not true, am I being paranoid? Am I having false memories or am I more accurate than I think? In order to understand the novel, Pynchon makes you paranoid so you can see the point he is making about paranoia.

There is so much more to Gravity’s Rainbow. It would be impossible to cover it all here. There is a bewildering amount of information, none of the plots ever reach completion, we never learn what happens to most of the characters. That is what life is like. It is impossible to tell if all the interconnections are connected or if we, like Slothrop, are using paranoia as a mechanism to make sense of the world we live in. My interpretation of it all is that Pynchon is telling us that paranoia is a normal response to a world that is consistently uncertain, incomprehensible, and without any final answers. Maybe he also means to say that a little paranoia might go a long way in making each of us, as individuals, more free. 

 

Book Review

The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

     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.