The Crying of Lot 49: Thomas Pynchon

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When you add the prefix “in-“ (as a negative) to it, the word could be concerned with the absence of truth. Even if you think you got it, there is no guarantee that your understanding reflects what Pynchon intended (behind the scenes). One of the Paranoids comments that di Presso's story is much like the plot of Richard Wharfinger's The Courier's Tragedy, a Jacobean revenge drama. Intrigued, Oedipa and Metzger go later to see a production of the play, directed by Randolph Driblette. The play itself is a complicated tale of mixed up communication, jealousy, and murder. The most important part of the play comes at the end of the fourth act, when one character says the line, "No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, / Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero." The mention of Trystero freezes Oedipa; it seems significant, but she does not know why yet (Pynchon hints that it will mean much more to her later on). Oedipa Maas – The protagonist. After the death of her ex-boyfriend, the real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, she is appointed co- executor of his estate and discovers and begins to unravel what may or may not be a world conspiracy. In the William Gibson novel Count Zero (1986), the multinational corporation Maas Neotek is named in honor of Oedipa Maas. [15]

It emerges that Inverarity had Mafia connections, illicitly attempting to sell the bones of forgotten U.S. World War II soldiers for use as charcoal to a cigarette company. One of The Paranoids' friends mentions that this strongly reminds her of a Jacobean revenge play she recently saw called The Courier's Tragedy. Intrigued by the coincidence, Oedipa and Metzger attend a performance of the play, which briefly mentions the name "Tristero". After the show, Oedipa approaches the play's director and star, Randolph Driblette, who deflects her questions about the mention of the unusual name. After seeing a man scribbling the post horn symbol, Oedipa seeks out Mike Fallopian, who tells her he suspects a conspiracy. This is supported when watermarks of the muted horn symbol are discovered hidden on Inverarity's private stamp collection. The symbol appears to be a muted variant of the coat of arms of Thurn and Taxis, an 18th-century European postal monopoly that suppressed all opposition, including Trystero (or Tristero), a competing postal service that was defeated but possibly driven underground. Based on the symbolism of the mute, Oedipa thinks that Trystero exists as a countercultural secret society with unknown goals. The Crying of Lot 49 is a 1966 novella by the American author Thomas Pynchon. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, the plot follows Oedipa Maas, a young Californian woman who begins to embrace a conspiracy theory as she possibly unearths a centuries-old feud between two mail distribution companies. One of these companies, Thurn and Taxis, actually existed, operating from 1806 to 1867, and was the first private firm to distribute postal mail. Like most of Pynchon's writing, The Crying of Lot 49 is often described as postmodernist literature. Time included the novel in its " TIME 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005". [1] Plot [ edit ] Oedipa is stirred by this development, but not quite shaken. The key to reading Pynchon is recognizing that a comedian never wishes to be found-out as a satirist; to be found-out is to admit earnestness and intention. Even Eugène Ionesco, Pynchon’s literary uncle, had a purpose to his parody in the bawdy The Bald Soprano—although it took him years to admit the game. Pynchon might throw Oedipa into a world she did not create, but he does so by arming her and disarming the men who surround her. The stamps turn out to be “forgeries”, postage stamps used not by the official postal service, but by an underground rival or illegitimate shadow called “Tristero”. It’s almost as if these companies are early proof that the medium is more important than the message.Yet, from the point of view of Tristero, it is not the content of the correspondence that matters, it is its delivery. Later that night, Oedipa's doctor, Dr. Hilarius, calls her at 3 a.m. and asks her to participate in a drug experiment he is conducting. The experiment relates in some way to LSD, although we do not find out many details. Oedipa refuses him. The next day, she goes to see her lawyer, Roseman, who asks her to run away with him, although he does not know to where. I haven’t seen any references to the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (different spelling) who made an enormous contribution to the field of semiotics (the study of signs and sign processes). At the end of the book, Oedipa tries to sort the noise of her life. She is not sure whether Pierce “encrypted” Tristero into the will so that Oedipa would discover it, or if she had discovered it by accident. Her search is not the vacuity of empty paranoia. Pynchon can get lyric: “For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, think, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.” Oedipa resigns herself to the fact that “there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.” Pynchon offers that both might be possible: Oedipa could be paranoid and prescient.

An Executor is a person who inherits the assets and liabilities of a person (the Testator) on their death and has to distribute the net assets of their Estate (their "Legacy") to the Beneficiaries identified in the Testator’s Will (their “Last Will and Testament”). and with all the wine in your head, the evening takes a turn for the intimate. it gets a much heavier that you would ever expect for a first encounter like this, especially because you just met this guy (scandalous!!!) but you feel so wrapped up in his world that you just go along with it and enjoy. and trust me, you do enjoy it. and right as your about to come to the full, uh, realization of your enjoyment, he says, "oh god!" and stops and looks at you awkwardly. and you recognize at that moment that the enjoyment is um, bust, and you will never have that full realization. A global postal conspiracy. Post horns graffitied across southern California. LSD prescribed as treatment for anxiety. Obscene radio station hosts. Beatles cover bands. Widespread paranoia. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon’s second novel, is quirky and eccentric even by Pynchon’s standards. Now 50 years old, the slim novel is truly a snapshot of mid-1960s culture. Oedipa walked in more or less by surprise to catch her trusted family lawyer stuffing with guilty haste a wad of different-sized and colored papers into a desk drawer. She knew it was the rough draft of The Profession v. Perry Mason, A Not-so-hypothetical Indictment, and had been in progress for as long as the TV show had been on the air."You didn't use to look guilty, as I remember," Oedipa said. They often went to the same group therapy sessions, in a car pool with a photographer from Palo Alto who thought he was a volleyball. "That's a good sign, isn't it?""You might have been one of Perry Mason's spies," said Roseman. After thinking a moment he added, "Ha, ha.""Ha, ha," said Oedipa. They looked at each other. "I have to execute a will," she said. "Oh, go ahead then," said Roseman, "don't let me keep you.""No," said Oedipa, and told him all. "Why would he do a thing like that," Roseman puzzled, after reading the letter. "You mean die?""No," said Roseman, "name you to help execute it." Hey," said Oedipa, "can't I get somebody to do it for me?""Me," said Roseman, "some of it, sure. But aren't you even interested?""In what?""In what you might find out." As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations. Hardly about Pierce Inveracity, or herself; but about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away. There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of 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 somebody to say hey, let down your hair.The Crying of Lot 49 follows Oedipa Maas, a disgruntled housewife living in the fictional Northern California suburb of Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, as she traces the footsteps of her deceased ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity and begins to uncover a vast conspiracy of renegade mail-carriers called Tristero. At the beginning of the novel, Oedipa receives a letter from Inverarity’s lawyer, Metzger, who explains that Inverarity has died and chose Oedipa to execute his last will and testament. A wealthy businessman who practically owned the sprawling, soulless Los Angeles suburb of San Narciso, Inverarity has left behind a gigantic estate of investments and real estate holdings. Oedipa is baffled: she last heard from Pierce a year ago, when he briefly called, greeted her in several absurd accents, and then hung up. As far as I can tell – and I am so very ready to be wrong about this – the mould is incidental to the plot of The Crying of Lot 49. But it is still integral to getting a grip on what Lot 49 is about, because it is only by asking why the mould (and things like the mould) are there in each sentence that you can begin to tease out what is going on. Every question the reader asks of Lot 49 is also asked by our avatar, the – as she puts it – executrix of Pierce Inverarity’s will, Mrs Oedipa Mass. From the off it is made clear that our lead is a novice, someone who “didn’t know how to tell the law firm in LA that she didn’t know where to begin.” To list the number of occasions in which Oedipa Mass is confused, perplexed, baffled or otherwise thrown by the plot and the world around her would come close to repeating the novel verbatim in a citation which would not so much plagiarise the text as pirate it.

Verarity” is not a word in its own right, but it is quite close to “veracity”, which has lead some commentators to infer that it suggests a concern with the truth. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. The Courier's Tragedy [ edit ] Oedipa’s husband Wendell “Mucho” Maas comes home and starts complaining about his job as a DJ at the KCUF radio station. Annoyed, Oedipa remembers that Mucho hated his old job as a used car salesman even more. In the middle of the night, Oedipa gets a call from her therapist, Dr. Hilarius, who asks her to take psychedelic drugs as part of an experiment. (She refuses.) In the morning, Oedipa’s lawyer, Roseman, advises her about the will. Oedipa reflects on how isolated she feels in her stagnant marriage and boring suburban life. She feels like Rapunzel, trapped in a tower, unable to escape.When a clerk pops up behind the reception desk of the American Deaf-Mute Assembly (Californian chapter) and starts signing at her, Oedipa considers giving him the V. In a very loose metaphorical way, the novel sets up Pierce’s Will as the Will of God, something which Oedipa is and feels compelled to obey. Mrs. Oedipa Maas received a letter naming her executrix of Pierce Inverarity's estate. Pierce was a California real estate mogul with a great number of assets whom she had an affair with years ago. Pierce died a year before the will was found. Oedipa did errands, trying to uncover what happened a year ago. Finally, she remembered a three A.M. phone call from Pierce. He had spoken to her in different voices. Oedipa's husband, Wendell "Mucho" Maas, arrived home. He complained, as usual, that his boss, Funch, at KCUF was trying to censor him. Mucho had formerly worked as a used car salesman. Mucho had tried not to be a stereotypical used car salesman, but the job overwhelmed him. Oedipa tried, unsuccessfully, to calm his memories. At three A.M., Dr. Hilarius, Oedipa's shrink, called and asked Oedipa if she was taking the tranquilizer pills. She refused to take pills or join his experiment testing hallucinogenic drugs on housewives. The next morning, Oedipa met with her lawyer, Roseman. Roseman played footsie with her. After lunch, he explained what Oedipa would do as executrix. Oedipa thought of herself as Rapunzel, Pierce having reached the top of her tower using a credit card to jimmy the doors. She thought of the painting by Remedios Varos she had once seen with Pierce in Mexico City which had made her cry. Out of the tower in the painting, wove a tapestry that contained the world and forced Oedipa to fear that she could not escape.

Whether or not Oedipa discovers conventional meaning at the end of the novel is besides the point. Her character is active, discerning, as much a part of the “game” as the dead man behind the curtain. It would be difficult to draw direct lines between Oedipa Maas and female protagonists who followed her, but Oedipa is a refreshing archetype: the female detective. To be certain, Oedipa struggles in the novel, and fails far more often than she succeeds, but the book is a sequence of her small resurrections. She refuses to give-in to “the man”—or any men, really.When you add the first name, Pierce, to the equation, some have suggested that it implies the piercing of the truth (or untruths). a b Grant, J. Kerry. A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). ISBN 0-8203-1635-0.