The Crying of Lot 49
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The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is a novel by the author Thomas Pynchon. The shortest of Pynchon's novels and often considered his most accessible, the book is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero (or Tristero). The former actually existed, and was the first firm to distribute postal mail; the latter is Pynchon's invention.
Characters
Oedipa Maas - The novel's protagonist. After her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, names her executor of his estate, she discovers and begins to unravel a worldwide conspiracy. Oedipa functions in the novel as a type of detective, trying to find out the meaning behind Trystero in the play The Courier's Tragedy.
Pierce Inverarity - Oedipa's ex-boyfriend and a wealthy real-estate tycoon. The reader never meets him directly: all encounters are presented through Oedipa's memories. At the beginning of the novel he is already dead and is said to have been extremely rich, having owned almost everything in the US.
Mucho Maas - The husband of Oedipa, Mucho once worked in a used-car lot but recently became a disc jockey for KCUF radio in Kinneret, California (a fictional town). At the end of the novel, he goes insane on LSD, alienating Oedipa.
Metzger - A lawyer who works for Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus law firm. He has been assigned to help Oedipa execute Pierce's estate. He and Oedipa have an affair.
Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard - The four members of the band called The Paranoids. They serve as a means of satirizing the southern Californian youth hippie culture in the mid 1960s.
Dr. Hilarius - Oedipa's psychiatrist, who prescribes medicine to Oedipa which she does not take. He goes crazy toward the end of the story. Admitting to being a former Nazi doctor at Buchenwald, he holes up in his office and shoots at the police as they try to storm his place.
John Nefastis - A scientist obsessed with perpetual motion. He has tried to invent a type of Maxwell's Demon, trying to create a machine that would decrease entropy. Oedipa visits him to see the machine after learning about him from Stanley Koteks.
Stanley Koteks - An employee of Yoyodyne Corporation, Oedipa meets him when she wanders into his office while touring the plant. He knows something about the Trystero, but he refuses to say what he knows.
Randolph Driblette - The director of the production of The Courier's Tragedy seen by Oedipa and Metzger. Driblette is a leading Wharfinger scholar (the author of the play), but he commits suicide before Oedipa can extract any useful information from him about Wharfinger's mention of the Tristero. Oedipa's meeting with Randolph after the play, however, sparks her to go on a quest to find the meaning behind Trystero.
Plot summary
After being defeated by Thurn und Taxis in the 1700s, the Tristero organization goes underground and continues to exist, with its mailboxes in the least suspected places, often appearing under their slogan W.A.S.T.E., an acronym for We Await Silent Tristero's Empire, and also a smart way of hiding their post-boxes disguised as regular waste-bins. In the plot of the novel, the existence and plans of the shadowy organization are revealed bit by bit, or, then again, it is possible that the Tristero does not exist at all. The novel's main character, Oedipa Maas, is buffeted back and forth between believing and not believing in them, without ever finding firm proof either way. The Tristero may be a conspiracy, it may be a practical joke, or it may simply be that Oedipa is hallucinating all the arcane references to the underground network, that she seems to be discovering on bus windows, toilet walls, et cetera.
Prominent among these references is the "Trystero symbol", a muted post horn with one loop. Originally derived, supposedly, from the Thurn and Taxis coat of arms, Oedipa finds this symbol first in a bar bathroom, where it decorates a graffitto advertising a group of polyamorists. It later appears among an engineer's doodles, as part of a children's sidewalk jump rope game, amidst Chinese ideograms in a shop window, and in many other places. The post horn (in either original or Trystero versions) appears on the cover art of many TCL49 editions, as well as within artworks created by the novel's fans.
Oedipa finds herself drawn into this shadowy intrigue when an old boyfriend, the California real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, dies. Inverarity's will names her as his executor. Soon enough, she learns that although Inverarity "once lost two million dollars in his spare time [he] still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary." She leaves her comfortable home in Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, a northern California village, and travels south to the fictional town of San Narciso, near Los Angeles. Exploring puzzling coincidences she uncovers while exploring Inverarity's testament, Oedipa finds what might be evidence for the Trystero's existence. Sinking or ascending ever more deeply into paranoia, she finds herself torn between believing in the Trystero and believing that it is all a hoax established by Inverarity himself. Near the novel's conclusion, she reflects,
- He might have written the testament only to harass a one-time mistress, so cynically sure of being wiped out he could throw away all hope of anything more. Bitterness could have run that deep in him. She just didn't know. He might himself have discovered The Tristero, and encrypted that in the will, buying into just enough to be sure she'd find it. Or he might even have tried to survive death, as a paranoia; as a pure conspiracy against someone he loved.
Pynchon devotes a significant part of the book to a "play within a play", a detailed description of a performance of an imaginary Jacobean revenge play, involving intrigues between Thurn und Taxis and Tristero. Like the Mousetrap which Shakespeare placed within Hamlet, the events and atmosphere of The Courier's Tragedy (by "Richard Wharfinger") mirror those in the larger story around them.
As in his earlier novel, V., Pynchon seems to be making a point about human beings' need for certainty, and their need to invent conspiracy theories to fill the vacuum in places where there is no certainty. Also, as he had in V., Pynchon laces the book with original song lyrics and outrageously named characters—e.g., Genghis Cohen, Manny DiPresso. "Mike Fallopian cannot be a real character's name," protests one reviewer Geddes, Dan. "[Distorted Communication in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49]", The Satirist (September 2002)..
Some have hypothesized that Pynchon was influenced by the racial tensions in southern California that would later turn into riots across the country. Critics have read the book as both an "exemplary postmodern text" Castillo, Debra A. "Borges and Pynchon: The Tenuous Symmetries of Art", in New Essays, ed. Patrick O'Donnell, pp. 21-46 (Cambridge University Press: 1992). ISBN 0-521-38833-3. and an outright parody of postmodernism Bennett, David. "Parody, Postmodernism and the Politics of Reading", Critical Quarterly 27, No. 4 (Winter 1985): pp. 27-43.. Pynchon himself disparaged this book, writing in 1984, "As is clear from the up-and-down shape of my learning curve, however, it was too much to expect that I'd keep on for long in this positive or professional direction. The next story I wrote was 'The Crying of Lot 49,' which was marketed as a 'novel,' and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then." Pynchon, Thomas R. Introduction to Slow Learner (Boston: Little, Brown: 1984). ISBN 0-316-72442-4.
Allusions within the book
As ever with Pynchon's writing, the labyrinthine plots offer myriad interconnecting cultural references. While a basic knowledge of some of these may help decipher the plot, ultimately the enjoyment of the literary games is all that is needed to understand the novel. J. Kerry Grant wrote A Companion to the Crying of Lot 49 Grant, J. Kerry. A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). ISBN 0-8203-1635-0. in attempts to catalogue these references, but it is neither definitive nor complete, and could not possibly be.
The Beatles
The Crying of Lot 49 was published shortly after Beatlemania and the "British invasion" which took place in America and other Western countries. Indeed, internal context clues indicate that it is probably set in 1964, the year in which A Hard Day's Night was released. Pynchon, aptly, makes a wide variety of Beatles allusions. Most prominent are the Paranoids, a band composed of cheerful marijuana smokers whose lead singer, Miles, is a high-school dropout. The Paranoids all speak with American accents but sing in English ones; at one point, a guitar player is forced to relinquish control of a car to his girlfriend because he cannot see through his hair. It is not clear whether Pynchon was aware of the Beatles' own nickname for themselves, "Los Para Noias" Harrison, George MBE et al. The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000). ISBN 0-8118-2684-8.; since the novel is replete with other references to paranoia, Pynchon may have chosen the band's name for other reasons.
Pynchon refers to a rock song, "I Want to Kiss Your Feet", a self-abasing version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand". The artist, Sick Dick and the Volkswagens, echoes such actual groups as the El Dorados, the Edsels, the Cadillacs and the Jaguars (as well as an early name the Beatles themselves were forced to use, "Long John and the Silver Beetles"). "Sick Dick" may also echo Richard Wharfinger, author of "that ill, ill Jacobean revenge play" known as The Courier's Tragedy . On top of all this, the song's title also keeps up a recurring sequence of allusions to Saint Narcissus, a third-century bishop of Jerusalem.
Late in the novel, Oedipa's husband Mucho Maas, a disc jockey at Kinneret radio station KCUF, describes his experience of discovering the Beatles. Mucho refers to their early song "She Loves You", as well as hinting at the areas the Beatles were later to explore. Pynchon writes,
- "Whenever I put the headset on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of beer.
- "Baby," she said, helpless, knowing of nothing she could do for this, and afraid for him.
- He put a little clear plastic bottle on the table between them. She stared at the pills in it, and then understood. "That's LSD?" she said.
Vladimir Nabokov
Pynchon, like Kurt Vonnegut, was a student at Cornell University, where he probably at least audited Vladimir Nabokov's Literature 312 class. (Nabokov himself had no recollection of him, but Nabokov's wife Vera recalls grading Pynchon's examination papers, thanks only to his handwriting, "half printing, half script".) Appel, Alfred Jr. Interview, published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8, No. 2 (spring 1967). Reprinted in Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973). The year before Pynchon graduated, Nabokov's novel Lolita was published in the United States; among other things, Lolita introduced the word "nymphet" to describe a sexually attractive girl between the ages of nine and fourteen. In following years, mainstream usage altered the word's meaning somewhat, broadening its applicability. Perhaps appropriately, Pynchon provides an early example of the modern "nymphet" usage entering the . Serge, the Paranoids' teenage counter-tenor, loses his girlfriend to a middle-aged lawyer. At one point he expresses his angst in song:
- What chance has a lonely surfer boy
- For the love of a surfer chick,
- With all these Humbert Humbert cats
- Coming on so big and sick?
- For me, my baby was a woman,
- For him she's just another nymphet.
Remedios Varo
Near the beginning of TCL49, Oedipa recalls a trip to an art museum in Mexico with Inverarity during which she encounters a painting—Bordando el Manto Terrestre by Remedios Varo. The painting shows four women inside a tower, where they are presumably held captive. The three maidens are weaving a tapestry that flows out of the windows. The tapestry seems to constitute the world outside of the tower. Oedipa's reaction to the tapestry gives us some insight into her difficulty in determining what is real and what is a fiction created by Inverarity for her benefit.
- 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.
Allusions to The Crying of Lot 49 in other works
The Yoyodyne company, which first appears in V., is also referenced in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and it is a manufacturer of starship drives in the Star Trek universe. Angel, the spin-off series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, includes a firm named Yoyodyne, although this may be an indirect allusion via the Buckaroo Banzai film. ABC television created a website for a fictional company named PB-Sales, in connection with their TV show Lost; PB-Sales specializes in managing and controlling other corporations, including Yoyodyne and Daystrom Data Concepts (a nod to the episode "The Ultimate Computer"). [PB-Sales website], accessed 18 May 2006. The GNU General Public License uses "Yoyodyne, Inc." as the name of a company in an example of a copyright disclaimer.
Pynchon himself has made two cameo appearances on the animated television series The Simpsons. In both cameos, his face is drawn covered by a paper bag to preserve his anonymity. His second appearance, on the sixteenth-season premiere "All's Fair In Oven War", features a sequence of puns. Tasting a wasabi-flavoured chicken wing, he comments:
- "These wings are V.-licious! I'll put this recipe in my Gravity's Rainbow Cookbook, right next to The Frying of Latke 49."[(long) A review of "All's Fair in Oven War (FABF20)" by Benjamin Robinson]
Nicholas Meyer's 1993 novel The Canary Trainer describes a fictional painting by the famous Impressionist Degas, a painting which happens to show Sherlock Holmes playing violin in the Opera Garnier. To explain why this work is not prominently displayed in an art gallery, Meyer adds a tongue-in-cheek footnote, explaining that it was bought by the late "Marquis de Tour et Tassis", then auctioned off by the Marquis's widow. Both the aristocrat's name (a clear variant of "Thurn and Taxis") and the auction are wry nods to Pynchon. The sixth book in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events sequence also contains a TCL49 reference. The middle child, Klaus, is reading an auction catalogue and mentions that he has "read up to Lot #49, which is a valuable postage stamp". Later on they attend the auction, but delays force the auctioneer to skip Lot 49.
Although Pynchon himself disparaged this book somewhat (see above), he reused characters from it. Clayton "Bloody" Chiclitz, the Yoyodyne founder who originated in V., returns in Gravity's Rainbow, and Mucho Maas has a cameo in Vineland.
In 2003, the peer-to-peer program WASTE briefly appeared, designed by Justin Frankel as a reference to the book's dark postal service W.A.S.T.E. It uses encryption to maintain privacy, while also requiring encryption keys on both sides to get into the network in the first place, maintaining its shadowy namesake. Ironically, it was disavowed by Nullsoft's parent company, AOL, and considered all subsequent downloads unauthorized. Development of this darknet still continues as of 2006. [WASTE page] at SourceForge, accessed 18 May 2006.
Jason Mordaunt's 2003 novel Welcome To Coolsville[link] (described in the publisher's blurb as 'Thomas Pynchon meets Flann O'Brien') features a company called Hither Twice Toys, ostensibly a play on the name of the actual toy company Fisher Price. However, 'yo-yo' in some dictionaries is said to translate literally from Filipino to 'come come' in English and Hither Twice ('come' X 2) is therefore thought by some #redirect to be a convoluted reference to Yoyodyne. The author seems to confirm this by including The Crying Of Lot 49 in a list of 'post-modernist intertextures' at the website for the book [link], although the nature of the reference is not specifically detailed.
Notes
External links in the following were last verified on 9 July 2005, unless otherwise noted.References
External links in the following were last verified on 9 July 2005, unless otherwise noted.- Pynchon, Thomas R. The Crying of Lot 49 (J. B. Lippincott, 1966): the original hardcover edition.
- Pynchon, Thomas R. The Crying of Lot 49 — Harper and Row, 1986, reissued 1990. ISBN 0-06-091307-X: Perennial Fiction Library edition.
- Pynchon, Thomas R. ["A Journey into the Mind of Watts"], The New York Times Magazine (12 June 1966), pp. 34-35, 78, 80-82, 84. Pynchon's article about the 1965 Watts riots.
- [Cover images], in HyperArts.
- [ThomasPynchon.com], a web-based exploration of Pynchon's fiction.
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