Category: The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49’s story-line is perhaps clearly explained by Randolph Driblette telling Oedipa, “You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several… You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth” (56). The novel may seem frustrating to some readers, presumably undergraduate English majors, to search for meaning in Oedipa’s investigation into Tristero, involving a convoluted web of real and fictional references such as Clark Maxwell’s information entropy, The Courier’s Tragedy, and Calculus’s instantaneous rate of change. The involvement of written messages, from single words and symbols to entire texts, is crucial to Oedipa’s investigation into Tristero, yet these references don’t give a definitive, stable concept of what is Tristero, but instead constantly refers to other words and texts.

Oedipa’s investigation mimics Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance. Derrida argues that language doesn’t consist of the union of signifier and signified that Structuralism postulates, but instead is just a chain of signifiers that (1) postpones, or defers, meaning and (2) meaning is just a result of the differences by which we distinguish one signifier from another, and what we take to be meaning is actually a trace left behind the chain of signifiers. And throughout the novel, Oedipa’s investigation can be seen as an emulation of this concept as she struggles to find the meaning of Tristero through waste and the muted post horn.

Oedipa’s first encounter with evidence of Tristero occurs when she sees the word “WASTE” and the image of a “loop, triangle, and trapezoid” inscribed on the walls in the ladies’ bathroom at The Scope (44-45). Oedipa only references these two signs as much because she’s only seen them in writing. But when she and Genghis Cohen encounter the watermark of the same symbol she saw on the wall in comparison with the Thurn and Taxis post horn, Oedipa immediately recalls the scene of Niccoló’s assassination after Cohen remarks that the watermark resembles a muted horn (90). Oedipa realizes the symbol’s meaning is actually to “mute the Thurn and Taxis post horn” (90). Afterwards, Oedipa’s interaction with Stanley Koteks at Yoyodyne about the pronunciation of WASTE not only shows the shift of meaning about also about the arbitrary and slippery nature of language as Oedipa refers to it as a word, with Koteks reprimanding her, “It’s W.A.S.T.E., lady…an acronym” (81). This acronym is revealed later on to mean “WE AWAIT SILENT TRISTERO’S EMPIRE” (127). But the meaning of W.A.S.T.E. and Tristero gets even more convoluted when she encounters the muted horn with the word DEATH, with an inscription reading “Don’t Ever Antagonize The Horn” (90). These two events demonstrate the consequence of Oedipa viewing these symbols as words and shapes since she referenced them through writing until her interactions cause her to differentiate their meaning.

Oedipa must also make use of other texts when words and symbols aren’t enough. The first obvious text and the catalyst to Oedipa’s investigation is the letter from the law firm naming her as a co-executor of Pierce Inverarity’s will at the beginning of the novel. The meaning of why Oedipa was named co-executor of Pierce’s will, much like the already dead Pierce, fades into the background of the storyline like a “shadow,” only to return later on (2). She also searches for the original version of The Courier’s Tragedy in the plagiarized anthology Jacobean Reference Plays at Zapf’s Used Books (55). She also attempts to piece together the beginnings of Trystero by consulting “obscure philatelic journals…an ambiguous footnote in Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, an 80-year-old pamphlet on the roots of modern anarchism, a book of sermons…” (119). Oedipa searches endlessly through texts, trying to pursue connections between them and finding any clues.

For the reader, Oedipa’s investigation feels like looking through a dictionary to find a definition for a word, only to be given more words that are even further defined by more words. Even Mucho’s nickname for Oedipa, “Oed,” can be seen as an abbreviation for OED, of the Oxford English Dictionary. And Oedipa feels like a living dictionary or reference, “pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts” (76). She’s even self-aware that she may never reach the true meaning of these clues, lamenting that she can “never [know] the central truth itself” (69). Her investigation into the true meaning of Tristero is fruitless, even with “the image of the muted post horn all but saturating the Bay Area” (98). Each clue is “only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word…” (87) that only informs her, “If you know what this means… you know where to find out more” (99). Yet, she always ended “back where’d she started” (97). Like a chain of signifiers, the clues in Oedipa’s investigation only refer to other clues, never reaching a definite point of meaning.

At the end of the novel, there is no resolution on whether or not Tristero exists. But it does provide some relief for Oedipa, who no longer has to search through messages and texts to find their meanings, but instead she has to identify the anonymous bidder just by “await[ing] the crying of lot 49” (138). Since language has signifiers constantly referring to one another, nothing can exist outside of language. Throughout the novel, Oedipa wanders through an endless stream of texts and trying to find meaning by making connections. It isn’t until she realizes Tristero cannot exist outside of written text that she decides to step out of its confines. And at that moment, she is perhaps closer to the truth of Tristero’s existence than any of us will ever be.

Few commentaries on the novel are silent on the subject of Oedipa’s name. Most take for granted that it is significant in a straightforward way: by referring the reader to some extra-textual network of meanings the name appropriates some or all of those meanings for the novel, which thus draws part of its own significance from the resonances they generate. This is the “conventional” response that at least one critic claims is unavoidable. Even if the name is a joke, the only way to determine that fact is by “answering the question ‘Is Oedipa Oedipal?’”. We can call into question the claim that Pynchon’s names are meaningful only in the sense that they expose the dangers of our willingness to read meaning into them. Lacan sees the fact that we are named before we can speak as a symptom of the degree to which we are at the mercy of language itself. Pynchon indicates that he can see how, in various ways, people are subject to the authority of naming. “‘Maas,’” a critic claims, “can be voiced to sound like ‘my ass’; this Oedipa is no Oedipus, or only one at the earnest reader’s peril”.

There are, it would seem, a lot of earnest readers out there. The association of Oedipa with the Sophoclean Oedipus is almost a leitmotif of critical writing on the novel, with Freud coming in a close second. Despite cosmological variances between their worlds, the general pattern of Oedipus’s and Oedipa’s lives is identical: during their investigations, both characters move away from absolute positivism to relative indeterminacy; the ‘crime’ that both find so appalling is that they were so self-absorbed that they never saw the danger of the former position. Other critics made the same point as the name refers back to the Sophoclean Oedipus who begins his search for the solution of a problem as an almost detached observer, only to discover how deeply implicated he is in what he finds. She shares Oedipus’s dignity as ‘solver of the riddle’ Freudian associations run the gamut from the relatively complex to the more or less straightforward “The Crying of Lot 49 is an attempt to bring the American consciousness, personified in Oedipa Maas (nothing is more American than Freudianism), to an awareness of all it has repressed. Hite remarks that Oedipa’s name is “initially merely ludicrous” but that it “loses its associations with Freudian trendiness as the quest proceeds, and begins to recall her truth-seeking Sophoclean predecessor”

“…there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth… another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting of a true paranoia or a real Tristero”. This quote came from The Crying Of Lot 49 written by Thomas Psychon. Oedipa on her journey of trying to figure out this conspiracy she finds truth in people who are often marginalized, without the truth but confusion within herself. To find change within there has to be an intrusion from the outside and Oedipa has to execute what is holding her back from change and anything around her that will prevent her from moving forward, to the answers. Oedipa searches for a deeper meaning than society has given her, a deeper truth in things that ordinary people don’t usually search for.

In search of Oeidipa’s revelation, came destruction. As a detective Oedipa will always connect and disconnect pieces of this mystery, trying to make an understanding of everything. Find some type of reason, and direction depending on just this, getting sucked into the system, there isn’t always a reason. And Oedipa disconnects herself from what she sought to be her answer. “Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being presumed, perhaps fantasied by Oedipa, so hung up on and interpenetrated with the dead man’s estate (Page 88). The stamps represent and revolve around, always searching for an answer. Tristero may only be Oedipa’s fantasy, an expression of her need to believe that there must be something to explain the drift of everyone she knows toward inhumanity. “Metaphor… was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending on where you were” (chapter 5). Otherwise, she is either paranoid or America is Tristero, and she an alien.

There seems to be a mystery with these stamps but the paradox is that there isn’t a solution, but a paranoia that there is. “Oedipa wondered whether…she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly” (Page 95). One truth and a lie per se. The Demon becomes the channel that carries the message from the transmitter to the receiver. Whatever information is contained within the channel will be accurate and truthful, but what information leaks out during the transmission will be lost. In its place may be a lie, the lie that Oedipa may have based her life around. The system lost it’s value and including the time that Oedipa wasted on Tristero. “Everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow be woven into the Tristero” (Page 65).

“Transcendent Meaning” almost translucent, she can almost see right through this theory but the actual meaning stuns Oedipa. The stamps that Oedipa was trying to find the meaning for the whole time, were a paradox, a metaphor within; however, the information is obtained. “But as with Maxwell’s Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist” (page 134). Her own demons, her own self-discoveries, an obsession around the mystery that doesn’t have the truth. The machine is beyond comprehension, causing it to be transcendent and abstract but truth and chaos inside and outside, not being able to communicate or “reach” herself. The tower that Oedipa is in fact stuck in, waiting for someone to help her escape, is everywhere she goes, the transcendent function, must come not from consciousness, but unconsciousness it comes not from within the tower, but from without it, in need of escape and yet separate from her. Oedipa can’t escape her paranoia of this concept that was left, causing lessons of fear, rather than evidence of love, as they are two sides to the same coin. “A hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate”, but the “revelation trembled just past the threshold of understanding” (Page 24). And Truth, like the entropy of information theory, irreversibly destroys the meaning of its own message. In this paradoxical state, Oedipa’s quest for the truth about Tristero, and her subsequent attempt to escape from her tower of thermodynamic entropy are useless, because they bring her back to the same quantity of heat energy. Oedipa is stuck in a ‘cycle’ of wasting energy trying to find out information that loses its value over time and ending up in the highly probable state of uncertainty over Tristero.

Oedipa wasn’t given a concrete reason, what the stamps were as they were theoretical like abstract truth, as they were very difficult to understand. The complication to her journey is that all communication, truth, and meaning, is founded in entropy, on a waste of force that alone makes abstract truth possible. “…Entropy is a figure of speech…it connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The machiene uses both. The demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true” (Page 85). A simple method of taunting Oedipa, leading right into peirce’s pathway in making her believe, but only emotionally responding, with imagination and perspective. With multiple realities, and no absolute truth left available,only objective. “Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of god knew how many parts; more than two, anyway” (page 87) With how abstract and confusing this “conspiracy” is, was a lie, and to understand Oedipa will have to alienate herself from anything involved. “…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” (Page 151).

Not everything is how it seems until Pynchon’s audience looked deeper inside, and inside was destruction, chaos, and what came with those, was no answers given. But an obsession and paranoia around what was, or what would be, what was left for Oedipa to “find her answers”. There were revelations everywhere, but Oedipa couldn’t find hers, chase her constellations or her dreams because of the paradoxical world with a meaning that she wasn’t looking for. Oedipa searches for a deeper meaning than society has given her, a deeper truth in things that ordinary people don’t usually search for.