Re-reading Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49
This is America, you live in it, you let it happen...
Thomas Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006 [1966]. 152 pp.
Thomas Pynchon’s second novel The Crying of Lot 49 is pretty good. There, I’ve said my scorching take. I will not censor myself in the face of the deadening entropy of our imperialist society.
All kidding aside, this re-read of Lot 49 was very enjoyable, and has taken on a new and luminous shine, relative to the rest of his body of work. (V. which your host read for the first time last November, seems underrated.) There is great narrational skill here, and maybe I can see how Pynchon “earned” the right to break all the rules in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) (which I find overrated, but we’ll have to see on the re-read).
The striking thing about Lot 49 is not its short length but its protagonist Oedipa Maas, who is a completely normal woman in southern Cali in the 60s, a Young Republican, who we meet coming back from a “Tupperware party [?!]” to her digs in an idyllic suburb.
The plot launches in the first para: Oedipa is named an “executrix” of the will of her last lover before marrying her husband Mucho, a rich guy named Pierce Inverarity. (I wonder if it’s a reference to the father of American pragmatism, with the name spelled “correctly”.) Was Pierce keeping the flame for Oedipa, or did he try to tell her something by roping her into a shady conspiracy?
She consults Roseman, the family lawyer.
But Roseman had also spent a sleepless night, brooding over the Perry Mason television program the evening before, which his wife was fond of but toward which Roseman cherished a fierce ambivalence, wanting at once to be a successful trial lawyer like Perry Mason and, since this was impossible, to destroy Perry Mason by undermining him.
The old Freudian triad gag. Classic!
The first leg of Oedipa’s quest for knowledge is accompanied with co-executor Metzger, and they sort of seduce each other in a hotel room in the very liminal city of “San Narciso” while a hardcore band is jamming by the pool. It reads like an immersive baptism into cybernetic “postmodernity.”
So it went: the succession of film fragments on the tube, the progressive removal of clothing that seemed to bring her no nearer nudity, the boozing, the tireless shivaree of voices and guitars from out by the pool. Now and then a commercial would come in, each time Metzger would say, “Inverarity’s,” or “Big block of shares,” and later settled for nodding and smiling.
The meanings of space and time are about to be adjusted. Pynchon’s narration is smooth as it may ever be, but he is seamlessly shifting Oedipa and the reader not only back and forth through time, but through hermetically sealed micro-societies, ensconced within a American administrative system that has reached mystifying proportions.
The pair have a sit-down with Mike Fallopian in an electronics music bar called “The Scope.” Fallopian lays down the rules for making meaning of this increasingly chaotic situation: “Good guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the underlying truth. Sure he [a Mr. Pinguid we’ll talk about later —Ed.] was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn’t it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror.”
The petty-bourgeois anti-capitalism of Fallopian and Metzger read like the sort of conversation by young Southern Cali denizens overheard by Pynchon while living in Manhattan Beach and scribbling GR down on engineer’s graph paper.
After Pierce’s shady mob connections are revealed, the next set piece is a production of a revenge play called The Courier’s Tragedy, which brings to her attention the existence of a secret society involving private mail couriers in medieval Europe. An employee at the defense corporation Yoyodyne seems to know more but its not telling. Mike Fallopian fills her in during another sit-down:
“Sure this Koteks [the Yoyodyne employee —Ed.] is part of some underground,” he told her a few days later, “an underground of the unbalanced, possibly, but then how can you blame them for being maybe a little bitter? Look what’s happening to them. In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor — Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and his this or that. Only one man per invention. Then when they grew up they found they had to sign over all their rights to a monster like Yoyodyne; got stuck on some ‘project’ or ‘task force’ or ‘team’ and started being ground into anonymity. Nobody wanted them to invent — only perform their little role in a design ritual, already set down for them in some procedures handbook. What’s it like, Oedipa, being all alone in a nightmare like that? Of course they stick together, they keep in touch. They can always tell when they come on another of their kind. Maybe it only happens once every five years, but still, immediately, they know.”
Now a picture’s coming together. Fallopian is nostalgic for a bygone epoch of liberal competitive capitalism, where individual initiative was recognized and celebrated with patents and historical legacy. (Actually, these “wizards” like Bell and Edison were constantly stealing each other’s concepts and specs in a kind of fratricidal free for all.)
Nothing is intelligibly made by a single “author” anymore. Now it’s massive monopoly contractors like Yoyodyne — the equivalent to Boeing in Pynchonland. The chief problem, which Pynchon’s characters only manage to talk around, is the scale and scope of monopoly capital and its entanglement with state power after WWII. And not just the military-industrial complex, but the whole shebang of state-monopoly capitalism.
Modern advanced capitalist states nationalize the biggest industries and enterprises. (America is a weird case where there aren’t state-owned enterprises — not anymore — yet the monopoly-state entanglement is still in play, in the figure of Musk.) That includes the good ole US Postal Service.
When Oedipa takes her hallucinatory and also cyclical journey into San Francisco, constantly finding iterations of the muted post horn symbol, and tracking down operatives of an underground W.A.S.T.E. mail network. It’s a decentralized, underground alternative social service — the kind that American anarchists loved to set up in the 60s, most notably the Jane Collective illegal abortion service in Chicago.
It’s an economistic way (to use a derogatory term from Marxism, of which Fallopian so heavily disapproves) to stick it to The Man. The post horn is muted because W.A.S.T.E. is contesting the legacy of state-monopoly services in the Holy Roman Empire, particularly the Thurn und Taxis private post line which operated in distinct forms from the 16th century up to the 1860s, enduring the French Revolution and counterrevolution alike.
Between the German-Italian noble family and the present disintegrating madness surrounding Oedipa in southern California, there are at least a couple other historical “interpolations.”
Mike Fallopian shares the story of Commodore Peter Pinguid, a Confederate trying to open a front of the Civil War in California. Russian rear admiral Popov was deployed by the tsar to defend San Francisco from Confederate attacks (thus frustrate British interests). Pinguid didn’t die in battle (it never took place) but was spiritually murdered by the political situation: the tsar had just abolished serfdom in his own country in 1861, and now he’s in an alliance with a country that “paid lip-service to abolition while it kept its own industrial laborers in a kind of wage-slavery,” that’s Mike’s reading. He belongs to an anti-Communist secret society in Pinguid’s honor, but it seems more like typical luddism.
There’s a ghastly story from WWII, of American troopers lost in Italy, pounded by German fire till they died in the dark, their bones at the bottom of a placid lake (like the one in the Jacobean play) — and these bones, were they ground up into charcoal dust to be used as invisible ink in clandestine activity?
Moreover, when Oedipa returns from her excursion, the folks in her circle seem to have transformed. Her therapist Dr. Hilarius is crashing out: turns out he’s an ex-Nazi doctor, fearing retaliation from the Mossad. And her husband Mucho, who was a fretful twerpy fellow at the beginning, has been brain-fried by medical LSD. And Mike Fallopian reappears as a philandering sellout. The pacification of the 60s is immanent.
In their last encounter, Mike asks Oedipa point blank if this whole mystery has been a joke, “that somebody’s putting you on? That this is all a hoax, maybe something Inverarity set up before he died?”
It had occurred to her. But like the thought that someday she would have to die, Oedipa had been steadfastly refusing to look at the possibility directly, or in any but the most accidental lights.
Oedipa’s namesake is pretty obvious, even for Pynchon. But her struggles don’t seem that Oedipal, nor do we stay with her long enough to see if she ever solves the riddle of the sphynx.
She does remind your host of another figure, the Lady of Shalott from Tennyson’s poem. Oedipa is a woman locked in a tower, perusing images, as these memorable lines closing the first chapter illustrate.
Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except her gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?
There happens to be a discussion of this book by Fredric Jameson in Signatures of the Visible. Your host came across this reference after writing the above letter, and I flatter myself that Jameson fastened on to the same Marxist theme of how the mode of production contradiction is informing this book, even if he quickly goes into a strange direction:
The representational ingenuity of this novel lies in its identification of the conspiracy with the media itself, here the postal system, in which the contradiction between private ownership and social production is redramatized by way of the enigmatic reappearance of ‘private’ mail delivery systems. Yet the force of Pynchon’s narrative draws not on the advanced or futuristic technology of the contemporary media so much as from their endowment with an archaic past: the pseudo-histories of the various postal systems and postage stamp substitutes, the traces left in old books, the archival remains of what the present imagines itself to have left behind. Indeed, the most ominous doubt inspired by this novella, which wants to contaminate its readers and beyond them to endow the present age itself with an impalpable but omnipresent culture of paranoia, is the conjecture that if the fossil record were complete, we would be likely to find the Thurn-and-Taxis post-horn on hominid artifacts as far back as the Pleistocene. Still, it must be observed that it is not the patterning system of the computer circuits that conveys this remarkable effect, but rather the archeological hermeneutic itself which endows cybernetic objects with a suggestive power they cannot muster on their own.
