| Lindsay Kaplan ENG 38b David Bottorff March 3, 2004 And the Wind Cries Lot 49 or: Move Over and Let Chaos Take Over In Thomas Pynchon's postmodern novel, The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist's fear of chaos causes her to obsess over a possible conspiracy, eventually causing her to fall victim to intense paranoia. The more Oedipa Maas investigates a long series of curious events, the more she seems to lose control over her actions and merely allow herself to be pushed along by the forces surrounding her. While other individuals in the novel progress as characters, Oedipa never seems to grow from the events or obtain any worthwhile evolution. She succumbs to her horror of contingency, stewing in a repressed sea of self-induced confusion. Pynchon highlights the feeling of bewildering paranoia by using significant features of postmodernism, such as communication breakdowns, alienation and psychoanalytic interpretation that Bran Nicol discusses in his essay, "Reading Paranoia: Paranoia, Epistemophilia and the Postmodern Crisis of Interpretation." Oedipa�s fictional postmodern expedition is mirrored by the actual literary process the reader must endure to complete the book. In the end, the reader feels as unfulfilled and lost as the tragic Oedipa Maas. Pynchon only hints at what Oedipa's normal life consisted of before jumping into the meat of the novel by the end of a rather long first sentence. "One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor . . . of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity" (Pynchon, p. 1). This opening seems like a deterrent of sorts, one that warns the reader of quickly paced writing found in meandering sentences, and the author's own dexterity for connecting the normal with the bizarre. The reader, like Oedipa, cannot wait to discover where this fantastic situation will lead. Because there is a third-person omniscient narrator, one is given the impression that the book's facts, however fictional, are as reliable as those in any fictional world. The Crying of Lot 49 concentrates completely on Oedipa, focusing only on peripheral characters when they are in her line of sight. There are no flashbacks or jumps in time and space, just a straight description of a sequential chain of events. For these reasons, the reader must conclude that the narrative is a strangely disconnected stream of consciousness, however third-person the novel is constructed. After getting entangled in Oedipa's mystery, the reader begins to naturally assume that Oedipa herself is narrating her own tale. Therefore, one assumes that she is stable, that what is represented in her travels is genuine. But Oedipa is not as reliable as the reader would like to assume. She is a victim of postmodern isolation, "deprived of unity and integrity, and rendered no more than a free-floating signifier, the human being who lives in this world is consequently propelled into a state which resembles psychosis . . . This alienation is compounded by the very real-sense in postmodern society of . . . an unseen Other" (Nicol, p. 1) Carrying around the weight of alienation throughout the novel, Oedipa imagines herself trapped in a tower like Rapunzel, but unable to use her hair as leverage. While she stares at a picture of this fairy-tale image, she cries behind ridiculous bubble sunglasses, realizing she "could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry" (Pynchon, p. 11). She may be grieving over Pierce Inverarity, the shock of his death, the uncontrollable nature of life and death. These sunglasses act as a postmodern shield, allowing her to see out into a disjointed world while her own emotions remain hidden behind a veil of stoic isolation. Oedipa's stability throughout the book leaves the reader with an ironic feeling. Though her husband is addicted to LSD, her doctor is insane, her ex-boyfriend is dead and she thinks she is uncovering a worldwide conspiracy, Oedipa remains eerily grounded. The fact that Oedipa does not have a mental breakdown leads to the reader to suspect that the narrator is not playing fair. Perhaps we are baring witness to a breakdown that is masked in normalcy and shrouded with denial. Towards the beginning of her quest, Oedipa goes through a moment of spiritual clarity, "As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken" (Pynchon, 14). This is the moment that Nicol would most likely characterize as "the internal construction of an alternative system of beliefs to replace the oppressive ones in the external world" (Nicol, p. 2). But instead of embracing this momentary enlightenment, "she gave it up presently, as if a cloud had approached the sun or the smog thickened, and so broken the 'religious instant,' whatever it might've been" (Pynchon, 15). Here, Oedipa repressed her own desires to break from reality. She gives up these thoughts, not understanding her own motivation or growing from it, but merely filing it away in her head like all the rest of the information she receives along her journey. Oedipa's ''tendency to delusion" (Nicol, p. 2) manifests itself in the symbol of the muted post horn that she sees wherever she goes. "With coincidences blossoming these days wherever she looked, she had nothing but a sound, a word, Trystero, to hold them together" (Pynchon, p. 87). She can no longer make sense out of life without connecting it to a conspiratory group that is most like a subconscious urge to find a tangible explanation. She fears the random chance of life, "that was really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all." Oedipa seeks deliverance from this thought process, yet is thrown into a chaotic answer to the question of conspiracy, equating that with a more purposeful, satifying life. Nicol claims that the connection between postmodernism and paranoia is not a new one. He believes that understanding that development of this phenomenon "involves considering the extreme effects on the subject of post-industrial society, a world dominated by rampant consumerism and the electronic media, where intersubjective communication has broken down, discourse is power, and information is the most valuable commodity" (Nicol, p. 1). Oedipa becomes obsessed with any knowledge that is beyond her, convinced that everything holds some deeper meaning. The reader becomes just as needy for knowledge as Oedipa, eagerly analyzing the novel's literary devices and searching for Pynchon's ulterior motives. After all, "paranoia itself, as the psychoanalytic definitions of the condition indicate, is essentially a crisis in interpretation." Oedipa and the reader can choose which aspects of the The Crying of Lot 49 are clues and which are just red herrings. For example, many of the characters' names seem to give incite to their purpose in the plot. Dr. Hilarius eventually loses his mind, while Oedipa, like Sophocles�s Oedipus Rex, devotes herself to solving a mystery. Certain acronyms, such as W.A.S.T.E., the secret underground mail system, and KCUF, the radio station, beg to be taken note of. But the meaning is never unveiled to the reader, as the conspiracy is never explained to Oedipa. The paranoid ideas are fostered by an extreme lack of communication that leads to more confusion and disconnection on Oedipa�s behalf. She feels utterly alone, in an existential rut, "teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead" (Pynchon, 141). During a game of questions Oedipa plays with a cheeky lawyer named Metzger, she involves a sexual element of stripping. Before they start the game, she dresses in "as much as she could of the clothing she'd brought with her: six pairs of panties in assorted colors, girdle, three pairs of nylons, three brassieres, two pairs stretch clacks, four half slips, one black sheath, two summer dresses, half dozen A-line skirts, three sweaters, two blouses, quilted wrapper, baby blue peignoir and Orlon muu-muu" (Pynchon, p. 24). For such a sexually charged game, she certainly spends more time dressing than she does removing clothing. In fact, "it all seemed to take hours to put on and she could hardly walk when she was finished" (Pynchon, p. 24). Oedipa has so many layers, the reader can never fully understand her relation to Inverarity or what exactly motivates her to seek out the order and meaning of the Trystero conspiracy "revealed in its terrible nakedness" (Pynchon p. 40). This failed stripping game also represents the layers of possibilities that will never be unraveled. No matter how many articles of clothing she removes, there are always more to take off. Like the mystery both Oedipa and the reader embark on, the nudity, or bare truth, is never exposed. There is "a tension between the need to come up with one satisfying interpretation and the simultaneous knowledge that interpretations are multiple and contingent" (Nicol, p. 2) that is prevalent in the Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon described paranoia as the discovery that everything in connected. One can assume that Oedipa longs "for this discovery in postmodernity, precisely because there is evidence all around that nothing is inherently connected. This form of paranoia is the kind observable in conspiracy theory and also, in fact, postmodern theory. acknowledge the depthlessness and dislocated nature of postmodern culture" (Nicol, 1). In the end, Oedipa cannot accept the vast uncertainty of chance. When Pierce dies, she breaks out of her normal life to find a deeper meaning. Part of her wonders if the entire charade was a last joke of Pierce�s, while the other prays that she is delusional, actually, ''hoping she was mentally ill'' (Pynchon p. 141). Oedipa can neither cope with contingency, nor can she cope the grand conspiracy she has created in order to deal. Instead, her obsession ultimately drives her into a sedated state of repressed madness. Similarly, the reader is placed in the situation where a novel is traditionally orchestrated by the writer. In the Crying of Lot 49, however, Thomas Pynchon allows the reader to get carried with paranoid interpretation. In the end, the reader hopes that the book was either an ironic literary joke, or merely a work of serious delusion. |
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