There are
many enemies lying in wait to ambush a great novel and rob it of everything
that makes it powerful and meaningful and moving. If the author is trying to “say something” in
addition to telling a compelling narrative, then those enemies only multiply. The dark figures of
destruction lined up against Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 are
as numerous and nefarious as the mythical marauders of Tristero, yet Pynchon
deftly sidesteps each attack, moving carelessly down his path as the failed
assassins fall into a dust-covered pile behind him. The Crying of Lot 49 is a truly amazing book
and one of my all-time favorites.
The first and
worst enemy to saying something meaningful is pretentiousness. Pretentiousness has taken the knees out from
under an untold number of potentially great stories. Of course, pretentiousness is to some extent
in the eye of the beholder, but in spite of all the academic and
inter-disciplinary topics touched upon by Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49,
the novel remains unpretentious. It does
so through its surreal humor and its wry ability to present one possibility and
in the next sentence undermine it.
Pynchon simultaneously proposes profound possibilities while winking at
us and making us laugh at those very notions.
As a quick example, during the play within the novel, The Courier’s
Tragedy, which humorously describes the violent nature of Jacobean revenge
plays, the narrator takes a moment to make things serious, noting, “It is at
about this point in the play, in fact, that things really get peculiar, and a
gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words.” Then, after the mystery of Tristero is
relayed to us, Pynchon once again laughs with us in the “bloodbath” that is the
fifth act: “Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including
the lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom’d talons, is
employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked
later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse.” Following the play, the director, Driblette,
warns Oedipa not to think too much about the play: “It was written to entertain
people. Like horror movies. It isn’t literature, it doesn’t mean
anything.” And that’s the line that the
novel itself delights in, between entertainment and meaning, for without one
the other is without value.
The second
and third enemy work together as a dual threat, like Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla
in this case is the danger of not saying anything of meaning, and Charybdis is
the danger of saying too much, being too on the nose and becoming more of a
lecture than a novel. The Crying of
Lot 49 is uniquely satisfying in this respect as it nimbly gathers up
historical, literary, technological, and cultural artifacts like so many
daisies to chain together, creating a woven and intricate article to admire and
ponder over. Freudian psychology, paranoia,
the mafia, generic narrative conventions, World War II battles, Civil War sea
battles, the Pony Express, oscilloscopes, corporate greed, mythical figures,
the homeless and disenfranchised, the workings of mystery novels, Jacobean
tragedies, acronyms, an underground postal system, stamp collecting—they are
all brought together and presented to us as part of the same cloth. The earth is dug up from this garden of life
and we are shown that all the roots of what seem to us like individual plants
are tangled and inseparable. Or rather,
like a magician, Pynchon shows us each colorful scarf before dropping them into
his hat and pulling out a single scarf of colors impossibly long. We laugh and wonder and simultaneously enjoy
the parlor trick and know that something great is hinted at even as we know
what we see is not what it seems.
Through all
this fun and play with the world and its history, Pynchon presents us with the
modern condition. In the last handful of
pages, in which Oedipa is wandering the streets and train tracks around San
Narciso, she contemplates what it all means, concluding that either she’s
paranoid, crazy, the victim of an elaborate hoax, or the witness of an
unbelievable plot. The road in her mind
leads her in circles but always back to something grand:
She walked down a stretch of railroad tracks next to the highway. Spurs ran off here and there into factory property. Pierce may have owned these factories too. But did it matter now if he’d owned all of San Narciso? San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment’s squall-line or tornado’s touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities—storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.
And again, a few pages later, bouncing between
paranoia and a real plot, Oedipa thinks:
Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For 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 an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into paranoia.
The truth of Tristero would
mean that America was irreparably divided into the affluent and the disenfranchised
to the point that there was a secret existence for those “storm-systems of
group suffering and need.” Knowing this,
Oedipa couldn’t continue in her old life and would have to exist in some space
between the two worlds, which is where the paranoids tread. Oedipa, once trapped in her Remedios Varo
tower of a woven world of her own creation has been freed by her pursuit of
Tristero, but that freedom is uncomfortable, lonely, and looks a lot like
madness.
Everything
about The Crying of Lot 49 is, to me, perfect. It is a book that I can open to any page and
read something hilarious and profound and insightful and gripping. We follow Oedipa’s travels with her at a safe
distance from our own towers, pushing ourselves to understand, to grasp, to make
sense of the world so lovingly and playfully laid out by Pynchon.
