A Lot to Love: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

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.