Part 1

MASTER I - CIV/LIT
AMERICAN LITERATURE
INTRODUCTION

THOMAS PYNCHON
‣ Thomas Pynchon is an American novelist and short-story writer whose works
combine black humour and fantasy to depict human alienation in the chaos of
modern society.

‣ He is noted for his dense and complex novels and skepticism about American
Culture.

‣ He is often considered a great innovator in that he pushed literary parody to

the point of literary self-parody, showing how the available conventions,
styles, forms of literature were insufficient as a breakwater of order and
elegance against the tide of life.

‣ Pynchon extends literary perception to science, to pop culture, to the

traditions of analysis, and even to the orderings of the unconscious, to dreams
themselves, to the chaos of meaning and the impossibility of stabilization.
INTRODUCTION

THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (1966)

▸ The Crying of Lot 49 is one of Pynchon’s most popular works and most taught
in literature classes.

▸ It offers a satirical vision of Contemporary America.

▸ It was written during on of the most turbulent decades of the U.S. and its style
mirrors its thematic concerns.

▸ These concerns include: Political tension (The Cold War and the fear of an
impending nuclear war, assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther
King,), Social tensions (Civil Rights Movement, Social Activism, Radical
Liberalism, College students Movements, protestations against the Vietnam
war, Hippie and drug culture)

▸ Therefore, the novel is highly complex, uncertain, uncomfortable, and full of

binary oppositions and paradoxes.
INTRODUCTION

THE CRYING OF LOT 49

▸ The novel is the story of a desperate housewife, Oedipa Maas, who
finds herself set on a quest to uncover an old conspiracy about a
radical group opposed to mail monopolies named The Tristero system.

▸ Oedipa may have stumbled upon an ancient conspiracy stretching

between 2 continents, from Medieval Europe to post-war America.

▸ In this different detective novel, Oedipa finds herself unable to

determine whether the revelations that come crowding on her are
genuine or not. She is uncertain about what she is doing or what she is
trying to uncover to begin with. That is why, the the plot becomes so
complex resisting interpretation to an extraordinary degree. It is
difficult to draw a comprehensive account of the novel’s message
from the tangled network of metaphors and information.
INTRODUCTION

THE CRYING OF LOT 49

▸ The novel ends with Oedipa in a dilemma, unable to solve

anything or get any definitive answer about the Tristero system.
The book denies the character the consolation of a conclusive
ending.

▸ The reader, who becomes involved and is set into this quest just
like Oedipa, is left with a plentitude of unanswered questions:

Does the Tristero system exist? Is Oedipa losing her mind and
hallucinating? Or is the whole plot just a hoax orchestrated by the
person who set Oedipa on this quest?
 LESSON’S MIND MAP

The Quest for truth/knowledge

THE TRISTERO SYSTEM

VERSIONS OF PLOT LANGUAGE AND
TRUTH/REALITY MEANING
Creation and World Absence of an
making objective truth
Lge reflects
anxiety and
Metafiction
uncertainty
Communication
Crisis
ANXIETY
EXISTENTIAL / NUCLEAR
possible
Apocalypse
‣ Commodity
Media and
Culture and
PARANOIA Technology
Consumerism

‣ Globalization
ORDER VS. ENTROPY
TRUTH AND VERSIONS OF PLOT
"The reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the
projector at the planetarium, all the closed
little universe visible in the circle of that
stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and
sometimes other orifices also."

The Crying of Lot 49

TRUTH AND VERSIONS OF PLOT

SUBJECTIVITY OF TRUTH

▸ The novel is actually concerned with “world making” and

the creation of a plot, world, or a truth.

▸ the different versions of truth and plot draw attention to

the subjective and selective nature of reality. (refer to
previous quote)

▸ Truth is related by the observing agent, and the novel

establishes this fact by providing multiple versions of the
plot.
TRUTH AND VERSIONS OF PLOT

REALITY IS JUST ANOTHER PLOT CONSTRUCTED BY SOME CHARACTER OR ANOTHER

How are these different plots established?

▸ Throughout the novel, the reader is faced with multiple

questions, and each question is a possible version of the story.

▸ Does the Tristero System exist?

▸ Is Oedipa hallucinating and the whole conspiracy is taking

place inside her mind? (at some point, many characters seem
to have lost their minds)

▸ Or is the whole story a hoax orchestrated by Pierce Inverarity?

TRUTH AND VERSIONS OF PLOT

ACTS OF CREATION/ PLOT MAKING:

1. Painting: “Bordando el Manto Terrestre”(check next slide)

Through invoking this painting, the author is comparing the act of

weaving a tapestry to the act of weaving and constructing a plot.

Metafiction: Both the character (Oedipa) and author (Pynchon)

are creating/weaving a plot.

In order to solve the puzzle, Oedipa has to travel and meet a lot
of people and look for information - the excess of information
leads to a process of selection which differs from one person to
another. Through this process of selection, Oedipa weaves her
own version of the plot.
“embroidering a kind of
tapestry which spilled out of
the slit windows into a void,
seeking hopelessly to fill the
void: for all the buildings
and creatures, all the waves,
ships and forests of the earth
were contained in this
tapestry”

The Crying of Lot 49

TRUTH AND VERSIONS OF PLOT

ACTS OF CREATION/ PLOT MAKING:

▸ The “Cashiered” movie
the co-executor of Inverarity’s will, lawyer Metzger, was a child actor
and he appeared in a movie called “Cashiered.” He tells Oedipa
that a lot of scenes were left out or totally altered.

Altering the arrangement of the scenes and the sequence of its

parts results in different possible versions of the story. Therefore, it
is subjective and subject to a process of selection.

Just like film-making, truth-making is subjective and a result of

selection and weaving.

The author relates different acts of creation to draw attention to plot

creation on a micro level, and truth/reality creation on a macro level.
TRUTH AND VERSIONS OF PLOT

TRUTH AND
REVELATION
TRUTH AND VERSIONS OF PLOT

IS THERE A REVELATION OF TRUTH AT THE END?

▸ Although Oedipa struggles to put the pieces together and to uncover
the Conspiracy of the Tristero, at the end, she does not solve the puzzle,
and the novel ends when she is waiting at the auction for the bidder
who was supposed to provide her with a crucial piece of information.

▸ Both Oedipa and the reader are actively involved in the process of
solving the puzzle and making sense of the pieces. Yet, both are
deprived of a final revelation.

▸ The novel, thus, mocks the process of truth-making, and the absence of
a revelation leaves the reader with the conclusion that: a total truth
can be approached but never reached.

▸ The novel is also a subversion of the traditional detective novel:

Pynchon rewrites the genre where there is a process of investigation to
solve a puzzle and make sense of the riddle or uncover.
LANGUAGE AND MEANING
 LANGUAGE AND MEANING

LINGUISTIC INDETERMINACY/ AMBIGUITY

▸ The novel questions the role of language in daily life and addresses culture’s movement
towards Intellectual Inertia.

▸ Pynchon reveals Language’s inability to convey meaning or help Oedipa make sense of
the pieces and the excess of information around her.

▸ One example of language’s ambiguity is the names of the characters. They are often
too odd or eccentric. Critics often attempted to make sense of the character’s names and
there is no definitive answer or interpretation to their meaning.

▸ None of the names are realistic, yet all seem to carry a kind of symbolic significance.

▸ Pynchon’s playfulness with names indicates that he is not necessarily using them as clues
to solve the riddle, but, in a way, an attempt to make a commentary on the power
language has in defining who the characters are. Reading too much into the meaning of
things can be misleading and, often, not the right thing to do.

▸ Example: although the name Oedipa is taken from Oedipus, a mythical Greek king who
is famous for solving a riddle, the woman Oedipa cannot solve any riddle, nor is she a
reincarnation of Oedipus.
LANGUAGE AND MEANING

THE TITLE OF THE NOVEL

▸ Lot 49: is the name Genghis Cohen gives to Inverarity’s
collection of stamps that is being auctioned.

▸ Crying: is the name for when a bidder is going to buy the

auctioned items.

▸ Nevertheless, the words “crying” and “lot” and “49” appear

and reappear in different contexts and with shifting meanings.

▸ therefore, the title becomes a collection of potential

meanings the reader is invited to decode.
LANGUAGE AND MEANING

THE IMPLOSION OF MEANING

▸ The main reason why Oedipa cannot make sense of the information and clues
she finds is because of the dissemination of information and implosion of
meaning.

▸ the problem is not that there is no meaning, but there is “too much meaning.”
In this case, too much can leave the reader as powerless as with too little.

▸ According to French Theorist Baudrillard, when there is an excess of

information (mainly through Media), information becomes void of meaning
resulting in a crisis of representation. he calls this “The Implosion of
Meaning.”

▸ Oedipa receives a myriad of messages and pieces of the puzzle and she
cannot select from this excess. tracking down meaning becomes an
impossible task. Oedipa’s experience reflects the postmodern condition of
excess and implosion.

▸ check Jean Baudrillard’s “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media”

LANGUAGE AND MEANING

COMMUNICATION
Throughout the novel there is a failure to communicate information/ truth effectively because
of language’s uncertainty and ambiguity.

Example: Mucho, Oedipa’s husband works at a Radio station. He tells his wife that at times he
alters the messages so that it suits the media, which is “politically dangerous.”

for an effective communication of a message, the sender must encode the message and the
receiver should decode the message, i.e. decipher the meaning of the message. The channel
of communication is disrupted if the sender fails to encode the message, or if the receiver
fails to decode.

In the first case, there is no meaning attached to the message so the receiver cannot make
sense of it. In the second case, the message is encoded, yet the receiver is not qualified to
decode it and make sense of it.

In the novel, it is possible that both cases are at work. At times the information Oedipa comes
across is void of meaning, at times she is unable to make sense of it.
Encoding Decoding
Sender Message Receiver

effective channel of communication