The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49

Cover of first edition
Author	Thomas Pynchon
Genre	Postmodern novel, paranoid fiction
Published	April 27, 1966 (1966-04-27) (J. B. Lippincott & Co.)
Publication place	United States
Pages	183

The Crying of Lot 49 is a novella by the American author

It emerges that Inverarity had

• Oedipa Maas – The protagonist. After the death of her ex-boyfriend, the real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, she is appointed co-executor of his estate and discovers and begins to unravel what may or may not be a world conspiracy.
• Wendell "Mucho" Maas – Oedipa's husband, Mucho once worked in a used-car lot but recently became a disc jockey for KCUF radio in Kinneret, California.
• Metzger – A lawyer who works for Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus. He has been assigned to help Oedipa execute Pierce's estate. He and Oedipa have an affair.
• Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard – The four members of the Paranoids, a small-time rock band consisting of marijuana-smoking American teenagers who sing with British accents and have haircuts inspired by the Beatles.
• Dr. Hilarius – Oedipa's psychiatrist, who tries to prescribe
  Nazi medical intern at Buchenwald concentration camp
  , where he worked in a program on experimentally-induced insanity, which he supposed was a more "humane" way of dealing with Jewish prisoners than killing.
• Stanley Koteks – An employee of Yoyodyne Corporation who knows something about the Trystero. Oedipa meets him when she wanders into his office while touring the plant.
• John Nefastis – A scientist obsessed with perpetual motion. He has tried to invent a type of
  perpetual motion machine
  . Oedipa visits him to see the machine after learning about him from Stanley Koteks; the visit is unproductive and she runs out the door after he propositions her.
• Randolph "Randy" Driblette – Director of The Courier's Tragedy by Jacobean playwright Richard Wharfinger and a leading Wharfinger scholar; he deflects Oedipa's questions and dismisses her theories when she approaches him taking a shower after the show; later, he commits suicide by walking into the Pacific before Oedipa can follow up with him but the initial meeting with him spurs her to go on a quest to find the meaning behind Trystero.
• Mike Fallopian – Oedipa and Metzger meet Fallopian in The Scope, a bar frequented by Yoyodyne employees. He tells them about The Peter Pinguid Society, a right-wing, anti-government organization that he belongs to.
• Genghis Cohen – The most eminent philatelist in the Los Angeles area, Cohen was hired to inventory and appraise Inverarity's stamp collection. Oedipa and he discuss stamps and forgeries and he discovers the horn symbol watermark on Inverarity's stamps.
• Professor Emory Bortz – Formerly of
  UC Berkeley
  , now teaching at San Narciso, Bortz wrote the editor's preface in a version of Wharfinger's works. Oedipa tracks him down to learn more about Trystero.

Critics have read the book as both an "exemplary postmodern text" and a parody of postmodernism.^[3][4] Contemporary reviews were mixed, with many critics comparing it unfavourably to Pynchon's first novel V.. A reviewer in Time described the novel as "a metaphysical thriller in the form of a pornographic comic strip".^[5] In a positive The New York Times review, Richard Poirier wrote "Pynchon's technical virtuosity, his adaptations of the apocalyptic-satiric modes of Melville, Conrad, and Joyce, of Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Nabokov, the saturnalian inventiveness he shares with contemporaries like John Barth and Joseph Heller, his security with philosophical and psychological concepts, his anthropological intimacy with the off-beat – these evidences of extraordinary talent in the first novel continue to display themselves in the second".^[6]

Pynchon described, in the prologue to his 1984 collection Slow Learner, an "up-and-down shape of my learning curve" as a writer and specifically does not believe he maintained a "positive or professional direction" in the writing of The Crying of Lot 49, "which was marketed as a 'novel', and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then".^[7]

As ever with Pynchon's writing, the labyrinthine plots offer myriad cultural references. Knowing these references allows for a much richer reading of the work. J. Kerry Grant wrote A Companion to the Crying of Lot 49 to catalogue these references but it is neither definitive nor complete.^[8]

After being prompted to by Stanley Koteks, Oedipa seeks out John Nefastis and his invention coined the 'Nefastis Machine'. This machine attempts to serve as a

Despite Nefastis' attempt at invention, the second law of thermodynamics and its statement regarding entropy cannot be disproven, as the system gains entropy by way of measurement by the demon.^[11][12] This alludes to a famous retort of Maxwell's demon by Szilard and Brillouin which sought to establish congruence between entropy in information theory and thermodynamics.^[13] Scholars have pointed to the entropic nature and indeterminacy of the novel as a symbol which invalidates the demon's existence.^[14][13]

Oedipa's role within The Crying of Lot 49 can be likened to Maxwell's demon—a force which seeks to reverse the flow of entropy on the town of San Narciso.^[14] Just as the demon is hypothesized to sort unpredictable, random molecules to create order from disorder, Oedipa seeks to make sense of the mystery of Trystero.^[14] San Narciso as a city is often described as 'still' or 'silent'; a place where life has stagnated, one cultural microcosm of many within the United States.^[14][12] The concept of Trystero acts as a promise to reverse the entropic regress that America has fallen into, as an 'anarchist miracle'.^[9][13]

The connection between

Supporters of the Freudian interpretation tend to point towards Pynchon's heavy borrowing of Greek literature and extensive use of allusions as part of the cyclic, incestuous nature of recycling within literature.[14] Alternatively, the homogeneity of society around San Narciso as a result of the convergence of entropy has also been pointed to as having an incestuous nature.^[14]

Upon arrival in San Narciso, Oedipa stops to check in at the Echo Courts Motel, which sports a painted sheet metal likeness of the nymph Echo from Ovid's Metamorphoses.^[14] This figure of Echo is holding a flower, suggested to be Narcissus poeticus, alike to the flower Narcissus turns into within the myth of Echo and Narcissus.^[14] Additionally, the pool at Echo Courts Motel is described as flat-surfaced, possibly symbolizing the pool in which Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection.^[14]

Scholars have drawn parallels between Oedipa and both Narcissus and Echo.^[14] Oedipa is initially suggested to bear a self-proclaimed resemblance to Echo, and it has been suggested the longing for answers regarding Trystero mirrors Echo's desire of Narcissus.^[14] Oedipa also recurringly encounters mirrors throughout the novel, initially failing to find herself in the bathroom mirror at Echo Courts, which could point to the beginning of her paranoia. She additionally recounts a dream in which she is making love to her husband at the motel, only to awake to herself staring back at her through a mirror, an act of self-love by way of a mirror, alluding to the fate of Narcissus within Metamorphoses.^[14]

Pynchon devotes a significant part of the book to a play-within-a-book, a detailed description of a performance of an imaginary Jacobean revenge play, involving intrigues between Thurn und Taxis and Trystero.^[15] Like "The Mousetrap", based on "The Murder of Gonzago" that William Shakespeare placed within Hamlet, the events and atmosphere of The Courier's Tragedy (by the fictional Richard Wharfinger) mirror those transpiring around them. In many aspects it resembles a typical revenge play, such as The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, Hamlet by Shakespeare and plays by John Webster and Cyril Tourneur.

The Crying of Lot 49 was published shortly after

Late in the novel, Oedipa's husband, Mucho Maas, a disc jockey at Kinneret radio station KCUF, describes his experience of discovering the Beatles. Mucho refers to their early song "She Loves You", as well as hinting at the areas the Beatles were later to explore. Pynchon wrote,

Whenever I put the headset on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of beer. "Baby," she said, helpless, knowing of nothing she could do for this, and afraid for him. He put a little clear plastic bottle on the table between them. She stared at the pills in it, and then understood. "That's LSD?" she said.

Pynchon, like

Early in The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa recalls a trip to an art museum in Mexico with Inverarity, during which she encountered a painting, Bordando el Manto Terrestre ("Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle") by Remedios Varo.^[18] The 1961 painting shows eight women inside a tower, where they are presumably held captive. Six maidens are weaving a tapestry that flows out of the windows and seems to constitute the world outside of the tower. Oedipa's reaction to the tapestry gives us some insight into her difficulty in determining what is real and what is a fiction created by Inverarity for her benefit,

She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape.

• The song "Looking for Lot 49" by The Jazz Butcher alludes to the novel in its title and theme of postal services.^[19]
• Radiohead allude to the novel in the name of their online merchandise shop and mailing list, W.A.S.T.E.^[20]
• The song "The Crying of Lot G" by Yo La Tengo is an allusion to the novel.^[21]
• The song "Radio Zero" by The Poster Children mentions "Radio KCUF" in the lyrics. They also used W.A.S.T.E. and the post-horn on their first cassette.^[22]
• In the William Gibson novel Count Zero (1986), the multinational corporation Maas Neotek is named in honor of Oedipa Maas.^[23]
• The sample configuration file for GNU's Wget uses proxy.yoyodyne.com as a placeholder for the proxy setting.^[24]
• The Phone Company (tpc.int), established by Carl Malamud and Marshall Rose in 1991, used the post horn of the Trystero guild as its logo.^[25]
• A
  QR Code scanner in the guise of a nominal secret decoder ring) prominently features the Trystero muted horn.^[26]
• The title of the 2018 AMC-TV series Lodge 49 alludes to the novel.^[27][28]
• The public art installation called the San Jose Semaphore, on top of the Adobe World Headquarters in San Jose, contained a riddle between 2006 and 2007 which, when solved, resulted in the text of the novel.^[29][30]
• The anime film Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space (2002) bases part of its plot about a religious cult becoming a mail-order monopoly and intergalactic power on the novel's Tristero.^[31]
• In the movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems is the name of a supposed defense contractor that is really a front for a group of red Lectroid aliens, all of whom are named John.^[32]
• In The O.C. episode "The L.A.", Paris Hilton reveals that she is working on a thesis on Pynchon. Another character responds, saying he has only read "The Crying of Lot 49".^[33]
• In the sixth book 'The Ersatz Elevator' of The Series of Unfortunate Events, Lot 49 of the auction featured a collection of rare stamps, referencing Pynchon's novel.^{[34][circular reference]}
• The title and lyrics of the song "San Narciso" by Faded Paper Figures refer to the fictional city featured in the novel.^[35]
• The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "In the Cards" features a Willie Mays baseball card being sold at an auction, where it is listed as Lot 49.
• The The Simpsons episode "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife" mirrors parts of the plot of the novel, and features Pynchon portraying himself.

• Pynchon, Thomas (December 1965). "The World (This One), The Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), And The Testament Of Pierce Inverarity". Esquire. pp. 170–173, 296–303. (excerpt)
• Pynchon, Thomas R. The Crying of Lot 49. J. B. Lippincott. Philadelphia. 1966.^[36] 1st edition. OCLC 916132946
• Pynchon, Thomas R. The Crying of Lot 49. Harper and Row, 1986, reissued 2006.
  ISBN 978-0060913076
   : Perennial Fiction Library edition.