The Postmodern Landscape of Thomas Pynchon’s The
Crying of Lot 49
Master Thesis
Literary Studies: Literature and Culture Supervisor: Carrol Clarkson
Table of Contents
Introduction ... 3
Defining the Flâneur ... 5
1.1 The Possibility of a female flâneur ... 7
1.2 The Postmodern flâneur ... 9
2. Oedipa's Journey From the Suburbs to the Streets ... 15
2.1 Escaping the Suburbs ... 16
2.2 The Detctive Plot in Lot 49 ... 20
2.3 The representation of Academic Inquiry in Lot 49 ... 26
2.4 Oedipa's Role as Flâneur ... 32
3. The Postmodernism of Lot 49 ... 38
3.1 Embracing the Uncertainty ... 41
3.2 The Postmodern City ... 48
Conclusion ... 52
Works Cited ... 54
Introduction
In the 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 Thomas Pynchon weaves together an image of a dreamlike America consisting of real and imaginary places. The city plays a
predominant role in the story as Pynchon’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas, can be seen exploring the urban landscapes of San Francisco and the fictional San Narciso. In doing so Oedipa comes to embody the same perceptive attitude as Walter Benjamin’s flâneur: she views the city as being capable of conducting her into a vanished time and as containing “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning” (Pynchon 19). One of the key moments in the novel, therefore, is when Oedipa decides to “drift […] at random, and watch nothing happen” (96). It is in the physical act of walking and observing the city that she comes closest to an understanding of both her own subjectivity and also the society she inhabits.
A few critics have mentioned the possibility of reading Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas as a flâneur (e.g. Paul Jahshan and Daniela Daniele) but no one appears to have written extensively on the topic. Nevertheless, The Crying of Lot 49 gives an important insight into how this famous icon of urban modernity has adapted to the age of postmodernity. In the novel it is possible to track Oedipa’s transformation from a detached and
authoritative spectator to her embracing a more marginal role as postmodern flâneur where she is able to engage with the diversity of the city. Although Oedipa goes back and forth between the two roles she comes, at least temporarily, to embrace
fragmentation and partiality in her interactions with the city.
Oedipa occupies several roles that all tie her to the figure of the flâneur: she is a drifter, an amateur detective, and an academic. As a detective and as an academic Oedipa subjects clues and texts to vigorous scrutiny in the belief that any concealed
meaning she discovers will be unifying. However, as the novel progresses and Oedipa steps into the role of a drifter she moves from “decipherment and self-enclosure to […] randomness” (Petillon 137). It is, as Pierre-Yves Petillon points out, a journey that takes her out of the conventional fifties and into the countercultural sixties (137). Although the novel takes place in 19641
Pynchon appears to be representing a period of transition, thus Oedipa can be viewed as a transitional figure, or as a mediator between two ages. Oedipa also inhabits a middle space in her role as a flâneur since she has gained a postmodern sensibility that moves her beyond Benjamin’s definition of the figure; yet she is, finally, unable to completely abandon her modernist hope of being able to decipher the chaos of experiences into a comprehensible narrative. Thus The Crying of
Lot 49 at once reconsiders the relation of the individual to the modern city, while it also
stresses how the encounter with a fragmented urban space can be a terrifying experience. Pynchon suggests a clear link between the spatial environment of the city and individual subjectivity; therefore we see how Oedipa struggles to come to terms with the possibility of her identity being as fragmented as the urban space she encounters.
The purpose of this thesis is threefold. Firstly, it aims to come to a definition of the postmodern flâneur by discussing the work of Walter Benjamin and contemporary critics, such as Susan Buck-Morss and Deborah L. Parsons. Secondly, it will explore
The Crying of Lot 49 in detail with a particular focus on how Oedipa transitions from a
state of self-enclosure to a more perceptive state as a flâneur capable of listening to the dispossessed people of her society. Finally, it will discuss whether the novel can be considered postmodern and how Pynchon’s description of the “decentered” city can be viewed as a reflection of postmodern subjectivity.
1 In chapter 5 the year 1904 is printed on a subscription magazine, which prompts a character
1. Defining The Flâneur
For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define (Baudelaire 9).
The passage above conveys at once the contradictory and elusive nature of the flâneur; nevertheless, critics have made use of this metaphorical figure again and again as a way to understand the modern metropolis and modernity itself. The word was first used to describe a very specific social type who could be seen strolling the streets and arcades of 19th
century Paris. Described as a man of leisure and as someone who enjoys going “botanizing on the asphalt” (Benjamin, “The Flâneur” 36), the image we get of the flâneur is of a person who has the means and freedom to go wherever he pleases. Yet, he is not simply an idler but spends his time observing and investigating “the stony labyrinths of the metropolis” (Benjamin, The Arcades Project 434). Since his heyday the flâneur has not quietly gone into extinction, but the term has become an important symbol, an analytical device, and an urban archetype, especially due to the work of Walter Benjamin in the early 20th
century.
However, this ambiguous character continues to refuse to be pinned down and has been likened to everything from the literary detective to the postmodern surfer of
cyberspace. The term, then, might be at risk of being too inclusive, which could result in it becoming meaningless (Parsons 4). In contrast Benjamin offers a rather narrow
characterisation of the flâneur by implying that this important figure is by definition a middle-class man who can only exist in certain environments, such as those found within the Parisian arcades. Thus the possibility of a contemporary presence is almost impossible, at least according to Benjamin, since the flâneur was on the verge of
extinction at the time he was writing, driven from his natural habitat by the increased pace of modernity. To get a sense of the favoured speed of the flâneur Benjamin notes that around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to bring turtles for a walk in the arcades, letting the animal set the pace for the walker (“The Flaneur” 54). But by the early 20th
century, the time in which Benjamin was writing, the increased pace of traffic and the manifestations of a swollen urban population made the slow pace favoured by the stroller impossible; thus the majority of the flâneurs retreated to the safety of the indoors.
Despite Benjamin’s suggestion that the flâneur would inevitably disappear due to the effects of capitalism upon metropolitan life several critics have claimed that the figure has evolved into contemporary incarnations, for instance as Susan Buck-Morss suggests:
The flâneur becomes extinct only by exploding into a myriad of forms, the phenomenological characteristics of which, no matter how new they may appear, continue to bear his traces, as ur-form. This is the truth of the flâneur, more visible in his afterlife than in his flourishing (346).
In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 we encounter just one of these recent incarnations of the flâneur. Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of the novel, is unemployed, independent (her husband is indifferent to her leaving the house for several days), and financially well off – in other words, she has the time and the means for flânerie. She is also a Young Republican and a housewife; she is painfully ordinary, an everywoman. Particularly the fact that Oedipa is a woman makes her a problematic candidate for the title of flâneur, at least from Benjamin’s perspective.
1.2 The Possibility of a Female Flâneur
Oedipa Maas is both a woman and a flâneur: two roles that Walter Benjamin implicitly suggests are mutually exclusive by equating the “gentleman of leisure” (“On Some Motifs” 172) with the flâneur. However, as Pynchon’s protagonist enters the streets of San Francisco in chapter 5, she comes to inhabit the characteristics of a typical flâneur: she is able to drift “unmolested” (Pynchon 92); she observes while “feeling invisible” (93); and she eavesdrops without anyone paying attention to her. Considering herself a “voyeur” (93) she subjects the elements of the city to her look; thus she is the bearer of the meaningful “gaze” (as coined by Laura Mulvey), and not its object. To consider whether Oedipa qualifies as a flâneur despite her gender, it will be helpful to have a closer look at the critical discussions surrounding the topic of the female flâneur. The flâneur, as both a critical metaphor and a social phenomenon, has historically been regarded as an exclusively male figure (Parson 4). As a social phenomenon the flâneur belongs to the 19th
century metropolis and can be described as a middle-class dandy fond of strolling, observation, and art. At this period of time it was frowned upon for women to enter the streets, which may help to explain why the figure, at least until recently, has been conceived of in male terms. The idea of a female flâneur, or flâneuse, was simply inconceivable to most people. Even some contemporary critics agree with this view, for instance Griselda Pollock who claims that “there is no equivalent of the quintessential masculine figure, the flâneur: there is not and could not be a female flâneuse” (100) Janet Wolff agrees with this position and points out that “the ideology of women’s place in the domestic realm permeated the whole of society” (37). For
city, thus rendering the possibility of a female flâneur impossible by “the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century” (47)
Of course women could still be seen in the 19th
century metropolis but often they were chaperoned, making the act of random strolling virtually impossible. If women were to be seen alone in the street, they would most likely be perceived as
“streetwalkers” – inherent in the very word that has come to mean prostitute, we get a sense of the negative connotations associated with women roaming the streets of a city. The tendency to equate women walking in urban areas with prostitutes has resulted in women becoming associated with consumerist urges due to their association with commodification. According to feminist critics, such as Wolff and Pollock, it is exactly these gendered preconceptions that make the notion of the female city observer
impossible: the flâneur is the bearer of the controlling “male gaze”, while the woman does not look but is reduced to the object of desire.
Critics have since challenged Wolff and Pollock by proving that women have had a more dominant presence in the 19th
century city than had previously been imagined. Furthermore, Deborah L. Parsons points out that Wolff and Pollock appear to have ignored “the important point that the flâneur is not only a historical figure but also a critical metaphor […] perhaps as a result of their tendency to blur historical actuality with its use as a cultural, critical phenomenon.” (5) Similarly, Susan Buck-Morss distinguishes between the historical figure and his metaphorical reincarnation: “If the flâneur has disappeared as a specific figure, it is because the perceptive attitude which he embodied saturates modern existence, specifically, the society of mass consumption” (37). In light of Morss’s statement we might consider the possibility of Pynchon having cast Oedipa Maas as his protagonist due to the fact that she is a character as far removed
from Benjamin’s description of the figure as possible, thus suggesting that the perceptive attitude, which this figure represents, is no longer a marginal experience. Although the flâneur as a critical metaphor is closely connected to the historical figure, he (and increasingly she) is no longer confined to the Parisian arcades of the 19th
century. It is particularly in light of postmodernist criticism that it has become possible to reimagine the flâneur as female. For as a result of contemporary criticism gender roles are perceived as being more fluent: masculinity and femininity no longer fitting as comfortably into the traditional gender binary. With the advent of postmodernism the flâneur appears to have taken a new form (or forms) altogether: no longer an
authoritative observer promising a totalizing narrative of reality, the flâneur has transmuted into countless forms. We can no longer look to the flâneur for a reassuring and unifying vision of the world since the postmodern flâneur is concerned with the marginal, accepting a partial and fragmented view of reality. In the work of Walter Benjamin we not only get a description of the modernist flâneur but he also develops an account of another figure, which we might call the precursor for the postmodern flâneur.
1.3 The Postmodern Flâneur
In an essay entitled “The Flâneur” Walter Benjamin considers the possibility of the flâneur taking two forms: Edgar Allen Poe’s “man of the crowd”, someone who seeks the crowd and only feels comfortable in its midst, and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “man of leisure” who sits at a window in his own home from which he, in a position of
superiority, can observe the cityscape and the swarm of people walking past. However, in a later text, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, Benjamin rejects the possibility of Poe’s flâneur altogether by proclaiming that “the man of the crowd is no flâneur” (172).
Having a closer look at the two short stories will illustrate how Hoffmann’s protagonist can be viewed as a modernist flâneur, while Poe’s character – although ultimately rejected by Benjamin – can be seen as representing the prototype for the postmodern flâneur.
In E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1822 short story “My Cousin’s Corner Window” an
unnamed narrator visits his cousin, an invalid confined to his house, his only channel to the outside world being his corner window. Outside the window a bustling marketplace presents a striking contrast to the quiet confinement of the small room. The narrator’s cousin is fond of observing the details of the crowd through opera glasses but is unable to actively join the hustle and bustle. Even if he could go outside it appears that he prefers to be at a distance from the crowd and would be “unwilling to forgo the life of […] leisure” (Benjamin, “On Some Motifs” 172).
It is curious that Benjamin alludes to a character that is physically incapable of strolling the streets of the metropolis, yet the comparison works to emphasise
Benjamin’s notion of the flâneur as being a detached observer rather than “a man of the crowd”. For Hoffman’s protagonist is no man of the crowd, rather he is a controlling and authoritative spectator searching for patterns of meaning in the cityscape beneath his window. He has mastered the art of seeing but like a voyeur he remains at a safe distance from the observed object, preferring to subject the street scene to his visual mastery. As Parsons points out, Hoffman’s flâneur is not a walker within the city but he views the city from an aloof position, attempting to translate “the chaotic and
fragmentary city into an understandable and familiar space” (3). This type of flâneur reassured the individual – as the detective figure would a few decades later – that social reality is essentially knowable and can be explained by reason. In contrast, the
into the exterior of the city before realising that there is something fundamentally unknowable about the world.
Edgar Allen Poe’s 1840 short story “The Man of the Crowd” introduces a narrator who is at first placed in a position of scopic authority, from which he attempts to provide a panoramic vision of the big-city crowd. From behind a café window he categorises the pedestrians into groups based on their appearances and facial expressions, yet in
hindsight he considers: “it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years” (Poe 233). By bringing up his “peculiar mental state” the narrator implies that his previous assumption of understanding human nature in its entirety was illusionary (perhaps a delusion brought on by his unspecified illness). Indeed, by following the dark stranger, who may be his double, through the busy streets of London, the narrator realises that there are hidden depths of the human psyche that are not only too hideous to be revealed but also that they might ultimately be unknowable. This shift in understanding is directly related to the protagonist’s transition from detached observer – as someone who
attempts to present a clear outline of the city (and humanity) – to investigative walker within the labyrinthine streets of the city. As he himself becomes a man of the crowd the narrator is able to actively interact with his surroundings, yet at street-level the city also appears more chaotic and uncertain. As the narrator plunges into the unknowability of the crowd, the reader is also confronted with a sense of uncertainty for by the end of the story the narrator has failed in his attempt to solve the mystery of the unknown man. In Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa goes through a transition similar to that of Poe’s narrator as she is drawn out of the sheltered suburbs and pushed into a chaotic street life where she encounters “drunks, bums, pedestrians, pederasts and hookers” (114). Pynchon presents a clear division of space where being inside evokes feelings of
safety but also utter predictability, while being outside induces a sense of dislocation and uncertainty. At the beginning of chapter 2 when Oedipa first encounters the fictional city San Narciso she is protected from the crowd by being in a car. Because the car functions as a mobile private space Oedipa is in an interior space, similar to the café in Poe’s short story or the small room in Hoffman’s story.
Pynchon compares Oedipa’s car with a soundproof DJ booth: “was it something like this he [Oedipa’s husband] felt, looking through the soundproof glass at one of his colleagues […] did Mucho stand outside Studio A looking in, knowing that even if he could hear it he couldn’t believe in it?” (19). Both the car and the booth are hermetically sealed containers, suggesting that Oedipa has become isolated from her surroundings. Pynchon’s objective is therefore not only to have Oedipa leave behind the suburbs but also to have her leave behind the safety of her car and explore her spatial environment on foot, strolling flâneur-like through the city of San Francisco.
Before entering the city at street-level Oedipa views it from the top of a hill and therefore perceives a sense of order, like the designer of a labyrinth would have done. The image of the labyrinth, or the maze, is a recurring image in the novel: the
labyrinthine estate of Pierce Inverarity (Oedipa’s former boyfriend), the mazy lines of playwright Randolph Driblette’s eyes, and the tangled network of San Narciso’s streets. William Gleason points out that the labyrinth can be perceived from two angles: “One may enter the labyrinth as an explorer (a Theseus figure) and experience it through time (diachronically – or, as a reader) or view it from above as a designer (a Daedalus figure) and see it all at once (synchronically – or, as a writer).” (84) Thus, whereas a labyrinth may appear chaotic, dangerous, and fragmented to an explorer, the designer, viewing his or her creation from above, may find the same labyrinth orderly and comforting.
Oedipa’s bird’s eye view of San Narciso gives her the impression of an ordered city consisting of unifying patterns waiting to be uncovered: “The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected,
astonishing clarity as the circuit card had […] there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.” (19) As the smog thickens over the horizon, literally and metaphorically clouding her view, Oedipa is finally incapable of piercing through the hidden meaning she believes to be present within the scenery. At this moment Oedipa inhabits the role of Benjamin’s modernist flâneur attempting to exhort her mastery over the city, desperately trying to organise scattered clues into a coherent meaning.
When we first meet Oedipa, then, she belongs to the nineteenth-century school of rationalism and scientific predictability (Das 144). Pynchon continually, but subtly, lets us know that Oedipa has faith in the system of determinability. Consider for instance the humorous description of an event that takes place in chapter 2 where Oedipa loses control over a can of hairspray:
The can knew where it was going, she sensed, or something fast enough, God or a digital machine, might have computed in advance the complex web of its travel, but she wasn’t fast enough, and knew only that it might hit them at any moment. (23)
According to Oedipa the seemingly erratic movements of the hairspray, follow the laws of cause and effect, along with the rest of the universe, and it is therefore, at least in theory, possible to predict “the complex web of its travel.”
Oedipa’s positivistic worldview extends to her self-identity: she considers herself a decipherer who is, at least potentially, capable of solving the mystery of the city. She wants to bring order to the chaos in the same way as a classical detective attempts to interpret a myriad of clues into a unifying narrative. The classical detective novel, as
Laura Marcus explains, is represented as “a closed structure, in which every aspect of the narration leads towards the exposure of the means by which the crime was
committed, the discovery of the criminal, and the re-establishment of order” (248). Walter Benjamin has called “The Man of the Crowd” an X-ray of a detective story; yet, it is not until the creation of C. Auguste Dupin (usually considered to be the first detective in fiction) that Poe created the ultra-rational universe that has come to be associated with classical detective fiction. Here it should be noted that the flâneur has long been associated with the detective. Even if the flâneur demands a deliberate
slowness and aimlessness his or her apparent idleness is only a front, behind which hides an observer. Observant and slow-paced the flâneur is able to pick up pieces of
information left behind by the city, which busy workers or distracted pedestrians might not see. The tendency of the stroller to see what ordinary people cannot has lead several critics, including Benjamin, to liken the figure to the detective. Having gained a social function that “accredits his idleness” (Benjamin, “The Flaneur” 41) the flâneur has come to put his or her skills of observation and interpretation to good use, or as James Werner puts it: “The rise of the detective reflects society’s uneasiness about the flâneur and its pressure to mitigate his elusiveness.” (6)
It is “The Man of the Crowd” with its failure of rational reasoning that can be seen as the predecessor for Pynchon’s postmodern investigator/flâneur – not the classical detective Dupin or Hoffman’s authoritative flâneur. The transformation Oedipa goes through in The Crying of Lot 49 in many ways mirrors that of Poe’s protagonist: she moves from an interior space of detection into a more sincere exchange in the exterior as flâneur. For it is when Oedipa lets herself be carried along by the “human surge” (97) of the big-city crowd that she encounters the hidden side of America (and of herself). Letting herself be led by the crowd transforms her as deeply as Poe’s protagonist,
undermining her liberal rationalism and faith in finding the underlying truth. Unlike Poe’s protagonist, however, Oedipa’s transition is threefold: she escapes from a state of complete inertia (her life in the suburbs), and gradually defines a new role for herself as an amateur detective/scholar, before finally confronting the uncertainties of Pynchon’s postmodern universe as a flâneur (the night she “decides to drift” in San Francisco). Before considering her role as a flâneur we must therefore first consider the
transformation she undergoes; her movement from the interior to the exterior.
2. Oedipa's Journey From the Suburbs to the Streets
The Crying of Lot 49 revolves around Oedipa’s quest to untangle her former boyfriend
Pierce Inverarity’s estate after she receives a letter in which he names her executrix of his will. The task grows increasingly more mysterious as she discovers that Pierce has left behind a set of stamps that may have been used by a secret postal system, which she names The Tristero. Her quest leads her to the acronym W.A.S.T.E. (We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire) suggesting that the secret organisation is not just an underground postal network but might represent an alternative to the official system of power. Yet both the reader and Oedipa begin to question if The Tristero really exists: it is equally plausible that it is a post-mortem prank played upon her by Pierce, or that Oedipa like a “true paranoid” (113) is fantasizing the whole thing. The uncertainty is never resolved for the novel has an open ending. The event that may determine whether The Tristero exists or not is the auction of “lot 49” (Pierce’s stamp collection) since members of the organisation are likely to turn up in order to avoid the circulation of the secret stamps. We leave Pynchon’s universe at the moment the auctioneer clears his throat, and thereby we never witness “the crying of lot 49.”
Although the novel takes place in the summer of 1964 the novel is not just about this particular period in time. According to Pierre-Yves Petillon, it symbolically represents that period of transition from the late 1950s to the early 1960s (129). The central symbol of the novel is a muted post horn, which signifies the mysterious Tristero. The muted post horn can be seen as an emblem of the silent, or “muted”, generation of the fifties – a generation brought up to value quiet conventionality. As Oedipa leaves behind her safe suburban life, which is very much part of the iconography of the fifties, she enters the countercultural sixties of free love, beat poetry, psychedelic drugs, and youth rebellion. Her journey is one from silence and conformity to curiosity and rebellion.
2.1 Escaping the Suburbs
When we first meet Oedipa she inhabits a structural world where identities are believed to be fixed and knowable. Her character is almost a pastiche of a 1950s suburban housewife: she attends Tupperware parties, gets drunk on kirsch, tends to her herb garden, cooks lasagne, goes shopping, and prepares drinks for her husband. Yet, Oedipa is “first to admit” that most of her days appear “more or less identical” (2), suggesting that she is well aware of the banality and predictability of her life. This insight along with the fact that she reads Scientific America may be the first inklings of a longing to escape the intellectual inertia of suburban America. Thus already before she is thrown into the shadowy world of The Tristero a creeping suspicion seems to be haunting Pynchon’s “young Republican” protagonist: maybe the foundations on which she has based her life and her perception of herself are not as stable as she thought them to be.
It is also the awareness of a sense of inertia, or greyness, that drives Oedipa’s husband, Mucho Maas, to despair. At his previous job as a used car salesman Mucho has encountered America’s “salad of despair” coated in a “grey dressing of ash” (5), which gives him an insight into the colourless existence of the disadvantaged people of
America. For Mucho, who would rather have worked in an outright junkyard, considers these people the living dead, nothing but shadows suffering from a “grey sickness”. Ironically, Mucho appears to have turned into exactly what he despises: he has lost the appetite for meaning, as he does not believe in his new job at a radio station, while his movement towards “the sweating shakerful of booze” suggests that he attempts to numb his feelings with alcohol. His response, “yeah, yeah”, to Oedipa’s attempt to involve him in the mystery of Pierce Inverarity’s letter, in which she has been appointed executrix of his estate, implies a lack of curiosity and a feeling of apathy. Like Oedipa he appears to be experiencing the “absence of an intensity”, or a sense of “insulation”.
The insulation metaphor is particularly interesting as Oedipa a few pages later, when meeting the lawyer Metzger, literally insulates herself in layers and layers of clothing. In her protective cocoon Oedipa attempts to fend off Metzger’s sexual advances, although in reality she is very attracted to this actor-turned-lawyer who is “so good-looking” that she wonders if somebody is putting her on. Metzger is eventually allowed to peel off layer after layer, perhaps in search of a core that finally may not exist, as Peer Gynt realises in Henrik Ibsen’s play when peeling an onion imagining that each layer represents a part of his ego.
Oedipa’s night of infidelity is also the starting point of her journey into the Tristero System, which “were to bring to an end her encapsulation in her tower” (29). By having an extra-marital affair Oedipa symbolically rejects the conventions of traditional family life, she is giving up the stillness and security of her “insulated” suburban life in
Kinneret in favour of a life of freedom and intellectual pursuit, as she attempts to discover a hidden America, which may or may not offer “a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American” (150). But giving up her previous life comes at a price for Oedipa is moving away from the illusion of an ordered universe where everything and everyone have been assigned a place and purpose, which has hitherto given her a sense of safety, and not least, a sense of sanity. As her shrink, Dr. Hilarius, reminds us, once this fantasy of an ordered world is lost you might go insane or “you begin to cease to be” (122).
What ushers Oedipa into attempting to recover from the “grey sickness” of her inert life in the suburbs is the arrival of Pierce Inverarity’s letter in which she is given the task of untangling his estate. Nonetheless, Pierce should not be seen as some kind of rescuing figure for his letter merely acts as the catalyst that brings Oedipa onto her quest for meaning. To accentuate the fact that Oedipa is embarking on a solitary pursuit Pynchon makes sure that all the men that she has previously looked to for answers disappear:
My shrink, pursued by Israelis, has gone mad; my husband, on LSD, gropes like a child further and further into the rooms and endless rooms of the elaborate candy house of himself and away, hopelessly away, from what has passed, I was hoping forever, for love; my one extra-marital fella has eloped with a depraved 15-year-old; my best guide back to the Trystero has taken a Brody. (135)
Oedipa’s “men” have disappeared in one way or another, which is quite a change for a woman whose identity has “been defined by the reflected light of the males surrounding her” (Bergh 4). When we are first introduced to her, for instance, she is referred to as “Mrs Oedipa Maas”, thus she is immediately associated with her husband.
If her last name is an “inheritance” of her husband’s lineage her first name, as the feminization of the name Oedipus, can similarly be called a legacy of the male literary tradition. Furthermore, her name brings up associations to psychoanalysis, which is a
narrative founded by a man to explain the world of both sexes. Thus Oedipa is defined not only by the men around her but also by the legacy left behind by the great men of history. We might say that she comes into contact with a series of “grand narratives”, represented by the various men she encounters, for instance: capitalism (Pierce Inverarity), psychoanalysis (Dr. Hilarius), and Fascism (Winthrope Tremaine). According to Jean-François Lyotard the postmodern condition is characterised by mistrust in any narrative attempting to offer a unifying explanation of the world: “The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal” (xxiv).
It is also a sense of scepticism towards the grand narrative of American capitalism that pulls Oedipa out of the sleepy suburbs. Pierce Inverarity is the archetypical
capitalist of the novel and he leaves his legacy (“the legacy was America” (157)) to Oedipa; thus she is given the enormous task of finding a new way of representing her own identity in a world that has changed and is forever changing. However, in her investigation of The Tristero Oedipa appears to be searching for another unifying grand narrative – or as she puts it: “the underlying truth” (42) – to explain her new encounter with the dispossessed people of America. In her quest for “truth” Oedipa takes on the role of amateur detective, and by extension that of amateur scholar. For Pynchon links (and criticises) the activities of the traditional literary scholar with those of the detective by suggesting that both are concerned with finding a unifying narrative when confronted with a text/mystery.
2.2 The Detective Plot in Lot 49
The first name of Pynchon’s protagonist immediately positions her within the role of an investigator as it links her to Oedipus who as a solver of riddles has been called the original detective. However, as this ancient myth from the European tradition has moved over the Atlantic and into the 20th
century there no longer seems to be any final solutions to the riddles posed within the story world. Thrown into a search for information about a shadowy communication network called The Tristero (or Trystero) Oedipa’s quest evolves into a search for a means of representing one’s self in an increasingly obscure world. However, unlike Oedipus who ultimately uncovers the mystery of his heritage, Oedipa is left only with clues and partial revelations, as she suspects midway through her quest: “[might she] not be left with only compiled memories of clues,
announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself?” (83). Whereas the mythical Greek king eventually, and regretfully, learns his true identity, Oedipa frees herself from a preconceived and reductive identity as a housewife, only to become more uncertain as to who she really is, or as Lance Olsen observes, she moves in the opposite direction of the conventional detective, she moves from “certainty to uncertainty” (158). The central mystery of The Crying of Lot 49 originates in a will written by Oedipa’s old boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. If we accept Joseph Slade’s suggestion that “Inverarity” is a play on “Dr. Moriarty” (108) Oedipa can be seen as performing the role of Sherlock Holmes, a sentiment that she herself confirms:
Where was the Odipa who’d driven so bravely up here from San Narciso? That optimistic baby had come on so like the private eye in any long-ago radio drama, believing all you needed was grit, resourcefulness, exemption from hidebound cops’ rules, to solve any great mystery. (94)
By using the past tense, however, Oedipa appears at this moment in time – having just confronted the chaotic streets of San Francisco – to abandon her ambition of solving the great mystery of the novel. Furthermore, by relegating the private eye to a long-ago radio drama, Pynchon suggests that Sherlock Holmes and his kind are fundamentally out of place in the postmodern world; the classical detective belongs to a time “long-ago.” Earlier in the novel Pynchon makes another reference linking the detective figure with the radio drama by having Pierce imitate Lamont Cranston, the most famous identity of a certain crime-fighting character better known as The Shadow. Fond of mimicking different voices it is Pierce’s Lamont Cranston voice that Oedipa hears in their very last phone conversation before his death, suggesting not only that Pierce’s sense of self is fragmented but also that the conventions of the classical detective story might have died with him.
Other classic tropes of the genre – sleazy bars, dark alleyways, suicides – make an appearance in the novel, yet The Crying of Lot 49 reconstructs rather than constructs a detective story and can therefore be considered a parody of the genre, or at least a parody of positivist detection (Sweeney 166). Despite the fact that the novel itself portrays the detective as an anachronistic figure, Oedipa continually returns to her hope of solving the mystery of The Tristero. She has moments of pessimism, and it is also true that she becomes more uncertain of her detective abilities as the novel progresses, but she is unable to forsake her optimistic faith altogether. Prasanta Das agrees that Oedipa for the most part has “the same faith that Holmes and his kind have in
rationalism and nineteenth-century scientific determinism and predictability” (Das 144). The reason Oedipa clings so desperately to her role as a detective might be
explained by the pattern of reassurance that detective fiction is said to have (Holquist 139). The classical detective story – as pioneered by Edgar Allen Poe – presents an
“ordered, ultra-rational world” and therefore it functions as an escapism from the world of disorder (Holquist 141). In the world of the detective everything can be explained by reason and intellect; thus nothing is uncertain or unknowable. In a chaotic world the detective works as a comforting presence, promising to find patterns of meaning in apparent disorder.
When Oedipa is first turned into an amateur detective by receiving Pierce
Inverarity’s letter the mystery seems simple enough: she has to untangle his assets and find the reason why he has assigned her executrix (a strange choice considering she is married to another man and that they have hardly spoken to each other for years). She believes there must be a logical explanation but as the novel progresses the central mystery keeps changing, becoming increasingly more complex. Pynchon at once makes use of the familiarity of the detective novel, while also subverting the genre’s
conventions. Thus we might call The Crying of Lot 49 a metaphysical detective story:
[…] the metaphysical detective story does not have the narcotizing effect of it progenitor; instead of familiarity, it gives strangeness, a strangeness which more often than not it the result of jumbling the well known patterns of classical detective stories. Instead of reassurance, they disturb. They are not an escape, but an attack. By exploiting the conventions of the detective story such men as Borges and Robbe-Grillet have fought against the Modernist attempt to fill the void of the world with rediscovered mythical symbols. Rather they dramatize the void. If, in the detective story, death must be solved, in the new metaphysical detective story it is life which must be solved. (Holquist 155)
Near the end of the novel Oedipa becomes sick (“there were headaches,
nightmares, menstrual pains” (151)) as a result of her creeping suspicion that she might be peering into the void (“for this, oh God, was the void” (151)). For Oedipa the notion that there might be no order, permanence, or planned purpose to life represents the void. She is having a full-blown existential crisis as she begins to suspect that exposing the reality behind the clues, or images, that she has collected on her journey presents a danger, for as Patricia A. Bergh points out with a reference to the work of Jean
Baudrillard: “there is danger in unmasking images since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them” (10). Nevertheless, Oedipa chooses to go against Dr. Hilarius’s advice and not “cherish the fantasy” (122). Although her journey through the uncertainty and ambiguity of Pynchon’s “twilight zone” (Petillon 130) is a difficult one, leading to feelings of emptiness, paranoia, and madness, it is also a necessary experience if Oedipa wishes to break free from her “Rapunzel-like” (10) captivity.
Several critics have noted that the detective is analogous to the reader, for instance as JoAnn Cannon writes: “the detective novel may be read as a metaphor of the reader’s search for meaning in the text” (48). Our predicament as readers attempting to unravel the complicated narrative discourse and Pynchon’s often tangled and complex writing style mirrors Oedipa’s detective quest. We might get a better understanding of
Pynchon’s literary style by having a closer look at one of the novel’s most complex sentences:
Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10c, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes it made him sick to look, but he had to look. (4-5)
From this long sentence (perhaps the longest of the novel) we get a sense of Pynchon’s convoluted prose: for the most part it reads smoothly and rhythmically but at times the flow of the sentence becomes disrupted by the frequent use of parentheses to express an
afterthought, with the result of the reader being thrown off guard, and perhaps becoming as confused and disoriented as Oedipa.
The sentence begins with an observation: “maybe to excess” (referring to the previous sentence: “Yet at least he had believed in the cars”). However, from this remark onwards the sentence moves into connected; yet never entirely illuminating images of the actual car lot – we never quite find out why exactly Mucho “believes” in the cars. Instead the reader like Oedipa is left to sort through an overflow of details and clues, taking us further and further into the chaotic world of the car lot, and subsequently into the interiors of the cars, and then into the very lives of the people that frequent the place: the dispossessed people of America, the people “poorer” than Mucho.
Consequently, the reader is tugged into this other America – the dark underbelly of the country – very much like Oedipa is pulled from her safe suburban life by Pierce’s letter. For it is also language, in the form of a letter, that is the beginning of Oedipa’s journey. Pynchon’s labyrinthine writing style is not confined to this specific sentence but examples can be found throughout the novel (another notable example being the plot description of the fictional play The Courier’s Tragedy). In the same way as Oedipa gets lost in the dark streets of San Francisco we might, at times, get lost and feel a sense of bewilderment when reading the text itself. Along with the ambiguity of the narrative discourse, the many intertextual references, and the complicated symbolic imagery, Pynchon turns his readers into detectives, as Pierce Inverarity does Oedipa in the opening scene. For as Debra Moddlemog puts it: “Our mystery is to learn how to read Pynchon’s story” (1).
The reader shares Oedipa’s mounting sense of epistemological doubt as there is no way of telling in what ways and to which degree she is an unreliable narrator. Almost entirely limited to Oedipa’s point of view, as expressed though free indirect discourse,
the reader cannot check her proposed versions of events against an objective reality. To complicate things further Pynchon often blurs the distinctions between narrator and character. As William Gleason notes, Pynchon adopts a kind of “narrative ventriloquy”, as the narrator at times appears to be speaking through Oedipa (89):
A Negro woman with an intricately-marbled scar along the baby-fat of one cheek who kept going through rituals of miscarriage each for a different reason, deliberately as others might the ritual of birth, dedicated not to continuity but to some kind of interregnum; an aging night-watchman, nibbling at a bar of Ivory Soap, who had trained his virtuoso stomach to accept also lotions, air-fresheners, fabrics, tobaccos and waxes in a hopeless attempt to assimilate it all, all the promise, productivity, betrayal, ulcers, before it was too late; and even another voyeur, who hung outside one of the city's still-lighted windows, searching for who knew what specific image. (108)
Gleason suggests that the insights of the woman’s “rituals of miscarriage” and the night-watchman’s “virtuoso stomach” must belong to the narrator, and not Oedipa. Not until we get to the more uncertain “another voyeur […] searching for who knew what specific image” do we again return to Oedipa’s point of view (Gleason 89). Although it is
possible to read these “insights” as Oedipa’s own speculations, given the fact that she is prone to look for unifying narratives to explain the world around her, it is perhaps a bit of a stretch to think Oedipa – who is at this point both exhausted and drunk – capable of such intricate and poetic reflections.
Considering the novel’s general rejection of unambiguity, however, it is possible to read the whole text as either stemming from Oedipa’s own point of view or as
containing a mixture of different voices. Thus the narrative style reflects the main dilemma of the novel: is Oedipa suffering from some delusional disorder making her hear different voices within her own head, which causes her to seek patterns in random information, ultimately leading her to create the Tristero conspiracy? Or are the voices “real”; is someone (or something) leading Oedipa (and the reader) either towards a revelation of the Tristero System or towards the realisation that the whole thing is just a joke?
Like Oedipa we attempt to untangle the information, distinguish clues from noise, and thereby find a unifying interpretation to the story. However, it is of course the very acts of untangling and categorising that are challenged throughout the novel. In fact, the more we read and attempt to categorise the text, the less sure we become that it will be possible to grasp all the nuances of this short, but dense novella that appears to grow with each rereading. The frustration of uncertainty and the desire for narrative closure are feelings that the reader shares with Oedipa. By robbing the reader of the satisfaction of closure Pynchon points out just how fundamental the activity of creating coherent narratives is for us, whether it concerns a fictional work of art, our own identities, or the larger history of the world.
2.3 The Representation of Academic Inquiry in Lot 49
In Pynchon’s novel the identification between Oedipa and the reader is twofold: the reader being confronted with Pynchon’s labyrinthine prose can identify with Oedipa’s role as a detective; at the same time Oedipa would be able to identify with the reader, as she is not only turned into a detective but also into an amateur scholar. Thus Pynchon is suggesting a parallel between the two roles: both in her role as detective and her role as scholar Oedipa attempts to interpret the concealed meaning of collected information into a unifying narrative.
As a former student of literature, Oedipa turns out to be an excellent reader of signs and texts. From an early age she has had the desire to look for patterns of meaning; for instance, we learn how she had, when encountering her first printed circuit, a sense of it attempting to communicate its concealed meaning to her (13). The fact that Oedipa
assurance all the while threatens to break into solipsism and paranoia: every clue encountered is clothed in a “quiet ambiguity” (8), and can therefore be read as a “real clue” or as further evidence of Oedipa’s tendency to project significance onto things that are meaningless (a risk that she is all too aware of herself). Nevertheless, she has no other choice than to continue her quest, even if it will lead her to a realisation of her own madness.
Like a true academic Oedipa goes about her research at university libraries and bookshops: she is not simply a reader but as a scholar she examines the history and intertextuality behind The Courier’s Tragedy, a fictional Jacobean revenge play which works as an uncanny mirror to Oedipa’s own world. The play is nearly as convoluted as the novel itself but two things in particular catch Oedipa’s attention: the bones that are turned into charcoal and the name of Tristero. In the play the bones of the assassinated characters are thrown into a lake, later they are fished up and made into charcoal. The scenario has somewhat of a resemblance to Oedipa’s discovery of Pierce Inverarity having acquired bones from an Italian lake, which later were made into charcoal to be used by a cigarette company. The apparent connection has Oedipa feeling uneasy, “the two things, so close” (65). The utterly bored Metzger, on the other hand, sees no
connection whatsoever, and perhaps it is merely a matter of coincidence. It is also during the play that Oedipa hears the word “Tristero” for the first time, and from then on the word becomes the centre of Oedipa’s “conspiracy theory”, all traces seemingly leading back to Tristero in one way or another.
We learn that it is Oedipa’s education that has made her “a whiz at pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts” (78). Considering Oedipa’s age, she is 28 years old2
, and the
2 In chapter 2 Oedipa breaks a mirror and considers that before the superstition of seven
years’ bad luck has run out she will be thirty-five. If the novel takes place in 1964 that would make her twenty-eight (27)
fact that the novel takes place in 1964 it is safe to assume that she would have gone to university in the fifties. This period of time was the heyday of the literary movement called New Criticism, its followers known for their emphasis on close reading of texts and their view of the text as a self-inclosed aesthetic object. For as we learn from Professor Emory Bortz – the novel’s predominant advocate of New Criticism – all that matters are the words on the page, “them, we can talk about” (116). Bortz almost feels a sense of panic when Oedipa shows him a different edition of The Courier’s Tragedy. The text must be “corrupt” he proclaims; it is the only reasonable explanation to Bortz for whom the words on the page are perceived as a stable, even immortal, feature – unlike their author.
By encouraging his students (and Oedipa) to focus on just the words, Bortz is promoting a critical approach that isolates the text from all historical and political structures. Bortz himself implies that his belief system as a New Critic is purist in nature: “remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the word” (120). According to Bortz the comparison is not unfavourable to himself as a New Critic. Pynchon, however, might beg to differ, as The Crying of Lot 49 appears to manifest a negative attitude towards any system that is too purist or self-enclosed in nature.
That Oedipa herself was a student of New Criticism appears to be confirmed by the following sentence: “For she had undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat among not only her fellow students but also most of the visible structure around and ahead of them” (78). However, Oedipa will come to look beyond “the words on the page”, as she attempts to place the text of The Courier’s Tragedy within a larger historical context. By searching for information about “the historical
Wharfinger” – the fictional author behind the play – Oedipa finally abandons the closed and self-referential system of New Criticism.
There is a sense of irony in the fact that when Oedipa finally decides to look beyond the text, Emory Bortz tells her to focus on “the words on the page”; whereas when Oedipa was still abhorring to the literary theory of New Criticism, the playwright Randolp Driblette criticises the way she is so “hung up with words”:
‘You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but’ – a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head – ‘in here. That’s what I’m for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor’s memory, right? But 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, sometimes other orifices also.’ (68)
Driblette, of course, appears to be directing his frustration against all scholars of literature. However, his emphasis on puritanism suggests that he is aiming his attack specifically at students who adhere to a closed system of criticism. At the same time, it is difficult not to suspect that Pynchon is speaking through this character, addressing the over-enthusiastic critic that might find patterns of meaning where there are none.
Despite Driblette’s outburst, academic inquiry is ultimately presented as a positive activity. Without Oedipa’s scholarly curiosity she would never have escaped the
intellectual inertia of her life in the suburbs in the first place. Oedipa’s academic pursuits may ultimately lead her nowhere but at least it has made her more aware of the world around her.
If Driblette is disturbed by the notion of New Criticism he instead embraces the concept of the artist as genius, a notion that was already horribly out of fashion within the world of academia at the time Pynchon was writing The Crying of Lot 49 but, nevertheless, a notion that remains a potent cultural force even today. The artisan
became an artist – a genius capable of projection and aspiration – sometime between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a period usually associated with romanticism. As William Deresiewicz notes in the online article “The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur”: “it was the age that taught itself to value not only
individualism and originality but also rebellion and youth. Now it was desirable and even glamorous to break the rules and overthrow tradition — to reject society and blaze your own path.” The revolutionary aspect of the Romantic period along with its
emphasis on individualism, originality, and youth rebellion resemble some of the characteristics of the countercultural 1960s, which Pynchon seems to be promoting in the novel. For instance, we get a sense of the zeitgeist when Oedipa visits Berkely University; it is as if she has stepped into another world where she finds not the isolated conventionalists of her own student days but a politically active group of youths who are engaged in “nose-to-nose dialogue” (77). The conversations between the students
suggest a sense of community, while the posters for FSM [Free Speech Movement], YAF [Young Americans for Freedom] and VDC [Vietnam Day Committee] signify the political engagement of the students and the revolutionary aspect of the period.
It is a similar longing for originality and individualism that Oedipa encounters when running into a frustrated engineer, Stanley Koteks, at the Yoyodyne Corporation. Oedipa’s reaction to the layout of the Yoyodyne building hints at the conversation to come, for she feels a sense of panic when getting lost in the clinically white hallways of the building. Her panic is caused not so much as a result of her getting lost but as a result of the sameness of the environment: “As far as she could see in any direction it was white or pastel: men’s shirts, papers, drawing boards” (62). It is also uniformity – the suppression of individuality and originality – that Stanley Koteks is against:
“This stifles your really creative engineer,’ Koteks said, adding bitterly, ‘wherever he may be.” (63)
A few pages later Oedipa meets another interesting character by the name of Mike Fallopian who more accurately explains Koteks’ frustration:
“Sure this Koteks is part of some underground,” he told her a few days later, “an underground of the unbalanced, possibly, but then how can you blame them for being maybe a little bitter? Look what's happening to them. In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and his this or that. Only one man per invention. Then when they grew up they found they had to sign over all their rights to a monster like Yoyodyne; got stuck on some 'project' or 'task force' or 'team' and started being ground into anonymity.” (66)
Here we get a sense of how American society, paradoxically, supresses what it appears to celebrate. Pynchon is critical of corporate America and its way of supressing all signs of originality, genius, uniqueness, and difference in order to maintain power. Yet, Pynchon is not unequivocally presenting individualism as positive for the threats of narcissism and solipsism lie just around the corner. In fact, both the New Critics – as represented by Bortz – and the individualists – as represented by Driblette – appear to be equally inflexible when it comes to looking beyond their own self-enclosed worldview. By pointing to his head and exclaiming: “the reality is in this head” (68), Driblette presents an entirely subjective notion of reality – like a true solipsist he suggests that the only verifiable reality is the one that exists in one’s own mind. At times, Oedipa too wonders whether the world exists only in her mind, causing her to write in her notebook: “Shall I project a world?” (71) Oedipa’s tendency towards solipsism combined with her role as detective/scholar makes her perceive the world as unified: each clue she finds points her towards a plot centred around herself, while each person she encounters might be a possible suspect in the conspiracy against her. This leads us to the suspicion that Oedipa, as a true paranoid, is self-absorbed to the extreme, blinding her to the society around her.
Since Oedipa is portrayed as an everywoman Pynchon may be proposing that we are all at risk of succumbing to solipsism and paranoia: this “mass solipsism” would of course be a dream for any regime wanting to control its subjects since everyone would be isolated from one another making communal action impossible. Oedipa, however, is not entirely a lost case since she at times manages to escape her own solipsism,
particularly in chapter 5 when she decides to wander flâneur-like into the streets of San Francisco. In the act of strolling Oedipa is momentarily able to escape the interior of her own mind and thereby connect with the people of her society.
2.4 Oedipa’s Role as Flâneur
Oedipa’s role as a flâneur is important in the sense that she perceives the city as being comprised of signs that can be interpreted into a narrative of her culture and her own subjectivity. On her walk Oedipa collects an array of information regarding the Tristero System, but most importantly she comes into close contact with a large number of dispossessed and isolated people. As she enters the nightly streets of San Francisco she is finally able to immerse herself completely in the metropolis, for it is not until one loses oneself in a city that the elements of the streets begin to speak to the wanderer (Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle” 598). It is in her irresolution, in the act of giving up control and simply drifting, that the city becomes hers, opening up a safe-passage for her to explore “its far blood’s branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see” (103). At this instance Oedipa is no longer a tourist or an outsider, thus the city is no longer threatening or strange but familiar.
As she walks into the city she quickly becomes part of the crowd and despite her inherent need for control she lets it lead her. Although she is not searching consciously for signs of The Tristero it takes her “no more than an hour to catch sight of a muted post horn” (96). On her nightly walk Oedipa perceives signs of The Tristero all around her: she sees it in a window in Chinatown and drawn in chalk on the sidewalk; she walks past a group of children using the symbol in their jump-rope game, while they sing a song about Tristero; on the bus she observes a Mexican girl tracing the symbol in the haze of her breath on the window; and she hears a boy telling his mother to write him by W.A.S.T.E. (the name of the underground postal system). It appears that no matter which path Oedipa takes she will inevitably encounter the symbol, which makes the following assertion by Benjamin relevant: “no matter what trail the flaneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime” (“The Flâneur” 41). Benjamin’s ambiguous statement evokes at least two possible interpretations: regardless of the chosen path the flâneur is either lead to commit a crime, or he/she stumbles upon a crime that needs to be solved. In light of Pynchon’s novel a third possible interpretation becomes obvious: the flâneur, like a paranoid, perceives patterns of significance in random and
meaningless information wherever he or she happens to look; in other words, the crime is imagined. For Oedipa the “crime” is of course the mysterious Tristero, and every path she takes appears to lead towards signs of its existence. Either we could put this down to the possibility that Oedipa might, like Benjamin’s flâneur, be an excellent reader of signs; or it might be that in her role as a flâneur Oedipa becomes a “true paranoid for whom all is organised in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pole of [her]self” (Pynchon 113).
The possibility of Oedipa being a paranoid is kept open by the narrative since her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic: she stays up for nights followed by 18 hours of
sleep, while her attention span becomes shortened and she begins to “laugh nervously more than speak” (151). The more Oedipa becomes immersed in the “conspiracy” of The Tristero “the more [revelations] would come to her, until everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero” (71). Certainly, Oedipa seems to be imagining at least some of the signs she encounters: it would take a great leap of faith (although it would not be entirely impossible) to consider the possibility that Tristero somehow emits a smell, or that it has access to her dreams. On the other hand, her all-encompassing obsession with the underground postal network may simply be an indication of her devotion to solving the mystery. For as Oedipa admits on her journey through the streets of the city: “She grew so to expect it [the muted post horn] that perhaps she did not see it quite as often as she later was to remember seeing it. A couple-three times would really have been enough. Or too much” (109). Thus she is aware of the possibility that some of the signs might be imagined and not part of a greater network of meaning. Nonetheless, she also implies that she has picked up on enough “real” information to put the whole thing beyond a simple matter of coincidence.
If the very real signs of alienation become visible by simply observing and listening to the people who inhabit the city, then why does Oedipa feel the need to look for signs of The Tristero? The Tristero would be evidence that a group of otherwise isolated people have found a way of communicating with one another; thus the possibility of the organisation existing taps into Oedipa’s “desire to unify and give a single name and history to something heterogeneous by its very nature” (Johnstonn 71). On the one hand, then, Oedipa persists in her role as a modernist flâneur attempting to decipher the
chaotic elements of the city into a comprehensible and unifying narrative. It is a desire for mastery over the city, and experience in general, that drives her to seek order, but
“the very mastery she seeks is the mirror image of official discourse itself” (Johnston 71). If The Tristero simply waits for their turn to institute their own system of control, then it would be false to claim that the organisation provides a genuine alternative to the official system.
The question of whether Oedipa is paranoid or not, and by extension whether The Tristero exists or not, appears to depend “more on the position, rather than the
knowledge, of the observer” (Johnston 67). The Tristero as a metaphor for an alternative reality can be seen as real or false: “the act of metaphor then was a thrust at the truth and a lie, depending on where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was” (Pynchon 113). Oedipa never fully crosses the line to the other side, nor can she go back to her old life in the suburbs. Therefore she can be seen as a mediator between official society and the underworld of the dispossessed.
It appears that Oedipa’s only tangible “revelation” is an acceptance of the alienated: the poor, the unassimilated immigrants, the mentally unstable, and the drunks. In other words, the people who have been rejected by the standards of American society, or who have chosen to reject the norms of society. These are the people she encounters as she decides to drift into “the infected city.” She parties with members of “the third-sex”; walks past a group of young delinquents, and rides among “an exhausted busful of Negroes”; encounters a seemingly insane Negro woman, and an equally crazy night-watchman; and observes a facially-deformed welder, and meets a group of lost children. Oedipa, however, is not simply a voyeur; she also becomes a listener and thereby interacts with her surroundings. At the beginning of the night she thinks to herself: “oh, no, Oedipa thought, not a fag joint [The Greek Way], no” (97). Her visible reluctance to visit The Greek Way suggests that she might be prejudiced against non-conformist people. However, by the end of the night (or rather, in the early hours of morning) she
literally and metaphorically embraces the outsiders of her society. For it is in the physical act of embracing an alcoholic old sailor that she appears to come to identify with the outcasts of her society. She approaches the old man outside a rooming house and he asks her to post a letter for him, addressed to his wife, using the W.A.S.T.E system. By accepting the task Oedipa becomes a carrier for the underground network and thereby she is able to penetrate the secret world of the dispossessed.
Before Oedipa proceeds to post the letter she is overcome by empathy for the man and takes him in her arms. In doing so she gains an insight into the lives of the
dispossessed. Especially interesting is the way the mattress on which the man lies becomes a metaphor for rejected memories:
What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper’s stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost? (111)
At this moment Oedipa is imagining that the man might die by falling asleep with a lit cigarette. More importantly this image leads her to consider how the memories of the old man will disappear when he dies. Since mainstream society has deemed him an outcast no one is interested in his stories, consequently they are not recorded within official history.
As Oedipa gains a new appreciation for the marginalized stories of the city she steps into the role of postmodern flâneur. Deborah L. Parsons compares the postmodern flâneur to the rag-picker, a figure that engages with the marginalized objects of the city (6). Like the rag-picker Oedipa wanders to the borders of the urban space where she encounters the leftover objects (and people) of the city: the forgotten and unwanted
