The Worldview of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon, is an extremely unusual book. In fact, it has recently made my oddly short list of "Weirdest Books I've Ever Read"! This is due in part to its plot and the worldview it subscribes to. At first, the main character, Oedipa Maas, seems to have a fairly normal view of the world, until she becomes executor of an ex-boyfriend's will. As she goes about this, she seemingly discovers a centuries-old conspiracy involving two competing postage systems. She steadily becomes more and more paranoid about this as the novel goes on, and although the book implies that it has had this paranoid view of the world all along, it doesn't necessarily suggest any alternatives to this view. It ends rather abruptly, with no real resolution given as to whether or not this was a real conspiracy or whether or not Oedipa was truly going crazy.

    Describing the exact worldview this novel takes is rather difficult, as there are not many direct quotes that specifically describe it. However, we get an inkling of it early on, as Oedipa discovers a mysterious symbol in the shape of a horn at the end of a message on a bathroom wall. She copies the symbol and the address in the message, thinking "[i]t might be something sexual, but she somehow doubted it" (Pynchon 38). The strangeness is only compounded when she leaves the restroom and one of her companions tells her she wasn't supposed to see that. This piques her curiosity, and she spends much of the rest of the book following the trail of supposed clues this message leaves for her. At one point, it leads her to a play known as The Courier's Tragedy, which she thinks may be connected to (perhaps the origin story of?) the message originally written on the bathroom wall, describing a secret, ongoing conflict between two underground (?) postal systems. As she goes backstage to talk to the lead actor, we get a hint that not everyone in this story agrees with the possible centuries-old conspiracy that may be affecting everyone. "'It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn't literature, it doesn't mean anything'" (Pynchon 60), he tells her. This is just one of the several possible red herrings that take place throughout the story. Despite the eventual overwhelming paranoid worldview this book ends up having, it also has a bit of a "This could only happen in California" kind of vibe to it, as well. While it could be that Pynchon only set the story in California because he lives there, that may not be the only reason. California has a history of being very tolerant of many different kinds of people and lifestyles, and many of the characters in this novel - such as the man obsessed with Maxwell's Demon - do not exactly live according to the "norm." While this not exactly be the overall worldview of the novel, it is an interesting aspect of it to think about, as the story itself is really difficult to set anywhere else. We agreed that you could possibly fit it into any major city in the country, but none of them really have the exact feel to them as the ones in California do.

    This book was published in 1965, just as the real life Cold War was really getting underway. The paranoia over the spread of Communism and their sympathizers, as well as government surveillance (by any government, seemingly, not just the United States or the Soviet Union), drugs, and other such fears were very real, and shades of it appear in this novel. A mention of being watched appears fairly early on, with one of the minor characters freaking out over how "'[t]hey've been listening, [...a]ll the time, somebody listens in, snoops; they bug your apartment, they tap your phone[...]" (Pynchon 48). While it's never clarified who might be doing the listening or bugging, it does reflect the fear and paranoia people had at the time that such things were going to occur. However, despite this eventually overwhelming fear Oedipa develops, the book does not exactly offer any real alternatives to this reality. In fact, we do not even really get an answer as to whether or not there actually IS a postal system conspiracy, or if Oedipa is truly going crazy. The book itself ends as Oedipa is waiting for the auction of her ex-boyfriend's items to start, expecting a mysterious bidder to show up - one that will perhaps provide more of an answer to the conspiracy theory she's been chasing after. Because of this, we do not really get Oedipa's opinion as to what the world would be like if this conspiracy were uncovered completely. I am not entirely sure she knows what she would do if it were revealed to the world!

Word Count: 810