The Crying of Lot 49, written in 1966 by Thomas Pynchon, follows Oedipa Maas as she embarks into the subliminal realm of conspiracies and counter-revolutions that lies beneath a Southern California in the midst of hazy, directionless unrest. Filled with a cast that includes washed-up entertainers, postulating and posturing academics, nazis and ex-nazis, aging radio DJs and punk rock kids, this America is a force of anarchy that may not have leader or a purpose, but is a coordinated exertion of history nonetheless.
The fictional play A Courier’s Tragedy is Oedipa’s gateway into the rumored underground postal system that she becomes obsessed with. Here a shining layer of satire coats the novel: the “worldwide conspiracy” proclaimed in the blurb is a rivalry between two mail services dating back to the 1500s, when a mysterious figure named Tristero (or Trystero) launched a plot to overthrow the Postmaster of Brussels. The instinctive ridiculousness of a revolution based around mail service is an endless source of satirical commentary about the pseudo-seriousness of American politics and rebellion, and there is a pervasive sense throughout the novel that Americans take everything very seriously: music, entertainment, culture, history, politics-- they all have metaphorical and sociological significance, extending, naturally, to America as a concept, but also down to the very ontological core of being. But as it turns out, that instinctive ridiculousness stays instinctive-- why can’t mail be at the center of the American spirit? Information starts revolutions, communication starts friendships, there’s intimacy and power wrapped up in the US Postal Service. And, alarmingly, it’s controlled entirely by the government. Yes, mail is communication, it’s information, it’s processing power. It’s both outdated and incomparably relevant to the modern technology age. Somewhere in that timeless need for people to organize and control their relationships, correspondences, and communities, there’s always been the latent potential for technological systematization. Even in our most vulnerable human connections, we want to be part of something greater than ourselves. Maybe, you’re thinking at this point, it’s not as satirical as it seems at first. Pynchon, inspired by the Joycean tradition of wading in the symbolism of the subconscious, holds his readers to a high standard: everything must be remembered, stored away, processed. At its core, this is a story about the conspiracy of information, the processing power that turns all our confusing desire for individuality into a unified momentum, and this book, faithful to its story, is meant to be simultaneously picked apart and consumed all at once. And there it is: just as every character, moment, scene and sequence is its own entertaining story, all together it’s layers and layers of superimposed modification, all fitted neatly on top of each other. And Oedipa is slipping through it all, seeing everything not as pre-synthesized phenomena but as their parts. It’s the way her husband, Mucho, takes enough LSD that he becomes “a roomful of people,” a creature of “spectrum analysis,” in his words, who can “break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once.” It’s the way there are editions upon editions of The Courier’s Tragedy, each with slight variations and extensive histories, the texts as permanent as they are living and breathing and shifting, and it’s in these variations that Oedipa discovers worlds. As if saying that, sometimes, to live is just to alter reality. All of this is placed delicately in 1960s America, a culture poised for an incoming technological age where, on a philosophical level, we are imposed with a binary perspective, 0s and 1s that make up a world of which we are only a function. From this bursts forth the idea that the overwhelming freedom of human choice really comes to a series of either this or that, compounded enough times to seem like freedom, and eventually, we start seeing that as its own cosmic beauty. Just as the Scurvhamites who preached a God and an anti-God, a purposeful universe alongside a “brute automatism that led to eternal death,” all ended up choosing annihilation over redemption, there is a seductive quality to the idea that certain things are inevitable. Or maybe it isn’t about perspective. Maybe there really is no freedom, maybe certain things are inevitable and what we’re being seduced by is an ineffable truth. Maybe there are certain systems in the world that will never be discovered because humans take comfort in a free world, unable to allow ourselves to live in a world of connections that we can never understand. There are different ways to interpret this book: maybe Oedipa suffers because she doesn’t know the truth, maybe she suffers because she looks for connections where there are none. Maybe Mucho’s drug use cures him of his nightmares about billboard signs against blue skies because he has the power to understand the world now, or maybe he’s stopped trying to understand all together. Maybe the world is a huge conspiracy and we’re naive to not see it that way, or maybe it’s all randomized chaos and expecting anything else is self-destructing. Or, maybe, the best conspiracy is one we’re all participating in, whether we know it or not.
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