Playing the Post Card
of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49
The difference between a collector of post cards and another [...] is
that he can communicate with other collectors with the help of post
cards, which enriches and singularly complicates the exchange. In the
bookstore I felt that between them [collectors of post cards] they
formed, from State to State, from nation to nation, a very powerful
secret society in the open air. -- The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Jacques Derrida.
For many readers, the primary attraction of Thomas Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49
(published in 1966) is the fact that it is short, a mere "novella,"
only 138 pages long in the paperback edition. By contrast, Pynchon's
first and third novels, V. (1963) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973), are quite long, especially the latter, which is over 700 pages. Furthermore, the plot of The Crying of Lot 49
is relatively simple and straightforward, while those of the other two
are not. And so, Pynchon's novella appears to obey what Herbert Spencer
calls an "economy of creative effort." In The Philosophy of Style, Spencer states: "To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort, is the desideratum."
For Pynchon, who is, like William Burroughs,
commonly regarded as -- indeed, praised for being -- a writer of
"difficult" fiction, there must have been risks involved in writing an
"economical" book, one without "waste" of any kind. In The Post Card,
Jacques Derrida sketches out the incredible, perhaps even infinite
complexity of the subject to which Pynchon's novella addresses itself
(i.e., the workings of postal systems): "[I] want to write and first to
assemble an enormous library on the courrier [both letter and
delivery person], the postal institutions, the techniques and mores of
telelcommunication, the networks and epochs of telecommunication
throughout history -- but the 'library' and the 'history' themselves are
precisely but 'posts,' sites of passage or of relay among others,
stases, moments or effects of restance [standing or remaining]
and also particular representations, narrower and narrower, shorter and
shorter sequences, proportionally, of the Great Telematic Network, the worldwide connection."
Even if one were able to compress such a huge subject into the pages of a short book (The Post Card
is over 500 pages), one might legitimately wonder if something as
familiar, ordinary and even banal as the post office is fit for
"serious" literature. "We have played the post card against literature,"
Derrida explains; post cards are "inadmissible literature." No doubt
Pynchon didn't want his readers to apply a remark about a play (The Courier's Tragedy) that is contained within or enveloped by The Crying of Lot 49
to the novella itself: "It was written [merely] to entertain people.
Like horror movies. It isn't literature, it doesn't mean anything." And
so Pynchon wrote The Crying of Lot 49 as one would write a post
card, something that is short, easy to read, and yet, despite its
apparent superficiality and "innocence," the carrier of meanings that
are indecipherable to all except those to whom it is addressed.
* * * *
If indeed the novella is a kind of post card, then the picture
-- usually placed on the side opposite the address/message/stamp side
-- is easy to locate. Amid much fanfare, it is unveiled at the end of
the first chapter: "the central painting of a triptych, titled 'Bordando
el Manto Terrestre' . . . by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios
Varo." According to Pynchon's narrator, this painting depicts the
following scene.
[A] number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold
hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind
of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking
hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures,
all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this
tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.
For Oedipa Maas, the novella's protagonist, this painting is deeply
moving and highly relevant to her own situation. She happened to see it
in Mexico City, where her then-lover, a rich man named Pierce
Inverarity, had once taken her on a tryst.
Oedpia, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one
had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she
wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the
tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry.
She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see
the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if
indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.
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 tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so
Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape.
(Emphasis added.)
According to Janet A. Kaplan, author of Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys, Pynchon saw Bordando el Manto Terrestre
("Embroidering Earth's Mantle") when, as part of the first full
retrospective of the painter's work, it was displayed at the Palacio de
Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1964, a year after her death at the age
of 55. Painted in 1961, el Manto (oil on masonite, roughly 40 by
48 inches) is the central panel in an autobiographical triptych. It is
possible that Pynchon, writing Lot 49 in 1965, recalled the painting from memory or incomplete notes, and not with a reproduction of it set in front of him. He gets a lot wrong.
1. Nothing here suggests that the golden-haired girls inside the octagonal (not circular) tower are Rapunzel-like prisoners. (By way of setting the stage for his recollection of Bordando el Manto Terrestre,
Pynchon's narrator says that, prior to her affair with Pierce, Oedipa
had "conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of pensive girl
somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs.") In Varo's
painting, there are six girls in total, all the same height and build,
all dressed the same way, like identical sisters, a sextuplet. We can
only see the faces of two of them. Though both girls have their eyes
lowered and focused down upon their busy hands, they are clearly smiling. They look so relaxed that they might be asleep and smiling at their dreams.
They might also be smiling because they are plotting their escape. If
viewers look closely enough, they can see -- upside-down and hidden
within one of the folds in the tapestry -- that one of the girls has, in
Varo's own words, "embroidered a trick [right into the tapestry] in
which one can see her together with her lover." This detail leads Janet
A. Kaplan to conclude that, "unlike Rapunzel [...], Varo's young heroine
imprisoned in the tower is not merely a metaphor for confinement, but
also an agent of her own liberation. To free herself [...] she connives
to flee the tower that isolates her from the very life she is expected
to create." (The third part of the triptych, The Escape, shows the girl and her lover fleeing/flying into the mountains.)
2. "Slit windows" is a misleading description, because the openings
in the tower are positioned too low for anyone in the room (either
standing or sitting down) to see out of them. (Kaplan calls them
"battlements.") Strictly speaking, there are no "real" windows in the
tower; no one inside can see out, into the "outdoors"; the tower is in
some sense blind. The only window is the one (imaginary, metaphorical
and/or hypothetical) opened up by the painter, who accomplishes the
trick by "removing" or rendering transparent one of the walls. In a nice
touch, the shape of this dream-like window exactly matches that of the
alcove, which is in the back part of the room, facing us. This echoing
or doubling effect suggests just how far into the "recesses" we (and no
one else) are seeing.
3. The tapestry that comes rolling out of the tower doesn't seek to "fill" any void, nor does it manage to "contain" the whole world. (In addition to "embroidering" or "weaving," Bordando
can also mean "bordering" or "circumnavigating.") There are several
pockets left open, uncovered by fabric, and in each case these pockets
are not empty or "void," but are filled with water, are in fact "bodies"
of water, several of them traveled by boats. And so the tapestry seeks
only to form or fill dry land, the land masses of the world, not the
oceans and lakes, not the entire planet. As in the Bible, (the) land is
only a "mantle" (a piece of clothing or the crust worn by the Earth),
not the original, naked, oceanic Creation itself. Ironically, in his
novel V., Pynchon himself had warned against making a very similar mistake.
Perhaps history this century [...] is rippled with gathers in its fabric
such that if we are situated [...] at the bottom of a fold, it's
impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue,
however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others,
compartmented off in sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater
importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity [...] We
are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if
we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.
In seeing or remembering only the tapestry, and not the bodies of water, Pynchon has, as it were, blindly mistaken
the view from "the bottom of a fold" for the view "on a crest." He
doesn't see or has perhaps forgotten the following paradox: bodies of
water make up the pre-existing and "continuous tradition," not the
added-on-later tapestry of the land, which is only a "compartmented"
fold within the (larger) weave.
4. Unaccountably, Pynchon's narrator makes no reference whatsoever to
the two other women in the tower. (Six plus two is eight. There's a
certain symmetry: eight women, eight walls.) One of these women is easy
to miss: she is sitting back in the alcove, where she appears to be
playing a musical instrument, perhaps a recorder. But the other woman
requires a real effort to overlook: she is purple, very tall and
slender, and standing near the epicenter of the room.
(No doubt Oedipa's LSD-crazed, devoutly Freudian psychoanalyst Dr
Hilarius would say that Pynchon has averted his eyes from what she
represents, i.e., mommy's missing phallus.)
A magician or sorceress of some kind, the tall woman holds a small
book in her left hand and, with her right hand, uses a long rod to stir a
turquoise potion. The cauldron is utterly remarkable. Double-bowled,
with one bowl atop the other, connected together by a narrow tube,
around which a magic ring circles -- the cauldron sits at the exact
center of the room. It is the source of two of the three sets of threads
out of which the girls (using both hands) are weaving and embroidering
the tapestry. (The third set of threads is quite obscure: it comes out
of holes in the floor, and it isn't clear how the girls are
incorporating it into the tapestry.) Perhaps the small book contains the
spells, songs or instructions necessary to script the mantle,
and the magician is needed to translate them, sing them or read them
aloud. (Janet A. Kaplan likens the scene Varo has depicted to "a
medieval scriptorium," a monastery for the writing or copying of
manuscripts.)
In a set of curious touches, the magician's face is veiled (and so we
can't see if her mouth is open or closed); and her eyes are averted,
off to her right (and so she doesn't see us, peering "in" at her.) (Her
averted gaze is all the more striking when compared to one of the girls
in the first panel in the triptych, Toward the Tower, who, in
Kaplan's words, "rebels, her gaze reaching out [back to/at the viewers]
defiantly, resisting what Varo termed 'the hypnosis.'"). As viewers, we
see everything; in Embroidering the Earth's Mantle, the viewers are invisible,
unseen by those who are seen. In the case of the magician, we might
have caught her during a pause, interruption or delay in the ceremony,
perhaps a moment of distraction or day-dreaming.
None of this is adequately captured, indeed, most of it changed to the opposite
of what it had previously been, by Pynchon's recollection: "Such a
captive maiden [Oedipa], having plenty of time to think, soon realizes
that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only
incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous
and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all."
The lesson for truly attentive readers of The Crying of Lot 49
is easy to see. As we follow Oedipa "from cry to cry" -- from
self-pitying tears to tears of mourning (shed for Pierce Inverarity
after his death), from "crying" (shedding tears) to the "crying"
(auctioning off) of Lot 49 -- we must pay careful attention to the
"economy" or "play" of Pynchon's writing, to his delays as well as to
his deliveries, to what he leaves out, changes or gets wrong. It is
possible that, embroidered into his elaborate yarns, there are designs
of which he himself is not fully aware.
* * * *
By the time Pynchon recalls and displays Bordando el Manto Terrestre for his readers, two things of consequence have already happened:
1). Oedipa has already cried once ("Mucho [her husband], baby," she
cried, in an access [sic] of helplessness"). Over the course of the
novella, Oedipa will cry a total of five times, and two other people --
Dr Hilarius, and Emory Bortz, an author and college professor -- will
cry (out) once each, making a grand total of seven cries. Perhaps this number, the square root of 49 -- itself an echo of the number of days of mourning in the Tibetan Book of the Dead -- is meant to evoke the seven-day-long period of mourning in Judaism called shiva or perhaps the "seven years' bad luck" Oedipa fears she's going to have after she breaks a mirror in her hotel room.
2). the plot has already begun. Hopefully without giving too
much of the game away in advance, it must be said that, here, "the plot"
means "the dramatic action," but also "the burial place" and "the
conspiracy."
This is the novella's very first sentence:
One summer afternoon, Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party
whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that
she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the
estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had
once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets
numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it out more than
honorary.
The narrator's "postal" metaphor ("the job of sorting it out")
foreshadows the fact that Oedipa learns the news of her new duties (ner
"naming") by letter. Sent "from the law firm of Warpe, Wistfull,
Kubitschek and McMingus, of Los Angeles, and signed by somebody named
Metzger," it explains that a codicil to the dead man's will mandates
that, post obit, "Metzger was to act as co-executor and special
counsel in the event of any involved litigation." Together, Oedipa and
Metzger are required, in the words of the narrator, to "learn intimately
the books and the business, go through probate, collect all debts,
inventory the assets, get an appraisal of the estate, decide what to
liquidate and what to hold on to, pay off claims, square away taxes,
distribute legacies. . . ."
Pierce had only been briefly involved with Oedipa, had not seen
her in a very long time, and had attached the codicil a year before his
death. Furthermore, the will itself had "only just now" been found. And
so, troubling questions arise. What accounts for all the delays? Why
wasn't all of this settled ages ago? Why had Pierce named Oedipa
(of all people) to be a co-executor? Didn't Pierce have any siblings,
ex-wives or children? Surely one of his legatees would serve better as
the distributor of his legacies. Oedipa has no experience in such
matters. "If only so much didn't stand in her way," the narrator says:
"her deep ignorance of law, of investment, of real estate, ultimately of
the dead man himself."
To get an answer to this Sphinx-like riddle ("why me?"), Oedipa must
"pierce" the "inveracity" of the death-shroud of Pierce Inverarity, and
thereby learn the naked truth about or standing behind her ex-lover.
Oedipa must dig the dead man, decrypt his meaning. At stake in this
quest for the truth isn't just Oedipa's peace of mind or her bond (her
"word" to the probate court), but also the value of speculating upon a
contemporary, feminized version of Oedipus; the interest of the novella
itself; the way Pynchon is "evaluated" and "appraised" by critics,
professors and other readers, book sales, etc etc.
But what happens if Pierce (declared to be of sound mind and body) didn't
in fact know exactly what he was doing when he named Oedipa
co-executor? A few pages from the novella's end, the narrator asks,
"Might Oedipa Maas yet be his heiress; had that been in the will, in
code, perhaps without Pierce really knowing, having been by then too
seized by some headlong expansion of himself, some visit, some lucid
instruction?" There is no answer, only the following consolation:
"Though she could never again call back any image of the dead man to dress up,
pose, talk to and make answer, neither would she lose a new compassion
for the cul-de-sac he'd tried to find a way out of, for the enigma his
efforts had created" (emphasis added). But finding compassion for blind
stumbling isn't the same thing as seeing the naked truth.
"As things developed," the narrator says, back at the beginning, "she
[Oedipa] was to have all manner of revelations." Some will have
concerned Pierce, some Oedipa herself, still others her husband Wendell
("Mucho") Maas. But the balance of these revelations will have concerned
what the narrator cryptically refers to as "what remained yet had
somehow, before this, stayed away": the possibly apocryphal, semi-secret
existence of an 800-year-old underground postal system that is
sometimes called "the Tristero," other times "WASTE." According to the
narrator,
Much of the [central] revelation was to come through the stamp
collection Pierce had left, his substitute often for her -- thousands of
little colored windows into deep vistas of space and time [...], he
could spend hours peering into each one, ignoring her. She had never
seen the fascination. The thought now that it would all have to be
inventoried and appraised was only another headache. No suspicion at all
that it might have something to tell her. Yet if she hadn't been set up
or sensitized, first by her peculiar seduction [by Metzger], then by
other, almost offhand things, what after all could the mute stamps have
told her, remaining then as they would've only ex-rivals, cheated as she
by death, about to be broken up into lots, [ready to be sent] on route to any number of new masters? (Emphasis added.)
Despite his knowledge that this story is to be short (a "mere" post card), not long (a "proper" letter), the narrator doesn't get to the stamp collection right away. There's a couple of places that must be visited first, before
it can be called upon. "It got seriously under way, this sensitizing,
either with the letter from Mucho or the evening she and Metzger drifted
into a strange bar known as The Scope. Looking back she forgot which
had come first." But the "omniscient" narrator hasn't forgotten the
ordering. (He can be trusted: his business is giving order or "taxis" to the plot.) The letter or, rather, the envelop in which it was mailed, came first.
It may have been an intuition that the letter would be newsless inside
that made Oedpia look more closely at its outside, when it arrived. At
first she didn't see. It was an ordinary Muchoesque envelop, swiped from
the [radio] station [at which Mucho worked], ordinary airmail stamp, to
the left of the cancellation a blurb put on by the government, REPORT
ALL OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POTSMASTER.
A set up within a set up: "At first she didn't see." An "economical"
abbreviation, surely: "At first see didn't see [the blurb]." But also,
if only for a flashing moment, there's a suggestion that Oedipa
was blind ("she didn't see [at all]") and then, jarred by the comical
spelling mistake ("potsmaster" for "postmaster"), regained her sight -- a
kind of reversal of the fortunes of Sophocles' Oedipus.
When told of the glaring mistake, Metzger makes a grim joke about two
different kinds of delivery systems that are monopolized by the federal
government (postal, and nuclear weaponry). "So they [the government]
make misprints," Metzger said, "let them. As long as they're careful
about not pressing the wrong button, you know?" Yes, of course: nuclear war
would be an "obscenity" too horrible to report to and, in any case,
well beyond the jurisdiction of the Postmaster General of the United
States of America.
In the very next sentence ("It may have been that same evening that
they happened across The Scope, a bar out on the way to L.A., near the
Yoyodyne [weapons delivery] plant"), the narrator conveys us, post-haste,
to the next stop along the route. While having a drink inside The
Scope, Oedipa witnesses what looks like "mail call" along "an
inter-office mail run" for employees at Yoyodyne. Immediately
afterwards, Oedipa enters the ladies' bathroom, where, "among lipsticked
obscenities," she quickly "noticed the following message, neatly indited in engineering lettering" (emphasis added):
'Interested in sophisticated fun? You, hubby, girl friends.
The more the merrier. Get in touch with Kirby, through WASTE only, Box
7391, L.A.'
It's a "personals" ad, a commonplace, a cliche: horny geek looking for sex.
But there's something else going on, as well. The word "indited" means
more than just written or engraved: it's usually applied to speeches,
poems, announcements and other "open letters," addressed to one-and-all.
It is at variance with the exclusivity of "WASTE only." And what is
WASTE? An economical or abbreviated rendering of W.A.S.T.E. (Later on,
Oedipa -- by pronouncing it "like a word, waste" -- will alienate a user
of the system, who explains, behind "a mask of distrust," "it's
W.A.S.T.E., lady, an acronym, not 'waste.'" The acronym "posts" or
stands for the slogan "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire," but still
remains a pun on "waste," on yet another collection, sorting and
delivery system controlled by the goverment. Looking for and finally
finding a W.A.S.T.E. mailbox, Oedipa sees "a can with a swinging
trapezoidal top, the kind you throw trash in: old and green, nearly four
feet high. On the swinging part were hand painted the initials
W.A.S.T.E. She had to look closely to see the periods between the
letters.")
Back in The Scope's bathroom, the narrator says: "Beneath the notice
[the personals ad], faintly in pencil, was a symbol she'd never seen
before, a loop, triangle and trapezoid [...]. It might be something
sexual [a depiction of genitalia], but somehow she doubted it. She found
a pen in her purse and copied the address and symbol [a post horn with a
mute inserted into its bell] in her memo book, thinking: God,
hieroglyphics." She might have thought, God, again with the hierogylphics.
Oedipa had already divined "a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning"
in the printed circuits (or "cards") in transistor radios, in the
"ordered swirl" of houses and streets in South California, and mostly
vidily in Pierce Inverarity's Fangoso Lagoons, a "new housing
development," which
was to be laced with canals with private landings for power boats, a
floating social hall in the middle of an artificial lake, at the bottom
of which lay restored galleons, imported from the Bahamas; Atlantean
fragments of columns and friezes from the Canaries; real human skeletons
from Italy [...] A map of the place flashed onto the screen, Oedipa
drew a sharp breath [...] Some immediacy was there again, some promise
of hierophany: printed circuit, gently curving streets, private access
to the water, Book of the Dead.
As soon as Oedipa returns from The Scope's bathroom, one of the bar's
patrons "had this funny look on his face" and says to her, "You weren't
supposed to see that." There's a moment of confusion. Did the
bar-patron (Mike Fallopian of the Peter Pinguid Society) mean the
W.A.S.T.E. personals ad, or the inter-office mail run? Did he, having
X-ray machines for eyes, happen to see Oedipa noticing the W.A.S.T.E.
personals ad, right through the bathroom wall? No, of course not; it would be paranoid to think so.
The very next sentence (the narrator is keeping the plot moving): "He
[Fallopian] had an envelop. Oedipa could see, instead of a postage
stamp, the handstruck initials PPS [Peter Pinguid Society]." Fallopian,
trying to reassure Oedipia that "it's not as rebellious as it looks,"
shows her the innocent, post card-like contents of a letter he'd just
received through the W.A.S.T.E. system.
"Dear Mike. How are you? Just thought I'd drop you a note. How's your
book coming? Guess that's all for now. See you at The Scope."
Here it is, then: the message on the post card that is The Crying of Lot 49.
(All we need now is the address, and the stamp, and it will be ready
for the post). Pynchon's narrator explains what Mike Fallopian's book is
about:
[It's] a history of private mail delivery in the U.S., attempting to
link the Civil War to the postal reform movement that had begun around
1845. [Fallopian] found it beyond simple coincidence that in of all
years 1861 the federal government should have set out on a vigorous
suppression of those independent mail routes still surviving the various
Acts of '45, '47, '51 and '55, Acts all designed to drive any private
competition into financial ruin. He saw it all as a parable of power,
its feeding, growth and systematic abuse.
Though he may be paranoid -- for what lies "beyond simple
coincidence," other than conspiracy? -- this Mike Fallopian is
definitely "on the right track," both historically (the international
postal reform movement of the 1840s) and ideologically (the parable of
power). Or at least he's traveling in the same route taken by Jacques
Derrida's The Post Card, in which the following passage appears.
[Y]es, in the "modern" period the country of the Reformation [Germany]
has played a rather important role, it seems to me in postal reform
[...] No, I don't have any big hypothesis about the conjoint development
of capitalism, Protestantism, and postal rationalism, but all the same,
things are necessarily linked. The post is a banking agency. Don't
forget that in the great reformation of the "modern" period another
great country of the Reformation [England] played a spectacular role: in
1837 Rowland Hill publishes his book, Post-Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability.
He is an educator; and a reformer of the fiscal system. What was he
proposing? the stamp, my love, what would we have done without it? The
sticking stamp, that is, the uniformization of payment, the general
equivalent of the tax, above all the bill before the letter, the payment
in advance (the uniform rate and a system of prepayment, which were adopted in 1840 after great popular agitation).
And so, at the center of it all: pre-paid postage stamps. The
"reformed" Post Office insists on their universal use, and "underground"
groups like the Peter Pinguid Society and the Tristero refuse to use
them at all and, on occasion, make mocking counterfeits of "official"
ones. And, at the center of the plot in The Crying of Lot 49, a whole collection of pre-paid postage stamps.
* * * *
With the opening of Mike Fallopian's book, about a quarter of the way through The Crying of Lot 49,
Pynchon's narrator has completed the necessary detours. We are ready to
precede to the heart of the matter: "So began, for Oedipa, the languid,
sinister blooming of the Tristero." No -- a hesitation on the
narrator's part -- "blooming" mixes the metaphor of the mantle (the
tapestry). And so he tries again:
So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of the Tristero. Or
rather, her attendance at some unique performance, prolonged as if it
were the last of the night, something a little extra for whoever'd
stayed this late. As if the breakaway gowns, net bras, jeweled garters
and G-strings of historical figuration that would fall away were layered
dense [...]; as if a plunge toward dawn indefinite black hours long
would indeed be necessary before the Tristero could be revealed in its
terrible nakedness.
This second try is a complex re-presentation, change and expansion of
the novella's central images (metaphors): the mantle isn't simply a
form of magic that covers parts of the world, but "historical
figuration" (the embroidery of experts), which doesn't seem to be magic
at all, but a neutral science; and it (the mantle) doesn't simply cover
the naked body of the Earth, but also the naked body of the Tristero
conspiracy.
Note as well the apocalyptic tone: "the last of the night," the
"late" hours, the "indefinite black hours," the "terrible" nakedness of
the final truth. A haunting certainly, but not by the shadow or
spectre of nuclear war, something in the looming future, but by the end
of a long-standing epoch. The end of the post (symbolized by the muted
post horn) and the beginning of the telephone, which Pynchon's narrator
refers to as "the horn." Derrida mourns the entire epoch from Socrates
to Freud: "We are writing the last letters [...] We are taking the last correspondance
[letters and correlations]. Soon there will be no more of them.
Eschatology, apocalypse, and teleology of epistles themselves. For the
same reason there will be no more money. I mean bills or coins, and no
more stamps. Of course the [mechanical] technology which is replacing
all that had already begun to do so for a very long time [...] It will
no longer be writing that will be transported, but the perforated card,
microfilm, or magnetic tape. The day will come that, thanks to the 'telepost,' the fundamentals will be transmitted by wire starting from the user's computer."
Incredibly, Pynchon's narrator, instead of moving on to Pierce's
stamp collection (his "proper" destination), does something
uneconomical, even wasteful. He goes backwards, back to the very
beginning, and tries to start the story again. "The beginning of that
peformance [the striptease-like denuding of the Tristero] was clear
enough. It was while she and Metzger were waiting for ancillary letters
to be granted representatives in Arizona, Texas, New York and Florida,
where Inverarity had developed real estate, and in Delaware, where he'd
been incorporated" (emphasis added). Different, but the same story:
waiting for the arrival of letters, more letters, more waiting.
This new thread (the striptease) leads Oedipa to the play The Courier's Tragedy,
a fictional Jacobean revenge play that alludes to the Tristero
conspiracy. From there, the yarn leads to a theatrical performance of
the play, the director of that particular performance (Randy Driblette),
the play's author (a fictional 17th century playwright named Richard
Wharfinger), the script Driblette used (there are, of course, several
different editions of the play, some of which are textually "corrupt,"
one of which is "obscene"), the bookstore at which Driblette purchased
his copy (Zapf), the publisher of that "unaccountable" edition (Lecturn,
based in Berkeley), the author of a preface to one of the rival
editions (Emory Bortz), etc etc.
Like the play-within-the-play in Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Courier's Tragedy
is used to both further and comment upon the plotting of the novella
itself. It is presented as "the landscape of evil Richard Wharfinger had
fashioned for his 17th-century audiences, so preapocalyptic,
death-wishful, sensually fatigued, unprepared, a little poignantly, for
the abyss of civil war that had been waiting, cold and deep, only a few
years ahead of them." There are three civil wars in perspective
here: the English Civil War, circa 1648; the American Civil War, circa
1861 (cf. Mike Fallopian's book); and the (Second) American Civil War,
circa 1965 (the "counter-culture" of Southern California).
Postal systems are central to the plot of The Courier's Tragedy.
(Once again, "the plot" involves dramatic action, burial place, and
conspiracy.) The "courier" of the play's title is Niccolo, who,
Pynchon's narrator says,
is hanging around the court of his father's murderer, Duke Angelo, and
masquerading as a special courier of the Thurn and Taxis family, who at
the time held a postal monopoly throughout most of the Holy Roman
Empire. [Niccolo's father had been the Duke of Faggio; Angelo had him
replaced by Pasquale.] What he [Niccolo] is trying to do, ostensibly, is
develop a new market, since the evil Duke of Squamuglia [Angelo] has
steadfastedly refused, even with the lower rates and faster service of
the Thurn and Taxis system, to employ any but his own messengers in
communicating with his stooge Pasquale over in neighboring Faggio. The
real reason Niccolo is waiting around is of course to get a crack at the
Duke.
In Act IV, Angelo learns that Pasquale has been assassinated, and
that someone named Gennaro has raised an army and declared himself
"interim head of state until the rightful Duke, Niccolo, can be
located." Angelo writes a letter, all the while "explaining to the
audience but not to the good guys, who are still ignorant of recent
developments, that to forestall an invasion from Faggio, he must assure
Gennaro with all haste of his good intentions." When the letter is
completed, Angelo (taking no chances) doesn't give it to one of his own
couriers, but summons someone from Thurn and Taxis to deliver it.
Niccolo shows up, takes the letter and goes off to deliver it to
Gennaro. Angelo doesn't realize that the courier was Niccolo in
disguise, and Niccolo doesn't know that the letter's contents pertain to
him personally. Neither Angelo nor Niccolo realize that the subject of
the letter and its deliverer are one and the same person.
Angelo is the first to make the connection. As soon as he does, he
"orders Niccolo's pursuit and destruction." Once again, Angelo doesn't
use his own men, but he doesn't summon Thurn and Taxis a second time.
Instead, he turns to the Tristero, Thurn and Taxis's sworn enemy. Just
before Niccolo is overtaken and killed by Tristero assassins, he opens
up the letter he's been carrying. Reading aloud, he makes "sarcastic"
comments about what "is blatantly a pack of lies devised to soothe
Gennaro until Angelo can muster his own army." But when Gennaro arrives
on the scene, and reads the letter aloud, "it is no longer the lying
document Niccolo read us excerpts from at all, but now miraculously a
long confession by Angelo of all his crimes [...] In the presence of the
miracle, all fall to their knees, bless the name of God, mourn Niccolo,
vow to lay waste to [Angelo's Dukedom of] Squamuglia." But who
performed the miracle? Who re-wrote and re-sealed the letter? If not the
Tristero, then whom? God?!
Oedipa's pursuit of the truth behind the text of The Courier's Tragedy,
though it turns up several tantalizing clues, takes her further and
further away from Pierce's stamp collection. Eventually, there's a kind
of break-down or catastrophe. At a particular place in the novella, the
narrator sets his readers' sights on a specific destination ("The publisher's up in Berkeley," Oedipa thinks to herself; "Maybe I'll try them directly") and then sends them somewhere else
("next day she drove out to Vesperhaven House, a home for senior
citizens"). Seven pages later, without noticing the lengthy and quite
extraordinary detour he's just pursued, the narrator takes up where he
left off, as if nothing unusual has happened ("She [Oedipa] found the
Lecturn Press in a small office building on Shattack Avenue").
But something unusual did happened. Jacques Derrida might say
that Pynchon intentionally and openly tried to imitate or import into
the form of his narration the truth of all postal operations. Drawing
upon both philosophy (historical figuration) and common sense (personal
experience), Derrida states:
The condition for [the letter] to arrive is that it ends up and even
that it begins by not arriving [...] A letter can always not arrive at
its destination, and that therefore it never arrives. And this is really
how it is, it is not a misfortune, that's life [...] To post is to send
by "counting" with a halt, a relay, or a suspensive delay, the place of
the mailman, the possibility of going astray and of forgetting [...] A
strike [by the employees], or even a sorting accident, can always delay
indefinitely, lose without return.
For these reasons, Derrida is fascinated by "dead letters," pre-paid
missives that never arrive, that enter into and remain in the postal
system.
"Dead Letter Office. -- Letters or parcels which cannot be delivered,
from defect of address or other cause, are sent to the Division of dead
letters and dead parcels post. They are carefully examined on both front
and back for name and address of the sender; if these are found, they
are returned to the sender. If the sender's address is lacking, they are
kept for a period, after which dead letters are destroyed, while dead
parcels are sold at auction." I ask myself, and truly speaking they
could never give me a satisfactory answer on this question, how they
distinguish a letter and a parcel, a dead letter and a dead parcel, and why they did not also sell a so-called dead letter at auction.
All this certainly goes a long way in The Crying of Lot 49,
the ultimate destination of which is a dead man's stamp collection,
parceled and ready to be sold at an auction. But there must be more in
play than just that. Note the abruptness of and confusion caused by the
beginning of the narrator's 7-page-long detour.
"Wait," [Oedipa] said, having just got an idea, "the publisher's up
in Berkeley. Maybe I'll try them directly." Thinking also she could
visit John Nefastis.
She had caught sight of the historical marker only because she'd gone back, deliberately,
to Lake Inverarity one day, owing to this, what you might have to call,
growing obsession, with "bringing something of herself" -- even if that
something was just her presence -- to the scatter of business interests
that had survived Inverarity. She would give them order, she would
create constellations; next day she drove out to Vesperhaven House, a
home for senior citizens that Inverarity had put up around the time
Yoyodyne came to San Narciso. (Emphasis added.)
In sharp contrast to Oedipa's commitment to giving "order" (Taxis)
and constellation-like coherence or legibility to Inverarity's
"scatter," the narrator here creates disorder, a sense of dislocation,
by deliberately going back and forth very quickly. Back to Lake
Inverarity, where, by accident, "on the other side of the lake at
Fangoso Lagoons," Oedipa happened to see "the historical marker," which
proclaimed:
On this site, in 1853, a dozen Wells, Fargo men battled gallantly with a
band of masked marauders in mysterious black uniforms. We owe this
description to a post rider, the only witness to the massacre, who died
shortly after. The only other clue was a cross, traced by one of the
victims in the dust. To this day the identities of the slayers remains shrouded in mystery. (Emphasis added.)
And then, suddenly forward, not to Berkeley and the Lecturn Press, but to Vesperhaven House, a destination that has arrived completely unannounced and totally unexpected.
On the day of Oedipa's visit, neither the residents of Vesperhaven nor
even Pynchon's own readers knew or were told that she was coming. She
had no real reason to go there, in the first place: Yoyodyne is only
peripherally involved in the Tristero conspiracy, and had already been
covered. Oedipa just wandered into Verperhaven one fine day, without
knowing who, exactly, she wanted to talk to. She might have met no one
on that particular day; the whole trip might've ended up a waste of time and effort.
Miraculously, the person Oedipa is lucky enough to meet isn't a "character" in the story, or at least hadn't yet been named, mentioned or alluded to.
In its front recreation room she [Oedipa] found sunlight coming in it
seemed through every window; an old man nodding in front of a dim Leon
Schlesinger cartoon show on the tube; and a black fly browsing along the
pink, dandruffy arroyo of the neat part in the old man's hair. A
fat nurse ran in with a can of bug spray and yelled at the fly to take
off so she could kill it. The cagey fly stayed where it was. "You're
bothering Mr Thoth," she yelled at the little fellow. Mr Thoth jerked
awake, jarring the loose the fly, which made a desperate scramble for
the door. The nurse pursued, spraying poison. "Hello," said Oedipa. "I
was dreaming," Mr Thoth told her, "about my grandfather. A very old man,
at least as old as I am now." (Emphasis added.)
Is it a mere "coincidence" or "accidental correlation" that, in ancient Egyptian mythology, Thoth
was the inventor of numbers and writing (hieroglyphics)? Or that, in
ancient Greek mythology, Thoth was identified with Hermes, herald and
messenger (mailman) of the gods? No, these correlations can't be
accidental, they must be intentional, because this "Mr Thoth" not only
knows about the Tristero, but has definite proof of its existence.
"A Spanish name," Mr Thoth said, frowning, "a Mexican name. Oh, I can't
remember. Did they write it on the ring?" He reached down to a knitting
bag by his chair and came up with blue yarn, needles, patterns, finally a
dull gold signet ring. "My grandfather cut this from the finger of one
of them he killed. Can you imagine a 91-year-old man so brutal?" Oedipa
stared. The device on the ring was once again the WASTE symbol.
Another stunning coincidence: dangling at the end of Mr
Thoth's "blue yarn" is Plato's version of the story of the ring of
Gyges. As Marc Shell points out in The Economy of Literature, the
story of Gyges had been told by many ancient writers, including
Herodotus, Xanthos, Anacreon, Plutarch, Cicero, Archilochus, and Horace.
(Modern writers who have told the story include Montaigne, La Fontaine,
Rousseau, Gautier, Gide and Tolkien.) But Plato was the first ancient
to insist that Gyges was able to commit murder, seize control of Lydia,
and become a tyrant (indeed, the very first tyrant of the ancient world)
because he possessed a magic solid-gold ring, which (another
coincidence!) he'd stolen from the finger of a corpse that'd been
brought up from underground by an earthquake. Is it yet another coincidence that, in Spanish, arroyo means "gulch," but also "mine shaft" (a place from which underground gold is brought to the surface)?
In Marc Shell's account, Plato introduced his novel hypothesis
because Gyges was the first ruler to mint coins and use them as money.
"Rings played several roles in the economic development of money [in
ancient Greece]," Shell notes. Before the invention of coined money,
rings were among the most commonly used symbola (valued items cut
in half and divided between parties who'd entered into a contract,
which was thus both sealed and "symbolized" by the cutting). Some of the
very first coins were actually ring-coins, coins that could circulate
and be worn as rings. And, perhaps most importantly, the seals or
writing on the rings of kings were sometimes used to mint coins (and, it
shouldn't go without mentioning, to seal and provide authentification
for the letters conveyed by the king's couriers).
And there's the hitch or gather in the fabric: you can't separate the
monetary system from the postal system. Mr Thoth's ring (the ring of
Gyges) joins them together. Recall what Derrida said: "The post is a
banking agency." Perhaps there's no need to remind Thomas Pynchon, who
wrote The Crying of Lot 49 the same year (1965) that the U.S.
Post Office announced it was closing all of its postal savings banks,
which had been in operation since 1910. There should have been no
need to remind Oedipa of the connection between letters and money.
According to the narrator, "the probate court," after evaluating "in
dollars [...] how much did stand in her way" -- that is, how likely she
was to bail out of her responsibilities to the court -- had required
Oedipa to "post" a bond. But, no: Oedipa needs to be reminded, again.
That, precisely, is her function, her primary purpose: to remember. She
tells herself: "I am meant to remember. Each clue is supposed to have
its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence." But then, the
narrator says, "she wondered if the gemlike 'clues' were only some kind
of compensation. To make up for having lost the direct, epilectic Word,
the cry that might abolish the night" (emphasis added).
After the miraculous appearance, deus ex machina, of Mr Thoth, Oedipa searches out Mike Fallopian. What does he
make of the historical marker she'd accidently seen? "There's no way to
trace it, unless you want to follow up an accidental correlation, like
you got from the old man," he tells Oedipa, trying to dissuade her from
pursuing the matter any further. Oedipa, ignoring Fallopian's use of the
word "accidential," asks him in response: "You really think it's a
correlation?" It's really a double correlation: a correlation
between the "band of masked marauders in mysterious black uniforms" and
the couriers of the Tristero; and a correlation between the incident
commemorated by the marker and the incident remembered by Mr Thoth (his
grandfather is the post rider who survived to tell the tale). And, of
course, there is also a pun, which Pynchon doesn't hesitate to make, on
"relation," as in family relations or "lines" of kinship. Oedipa, the
narrator says, "thought of how tenuous it was, like a long white hair,
over a century long. Two very old men [grandfather and grandson]. All
these fatigued brain cells between herself and the truth."
Even the narrator thinks that Oedipa should be getting the
hang of the weave (the plot) by now. "If she'd thought to check a couple
lines back in the Wharfinger play," he says, "Oedipa might have made
the next connection by herself." But she didn't. "As it was she got an
assist from Genghis Cohen," "the most eminent philatelist in the L.A.
area," who'd been retained by Metzger, "acting on instructions in the
will," "to inventory and appraise Inverarity's stamp collection [...]
for a percent of his valuation." In this arrangement, a lot, Lot 49
itself, depends on Cohen's "values." If he is an honest man, he will
correctly appraise or evaluate the collection, and get paid "properly,"
according to the stipulated percent (which of course can either be large
or small). But if he's a dishonest or corrupt man, he can intentionally
overestimate the collection's value and thereby collect more money than
he would have otherwise. It's called a "con game," a manipulation of
"confidence." (At the end of the novella, when Oedipa spots him at the
auction, Cohen looks "genuinely embarassed," and knows exactly why he
shouldn't be there: "Please don't call it a conflict of interests," he
tells her. "There were some lovely Mozambique triangles I couldn't quite
resist." He's "conned" himself into believing he's not corrupt, much in
the same way that Oedipa had once "conned herself into the curious,
Rapunzel-like role of pensive girl.")
An indefinite time after her encounter with Mr Thoth ("One rainy
morning"), but still within the narrator's unaccountable, 7-page-long
interruption, "Oedipa got rung up by this Genghis Cohen, who even over
the phone she could tell was disturbed. 'There are some irregularities,
Miz Maas,' he said. 'Could you come over?'" Since this is the
destination to which the entire narrative so far has been heading,
Oedipa gets in her car right away (no delays) and drives straight to
Cohen's office (no detours). Once she's arrived, however, Cohen serves
her "real homemade dandelion wine," and tells her, "I picked the
dandelions in a cemetary, two years ago. Now the cemetary is gone. They
took it out for the East San Narciso Freeway." It's like she's hearing a
post horn, heralding a delivery. Then she blacks out.
She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the
epilectic is said to -- an odor, color, pure piercing grace note
announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross,
this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack,
that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end),
she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues,
announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which
must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must
always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an
overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back [...] She glanced
down the corridor of Cohen's rooms in the rain and saw, for the very
first time, how far it might be possible to get lost in this. (Emphasis
added.)
When, exactly, does Oedipa's seizure end? Is it even supposed to end?
Did it end as soon as or a few moments after Cohen started explaining
what he's found? After she leaves his office? After the narrator's
seven-page-long interruption has ended? There's no telling.
The "disturbing" news is the fact that Pierce's stamp collection is
corrupt or, rather, contains several corrupt stamps. Cohen shows Oedipa
"a U.S. commemorative stamp, the Pony Express issue of 1940, 3 cents
henna brown," which, like many other stamps, uses a watermark to verify
and reassure that the stamp itself is legitimate, and to discourage or
trap counterfeiters. But this particular watermark has the W.A.S.T.E.
symbol (a muted post horn) worked into it. "It's obviously a
counterfeit," Cohen tells Oedipa. "Not just an error." There are eight
"counterfeits" in all, each of which, Cohen reports, has "an error like
this, laboriously worked into the design, like a taunt. There's even a
transposition -- U.S. Potsage, of all things."
As Cohen himself notes, "The question is, who did these?" Asked
another way, "Who would want to taunt the U.S. Post Office?" Several
possibilities immediately come to mind: bored, disgruntled or striking
postal employees (insiders); agents from competing postal systems,
possibly the Tristero (infiltrators); and enemies of the United States
government itself, not just its Post Office (in wartime, even a "cold
war," an obviously counterfeit stamp can be circulated in the hopes that
it will destroy public confidence in both the financial and political
legitimacy of the enemy's leadership).
In any case, Oedipa doesn't understand. She thinks that a counterfeit
stamp will be like a counterfeit banknote: valuable only when
overlooked, and worthless when properly identified. "Then it isn't worth
anything," she guesses when Cohen first uses the word "counterfeit."
But she's wrong: a counterfeit stamp remains (valuable), after it has
been identified and exposed. Doubly corrupt, it can be sold or auctioned
off after being seized, while a counterfeit banknote is always
destroyed after being seized. "You'd be surprised how much you can sell
an honest forgery for," Cohen tells Oedipa. "Some collectors specialize
in them." And so this "disturbing" news is actually very good news. It
means that Pierce's stamp collection is probably worth a great deal more
than originally thought, which in turn means that Cohen's fees will in
turn be much higher. The government -- not only the postal inspectors,
but the probate court, as well -- should be notified of these
discoveries. "Do we tell the government, or what?" innocent Oedipa asks
Cohen, who, "nervous or suddenly in retreat," replies, "No, I wouldn't.
It isn't our business, is it?" No, apparently not: Cohen's "business"
lies in not reporting things (sources of income, conflicts of interest, criminal activity) to the government.
So ends the 7-page-long interruption and the first half of the
novella. The transition back to the main thread (the beginning of
Chapter 5) is yet another "postal" relay. A kind of reverse of the
others, this one -- instead of addressing us properly (to Lecturn Press,
in Berkeley) and then sending us to the wrong destination (Vesperhaven)
-- addresses us improperly and then sends us to the right destination:
"Though her next move should have been to contact Randolph Driblette
again, she decided instead to drive up to Berkeley."
* * * *
Marc Shell notes that "the ring of Gyges is a hypothesis that is discarded in the philosophical course" of the Republic,
in which Socrates eventually declares "we have proved [...] that the
soul ought to do justice whether it possess the ring of Gyges or not."
Shell also notes that "the conclusion that the ring of Gyges is finally a
bad thing and ought (if found) to be thrown away influenced many
political philosophers after Plato," especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
But what about Thomas Pynchon? He's got the ring of Gyges; he got it
from Tolkien; Mr Thoth (even) showed it to Oedipa. But what's Pynchon
going to do with it: use it and be corrupted, or throw it away? No;
no excluded middles. "[Oedipa] had heard all about [them]; they were
bad shit, to be avoided." Pynchon is going to try to have it both ways:
he's gonna keep the ring, let Oedipa use it in her search for the truth,
but only for a little while; then he'll take it back from her and cashier it.
Cashiered is the name of a disaster movie that Metzger starred
in when a child, and "kasher" (a punning cross between cashier and
kosher) is part of his schtick, his "come on" to women: "My mother was
really out to kasher me, boy, like a piece of beef on the sink, she
wanted me drained [of blood] and white. Times I wonder [...] if she
succeded. It scares me. You know what mothers like that turn their male
children into." In our usage of the word, "cashiering" means
dismissing the ring (as one might dismiss a disgraced person from a high
post), rejecting and discarding it (as one might refuse a ring
consummating or offered in proposal of a marriage), and annuling and
discharging it (as one might "break" a contractual agreement, vow or
bond).
For most of the second half of the novella, Oedipa is or at least
feels "invisible." As a result, she is able to go to commonplace
locations and see and hear "secret," even forbidden (Oedipal), things.
Out at the airport Oedipa, feeling invisible, eavesdropped on a poker
game whose steady loser entered [posted] each loss neat and
conscientious in a little balance-book decorated inside with scrawled
post horns [...] Catching a TWA flight to Miami was an uncoordinated boy
who planned to slip at night into aquariums and open negotiations with
the dolphins, who would succeed man. He was kissing his mother
passionately goodbye, using his tongue. "I'll write, ma," he kept
saying. "Write by WASTE," she said, "remember. The government will open
it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad." "I love you, ma," he
said. "Love the dolphins," she advised him. "Write by WASTE." So it
went. Oedipa played the voyeur and listener.
Thanks to the powers of the ring, Oedipa, "with her own eyes,"
"verified a [whole] WASTE system: [she'd] seen two WASTE postmen, a
WASTE mailbox, WASTE stamps, WASTE cancellations. And the image of the
muted post horn all but saturating the Bay Area" (emphasis
added). She was also able "to fit together" a credible "account" of how
the Tristero organization began, back in the 16th century, as a rival to
the (quite real) Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly, the symbol of which
was an open or unmuted post horn. But, most importantly, Oedipa was to
able to understand how and why the Tristero survived, how and why it
became today's W.A.S.T.E.
For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to
communicate by U.S. Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly
even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the
life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied
them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes,
simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate silent, unsuspected world. (Emphasis added.)
There's been an exchange of "withdrawals" that, tragically, leaves a
kind of vacuum in the middle. Ignored, denied and excluded from the
Republic by the rich and powerful people of America, the poor and
powerless have responded by going silent or only speaking in code. But,
on both sides of the exchange, the withdrawals keep something back or
take away something with them. The "machinery" of America's putatively
democratic society (despite the absence of real citizens) keeps its
"life," and the network of the excluded (despite being given a kind of
death sentence) keep their dignity and sense of self as people who
"belong." Indeed, they identify with D.E.A.T.H.: "Don't Ever Antagonize
the Horn" is a graffito Oedipa sees accompanying a muted post horn.
Towards the end of the novella, Oedipa herself suddenly starts to withdraw from or cry off
her quest for the truth, though she risks losing her bond and having
the probate court revoke her "letters testamentary." Perhaps the
corruption of the ring has begun to seize her (); perhaps the ring's no
longer in her possession (Pynchon having withdrawn it). Instead of being
curious, even zealous, she becomes "anxious that her revelation not
expand beyond a certain point. Lest, possibly, it [like the ocean] grow
larger than she and assume her to itself." She tells one of her sources
of information, "It's over, they've saturated me. From here on
I'll only close them out. You're free. Released" (emphasis added). And
then, "her isolation complete," Oedipa "tried to face toward the sea.
But she'd lost her bearings." She, too, has been "released," set "free."
The indefinitely long period of mourning for Pierce Inverarity --
seven days? seven weeks, that is, 49 days? whatever -- it's over. Images
of Varo's Bordando el Manto Terrestre and "the continuous tradition" of "the weave itself" itself are clearly recalled at the crucial moment:
San Narciso at that moment lost (the loss pure, instant, spherical, the
sound of stainless orchestral chime held among the stars and struck
lightly), gave up its residue of uniqueness for her; became a name
again, was assumed back into the American continuity of crust and mantle. Pierce Inverarity was really dead. (Emphasis added.)
Oedipa can now see what had previously escaped her notice:
Every access route to the Tristero could be traced back to the
Inverarity estate [...] The whole shopping center that housed Zapf's
Used Books [...] had been owned by Pierce. Not only that, but the Tank
Theatre [where Driblette's production of The Courier's Tragedy had been staged], also [...] Even Emory Bortz, with his copy of Blobb's Peregrinations
(bought, she had no doubt he'd tell her in the event she asked, also at
Zapf's), taught now at San Narciso College, heavily endowed by the dead
man. Meaning what? That Bortz, along with Metzger, Cohen, Driblette,
Koteks, the tattoed sailor in San Francisco, the W.A.S.T.E. carriers
she'd seen -- that all of them were Pierce Inverarity's men? Bought? Or
loyal, for free, for fun, to some grandiose practical joke he'd cooked
up, all for her embarassment, or terrorizing, or moral improvement?
Oedipa has realized that the Sphinx-like riddle of the Tristero ("why me?") might not be a conspiracy, but a hoax,
and that it isn't being played on the U.S. government and its
Potsmaster, but, once again, on her personally and her alone. Thinking
aloud for Oedipa, the narrator speculates on the following possibility:
"A plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate,
involving items like the forging of stamps, and ancient books, constant
surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over
San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors and
Pierce Inverarity only knows what-all besides, all financed out of the
estate, in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal
mind to know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that
it must have meaning beyond a practical joke."
Perhaps Pierce's cryptic motivations concerned not so much Oedipa's
behavior as what she symbolized: "Though he had never talked business
with her, she had known it to be a fraction of him that couldn't come
out even, would carry forever beyond any decimal place she might name;
her love, such as it had been, remaining incommensurate with his need to
possess, to alter the land, to bring new skylines, personal
antogonisms, growth rates into being." It's also possible that the hoax
wasn't on Oedipa so much as on Death:
She just didn't know. He himself [Pierce] might have discoverd The Tristero, and encrypted that into the will, buying into just enough
to be sure she's find it. Or he might even have tried to survive death,
as a paranoia; as a pure conspiracy against someone he loved. Would
that breed of perversity prove at last too keen to be stunned even by
death, had a plot finally been devised too elaborate for the dark Angel
to hold at once, in his humorless vice-president's head, all the
possibilities of? Had something slipped through and Inverarity by that
much beaten death? (Emphasis added.)
And so, "the plot" of The Crying of Lot 49 comes down to four
distinct, mutually exclusive possibilities. The Tristero/WASTE system is
either (1) a conspiracy against the pre-paid postal stamp or (2) a hoax
that counterfeits such a conspiracy; and if "the plot" is a hoax, the
motivation for perpetrating it is either (3) pay-back for an unwanted
remainder (an "odd" fraction of Pierce's personality, or Oedipa's
"incommensurate" love), or (4) an investment in a highly prized
remainder (life after death, or immortality). There's a thread that runs
through or connects each one: money, which doesn't simply
corrupt people, their motivations and their behavior; it also corrupts
their minds, thinking and language. It stamps everything.
Pynchon's narrator also comes up with four symmetrical possibilities, but his list varies from ours.
Either (1) you [Oedipa] have stumbled [...] onto a network by which X
number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies,
recitation of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the
official government delivery system [...] Or (2) you are hallucinating
it. Or (3) a plot has been mounted against you, so expense and elaborate
[...] that it must have meaning beyond a practical joke. Or (4) you are
fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of
your skull. (Numbers added.)
Note that the narrator has substituted psychology
(possibilities 2 and 4) for money. As a matter of fact, the word "money"
is only used once in the whole novella: "No one could begin to trace
it," the narrator says of Driblette's decision to add two lines to The Courier's Tragedy.
"A hundred hangups, permuted, combined -- sex, money, illness, despair
with the history of his time and place, who knew." Money is just one
"problem" or thread among many, and not the principle or dominant one.
Who has the authority to choose one of these possibilities and
exclude the others, to make a "finding of fact" or other legally
binding decision? As co-executor of Pierce's estate, Oedipa Maas
does. But, "saturated," she's "freed" and "released" those who had felt
bound to give information, and has vowed to "close them out" thereafter.
Who does that leave, next in the order of succession? The narrator.
And he does not fail to deliver or deposit Oedipa at the auction,
though she is, like Wharfinger's 17th century audiences, "death-wishful,
sensually fatigued, [and] unprepared" for the drama about to unfold.
To make sure that the estate makes as much money as possible and that
there's no conflict of interest (no "hidden" deals, no price-fixing),
the stamps are auctioned off, in a public ceremony, rather than simply
sold in the usual fashion, i.e., privately. Despite the fact that the
auction is open to "you, hubby, girl friends," anyone, the mood is exclusive ("WASTE only," men only).
The men inside the auction room wore black mohair and had pale, cruel
faces. They watched her [Oedipa] come in, trying each to conceal his
thoughts. Loren Passerine [the auctioneer], on his podium, hovered like a
puppet-master, his eyes bright, his smile practiced and relentless. He
stared at her, smiling, as if saying, I'm surprised you actually came.
Oedipa sat alone, toward the back of the room [...] An assistant closed
the heavy door on the lobby windows and the sun. She heard a lock snap
shut; the sound echoed a moment. Passerine spread his arms in a gesture
that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture; perhaps
to a descending angel. The auctioneeer cleared his throat. Oedipa
settled back, to await the crying of Lot 49.
This scene, the novella's very last, has its echo in Derrida's The Post Card.
When I enter the post office of a great city I tremble as if in a sacred
place, full of refused, promised, threatening pleasures. It is true
that inversely I often have a tendency to consider the great temples as
noisy sorting centers, with very agitated crowds before the distribution
begins, like the auctioning of an enormous courrier. Occasionally the preacher opens the epistles and reads them aloud. This is always the truth.
But that's just it. At the Lot 49 auction, the crier clears
his throat but doesn't get to open his mouth, open and read aloud from
the epistles (testaments mailed by the apostles), or reveal the truth.
He's interrupted or silenced by Pynchon's narrator, or perhaps by
Pynchon himself, who has given out, given up, or dropped the ball
("Keep it bouncing," Pierce, "talking business," had once told Oedipa,
"that's all the secret [is], keep it bouncing"). The last word is "END,"
not "THE END," not "TO BE CONTINUED" (which would have more "bounce"). Just END, no bounce at all.
And so, despite the post card-like "economy" of the narration, and despite the (implicit) promise to "deliver," nothing
gets confirmed, decided or resolved. The reader has waited until the
end, only to find that, in the end, more waiting (an "afterlife")
awaits. All four symmetrical possibilities remain in play, cancelling
each other out. Or, rather, the whole "lot" of them have been cancelled,
but not redeemed ("made good"); they've been addressed and stamped (Lot 49 on route to auction), but haven't arrived, won't ever arrive, God only knows.
-- Written by Bill Brown, 27 February 2004.
Authors cited:
Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond,
originally published in French in 1980; translated into English by Alan
Bass and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1987.
Kaplan, Janet A. Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys, published by Cross River Press, 1988. Edition used: first paperback edition, 2000.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49, originally published by the J.B. Lippincott Company, 1966. Edition used: 19th ("Windstone") printing by Bantam, 1982.
Pynchon, Thomas. V., originally published by the J.B. Lippincott Company, 1963. Edition used: 4th printing by Bantam reprint, 1968.
Shell, Marc. The Economy of Literature, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Edition used: 2d printing, 1979.
The problems with Yili-Juonikas’ experimental 650-page novel Neuromaani start already with the title. According to translator Doug Robinson, who mentions this book in an interview for The Collidescope, the ambiguous title can be translated as Neuronovel, Neuromaniac, or My Neurocountry.
Once you get past that, it gets only worse. There are at least three
degrees of inaccessibility you have to reckon with when it comes to Neuromaani.
Firstly, and most obviously, if you, like myself, don’t know Finnish,
you cannot hope to read the novel even in theory, and all you are left
with is the impressions of other people shared in a language you
understand. The second degree is applicable to you if you know the
language but have just learnt about the existence of Neuromaani.
You still won’t be able to read the novel because it is out of print
and is impossible to get in any online used bookstores. The third degree
of inaccessibility is for the lucky ones: you are not only proficient
in Finnish but also managed to buy your copy when it was still
available. But even you can’t possibly read the book in its entirety. Of
course, you can try and read all the pages from first to last, but
instead of following the story, you will be exposed to a jumble of
incoherent episodes without rhyme or rhythm. Such a stab at the
old-fashioned linear method of reading will leave you frustrated and
suffering from a headache. All you can hope for is to experience some
parts of Neuromaani by undertaking a series of non-linear journeys through the novel, making choices at the end of each chapter.
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