The Crying of lot 49

Thoughts upon third read:

Was Pynchon always a cyberpunk author? In 1966, he compared the layout of Californian coast towns to circuit boards. There's a straight line (in as much as anything Pynchon can be a straight line) between the underground mail services of CoL49 and the darknet of Bleeding Edge, between the unfathomable rat's nest of inforrmation in Pierce Inverarity's papers and the post-Internet information overload of Against The Day.

For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless.



Damn, Pynchon writes like Monk plays; never the expected note, never the obvious shortcut, so many beats that would simply be wrong if he didn't know exactly what he was doing and how they related to each other.

Paranoia and entropy pop up everywhere. No system works without them, precisely because they break apart any system. N Katherine Hayles knew what she was doing when she used an English teacher assigning Pynchon as an example of entropy in How We Became Post-Human. The example, quoted from memory: If the teacher says "We'll be reading Crying of Lot 49", there can be no miscommunication, no entropy; no possible evolution of the message. If she says we'll be reading a Pynchon novel and lets the students guess which one, there are all sorts of possible outcomes - information theorists will tell you that if the sender and the receiver don't get the same message, communication has been ineffective; a biologist will tell you that's called "inbreeding". (The lead character is called "Oidipa".) A world without entroy would be dead. No growth without mutation.

change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick.

Obviously, there's always the option of insanity. Of paranoia being, well, paranoia, of all the connections being confirmation bias and a wish to have it all make sense rather than accept blunt reality.

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.

None of what we read prove anything but that it's been written down at some point before we read it. And the interpretations, boy, they're the biggest noise of all. Is every reader just the executor of a dead author's estate? Does "just" belong in that sentence? And they're using corpses to make ink anyway.

One of two great works of American 1966 art to mention the Black Angel.

The object of the conspiracy/faith/agenda is long lost, if it ever existed; what remains is what we've built around it, which keeps it alive.

What was left to inherit? That America coded in Inveracity’s testament, whose was that? She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages.

She remembered drifters she had listened to, Americans speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else invisible yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in; and walkers along the roads at night, zooming in and out of your headlights without looking up, too far from any town to have a real destination. And the voices before and after the dead man's that had phoned at random during the darkest, slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial's ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnameable act, the recognition, the Word.

The beauty of that. The lie of it. The LSD-induced insanity of trying to isolate any one voice in this chaotic harmony.

-----

A couple of thoughts upon re-reading The Crying Of Lot 49.

Being by far the shortest and condensed of Pynchon's novels, it's both easier and harder to make sense of than his longer works. On the one hand, the plot - a woman is asked to be executor of her ex's estate, and in the process uncovers a conspiracy involving a shadow post office going back hundreds of years (or does she?) is much easier to follow than the vast, intermingling storylines of his other works. On the other hand, the world in Crying is just as mad and chaotically ordered as in any of his other books; but since we only see one person's view of it, we can't even trust that fully. Which of course is part of the point. It's not for nothing that he drops several references to Lolita; Oedipa Maas' story may be told in the third person, but her experiences are just as unreliably told as Humbert's. There are bunches of references to things being deliberately fake; the Hollywood world, American rock bands posing as Brits (this being 1963), newly made Nazi uniforms for sale to collectors...

Either way, they'll call it paranoia. They.

All of Pynchon's novels play around with the idea of disestablishmentarianism, of underground (or overground, or inground, as in Against The Day) organisations refusing to follow the official line of how the world is. The world isn't simple, the ones in control are only in control of what we acknowledge them to be in control of. It's essentially a pre-Internet cyberthriller, all about the control (or lack thereof) of information. But if the ones in control are actually behind the anti-establishment - what then? Or what if all that gets sent through this alternative information system is meaningless "hi, hope you are well" messages - what's so subversive about that?

As conspiracy thrillers go, it's really more Foucault's Pendulum than The Da Vinci Code. Oedipa Maas is stuck in the midst of what might be a huge conspiracy, might be all in her head, or might actually even be exactly what it looks like: that we prefer the idea of there being a conspiracy to simply realising that we're being openly screwed.

For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.

Or not. The Crying Of Lot 49 came out in the early 60s, at the beginning of something of a paradigm shift; it's no less relevant in today's world. It doesn't offer any answers, Pynchon's novels never do, it just spins you around until you're not sure what side is up and if you're on either of them. It ridicules the ideas of conformity and efficiency - for instance, in the anecdote of the man who's replaced by a machine, eventually decides (after consulting the underground mail service) to commit suicide by self-immolation, and is surprised in the act by his wife and her lover, the very efficiency expert who had him replaced:

"Nearly three weeks it takes him," marvelled the efficiency expert, "to decide. You know how long it would've taken the IBM 7094? Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced."

And it stops right before the supposed revelation, leaves you hanging, wanting both more and less of this glorious, bewildering, hilarious madness.