The Crying of Lot 49

"She was overcome all at once by a need to touch him, as if she could not believe in him, or would not remember him, without it. Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning. She felt wetness against her breast and saw that he was crying again. He hardly breathed but tears came as if being pumped. 'I can't help,' she whispered, rocking him, 'I can't help.' It was already too many miles to Fresno... 'Ramirez,; she cried. The arthritic looked around on his rusty neck. 'He's going to die,' she said. 'Who isn't?'" Pg 102-104

When this passage occurs, Oedipa has stumbled upon an old man linked to the Trystero who's last wish is to have a letter delivered to his wife. The moment allows Oedipa to, for once, let in few emotions that she has managed to block out before. She seems to detach herself out of getting hurt, which is why this moment is so perfectly characterized for her. The way that Pynchon uses imagery to describe how the moment in all its simplicity is very unlike his style of writing, which is why it stuck out so much for me. Words like "wetness" and "arthritic," help the reader visualize the way these people behave and almost captures their aura. I particularly like how Pynchon says that she had to take a few steps towards the man and how she "actually held him" because it almost shows the emotional steps Oedipa needs to take to come close to another human being.
Then, right after this emotional scene, Oedipa kind of sits back and talks to the man who is supposed to be taking care of the other man and her emotions are thrown right back in her face. I think that this is very satirical and also extremely realistic. Ramirez does not care that she has made an emotional breathrough, or that the old man has a final wish, he just figures, he's going to die and that is that. I feel like most people say and do these kinds of things, because mourning over people and letting your hopes go is much easier than feeling things. Pynchon is making the same criticism about people because Ramirez should care more. After having spent several months with the old man, taking care of him and leading him around town, he should have some kind of emotional connection, right? But maybe that is why he is actually distancing himself, is because he does not want to be too close and feel that sorrow when the old man does die.

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1. http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://joshspear.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/lisa-solberg.jpg&imgrefurl=http://joshspear.com/item/lisa-solberg-x-new-paintings/&h=265&w=550&sz=88&tbnid=6PD8TqG_Cia-JM:&tbnh=64&tbnw=133&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dlisa%2Bsolberg&usg=__Ey9j6hFdAPrYzewBdybofEcqZ2E=&ei=IdchS-WaBoaVtgeG8_TRBw&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=6&ct=image&ved=0CBcQ9QEwBQ


2. http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.thearchibaldprize.com.au/07/__data/page/9918/Fransella.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.thearchibaldprize.com.au/07/winners/trustees_watercolour&usg=__5T8mGw8w8j12xwdDUy8zcNbbkCI=&h=500&w=376&sz=45&hl=en&start=3&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=JhCoHKVpBEguLM:&tbnh=130&tbnw=98&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgraham%2Bfransella%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1T4ADBF_enUS324US325%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1


3. http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://aquafornia.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/los-angeles-aerial-bor.jpg&imgrefurl=http://sacnewsblogger.blogspot.com/2008/07/los-angeles-mini-earthquake.html&usg=__Yp4dM6FJj5Kw59NjuCp56SEWQcs=&h=1280&w=1600&sz=304&hl=en&start=42&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=QVo45Exm05fnTM:&tbnh=120&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dlos%2Bangeles%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1T4ADBF_enUS324US325%26sa%3DN%26start%3D36%26um%3D1
4. http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.lonelycomics.com/lonelyleague.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.lonelycomics.com/&h=625&w=565&sz=35&tbnid=6d_n_CtpiZet3M:&tbnh=237&tbnw=214&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dlonely%2Bart&hl=en&usg=__WHtTf70H9P3XxqVvjSVlGK8kfbY=&ei=ru4hS5PxD9GOtgfFt_DUBw&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=1&ct=image&ved=0CAcQ9QEwAA

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Character names in this book were especially important in this novel. Most of them were named to be a contradiction to ther original names while still applying to the character in the book. Their names almost mock themselves, as the people are almost the opposite of what they arelike and how they act. The other thing that is important about their names is the way they sound and are spelled. One big theme in this novel is how people confuse things. The character's names are all strange from their pronounciation to spelling, which really helps reflect who they are and whether or not they are confused.

1. Oedipa Maas is the main character of the novel. She is never directly described, either in personality or looks, but is expected to be pretty, since men are constantly attracted to her. Oedipa is very confused between what is reality and what is a lie, both before she stumbles upon the Trystero and after. Over time, she has been worn down, and no longer has faith in anything. This contributes to her confusion because she does not know herself since she does not have a definite personality anymore, but by trying to understand who the Trystero are, she starts to refind herself as well. Oedipa is named so because she has a questionable life, like Oedipus, but she is cowardly and weak, unlike Oedipus. Both were deeply confused and lived surrounded by secrets that they wanted to know. However, when Oedipus found out his truth, he went crazy, while we never know what Oedipa did.

Mucho Maas is Oedipa's husband. In the beginning of the book, he is weak just like Oedipa. They have both been known to cheat on each other, but are both so emotionally distant they do not know if they should care or not. Mucho's name is satirical because mucho is the exact opposite of who he is. Mucho is not really a full man in the beginning of this book because he cannot hold a job, cannot keep his wife, and cannot believe in anything, as much as he wants to. But as the book progresses, he becomes more of a man, and less of one, because he must rely on LSD to be one. He finally realizes that he has aspirations, and that he does not wanted to be trapped speaking WASP (never acknowledging the things that are on his mind).

Metzger is the co-executor of Pierce's will. He is restless and lonely. He has lived a rather strange life since he was a child star and grew up in an environment notorious for drugs and isolation, but has managed to grow up and become a lawyer. He is interested in challenges, since everything seems to come easy to him. Metzger is described to be very good looking which helps the author convey the idea that better looking people have it easier. Much of the southern California lifestyle becomes Metzger since he is good looking and has so many privileges, but is still looking for something.

Driblette is a playwright and actor. He starred in his own production of The Couriers Tragedy where he slipped in little bits of information about the Trystero, which led Oedipa to him. He really seems to signal the beginning and end of the journey Oedipa is taking since he is the first person to point her on the journey. He also signals the universe's paranoia since he knows says that they are each interpreted their own way. When he kills himself, it leads Oedipa into a dead end that she does not know how to get out of until someone else helps her out.

Fallopian is not particularly importan to the plot, but he symbolizes the rational side of things. Whenever Oedipa is questioning something, she miraculously finds him. When she wants to believe in the Trystero and other government plots, there he is to say, "It is possible." But when she feels like giving up he has a rational possibility that "It was all somebody putting [her] on." He has many different ideas for what everything is, but based on the situation, he comes up with rational explanations.

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Oedipa returns to San Narciso to finish learning what she can about the Trystero and hopefully figure out whatever Pierce had wanted he to know so she can put the whole experience to an end. She finds out that Metzger has run off to get married and has left a lawyer Oedipa does not know to help her execute the will. She moves on quickly and decides her best start is to find Driblette, the playwright who knew more about the Trystero than he let on, who committed suicide. Oedipa then goes to look for Emory Bortz, who wrote the original play that Driblette put on, in hopes that he can explain where the line "No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero" came from and more importantly, what it means. Bortz does not know the exact origin of the phrase, but thinks Trystero is linked to the Puritans as well as the Italians, and several other places. He gives her a book about the Trystero that describes a postal battle between them and Thurn and Taxis, as well as how the muted horn came, why men in all black are important, and other various secret symbols they use. She does not know what to make of the information, and goes to find Fallopian, who suggests that the whole Trystero is a clever trick that Pierce has played on her. Oedipa thinks the same, whether she wants to or not, and after talking to Genghis Cohen, decides to take a second look at everything. She realizes everywhere she has been and that has to do with the Trystero, is somehow related to Pierce. She then goes crazy. Oedipa finds out from Genghis that someone is interested in buying Pierce's stamp collection, whch will be auctioned off as lot 49. Still hungry for the truth, Oedipa assumes that this person knows about the Trystero, and goes in pursuit of him. The book closes as Oedipa regains her drive to solve the mystery as well as the beginning of the auction.
It is easy to say that this ending made me mad. I was so angry at Oedipa for giving up for the brief amount of time that she did because she wasted time. She never looked for the other people to see if the theory about Pierce and the Trystero being fake was true, so she should have kept pursuing, especially since her instincts told her it was not true. Then the entire ending is just so frustrating because the cycle never ends. The reader feels so close to the truth that they can taste it, but they never get to read about this new character who is crucial to the plot. Not only that, but I felt like Oedipa never finished changing. Her character was mid-recovery and it ended just as she was finding herself again. However, if the mystery were solved, and Oedipa made whole again, I do think that it would have been a little too happily ever after for me. But I really do wish that there was some kind of conclusion to the conspiracy.
From this book, I know that I like what I could understand. I basically had to reread this whole thing because so many things did not make sense. The final two chapters felt like a blur since it was kind of hard to understand what was going on. As far as the actual conspiracy goes, I had no idea what the Trystero was or why Oedipa needed to know if they existed or not. It is not like she knows what they do or how they affect society, or probably even her life. The Trystero could be anything, so it was kind of dumb for her to be in such avid pursuit of it when she didn't know what she was fighting for.
That is another big theme in the book that I liked and related to. The question of knowing and not knowing and believing in it or not. Fiction vs. non-fiction was ever present, and the way that the characters live in the world, with both fake and real, just shows how sometimes fiction is right. The whole character of Mucho is one way of showing this, since he wound up hooked on LSD and living a complete fallacy. He needed something to make him feel like he was happy, which is not that bad since in pretending to be happy, he actually becomes it.
Overall, I thought this book was good when it was good, but very dry and confusing. Maybe it is because I am a girl, but I like reading books that have more emotion in it than conspiracy plots. I also like to read about characters who are actually interacting with their world instead of the world interacting with them. Oedipa seems like such a dull main character because she does not have a strong female role that could match her intricate and wacky life.

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In chapter five, Oedipa develops new conspiracy theories as she speaks to people who are actually involved with the Trystero. She first meets John Nefastits to see if she is a "sensitive" or can operate a machine that defies the Law of Thermodynamics, only to realize that she is not special at all. She then wallows while drinking in a bar until she sees a man with a tattoo of the muted horn who tells her about the Inamorati Anonymous (IA), a satirical version of AA. The next day, Oedipa meets a man who has a tattoo on his arm of the muted horn and is about to die. He asks Oedipa to mail a strange letter, with a postage stamp that has the muted horn on it as well. Intrigued, she decides to help, and waits for the mailman to pick up the letter along with all the other mail with the strange post markings, which only leads her back to John Nefastis. She goes back home, with thoughts of the Trystero and the symbol in mind, and decides she should talk to her shrink. When she does to find Dr. Hilarius, she finds that he has gone crazy himself, as a consequence of surrounding himself with crazy people. He reveals how he used to be a Nazi and accidentally kidnaps her. When she escapes, she is reunited with Mucho only to find that he is hooked on LSD, and has decided to realize his dreams and have a personality, which is why she leaves him.
This chapter was much more interesting than the others, and was written in a way that was not nearly half as jumbled as the rest of the book. Not only that, but the book starts to get into things that are much more interesting, like the whole government conspiracy idea about the mail being rigged, and everyone in on it from your local business workers, to the children who play hopscotch.
It is funny how Oedipa starts to really develop in this chapter, because I feel that, for a main character, she does not have an established personality. I don't really like her because she does not have a real personality, is weak-minded, and lacks self respect. But, in this chapter I started to not be annoyed by her. I still don't really like her, but understand her more. She is all the things that I hate about her, but she is like that because she is so much more lonely than she wants to be. It is hard for her to believe in people, and wound up abandoned because they did not believe in her in return. Then you see why she likes mysteries and being confused. After walking home from the bar, she goes on a walk and realizes how she never solves the things that confuse her because she does not want to get any closer to the truth. But she has this underlying feeling that she needs to know the truth sooner or later.
I actually really like the whole concept behind the IA. I think that it was a funny allusion to use, but it is also sad because I know that there are much sadder and more unrealistic support groups. When the story behind the IA is expained, it actually makes sense because so many people make mistakes because of love and getting rid of it altogether actually makes sense. The basic story behind the IA is that a man came home ready to committ suicide because he could not find a new job, but overhears his wife sleeping with the man who got him fired, and decides to live and help people avoid falling in love. This only further proves the theme in this book that you cannot trust other people.

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"San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts- census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway. But it had been Pierce's domicile, and headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on which everthing afterward had been built, however rickety or grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed would set the spot apart, give it an aura. But if there was any vital difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was invisible on first glance... Nothing was happening... She thought of Mucho, her husband, trying to believe in his job. Was it something like this he felt, looking through the soundproof glass at one of his colleagues with a headset clamped on and cueing the next record with movements stylized as the handling of chrism, senser, chalice might be for a holy man, yet really tuned in to the voice, voices, the music, its message, surrounded by it, digging it, as were all the faithful it went out to; did Mucho stand outside Studio A looking in, knowing that even if he could hear it he couldn't believe in it?" -Pg. 14

This passage describes Oedipa's first impression of San Narciso, a town where Pierce's hope and Mucho's despair are present everywhere. Oedipa thinks of both when she sees this town because she sees how Pierce transformed such a rustic, unnoticeable place into something that was a place he called home, had his share of secrets, and was almost happy. But then she thinks of Mucho, who looks at the world from the outside, and he can see the homes, secrets, and happiness, but he never believes in these things. He just can't.

I think that this embodies the way the American Dream can work. There are the people who sit on the outside and watch the dreams being built. Mucho, like many people, doesn't allow himself to truly want success, either out of ignorance or the knowledge that he might fail. I feel like that is even more present in today's society. People watch the rich and famous get what they work for, think about how much they want their success, but don't put forth the effort to get it. The only difference between the two is that the people who go for their dreams believe they will make it in the end. Mucho is an all too reliable character; he falls into depression from being unfulfilled, loses his wife to everything else that guarantees to be more interesting than him, and/or puts up with jobs that slowly crush his spirit. This also embodies the time, since many middle-class families had husbands who worked monotonous corporate jobs and wound up with nothing to show for their lives.

The one thing that I found funny was that Mucho got the girl instead of Pierce. During a conversation between Metzger and Oedipa, she asks, "'What the hell didn't he own?'" to which Metzger says, "'You tell me.'" This could reflect how people tend to pick the safe things in life. They want the people who they know they can fall back on, not the people they have to take a chance with. While Pierce was dangerous and caring, Mucho was reliable and distant. Or it could reflect the way people spare their feelings, once again, out of fear. Oedipa is equally like Mucho, only she is unsatisfied in the world of love. She saw what it was like to be with Pierce, enjoyed it, but did not believe that they could be together, as they broke up. But I have a feeling that Pierce still had a thing for her, as he left her the executor of his will.

The whole American Spirit is the prospect of change. We all want change in some way, look at Obama's entire presidential campaign. Pierce helps embody that aspect of America because he transformed that town. While it was not by the most moral means, he still obtained his success and made San Narciso something. He saw the possibilities in small things, which is not easy.

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Oedipa decides to go visit the Yoyodyne factory, a company Pierce holds stock in. While on her tour, she gets lost and winds up meeting a man named Koteks who is doodling the same symbol she saw on the bathroom walls. Kotek is possibly crazy or extremely brilliant, as he is well educated in science, but rambles on in an insane way. After Oedipa pretends to know the secret Trystero symbols and people, Kotek begins to give her information, only to realize that she was lying. He quickly takes back his words, and Oedipa leaves to find Fallopian. After not getting any useful information, Oedipa leaves to find Driblette, the actor who knew about Trystero. Instead she meets Mr. Thoth who has a rind with the symbol she saw in the bathroom on a ring, and once again goes to meet Fallopian who says it is a historical marker. Oedipa then gets a call from one of Pierce's old friends, Genghis Cohen, who notices the same symbols on all of Pierce's stamps. The markings were made purposely, but neither of them knows why they are there.

In this chapter, I started to like Oedipa a little bit more. Pynchon's writing started to become more clear, so her thoughts were not as clouded as they were before, making it easier to relate to her. I thought that this chapter was the easiest to get through, or at least the most involved with the plot. The only thing I wish is that Metzger was in it more. He seems to have disappeared ever since the book revealed how he is going to litigate Pierce's home to make a name for himself. I just wish the characters would stay more consistent through the whole book. Mucho is barely in here, and he is Oedipa's husband. It just makes things that much harder to know what is important and what is not.

Pynchon's use of music and pop culture is also used again. The Paranoids are one example of music's importance, as their actions and lyrics tend to coincide with the events of the book. Pynchon did not include them in this chapter at all, so that could symbolize how Oedipa's paranoia is slowly starting to subside as she gets closer to the truth. But while Oedipa is in Yoyodyne, she hears a hymn being sung through the halls. It is about loyalty and warmth, which is ironic, because I would hardly describe the Yoyodyne building or corporation as being warm. The other cultural reference is to the amount of plays and books Oedipa reads and sees. They just happen to coincide with her life too perfectly, as if symbolizing and foreshadowing her future.

The one passage that I made me think and connect with my own reality was, "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." I really had to think about that sentence when I read it because I can relate that so easily to life. There are the mysteries you want to be solved, but sometimes don't know if you can hande the truth. Then there is the fear of being left with things unanswered and going on being unfulfilled. It's sad to think of the regret that Oedipa could have over Pierce and not solving the mystery that was him and them together. I wonder if it would have been better if she had not been left his executor at all. She would not have known he cared about her, but she would not have to find out some ugly truth that could ruin her memory of him.

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