The Insulated Mainstream and The Tristero Reaction

Pyncheon’s Crying of Lot 49 begins with a vivid description of the “insulated” Oedipa Mass. Though this novel was published in 1965, she is the product of, what I call, ‘The Whole Foods culture’ that runs rampant through mainstream America. Tupperwear parties and Scientific American merely cap the iceburg of the dual nature of Inverarity’s America, a culture that is embedded in the modern corporate world exemplified by San Narcisco, that yields a ‘wasted’ universe of “the disinherited” or dispossed of San Francisco, and those such as Mike Fallopian and Pierce Inverarity, who appear to succeed in the circuitry of the mainstream world, and yet also seem to circumvent it through their connections to the enigmatic Tristero.
Tristero, whether it is real or ‘a forgery,’ in the same way Genghis Cohen refers to the W.A.S.T.E./ Tristero stamps as “forgeries” when compared to the U.S. Postal Service stamps, emboddies the postmodern reaction to the homogeneity and the safe reality of the mainstream that has been structurally laid down as a ‘buffer’ between everyday human life, and “the underlying truth.’ The truth is as obscure and inaccessible as the Tristero. Truth in the form of ‘hard’ evidence is rendered indecipherable and it cannot be discerned with a ready made explanation, but it does include the “swirl of houses and streets” of our cookie cutter, ‘circuit card’ communites and “the heiroglyphic sense of concealed meaning” that lies beneathe.
The postmodern reaction to mainstream in the novel is connected by the Tristero symbol of the muted post horn. However, the W.A.S.T.E. system, assuming that it is exists, is a discordant opposition without a clear motive or plan for resolution. W.A.S.T.E. is an alternative that offers no alternative solution. Each person Oedipa encounters that obides by some cause affiliated with the symbol or is in some way connected to the muted post horn, has their own sense of the emblem’s history in terms of how it relates to his immediate cause, eventhough none of these men appear to know the true history of the symbol, if there is one. Objective reality or truth is not the point. Perception of truth as applied to one’s identity and the expression of that identity is of significance. For example, Mike Fallopian, an employee of Yoyodine, recieves letters through the Tristero that bear no real message or significance. He, nor any of the employees at Yoyodine who use the alternative postal system, express anything of significance. They don’t attempt to change the systems in which they live and make them any better. He is rebelling for the sake of rebelling, and it appears, for no other reason. However, Fallopian is an inconsistent, untrustworthy character, as are all of the men in the novel, since he ultimately embraces corporate showmanship and suggests that Tristero is all in her head. The member of the “Inamorati Anonymous” that Oedipa, as Arnold Snarb, meets at the Greek Way, wears the symbol in honor of a former suicidal executive who “was automated out of job” and blames “love” for his “disinherited” state as a ‘dithering executive’ that can’t come to a “decision without first hearing the ideas of a committee.” Love had nothing to do with the executive’s misfortunes, but he founded the I.A., to which members subscribe because, feeling alienated, they identify with a “society of isolates… a whole underworld of failed suicides.” The group, however, chooses to alienate itself even further rather than make a conscious effort to take a stand against a society that renders them incompetent, such as the case of the executive that attempted to torch himself. According to Oedipa’s findings, the original Tristero, possibly nothing more than a Spanish misanthrope who desired to undermine the elitist, mainstream Thurn and Taxis postal system that had “disinherited” him from wealth and power. He, in turn, created a band of terrorists to set up an alternative “power spectrum,” that happens to be no better than what it opposes. Oedipa, whether she believes she’s awake, or hung up in a nightmare, or some combination of both realities, navigates through these and many other experiences, which includes her dealings with her husband Mucho, who was initially, a “sensitve” car salesman who could not except the “motorized, metal extensions” of the hopelessly impoverished, but who ultimately ‘looses his identity’ to L.S.D. , prescribed to him by one Dr. Hilarious, who seems to have been involved with the county hospitals and government in some conspiracy to eliminate individuation. This easily connects to Stanley Kotek’s qualms with Yoyodine Inc. and its policy toward the creativity of the individual employee. While Oedipa is harassed by Hilarious to take L.S.D. to soothe anxiety, a very real marker of personhood regardless of its sometimes negative consequences, L.S.D. also eliminates a sense of the individual self, which Mucho looses. Expression of the individuated self is, in fact, creativity, the ability to create or invent. Yoyodyne forces its employees to sign a patent agreement which stipulates that employees, if they do create, cannot take credit for their individual expression. It is therefore labeled a product of “teamwork” and the individual is lost in the mix. However, Koteks as does Fallopian, Driblette, Metzger, the sleezy lawyer, Mucho and Hilarious all accept their fates by either surrendering to the complete assimilation of self with everything else or die. Then there’s Dr. Hilarious, who is overtaken by the paranoia hyper self-consiousness yields. He seems to individuate too much since he comes to believe that he is the locus of all plots and conspiracies due to his service to the Nazi’a at Buchenwald. All are symptoms of the postmodern reaction to modern societal structures. Oedipa doesn’t seem to accept any of these reactions as viable or useful since they further the alienation of those around her and deepen her own sense of isolation.
Though these many causes attached to Tristero diverge according to separate mythologies, supposing “there really was a Tristero…then by that continuity, she might have found The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she’d looked.” What is truth beyond our own perceptions and personal myths that we hold onto? Whether Tristero exists as a tangibly real enitity that levies its power along the dispensation of the myriad of mythologies of “the disinherieted” or whether it is Inverarity’s perverse attempt “to survive death, as a paranoia: a pure conspiracy against someone he loved,” Oedipa is remarkably changed. At the conclusion of the novel, regardless of her isolation and her sense of loss, since she can no longer trust in the people or the superficial ‘matirx’ of ‘Kinneret towers’ and postmodern American institutions that have kept her “insulated” and quiet, like Tristero itself, she has gained a clearer sense of self since she can never go back to her former, “buffered” way of life. The novel, though it appears cyclical in terms of her hunt for the cold, hard facts of Tristero, which may not exist at all in any situation in the postmodern world, it is not cyclical because she chooses to finally act on behalf of her own self interest. She attends the Crying of Lot 49, the point at which she will truly finds out the significance of the Tristero. She decides to take action and move toward some semblence of reconciliation, a move that none of the diverse constituents of the Tristero symbol or the Tristero system itself has accomplished. Tristero seeks to remain silent, to hide, to pillage society in the darkness, and yet never to take responsibility for its actions, and therefore, never gain a unique identity that can express its discontent, let alone resolve the “disinherited” status of its loosely affiliated, in some cases grossly misguided, memebers. Contrarily, Oedipa will no longer accept what she is told to believe, from any side. She wants to know, for herself, the underlying continuity between “the Whole Foods” culture of San Narcisco and Kinneret Among the Pines and its inadequate, silent, diffuse, and immoblized oppostion, the Tristero. She desires a new identity, individuated, defined, competent as a woman as well as an American, and resourceful even when the given resources are questionable. At the end, standing “in a patch of sun, among brilliant rising and falling poinst of dust” before she enters Lot 49, she is the only woman, highly distinquishable among the men in “black mohair…pale, cruel faces.” She is ready to move forward, to take action on behalf of her responsibility as ‘executrix’, to take responsibility for who she wants to be in relation to the world of the entrenced and the isolates, who ever that may be.