My own thinking was most stimulated by an alternative theory Fredric Jameson referred to in the beginning of his essay: “Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that postmodernism is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper…” He mentions that Gertrude Stein, among others, could be an “outright postmodernist”, and this, in turn, jogged my memory on a theory Stein herself floated and which ties in neatly with the postmodernist view of time: the idea of the continuous present.
If postmodernism is an extension of modernism, and Stein is rightfully a postmodern author, then her concept of a continuous present is seen throughout The Crying of Lot 49. The passage of time is not important in the novel. Everything that Oedipa experiences occurs in the now, and it could be any now. An example of this is when she visits the campus of San Narciso College, looking for Professor Bortz: “It was summer, a weekday, and midafternoon…” (82). This could be any day, in any summer. Furthermore, recent experiences keep slipping away from Oedipa, and isolating her in the now – Driblette dies and takes his knowledge with him, Mucho goes mad and can no longer explain the “potsmaster” notation, Zapf’s Used Books is burned to the ground. Memory leaves Oedipa too, causing her to remain in the continuous present: “She copied the address and walked away trying to remember who’d put out the paperback. She couldn’t.” (82).
I felt that when the passage of time did occur, it was depicted as circuitous. For example, when Oedipa follows the W.A.S.T.E. carrier throughout the day, she merely ends up back at John Nefastis’s house. After her night in San Francisco, Oedipa finds herself back at her hotel, dancing in a circle with a deaf-mute, in a crowd of deaf-mutes, all dancing in almost-but-never-interlocking circles.
Oedipa’s circuitous experiences made me think of another postmodernist tenet – that perhaps there is no ultimate truth. Each time Oedipa meets Mike Fallopian, Dr. Hilarius, and the tall man from The Greek Way, she learns more and more about The Tristero. Her increasing knowledge perpetuates her journey – to discover whether this organization is real or not – which is its own circle. Oedipa debates this, at the end: “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 was she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia” (151).
Since I’m definitely someone who would like to believe that there is an ultimate truth out there, I found the end of the novel disturbing. I took it to mean that perhaps there was no ultimate truth, but that there is only what one chooses to believe or not to believe, and that this locks us in our own circles.
Well, there is much, much more to discuss, debate, and dissect in The Crying of Lot 49, but right now I’ll quit while I’m behind. :)