Reading The Crying of Lot 49, I’m struck by many of the similarities between this work and Pynchon’s first novel V.. Oedipa Maas’s quest mirrors that of Herbert Stencil’s search for the illusive figure of V. in the earlier novel. Both characters become obsessed with goals of discovery (and to a certain extent self-discovery) that seem perpetually out of reach. The clues that they follow are random and not firmly grounded or linked together. In V., Pynchon emphasizes the wild-goose-chase nature of the search writing that the journey becomes such an obsession that without the search Stencil has no meaning so he deliberately perpetuates the fruitless search.
The Crying of Lot 49 also contains traces of another pivotal character from V. named Benny Profane. Benny seems to have no purpose in life, no internal drive, no meaning or anchor. I think that at the beginning of the novel Oedipa seems stuck in a similar kind of apathetic malaise. Many other characters in the novel, particularly the Paranoids, display the same detachedness as Benny Profane and inclination toward debauchery as the Whole Sick Crew, Benny’s group of drinking, partying, whoring, irresponsible companions.
Pynchon continues his interest in entropy from V. on into The Crying of Lot 49. In The Crying of lot 49, Pynchon actually touches more directly on the subject of entropy in terms of its scientific definition. At the same time though, there appears to be a kind of social entropy taking place as well. The order of things is breaking down in Oedipa’s world. It is a world where a psychiatrist can get away with calling his client at three in the morning, a husband and wife nonchalantly and knowingly cast fidelity out the window, and people feel little reverence for dead American soldiers. There is something amiss in this setting. Social entropy similarly appears in Pynchon’s earlierst novel, most notably manifesting itself in the chaotic activities of the Whole Sick Crew.
Pynchon also carries weird names over from V. V. is populated with characters with strange yet meaningful names like Dewey Gland, Pig Bodine (one of the more profane characters), Slab (ironically an artist by profession),Rachel Owlglass (easily one of the most compassionate and insightful characters in the novel), and Benny Profane (a combination of Benny as in Benzadrine, an amphedamine drug, and Profane, which stands for his degenerative path). I think that Oedipa Maas’s name has a similar imbedded meaning to that of Herbert Stencil. Like a Stencil, Herbert Stencil is empty and must fill himself with something outside himself to give him meaning. For Herbert, his meaning derives from his search for V. Similarly Oedipa Maas or “more” seems to be searching for something “more.” To me, the word “more” connotes reaching higher or aspiring; in a capitalistic society we try to achieve “more” money, toys, happiness, et cetera. Her first name calls to mind Oedipus, the hero of Sophocles’s Greek tragedy about a man who makes an unsettling self-discovery and, perhaps on some level, mirrors Oedipa’s personal quest to discover the meaning of the Tristero System.