I can somewhat understand Adams’s argument about the differences between The Crying of Lot 49 as a closed paranoid space and The Tropic of Orange as an open space. Still, as much as Tropic of Orange honors diversity and expresses a multi-national vision, there were a couple of images that struck me as Pychon-esqe and drew attention to the restraints of society that could lead to paranoia and anxiety like that of the Cold War era.
First and most obviously, the contaminated orange scare, while not as devastating as a nuclear attack, is still far reaching in its impact. Global markets are a wonderful innovation because they allow people to have fresh produce almost everywhere even when something is out of season. On the other hand though, the different standards of health inspection in different countries and the difficulty of tracing where some imports come from can make a food scare as random and potentially as harmful and frightening as a terrorist attack.
The highways so prominently featured in Crying Lot and Tropic of Orange connect nations and people are a fantastic invention because they allow for greater freedom to movc about and provide for greater transparency and acceptance between cultures. At the same time though, these paths often become blocked with congestion and accidents, which, far from liberating, can be confining, frustrating, and dangerous. The character of Manzanar Murakami, the homeless music of the traffic conductor, reminds me of Pynchon and his novel V., which deals with the ideas of closed systems and entropy, the inevitable breakdown of order in any given closed system. The highways in Tropic become closed, toxic, destructive systems when accidents occur and yet Murakami seems to accept this. Personally, I hate traffic and traveling, even when I’m speeding along uninterrupted so the idea of someone watching traffic and watching traffic disasters and somehow integrating it into something beautiful, a work of art, is astonishing to me. Murakami seems to voice Pynchon’s belief that the breakdown of order cannot be avoided so one might as well celebrate. In the novel V., Pynchon creates a metaphor for the contemporary person, writing that we are all sailors on sinking ships, but we can still paint the ship as it goes down, a sentiment that seems reflected in Murakami.
Another detail in Tropic of Orange that seemed to change the setting into a closed system was the brief exchange at the end of chapter 20. A woman in the restaurant says ‘”I happen to adore Japanese culture. What can I say? I adore different cultures. I’ve traveled all over the world. I love living in L.A. because I can find anything in the world to eat, right here'” (129). The odd thing about this statement is that is takes ethnic diversity and reduces it to a commodity to be consumed, literally. L.A. becomes a microcosm of the world, a concentrated mass of multi-culturalism. If one believes that L.A. contains everything one could want from another culture, then hasn’t that other culture been simplified and restricted?