Signifiers, Oedipa/Oedipus, and Postmodernism…

When reading The Crying of Lot 49, I thought about what someone said in class in reference to signifiers in Foer’s story. The thing with signifiers, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, is that they’re arbitrary, at least, as far as its connection to the signified. So, Oedipa Maas is seemingly lost in this world of detached signifiers, struggling with clues and trying to seek meaning in symbols like the muted horn, or meaning in words like W.A.S.T.E. and the Trystero. She even says at one point, “Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity,” as if she recognizes that the signifiers should have a signified. I’m not sure if this is a postmodern thing, insofar as having these detached signifiers; it was just a connection I made to the readings from last week.

I also thought about the names Pynchon picked for people and places in this novel, but considering the thing with the detached signifiers, I’m now wondering if he arbitrarily chose these names. Of course, when one see Oedipa written on the page, one thinks Oedipus. The only connection I can think of now, between Oedipa and Oedipus, is the blindness. This comes later in the book, when Oedipa is drinking bourbon and then “went out and drove on the freeway for a while with her lights out.” For those not familiar with Oedipus Rex, he blinds himself and says something like, “From now on, go in darkness!” So, maybe this is what Pynchon was thinking when naming her Oedipa (and maybe there’s more to it than the blindness), or maybe he was just “arbitrarily” naming her. If he did arbitrarily name everyone, you still have to wonder about the names. I mean: Mucho Maas (I think that means “a lot more” in Spanish), Dr. Hilarious, etc. These seem so telling. But maybe that’s just postmodernism: messing with what seems to be there, on the surface, or what should be there, according to what one expects. Or maybe I’m just making an unrelated mess out of all of this.

If put on the spot about why The Crying of Lot 49 is postmodern, I’d probably say that it’s because you can’t figure it out, at least, not right away and not in one way. This explanation would hardly win me an A in this class, but it seems like a right explanation for this text. If written in a modern manner, it would leave nothing unexplained at the end and would have an apt conclusion—maybe not a satisfying conclusion, but a plausible one. All the little threads would form some sort of picture, and the reader wouldn’t be left hanging. But postmodernism seems to always have the reader questioning if what he/she read indeed happened or if what was presented as reality wasn’t actually reality at all.