Pynchon – Page 2 – American Postmodernism

The problem with certainty

I must admit to being a little dazed after completing The Crying Lot of 49. What is a reader to make of symbols of postal horns appearing in windows of herbalists in Chinatown, or children who have sketched them on sidewalks, or on the bathroom stalls, or in the corners of stamps? I think I am just as confused as Oedipa as to whether or not there is a secret conspiracy to suppress Tristero/Trystero or if it is all a hoax? Clearly, this is one of Pynchon’s points.

It seems that everywhere Oedipa turns, she encounters uncertainty regarding The Tristero. After she meets with Mr. Thoth and sees the WASTE symbol on his ring, she is compelled to tell Fallopian. “‘You think it’s really a correlation?’ She thought of how tenuous it was, like a long white hair, over a century long. Two very old men. All these fatigued brain cells between herself and the truth” (74). Chasing after leads, Oedipa tracks down the missing line in the “Whitchapel” fragment, only to find out later that that version is corrupt according to professor of English at Cal, Emory Bortz. Then there is the concidential (?) meeting of Arnold Snarb who dons the WASTE symbol on his lapel pin, but he uses it as a symbol of his membership in I.A. or Inamorati Anonymous. It is Arnold who Oedipa contacts at the end of the novel, who now seems to be involved in The Tristero after all. Even Dr. Hilarious’s experiments with LSD and other drugs on suburban housewives like Oepida seem to give rise to the question of whether or not she is involved in a larger plot against her. Ironically, Hilarious preformed experiments of induced insanity–certainly calling into question Hilarious’s own sanity. In the end, he too is silenced by the “cops.”

As the novel progresses Oedipa appears to question this idea of truth and certainty more frequently. “Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself[…]” (76). The notion that she is in a dream continues to appear, as Oedipa encounters more clues. Leaving her to “have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed” (95). When her perception of reality fails her, she is left to test reality through touch. When the sailor throws a letter at her in the hallway, “she was overcome all at once by a need to touch him, as if she could not believe in him, or would not remember him, without it” (102). Poor Oedipa. What is she to make of all of this? Her notion of certainty has been turned upside down.

The notion of certainty seems to be the pivotal idea when discussing the difference between modern literature and postmodern literature. The modernists– Eliot and the like– established New Criticism in hopes of identifying one meaning in a text. Hemingway wrote in excruciating detail about certainty with stories about the practical– how to fish for trout or watch a bullfight. Whereas in postmodernism, nothing is certain. Fact and fiction are one in the same.

Just for kicks, I looked up up the Thurn und Taxis family and it turns out they have their own website. Click the link below.

http://www.thurnundtaxis.com/

Don’t skip the intro that contains pictures of their palace. You can even rent out the dining room to throw a private party. In addition, the current Prince turns out to be a 25-year-old who loves to race Lamborghinis. Here is a picture of him.

fuerst-albert_01

An Unimaginative Use of Tapioca.

I quite like Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The breathless narrative and endless lists of little fiddly things-stamps, letters, bits of graffiti-are quite appealing. Moving through the book gives me a sense of gradually sliding out of control, the slow development of a paranoia in which one starts to distrust one’s own perceptions when it begins to seem that the scheme (or swindle) that one is caught in is ultimately too big to see as a coherent whole. In that sense it reminds me of Ellis’ Glamorama at the point where even mundane objects-confetti, a black hat, a stick-on tattoo-become objects of dread and signals of a large system. The protagonist’s perception becomes more and more faulty as objects-photographs, pornographic videos-are manipulated to create a “reality” that is false but can’t be argued with.

Michael Holquist makes some interesting points in his “Whodunit and Other Question.” I find his inclusion of Poe in the canon of detective stories very fascinatingl; I wonder if he would also admit H.P. Lovecraft into the same group? But the question is, what does this have to do with postmodernism and Pynchon? Earlier we spoke about whether postmodernism was a break from modernism or a continuation (evolution?) of modernism. Holquist writes that “post-modernism…can best be understood as springing from a different view of man, and therefore a different view of art from that which obtained in Modernism” (Holquist 147). I suppose this can be taken as Holquist’s assertion that postmodernism is more of a break with moderning (or a perspective shift) than a continuation. Holquist goes on to say that postmodernism is “about things, not people” and mentions the 1930s “murder classics” by Wheatley and Links and The Voyeur as examples. I suppose an argument could be made for Pynchon’s novella that links it with Holquist’s argument, using the obsessive minutiae of objects in the book.

One thing that stood out for me particularly is the gradual revelation of how enmeshed Oedipa is in the unfathomable plan of Inverarity’s, the feeling that she cannot figure it out because she cannot get outside of it enough to do so, of being caught in a possibly malevolent system. The “clues” which we might expect to help us start unraveling the mystery only serve to further complicate matters. There is a sort of “meta” feeling I get when reading this novella and making connections to things mentioned in the novel with things outside of the novel, then eventually feeling as though I’m becoming paranoid along with Oedipa (for example-Maxwell’s Demon and “The Ballad of Maxwell Demon” from the fictionalized biopic of a character based on David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1y_PRuq7x0). The novella greatly puts me in mind of China Mieville’s short story “The Go-Between” from Looking For Jake, and Holquist’s article also brings Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”-really a stylistic mash-up-from Fragile Things to mind.

Holquist and Fredric Jameson both seem to put the burgeoning of postmodernism at roughly the end of the 1950s/beginning of the 1960s. Jameson also raises the question of whether postmodernism should be viewed as a break or a continuation of modernism, although from what I understand he presents both positions as plausible but mentions that the latter view does not “take into account the social position of the older modernism” (Jameson 56). Jameson also makes an interesting assertion that postmodern global culture in the “superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world” (Jameson 57). Given that we have recently seen a rather dramatic re-structuring of the existing economic system and are poised at the brink of an unprecendented level of reorganization of the American economic system in particular, does this alter Jameson’s argument at all? Or are these changes rather superficial? Or is this possibly the sign that we are actually moving into the post-postmodern era? I do wonder about Jameson’s claim on page 57 that the “offensive features” of postmodernism have become institutionalized-I suppose he’s right-but I don’t consider a strong reaction to something an indication that the point has been missed; I don’t think the two positions have to be occupied simultaneously.

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.

muted-horn

Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and Entropy

The Crying of Lot 49 has a plethora of information that was just as confusing to me as it was to Oedpia. But I think this was intentional on Pynchon’s part. Oedpia pursues clues and information that appear to be connected, but when looked at from an objective viewpoint, these connections are arbitrary and only bring up more questions with indefinite answers.

Entropy is symbolic and used in a broader sense than just the explanation of Maxwell’s Demon. Oedpia is constantly getting clues to the mystery of the Trystero. There are loosely connected clues that Oedpia encounters throughout the story, but one that really grabbed me was what leads her to Nefastis’s perpetual motion machine and its relevance to Trystero. This is completely arbitrary. Koteks is merely sketching the muted post horn on a piece of paper when she walks by and he tells her the story of Maxwell’s Demon and Nefastis’s machine. Oedpia takes this to be some sort of clue and seeks Nefastis out. When she meets him, Nefastis says, “Entropy is a metaphor, It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow” (85). I vaguely know what entropy is from merely the text and Wikipedia, so I spoke with my roommate, who is majoring in physics, and he tried to explain it to me a little better. He said that entropy is an actual measurable quantity in physics. The idea is that in a closed system, things tend to degrade into chaos. Without any force or loss in a system, that system cannot function (He gave an example of a boiling pot of water with the lid on and how the tendency is for the energy in the pot to push the lid off and escape). I think this idea is a prevailing one in the text, and entropy is used in terms of information and culture. All the information that Oedpia encounters during her journey in California does not fit together like she hopes. One thing leads to another and so on, and Oedpia becomes obsessive in solving this apparent mystery. While Oedpia is experiencing culture in 1960s California, she is trying to make sense of the world around her, or should I say, the world that seems to be hidden from her, but draws no logical conclusion. When Oedpia tries to formulate a conclusion and, seeing that the further she goes the more confusing things become, she loses the aspects of her life that were orderly and she becomes detached and paranoid: “They are stripping from me – she said subvocally – feeling like a fluttering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out over the abyss – they are stripping away, one by one, my men” (126). In chapter 6 we really see her lose it as she wonders back to The Scope and her hotel started and meets with Mike Fallopian and Genghis Cohen again. The world that Pynchon created has caused Oedpia to descend into chaos.

Crying of Lot 49 is obviously more than a commentary on the monopoly of the postal service. It’s clear that Pynchon is making a greater point. Crying of Lot 49 is considered one of the definitive postmodern novels, and I think I’ll take a stab at the reason why. COL49 is reflective of the 60s culture of the time – music, drugs, promiscuity, and rebellion of authority – all these things are inherent in the plot (and rather cleverly mocked at). Elements of mystery, pop culture, history, counterculture, and science are combined in COL49 to form a pastiche, which is a symptom of postmodernism. Culture is mirrored and satirized in the text while realism is ignored in order to exaggerate culture. That’s the most I can make out of it for now.

Overall I enjoyed the novel and thought it had some fantastic sentences, like this one: “I am the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming from my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also” (62). With such a dense novel in so few pages it is obvious that Pynchon is smart, but with outbursts like this he also has a sense of humor.