The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49

Critic: Edward Mendelson Source: Individual and Community: Variations on a Theme in American Fiction, edited by Kenneth H. Baldwin and David K. Kirby, Duke University Press, 1975, pp. 182-222. Reproduced by permission Criticism about: Thomas (Ruggles) Pynchon, (Jr.) (1937-), also known as: Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., Thomas Ruggles Pynchon



Nationality: American

Described briefly, in the sort of the bare outline that makes any serious plot sound ridiculous, The Crying of Lot 49 recounts the discovery by its heroine, Mrs. Oedipa Maas, of an ancient and secret postal system named the Tristero. The manifestations of the Trystero (an alternate spelling), and all that accompanies it, are always associated in the book with the language of the sacred and with patterns of religious experience; the foils to the Trystero are always associated with sacrality gone wrong. As every person and event in V. is implicated in the general decline into the inanimate, everything in Lot 49 participates either in the sacred or the profane. A major character in V. is named Benny Profane; in Lot 49 there are wider possibilities (including someone named Grace). As Pynchon's work avoids the weightlessness of Nabokovian fantasy, so it avoids the self-important nostalgie de la boue of the social and psychological novels that occupy most of the fictional space in postwar America. Oedipa has "all manner of revelations," but they are not in the manner of most recent fiction, and certainly not the kind of revelations that her name might suggest: they are "hardly about ... herself." Pynchon writes at the end of an era in which the Freudian interpretation of an event served as a more than adequate succedanium for the event itself: it was an act of courage to name his heroine Oedipa (I shall have more to say later about the courage to risk facetiousness), for the novel contains not even a single reference to her emotional relations with her parents or her impulses towards self-creation. The name instead refers back to the Sophoclean Oedipus who begins his search for the solution of a problem (a problem, like Oedipa's, involving a dead man) as an almost detached observer, only to discover how deeply implicated he is in what he finds. As the book opens, and Oedipa learns that she has been named executor of the estate of the "California real estate mogul" Pierce Inverarity, she "shuffl[es] back" in her memory "through a fat deckful of days which seemed ... more or less identical." But as she begins to sort out the complications of Inverarity's estate she becomes aware of moments of special significance, repeated patterns of meaning, that had not previously been apparent. Driving into the town where Inverarity's interests had been centered, she looks down from the freeway upon "the ordered swirl of houses and streets" and senses the possibility of a kind of meaning that is, for the moment, beyond her comprehension:

she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity ... [T]here were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.... [Now,] a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding ... [She] seemed parked at the centre of an odd religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.

At this point Oedipa's revelations are only partly defined. In the next paragraph the narrator dismisses Oedipa's experience by placing it in distancing quotation marks: "the `religious instant,' or whatever it might have been."

But a few pages later an "instant" of the same kind occurs, but this time more clearly defined. Oedipa sees in a television commercial a map of one of Inverarity's housing developments, and is reminded of her first glimpse of the town in which she is now: "Some immediacy was there again, some promise of hierophany." This "promise of hierophany," of a manifestation of the sacred, is eventually fulfilled, and her "sense of concealed meaning" yields to her recognition of patterns that had potentially been accessible to her all along, but which only now had revealed themselves. In the prose sense, what Oedipa discovers is the Trystero, "a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty"that is, everything profane"for the official government delivery system." But across this hidden and illegal network information is transmitted in ways that defy ordinary logic: often, the links in the system cross centuries, or move between the most unlikely combinations of sender and receiver, without anyone in the world of routine ever recognizing that something untoward has occurred. The Trystero carries with it a sense of sacred connection and relation in the world, and by doing so it manifests a way of comprehending the world. By the end of the novel Oedipa is left alone, out over seventy thousand fathoms, left to decide for herself whether the Trystero exists or if she has merely fantasized, or if she has been hoodwinked into believing in it. On that all-or-nothing decision, everythingher construing of the world, and the world's constructiondepends:

how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.... Ones and zeroes.... Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there was either some Tristero behind the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America....

As in all religious choices, no proof is possible: the choice of ones or zeroes presents itself "ahead ... maybe endless," and the watcher is left alone.

Pynchon uses religious terms and hieratic language not simply as a set of metaphors from which to hang his narrative, not merely as a scaffolding (as Joyce, for example, uses Christian symbols in Ulysses). The religious meaning of the book does not reduce to metaphor or myth, because religious meaning is itself the central issue of the plot. This creates difficulties for criticism. The Trystero implies universal meanings, and since universal meanings are notoriously recalcitrant to analysis, it will be necessary to approach the holistic center of the book from various facets and fragments. I hope the reader will bear with an argument that may, for a number of pages, ask him to assent to resolutions of issues that have not yet been discussed.

The book refers at one point to "the secular Tristero," which has a plausible history and a recognizable origin in ordinary human emotion and human society. During one of the few areas of the narrative in which nothing extraordinary happensa "secular" part of the bookOedipa compiles, with the help of one of the book's prosier characters (an English professor, alas), a history of the system that is somewhat speculative, but more plausible than the mock-theorizing in V. The history of the Trystero intersects with authentic history in a manner taken from historical novels like Henry Esmond or The Scarlet Pimpernel, where an extraordinary, fictional pattern of events, one that almost but not quite alters the larger course of history, is presented behind the familiar, public pattern. The Trystero, then, began in sixteenth-century Holland, when an insurgent Calvinist government unseated the hereditary postmaster, a member of the Thurn and Taxis family (here Pynchon blends authentic history with novelistic fantasythe counts of Taxis did hold the postal monopoly in the Empire), and replaced him with one Jan Hinckart, Lord of Ohain. But Hinckart's right to the position, which he gained through political upheaval, not through inheritance, is disputed by a Spaniard, Hernando Joaquin de Tristero y Calavera, who claims to be Hinckart's cousin and the legitimate Lord of Ohainand therefore the legitimate postmaster. Later, after an indecisive struggle between Hinckart and Tristero, the Calvinists are overthrown, and the Thurn and Taxis line restored to postmastership. But Tristero, claiming that the postal monopoly was Ohain's by conquest, and therefore his own by blood, sets up an alternative postal system, and proceeds to wage guerrilla war against the Thurn and Taxis system. The rallying theme of Tristero's struggle: "disinheritance."

So far, the story, though a fantasy, is still historically plausible, requiring only a relatively slack suspension of disbelief. However the word Calavera (skull, Calvary) in Tristero's name already suggests some emblematic resonances, and the theme of disinheritance joins the Tristero's history to Oedipa's discovery of it while executing a will. Later in the history, the Trystero system takes on, for its contemporaries, a specifically religious meaning. Pynchon invents a severe Calvinist sect, the Scurvhamites, who tend toward the gnostic heresy and see Creation as a machine, one part of which is moved by God, the other by a soulless and automatic principle. When the Scurvhamites decide to tamper with some secular literature (specifically, the play The Courier's Tragedy, of which more shortly) to give it doctrinal meaning, they find that the "Trystero would symbolize the Other quite well." For Thurn and Taxis itself, faced with the enmity of the anonymous and secret Trystero system, "many of them must [have] come to believe in something very like the Scurvhamite's blind, automatic anti-God. Whatever it is, it has the power to murder their riders, send landslides thundering across their roads ... disintegrate the Empire." But this belief cannot last: "over the next century and a half the paranoia recedes, [and] they come to discover the secular Tristero." The Trystero returns from its symbolic meanings into a realm that is historically safe and believable. In this passage Pynchon offers an analogously safe way to read his own book: the Trystero is a symbol for a complex of events taking place on the level of a battle in heaven, but it is merely a symbol, a way of speaking that has no hieratic significance in itself. But the novel, while offering this possibility, does so in a chapter in which nothing strange happens, where the world is Aristotelian and profane, where the extraordinary concrescences of repetition and relation that inform the rest of the book briefly sort themselves out into simple, logical patterns. The book offers the possibility that its religious metaphor is only metaphor: but if the book were founded on this limited possibility, the remaining portions of the book would make no sense, and there would be little reason to write it in the first place.

The potted history near the end of the novel describes the discovery of the "secular Tristero" behind the demonic one; the book itself describes the progressive revelation of the sacred significance behind certain historical events. It should perhaps be mentioned that the frequent associations of the Trystero with the demonic do not contradict the Trystero's potentially sacred significance: the demonic is a subclass of the sacred, and exists, like the sacred, on a plane of meaning different from the profane and the secular. When Pynchon published two chapters from the book in a magazine he gave them the title, The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity: it is through Inverarity's will that Oedipa completes this proverbial equation, and finds her own devil in the agonizing ontological choice she has to make as the novel ends. The revelation of the sacred gets underway when Oedipa sees in the map of one of Inverarity's interests "some promise of hierophany." The sense of the word "hierophany" is clear enoughit is a manifestation of the sacredbut the word itself has a history that is informative in this context. The word is not recorded in the dictionaries of any modern European language (the related "hierophant" is of course recorded, but "hierophany" is not), and it appears to have been invented by Mircea Eliade, who expands most fully on the word in his Patterns in Comparative Religion but gives a more straightforward definition in his introduction to The Sacred and the Profane: "Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply anything further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred shows itself to us.... From the most elementary hierophany ... to the supreme hierophany ... there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious actthe manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural `profane' world." This latter condition, that the objects in which the sacred manifests itself be part of the natural world, is central to Lot 49, because everything in the novel that points to a sacred significance in the Trystero has, potentially, a secular explanation. The pattern and the coherence may, as Oedipa reminds herself, be the product of her own fantasy or of someone else's hoax. She is left, at every moment, to affirm or deny the sacredness of what she sees.

When, as she begins to uncover the Trystero, Oedipa decides to give, through her own efforts, some order to Inverarity's tangled interests, she writes in her notebook, "Shall I project a world?" But her plan to provide her own meanings, "to bestow life on what had persisted" of the dead man, soon confronts the anomaly that more meanings, more relationships and connections than she ever expected begin to offer themselvesmanifest themselves. And these manifestations arrive without any effort on her part. When, by the middle of the book, "everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Trystero," she tries to escape, to cease looking for order. "She had only to drift," she supposes, "at random, and watch nothing happen, to be convinced that it was purely nervous, a little something for her shrink to fix." But when she drifts that night through San Francisco she finds more extensive and more varied evidence of the Trystero's existenceevidence far more frequent and insistent than she found when she was actually looking for it. Like the mystic whose revelation is dependent on his passivity, Oedipa's full discovery of the Trystero depends on her refusal to search for it. In the last chapter even the most surprising events leave her only in expectant passivity: "Even a month ago, Oedipa's next question would have been `Why?' But now she kept a silence, waiting, as if to be illuminated."

Recent criticism has devoted much energy to finding detective-story patterns in fiction, and The Crying of Lot 49, with its heroine named after the first detective of them all, lends itself admirably to this method. However, Pynchon 's novel uses mechanisms borrowed from the detective story to produce results precisely the opposite of those in the model. Where the object of a detective story is to reduce a complex and disordered situation to simplicity and clarity, and in doing so to isolate in a named locus the disruptive element in the story's world, The Crying of Lot 49 starts with a relatively simple situation, and then lets it get out of the heroine's control: the simple becomes complex, responsibility becomes not isolated but universal, the guilty locus turns out to be everywhere, and individual clues are unimportant because either clues nor deduction can lead to the solution. "Suppose, God, there really was a Tristero then and that she had come on it by accident.... [S]he might have found The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she'd looked." What the detective in this story discovers is a way of thinking that renders detection irrelevant. "The Christian," Chesterton writes somewhere, "has to use his brains to see the hidden good in humanity just as the detective has to use his brains to see the hidden evil." This, in essence, describes Oedipa's problem: she never discovers the alienation and incoherence in the worldthose were evident from the startbut she stumbles instead across the hidden relationships in the world, relations effected through and manifested in the Trystero.

Near the middle of the book Oedipa stops searching. From this point on she becomes almost the only character in the novel who is not looking for something. While hierophanies occur all around her, almost everyone else is vainly trying to wrench an experience of the sacred out of places where it cannot possibly be found. As everyone in V. worries constantly about the inanimate, everyone in The Crying of Lot 49 suffers from some distortion of religious faith, and almost everyone in the book eventually drops away from Oedipa into some religious obsession. Their examples demonstrate the wrong turnings that Oedipa must avoid.

Mucho Maas, for example, Oedipa's husband, who works as a disc jockey, suffers "regular crises of conscience about his profession[:] `I just don't believe in any of it'." This sounds at first like a suburban cliche, but the religious language soon develops in complexity and allusiveness. Oedipa's incomprehension during her first "religious instant" reminds her of her husband "watching one of his colleagues with a headset clamped on and cueing the next record with movements stylized as the handling of chrism, censer, chalice might be for a holy man ... [D]id Mucho stand outside Studio A looking in, knowing that even if he could hear it, he couldn't believe in it?" His previous job had been at a used car lot, where although "he had believed in the cars" he suffered from a nightmare of alienation and nothingness (which also provides Pynchon with a send-up of Hemingway 's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"): "`We were a member of the National Automobile Dealers' Association. N.A.D.A. Just this creaking metal sign that said nada, nada, against the blue sky. I used to wake up hollering'." HIs escape from a nihilistic void takes him into the impregnable solipsism granted by LSD, and he leaves Oedipa behind him.

The drug had previously been urged on Oedipa herself by her psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarius, who was conducting an experiment he called the Bridgenot a bridge across to community but "the bridge inward." Oedipa, who seems to merit her revelations through her knowledge of what does not lead to revelation, knows that she "would be damned if she'd take the capsules he'd given her. Literally damned." Hilarius himself distorts the purpose of faith. In an attempt to atone for his Nazi past he tries to develop "a faith in the literal truth of everything [Freud] wrote.... It was ... a kind of penance.... I wanted to believe, despite everything my life had been." The strain finally sends him into paranoia and madness: fantasies of vengeful Israelis, a wish for death. (pp. 188-97)

At least one character, however, has something of the enlightenment that Oedipa is approaching. A Mexican anarchist whom Oedipa meets on her night of drifting, and whom she and Inverarity had first met in Mexico some years before, is named Jesus Arrabal. When he talks politics his language quickly shifts to the language of religion:

You know what a miracle is ... another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort.... And yet ... if any of it should ever really happen that perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle. Like your friend [Inverarity the real-estate mogul]. He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage, redeemed, one of the people. Unmiraculous. But your friend, unless he's joking, is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to an Indian.

The intersection of two worlds in miracles is a theme we shall return to. For the moment, it should be noted that Arrabal admits the possibility that the "miraculous" Inverarity may be "joking" just as Oedipa has to admit the possibility that the miraculous Trystero may be a hoax, a joke written by Inverarity into his will.

Compared with the obsessions and confusions that surround most of the other characters, the religious language associated with Oedipa herself is on a different and clearer level. The word "God" occurs perhaps twenty times in the book (it appears hardly at all in V.), and on almost every occasion the word hovers near Oedipa or her discoveries. In her very first word, on the first page of the book, she "spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible." When she first encounters the Trystero's emblem, a drawing of a muted post horn, she copies it into her notebook, "thinking: God, hieroglyphics"a double iteration, through the prefix hiero, of the Trystero's sacrality. In an early passage that anticipates the book's later, culminating reference to "a great digital computer [with] the zeroes and ones twinned above," Oedipa tries to elude a spray-can gone wild: "something fast enough, God or a digital machine, might have computed in advance the complex web of its travel." When she sees the Trystero symbol in one more unexpected place she feels "as if she had been trapped at the center of some intricate crystal, and say[s], `My God'." Faced with the choice of ones and zeroes, of meaning or nothingness, she thinks, "this, oh God, was the void." And there are other examples. What would simply be a nagging cliche in another kind of novel becomes here a quiet but insistent echo, a muted but audible signal.

The Crying of Lot 49 is a book partly about communications and signalsOedipa's discovery of the Trystero involves the interpretation of ambiguous signsand, logically enough, its central scientific metaphor involves communication theory (alternately called Information Theory). It is through information theory, in fact, that Pynchon establishes in this novel a richly imaginative logical link with the world of his first novel, V. The two novels share some superficial details on the level of plotone minor character appears briefly in both, a Vivaldi concerto for which someone is searching in V. is heard over muzak in Lot 49but their deeper connection lies in Lot 49's extension and transformation of V.'s central metaphor. V. describes the thermodynamic process by which the world's entropy increases and by which the world's available energy declines. But the equations of thermodynamics and the term "entropy" itself were also employed, decades after their original formulation, in information theory, where they took on a wider and more complex function than they ever had before. By using information theory as a controlling pattern of ideas in his second book, Pynchon is in one way simply extending the metaphor central to his first book: but the extension also adds immeasurably to the complexity and fertility of the original idea. Thermodynamic entropy is (to speak loosely) a measure of stagnation. As thermodynamic entropy increases in a system, and its available energy decreases, information about the system increases: the system loses some of its uncertainty, its potential. In the language of information theory, however, entropy is the measure of uncertainty in a system. As you increase thermodynamic entropy, therefore, you decrease information entropy. In information theory, also, the entropy rate of a system is the rate at which information is transmitted. Entropy increases in V., and the world slows down; in The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa receives more and more surprises, more and more rapidly, and entropy still increasesbut now it is information entropy rather than thermodynamic, and the effect of the increase is invigorating rather than stagnating.

Metaphorically, then, the two meanings of the term "entropy" are in opposition, and it is precisely this opposition which John Nefastis tries to exploit in his machine. Oedipa finds Nefastis's account of his machine confusing, but

she did gather that there were two distinct kinds of this entropy. One having to do with heat-engines, the other to do with communication. The equation for one, back in the '30's, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence. The two fields were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell's Demon. As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information gained about what molecules were where. "Communication is the key," cried Nefastis....

When Maxwell's hypothetical "Demon" (a received term that fits neatly into Pynchon 's hieratic language) sorts hot and cold molecules, he can apparently raise the temperature in one part of a system, and lower the temperature in the other part, without expending workthereby decreasing the system's thermodynamic entropy, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. But the decrease of thermodynamic entropy is balanced by an increase in information entropy, thereby supposedly making the whole thing "possible," when a person whom Nefastis calls a "sensitive" transmits information to the Demon that Nefastis believes is actually in his machine. Nefastis mixes the language of science with that of spiritualism. The "sensitive" has to receive data "at some deep psychic level" from the Demon; the "sensitive" achieves his effects by staring at the photo of Maxwell on the machine; and so forth. The whole effect is one of Blavatskian mumbo-jumbo, but Nefastis also uses the language of belief that Oedipa is learning to understand. Feeling "like some kind of heretic," she doubts Nefastis's enterprise: "The true sensitive is the one that can share in the man's hallucinations, that's all." But the implied question, raised by Oedipa's doubt, is whether Oedipa's sensitivity to the Trystero is also the product of hallucinations.

The Nefastis machine is based on the similarity between the equations for information entropy and those of thermodynamic entropy, a similarity which Nefastis calls a "metaphor." The machine "makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true." Pynchon has much to say elsewhere in the book about the relation between truth and metaphor, but Nefastis's error is based on the confusion of language and reality, on an attempt to make two worlds coincide. Nefastis, the "believer," has faith in his metaphor, and believes that the truth of that faith can objectively be demonstrated and confirmed. Oedipa, on the other hand, receives no confirmation. Faith, wrote Paul to the Hebrews, is "the evidence of things not seen."

Besides using the association of entropy and information theory, Pynchon also exploits the theory's rule of concerning the relation of surprise and probability in the transmitting of data. Briefly, the rule states that the more unexpected a message is, the more information it contains: a series of repetitive messages conveys less information than a series of messages that differ from each other. (Of course there must be a balance between surprise and probability: a message in language the receiver cannot understand is very surprising, but conveys little information.) In The Crying of Lot 49 there are two secret communications systems: the Trystero, and its entirely secular counterpart, the system used by the right-wing Peter Pinguid Society. Both circumvent the official government delivery system, but, unlike the Trystero, the Pinguid Society's system cares less about transmitting information than about nose-thumbing the bureaucracy. Oedipa happens to be with a member of the Society when he receives a letter with the PPS postmark:

Dear Mike, it said, how are you? Just thought I'd drop you a note. How's your book coming? Guess that's all for now. See you at The Scope [a bar]. "That's how it is," [the PPS member] confessed bitterly, "most of the time."

The Pinguid Society's letters, bearing no information, are empty and repetitive. With the Trystero, in contrast, even the stamps are surprising:

In the 3¢ Mothers of America Issue ... the flowers to the lower left of Whistler's Mother had been replaced by Venus's-flytrap, belladonna, poison sumac and a few others Oedipa had never seen. In the 1947 Postage Stamp Centenary Issue, commemorating the great postal reform that had meant the beginning of the end for private carriers [of which the Trystero is the only survivor], the head of a Pony Express rider at the lower left was set at a disturbing angle unknown among the living. The deep violet 3¢ regular issue of 1954 had a faint, menacing smile on the face of the Statue of Liberty....

This delicate balance of the familiar and the unexpected (note, for example, that there are enough surprising poisoned plants, on one of the stamps, to indicate that the even more surprising ones which "Oedipa had never seen" are also poisonous) produces a powerful sense of menace and dreada sense no less powerful for its comic aspectswhile the secular Pinguid Society messages are capable only of conventionality, of repetition without a sense of the numinous.

The unit of information in communication theory is the bit, abbreviated from binary digit. Theoretically, all information can be conveyed in a sequence of binary digits, i.e., ones and zeroes. By the end of the novel, in a passage quoted above, Oedipa perceives the dilemma presented to her by the possible existence of the Trystero in terms of the choice between one bit and another (Pynchon always provides the possibility that the Trystero is "only" Oedipa's fantasy, or that the whole system is a hoax written into Inverarity's will): "For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above ... Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth." The signs themselves do not prove anything: the streets are "hieroglyphic"an example of sacred carvingbut behind the sacred sign may lie what is merely profane, "only the earth." The religious content of the book is fixed in Oedipa's dilemma: the choice between the zero of secular triviality and chaos, and the one that is the ganz andere of the sacred.

In Pynchon 's novel, as in life, there are two kinds of repetition: trivial repetition, as in the monotony of the Pinguid Society letters, and repetition that may signify the timeless and unchanging sacred. In The Sacred and the Profane Eliade writes that "religious man lives in two kinds of time, of which the more important, sacred time, appears under the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of mythical present that is periodically regenerated by means of rites." Oedipa's first experience (in the book, that is) of trivial repetition occurs when she encounters a debased version of Eliade's "circular time, reversible and recoverable." In the second chapter, before she has any evidence of the Trystero, she watches television in the Echo Courts motel (the name is a grace-note on the main theme), with her coexecutor Metzgera lawyer, once a child actor. The film on the screen turns out to star Metzger as a child, and when the film-Metzger sings a song, "his aging double, over Oedipa's protests, sang harmony." At the end of the book, Oedipa wonders if the Trystero system is simply a plot against her; here, at the beginning, she suspects that Metzger "bribed the engineer over at the local station to run this[:] it's all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot." Time, on this occasion, seems to become even more confused and circular when one reel of the film is shown in the wrong order: "`Is this before or after?' she asked."

In the midst of the film Oedipa glimpses a more significant form of repetition: in a passage discussed above, a map in a television commercial reminds her of the "religious instant" she felt on looking over the town where she is now. But this significant repetition occurs in the midst of reports of other, sterile ones. For example, Metzger, an actor turned lawyer, describes the pilot film of a television series on his own life, starring a friend of his, a lawyer turned actor. The film rests isolated in its own meaningless circular time, "in an air-conditioned vault ... light can't fatigue it, it can be repeated endlessly." Outside the motel room, a rock-music group called the Paranoids, who all look alike, seem to be multiplying"others must be plugging in"until their equipment blows a fuse.

In contrast, the reiterative evidence of the Trystero that Oedipa later discovers suggests that something complex and significant has existed almost unaltered for centuries, in Eliade's "mythical present that is periodically reintegrated." Many of the events, linked with the Trystero, that occur in the Jacobean Courier's Tragedy that Oedipa sees early in the book, recur in the midst of the California gold rush, and again in a battle in Italy during the Second World War. The Trystero's emblem, a muted post horn (suggesting the demonic aspect of the system: it mutes the trumpet of apocalypse), recurs in countless settings, in children's games, in postmarks, lapel pins, tattoos, rings, scrawled on walls, doodled in notebooksin dozens of contexts which cannot, through any secular logic, be connected. Each of these repetitions, each evidence of the Trystero's persistence, seems to Oedipa a link with another world. As the Nefastis machine futilely tried to link the "worlds" of thermodynamics and communications, Jesus Arrabal talks of a miracle as "another world's intrusion into this one." Those who joined the Trystero, Oedipa thinks, must have entered some kind of community when they withdrew from the ordinary life of the Republic, and, "since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum ... there had to exist the separate, silent, unexpected world." To enter the Trystero, to become aware of it, is to cross the threshold between the profane and sacred worlds. "The threshold," Eliade writes in The Sacred and the Profane, "is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worldsand at the same time the paradoxical place where those two worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible." Oedipa wonders if she could have "found the Trystero ... through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations."

Yet in the middle of the fifth chapter of the book the entranceways, the alienations ("Decorating each alienation ... was somehow always the post horn"), suddenly disappear: the repetitions stop. For perhaps thirty pages Oedipa receives no immediate signs of the Trystero, nothing more than some historical documents and second-hand reports. Until the middle of the fifth chapter Oedipa consistently sees the post horn as a living and immediate symbol, actively present in the daily life around her. From that point on she only hears about its past existence through documents, stamps, booksalways second-hand. (This distinction is nowhere mentioned in the book, but the clean break ... is too absolute to be accidental.) And at the same time, all her important human contacts begin to fade and disperse: "They are stripping from me, she said subvocallyfeeling like a fluttering curtain, in a very high window moving ... out over the abyss.... My shrink ... has gone mad; my husband, on LSD, gropes like a child further and further into the rooms and endless rooms of the elaborate candy house of himself and away, hopelessly away, from what has passed, I was hoping forever, for love; ... my best guide to the Trystero [Driblette] has taken a Brody. Where am I?" Without signs, without the repetition that all signs embody, she is left to her own devices. Until now, the repetitions told her of the Trystero ("the repetition of symbols was to be enough ... She was meant to remember.... Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence"Pynchon's italics), but the simple reception of signs is insufficient for the revelation she is approaching: "she wondered if each one of the gemlike `clues' were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night." (pp. 198-206)

The Trystero's illuminations are conveyed through miracles, sacred versions of what Oedipa thinks of as the "secular miracle of communication." The one traditional miracle most closely involved with communication is the miracle of Pentecost:

When the day of Pentecost had come, [the Apostles] were ... all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.... [T]he multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.... And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" But others mocking said, "They are filled with new wine."

Pynchon names Pentecost only once, in the play-within-the-novel The Courier's Tragedy, where the novel's use of the Pentecost motif is parodied darkly. The gift of tongues is perverted, amidst a scene of Jacobean horror, into the tearing out of a tongue. The torturer gloats:

Thy pitiless unmanning is most meet, Thinks Ercole the zany Paraclete. Descended this malign, Unholy Ghost, Let us begin thy frightful Pentecost.

The feast of Pentecost is alternately called Whitsunday, after the tradition that on that day baptismal candidates wear white. The final scene of the booka stamp auction held, surprisingly, on a Sundayis a parody of Pentecost: "The men inside the auction room wore black mohair and had pale cruel faces.... [The auctioneer] spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture; perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of Lot 49." And the book ends. The auctioneer prepares to speak; Oedipa awaits the forty-ninth lot of the sale, a lot whose purchaser "may" turn out to be from the Trystero, thus forcing the system to reveal itself. But why the forty-ninth lot? Because Pentecost is the Sunday seven weeks after Easterforty-nine days. But the word Pentecost derives from the Greek for "fiftieth." The cryingthe auctioneer's callingof the forty-ninth lot is the moment before a Pentecostal revelation, the end of the period in which the miracle is in a state of potential, not yet manifest. This is why the novel ends with Oedipa waiting, with the "true" nature of the Trystero never established: a manifestation of the sacred can only be believed in; it can never be proved beyond doubt. There will always be a mocking voice, internal or external, saying "they are filled with new wine"or, as Oedipa fears, "you are hallucinating it ... you are fantasying some plot."

Oedipa's constant risk lies in that nagging possibility: that the Trystero has no independent existence, but is merely her own projection on the world outside. The center of Pierce Inverarity's interests is a town named San Narciso, and the name insistently mocks Oedipa's quest. (There is a Saint Narcissus in The Courier's Tragedy, so the narcissism in question is not limited to mid-century America.) The novel describes, however, Oedipa's progress away from the modes of narcissism. At the end of the first chapter Pynchon writes that Oedipa was "to have all manner of revelations[, h]ardly about Pierce Inverarity, or herself." Oedipa recalls, a few lines later, a past moment with Inverarity in Mexico when she saw an emblem of solipsism to which she responded in kind. They had

somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by ... Remedios Varo; in the central painting of a triptych ... were a number of frail girls ... prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.... Oedipa ... stood in front of the painting and cried.... She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she had stood on had only been woven a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape.

The tower of isolation, though an expression of the self, is not a product of the self, but one of the conditions of this world:

Such a captive maiden ... soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.... If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

With this gesture towards hopelessness the chapter ends. But to its final question, the remainder of the bookwith its partial revelation of what the Trystero might stand foroffers a tentative answer.

Near the end of the novel, when Oedipa stands by the sea, "her isolation complete," she finally breaks from the tower and from the uniqueness of San Narciso. She learns, finally, of a continuity that had been available, but hidden, from the beginning:

She stood ... her isolation complete, and tried to face toward the sea. But she'd lost her bearings. She turned, ... could find no mountains either. As if there could be no barriers between herself and the rest of the land. San Narciso at that moment lost (the loss pure, instant, spherical ... ), gave up its residue of uniqueness for her; became a name again, was assumed back into the American continuity of crust and mantle.

At this point the uniqueness of her experience matters less than the general truth it signifies: "There was the true continuity.... If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other town, and any other estate, then by that continuity she might have found The Tristero anywhere in her Republic ... if only she'd looked." Her choice now is either to affirm the existence of the Tristerothrough which continuity survives, renews, reintegrates itself over vast expanses of space and timeor to be entirely separated, isolated, an "alien ... assumed full circle into some paranoia." San Narciso or America. (pp. 207-11)

The achievement of The Crying of Lot 49 is its ability to speak unwanted words without a hint of preaching or propaganda. The book's transformation of the impersonal language of science into a language of great emotional power is a breathtaking accomplishment, whose nearest rival is perhaps Goethe's Elective Affinities. Equally remarkable is the book's ability to hover on the edge of low comedy without ever descending into the pond of the frivolous. The risks Pynchon takes in his comedy are great, but all the "bad" jokes, low puns, comic names, and moments of pure farce that punctuate the book have a serious function: the book, through its exploration of stylistic extremes, constantly raises expectations which it then refuses to fulfill. Its pattern of comic surprises, of sudden intrusions of disparate styles and manners, is entirely congruent with the thrust of its narrative. As Oedipa is caught unaware by the abrupt revelations that change her world, and is thus made attentive to significance she never recognized before, so the variations in the book's texture alert a reader to the book's complexity. High seriousness is difficult to sustainnor, clearly, would Pynchon ever want to do so. A serious vision of relation and coherence must include comic relationships, and recognize comic varieties of attention.

Pynchon recognizes the limits of fictionhis comedy is in part a reminder of the fictional quality of his worldbut he never lets his book become therefore self-reflective. Although he shares the painful knowledge wrought by modernism of the limits of art, and although he knows that no work of quotidian fictionneither social nor psychologicalcan ever again persuade, he devotes himself to the effort that leads from pure fiction to a thrust at truth. The effort is difficult and complex, and most of the modes in which the effort has previously been attempted now seem exhausted. Pynchon's search for a new mode of indicative fiction is a lonely and isolated one, but it leads to a place where fiction can become less lonely, less isolated than it has been for many years. (pp. 218-19)

Source: Edward Mendelson, The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49, in Individual and Community: Variations on a Theme in American Fiction, edited by Kenneth H. Baldwin and David K. Kirby, Duke University Press, 1975, pp. 182-222. Reproduced by permission.

Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism