Bloom’s Modern Critical Views African American Poets: Wheatley– Tolson African American Poets: Hayden– Dove Edward Albe... 230 downloads 1848 Views 2MB Size Report This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below! Report copyright / DMCA form DOWNLOAD PDF

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views African American Poets: Wheatley– Tolson African American Poets: Hayden– Dove Edward Albee American and Canadian Women Poets, 1930–present American Women Poets, 1650–1950 Maya Angelou Asian-American Writers Margaret Atwood Jane Austen James Baldwin Honoré de Balzac Samuel Beckett Saul Bellow The Bible William Blake Jorge Luis Borges Ray Bradbury The Brontës Gwendolyn Brooks Elizabeth Barrett Browning Robert Browning Italo Calvino Albert Camus Truman Capote Lewis Carroll Willa Cather Cervantes Geoffrey Chaucer Anton Chekhov Kate Chopin Agatha Christie Samuel Taylor Coleridge Joseph Conrad



Contemporary Poets Stephen Crane Dante Daniel Defoe Don DeLillo Charles Dickens Emily Dickinson John Donne and the 17th-Century Poets Fyodor Dostoevsky W. E. B. DuBois George Eliot T. S. Eliot Ralph Ellison Ralph Waldo Emerson William Faulkner F. Scott Fitzgerald Sigmund Freud Robert Frost Johann Wolfgang von Goethe George Gordon, Lord Byron Graham Greene Thomas Hardy Nathaniel Hawthorne Ernest Hemingway Hermann Hesse Hispanic-American Writers Homer Langston Hughes Zora Neale Hurston Aldous Huxley Henrik Ibsen John Irving Henry James James Joyce Franz Kafka John Keats Jamaica Kincaid Stephen King Rudyard Kipling



Milan Kundera D. H. Lawrence Doris Lessing Ursula K. Le Guin Sinclair Lewis Norman Mailer Bernard Malamud Christopher Marlowe Gabriel García Márquez Cormac McCarthy Carson McCullers Herman Melville Arthur Miller John Milton Molière Toni Morrison Native-American Writers Joyce Carol Oates Flannery O’Connor Eugene O’Neill George Orwell Octavio Paz Sylvia Plath Edgar Allan Poe Katherine Anne Porter Thomas Pynchon Philip Roth Salman Rushdie J. D. Salinger Jean-Paul Sartre William Shakespeare: Histories and Poems William Shakespeare: Romances William Shakespeare: The Comedies William Shakespeare: The Tragedies George Bernard Shaw



Bloom’s Modern Critical Views Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley Alexander Solzhenitsyn Sophocles John Steinbeck Tom Stoppard Jonathan Swift Amy Tan Alfred, Lord Tennyson



Henry David Thoreau J. R. R. Tolkien Leo Tolstoy Ivan Turgenev Mark Twain John Updike Kurt Vonnegut Derek Walcott Alice Walker Robert Penn Warren Eudora Welty



Edith Wharton



Walt Whitman Oscar Wilde Tennessee Williams Thomas Wolfe Tom Wolfe Virginia Woolf William Wordsworth Richard Wright William Butler Yeats



Bloom’s Modern Critical Views



THOMAS PYNCHON



Edited and with an introduction by



Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University



©2003 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications.



Introduction © 2003 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1



Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas Pynchon / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. p. cm. -- (Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 0-7910-7445-5 1. Pynchon, Thomas--Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series. PS3566.Y55Z94 2003b 813'.54--dc21 2003000808



Chelsea House Publishers 1974 Sproul Road, Suite 400 Broomall, PA 19008-0914 http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Jesse Zuba Cover designed by Terry Mallon Cover: © CORBIS Layout by EJB Publishing Services



Contents Editor’s Note



vii



Introduction Harold Bloom



1



The Sacred, The Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49 Edward Mendelson The Importance of Thomas Pynchon Richard Poirier Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Pynchon’s Fiction George Levine Pre-Apocalyptic Atavism: Thomas Pynchon’s Early Fiction Catharine R. Stimpson



43



57



77



Twentieth-Century American Allegory Maureen Quilligan



93



Order in Thomas Pynchon’s “Entropy” David Seed Pynchon’s Mythological Histories Kathryn Hume Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature Leo Bersani Probing the Nihil: Existential Gnosticism in Pynchon’s Stories 169 Dwight Eddins



109 131 145



11



vi



CONTENTS



V.: A Fierce Ambivalence John Dugdale



197



“Who Was Saved?”: Families, Snitches and Recuperation in Pynchon’s Vineland N. Katherine Hayles



217



“Hushing Sick Transmissions”: Disrupting Story in The Crying of Lot 49 235 Bernard Duyfhuizen Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon Michael Wood



251



The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon David Cowart



261



Plot, Ideology, and Compassion in Mason & Dixon Thomas H. Schaub Chronology



297



Contributors



299



Bibliography



303



Acknowledgments Index



311



309



283



Editor’s Note



My Introduction concerns Gravity’s Rainbow, with particular emphasis upon “The Story of Byron the Bulb.” Edward Mendelson traces what he considers the interplay of sacred and profane in The Crying of Lot 49. To Richard Poirier, Pynchon is a great novelist of betrayal, heir of Melville and Hawthorne. George Levine comments on Pynchon’s “sado-anarchism” and its effect of disorienting us. Catharine R. Stimpson examines the equivocal role of women as apocalyptic ﬁgures in Pynchon. Analyzing allegorical language in Pynchon, Maureen Quilligan observes that every reader becomes her or his own allegorist. The early story, “Entropy,” is seen by David Seed as an inverted allegory of order. Kathryn Hume bravely attempts to unravel some of Pynchon’s complex mythographies. The large question of what “paranoia” means in Pynchon is explored by Leo Bersani. Dwight Eddins examines Pynchon’s Gnosticism in his early stories. V., a reader’s delight, is read by John Dugdale in terms of its prevalent ambivalences, while Vineland, the weakest of Pynchon’s works, receives a rescue operation from N. Katherine Hayles. Bernard Duyfhuizen returns us to The Crying of Lot 49, to examine its creative disruptions.



vii



viii



Editor’s Note



The remaining essays deal with Pynchon’s late masterpiece, Mason & Dixon. Michael Wood subtly praises Mason & Dixon for balancing completion and the truth of disorder, after which David Cowart sees Pynchon as embracing a limited idea of order. Finally, Thomas H. Schaub refreshingly expresses the element of compassion in Mason & Dixon.



Introduction I We all carry about us our personal catalog of the experiences that matters most—our own versions of what they used to call the Sublime. So far as aesthetic experience in twentieth-century America is concerned, I myself have a short list for the American Sublime: the war that concludes the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup; Faulkner’s As I lay Dying; Wallace Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn”; nearly all of Hart Crane; Charlie Parker playing “Paker’s Mood” and “I Remember You”; Bud Powell performing “Un Poco Loco”; Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts; and most recently, the story of Byron the light bulb in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I am not suggesting that there is not much more of the Sublime in Gravity’s Rainbow than the not quite eight pages make up the story of Byron the Bulb. Pynchon is the greatest master of the negative Sublime at least since Faulkner and West, and if nothing besides Byron the Bulb in Gravity’s Rainbow seems to me quite as perfect as all of The Crying of Lot 49, that may be because no one could hope to write the ﬁrst authentic post-Holocaust novel, and achieve a total vision without fearful cost. Yet the story of Byron the Bulb, for me, touches one of the limits of art, and I want to read it very closely here, so as to suggest what is most vital and least problematic about Pynchon’s achievement as a writer, indeed as the crucial American writer of prose ﬁction at the present time. We are now, in my judgment, in the Age of John Ashbery and of Thomas Pynchon, which is not to suggest any inadequacy in such marvelous works as James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover or Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Bound but only to indicate one critic’s conviction as to what now constitutes the Spirit of the Age. For Pynchon, ours is the age of plastics and paranoia, dominated by the System. No one is going to dispute such a conviction; reading the New York Times ﬁrst thing every morning is sufficient to convince one that not even



1



2



Introduction



Pynchon’s imagination can match journalistic irreality. What is more startling about Pynchon is that he has found ways of representing the impulse to defy the System, even though both impulse and its representations always are defeated. In the Zone (which is our cosmos as the Gnostics saw it, the kenoma or Great Emptiness) the force of the System, of They (whom the Gnostics called Archons), is in some sense irresistible, as all overdetermination must be irresistible. Yet there is a Counterforce, hardly distinguished in its efficacy, but it never does (or can) give up. Unfortunately, its hero is the extraordinarily ordinary Tyrone Slothrop, who is a perpetual disaster, and whose ultimate fate, being “scattered” (rather in biblical sense), is accomplished by Pynchon with dismaying literalness. And yet—Slothrop, who has not inspired much affection even in Pynchon’s best critics, remains more hero than antihero, despite the critics, and despite Pynchon himself. There are more than four hundred named characters in Gravity’s Rainbow, and perhaps twenty of these have something we might want to call personality, but only Tyrone Slothrop (however negatively) could be judged a self representation (however involuntary) on the author’s part. Slothrop is a Kabbalistic version of Pynchon himself, rather in the way that Scythrop the poet in Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey is intentionally a loving satire upon Peacock’s friend the poet Shelley, but Kabbalistically is a representation of Peacock himself. I am not interested in adding Nightmare Abby to the maddening catalog of “sources” for Gravity’s Rainbow (though Slothrop’s very name probably alludes to Scythrop’s, with the image of a giant sloth replacing the accuity of the Shelleyan scythe). What does concern me is the Kabbalistic winding path that is Pynchon’s authentic and Gnostic image for the route through the kelippot or evil husks that the light must take if it is to survive in the ultimate breaking of the vessels, the Holocaust brought about by the System at its most evil, yet hardly at its most prevalent. The not unimpressive polemic of Norman Mailer—that Fascism always lurks where plastic dominates—is in Pynchon not a polemic but a total vision. Mailer, for all his legitimate status as Representative Man, lacks invention except in Ancient Evenings, and there he cannot discipline his inventiveness. Pynchon surpasses every American writer since Faulkner at invention, which Dr. Samuel Johnson, greatest of Western literary critics, rightly considered to be the essence of poetry or ﬁction. What can be judged Pynchon’s greatest talent is his vast control, a preternatural ability to order so immense an exuberance at invention. Pynchon’s supreme aesthetic quality is what Hazlitt called gusto, or what Blake intended in his Infernal proverb: “Exuberance is Beauty.”



Introduction



3



Sadly, that is precisely what the Counterforce lacks: gusto. Slothrop never gives up; always defeated, he goes on, bloody and bowed, but has to yield to entropy, to dread scattering. Yet he lacks all exuberance; he is the American as conditioned reﬂex, colorless and hapless. Nothing holds or could hold Gravity’s Rainbow together—except Slothrop. When he is ﬁnally scattered, the book stops, and the apocalyptic rocket blasts off. Still, Slothrop is more than a Derridean dissemination, if only because he does enable Pynchon to gather together seven hundred and sixty pages. Nor is Gravity’s Rainbow what is now called “a text.” It is a novel, with a beginning, an end, and a monstrous conglomerate of middles. This could not be if the schlemiel Slothrop were wholly antipathetic. Instead, he does enlist something crucial in the elitist reader, a something that is scattered when the hero, poor Plasticman or Rocketman, is apocalyptically scattered. Pynchon, as Richard Poirier has best seen and said, is a weird blend of esoteric and insanely learned with popular or the supposed popular. Or, to follow Pynchon’s own lead, he is a Kabbalistic writer, esoteric not only in his theosophical allusiveness (like Yeats) but actually in his deeper patterns (like Malcolm Lowry in Under the Volcano) A Kabbalistic novel is something beyond an oxymoron not because Kabbalah does not tell stories (it does) but because its stories are all exegetical, however wild and mythodical. That does give a useful clue for reading Pynchon, who always seems not so much to be telling his bewildering, labyrinthine story as writing wistful commentary upon it as a story already twice-told, though it hasn’t been, and truly can’t be told at all.



II That returns us to Byron the Bulb, whose story can’t be told because poor Byron the indomitable really is immortal. He can never burn out, which at least is an annoyance for the whole paranoid System, and at most is an embarrassment for them. They cannot compel Byron to submit to the law of entropy, or the death drive, and yet they can deny him any context in which his immortality will at last be anything but a provocation to his own madness. A living reminder that the System can never quite win, poor Byron the Bulb, becomes a death in life reminder that the System also can never quite lose. Byron, unlike Slothrop, cannot be scattered, but his high consciousness represents the dark fate of the Gnosis in Pynchon’s vision. For all its negativity, Gnosticism remains a mode of transcendental belief. Pynchon’s is



4



Introduction



a Gnosis without transcendence. There is a Counterforce, but there is no fathering and mothering abyss to which it can return. And yet the light bulb is named Byron, and is a source of light and cannot burn out. Why Byron? Well, he could hardly be Goethe the Bulb or Wordsworth the Bulb or even Joyce the Bulb. There must be the insouciance of personal myth in his name. Probably he could have been Oscar the Bulb, after the author of The Importance of Being Earnest or of the marvelous fairytale “The Remarkable Rocket.” Or perhaps he might have been Groucho the Bulb. But Byron the Bulb is best, and not merely for ironic purposes. Humiliated but immortal, this Byron, too, might proclaim: But there is that within me which shall tire Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire; Something unearthly, which they deem not of, Like the remembered tone of mute lyre. Byron the Bulb is essentially Childe Harold in the Zone: He would not yield dominion of his mind To spirits against whom his own rebell’d. Like Childe Harold, Byron the Bulb is condemned to the fate of all High-Romantic Prometheans: there is a ﬁre And motion of the soul which will not dwell In its own narrow being, but aspire Beyond the ﬁtting medium of desire; And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore, Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire Of aught but rest; a fever at the core, Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore. There are, alas, no high adventures for Byron the Bulb. We see him ﬁrst in the Bulb Baby Heaven, maintained by the System or Company as part of its business of fostering demiurgic illusions: One way or another, these Bulb folks are in the business of providing the appearance of power, power against the night, without the reality.



Introduction



5



From the start, Byron is an anomaly, attempting to recruit the other Baby Bulbs in his great crusade against the Company. He is already a voice in the Zone, since he is as old as time. Trouble with Byron’s he’s an old, old soul, trapped inside the glass prison of a Baby Bulb. Like the noble Lord Byron plotting to lead the Greeks in their Revolution against the Turks, Byron the Bulb has his High-Romantic vision: When M-Day ﬁnally does roll around, you can bet Byron’s elated. He has passed the time hatching some really insane grandiose plans—he’s gonna organize all the Bulbs, see, get him a power base in Berlin, he’s already hep to the Strobing Tactic, all you do is develop the knack (Yogic, almost) of shutting off and on at a rate close to the human brain’s alpha rhythm, and you can actually trigger an epileptic ﬁt! True. Byron has had a vision against the rafters of his ward, of 20 million Bulbs, all over Europe, at a given synchronizing pulse arranged by one of his many agents in the Grid, all these bulbs beginning to strobe together, humans thrashing around the 20 million rooms like ﬁsh on the beaches of Perfect Energy—Attention, humans, this has been a warning to you. Next time, a few of us will explode. Ha-ha. Yes we’ll unleash our Kamikaze squads! You’ve heard of the Kirghiz Light? Well that’s the ass end of a ﬁre ﬂy compared to what we’re gonna—oh, you haven’t heard of the—oh, well, too bad. Cause a few Bulbs, say a million, a mere 5% of our number, are more than willing to ﬂame out in one grand burst instead of patiently waiting out their design hours.... So Byron dreams of his Guerilla Strike Force, gonna get Herbert Hoover, Stanley Baldwin, all of them, right in the face with one coordinated blast. The rhetoric of bravado here is tempered and defeated by a rhetoric of desperation. A rude awakening awaits Byron, because the System has in place already its branch, “Phoebus,” the international light-bulb cartel, headquartered of course in Switzerland. Phoebus, god of light and of pestilence “determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world,” and yet does not as yet know that Byron, rebel against the cartel’s repression, is immortal. As an immortal, bearer of the Gnostic Spark or pneuma, Byron must acquire knowledge, initially the sadness of the knowledge of love:



6



Introduction



One by one, over the months, the other bulbs burn out, and are gone. The ﬁrst few of these hit Byron hard. He’s still a new arrival, still hasn’t accepted his immortality. But on through the burning hours he starts to learn about the transience of others: learns that loving them while they’re here becomes easier, and also more intense—to love as if each design-hour will be the last. Byron soon enough becomes a Permanent Old-Timer. Others can recognize his immortality on sight, but it’s never discussed except in a general way, when folklore comes ﬂickering in from other parts of the Grid, tales of the Immortals, one in a kabbalist’s study in Lyons who’s supposed to know magic, another in Norway outside a warehouse facing arctic whiteness with a stoicism more southerly bulbs begin strobing faintly just at the thought of. If other Immortals are out there, they remain silent. But it is a silence with much, perhaps, everything, in it. A silence that may have everything in it is a Gnostic concept, but falls away into the silence of impotence on the part of the other bulbs when the System eventually sends its agent to unscrew Byron: At 800 hours—another routine precaution—a Berlin agent is sent out to the opium den to transfer Byron. She is wearing asbestos-lined kid gloves and seven-inch spike heels, no not so she can ﬁt in with the crowd, but so that she can reach that sconce to unscrew Byron. The other bulbs watch, in barely subdued terror. The word goes out along the Grid. At something close to the speed of light, every bulb, Azos looking down the empty black Bakelite streets, Nitralampen and Wotan Gs at night soccer matches, Just-Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses, every bulb in Europe knows what’s happened. They are silent with impotence, with surrender in the face of struggles they thought were all myth. We can’t help, this common though humming through pastures of sleeping sheep, down Autobahns and to the bitter ends of coaling piers in the North, there’s never been anything we could do... Anyone shows us the meanest hope of transcending and the Committee on Incandescent Anomilies comes in and takes him away. Some do protest, maybe, here and there, but it’s only information, glow-modulated, harmless, nothing close to the explosions in the faces of the powerful that Byron once envisioned, back there in his Baby ward, in his innocence.



Introduction



7



Romantics are Incandescent Anomalies, a phrase wholly appropriate to John Ashbery’s belated self-illuminations also, defeated epiphanies that always ask the question: Was it information? The information that Pynchon gives us has Byron taken to a “control point,” where he burns on until the committee on Incandescent Anomolies sends a hit man after him. Like the noble Lord Byron, who was more than half in love with easeful death before he went off to die in Greece, Byron the Bulb is now content to be recycled also, but he is bound upon his own wheel of ﬁre, and so must continue as a now involuntary prophet and hero: But here something odd happens. Yes, damned odd. The plan is to smash up Byron and send him back right there in the shop to cullet and batch—salvage the tungsten, of course—and let him be reincarnated in the glassblower’s next project (a balloon setting out on a journey from the top of a white skyscraper). This wouldn’t be too bad a deal for Byron—he knows as well as Phoebus does how many hours he has on him. Here in the shop he’s watched enough glass being melted back into the structureless pool from which all glass forms spring and respring, wouldn’t mind going through it himself. But he is trapped on the Karmic wheel. The glowing orange batch is a taunt, cruelty. There’s no escape for Byron, he’s doomed to an inﬁnite regress of sockets and bulb-snatchers. In zips young Hansel Geschwindig, a Weimar street urchin-twirls Byron out of the ceiling into a careful pocket and Gessschhhwindig! out the door again. Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light, in his dreams, was always hope: the basic, mortal hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, “Who? Who?” Byron the Bulb’s Promethean ﬁre is now a taunt and a cruelty. A mad comedy, “an inﬁnite regress of sockets and bulb snatchers,” will be the poor Bulb’s destiny, a repetition-compulsion akin to the entropic ﬂight and scattering of the heroic schlemiel Slothrop. The stone-faced search parties of the Phoebus combine move out into the streets of Berlin. But Byron is off upon his unwilling travels: Berlin to Hamburg to Helgoland to Nürnberg, until (after many narrow escapes):



8



Introduction



He is scavenged next day (the ﬁeld now deathempty, columned, pale, streaked with long mudpuddles, morning clouds lengthening behind the gilded swastika and wreath) by a poor Jewish ragpicker, and taken on, on into another 15 years of preservation against chance and against Phoebus. He will be screwed into mother (Mutter) after mother, as the female threads of German light-bulb sockets are known, for some reason that escapes everybody. Can we surmise the reason? The cartel gives up, and decides to declare Byron legally burned out, a declaration that deceives nobody. Through his years of survival, all these various rescues of Byron happen as if by accident. Whenever he can, he tries to instruct any bulbs nearby in the evil nature of Phoebus, and in the need for solidarity against the cartel. He has come to see how Bulb must move beyond its role as conveyor of light-energy alone. Phoebus has restricted Bulb to this one identity. “But there are other frequencies, above and below the visible band. Bulb can give heat. Bulb can provide energy for plants to grow, illegal plants, inside closets, for example. Bulb can penetrate the sleeping eye, and operate among the dreams of men.” Some bulbs listened attentively—others thought of ways to ﬁnk to Phoebus. Some of the older anti-Byronists were able to fool with their parameters in systematic ways that would show up on the ebonite meter under the Swiss mountain: there were even a few selfimmolations, hoping to draw the hit men down. This darkness of vain treachery helps to ﬂesh out the reason for Byron’s survival. Call it the necessity of myth, or of gossip aging productively into myth. Not that Phoebus loses any part of its proﬁt; rather, it establishes a subtler and more intricate international cartel pattern: Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon ﬁlament was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron



Introduction



9



gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seems impossible now—the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don’t last long—they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will ﬁnd himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it. This seems to me the saddest paragraph in all of Pynchon; at least, it hurts me the most. In it is Pynchon’s despair of his own Gnostic Kabbalah, since Byron the Bulb does achieve the Gnosis, complete knowledge, but purchases that knowledge by impotence, the loss of power. Byron can neither be martyred, nor betray his own prophetic vocation. What remains is madness: limitless rage and frustration, which at last he learns to enjoy. That ends the story of Byron the bulb, and ends something in Pynchon also. What is left is the studying of new modalities of post-Apocalyptic silence. Pynchon seems now to be where his precursor Emerson prophesied the American visionary must be: There may be two or three or four steps, according to the genius of each, but for every seeing soul there are two absorbing facts, —I and the Abyss. If at best, the I is an immortal but hapless light bulb and the Abyss, our Gnostic foremother and forefather, is the socket into which that poor I of a bulb is screwed, then the two absorbing facts themselves have ceased to absorb.



E D WA R D M E N D E L S O N



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



I



T



homas Pynchon’s ﬁrst two novels (a third has been announced at this writing) are members of that rare and valuable class of books which, on their ﬁrst appearance, were thought obscure even by their admirers, but which became increasingly accessible afterwards, without losing any of their original excitement. When V., Pynchon’s ﬁrst novel, appeared in 1963, some of its reviewers counselled reading it twice or not at all, and even then warned that its various patterns would not fall entirely into place. Even if its formal elements were obscure, V. still recommended itself through its sustained explosions of verbal and imaginative energy, its immense range of knowledge and incident, its extraordinary ability to excite the emotions without ever descending into the easy paths of self-praise or self-pity that less rigorous novelists had been tracking with success for years. By now the published discussions of the book agree that its central action, repeated and articulated in dozens of variations, involves a decline, both in history broadly conceived and in the book’s individual characters, from energy to stasis, and from the vital to the inanimate. The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon’s second book, published in 1966, is much shorter and superﬁcially more cohesive than the ﬁrst book. Its reception, compared with V.’s almost universal praise, was



From Individual and Community: Variations on a Theme in American Fiction. © 1975 by Duke University Press.



11



12



Edward Mendelson



relatively muted, and it has since received less critical attention than it deserves. Yet a clear account of its total organization is now becoming possible. Lot 49 clariﬁed many of the issues of V., by inverting and developing them; Pynchon’s new novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, will probably help to sort out many of the difficulties of Lot 49. This paper is an attempt at an interim progress report, with new observations, on the reading of Pynchon’s second novel. Both of the novels describe a gradual revelation of order and unity within the multiplicity of experience, but the kinds of order that the two books discover are almost diametrically opposed. Despite its cosmopolitan variety of incident and character, V. develops around a unifying principle that is ultimately constricting and infertile. The book’s central metaphor is the thermodynamic concept of entropy, which for the moment may be deﬁned loosely as the slowing down of a system, the calcifying decay of life and available energy on a scale that may be minute or global. Entropy is the principle within irreversible processes, the principle that, in Freud’s words, opposes the undoing of what has already occurred. By extending this principle one may speculate that the universe itself must eventually suffer a “heat-death,” reduced and simpliﬁed to a luke-warm system in which no energy may be used for any purpose. Pynchon used “Entropy” as the title and theme of one of his ﬁrst published stories,1 and the concept recurs, in a signiﬁcantly different form, in The Crying of Lot 49. In Pynchon’s hands entropy serves as a metaphor of exceptional range and emotional power, and in this Pynchon is not alone. The concept of entropy, whether or not it is named as such, has informed much ﬁction and philosophy for centuries: it is a central motif in satire, and is the historical principle behind Plato’s account of four types of unjust society in the Republic. The Crying of Lot 49, although slighter in scale than V., ﬁnds the intrusive energy that is needed to reverse the process that V. describes. In Lot 49 a world of triviality and “exitlessness”2 becomes infused with energy and choice, and Pynchon seems to be demonstrating that he can balance the 500 pages of decline recounted in V. with some 200 pages of possible recovery in Lot 49. The ostensible subject of the latter novel is one woman’s discovery of a system of communication, but the system refers to something far larger than itself: it fosters variety and surprise, and offers a potential access to “transcendent meaning” and “a reason that mattered to the world” (181). Extend the world of V. beyond the book’s ﬁnal chapters, and you eventually intrude on the unlit, motionless world of the later Beckett. Extend The Crying of Lot 49, and you soon come in sight of Prospero’s island and the



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



13



seacoast of Bohemia. The processes of V. isolate; those of Lot 49 create community. Almost all the incidents in V. enact a decline of available energy, a hardening of living beings into artiﬁcial ones, a degradation from vitality to mechanism, a transfer of sympathy from human suffering to inanimate, objective existence. In the world of V. there can only be few alternatives to decline, and those few are weak: some understated temporary acts of escape and love, a sudden dash into the sea as all the lights go out in a city, the reconstruction of a marriage. All the rest leads to stasis—although the book’s scale and exuberance suggest that mass decline is a principle of existence in the novel but not in its creator. The central plot from which the book’s various historical fantasies—Egypt in 1898, Florence in 1899, Paris in 1913, Malta in 1919 and again in the 1940s, South-West Africa in 1922, and glimpses of a score of other settings and moments—involves the search made by one Herbert Stencil for traces of the woman V., who may have been Stencil’s mother, as she moves through Europe and the twentieth century, becoming ever less vital and more artiﬁcial as she grows older. In her ﬁnal manifestation as “the Bad Priest” at Malta during the Second World War, V. advises young girls to become nuns, to “avoid the sensual extremes— pleasures of intercourse, pain of childbirth”—and to prevent the creation of new life. To young boys she preaches “that the object of male existence was to be like a crystal: beautiful and soulless.”3 And before her death she gives up much of her own body to inanimate surrogates: a wig, artiﬁcial feet, a glass eye containing a clock, false teeth. A jewel is later found sewn in her navel. Increasingly lifeless and crystalline, ﬁnally killed by the mechanical engines of war in the sky over Malta, the woman V. is the most vividly realized victim of the book’s pandemic processes of inanition and decline. The other victims include a ruined product of failed plastic surgery, a man with a knife-switch in his arm, a synthetic body used for radiation research, a girl reduced to a fetish, a character named Profane constantly victimized by hostile objects. The book implies a conclusion that lies beyond itself: an ending where all life and warmth have declined and disappeared, an apocalypse that arrives in total silence. “There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she,” asks Stencil’s father in his diary (V., 53). The novel V. is an elaborate gloss on an earlier account of a woman whom history replaced with an object: the chapter on “The Dynamo and the Virgin” in The Education of Henry Adams. Pynchon’s Stencil, who like Adams talks of himself in the third person, searches for a symbol even more inclusive than Adams’s; V. is the virgin who became the dynamo. The woman V. is Stencil’s



14



Edward Mendelson



reconstruction of scattered and ambiguous clues and symbols, gathered into episodes told by narrators—often obviously ﬂawed and unreliable—whom Stencil creates for the occasion. Half the novel consists of Stencil’s indirect narration of the life of V., who is seldom central to the story, but slips in sideways when she is least expected. Stencil’s reconstruction of V.’s fragmentary signs—an enactment in reverse of her physical disintegration— is a paradigm of Pynchon’s reconstruction of twentieth-century history, a reconstruction which establishes the novel’s “ground.” The woman V., like Pynchon’s history, is put together by design. In his Spenglerian sweep through the century (Stencil, born in 1901, is “the century’s child”—V., 52— as well as V.’s) Pynchon invents coincidences and patterns which suggest historical design in the novel’s world. “If the coincidences are real then Stencil has never encountered history at all, but something far more appalling” (V., 450). This suggestion of will and design in history is analogous to Stencil’s own “design” of V., but Pynchon makes the analogy even more complex and suggestive than a simple equation can be. To begin with, V. is not entirely a product of Stencil’s reconstructions. The frame of the novel V. is a narrator’s direct account of events in 1955 and 1956, events which include Stencil’s indirect narrations of the life of V. (Pynchon makes certain that Stencil’s narratives, compelling as they are, are taken as speculative and suspect: people speak and understand languages which they could not understand “in life,” and characters in the book occasionally remark on such difficulties.) The direct framing narrative is apparently reliable, unlike Stencil’s, and it gradually and increasingly provides its own, un-Stencilled, evidence of V.’s existence. “The Confessions of Fausto Maijstral,” another apparently reliable narrative written by the last person who saw V. alive, has a chapter to itself, unmediated by Stencil, with a plausible account of V.’s ﬁnal moments. And a relic of V., an ivory comb which in Stencil’s invented narrative she had perhaps acquired decades earlier, later appears both in Maijstral’s confessions and, in the hands of Maijstral’s daughter, in Pynchon’s direct narrative. The comb serves as a kind of optical proof that V. once existed in the world of the book. But by the time the evidence appears in the direct narrative, Stencil has gone off to Stockholm to pursue other and more tenuous threads, and the authentic clue eludes him, presumably forever. The moment when the comb reappears is a heartbreaking one, not only because the reader knows then that one neat and satisfying conclusion to the novel—a reasonably successful conclusion of Stencil’s search—has been irrevocably denied, but also because the incident makes a faint and reticent suggestion about the limits of human knowledge: a suggestion that, perhaps because of its reticence, rings true.



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



15



This leads back to the matter of historical design. For the characters in the direct narration of the book, V.’s existence is never more than speculative: their evidence of her is always partial. It is only the narrator, who has no use for it, who has thorough knowledge of the evidence and the “truth.” The characters have only partial knowledge of what in the book “in fact” exists. Now the book’s Spenglerian speculation on historical design is also a reconstruction from partial evidence, for even the narrator’s historical knowledge is severely limited. But by analogy with the “real” coherence of the woman V. (and the book softly but insistently presses the analogy), there may, the book suggests, be a real order and coherence to history in the world of phenomena that lies outside ﬁction’s garden. But, as the genuine signs of V. elude Stencil—though they do exist, and Stencil has partial knowledge of some of them—so there may be a genuine transcendent coherence in the world’s history, although the signs of that coherence either refuse to cooperate with our preconceptions, or elude us entirely. V. is ﬁnally a tragedy of human limitation, and like all tragedy it points towards the larger frame in which the tragic action occurs. The contradiction between human ignorance of the frame, and the frame itself, is tragedy’s ultimate source, its mode of being.



II In contrast with the absconded signs of V., the signs that appear throughout The Crying of Lot 49 are not elusive at all. They intrude iteratively on the book’s heroine until they entirely supplant the undemanding world with which she had once been familiar. In Lot 49 the systems of interrelation and commonality that inform the book’s world have consequences entirely different from the superﬁcially similar systems in V. To participate in the processes of decadence in V. you have only to become passive, inanimate and selﬁsh; history, which simpliﬁes V.’s world, will do the rest. But in The Crying of Lot 49 the revealed pattern offers “maybe even ... a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life that harrows the head of everybody American you know” (170), an alternative to physical crowding and ethical vacancy, an alternative that reveals itself quietly but persistently to the passive listener, yet will not allow that listener to remain passive for long. In this second novel, published only three years after V., a hidden order reinfuses Pynchon’s world with energy, adds to the world’s complexity, and demands not acquiescence but conscious choice. 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



16



Edward Mendelson



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” (20). 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” (11). 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



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



17



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. (24–25) 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” (31). 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” (170). 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-ornothing decision, everything—her construing of the world, and the world’s construction—depends: 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....



18



Edward Mendelson



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.... (181–182) 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 happens—a “secular” part of the book—Oedipa 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 sixteenthcentury 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 fantasy—the 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 Joaqúin de Tristero y Calavera, who claims to be Hinckart’s cousin and the legitimate Lord of Ohain—and 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



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



19



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” (159–160). 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” (156). 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” (165). 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



20



Edward Mendelson



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”:4 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 enough—it is a manifestation of the sacred—but 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;5 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 act—the 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.”6 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?” (82). 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 themselves—manifest themselves. And these manifestations arrive without any effort on her part. When, by the middle of the book, “everything she saw, smelled, dreamed,



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



21



remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Trystero” (81), 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” (104). But when she drifts that night through San Francisco she ﬁnds more extensive and more varied evidence of the Trystero’s existence—evidence 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” (152). 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 neither 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” (179). 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 world—those were evident from the start—but 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



22



Edward Mendelson



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.7 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’” (12). This sounds at ﬁrst like a suburban cliché, 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?” (25). 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’” (144). 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 Bridge—not 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” (17). 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” (134–135). The strain ﬁnally sends him into paranoia and madness: fantasies of vengeful Israelis, a wish for death. Randolph Driblette, who directs the play in which Oedipa ﬁrst hears the name Trystero, suffers from the nihilistic pride that thinks itself the only possible source of order in the universe. In the play he directs, “‘the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector in the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other oriﬁces also’” (79). (It is from Driblette that Oedipa borrows the metaphor of her notebook-question, “Shall I project a world?”) In directing plays Driblette “felt hardly any responsibility toward the word,



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



23



really; but to ... its spirit, he was always intensely faithful” (152). The logical response to a world where one creates, alone, the only order—where one ignores the data of the word—is nihilistic despair. And the logical culmination of an exclusive devotion to the spirit is the sloughing-off of the ﬂesh: Driblette commits suicide by walking into the sea. John Nefastis, the inventor of a machine which joins the worlds of thermodynamics and information theory (of which more later) through the literal use of a scientific metaphor known as Maxwell’s Demon is “impenetrable, calm, a believer”—in whose presence Oedipa feels “like some sort of heretic.” Nefastis, the book’s fundamentalist, believes his scientiﬁc metaphor is “not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.” His language recalls similar moments in the rest of the book when he refers to the visible operation of his machine as “the secular level” (105–106), and the photograph of the physicist James Clerk Maxwell that adorns the machine is, oddly enough (though the narrator does not remark on the oddity), “the familiar Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge photo” (86). Nefastis’s unbalanced science is endorsed, shakily, by the language of belief. 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 Jésus 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. (120) 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



24



Edward Mendelson



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” (52)—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” (37). 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’” (92). Faced with the choice of ones and zeroes, of meaning or nothingness, she thinks, “this, oh God, was the void” (171). And there are other examples. What would simply be a nagging cliché in another kind of novel becomes here a quiet but insistent echo, a muted but audible signal.



III The Crying of Lot 49 is a book partly about communications and signals— Oedipa’s discovery of the Trystero involves the interpretation of ambiguous signs—and, 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 plot—one minor character appears brieﬂy in both, a Vivaldi concerto for which someone is searching in V. is heard over muzak in Lot 49—but 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



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



25



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.8 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 increases—but 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.... (105) 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 work—thereby 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



26



Edward Mendelson



Demon that Nefastis believes is actually in his machine.9 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” (107). 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” (106). 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].



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



27



“That’s how it is,” [the PPS member] confessed bitterly, “most of the time.” (53) 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.... (174) 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 dread—a sense no less powerful for its comic aspects—while 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” (181). The signs themselves do not prove anything: the streets are “hieroglyphic”—an example of sacred carving—but 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.



28



Edward Mendelson



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” (70). 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 Metzger—a 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” (31). 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,



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



29



rings, scrawled on walls, doodled in notebooks—in 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, Jésus Arrabal talks of a miracle as “another world’s intrusion into this one” (120). 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” (92). 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 worlds—and at the same time the paradoxical place where those two worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible” (25). Oedipa wonders if she could have “found the Trystero ... through any of a hundred lightlyconcealed entranceways, a hundred alienations” (179). Yet in the middle of the ﬁfth chapter of the book the entrance ways, the alienations (“Decorating each alienation ... was somehow always the post horn”—123), 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 (131, to be exact) 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, books—always second-hand. (This distinction is nowhere mentioned in the book, but the clean break after 131 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 subvocally—feeling 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?” (152–153). 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



30



Edward Mendelson



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” (118). Pynchon’s reference to epilepsy recalls its traditional status as a sacred disease. A few pages earlier, Oedipa had encountered another repetition of one of the book’s motifs: the destruction of a cemetery for a freeway. When she hears the cemetery and freeway mentioned again, “She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to.... Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers.” She had been given a glass of wine made from dandelions picked once from the destroyed cemetery. “In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it came to her that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again” (95). The “message” of the epileptic seizure, the sacramental content of the wine, the persistence of mythical time behind the profane world, becomes explicit when she receives the wine once again: He poured her more dandelion wine. “It’s clearer now,” he said.... “A few months ago it got quite cloudy. You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through a fermentation. As if they remembered.” No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine. (98–99) This splendid passage combines almost all the book’s central motifs: the alternate world “where you could somehow walk,” the persistence of the world of the sacred present, the tristesse of the illumination that accompanies the Trystero. The Trystero’s illuminations are conveyed through miracles, sacred versions of what Oedipa thinks of as the “secular miracle of communication” (180). 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,



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



31



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.” (Acts 2) 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. (68) The feast of Pentecost is alternately called Whitsunday, after the tradition that on that day baptismal candidates wear white. The ﬁnal scene of the book—a stamp auction held, surprisingly, on a Sunday—is 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 Easter—forty-nine days. But the word Pentecost derives from the Greek for “ﬁftieth.” The crying—the auctioneer’s calling—of 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” (170–171). 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



32



Edward Mendelson



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.10 (Driblette’s vision of himself as director is a later version of this image.) 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? (20–21) With this gesture towards hopelessness the chapter ends. But to its ﬁnal question, the remainder of the book—with its partial revelation of what the Trystero might stand for—offers a tentative answer.



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



33



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. (177) 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” (179). Her choice now is either to affirm the existence of the Tristero—through which continuity survives, renews, reintegrates itself over vast expanses of space and time—or to be entirely separated, isolated, an “alien ... assumed full circle into some paranoia” (182). San Narciso or America.



IV Like every sophisticated work of ﬁction The Crying of Lot 49 contains within itself guides to its own interpretation. The book offers synthesizing critical methods which are integral with the very material the methods propose to organize. Certainly this is a book that needs a vade mecum: its reader ﬁnds himself continuously in a dilemma analogous to its heroine’s. Both are given a series of clues, signs, interconnecting symbols, acronyms, code words, patterns of theme and variation which never demand to be interpreted, but which always offer themselves as material that is available for synthesis and order. The play-within-the-novel, The Courier’s Tragedy “by Richard Wharﬁnger,” offers in concentrated and often inverted form the main concerns of the novel as a whole. The plot of the play is quite as elaborate as that of any genuine Jacobean tragedy, and any summary here would be almost as long as Pynchon’s account in the novel (q.v.). One or two points,



34



Edward Mendelson



however, call for special attention. As on every occasion when a work of art appears within another, Pynchon offers his readers the possibility that their “attendance” at the novel is analogous to Oedipa’s attendance at the Wharﬁnger play. In the performance that Oedipa attends, and, it later develops, only in that performance, the director, Driblette, alters the text to conform with the version produced by Scurvhamite tampering (as discussed above), the version which actually names the Trystero. (The other editions of the play, all discussed later in the book, omit the name altogether.) The implication of this is that the naming of the Trystero on one particular night may have been directed at Oedipa—that the production was not simply made available to whomever happened to buy a ticket. Underneath this suggestion (and the implications are developed in another passage which I shall discuss shortly) is the implied possibility that the relationship of a reader and a work of art may perhaps not be simply an aesthetic relationship—that the work has, potentially, a purposive effect. In the action of the play itself one event casts special light on the meaning of the Trystero system within the rest of the novel. The eponymous hero of the tragedy, a rightful prince deposed (disinherited, like the founder of the Trystero) and now disguised as a courier at the court of his enemy, is sent by that enemy with a lying message to another court. But this enemy then sends out agents—from the Trystero, in Driblette’s production—after the disguised prince, with orders to murder him. Later, the lying message is found on the dead body, but “it is no longer the lying document ... but now, miraculously, a long confession by [the prince’s enemy] of all his crimes” (74). In an unexplained manner the Trystero has been associated with a miracle: though murderers, they have somehow produced the miraculous transformation of lies into truth. And this transformation, in which a message is miraculously different when sent and when received, is a version of the miracle of Pentecost—which the play has already named. The patterns of the novel are here sketched for the novel’s heroine. But how is she—and by analogy the reader—to construe these patterns? Is Oedipa to interpret the signs she discovers merely as she would interpret a play in performance—or do the signs have a meaning that “mattered to the world”? The performance of The Courier’s Tragedy which she attended may have been directed speciﬁcally at her: her relationship with it was either potential or actual. Pynchon elaborates on these two possibilities in another metaphor derived from theatrical performance, this time strip-tease: So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero. Or rather, her attendance at some unique performance



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



35



... something a little extra for whoever’d stayed this late. As if the breakaway gowns, net bras, jeweled garters and G-strings of historical ﬁguration ... would fall away ... ; as if a plunge toward dawn indeﬁnite black hours long would indeed be necessary before The Tristero could be revealed in its terrible nakedness. Would its smile, then, be coy, and would it ﬂirt away harmlessly backstage ... and leave her in peace? Or would it instead, the dance ended, come back down the runway, its luminous stare locked on to Oedipa’s, smile gone malign and pitiless; bend to her alone among the desolate rows of seats and begin to speak words she never wanted to hear? (54) Pynchon here uses a metaphor from performance to describe the demands that may be made by the Trystero, and the metaphor thus transfers the problem of belief to one of its analogues, the problem of literary meaning. Pynchon joins the problem posed by the novel’s content—the meaning of the Trystero to Oedipa—to the problem posed by the book’s presentation—the meaning of the novel to its reader’s nonliterary experience. What the passage delineates, in a version of the one-zero alternative that pervades the book, are two different concepts of art. In the ﬁrst, according to which art’s function is delectare, a novel is a superior form of entertainment which never intrudes into the world of decision and action, and whose structure and texture aspire to illuminate nothing but themselves (one might think of the later Nabokov or the stories of Borges’s middle period). According to the second concept, art’s purpose is monere, and a novel offers to its reader an example of coherence and order that rebukes the confusion of life and offers an alternative example: “the dance ended,” its meaning taken out of the aesthetic realm, it offers to a reader “words [he] never wanted to hear.” These two extremes suggest a scale along which any work of ﬁction may be placed, a scale that measures the degree to which a work illuminates (at one end of the scale) the nature of the world outside the work, or (at the other end) the nature of the work’s own language and structure. At the latter extreme is that which may be called subjunctive ﬁction, works concerned with events that can occur only in language, with few or no analogues in the phenomenal world. At the other extreme is indicative ﬁction (which includes imperative ﬁction), works that transmit, through no matter how elaborate a transformation, no matter how wide or narrow a focus, information about the emotional and physical world of nonliterary experience, including, but not limited to, the experience of language. Of course all indicative ﬁction has subjunctive elements, or it would be formless and not “ﬁction”; and all



36



Edward Mendelson



subjunctive ﬁction has indicative elements, otherwise it could not be understood at all.11 Read superﬁcially, The Crying of Lot 49 seems to fall near the subjunctive end of the scale. One often ﬁnds the book compared with Nabokov or Borges, and Pynchon’s invention of an alternate “world,” an alternate system of organization revealed through the Trystero, appears to justify these comparisons. If Van Veen can live in Anti-Terra, then Oedipa can ﬁnd a Trystero. But a “subjunctive” reading accounts for too few of the novel’s details and complexities, and is ﬁnally insufficient. Where Nabokov and Borges create a novelistic equivalent to poésie pure, Pynchon strives to remain as impure as possible. His novel insists on its indicative relation to the world of experience; and its proposal of “another mode of meaning behind the obvious” is not a tentative aesthetic proposal, but “words [one] never wanted to hear.” A story by Borges, from which Pynchon may have jumped off into the deeper themes of his novel, offers a subjunctive version of The Crying of Lot 49. Borges’s “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim,” in Ficciones, poses as a review of a novel published in Bombay (and described with the usual Borgesian panoply of sources, analogues and scholarly commentary). The “reviewers” of the novel point out its “detective-story mechanism and its undercurrent of mysticism.” The central ﬁgure of this novel, a student, goes in search of a woman whom he has heard about, vaguely, from a particularly vile thief. In the course of his search the student takes up “with the lowest class of people,” and, among them, “all at once ... he becomes aware of a brief and sudden change in that world of ruthlessness—a certain tenderness, a moment of happiness, a forgiving silence.” The student guesses that this sudden change cannot originate in the people he is among, but must derive from somewhere else: “somewhere on the face of the earth is a man from whom this light has emanated,” someone for whom he now begins to search. “Finally, after many years, the student comes to a corridor ‘at whose end is a door and a cheap beaded curtain, and behind the curtain a shining light.’ The student claps his hands once or twice and asks for al-Mu’tasim [the object of the search]. A man’s voice—the unimaginable voice of al-Mu’tasim—prays him to enter. The student parts the curtain and steps forward. At this point the novel comes to its end.”12 The structural analogies to The Crying of Lot 49 are clear. The hero who sets out in search of one thing, as Oedipa sets out to give order to Inverarity’s legacy; the discovery of something else entirely, as Oedipa begins to be made aware of the Trystero; the revelation of happiness and forgiveness, informed by and originating from a semi-divine object; the “detective-story and [the]



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



37



undercurrent of mysticism”—all these are common to Pynchon’s novel and Borges’s novel-within-a-story. But Pynchon inverts the playful superﬁcialities in Borges to create a pattern of greater intellectual depth and one deeper in emotional resource. In Borges, for example, the student hears his evidence of love and coherence amidst a scene of evil and degradation. In a corresponding episode in Lot 49 Oedipa herself enacts the love and charity that Borges’s hero can only witness. Oedipa’s action occurs when she sees, on the steps of a dilapidated rooming house, an old sailor with a “wrecked face” and “eyes gloried in burst veins,” who asks her to mail a letter bearing a Trystero stamp. After a night in which she has seen scores of signs of the Trystero, she is now ﬂooded by a vision of the old man’s whole experience of suffering, futility and isolation. She pictures to herself the mattress he sleeps on, bearing the “vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overﬂowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost.” She was overcome all at once by a need to touch him.... Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning. (126) Here Oedipa performs an act in which she takes personal responsibility for the patterns of corelation and coinherence which she has found in the world outside. Her embrace of the old sailor is a tangible manifestation of the unlikely relations for which the Tristero is an emblem. Through the Tristero Oedipa has learned to comfort the book’s equivalent of that helpless ﬁgure to whom all successful quest-heroes must give succour. But the Trystero is not simply a vehicle by which unseen relationships are manifested. Its name hides not only the unseen (and, to the secular world, illicit) relationship of the tryst, but also the tristesse that must accompany any sense of coherence and fullness. For if even the smallest event carries large signiﬁcance, then even the smallest loss, the most remote sadness, contains more grief than a secular vision can imagine. When Oedipa helps the old sailor upstairs she imagines the enormous loss that must accompany his death (which she imagines as occurring when a spark from his cigarette will ignite his mattress): She remembered John Nefastis, talking about his