“Shall I project a world?” (64).

Page numbers are taken from this Harper Perennial edition.

Is Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 classic, The Crying of Lot 49, subtly a work of Existentialist fiction? It’s more plausible than you think. In many ways, Oedipa Mass’s search for truth throughout a Tristero-controlled Southern California represents her search for the truth of herself — of her own identity and worldview — in the chaotic cultural atmosphere of the 1960s.

From the get-go, Pynchon explores the idea of wavering identities in TCOL49‘s secondary characters. Oedipa’s late husband, Pierce Inverarity, likes to experiment with voice impressions. Chapter 1’s call from Oedipa’s shrink, Dr. Hilarius, “sound[s] a lot like Pierce doing a Gestapo officer,” calling the identity of the caller into question (Pynchon 7). Her new husband, Mucho Mass, suffers “regular crises of conscience about his profession” as a disc jockey and worked briefly as a car salesman despite being too “thin-skinned” for the job (3-4). Even Metzger, the co-executor of Pierce’s estate, finds himself working as a lawyer after a brief acting career. Oedipa finds him “so good-looking that [she] thought at first They, somebody up there, were putting her on. [He] had to be an actor” (17). Where do these men place their true identities, their self-imposed purposes? The answer is never quite explored, but it may be found when examining Oedipa’s journey throughout the novel.

In Chapter 1, Oedipa recalls a vacation to Mexico with Pierce, during which she marveled at Remedios Varo’s surrealist painting Bordando el Manto Terrestre, or Embroidering the Earth’s Mantel, which depicts six maidens trapped inside a tower, spinning out tapestry to cover the earth’s void with their collective efforts.

Bordando el Manto Terrestre was painted by Remedios Varo in 1961.

Crying, Oedipa realizes that her trip to Mexico with Pierce was an attempt to escape her own entrapment within her tower, although “Pierce had taken her from nothing, there’d been no escape” (11). The text then presents her first venture into her journey of self-enlightenment:

Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, 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. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else? (11-12).

With this, Pynchon presents Oedipa’s desire to escape the world that oppresses her. The tower’s “magic,” then, represents the standards of collective thought that Oedipa is unable to break away from; she isn’t left to see the world through her own eyes — having “no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning” to interpret the magic — but through the eyes of those who decide how and what she sees. Only through her exploration of the Tristero, where perception of its reality is shrouded in mystery, is she able to understand that meaning and purpose is found from within herself. The Tristero is only presented to her, not forced upon her like everything else. It’s up to her to give it meaning, which is where Pynchon enters the territory of Existentialism.

One key instance of this idea comes in Chapter 4 when Oedipa ponders the connection between Pierce’s estate and The Tristero. The text reads: “It was part of her duty, wasn’t it, to bestow life on what had persisted… to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her?” (64). Notice that Pynchon capitalizes “Meaning” here, giving us some insight into his influences — perhaps’ Kierkegaard or Nietzsche’s ideas of finding meaning through individualist thought and perception. Oedipa finds herself hesitant to explore this idea, though, because of her “deep ignorance of law, of investment, of real estate, ultimately of the dead man himself” (64). In other words, her ignorance of “lawful” institutions and the man in her life who was so invested in them; she is, then, ignorant of “law” itself — the outside laws that govern her life. Because of this, she drifts through life with vast uncertainty: the void of Varos’ painting. She is still, as of yet, unable to interpret the things around her with an outside eye, still subject to the worldview imposed upon her by those outside forces of Pierce, Hilarius, Metzger, and ’60s culture itself. However, this passage does suggest her desire to change, to understand things as she believes is the only way to uncover the truth — to develop her own Meaning of the connection between Pierce and the Tristero. Kierkegaard’s idea of subjective truth, anyone?

As the novel progresses, more instances of this individual, subjective thought permeate Oedipa’s journey. In Chapter 5, as she visits the now-hysterical Dr. Hilarius, he remarks to her:

Cherish [fantasy]! What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You cease to be (113).

How should losing fantasy make us cease to be? Because with fantasy, or imaginative interpretation in general, we enter subjective and individual thought. Despite his insanity, Hilarius touches on a main theme of the novel in this scene. His “Freudians” and “pharmacists,” recalls Oedipa’s own psychological and medicinal explorations; Hilarius had her taking psychedelics at the beginning of the novel, which she had since stopped taking. Perhaps this is another nod to Existentialism from Pynchon, in which he claims that the mind-opening power of psychedelic drugs allows an individual to fully experience their own Meaning, their own reality. Since the Tristero conspiracy begins slightly after Oedipa stops taking her own LSD-25, mescaline, and psilocybin, this may be the case. Far out, man. Nevertheless, it seems that Oedipa learns more from this quote than she lets on. She continues her search for the truth, consulting everyone from university professor Emory Bortz to right-wing extremist Mike Fallopian, each seeming to overturn their own slim grasp on the Tristero enigma.

Ultimately, Pynchon shrouds Oedipa’s fate in ambiguity. The mysterious party interested in Pierce’s stamp collection at the end of the novel– which, of course, contains the Tristero’s muted posthorn symbol — is never revealed. The answer to whether Oedipa is imagining this vast conspiracy surrounding her is never revealed either, then. With this, Pynchon forces readers to choose their own ending — does Oedipa get approached by a member of the Tristero at the auction? Does she, perhaps, get killed for the knowledge she uncovered? Or, rather, does she come to understand that the Tristero has nothing to do with her, that him buying the W.A.S.T.E. stamps is only an eccentric stamp collector — that her business in Southern California was nothing more than an abstract distraction from reality, a plot devised by her late husband and enacted by those she believed to be on her side? The text states this most beautifully:

Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only was [sic] she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia (150-151).

Thus, Pynchon invites readers to determine their own Meaning to Oedipa’s story. The answers lie in our own interpretations of the story’s reality or lack thereof — in our own subjective thoughts, à la Kierkegaard. We are, therefore, kindred souls of Oedipa’s. We ourselves are trapped within the novel’s world of dubious identities, subjective realities, and communicative entropy. That’s the beauty of The Crying of Lot 49: Pynchon takes something that’s happening and makes it happen to you, the reader. To find meaning in Oedipa’s story, we must undergo our own self-reflection and uncover our own interpretations. The Tristero’s mystery, then, rests with each of us independently. Like Oedipa, we must give it validity in our own minds, or else it means nothing.