Ronald Flores

Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel “The Crying of Lot 49” can be read as a reflection of the failures of the communication process. A message muted, differed, changed or lost between its sender and its receiver, or by the inability of the receiver to decode it.

Various symbols of this failure can be observed throughout the novel, beginning from the main character’s name: Oedipa, as an extension or play of the man that was able to decipher the Sphinx’s riddle, which might parallel the solution of the enigma (man’s entropy) to America’s culture.

The Tristero “message-carrying” system, which carries the narrative, can be seen in this light, since as Hilfer points out, “is seeking to undermine official systems of communication”. The muted horn. The similarity between the order of houses in Suburbia and a radio’s circuit card, convey a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning.In a way, all readers duplicate Oedipa’s quest as she tries to execute Pierce Inverarity’s will (which is…?, one is left to wander). As Hilfer notes: “The basic question of this text, foregrounded as a text by such devices as the antirealistic character names, is whether its protagonist can correctly interpret the text which she confronts, that is, a fictional world made up of what looks like signs but may not be (148)”.

It does not take long for the reader to share Oedipa’s concern, since he is expecting it to be: “…it’s all a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot (31)”. But, like a postmodern work, the plot in The Crying of Lot 49 is self-referred, since it involves the plot of language.

The Russian Formalist conceived literature as an especial “organization” of language. According to Barthes, Semiology’s aim is to take “any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least a system of signification (9)”.

Therefore, literature can be considered a system, some sort of structural conspiracy against individual. Barthes defines language (langue) as such: “it is because a language is a system of contractual values (in part arbitrary, or, more exactly, unmotivated) that it resists the modifications coming from a single individual, and is consequently a social institution (14)”.

Hilfer has noted that the Oedipa’s role and the role of the reader are similar. They both suffer some kind of paranoia: “Hertzberg and McClelland note in an essay on paranoia that ‘The Crying of Lot 49…is a story whose plot is a plot –a fiction with the structure of a paranoid delusion’. The normal way of reading any complex text is to infer links between the signs of the text even when they are not self-evident as in, Jonathan Culler argues, taking contiguity to imply relationship. The reader, in effect, creates textual pattern and meaning (148)”.

A reader takes it for granted that a story, any story, conveys meaning. His search, as the Argentinean writer Ricardo Piglia has pointed out, is that of an epiphany. As long as there is a sign transmitted, a receiver will attempt to decode the meaning of the message being transmitted. The basic presumption in human communication is that: the message conveys a meaning (even when its meaning is that there is no meaning), we are to decode.

Culture is a codification as well. According to Eco: “all the aspects of a culture can be studied as elements of communication”. Reader and writer alike are surrounded by signs and symbols, conveying all kind of different meaning, of different layers of meaning. There is the constant simile of Nature and book, that writers so often use. At any sign, even one found in a bathroom stall, one could think: “God, hieroglyphics (52)” as Oedipa sighs at the horn the first time she sees it.

In that sense, The Crying of Lot 49 is very similar to Borges’ short story The God’s Script, which tells about Tzinacan, the last Qaholom magician, and his attempt to find and decipher the magical sentence –the one with the ability to ward off the powers of devastation and ruin- God wrote on the first day of creation. Since the magician is imprisoned, he can but recall the days when he was free:

“Throughout the earth there are ancient forms, forms incorruptible and eternal; any one of them could be the symbol I sought. A mountain could be the speech of the god, or a river or the empire or the configuration of the stars. But in the process of the centuries the mountain is levelled and the river will change its course, empires experience mutation and havoc and the configuration of the stars varies.

There is change in the firmament. The mountains and the stars are individuals and individuals perish. I sought something more tenacious, more invulnerable. I thought of the generations of cereals, of grasses, of birds, of men. Perhaps the magic would be written on my face, perhaps I myself was the end of my search… (170)”

Unlike Borges’ The God’s Script, there is no conclusive end to Oedipa’s quest in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. For Hilfer, the very title is a hint of a revelation denied: “On one level, The Crying of Lot 49 is an auctioneer’s calling of the lot number of a collection of stamps which Oedipa believes may provide a crucial clue to Tristero.

But as Mendelson explicates: ‘the word Pentecost derives from the Greek for the “fiftieth”. The crying –the auctioneers calling – of the forty ninth lot is the moment before a Pentecost revelation, the end of the period in which the miracle is in a state of potential, not yet manifest’. Pynchon not only withholds his revelation but implies that it might encode an epiphany of nothingness (151)”.

Pynchon teases his reader all along the narrative. Hints of possible plots appear and banish, leaving the reader uncertain if what he has read will “mean” something later on, if the writer will “tie it all up, bring it all down”, making “sense” of it all in the end. In The Crying of Lot 49, though, the reader is left in the discomforting uncertainty of not knowing “what it all really meant”. And yet, for Borges, that is precisely the aesthetic phenomenon.

In his prose essay, The wall and the Books, Borges writes: “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should have not missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon (188)”.

It is the aesthetic phenomenon what one finds all throughout Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.

Works cited
Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Direction
Books, 1964.
Hilfer, Tony. American Fiction Since 1940. New York: Longman Publishing, 1992.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

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