The Crying of Lot 49
Encyclopedia
The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel
by Thomas Pynchon
, first published in 1966. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail
distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis
and the Trystero (or Tristero). The former actually existed, and was the first firm to distribute postal mail; the latter is Pynchon's invention. The novel is often classified as a notable example of postmodern
fiction.
Time
included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
Pierce Inverarity – Oedipa's ex-boyfriend and a wealthy real-estate tycoon. The reader never meets him directly: all encounters are presented through Oedipa's memories. At the beginning of the novel he is already dead and is said to have been extremely rich, having owned, at one time or another, a great deal of real property and holdings in California
.
Wendell "Mucho" Maas – The husband of Oedipa, Mucho once worked in a used-car lot but recently became a disc jockey for KCUF radio in Kinneret, California (a fictional town). Towards the end of the novel, the effects of his nascent LSD
use alienate Oedipa.
Metzger – A lawyer who works for Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus law firm. He has been assigned to help Oedipa execute Pierce's estate. He and Oedipa have an affair.
Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard – The four members of the band called The Paranoids. They serve as a means of satirizing the southern Californian youth hippie culture in the mid 1960s.
Dr. Hilarius – Oedipa's psychiatrist, who prescribes LSD, which she does not take, to Oedipa as well as other housewives. He goes crazy toward the end of the story, admitting to being a former Nazi doctor at Buchenwald
, where he worked in a program focused on experimentally-induced insanity to render Jews permanently catatonic. He claims to use facial expression
s as a weapon, and boasts of a face he made once that drove a subject insane. He holes up in his office, but is taken away peacefully by the police after Oedipa disarms him.
John Nefastis – A scientist obsessed with perpetual motion. He has tried to invent a type of Maxwell's demon
, in an attempt to create a perpetual motion machine. Oedipa visits him to see the machine after learning about him from Stanley Koteks.
Stanley Koteks – An employee of Yoyodyne
Corporation, Oedipa meets him when she wanders into his office while touring the plant. He knows something about the Trystero, but he refuses to say what he knows.
Randolph Driblette – The director of the production of Wharfinger's The Courier's Tragedy seen by Oedipa and Metzger. Driblette is a leading Wharfinger scholar, but he commits suicide before Oedipa can extract any useful information from him about Wharfinger's mention of the Tristero. Oedipa's meeting with Randolph after the play, however, spurs her to go on a quest to find the meaning behind Trystero.
Mike Fallopian – Oedipa and Metzger meet Mike Fallopian in The Scope, a bar frequented by Yoyodyne employees. He tells them about The Peter Pinguid Society. Oedipa searches him out again later.
Genghis Cohen – The most eminent philatelist
in the LA area, Cohen was hired to inventory and appraise the deceased's stamp collection. Oedipa and he discuss stamps and forgeries.
Professor Emory Bortz – Formerly of Berkeley, now teaching at San Narciso, Bortz wrote the editor's preface in a version of Wharfinger's works. Oedipa tracks him down to learn more about Trystero.
Prominent among these references is the "Trystero symbol", a muted post horn
with one loop. Originally derived, supposedly, from the Thurn and Taxis coat of arms
, Oedipa finds this symbol first in a bar bathroom, where it decorates a graffito
advertising a group of polyamorists
. It later appears among an engineer's doodles, as part of a children's sidewalk jump rope
game, amidst Chinese
ideograms in a shop window, and in many other places. The post horn (in either original or Trystero versions) appears on the cover art of many TCL49 editions, as well as within artwork created by the novel's fans.
Oedipa finds herself drawn into this shadowy intrigue when an old boyfriend, the California real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, dies. Inverarity's will names her as his executor. Soon enough, she learns that although Inverarity "once lost two million dollars in his spare time [he] still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary." She leaves her comfortable home in Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, a northern California village, and travels south to the fictional town of San Narciso (Spanish for "Saint Narcissus
"), near Los Angeles
. Exploring puzzling coincidences she uncovers while parsing Inverarity's testament, Oedipa finds what might be evidence for the Trystero's existence. Sinking or ascending ever more deeply into paranoia, she finds herself torn between believing in the Trystero and believing that it is all a hoax established by Inverarity himself. Near the novel's conclusion, she reflects,
Along the way, Oedipa meets a wide range of eccentric characters. Her therapist in Kinneret, a Dr. Hilarius, turns out to have done his internship in Buchenwald, working to induce insanity in captive Jews. "Liberal SS
circles felt it would be more humane," he explains. In San Francisco
, she meets a man who claims membership in the IA, Inamorati Anonymous—a group founded to help people avoid falling in love, "the worst addiction of all". (Ironically, the anonymous inamorato wears a lapel pin shaped as the Trystero post horn, which Oedipa first saw on an advertisement for group sex
.) And, in Berkeley
, she meets John Nefastis, an engineer who believes he has built a working version of Maxwell's demon
, a means for defeating entropy
. The book ends with Oedipa attending an auction, waiting for bidding to begin on a set of a rare postage stamps, which she believes representatives of Tristero are trying to acquire. (Auction items are called "lots"; a lot is "cried" when the auctioneer is taking bids on it; the stamps in question are "Lot 49".)
, Pynchon seems to be making a point about human beings' need for certainty, and their need to invent conspiracy theories
to fill the vacuum in places where there is no certainty. Also, as he had in V., Pynchon laces the book with original song lyrics and outrageously named characters—e.g., Genghis Cohen
, Manny DiPresso. "Mike Fallopian cannot be a real character's name," protests one reviewer.
Critics have read the book as both an "exemplary postmodern
text" and an outright parody
of postmodernism. Pynchon himself disparaged this book, writing in 1984, "As is clear from the up-and-down shape of my learning curve, however, it was too much to expect that I'd keep on for long in this positive or professional direction. The next story I wrote was The Crying of Lot 49, which was marketed as a 'novel,' and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then."
and the "British invasion
" which took place in America and other Western countries. Indeed, internal context clues indicate that it is probably set in 1964, the year in which A Hard Day's Night was released. Pynchon makes a wide variety of Beatles allusions. Most prominent are the Paranoids, a band composed of cheerful marijuana
smokers whose lead singer, Miles, is a high-school dropout. The Paranoids all speak with American accents but sing in English ones; at one point, a guitar player is forced to relinquish control of a car to his girlfriend because he cannot see through his hair. It is not clear whether Pynchon was aware of the Beatles' own nickname for themselves, "Los Para Noias"; since the novel is replete with other references to paranoia, Pynchon may have chosen the band's name for other reasons.
Pynchon refers to a rock song, "I Want to Kiss Your Feet", a self-abasing version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand
". The artist, Sick Dick and the Volkswagens, echoes such actual groups as the El Dorados
, the Edsels
, the Cadillacs
and the Jaguars (as well as an early name the Beatles themselves were forced to use, "Long John and the Silver Beetles"). Sick Dick and the Volkswagens is also a play on words. "Sick Dick" may also echo Richard Wharfinger, author of "that ill, ill Jacobean revenge play" known as The Courier's Tragedy. On top of all this, the song's title also keeps up a recurring sequence of allusions to Saint Narcissus
, a 3rd-century bishop of Jerusalem.
Late in the novel, Oedipa's husband Mucho Maas, a disc jockey at Kinneret radio station KCUF
, describes his experience of discovering the Beatles. Mucho refers to their early song "She Loves You
", as well as hinting at the areas the Beatles were later to explore. Pynchon writes,
, was a student at Cornell University
, where he probably at least audited Vladimir Nabokov
's Literature 312 class. (Nabokov himself had no recollection of him, but Nabokov's wife Véra recalls grading Pynchon's examination papers, thanks only to his handwriting, "half printing, half script".) The year before Pynchon graduated, Nabokov's novel Lolita
was published in the United States; among other things, including the novel's adaptation to cinema in 1961 by Stanley Kubrick
, Lolita introduced the word "nymphet" to describe a sexually attractive girl between the ages of nine and fourteen. In following years, mainstream usage altered the word's meaning somewhat, broadening its applicability. Perhaps appropriately, Pynchon provides an early example of the modern "nymphet" usage entering the literary canon. Serge, the Paranoids' teenage counter-tenor, loses his girlfriend to a middle-aged lawyer. At one point he expresses his angst
in song:
. The painting shows eight women inside a tower, where they are presumably held captive. Six maidens are weaving a tapestry that flows out of the windows. The tapestry seems to constitute the world outside of the tower. Oedipa's reaction to the tapestry gives us some insight into her difficulty in determining what is real and what is a fiction created by Inverarity for her benefit.
revenge play
, involving intrigues between Thurn und Taxis and Tristero. Like "The Mousetrap", based on "The Murder of Gonzago" which Shakespeare
placed within Hamlet
, the events and atmosphere of The Courier's Tragedy (by the fictional Richard Wharfinger) mirror those in the larger story around them.
In many aspects it resembles a typical revenge play, such as The Spanish Tragedy
by Thomas Kyd
, Hamlet
by William Shakespeare
and plays by John Webster
and Cyril Tourneur
.
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, first published in 1966. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail
Mail
Mail, or post, is a system for transporting letters and other tangible objects: written documents, typically enclosed in envelopes, and also small packages are delivered to destinations around the world. Anything sent through the postal system is called mail or post.In principle, a postal service...
distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis
Thurn und Taxis
The Princely House of Thurn and Taxis is a German family that was a key player in the postal services in Europe in the 16th century and is well known as owners of breweries and builders of many castles.- History :...
and the Trystero (or Tristero). The former actually existed, and was the first firm to distribute postal mail; the latter is Pynchon's invention. The novel is often classified as a notable example of postmodern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
fiction.
Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
Characters
Oedipa Maas – The novel's protagonist. After her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, dies and she becomes co-executor of his estate, she discovers and begins to unravel a worldwide conspiracy. Oedipa functions in the novel as a type of detective, trying to find out the meaning behind Trystero in the play The Courier's Tragedy.Pierce Inverarity – Oedipa's ex-boyfriend and a wealthy real-estate tycoon. The reader never meets him directly: all encounters are presented through Oedipa's memories. At the beginning of the novel he is already dead and is said to have been extremely rich, having owned, at one time or another, a great deal of real property and holdings in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
.
Wendell "Mucho" Maas – The husband of Oedipa, Mucho once worked in a used-car lot but recently became a disc jockey for KCUF radio in Kinneret, California (a fictional town). Towards the end of the novel, the effects of his nascent LSD
LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD or LSD-25, also known as lysergide and colloquially as acid, is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family, well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed and open eye visuals, synaesthesia, an...
use alienate Oedipa.
Metzger – A lawyer who works for Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus law firm. He has been assigned to help Oedipa execute Pierce's estate. He and Oedipa have an affair.
Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard – The four members of the band called The Paranoids. They serve as a means of satirizing the southern Californian youth hippie culture in the mid 1960s.
Dr. Hilarius – Oedipa's psychiatrist, who prescribes LSD, which she does not take, to Oedipa as well as other housewives. He goes crazy toward the end of the story, admitting to being a former Nazi doctor at Buchenwald
Buchenwald concentration camp
Buchenwald concentration camp was a German Nazi concentration camp established on the Ettersberg near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937, one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps on German soil.Camp prisoners from all over Europe and Russia—Jews, non-Jewish Poles and Slovenes,...
, where he worked in a program focused on experimentally-induced insanity to render Jews permanently catatonic. He claims to use facial expression
Facial expression
A facial expression one or more motions or positions of the muscles in the skin. These movements convey the emotional state of the individual to observers. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying social information among humans, but also occur...
s as a weapon, and boasts of a face he made once that drove a subject insane. He holes up in his office, but is taken away peacefully by the police after Oedipa disarms him.
John Nefastis – A scientist obsessed with perpetual motion. He has tried to invent a type of Maxwell's demon
Maxwell's demon
In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment created by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell to "show that the Second Law of Thermodynamics has only a statistical certainty." It demonstrates Maxwell's point by hypothetically describing how to...
, in an attempt to create a perpetual motion machine. Oedipa visits him to see the machine after learning about him from Stanley Koteks.
Stanley Koteks – An employee of Yoyodyne
Yoyodyne
__notoc__Yoyodyne is the name of several companies in fiction and real life.Yoyodyne is a fictional defense contractor introduced in Thomas Pynchon's V. and featured prominently in his novel The Crying of Lot 49 . Described in the latter book as "a giant of the aerospace industry", Yoyodyne was...
Corporation, Oedipa meets him when she wanders into his office while touring the plant. He knows something about the Trystero, but he refuses to say what he knows.
Randolph Driblette – The director of the production of Wharfinger's The Courier's Tragedy seen by Oedipa and Metzger. Driblette is a leading Wharfinger scholar, but he commits suicide before Oedipa can extract any useful information from him about Wharfinger's mention of the Tristero. Oedipa's meeting with Randolph after the play, however, spurs her to go on a quest to find the meaning behind Trystero.
Mike Fallopian – Oedipa and Metzger meet Mike Fallopian in The Scope, a bar frequented by Yoyodyne employees. He tells them about The Peter Pinguid Society. Oedipa searches him out again later.
Genghis Cohen – The most eminent philatelist
Philately
Philately is the study of stamps and postal history and other related items. Philately involves more than just stamp collecting, which does not necessarily involve the study of stamps. It is possible to be a philatelist without owning any stamps...
in the LA area, Cohen was hired to inventory and appraise the deceased's stamp collection. Oedipa and he discuss stamps and forgeries.
Professor Emory Bortz – Formerly of Berkeley, now teaching at San Narciso, Bortz wrote the editor's preface in a version of Wharfinger's works. Oedipa tracks him down to learn more about Trystero.
Plot summary
After being defeated by Thurn und Taxis in the 18th century, the Trystero organization goes underground and continues to exist, with its mailboxes in the least suspected places, often appearing under their slogan W.A.S.T.E., an acronym for We Await Silent Tristero's Empire, and also a smart way of hiding their post-boxes disguised as regular waste-bins. In the plot of the novel, the existence and plans of the shadowy organization are revealed bit by bit, or, then again, it is possible that the Tristero does not exist at all. The novel's main character, Oedipa Maas, is buffeted back and forth between believing and not believing in them, without ever finding firm proof either way. The Tristero may be a conspiracy, it may be a practical joke, or it may simply be that Oedipa is hallucinating all the arcane references to the underground network, that she seems to be discovering on bus windows, toilet walls, et cetera.Post horn
The post horn is a valveless cylindrical brass or copper instrument with cupped mouthpiece, used to signal the arrival or departure of a post rider or mail coach...
with one loop. Originally derived, supposedly, from the Thurn and Taxis coat of arms
Coat of arms
A coat of arms is a unique heraldic design on a shield or escutcheon or on a surcoat or tabard used to cover and protect armour and to identify the wearer. Thus the term is often stated as "coat-armour", because it was anciently displayed on the front of a coat of cloth...
, Oedipa finds this symbol first in a bar bathroom, where it decorates a graffito
Graffiti
Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
advertising a group of polyamorists
Polyamory
Polyamory is the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved....
. It later appears among an engineer's doodles, as part of a children's sidewalk jump rope
Jump rope
Jump rope or skipping rope is the primary tool used in the game of skipping played by children and many young adults, where one or more participants jump over a rope swung so that it passes under their feet and over their heads...
game, amidst Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
ideograms in a shop window, and in many other places. The post horn (in either original or Trystero versions) appears on the cover art of many TCL49 editions, as well as within artwork created by the novel's fans.
Oedipa finds herself drawn into this shadowy intrigue when an old boyfriend, the California real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, dies. Inverarity's will names her as his executor. Soon enough, she learns that although Inverarity "once lost two million dollars in his spare time [he] still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary." She leaves her comfortable home in Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, a northern California village, and travels south to the fictional town of San Narciso (Spanish for "Saint Narcissus
Saint Narcissus
Saint Narcissus may refer to:*Narcissus of Athens, apostle*Narcissus, Argeus, and Marcellinus, martyrs*Narcissus of Jerusalem, bishop of Jerusalem*An early bishop of Girona who converted Saint Afra...
"), near Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
. Exploring puzzling coincidences she uncovers while parsing Inverarity's testament, Oedipa finds what might be evidence for the Trystero's existence. Sinking or ascending ever more deeply into paranoia, she finds herself torn between believing in the Trystero and believing that it is all a hoax established by Inverarity himself. Near the novel's conclusion, she reflects,
He might have written the testament only to harass a one-time mistress, so cynically sure of being wiped out he could throw away all hope of anything more. Bitterness could have run that deep in him. She just didn't know. He might himself have discovered The Tristero, and encrypted that in the will, buying into just enough to be sure she'd find it. Or he might even have tried to survive death, as a paranoia; as a pure conspiracy against someone he loved.
Along the way, Oedipa meets a wide range of eccentric characters. Her therapist in Kinneret, a Dr. Hilarius, turns out to have done his internship in Buchenwald, working to induce insanity in captive Jews. "Liberal SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
circles felt it would be more humane," he explains. In San Francisco
San Francisco, California
San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...
, she meets a man who claims membership in the IA, Inamorati Anonymous—a group founded to help people avoid falling in love, "the worst addiction of all". (Ironically, the anonymous inamorato wears a lapel pin shaped as the Trystero post horn, which Oedipa first saw on an advertisement for group sex
Group sex
Group sex is sexual behavior involving more than two participants. Group sex can occur amongst people of all sexual orientations and genders...
.) And, in Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
, she meets John Nefastis, an engineer who believes he has built a working version of Maxwell's demon
Maxwell's demon
In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment created by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell to "show that the Second Law of Thermodynamics has only a statistical certainty." It demonstrates Maxwell's point by hypothetically describing how to...
, a means for defeating entropy
Entropy
Entropy is a thermodynamic property that can be used to determine the energy available for useful work in a thermodynamic process, such as in energy conversion devices, engines, or machines. Such devices can only be driven by convertible energy, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency when...
. The book ends with Oedipa attending an auction, waiting for bidding to begin on a set of a rare postage stamps, which she believes representatives of Tristero are trying to acquire. (Auction items are called "lots"; a lot is "cried" when the auctioneer is taking bids on it; the stamps in question are "Lot 49".)
Critical reception
As in his earlier novel, V.V.
V. is the debut novel of Thomas Pynchon, published in 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveller named...
, Pynchon seems to be making a point about human beings' need for certainty, and their need to invent conspiracy theories
Conspiracy theory
A conspiracy theory explains an event as being the result of an alleged plot by a covert group or organization or, more broadly, the idea that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.-Usage:The term "conspiracy...
to fill the vacuum in places where there is no certainty. Also, as he had in V., Pynchon laces the book with original song lyrics and outrageously named characters—e.g., Genghis Cohen
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan , born Temujin and occasionally known by his temple name Taizu , was the founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death....
, Manny DiPresso. "Mike Fallopian cannot be a real character's name," protests one reviewer.
Critics have read the book as both an "exemplary postmodern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
text" and an outright parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
of postmodernism. Pynchon himself disparaged this book, writing in 1984, "As is clear from the up-and-down shape of my learning curve, however, it was too much to expect that I'd keep on for long in this positive or professional direction. The next story I wrote was The Crying of Lot 49, which was marketed as a 'novel,' and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then."
Allusions within the book
As ever with Pynchon's writing, the labyrinthine plots offer myriad interconnecting cultural references. Understanding these references allows for a much richer reading of the work. J. Kerry Grant wrote A Companion to the Crying of Lot 49 in attempts to catalogue these references, but it is neither definitive nor complete.The Beatles
The Crying of Lot 49 was published shortly after BeatlemaniaBeatlemania
Beatlemania is a term that originated during the 1960s to describe the intense fan frenzy directed toward The Beatles during the early years of their success...
and the "British invasion
British Invasion
The British Invasion is a term used to describe the large number of rock and roll, beat, rock, and pop performers from the United Kingdom who became popular in the United States during the time period from 1964 through 1966.- Background :...
" which took place in America and other Western countries. Indeed, internal context clues indicate that it is probably set in 1964, the year in which A Hard Day's Night was released. Pynchon makes a wide variety of Beatles allusions. Most prominent are the Paranoids, a band composed of cheerful marijuana
Cannabis (drug)
Cannabis, also known as marijuana among many other names, refers to any number of preparations of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug or for medicinal purposes. The English term marijuana comes from the Mexican Spanish word marihuana...
smokers whose lead singer, Miles, is a high-school dropout. The Paranoids all speak with American accents but sing in English ones; at one point, a guitar player is forced to relinquish control of a car to his girlfriend because he cannot see through his hair. It is not clear whether Pynchon was aware of the Beatles' own nickname for themselves, "Los Para Noias"; since the novel is replete with other references to paranoia, Pynchon may have chosen the band's name for other reasons.
Pynchon refers to a rock song, "I Want to Kiss Your Feet", a self-abasing version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand
I Want to Hold Your Hand
"I Want to Hold Your Hand" is a song by the English rock band The Beatles. Written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and recorded in October 1963, it was the first Beatles record to be made using four-track equipment....
". The artist, Sick Dick and the Volkswagens, echoes such actual groups as the El Dorados
The El Dorados
The El Dorados were an American doo-wop group, who achieved their greatest success with the song "At My Front Door", a no. 1 hit on the R&B chart in 1955.-Career:...
, the Edsels
The Edsels
The Edsels were an American doo-wop group active during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The name of the group was originally The Essos, after the oil company, but was changed to match the then-new Ford automobile, the Edsel. The Edsels recorded over 25 songs and had multiple performances on Dick...
, the Cadillacs
The Cadillacs
The Cadillacs were an American rock and roll and doo-wop group from Harlem, New York; active from 1953 to 1962. The group was noted for their 1955 hit "Speedoo", which was instrumental in attracting White audiences to Black rock and roll performers.-History:...
and the Jaguars (as well as an early name the Beatles themselves were forced to use, "Long John and the Silver Beetles"). Sick Dick and the Volkswagens is also a play on words. "Sick Dick" may also echo Richard Wharfinger, author of "that ill, ill Jacobean revenge play" known as The Courier's Tragedy. On top of all this, the song's title also keeps up a recurring sequence of allusions to Saint Narcissus
Narcissus of Jerusalem
Saint Narcissus of Jerusalem was an early patriarch of Jerusalem. He is venerated as a saint by both the Western and Eastern Churches...
, a 3rd-century bishop of Jerusalem.
Late in the novel, Oedipa's husband Mucho Maas, a disc jockey at Kinneret radio station KCUF
Fuck
"Fuck" is an English word that is generally considered obscene which, in its most literal meaning, refers to the act of sexual intercourse. By extension it may be used to negatively characterize anything that can be dismissed, disdained, defiled, or destroyed."Fuck" can be used as a verb, adverb,...
, describes his experience of discovering the Beatles. Mucho refers to their early song "She Loves You
She Loves You
"She Loves You" is a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney based on an idea by McCartney, originally recorded by The Beatles for release as a single in 1963. The single set and surpassed several records in the United Kingdom charts, and set a record in the United States by being one of the...
", as well as hinting at the areas the Beatles were later to explore. Pynchon writes,
- "Whenever I put the headset on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of beer.
- "Baby," she said, helpless, knowing of nothing she could do for this, and afraid for him.
- He put a little clear plastic bottle on the table between them. She stared at the pills in it, and then understood. "That's LSDLSDLysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD or LSD-25, also known as lysergide and colloquially as acid, is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family, well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed and open eye visuals, synaesthesia, an...
?" she said.
Vladimir Nabokov
Pynchon, like Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...
, was a student at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, where he probably at least audited Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
's Literature 312 class. (Nabokov himself had no recollection of him, but Nabokov's wife Véra recalls grading Pynchon's examination papers, thanks only to his handwriting, "half printing, half script".) The year before Pynchon graduated, Nabokov's novel Lolita
Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...
was published in the United States; among other things, including the novel's adaptation to cinema in 1961 by Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
, Lolita introduced the word "nymphet" to describe a sexually attractive girl between the ages of nine and fourteen. In following years, mainstream usage altered the word's meaning somewhat, broadening its applicability. Perhaps appropriately, Pynchon provides an early example of the modern "nymphet" usage entering the literary canon. Serge, the Paranoids' teenage counter-tenor, loses his girlfriend to a middle-aged lawyer. At one point he expresses his angst
Angst
Angst is an English, German, Danish, Norwegian and Dutch word for fear or anxiety . It is used in English to describe an intense feeling of apprehension, anxiety or inner turmoil...
in song:
- What chance has a lonely surfer boy
- For the love of a surfer chick,
- With all these Humbert HumbertLolitaLolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...
cats - Coming on so big and sick?
- For me, my baby was a woman,
- For him she's just another nymphet.
Remedios Varo
Near the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa recalls a trip to an art museum in Mexico with Inverarity during which she encounters a painting: Bordando el Manto Terrestre by Remedios VaroRemedios Varo
Remedios Varo Uranga was a Spanish-Mexican, para-surrealist painter and anarchist. She was born María de los Remedios Varo Uranga in Anglès, Girona, Spain in 1908. During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris where she was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement...
. The painting shows eight women inside a tower, where they are presumably held captive. Six maidens are weaving a tapestry that flows out of the windows. The tapestry seems to constitute the world outside of the tower. Oedipa's reaction to the tapestry gives us some insight into her difficulty in determining what is real and what is a fiction created by Inverarity for her benefit.
- She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together 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.
California Gold Rush
The significance of the number 49 within the novel cannot be placed for sure, but, as the book is preoccupied with the theme of communications, the year 1849 would seem to be a possible reason for the title's choice. In 1849, the second year of the California Gold Rush, vast quantities of telecommunications equipment, including a private mail system, were rolled out to support those rushing to California.The Courier's Tragedy
Pynchon devotes a significant part of the book to a "play within a play", a detailed description of a performance of an imaginary JacobeanJacobean era
The Jacobean era refers to the period in English and Scottish history that coincides with the reign of King James VI of Scotland, who also inherited the crown of England in 1603 as James I...
revenge play
Revenge play
The revenge play or revenge tragedy is a form of tragedy which was extremely popular in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. The best-known of these are Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and William Shakespeare's Hamlet...
, involving intrigues between Thurn und Taxis and Tristero. Like "The Mousetrap", based on "The Murder of Gonzago" which Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
placed within Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
, the events and atmosphere of The Courier's Tragedy (by the fictional Richard Wharfinger) mirror those in the larger story around them.
In many aspects it resembles a typical revenge play, such as The Spanish Tragedy
The Spanish Tragedy
The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is an Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592. Highly popular and influential in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy. Its plot contains several violent...
by Thomas Kyd
Thomas Kyd
Thomas Kyd was an English dramatist, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama....
, Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
by William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
and plays by John Webster
John Webster
John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare.- Biography :Webster's life is obscure, and the dates...
and Cyril Tourneur
Cyril Tourneur
Cyril Tourneur was an English dramatist who enjoyed his greatest success during the reign of King James I of England. His best-known work is The Revenger's Tragedy , a play which has alternatively been attributed to Thomas Middleton.-Life:Cyril Tourneur was possibly the son of Captain Richard...
.