May 1, 1966

Embattled Underground
By RICHARD POIRIER

The Crying of Lot 49 By Thomas Pynchon

homas Pynchon's second novel, "The Crying of Lot 49," reads like
an episode withheld from his first, the much-acclaimed "V.,"
published three years ago. Pynchon's technical virtuosity, his
adaptations of the apocalyptic-satiric modes of Melville, Conrad, and
Joyce, of Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Nabokov, the saturnalian
inventiveness he shares with contemporaries like John Barth and
Joseph Heller, his security with philosophical and psychological
concepts, his anthropological intimacy with the off-beat--these
evidences of extraordinary talent in the first novel continue to display
themselves in the second. And the uses to which he puts them are
very much the same.

The first novel, "V." was a designed indictment of its own comic
elaborateness. The various quests for "V." all of them substitutes for
the pursuit of love, are interwoven fantastically, and the coherence
thus achieved is willfully fabricated and factitious. Pynchon's
intricacies are meant to testify to the waste--a key word in "The
Crying of Lot 49"--of imagination that first creates and is then
enslaved by its own plottings, its machines, the products of its
technology.

Except for the heroin of "V.," Rachel Owlglass (she who can see
wisely without being a voyeur), and the heroine of this novel, Oedipa
Maas--lovable, hapless, decent, eager girls--both novels are
populated by self-mystified people running from the responsibilities
of love and compelled by phantoms, puzzles, the power of Things.
No plot, political, novelistic, or personal, can issue from the
circumstances of love, from the simple human needs, say, of a Rachel
or an Oedipa, and Pynchon implicitly mocks this situation by the
Byzantine complications of plots which do evolve from
circumstances devoid of love.
Gestures of warmth are the more touching in his novels for being
terrifyingly intermittent, shy, and worried. The coda of the first novel,
enunciated by the jazz player, McClintic Sphere, also serves the
second: "Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass
or publicizing it; keep cool but care." This is the stoical resolve of an
embattled underground in a world increasingly governed by
Ionesco's rhinoceri, to mention a vision markedly similar to
Pynchon's. Efforts at human communication are lost among
Pynchon's characters, nearly all of whom are obsessed with the
presumed cryptography in the chance juxtaposition of Things, in the
music and idiom of bars like the V-Note or The Scope, or merely in
the "vast sprawl of houses" that Oedipa sees outside Los Angeles,
reminding her of the printed circuit of a transistor radio, with its
"intent to communicate."

Even the title of "V." was cryptographic. It was available to all

interpretations and answerable to none. Though "V." probably did
not have Vietnam as one of its meanings in 1963, the novel so
hauntingly evokes the preconditions of international disaster that
Vietnam belongs in the long list of other V's. Roughly half the novel
is an international melodrama of spying in the years since the
Fashoda incident of 1898. It shows how international, like personal,
complications accumulate from an interplay of fantasies constructed
by opposing sides, each sustaining the other's dream of omnipotence,
each justifying its excesses by evoking the cleverness of its
opposition, each creating that opposition and, in some mysterious
and crazy way, the moves and the successes of the other side as a
provocation of its own further actions.

"Plots" are an expression in Pynchon of the mad belief that some

plot can ultimately take over the world, can ultimately control life to
the point where it is manageably inanimate. And the ascription of
"plots" to an opposition is a way of explaining why one's own have
not achieved this ultimate control. Nearly from the outset, the people
of Pynchon's novels are the instruments of the "plots" they help
create.

Their consequent dehumanization makes the prospect of an

apocalypse and the destruction of self not a horror so much as the
finally ecstasy of power. In international relations the ecstasy is war;
in human relationships it can be sado-masochism, where skin itself is
leather, leather a substitute for skin. The process is a party of daily
news, and no other novelist predicts and records it with Pynchon's
imaginative and stylist grasp of contemporary materials.

In "V." private life (the story of Benny Profane, his girl Rachel, and
the Whole Sick Crew) and international politics (involving the
various European and African manifestations of "V." from the 1890's
to 1939) are related only metaphorically. The characters in one plot
take no direct part in the other. Of much shorter length and narrower
focus, "The Crying of Lot 49" is located between Berkeley and Los
Angeles, and its events, historical as well as private, are filtered
through the career of one person, Oedipa Maas. Oedipa is introduced
as a good suburban housewife in Kinneret-Among-The-Pines,
making "the twilight's whiskey sours" against the arrival of her
husband Wendell ("Mucho") Maas.

At the outset her troubles are all manageable within the terms of
ordinary daily living. She has a not always potent husband who
suffers crises of conscience about his professions--formerly a used
car salesman, he is now a disk jockey--and about his teen-age tastes
and his taste for teen- agers. Also, she has a neurotic psychiatrist
named Hilarius, who wants her to take LSD as an experiment, and a
former lover, the tycoon Pierce Inverarity, who would sometimes call
her, before his recent death, at one in the morning, using Slavic,
comic Negro, or hostile Pachuco dialects.

As the novel opens, Oedipa learns, on her return from a party whose
"hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue," that she is
an executor, along with a man named Metzger, formerly the child
movie star known as Baby Igor, of Inverarity's will. The will was
discovered some months after his death, a period during which it was
perhaps tampered with in order to hide from Oedipa the revelations
which his network of holdings, her "inheritance," seem to
communicate: an America coded in Inverarity's testament. Before the
novel closes, Oedipa loses her husband to LSD, her psychiatrist to
madness, her one extra-marital lover, Metzger, to a depraved 15-
year-old, and her one guide through the mazes of her inheritance, a
Ralph Driblette, to suicide. In the final scene, accompanied by the
famed philatelist, Genghis Cohen, she enters the "crying of Lot 49,
a collection of Inverarity's stamps.

The "crying of Lot 49" refers to an auction, but the phrase evokes the
recurrent suspicion on Oedipa's part that there is "revelation in
progress all around her," that the stamps, "thousands of little colored
windows into deep vistas of space and time," are themselves "crying"
a message-- not above Pierce Inverarity necessarily, or even about
Oedipa, but about "their Republic," about America, its inheritances
and what we inherit from it, including things like used lots of stamps
and used car lots. The "stamps" were often Inverarity's substitute for
Oedipa, just as Mucho sought communication less with her than
with his used cars or in the dancing of his teen-agers.

Oedipa's fascination with the possibilities of "revelation," in

inanimate things, and the curious patterns of connection among
them, is induced, at least in party, by the fact that "things" have
stolen from her the attention and love of both men. It is therefore
possible that Inverarity became connected with the famous Tristero
System, the central cryptograph of this novel as "V" was of the first,
out of the impulse not to communicate with her, or to communicate
with her only under cover of various disguises. It is also possible that
the System, participation in which allows a "calculated withdrawal
from the life of the Republic, from its machinery," from its forms of
public communication, is an elaborate hoax, a teaser arranged by
Inverarity to tantalize her away from home, love, and the open
community, to seduce her into such subsidiary organizations as the
"Inamorati Anonymous," an outfit she encounters in a queer bar in
San Francisco.

Alternatively, the hints about a Tristero System could have been

planted in the will by interests anxious to prevent Oedipa from
discovering the whole network of Inverarity's holdings, including
those in Yoyodyne, an electronics and missile corporation, one
executive of which, retired by automation, founded the Inamorati
Anonymous. (Yo-yoing in "V." was the pointless, repetitive passage
and return on any convenient ferry or subway, usually the Times
Square-Grand Central run, for Benny Profane and his friends, and it
is characteristic of Pynchon's metaphoric translations of personal into
international idiosyncrasies that yo-yoing can also describe the
horror of nuclear exchange.)
Finally, Tristero may only be Oedipa's fantasy, an expression of her
need to believe that there must be something to explain the drift of
everyone she knows toward inhumanity. Otherwise she is either a
paranoid or America is Tristero and she an alien.

Between the opening scenes of domesticity and the closing scenes of

the "crying" of Lot 49, Oedipa is like the hero in a book of "The
Faerie Queene," tempted from her human virtues while on a quest
that takes her through all manner of seemingly prearranged
weirdness and monstrosity, all kinds of foreign "systems" thriving
within an America which is itself "a grand and so intricate enigma."
Only the Tristero, imagined as an intricate network of underground
organizations, can encapsulate what she would otherwise have to see
as the drift of the Republic itself toward "the glamorous prospect of
annihilation."

This novel is a patriotic lamentation, an elaborate effort not to believe

the worst about the Republic. Patriotism for an ideal of America
explains the otherwise yawning gap in Pynchon's comic shaping of
his material. The Tristero System--it began in 1577 in Holland in
opposition to the Thurn and Taxis Postal System and is active now in
America trying to subvert the American postal system through an
organization called W.A.S.T.E.--is a masterpiece of comic invention.
It involves, among other things, one of the best parodies ever written
of Jacobean drama, "The Courier's Tragedy," and a perhaps final
parody of California right-wing organizations, Peter Pequid Society,
named for the commanding officer of the Confederate man-of-war
"Disgruntled" and opposed to industrial capitalism on the grounds
that it has led inevitably to Marxism. Its leader, Mike Fallopian,
speculates in California real estate.

The exuberance of such comedy softens the portents of national

calamity, but at the same time it makes it nearly impossible for
Pynchon to persuade the reader, as he anxiously wants to do, that the
whole System and the whole book have more meaning than a
practical joke. The same difficulty was apparent in "V.", where the
author's style at points of sincerity about love and youth was, by
contrast to the vitality of his comic writing, platitudinously limp and
sloganeering.
In this second novel, the difficulty is if anything more acute. Pynchon
chooses to have all the significance pass through the experience of
only one comically named character, Oedipa Maas, as if he had
chosen to have all of "V." assembled and assimilated by Benny
Profane or by Rachel Owlglass. In "V." a structure of metaphor and
cross-reference existed beyond the inquiry of many of the characters.
The result was a dimension secured from comedy and within which
the comedy could function as a form of what might be called local
ignorance of the issues on which it was commenting. In "The Crying
of Lot 49," however, the role given Oedipa makes it impossible to
divorce from her limitations the large rhetoric about America at the
end of the novel. This is unfortunately simply because Oedipa has
not been given character enough to bear the weight of this rhetoric:

"If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other
town, any other estate, then by that continuity she 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. She stopped a minute between the steel rails, raised her head
as if to sniff the air. She became conscious of the hard, strung
presence she stood on--knew as if maps had been flashed on her on
the sky how these tracks ran on into others, and others, and others,
knew they laced, deepened, authenticated the great American night,
so wide and now so suddenly intense for her."

What I think is happening at the end is that Pynchon desperately

needs to magnify the consciousness of his heroine, if he is to validate
her encounter with The Tristero System. Only by doing so can he
maintain the possibility that the System is distinguishable from the
mystery and enigma of America itself. To say that no distinction
exists would be to sacrifice the very rationale of his comic reportage:
that he is reporting not evidence about American so much as pockets
of eccentricity in it, fragments dangerously close to forming a design
but fragments nonetheless. Pynchon is reluctant to make all his
people submit to the pervasive grotesqueness of American life,
though he comes close to that, and he therefore exalts a character
altogether too small for the large job given Oedipa at the end.

In fact, Pynchon's best writing is often in his descriptions of

American scenery, of objects rather than persons. He shows at such
points a tenderness, largely missing from our literature since Dreiser,
for the very physical waste of our yearnings, for the anonymous
scrap heap of Things wherein our lives are finally joined. The
Pynchon who can write with dashing metaphoric skill about the way
humans have become Things, can also reveal a beautiful and
heartbreaking reverence for the human penetration of the Thingness
of this country, the signatures we make on the grossest evidences of
our existence. Indeed we do leave codes and messages, seen by the
likes of Mucho even in used cars:

"Yet at least he had believed in the cars, maybe to excess: how could
he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican,
cracker, a parade seven days a week, bring with them the most
godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of
their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so
naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame
cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off
enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling
hopeless of children, of supermarket booze, or two, sometimes three
generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust--and when the cars
were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives,
and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused
(when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to
be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been
lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10, trading stamps,
pink flyers advertising specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs,
help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old
underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping
your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see
whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who
might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated
uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash,
condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes--it nauseated him to look, but
he had to look."

Within this description is a haunting sequence of imagined human

situations, typical and pathetic ones, fused with the particularized
power that shows Pynchon's own obsession with the encoded
messages of the American landscape. What is also noticeable here,
and throughout the novel, is that the major character is really
Pynchon himself, Pynchon's voice with its capacity to move from the
elegy to the epic catalogue. The narrator sounds like a survivor
looking through the massed wreckage of his civilization, "a salad of
despair." That image, to suggest but one of the puns in the word
Tristero, is typically full of sadness, terror, love, and flamboyance.
But then, how else should one imagine a tryst with America? And
that is what this novel is.