Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Crying of Lot 49, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning
American Modernity and Counterculture
Media, Communication, and Human Relationships
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization
Summary
Analysis
Oedipa Maas returns home slightly inebriated from a Tupperware party and discovers that she is responsible for executing the last will and testament of wealthy real estate investor Pierce Inverarity. Confused, she calls up memories of her past and wonders how Inverarity might have died. Oedipa has received a letter from someone named Metzger at a Los Angeles law firm, who writes that Inverarity died several months before and promises to help Oedipa resolve any disputes that arise regarding the will. After reading the letter, Oedipa goes to the market and then spends the rest of the day making dinner and drinks for her husband, Wendell (who usually goes by his nickname, “Mucho”).
Oedipa Maas opens the novel in the role of an ordinary 1960s California housewife, attending Tupperware parties with other local women, cooking and cleaning, and caring for her husband. But Pynchon’s prose highlights her sense of boredom and alienation: for Oedipa, as for many women, domestic tasks are an empty, isolating routine, not a source of fulfilment. Like the characters’ names, the mysterious letter from Metzger is intentionally ambiguous. Through Oedipa’s sense of blind confusion at receiving it, Pynchon implies that it may not mean anything at all. By extension, he suggests that different elements of The Crying of Lot 49’s plot might not fit together—or need to fit together—at all. Indeed, nothing in the novel’s opening scene seems to have a clear purpose behind it—not least of all Oedipa’s daily routine.
Themes
During the evening news, Oedipa remembers that she got a phone call in the middle of the night the year before. The caller made a bunch of absurd requests in different, exaggerated accents, and Oedipa knew it must be Pierce Inverarity. As Inverarity went on imitating The Shadow, Mucho told Oedipa to hang up. Inverarity warned that The Shadow will visit Mucho, then hung up. Oedipa did not even know where Inverarity was, and that was the last she heard from him.
While Mucho’s jealousy about Inverarity’s call suggests that Oedipa and Inverarity might have been involved in the past, the phone call also deepens the sense of the absurd and the surreal in the novel. The call contains no message—it is an empty act of communication with no content. Inverarity’s performance is totally one-sided: he completely disregards Oedipa, both by not giving her the chance to reply and by waking her up in the middle of the night in the first place. None of the identities Inverarity assumes seem realer than any of the others. Like The Shadow (an invisible detective character from mid-20th-century novels, comic books, and radio shows), Inverarity remains disguised throughout the novel. He leaves a mark on everything that Oedipa touches, and his presence (or absence) constantly haunts her as she looks for some meaning in his legacy and estate.
Themes
Mucho gets home and starts complaining about his day at work. He is a radio DJ on the station KCUF, but he complains just as much as he used to at his old job selling used cars. Back then, he carefully tried to avoid embodying any stereotype about used-car salesmen, and he still gets uncomfortable whenever he sees things that remind him of old cars. He remembers cleaning trash out of the “godawful” cars that his working-class customers traded in. Maybe he would have enjoyed wrecking these cars in a junkyard, but he could not handle watching customer after customer trade one rundown car for another. Five years after leaving the used-car lot, Mucho still constantly complains about working there. Oedipa compares it to how the war haunts men a generation older than him.
Mucho’s one-sided complaining is just as inconsiderate as Inverarity’s one-sided phone call. Judging by how Mucho vents to Oedipa rather than engaging her in conversation, it seems that they are playing the roles of husband and wife as though out of obligation—not because they genuinely want to. And Mucho has the same attitude toward work: it is soul-crushing to waste his life doing something he does not care about. Worst of all, he has to deal with the “godawful” waste of others who also never get any closer to freeing themselves from the obligation of work. The trash in their cars becomes the only record of their lives, and their trade-ins represent the same sense of pointless, unnecessary, but obligatory stagnation that Mucho also feels, and that defines life under American capitalism in the novel.
Themes
Mucho complains to Oedipa that his boss, Funch, wants him to be less “horny” on the radio, especially when he talks to young women who call to request a song. Mucho announces that this is “censorship,” but he and Funch get into arguments like this all the time. Changing the subject, Oedipa shows Mucho the letter she received. Mucho, who was always jealous of Oedipa’s relationship with Pierce Inverarity, tells Oedipa that he cannot help and that she should check with their lawyer, Roseman.
Mucho seems comically blind to Funch’s point: his predatory “horny” attitude is making women uncomfortable. Ironically, at the same time as he is hitting on other women, he is also overly possessive towards Oedipa, though he proves completely useless when she actually needs his advice. Mucho seems to care about living up to contradictory imaginary standards of masculinity—both promiscuity with and ownership over women—but he does not actually care about women themselves. At work, Mucho is oversensitive to others stepping on his autonomy precisely because he has so little of it: he conflates a reasonable request with “censorship” because the way he talks on the radio is basically the only real freedom he has in his otherwise unfulfilling life.
Themes
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Oedipa goes to visit Roseman the next morning, but first she spends half an hour doing her eye makeup. She is trying to disguise her exhaustion: she did not get any sleep because the phone rang again in the middle of the night, just like it did when Inverarity called her the year before. This time, it’s her therapist, Dr. Hilarius. He asks about Oedipa’s pills, but she explains that she is not taking them because she doesn’t know what they are. Hilarius is running an experiment on how local housewives respond to psychedelic drugs, but Oedipa refuses to participate.
Pynchon tempts the reader to search for symbolic links between Hilarius’s late-night call and Inverarity’s, but it is unclear what they actually have in common besides bothering Oedipa. For one, Hilarius gets straight to the point, whereas Inverarity had nothing to say at all. Hilarius’s ethically questionable experiment is a parody of 1960s counterculture: psychedelic drugs were all the rage, including among prominent researchers like psychologist Timothy Leary. But Hilarius is such an exaggerated, absurd figure that he allows Pynchon to critique this movement in the same way as he critiques mainstream culture. For example, he is so coercive and indifferent to Oedipa’s needs and autonomy that he does not appear to be a trustworthy authority on anything.
Themes
Hilarius tells Oedipa that “we want you,” which reminds her of the famous posters on which Uncle Sam says, “I want you,” for the army. Hilarius says that he feels like Oedipa was somehow calling for him, but Oedipa hangs up on him. Unable to sleep, Oedipa tells herself that she will never take Hilarius’s pills. She still visits him for therapy just because it would be complicated to stop. He likes to make faces, which he thinks can have a therapeutic effect. She remembers his “Fu-Manchu” face, in which he sticks out his tongue and stretches out his eyes, mouth, and nose.
The similarity between Dr. Hilarius’s “we want you” and Uncle Sam’s “I want you” clearly establishes a link between the insanity of Hilarius’s experiment and the insanity of American foreign policy—specifically, the Vietnam War, which was just starting in 1964 (The Crying of Lot 49 is set around this time). Hilarius’s performance of a “Fu-Manchu” facial expression also solidifies this connection, as Fu-Manchu was a fictional character who perpetuated racist stereotypes about Asian people (like those that many Americans espoused toward Vietnamese people during the war). Through this parallel, Pynchon suggests that both Hilarius and the U.S. government’s recruitment efforts deceive people into sacrificing themselves for someone else’s benefit by falsely promising that this sacrifice will give meaning to their lives. Like her relationship with Mucho, Oedipa’s therapy with Hilarius is more the product of obligation and inertia than of genuine desire. She does not think his treatments might actually work—even Hilarius’s own name points out that his practices cannot be taken seriously.
Themes
Like Oedipa, Roseman was awake all night: he was ruminating about Perry Mason, the TV lawyer whom he both admires and resents. When Oedipa walks into Roseman’s office, she catches him stuffing a bunch of papers—a draft of fictional charges against Perry Mason—into his desk. She awkwardly comments that Roseman looks less guilty than usual. (They first met in therapy.) Over lunch, Roseman clumsily hits on Oedipa while they discuss the will, and afterwards he explains all the work that goes into executing a will, from learning about Inverarity’s business and inventorying his estate to dealing with his taxes. Roseman says that he can help with the work, but it might be interesting for Oedipa.
Roseman’s obsession with Perry Mason suggests that his own identity now depends upon his relationship to the mass media. He feels inadequate because he cannot live up to a fictional character, but this shows that he is losing track of the boundaries between fiction and reality. In fact, his gutless sexual advances seem more like failed attempts to play a role than genuine interest in Oedipa: even though Oedipa is right in front of him, he is treating her as an element of his own fantasy rather than as an actual person.
Themes
Oedipa contemplates inventorying the estate herself. She feels slightly buffered from the world, like watching an out-of-focus movie. In fact, she feels trapped in her boring life in the suburb of Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, like Rapunzel in her tower. She briefly tasted excitement with Pierce Inverarity, like when they went to Mexico, where they visited an art exhibit by the Spanish painter Remedios Varo. Varo’s painting “Bordando el Manto Terrestre” (or “Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle”) depicted women in a tower embroidering a tapestry that contains the whole world. Looking at this painting, Oedipa started crying into her sunglasses because she realized that she never truly could escape her proverbial tower. Wherever she goes, some “formless magic” is holding her captive, and she is not sure what she can do to understand or escape it.
The blurry movie and Rapunzel’s tower are Oedipa’s metaphors for her own sense of alienation, purposelessness, and indifference. She feels disconnected from the world because she has no sense of direction in it—no meaningful relationships or interests. This certainly has to do with being a middle-class woman in a society that gives her no options besides becoming a housewife and mother. But the stultifying “formless magic” also has to do with other social processes that are so all-encompassing as to seem indistinct. Namely, after World War II, American life became organized around cars, suburban neighborhoods, and consumer goods—all of which suddenly made society seem far more homogeneous than ever before. Treated as interchangeable workers and consumers, Americans like Oedipa began losing their sense of individuality and their feeling that they could somehow leave an impact on the world. Curiously, the juxtaposition between the story of Rapunzel trapped in her tower and Remedios Varo’s painting (in which women trapped in a tower are actually creating the world) suggests that Oedipa might have more power than she realizes.
Themes
