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 leaves Mucho in Kinneret-Among-The-Pines and goes to meet Metzger in Pierce Inverarity’s hometown San Narciso, which is an average suburb of Los Angeles. As soon as Oedipa arrives, she pauses and looks out through the smog at the city’s endless sprawl, which reminds her of a circuit board: she knows it fits together but does not understand how. It’s like someone is saying something, but she cannot hear the message. She wonders if Mucho feels the same way at the radio station, having lost his faith in his job.
The city of San Narciso visually represents the alienating homogeneity of post-World War II American life: every street, house, and lifestyle look essentially the same. Its smog both literally and figuratively represents Oedipa’s feeling of being buffered off from the world. And because this smog is the direct result of cars—the ultimate symbol of American consumerism—it becomes clear that Oedipa’s sense of alienation is a response to the culture of mainstream, white, middle-class America in the 1960s. Because everything is identical, nobody has the autonomy to truly define their own life: everyone is merely playing out a role that the society has chosen for them. Oedipa’s search for some hidden code in the city’s metaphorical circuit board represents her attempt to somehow find meaning in the homogeneity.
Themes
Oedipa drives off, past an endless stream of unassuming beige industrial buildings. She also passes the huge missiles standing outside the Yoyodyne company’s huge Galactronics Divisions factory, which she remembers that Inverarity invested in. Disillusioned by the city’s ugliness, Oedipa pulls into a motel called Echo Courts, which has a giant sculpture of a nymph outside. Oedipa realizes that she looks like the nymph, who holds a flower while a huge fan blows her clothing out of the way to expose her breasts and thighs.
The names San Narciso and Echo Courts are a clear play on the Ancient Roman myth of Narcissus and Echo. In this story, the beautiful hunter Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection, scorning the mountain nymph Echo, who faded away into a literal echo. Of course, San Narciso (“Saint Narcissus” in Spanish) happens to be ugly instead of beautiful, and Oedipa is clearly associated with Echo, which raises the danger that she might become an empty reflection of the ugly city (or the sexually objectified nymph sculpture). Indeed, the Narcissus and Echo myth reflects how the novel’s self-obsessed male characters mistreat Oedipa. But the story also serves as a broader metaphor for what Pynchon sees as a broader social tendency toward self-interest, obsession with appearances, and disdain for others.
Themes
Although Oedipa’s room has a view of the swimming pool, the motel is eerily silent. Miles, the teenage motel manager, sings in a British accent while he carries Oedipa’s bags and tells her that he’s in a band called the Paranoids. Oedipa offers to show Miles’s music to Mucho. Miles assumes that she is asking for a sexual favor in return, but he ends up demanding a tip and going back downstairs.
Miles and his band are an obvious parody of the Beatles, another landmark of 1960s American culture. But his band is so glaringly unoriginal that it is really a cheap copy of the mainstream culture—the Paranoids dress, sing, and act exactly like the Beatles. In fact, the Beatles quickly went from counterculture to being absorbed into the mainstream culture, which suggests that it may not be possible to fight the mainstream without becoming absorbed into it.
Themes
Metzger surprises Oedipa at Echo Courts the same night. He is so attractive that Oedipa wonders if he is an actor playing a trick on her. Over a bottle of wine on the motel room floor, Metzger explains that his mother actually forced him to act in in movies as a child, under the name “Baby Igor.” He implies that this was emasculating and that he might be gay.
The lawyer Metzger, unlike his counterpart, Roseman, is good enough to be on TV. If Oedipa is the nymph from the Echo Courts sign, then Metzger seems to be Echo’s counterpart, Narcissus. At the same time, his attractiveness and past as an actor are bound up with obvious insecurities which suggest that he is emotionally out-of-touch.
Themes
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Oedipa turns on the television, which shows a dog licking an androgynous-looking child: it is Metzger, acting as Baby Igor in an absurd movie called Cashiered. The film is about a man, son, and dog who take it upon themselves to build a submarine and fight in World War I. Baby Igor breaks out into song, and Metzger sings along. Oedipa wonders if all of this is an elaborate joke or conspiracy. Then, a commercial about Fangoso Lagoons comes on: it’s a housing development full of canals and lakes that Inverarity built specifically for scuba-divers.
The reader might share Oedipa’s suspicion that the world could be playing a practical joke on her. It is hard to tell which is most absurd: the coincidence that Metzger’s movie happens to be on, the plot of that movie, or the Fangoso Lagoons project that Inverarity has built. (Fangoso means “muddy,” and the project is so over-the-top that it seems gaudy, cheap, and unsophisticated.) The sense of living through a joke or conspiracy points to people’s tendency to seek meaning in coincidences, even when they rationally know that these coincidences mean nothing at all. In a novel, however, readers usually do expect coincidences to mean something—and yet, by sticking so many of them together, Pynchon taunts his readers and challenges them to make sense of the book without starting to feel ridiculous or paranoid themselves.
Themes
Metzger pulls out a bottle of tequila and tells Oedipa that being a lawyer and being an actor are really similar. Manny Di Presso, a former lawyer who became an actor, is even playing Metzger on a television pilot. Metzger asks Oedipa to guess the ending to Cashiered. They’re interrupted by a commercial for Beaconsfield bone charcoal cigarettes, which used a filter technology owned by Inverarity. Then, Oedipa remarks that the movie should have a happy ending, so she will bet the opposite: that the protagonists will die. Metzger pressures her into agreeing that the winner of the bet will get anything they want from the other person. He kisses Oedipa’s hand, which reminds her of when she first had sex with Inverarity.
With lawyer-turned-actor Di Presso playing actor-turned-lawyer Metzger on television, reality and fiction again become comically intertwined, to the point that reality is just appearances and appearances are just reality. Similarly, between the alcohol and the movie, Oedipa and Metzger manage to pass the night together without really getting to know each other at all. Not only is their relationship blatantly superficial, but they both seem to recognize and accept this fact. Paradoxically, this recognition shows that they are not actually superficial as individuals—rather, they are simply choosing to have a superficial relationship rather than putting in any serious effort. Indeed, Metzger pesters and pressures Oedipa in a way that makes it clear that he does not really care about her, except to the extent that he can manipulate her for his own purposes.
Themes
The next scene of Cashiered shows the father character alone, and Metzger objects that the movie is out of order. Oedipa asks where this current scene belongs, but Metzger refuses to answer her questions unless she agrees to take off one article of clothing per question. She agrees, runs to the bathroom, and puts on all of the clothing she brought with her, which makes her look completely ridiculous. When she sees herself in the mirror, she breaks out laughing so hard that she falls to the floor and knocks over a hairspray aerosol can, which starts fly around the bathroom as it depressurizes. Metzger comes inside and hides on the floor with Oedipa. While the can shatters the mirror and the glass shower wall, a massacre scene plays on the television in the bedroom, and Oedipa bites Metzger’s arm.
The jumbled movie presents Oedipa with an interpretive challenge that is not unlike the difficulty that The Crying of Lot 49 presents to its readers. Unsurprisingly, Metzger takes advantage of this opportunity to make sexual advances, and Oedipa puts on all her clothing in order to show Metzger that she fully understands what he is doing and is capable of manipulating him back. Laughing at her figure in the mirror, Oedipa has a classic moment of self-awareness: wearing so many layers of clothing, she proves unrecognizable to herself. This is a total inversion of the Narcissus myth, in which Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection. Of course, the can of hairspray then shatters the bathroom mirror, depriving Oedipa of her reflection altogether.
Themes
The hairspray can runs out of air and falls to the ground. Suddenly, Miles is at the door, accompanied by three guys who look exactly like him and a handful of girls their age. They think that the sight of Oedipa dressed in all her clothes, biting Metzger on the bathroom floor, is “kinky.” Miles starts talking about a similar orgy he went to a few days earlier. Oedipa asks Miles and his bandmates to leave, and they play a loud rock song about loneliness and the moon from somewhere near the swimming pool.
The hairspray could symbolize many different things, ranging from sexual release to the gradual equalization of pressure across the system through an increase in entropy (which later becomes an important concept in the novel). If Oedipa and Metzger’s position on the bathroom floor is not comical enough, it gets funnier when the socially tone-deaf Miles unironically assumes that they are acting out some sexual fantasy. (Of course, this is a more logical explanation than the actual truth.)
Themes
Oedipa and Metzger return to Cashiered, and Oedipa starts making guesses about the plot and taking off one of her numerous pieces of jewelry every time. Meanwhile, Metzger eagerly takes his pants off. They keep drinking and watching advertisements for things that Pierce Inverarity owned. At some point, Oedipa goes to the bathroom and changes into fewer clothes, but when she returns, Metzger is asleep in his underwear. Oedipa climbs on top of him and starts kissing him, but Metzger falls asleep several times while they have sex. The movie is still on, and the Paranoids are still playing music outside. More of them start plugging in their guitars. Precisely when Oedipa and Metzger climax, the Paranoids blow the motel’s power supply, and all the lights go out.
After giving up on their lazy stripteases, Oedipa and Metzger have sex with such a total indifference and lack of passion that it becomes obvious that they only care about satisfying themselves. The Paranoids echo the main action throughout, and the fuse blowing and the lights going out are a clear metaphor for Oedipa and Metzger climaxing. This also highlights the interplay between their relationship and the technology that mediates it: they have only really interacted in relation to Metzger’s movie, and when they have sex and the lights go out, they have to share a genuine moment of personal intimacy for the first time.
Themes
When the lights come back on, Oedipa and Metzger watch the end of Cashiered. The protagonists die one by one in their submarine, and Baby Igor is electrocuted to death in a particularly gruesome scene. Oedipa announces that she won their bet, and she wants to know what Pierce Inverarity told Metzger about her. Metzger says that Inverarity told him that Oedipa “wouldn’t be easy.” When she hears this, Oedipa cries, but only for a little while.
Although uncharacteristically cruel, the ending of Cashiered allows Pynchon to parody the unrealistic narrative tropes of Hollywood—which, as his novel’s plot suggests, seem to be gradually pushing everyday life toward exaggeration and absurdity. When Metzger reports that Inverarity said Oedipa “wouldn’t be easy” to have sex with, he reveals a contradiction in the attitude of the novel’s men: Inverarity and Metzger only value women as sexual objects, yet they evaluate women’s character based on how easily they give in to sexual advances.
Themes
