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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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.
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