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Chapter 2
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
The narrator explains that Oedipa gradually learns about the “Tristero System,” which might help her overcome the feeling that she is trapped in life, like Rapunzel in her tower. This process begins when she has sex with Metzger and gradually unfolds around her, as though the world were logically revealing the truth to her. The next part of this process involves Pierce Inverarity’s treasured stamp collection, which he used to gaze at for hours when he and Oedipa were together.
Curiously, Pynchon’s narrator introduces the “Tristero system” before Oedipa ever encounters it. The novel pushes the reader to start looking for a conspiracy, just like Oedipa. And this sensitizes the reader to the idea of Tristero: if and when the word pops up again, readers will know to take it seriously as a clue because the narrator has already signaled its importance beforehand. By explicitly foreshadowing the novel’s main plot before it truly begins, Pynchon underlines the very fact that this plot is a web of events and concepts that he has deliberately constructed. In other words, at the same time as the narrator muses about Oedipa discovering the hidden truths of the universe and overcoming her sense of imprisonment, Pynchon draws attention to the way that people’s sense of reality depends upon their individual perception.
Themes
Oedipa pays attention to Inverarity’s stamps for two reasons. The first is that she receives a letter from Mucho. In her letters to him, she does not mention her affair with Metzger. She does this out of respect, just as she and Mucho do not talk about his habit of hitting on underage teenaged girls. On one of Mucho’s letters back to her, the envelope is stamped with a typo: it reads “POTSMASTER” instead of “POSTMASTER.”
Much like Pierce Inverarity’s phone call, Mucho’s letter says absolutely nothing of merit, revealing how empty his relationship with Oedipa really is. The most important subjects of all—Oedipa’s affair and Mucho’s predatory advances toward younger women—go totally unspoken, so Mucho and Oedipa come to a mutual understanding despite their communication, not because of it. The slight typo on Mucho’s envelope is totally ambiguous: although it later connects with other elements of the plot, for now it is impossible for Oedipa or the reader to tell if it is a significant clue or a meaningless coincidence.
Themes
The second reason Oedipa thinks about Inverarity’s stamps is that she visits a nearby bar called The Scope with Metzger. They go to get a break from Echo Courts, where Miles and the Paranoids frequently walk in on them having sex (even after they start doing so in the closet as a precaution). The Scope is full of Yoyodyne employees, who awkwardly stare at Oedipa and Metzger. The bar only plays avant-garde electronic music; sometimes, there are live performances.
Themes
At The Scope, a young man named Mike Fallopian approaches Oedipa and Metzger and starts telling them about the Peter Pinguid Society. The Society is named after an obscure Confederate officer who may or may not have lost a battle with a Russian admiral in California during the Civil War and then decided that capitalism and slavery are one and the same. Pinguid’s followers hate everything industrialized, including both capitalism and communism, even though Pinguid eventually became a wealthy real estate speculator in Los Angeles.
Themes
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Someone in the bar suddenly starts handing out mail. Oedipa goes to the bathroom, where she finds a suspicious message written neatly on the wall: it claims to be a solicitation for sex, it but asks interested parties to contact the writer, Kirby, through “WASTE.” It includes a strange symbol that looks like a muted trumpet.
Themes
Back in the bar, Fallopian explains that his group has been developing an alternative postal system, in part by sending letters through Yoyodyne. The problem is that they have nothing to send or say to one another—Fallopian shows Oedipa and Metzger the letter he has just received, which is from a friend who asks how he’s doing and whether he’s progressing on his book. Fallopian explains that he is researching private mail systems in the 1800s, because he thinks that the government postal service is an unjust monopoly that abused its power and caused the Civil War.
The narrator explains that this conversation with Mike Fallopian is Oedipa’s first taste of the mysterious Tristero. The truth unfolds for her over time, like a performance. Its continues with a trip with Metzger and the Paranoids to the Fangoso Lagoons neighborhood that Inverarity built. On the drive over, Oedipa thinks about how the Pacific Ocean redeems humankind’s excesses on land. When they arrive, they find their way to the manmade Lake Inverarity, which has an island with a beautiful social hall in the middle. To get there, the group decides to hijack one of the many boats docked nearby.
Themes
Manny Di Presso, the lawyer-turned-actor who works with Metzger, suddenly jumps out from under a tarp and boards the boat. He needs to cross the lake, and two men in gray suits are pursuing him. While the Paranoids sing, Di Presso explains that the mafia is after him and that he’s planning to sue Pierce Inverarity’s estate. Before he can continue further, the boat reaches the island, and the group climbs up onto the social hall’s roof to have a picnic. Then, Di Presso explains that Tony Jaguar, his client in the mafia, is after him because he is broke and cannot loan Tony any money. Tony is suing Inverarity because he sold Inverarity some human bones for his Beaconsfield cigarettes, but Inverarity never paid Tony.
Themes
Oedipa asks where the bones for Beaconsfield cigarettes came from. Metzger suggests that they have to dig up cemeteries to build highways like the East San Narciso Freeway, but Di Presso explains that the bones were really from the Lago di Pietà in Italy, where there was a long siege during World War II. The Germans killed off a group of stranded American troops, then dumped their bodies in the lake. Thinking he could get someone to pay for the bones, Tony Jaguar had them dug up and sent to the United States, where they ended up in Beaconsfield cigarettes. Metzger triumphantly points out that Inverarity invested in the company that designed the filters, not Beaconsfield, which actually bought the bones.
Themes
Miles and one of the other Paranoids’ girlfriends comment that the story about the bones reminds them of The Courier’s Tragedy, a play they saw recently. Di Presso freaks out because he didn’t think the Paranoids were listening to his conversation, and then he realizes that the men in the gray suits are coming after him in a boat. He runs off, commandeers the boat that the group hijacked, and disappears, leaving the rest stuck on the island.
Themes
Oedipa, Metzger, and the Paranoids eventually get off the island after they get the neighborhood security force’s attention that night. All afternoon, the marijuana-smoking Paranoids try to explain the complicated plot of The Courier’s Tragedy. Confused, Oedipa decides to just go and see the play, which is being put on by a struggling local theater company. Although it is all in a Shakespearean dialect of “Transplanted Middle Western Stage British,” Oedipa is entranced by The Courier’s Tragedy. Written by the 17th-century writer Richard Wharfinger, it is set during a “preapocalyptic, death-wishful” civil war in Italy.
Themes
The excessively complicated plot of The Courier’s Tragedy centers on the ruling families of two Italian duchies, Squamuglia and Faggio. Ten years before the play starts, Angelo, the malicious Duke of Squamuglia, plotted to kills the Duke of Faggio and his young son Niccolò. This would allow Angelo’s ally, the Duke of Faggio’s illegitimate son Pasquale, to take power. Angelo successfully killed the Duke of Faggio, but a dissident named Ercole secretly saved Niccolò, who started plotting his revenge after Pasquale took power.
Themes
After explaining this lengthy backstory, an adult Niccolò reveals that he is working in disguise at Duke Angelo’s court in Squamuglia. Angelo refuses to use the postal company Thurn and Taxis, which is dominant throughout Europe, because he does not want to reveal that he is secretly corresponding with Pasquale. So Thurn and Taxis hires Niccolò as a “special courier” to lobby on their behalf in Squamuglia. Meanwhile, to unite Squamuglia and Faggio under his rule, Duke Angelo tries to marry his sister Francesca to Duke Pasquale, who happens to be Francesca’s son. Francesca objects to the incest, even though she also happens to be having sex with Angelo, her brother.
Themes
The rest of the first act of The Courier’s Tragedy, as well as all of Acts Two and Three, consists of graphic scenes of medieval torture and murder. First, Ercole tortures a friend who tried to betray Niccolò. In Act Two, Angelo’s men torture and kill a priest who objects to the incestuous marriage between Francesca and Pasquale, and Niccolò learns that a group of 50 Faggian knights mysteriously disappeared just before Angelo poisoned the Duke of Faggio. In Act Three, Ercole’s allies interrupt Pasquale during an orgy and torture and murder him, which leads to a man named Gennaro taking power.
Themes
After the intermission, in Act Four, Angelo learns that Niccolò is really alive and that Gennaro is planning to attack Squamuglia. He sends a cryptic letter for Gennaro with the official courier from Thurn and Taxis—who happens to be Niccolò. When Angelo soon learns about Niccolò’s true identity, he starts planning to kill him, but he strangely refuses to say who he is sending to commit the deed and shares an unusual moment of silence with everyone on stage. When Gennaro and his army learn that Niccolò is coming, they respond with the same uncomfortable silence.
Themes
Meanwhile, at the same lake where Faggio’s soldiers disappeared, Niccolò reads Angelo’s letter to Gennaro and realizes that he is about to win back his rightful place as the Duke of Faggio. Then, he falls into the same awkward silence as Angelo’s court and Gennaro’s army, and he starts stuttering, “T-t-t-t-t…” Three limber men dressed in black leotards inexplicably run onstage.
Themes
Later, Gennaro and his men find Niccolò’s body at the lake and share another moment of suspicious, uncharacteristic silence. They realize that Angelo’s letter has transformed into a confession. Among other things, Angelo admits to killing Faggio’s soldiers, dumping them in the lake, retrieving their bones, and then turning them into charcoal—which eventually became the very ink that he used to write his letters. The soldiers say a prayer, and Gennaro laments that Niccolò has died after a “tryst with Trystero.” Oedipa realizes that this is the name nobody was willing to say, but she doesn’t yet understand that it will be the next clue in her quest.
The play’s last act just shows Gennaro’s army slaughtering Angelo and everyone who works for him. Everybody dies except Gennaro himself, who is played by the play’s director, Randolph Driblette. Oedipa insists on meeting Driblette backstage after the play to ask about the bones. Metzger mocks her for caring so much about an unsolved mystery from World War II, 20 years ago. He waits in the car while Oedipa goes to investigate the possible connection between the play and the Lago di Pietà.
Themes
Oedipa meets Driblette in his dressing room. Although he insists that the play “isn’t literature” and “doesn’t mean anything,” Oedipa asks him for a script. He points her to a filing cabinet, but the documents inside are old and stained. Driblette explains that he found the original script at Zapf’s Used Books, in an anthology called Jacobean Revenge Plays. There was another copy, so he tells Oedipa to look for it there. He complains how people are seeking out this original text, probably for some academic analysis, and then looks at Oedipa the same way that the actors looked at one another instead of naming Niccolò’s assassins—Trystero.
Oedipa asks about the mysterious silences surrounding Trystero, and Driblette explains that it was his idea. In fact, the assassins did not even come onstage in the original script. He tells Oedipa that he invented the real version of the play, projecting it out like a projection of the universe on the dome of a planetarium. Oedipa asks him why he changed the script, but Driblette continues saying that words are not as real as things. Even if Oedipa spends her whole life trying to explain Trystero’s role in the play, he declares, she will “never touch the truth.” Oedipa gives up and leaves, then realizes that she completely forgot to ask about the bones. She meets Metzger in his car, where he is listening to Mucho on KCUF.
Themes
