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 drives to Berkeley to investigate the Wharfinger play and the inventor John Nefastis. Metzger does not mind her going, and she does not stop at Kinneret-Among-the-Pines, even though it is on her way. In Berkeley, Oedipa checks into a grandiose hotel that is hosting a conference for deaf-mute people. She has a vague nightmare about the mirror in her room, and then she dreams of having sex with Mucho on a beach.
Oedipa’s decision not to visit home clearly shows that her time away has not warmed her up to the idea of dealing with Mucho or briefly returning to the drudgery of her life as a housewife. Meanwhile, her new hotel’s deaf-mute conference shows how people can develop alternative ways to communicate when they are unable to use more common methods. This gestures to the underground mail system Oedipa seems to be investigating, which is literally an alternative to ordinary communication mechanisms for people, as well as the general breakdown in communication among the novel’s characters, who spend much of the book talking past one another. Oedipa’s nightmare about the mirror recalls the last time she checked into a hotel (Echo Courts) and promptly shattered the bathroom mirror. Like the part of her dream about Mucho, this nightmare about the mirror suggests that she is afraid of repeating her past.
Themes
The next day, Oedipa visits Lectern Press in search of their original anthology, and she eventually finds a copy in their warehouse later that afternoon. But the line about Trystero is gone, replaced with a totally different couplet. A footnote in the book explains that Wharfinger’s original line may have been changed for legal reasons, and it also notes that the dubious, fragmented Whitechapel edition of the play included a line about a “tryst or odious awry.” Although one scholar has said that this is a play on “trystero dies irae,” the Lectern anthology notes that “trystero” is not actually a word and concludes that this version of the line was just one of the Whitechapel edition’s numerous errors.
“Tryst or odious awry” simply implies that something goes wrong when Niccolò dies, and “trystero dies irae” specifically recalls the Latin funeral mass Dies irae, which is about Judgment Day. Oedipa’s failure to find the original source of the “tryst with Trystero” line has two main effects. First, it shows her that there is no authoritative, pure, original version of the play that is more “real” than the others—indeed, the footnotes she finds explicitly point out the way past versions of the play have been intentionally altered. Secondly, these old editions seem to be trying to erase the word “Trystero,” which naturally raises suspicion about whether The Courier’s Tragedy has perhaps been carefully edited throughout history in order to hide the existence of this Trystero organization. As with so many of Oedipa’s other clues, the discrepancies in these versions of The Courier’s Tragedy either provide evidence against the existence of the conspiracy or show how far the conspirators have gone to hide their actions. In other words, as the evidence against it piles up, the conspiracy continues to grow larger and larger.
Themes
Oedipa goes to inquire with Professor Emory Bortz, the author of the book’s introduction, who supposedly teaches at the University of California nearby. When she arrives, the department informs her that Bortz has left and moved to—of all places—San Narciso. Oedipa walks through the Berkeley campus feeling insecure and irrelevant, as she went to college in an era of conformity, not protest and freethinking. She wonders how her peculiar, random path through life led her to this moment—where her life revolves around figuring out one word from an obscure 17th-century play.
When Oedipa learns that Bortz is teaching back in San Narciso, the bitter irony bothers her, but it does not at all surprise her. By this point, bizarre coincidences have become commonplace. Walking through the University of California, Berkeley—a famous hotbed of student activism in the 1960s—Oedipa realizes that she is utterly boring and conservative. Seeing how much one’s generation shapes one’s character, she starts to admit that she has had virtually no control over the person she has become.
Themes
Oedipa looks up John Nefastis in the phone book and visits him at his apartment. He starts by offhandedly mentioning his interest in underage girls; then, he shows Oedipa his machine and explains the balance between heat and communication entropy in a complicated way that Oedipa does not completely understand. Nefastis believes that the demon in the box is real and that it communicates with “sensitive” people. Oedipa stares at the picture of Maxwell and wonders if he even believed in the demon. After most of an hour, the box still hasn’t moved, and Oedipa starts breaking down in frustration. Nefastis holds her and proposes that they have sex while listening to the evening news, but Oedipa promptly runs outside and drives away.
Curiously, Nefastis’s machine has absolutely nothing to do with W.A.S.T.E. or Tristero. Rather, it merely shows Oedipa that Nefastis’s strange magic will not cure her stagnation and inability to communicate with others. The closed system of Nefastis’s box can only function if it is connected to some outside source—in other words, if it is not truly closed at all. Indeed, Nefastis clearly forgets that Maxwell’s Demon is a thought experiment, not a real being, which suggests that he has lost track of the rational thinking that is supposed to be the foundation of science. Nefastis’s sexuality also points to social breakdown: his sexual interest in young girls immediately associates him with Mucho, and his clumsy proposition to Oedipa at the end of her visit shows that, like the rest of the book’s male characters, he only sees her as a sexual object. He has no genuine interest in communication with her, as shown by his desire to have sex with her while paying attention to the news—much like Oedipa and Metzger’s relationship is initially based entirely on his old movie. In short, Nefastis wants Oedipa to help him play out the escapism he seeks through television.
Themes
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Oedipa suddenly realizes that she is crossing the Bay Bridge into hazy San Francisco, and she starts to try and connect the web of evidence she has assembled around Trystero. She knows it functioned in parallel to Thurn and Taxis, battled Wells, Fargo and the Pony Express, and is still being used to communicate by several people around her. But she could also be imagining it.
Oedipa starts to question the entire conspiracy theory she has spent the last two chapters weaving: the larger her conspiracy gets, the more she begins to realize that it could simply be a figment of her imagination. Like San Narciso’s smog, San Francisco’s haze is a visual representation of Oedipa’s sense of disconnection from the world. As the result of automobile pollution, it makes a clear metaphorical connection between consumer capitalism, the spiritually empty world it creates, and Oedipa’s sense of despair.
Themes
Oedipa decides to spend the rest of the day in San Francisco and see if she can totally forget Trystero for awhile. While she is walking around, a man gets off a tourist party bus and sticks his nametag on her chest. It says “HI! MY NAMEIS Arnold Snarb! AND I’M LOOKIN’ FOR A GOOD TIME!” Oedipa gets caught up in the crowd of revelers and swept into The Greek Way, a gay bar, where the tour guide excitedly tells the group that they are about to see an authentic slice of San Francisco’s famous gay culture.
Oedipa realizes that her thirst for conspiracy is just one of various reasonable perspectives on all the clues she has encountered. Therefore, she makes a conscious effort to change her perspective and see if she can make herself interpret things in a different way. When she tries to take this fresh perspective, she even gets a new identity, ending up on a tour that essentially turns other people’s identities into a tourist attraction. Like Fangoso Lagoons, The Greek Way becomes prized for the concept it represents to people—not what it actually is.
Themes
In The Greek Way, Oedipa ends up with a drink, chatting with a man who is wearing a lapel pin of the Trystero horn symbol. She asks him about Thurn and Taxis and the U.S. Mail service, but he asks her why she is named Arnold Snarb and promises that he is not gay. Eventually, Oedipa just tells him everything she has found out about Trystero so far, and the man reveals that his muted horn pin means he is a member of the Inamorati Anonymous, a support group for people who want to cure their addiction to love. Their mission is to help people avoid falling in love or learn not to pursue it. Accordingly, they have to do everything over the phone and can never talk to the same person twice—lest they fall in love.
Oedipa’s effort to distance herself from the Trystero conspiracy lasts all of 15 minutes. She can barely contain her suffocating curiosity, and this leads her to overlook the obvious possibility that some of the horn symbols she has found so far are really from the Inamorati Anonymous, not from Tristero. (Kirby’s message soliciting sex on the bathroom wall and Stanley Koteks’s scribbles in his journal most likely to relate to Inamorati Anonymous.) Oedipa also overlooks the oddity of meeting a straight man hanging out in a gay bar, which is part of the situation’s ridiculous humor. The Inamorati Anonymous represent the logical conclusion of the attitudes toward sex and romance that all of this novel’s men display to some extent. Everyone in The Crying of Lot 49 is emotionally and romantically isolated from others, usually because their own fantasies and psychological fixations prevent them from empathizing with others. Inamorati Anonymous twists this loneliness into a virtue, as though there are no benefits to falling in love that could make up for the risk of heartbreak and rejection.
Themes
The founder of the Inamorati Anonymous is a high-ranking Yoyodyne executive who did not know what to do when he lost his job. Unable to make decisions for himself, he put out a newspaper ad asking for advice about whether to kill himself. He got several letters expressing pity and several more from people who tried and failed to kill themselves, including a number delivered personally by a hook-handed bum. But he still couldn’t decide until he learned about a Vietnamese monk who burned himself to death in protest. The executive decided to do the same thing, so doused himself in gasoline in his kitchen.
It is not surprising that the Inamorati Anonymous has its roots in Yoyodyne: not only are such coincidences already commonplace in this novel, but Yoyodyne embodies the same ruthlessness worldview that the Inamorati Anonymous is based on. In short, these groups treat emotions as a mere obstacle to success, but they never get around to figuring out what success actually is. The founder was unable to identify himself except through the corporation that employed him and, evidently, did not at all care about his individuality or continued survival. His fate is a parable about the way in which capitalism and corporations devalue people in the quest for profit and efficiency—Yoyodyne’s ideal worker is a computer, not a human being. By reaching out through the mail, the executive ensured that any communication he received would stay anonymous and impersonal. And although he planned to self-immolate in protest, he never seems to have figured out what he was trying to say.
Themes
Right before lighting himself on fire, the Inamorati Anonymous founder heard his wife entering the house with the man who fired him and having sex with him on the living room rug. When they met the founder in the kitchen, he maniacally laughed and then took his suit off. He saw that the stamps on the gasoline-doused letters in his pocket showed the horn watermark, and he decided that this was a sign that he had to give up on love for the rest of his life and create a “society of isolates” who would do the same.
The founder appears to have discovered a sense of purpose—his “society of isolates”—only after giving up on his planned act of protest. In fact, the empty relationships among the novel’s characters suggest that such a society is already forming without the Inamorati Anonymous’s help. Here, it also becomes clear why the Inamorati Anonymous uses the same muted horn symbol as W.A.S.T.E.: just like Oedipa, the founder simply decided that this symbol was an important sign and incorporated it into his worldview. In fact, he seemingly never learned the symbol’s original meaning or realized that many people mailed in their responses to his newspaper ad through W.A.S.T.E.
Themes
The Inamorati Anonymous member admits that nobody knows who this founder is, but he proposes that Oedipa try to contact the man by means of W.A.S.T.E. He wonders aloud about what W.A.S.T.E. users even have to say to one another. He goes to the bathroom but never comes back, and Oedipa looks at the gay men around her while she contemplates the indifference that all the men in her life seem to feel for her.
The man’s question about why people would use W.A.S.T.E. directly recalls Mike Fallopian’s underground mail system and implicitly raises the question of whether they might be one and the same. The man’s disappearance shows that he is taking his vow of isolation to heart, and Oedipa explicitly connects this to the way that all of the men in the novel—most of all her lovers, Mucho and Metzger—seem to have lost their capacity for human connection.
Themes
Oedipa leaves the bar and spends the evening searching San Francisco for any sign of the Trystero horn symbol. She sees one on the sidewalk but notices a man in a suit staring at her, so she runs away and boards a bus. Oedipa spends most of the night on buses, slipping in and out of consciousness, but she eventually decides that she will definitely be safe and finally begins to enjoy the sensation of risk. She starts walking again and wonders if her clues will lead her anywhere, or if they are the whole message.
For the first time in the book, Oedipa moves through the world in public spaces—the sidewalk and the bus—rather than in the sealed-off privacy of her car. Caught between hope and paranoia, Oedipa is unsure whether to see the city as a source of salvation or a source of danger. But she recognizes that her sense of safety is within her control, as is her interpretation of all the Trystero clues.
Themes
Oedipa meets a group of children in the park who say that they are dreaming, but also that dreaming and being awake are the same thing. Oedipa asks them about the Trystero symbol, and they explain that they jump rope in the different parts of the symbol while singing, “Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three, / Turning taxi from across the sea…”
Oedipa’s dreams and her waking life begin to blend together, showing how her unconscious mind literally shapes her sense of reality. But when she realizes that she is dreaming, this suggests that she is adapting to the knowledge that her perceptions are not the same as absolute reality. Although the Trystero symbol shows up in her dream, it takes a radically different form that is only loosely associated with the W.A.S.T.E. conspiracy. Nevertheless, the children’s song has an obvious buried meaning: “Turning taxis” is “Thurn and Taxis,” and Oedipa will soon learn about Trystero migrating “from across the sea.”
Themes
Next, Oedipa meets an old acquaintance, the Mexican activist Jesús Arrabal, who used to run an anarchist group conveniently called the CIA but is now living in exile and running a restaurant. Jesús asks Oedipa about Inverarity, whom he remembers seeing as the perfect enemy. Jesús saw this as a miracle: “another world's intrusion into this one,” showing him exactly what he had to destroy. Oedipa wonders whether Jesús would have given up on anarchism had he not met Inverarity, who is really the person linking her and Jesús together. She notices an old anarchist newspaper from 1904 with the post horn symbol on it, and Jesús comments that this paper has somehow made it to him 60 years after it was first mailed out.
Even though Inverarity is dead, his massive footprint of investments and properties in San Narciso makes it easy to see why he would inspire Arrabal to recommit to overthrowing capitalism. Arrabal’s name actually embodies the very theory of miracles that he presents. The name “Jesús” undeniably aligns him with Christ, whose “intrusion into this [world]” is a way of saving it. And an “Arrabal” is a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city—a place on the geographical and socioeconomic margins. If salvation comes from the margins, or if miracles are really about the entrance of something that seemed out-of-this-world because it was out of our sight, then Jesús Arrabal suggests that the miracle Oedipa is waiting for will come from the place she is not looking.
Themes
Oedipa she sees a group of hoodlums with the horn symbol stitched into their jackets at the beach. She sees it scratched into the back of a bus seat with a caption: “DEATH […] Don’t Ever Antagonize The Horn.” Oedipa also finds it on the front of an empty laundromat, on a sign promising that anyone who knows the symbol will “know where to find out more.” A girl traces out the shape of the horn on the bus, and a man with the symbol in his balance-book loses money in a poker game. Even the Alameda County Death Cult features the horn next to its bathroom-stall ad for a monthly ritual murder. Oedipa dreams of a boy planning to negotiate humankind’s transfer of power to the dolphins, asking his mother to write to him through W.A.S.T.E. She sees the symbol several more times throughout the night.
The horn starts appearing in so many places, so conspicuously and so inexplicably, that Oedipa starts to seriously question whether it is as significant as it first appeared. Not only is it impossible to reconcile all these different versions of the horn—it would also be exhausting to do so. And it seems impossible that someone would not have done it before, that its existence would not be common knowledge. Oedipa is again left to wonder: is she missing some interpretive key that explains the whole thing?
Themes
In the morning, Oedipa feels defeated, paralyzed by the sheer quantity of clues and the popularity of W.A.S.T.E. Downtown, she sees an elderly sailor with the symbol tattooed on his hand crying inside a building. She approaches him, and he gives her a letter for his wife, whom he abandoned many years ago. He tells Oedipa to take it under the bridge, and she embraces him. Another old man asks Oedipa to bring the sailor up the stairs, and she does. The other man explains that the sailor went looking for his wife and, as usual, disappeared. Oedipa leads the sailor to his room and imagines helping him finally get to his wife, but the sailor tells her to send the letter. The stamp on it has a small black figure added on.
At first, when Oedipa only had a few clues to fit together, she felt that she was piecing together something significant. But now, as the clues multiply, no one theory holds together. Oedipa is therefore lucky to run into the sailor, whose heartfelt desire to reconnect with his wife shocks Oedipa back into reality. The sailor reminds Oedipa that the world is made of a web of normal relationships among people, even if she is busy looking for a deep conspiracy behind it all. In a way, he shows Oedipa that, although she might be projecting her world, she is still projecting it onto real people. The sailor also represents some fleeting hope for the novel’s male characters: in the past, the sailor abandoned his wife (just like so many other men in the novel treat women as disposable). But now, he genuinely regrets what he did—although it is not clear whether this is out of love or mere loneliness.
Themes
Oedipa gives the sailor $10, but he complains that he’ll spend it on alcohol. He asks for a cigarette, and Oedipa imagines him lighting his mattress on fire—and forever erasing all the memories it holds. She sees that the man has delirium tremens, which means he is hallucinating, but this is just another way of saying seeing the world through metaphors. In a split second, Oedipa scans through her own memories and realizes that this man must see things that nobody else ever can.
Although the sailor turns out to be an unruly alcoholic with a sour attitude, Oedipa still sees him as a sort of savior figure (and not only because his letter will connect her to W.A.S.T.E.). Oedipa sees the man’s mattress as a metaphor for his memory: while it is soaked through with waste, this waste is proof that the man lived, the mark of his totally individual and irreplaceable existence. Whereas Inverarity leaves behind things but few meaningful memories, Oedipa views the sailor’s legacy in terms of his experience and, above all, his story.
Themes
Oedipa runs outside and finds the bridge that the sailor told her to seek out. Once she arrives, it takes her an hour to find the green can marked “W.A.S.T.E.” She sees someone else leave some letters inside, adds her own, and then waits. When a raggedy man picks the letters up, she follows him downtown, where he trades letters with another courier. Oedipa continues following the man across the bay to Oakland, where he passes through a nondescript neighborhood and then ends up, of all places, back at John Nefastis’s house.
Oedipa finally gets a chance to confirm the existence of W.A.S.T.E. The system’s bins are cleverly disguised to be indistinguishable from ordinary trash cans. And its mail carriers appear to be homeless people, whose social marginalization acts as a perfect disguise. In other words, W.A.S.T.E. is fully coexistent with mainstream America—it is just that people who do not use it do not bother to take notice of it. When Oedipa returns to Nefastis’s house in Berkeley, this chapter closes back in on itself. While she desperately yearned for clarity when she first left Nefastis’s house, now she has solid evidence of W.A.S.T.E. when she returns to it.
Themes
Oedipa goes back to her hotel, where she gets lost in a crowd of drunk deaf-mute people. They drag her into a ballroom where couples are dancing “whatever [is] in the fellow’s head.” She dances with someone for a half hour, then the group mysteriously stops dancing all at once, which gives her the opportunity to go back to her room.
In the hotel, Oedipa confronts a pattern of communication that is totally unfamiliar to her. As with the references to Trystero during The Courier’s Tragedy, everyone else seems to know what is going on, except for her. But this encounter with a radically different kind of perception and communication intrigues her, and it clearly points back to Jesús Arrabal’s definition of a miracle as one world entering into another.
Themes
In the morning, Oedipa decides to return to Kinneret-Among-The-Pines and visit her therapist Dr. Hilarius on the way. Although she has seen clear evidence that the horn and W.A.S.T.E. are all over the Bay Area, she hopes that Hilarius will convince her that she imagined the whole thing. When she arrives, Hilarius’s office looks empty—and then a bullet flies past her head. Oedipa runs to the office door, where Hilarius’s assistant lets her inside and explains that Hilarius has locked himself in his office with a gun and is shooting at anyone who approaches. He thinks that three armed terrorists are coming after him. The assistant suggests that maybe this is because of the miserable housewives that Hilarius treats.
By switching the roles of mental patient and healer, Pynchon gives Oedipa and Hilarius a taste of what their normal roles feel like from the other side. But Pynchon is going for more than just zany irony when he depicts an insane psychotherapist fighting off figments of his own paranoid imagination: this fight is also a metaphor for the way psychoanalysts explain individuals’ personal struggles as tensions between their conscious and unconscious selves. As Hilarius’s assistant points out, Hilarius’s insanity seems to be connected to a breakdown in communication: he has to listen to people’s problems all day, but he never gets to resolve his own unconscious conflicts.
Themes
Oedipa reluctantly approaches Hilarius’s office and introduces herself. Through the door, Hilarius accuses her of working with the plot against him, and then embarks on a diatribe about his waning faith in Sigmund Freud: he no longer believes that therapy can help people tame the unconscious. Police sirens approach, but Hilarius says that it is pointless to try and stop the Israeli “fanatics” who are after him, because they can pass straight through the walls of his office and clone themselves. He also does not trust the police, who may be in danger too.
The Israeli “fanatics” sound an awful lot like the black-clad Trystero bandits from The Courier’s Tragedy, which again forces the reader to ask whether Trystero might be a figment of Oedipa’s imagination (just like the Israelis are for Hilarius). When Hilarius says that he has given up on Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis) because the conscious mind cannot tame the unconscious, what he really means is that the unconscious has totally taken over. Oedipa went through a similar episode in San Francisco when she could not distinguish between dreams, memories, fantasies, and real experiences. While it is difficult to explain why the unconscious is so powerful in The Crying of Lot 49, it is easy to speculate: perhaps it’s due to the generalized repression and emotional isolation of suburban American life, or perhaps it’s due to the effects of alcohol and drugs.
Themes
As the police approach, Dr. Hilarius reveals to Oedipa that there is a special, secret face that makes people go insane, and he warns that he will make it for the police. The police break into Hilarius’s office, and Hilarius pulls Oedipa inside. He expected someone else but notes that his patients on drugs like LSD can’t distinguish between other people either. Hilarius asks Oedipa what she is supposed to tell him, and she begs him to surrender to the police. But Hilarius keeps talking about the face, which he says he only made once, at Buchenwald.
Hilarius’s breakdown takes on a much more sinister tone when he reveals that he is an ex-Nazi (Buchenwald was a German concentration camp during World War II). Though Pynchon is also pointing out the similarities between Nazi psychological experiments during the Holocaust and American ones after World War II (like the famous MK-Ultra mind control experiment, which tested drugs like LSD). Although Hilarius does not reveal whether he is on LSD like his patients are, he clearly does lose a sense of others’ identities. This is jarring to Oedipa, who realizes that her relationship with Hilarius has become valueless to him, since he cannot even distinguish her from anyone else. In short, even though Hilarius’s breakdown is a response to his lack of human connection with his patients, the breakdown ironically only worsens his capacity for such connection.
Themes
The police talk to Oedipa through the door and ask if she can distract Dr. Hilarius so that the TV news crew can film them. Hilarius reveals that he was helping the Nazis look for a way to drive Jews insane by making faces at them. He insists that he always tried to avoid confronting his past by analyzing it like Freud: by analyzing it, he thought that he could neutralize the evil, but he’s realized that he will never be able to. Oedipa gets ahold of Hilarius’s rifle and threatens to kill him, and then mentions that she wanted him to help her cure a fantasy. On the contrary, Hilarius tells her to “cherish” her fantasy, which is all she has, and he urges her to shoot him.
The fact that the police are more interested in filming the standoff than ending it goes to show how the norms and demands of mass media—including people’s appetite for sensational content—transform the ways people relate to one another. Hilarius explains his therapy career as an attempt to overcome his own guilt from the past, but he evidently now sees that this theory of the situation is really just a fantasy he used to cling to, until it was no longer viable. In turn, by telling Oedipa to “cherish” her own fantasies, Hilarius suggests that there may not be a sharp division between reality and fantasy at all—instead, what seems like reality today might look like fantasy in retrospect.
Themes
Oedipa lets the police inside Dr. Hilarius’s office and then goes outside. She finds Mucho in the KCUF radio truck, covering the standoff. He gives her the microphone and asks her to summarize the day’s events, then thanks her, calling her “Mrs. Edna Mosh.” He promises that the radio’s distortion will correct her name. After they briefly chat with the police, Oedipa and Mucho go to the KCUF radio station, where Mucho’s boss, Caesar Funch, reveals that Mucho seems to be “losing his identity,” gradually becoming “generic.” Although Oedipa tells Funch that he’s overreacting, she soon notices that Mucho is calmer than usual.
When Oedipa and Mucho finally reunite, they do not seem to have missed each other—they share no affection. In fact, they reencounter each other not as husband and wife, but rather as journalist and interviewee. Unable to summon any genuine feeling for each other, it seems, they just relay everything through the radio instead. Mucho overcorrecting for the radio’s distortions, mangling Oedipa’s name in the process, points out how new media technologies change people’s identities. Indeed, this seems to partially explain why he is “losing his [own] identity.” This pattern of people becoming “generic” is, of course, the same trend that Oedipa sees everywhere in the society of mass-produced things that surrounds her: people increasingly do, own, and like exactly the same things. This makes them interchangeable and destroys their humanity—like the Yoyodyne executive who got replaced by a computer.
Themes
Oedipa and Mucho go to a restaurant to get pizza. Mucho asks about Oedipa’s relationship with Metzger, and then he starts commenting on the background music in the restaurant: one of the violins is slightly out of tune. He declares that it would be wonderful to deduce everything about the violinist from one note—just as he can break a chord, or a person’s voice, down into all its component parts.
Although Mucho is a radio DJ, his bizarre interest in the music is still out of character: he seems to be perceiving the world in a different way than others do. This is similar to how, in San Francisco, Oedipa started seeing everything she encountered as a possible clue to the Tristero. However, there is a crucial difference: Mucho is learning to break down unity into individuality, turning a unified chord into its constituent parts. But Oedipa goes in the other direction: she learned to see the apparent connections between seemingly separate phenomena. This difference is significant because Oedipa’s quest is about overcoming isolation, or finding interconnection, whereas Mucho’s new perceptions actually accelerate the opposite process of alienation that she is seeking to combat.
Themes
Mucho asks Oedipa to say, “rich, chocolaty goodness.” She does, and after a long pause, Mucho explains that people who say the same words become the same people, even if they say them at different points in time. Oedipa suddenly understands what Funch was saying, and Mucho pulls out a bottle of LSD and explains that Dr. Hilarius is running his drug experiments on men too, now.
The phrase “rich, chocolaty goodness” is a marketing slogan: it is a fantasy designed to deceive people into buying a product, not a literal or socially relevant message worth sending in any real-life situation. By asking Oedipa to say it to him, Mucho makes it all the more clear that their relationship is just a formality—he would rather her be one member of the consumerist masses than the unique person he married. It seems paradoxical that Mucho was just separating out musical notes, but he is now saying that different people become one and the same. This is actually the same paradox that Oedipa sees all around her in contemporary America: as people become more and more separate from one another, they also become more and more similar to one another.
Themes
Mucho gladly proclaims that he feels like an antenna sending and receiving messages from the world, and that he is sleeping better. It’s not that he’s found a girl—he’s just not scared anymore, not even of his worst dreams, like the one in which he saw a sign saying “NADA” (the National Automobile Dealers’ Association) at the car lot where he used to work. Oedipa realizes that she has lost Mucho, and she returns to San Narciso that same night.
Crucially, Mucho uses a metaphor from media technology—the radio antenna that transmits his broadcasts—in order to explain his new self-image. Not only does he define this self-image through the same technologies that seem to be cutting him off from other human beings, but he also specifically talks about the technology his job depends on. Now, he is only satisfied at work because he has lost self-awareness—not because his work has gotten any more interesting, fulfilling, or dignified. His dream about “NADA” (“nothing”) is even more of a reason to believe that Dr. Hilarius’s drugs are emptying out his brain and destroying his individual personality. Pynchon seems to be suggesting that drugs like LSD actually turn people into passive participants in an oppressive society, rather than showing them how to resist it.
Themes
