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Chapter 4
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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…”
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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