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Chapter 5
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 returns to Echo Courts in San Narciso, where she finds the Paranoids sitting motionless with their instruments next to the swimming pool, as though frozen in time. Serge, one of the Paranoids, explains that his girlfriend left him for Metzger, and then he sings a song about copying the ways of older men by dating far younger women—in his case, an eight-year-old at the playground. Metzger has left Oedipa a note explaining that one of his colleagues at the law firm is taking his place as her co-executor, which doesn’t bother Oedipa at all.
The Paranoids’ frozenness is another offhand reference to entropy (which results in homogeneity and motionlessness) and the myth of Narcissus and Echo (because Narcissus ended up staring at his own reflection forever). Metzger’s disappearance does not faze Oedipa, who is perfectly used to men being emotionally distant and treating women as sexual objects. Metzger’s preference for younger women recalls Mucho’s and John Nefastis’s—but Serge takes this to an exaggerated, ridiculous, frightening next level. Of course, he is so offhandedly proud of his pedophilia that he seems to be following a media trend (hearkening to Vladimir Nabokov’s popular novel Lolita) without understanding the implications of his actions—must like his band formed as a cheap imitation of the Beatles.
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Themes
Oedipa calls Randolph Driblette, but Driblette’s mother picks up the phone and says that they will have a statement ready from their attorney tomorrow. Confused, Oedipa calls Professor Emory Bortz, whose wife picks up and explains that, although Professor Bortz is busy getting drunk and throwing beer bottles at passing birds with his students, Oedipa is free to visit.
Like Metzger, Driblette suddenly disappears, getting in the way of Oedipa’s plans. Although she wants all the people involved in her conspiracy to stay put so that she can fit them together into a complete vision of Tristero, they go on living their lives. Meanwhile, Bortz defies all stereotypes of a reserved, introverted, refined professor—his boisterous drunkenness is jarring because it undermines his sense of expertise, and Oedipa needs this expertise to make sense of The Courier’s Tragedy.
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On her way to Emory Bortz’s house, Oedipa passes Zapf’s Used Books, which has completely burnt down. At the store next door, a clerk explains that Zapf burned down his store for the insurance money. This clerk, Winthrop (“Winner”) Tremaine, is a virulent racist who sells government surplus weapons and replica Nazi military gear. Oedipa is disgusted and leaves, but she regrets not killing Winthrop on her way out.
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At Bortz’s house, one of the Professor’s belligerent children meets Oedipa at the door. Bortz’s wife is surprised that Oedipa, who looks “harassed” like most mothers do, does not have children. In the backyard, Bortz and his drunken graduate students make fun of Oedipa’s question about “the historical Wharfinger,” because they say that there are nothing but words left from him. Oedipa quotes the line about the “tryst with Trystero,” and a stunned Bortz asks if she has been in the Vatican library. Oedipa shows Bortz the anthology with this line in it, and after looking through it and complaining about its errors, Bortz announces that this line has been added from the pornographic edition of The Courier’s Tragedy that is hidden in the Vatican.
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In contrast, Bortz continues, Driblette’s version lightened the play in an attempt to capture its spirit. But, one of the students tells Oedipa, Driblette committed suicide two days ago by drowning himself in the Pacific Ocean. Just before, Bortz explains, “they” attacked the play’s set. Oedipa does not ask what he means—she only thinks about how all the men in her life (Hilarius, Mucho, Metzger, and Driblette) are disappearing or losing their minds.
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Bortz explains that Driblette was following Bortz’s own version, which did not include the couplet about Trystero. Oedipa insists that this couplet was spoken, but Bortz says that Driblette, who spoke the line as Gennaro, must have been familiar with all the versions of the play and just made a decision to say the line on that day. Oedipa suggests that some event in Driblette’s personal life would have triggered this change, but Bortz says that it’s impossible to know.
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Bortz invites Oedipa and his graduate students inside and shows them copies of the pornographic woodcut illustrations from the corrupted Vatican edition that he attributes to the Scurvhamites, a Puritan sect that was so intrigued by sin that they gave themselves over to it entirely. Bortz thinks that they might have written this pornographic version of the play in order to make a point about the story’s moral repulsiveness. Furthermore, he argues that the line about God redeeming nobody who has had a “tryst with Trystero” was a way of talking about something morally irredeemable. Trystero must have stood for whatever the “Other” of God was—whatever force orchestrated the world of those who were not the chosen ones.
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Oedipa asks Bortz what Trystero was, and Bortz explains that it’s an ongoing question he addresses in his next book, which will come out the following year. He pulls out an old book entitled An Account of the Singular Peregrinations of Dr. Diocletian Blobb among the Italians, Illuminated with Exemplary Tales from the True History of that Outlandish and Fantastical Race and tells Oedipa to check out Chapter Seven. She finds what she’s looking for in Chapter Eight, in which Dr. Blobb is crossing the mountains in a Thurn and Taxis mail coach and gets attacked by black-clad horsemen on the shores of “the Lake of Piety.” The men killed everybody but Blobb, whom they warned of “the wrath of Trystero” and asked to spread the news back to England.
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As Oedipa continues investigating Trystero over the next several days, she pieces together enough fragmentary information to get a basic idea of its history. During a period of political turmoil in central Europe during the late 1500s, a new government kicked the Baron of Taxis and the nobleman who ran the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly out of their official positions. They replaced the latter with a nobleman named Jan Hinckart, but a mentally unstable Spanish man named Hernando Joaquín de Tristero y Calavera started claiming that he was the true heir to Hinckart’s lordship. Hinckart lost control of Thurn and Taxis, and sensing an opportunity to take revenge for his alleged disinheritance, Tristero decided to start a rival mail-carrying operation and have his couriers wear all black.
The next day, Oedipa goes to Driblette’s funeral with Bortz, his wife, and his graduate students. She contemplates the disappearance of identity and the vanishing of the self, and she begs Driblette’s spirit to send her some clues from the last moments of his life. Oedipa wants to know if his death had something to do with Tristero, if she could have saved him, and why he added the last two lines to his act the night she saw the play.
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Oedipa cannot find any more information about Tristero, but Bortz speculates about its history. During a weak period for Thurn and Taxis in the mid-1600s, Bortz thinks that Tristero’s leaders would have debated what to do. He imagines Thurn and Taxis not fully understanding Tristero and believing that some mystical force was haunting them. Bortz even speculates that Tristero caused the French Revolution, but he admits that he’s making all of this up.
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Oedipa gradually gives up on the Tristero story. She does not follow up with Genghis Cohen, Mr. Thoth, or the publisher of The Courier’s Tragedy. She also tries not to talk about Driblette and ignores Bortz’s offer to introduce her to another Wharfinger expert. However, she does meet Mike Fallopian again at The Scope. She explains all her findings and asks why his mail club does not use W.A.S.T.E. Mike replies that maybe they just haven’t found the right opportunity yet, and that maybe Oedipa is really caught up in a complex hoax designed for her by Inverarity. He tells her to seriously double-check her evidence. Oedipa accuses Mike of hating her and recommends that he visit Winthrop Tremaine’s store.
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One day, Genghis Cohen calls Oedipa and asks her to visit. He shows her an old stamp with the muted horn symbol that reveals the true meaning of W.A.S.T.E.: “We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire.” This stamp is not in Cohen’s catalogue, but it appears on a mysterious a piece of paper glued into the beginning of the book. Oedipa notices that the catalogue was from Zapf’s Used Books, so she goes to San Narciso to investigate.
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Oedipa is not surprised to learn that Inverarity owned the building where Zapf’s Used Books was located and the theater where Driblette put on The Courier’s Tragedy. Inverarity is the common denominator in every aspect of the Tristero story—he even funded the college where Professor Bortz teaches. Oedipa wonders whether Inverarity could have paid or persuaded everyone she has met so far to participate in his scheme. In fact, she realizes, Tristero could be a dream, a real secret mail network, an insane hallucination, or an unbelievably elaborate conspiracy created by Inverarity. Given these “symmetrical four” alternatives, Oedipa hopes that she is insane. She spends the night frozen in terror, realizing that nobody can save her from her paranoia.
Oedipa grows mysteriously ill over the next few days—she visits a random doctor, who suggests that she is pregnant. Genghis Cohen calls with new clues, including an article about Tristero splitting up during the French Revolution. Many of Tristero’s patrons despised the Revolution and decided to support Thurn and Taxis because it was an aristocratic institution. After they were outvoted, they abandoned Tristero, whose remaining members mostly immigrated to the United States in 1849 and 1850. Oedipa tells Professor Bortz, who suggests that Tristero would have been crushed by the American government’s postal reform, and that maybe its members disguised themselves as Native Americans to deliver mail. This explains all the imperceptibly modified, counterfeited stamps that Genghis Cohen has found.
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Genghis Cohen calls Oedipa to explain that Pierce Inverarity’s stamps will soon be auctioned off, and some secretive party has signed up to bid on the collection remotely, by mail. The “super-secretive” bidder has hired C. Morris Schrift, a well-known agent. They want to examine Inverarity’s stamps, the auction’s lot #49, but the auction house has refused. Cohen wonders if this secret bidder might work for Tristero and want to cover up the evidence of its existence.
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That night, Oedipa gets drunk at Echo Courts and then recklessly goes driving on the freeway. Soon, she is calling The Greek Way from a phone booth and asking for the man from the Inamorati Anonymous. She introduces herself as Arnold Snarb, and she tells the man everything she has learned about Tristero since she met him in San Francisco. She asks if their meeting was arranged by Tristero and pleads with him to tell the truth. But the man says that “It’s too late […] For me,” and he hangs up.
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Oedipa looks around and realizes that San Narciso is no longer special: it is just one more part of “the American continuity of crust and mantle.” Walking by the railroad tracks, she decides that Pierce Inverarity might have owned the whole city, but he was just part of the broader pattern of American life and inequality. His “legacy was America,” and Oedipa has inherited this legacy, even though she is not named in his will. She remembers Pierce’s insatiable desire to grow his business but wonders how he felt writing his will, knowing that it would all end one day. Did he really make her his executor just to pester her, to take revenge? Did he want to pass on the secret of Tristero? Or is he just dead, and is it a total coincidence that he led Oedipa to the Tristero?
Oedipa thinks about how these railroad tracks connect with so many other ones throughout the country. The squatters living in the abandoned trains and delivering mail for Tristero probably don’t even know what Tristero was supposed to inherit. So many Americans are forced to live in the shadows, Oedipa realizes: they live in a world parallel to, but also inseparable from, Inverarity’s country of profit and consumerism. They wander around, waiting for a miracle, embodying the legacy of Tristero. Oedipa wishes that she could give them all a share in Inverarity’s estate, but she knows that the lawyers would stop her.
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Oedipa yearns to join Tristero, because she, too, is waiting for a new version of the world. There must be something better than the binary choice between the mainstream and the underground, which she feels hanging over her head like a computer’s ones and zeros. Everything can be part of the conspiracy (one) or meaningless (zero). Maybe the disinherited Tristero lurks behind the legacy of America, or maybe there is only America, which invites paranoia but doesn’t mean anything.
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Oedipa calls C. Morris Schrift, the auction agent, who explains that his client has changed his mind and will be going to the auction. At the auction house, Oedipa meets Genghis Cohen, who admits that he wants to bid on some of the stamps himself. Cohen is also excited that the prominent auctioneer Loren Passerine is going to be “crying”—or selling off the day’s items. Oedipa briefly thinks about making a scene to unmask the secret bidder, but instead she goes to her seat and look out at the crowd. The auctioneer smiles at Oedipa and moves his arms like an exotic priest or “descending angel.” The book ends with Oedipa “await[ing] the crying of lot 49.”
