Although mail might seem like an unremarkable feature of modern life, it represents the social interconnectedness that Oedipa is searching for, and it stands in contrast to the electronic, immaterial media technologies that were increasingly taking over Americans’ lives in the 1960s, when The Crying of Lot 49 was written and set. The complex web of signs that draws Oedipa into the Tristero conspiracy in this novel centers on letters and postal systems. Whereas these new media recycle absurd stories like Cashiered and form adults whose primary relationships are to a screen rather than another person, the mail systems in this novel are an essential infrastructure connecting many Americans who send letters or packages back and forth. This service is easy to forget only because it has taken an immense amount of work over generations to create a robust network of mail-carriers across an enormous country. But now, mail exists in the shadows because it is not as convenient as the telephone or as glamorous as the radio or television. Curiously, however, many of the letters sent in this novel—like the notes Mike Fallopian sends to his friends and the letter Mucho writes to Oedipa in the third chapter—do not say much of anything at all. In fact, these empty letters point out the dwindling importance of direct, tangible social connections, and Oedipa’s quest to unmask the Tristero system can be seen as a search for the authentic human connections are fading fast all around her.
Mail Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49
“It’s the principle,” Fallopian agreed, sounding defensive. “To keep it up to some kind of a reasonable volume, each member has to send at least one letter a week through the Yoyodyne system. If you don’t, you get fined.” He opened his letter and showed Oedipa and Metzger.
Dear Mike, it said, how are you? Just thought I’d drop you a note. How’s your book coming? Guess that’s all for now. See you at The Scope.
“That’s how it is,” Fallopian confessed bitterly, “most of the time.”
“Then the watermark you found,” she said, “is nearly the same thing, except for the extra little doojigger sort of coming out of the bell.”
“It sounds ridiculous,” Cohen said, “but my guess is it's a mute.”
She nodded. The black costumes, the silence, the secrecy. Whoever they were their aim was to mute the Thurn and Taxis post horn.
[…]
“Why put in a deliberate mistake?” he asked, ignoring—if he saw it—the look on her face. “I've come up so far with eight in all. Each one has an error like this, laboriously worked into the design, like a taunt. There's even a transposition—U. S. Potsage, of all things.”
Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream […] Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you […] all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.
Those, now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the alternatives. Those symmetrical four. She didn’t like any of them, but hoped she was mentally ill; that that’s all it was. That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.
Mail Symbol Timeline in The Crying of Lot 49
