Beyond literally representing the shadowy Tristero organization, the muted post horn symbol also represents the impossibility of objective interpretation—an idea that’s embodied by Oedipa Maas’s uncertain, confusing investigation into Tristero. Just like the reader, Oedipa Maas spends much of the novel struggling with the very process of interpretation. Eventually, she learns that the Tristero symbol is a muted version of the post horn from the Thurn and Taxis emblem, representing Tristero’s origins in a rebellious offshoot of Thurn and Taxis. But during most of the book, Oedipa is convinced that the symbol is meaningful despite having no evidence about what it means or where it comes from. In other words, while the horn symbol is still just one among many suspicious images that could be taken as meaningful clues, Oedipa actively picks it out and gives it the importance that it later takes on.
Later, when Oedipa spends a night in San Francisco, the symbol suddenly surrounds her. She sees it on the Inamorati Anonymous man’s lapel pin, in a laundromat’s window, and in several other places that could not all possibly be part of Tristero’s mail conspiracy. By emphasizing Oedipa’s struggle to identify the horn symbol’s meaning, Pynchon explicitly shows her struggle to form a coherent explanation of the Tristero phenomenon as a whole. Of course, at this point in the novel, the reader is likely to be having the same problem: Pynchon’s ambiguous clues make it nearly impossible to separate the meaningful signal from the distracting noise. Everything can mean something, something else, or nothing at all—while the post horn symbol could mean Tristero, it could also mean that Inamorati Anonymous has a wide membership in San Francisco, or its appearance could just be a coincidence. The horn thus represents the idea that interpretation is always subjective and that explanations are always in the eye of the beholder.
The Tristero Muted Horn Symbol Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49
He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew
Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn,
And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.
No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,
Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.
Under the symbols she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world?
“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.”
It may have been some vision of the continent-wide power structure Hinckart could have taken over, now momentarily weakened and tottering, that inspired Tristero to set up his own system. He seems to have been highly unstable, apt at any time to appear at a public function and begin a speech. His constant theme, disinheritance. The postal monopoly belonged to Ohain by right of conquest, and Ohain belonged to Tristero by right of blood. He styled himself El Desheredado, The Disinherited, and fashioned a livery of black for his followers, black to symbolize the only thing that truly belonged to them in their exile: the night. Soon he had added to his iconography the muted post horn and a dead badger with its four feet in the air (some said that the name Taxis came from the Italian tasso, badger, referring to hats of badger fur the early Bergamascan couriers wore). He began a sub rosa campaign of obstruction, terror and depredation along the Thurn and Taxis mail routes.
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.
The Tristero Muted Horn Symbol Symbol Timeline in The Crying of Lot 49
