The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49

by

Thomas Pynchon

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Themes and Colors
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
Media, Communication, and Human Relationships Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
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.
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon

The Crying of Lot 49 is undoubtedly a novel of the 1960s: its protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is a conservative young housewife who feels stuck in suburban America and seeks an alternative to her boredom by adopting a wild conspiracy theory about an underground group of mail-carriers called Tristero. Oedipa shares the sense of profound alienation that many Americans felt in the 1960s, as their society became increasingly privatized, homogeneous, consumerist, and militaristic. But she also encounters various antiestablishment groups that symbolize famous political and countercultural movements from the 1960s, like the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the hippie subculture. Pynchon satirizes both of these trends: while he points out the absurdity of American consumer capitalism and the danger of privatizing modern technology, he also argues that counterculture replicated the errors of the dominant culture and became absorbed into the very structures it protested.

Pynchon’s characters are exaggerated figures of American consumer capitalism who reveal that economic system’s misguided and inhuman impulses. Pierce Inverarity, Oedipa’s deceased ex-boyfriend who charges her with sorting out his estate, was a stereotypically greedy and egocentric businessman during his lifetime. He owned virtually everything in his hometown of San Narciso, California, and he dealt with nefarious actors like the mafioso Tony Jaguar and the hyper-patriotic defense contractor Yoyodyne. While Pierce never contributed to any identifiable social good, Oedipa realizes that his “legacy was America,” which makes it clear that he stands for the excesses of postwar America’s fully privatized economy. In contrast, Oedipa and her husband, Mucho, represent the disaffected middle class. Stuck at home, Oedipa is profoundly bored and has no meaningful relationships, and Mucho is a depressed radio DJ who feels utterly disconnected and purposeless at work. While Inverarity is busy making millions for no clear reason, Mucho and Oedipa are exhausted and unfulfilled. American capitalism, the novel seems to imply, does not make anybody’s lives any better.

Like Pynchon’s characters, California itself is alienated in this novel, which speaks to the way that modern capitalism and technology create material excess but spiritual poverty. Oedipa experiences San Narciso as “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei.” It is a meticulously planned, soulless, and centerless place covered in smog and full of “unnatural” buildings. Built for efficiency, scale, and production—rather than for human beings to live in—San Narciso’s emptiness is the direct product of Pierce Inverarity’s business empire. And it looks the same as the rest of Southern California, which suggests that businesspeople like Inverarity have developed the whole region for their own investments rather than for people’s actual needs. While destroying California, wealthy Americans reward themselves with inauthentic simulations of reality. One example is Fangoso Lagoons, a ritzy neighborhood that Inverarity builds for rich scuba-divers and fills with imported shipwrecks from the Bahamas and ruined columns from the mythological lost city of Atlantis. Fangoso Lagoons is even built around an artificial lake—although the Pacific Ocean is just around the corner. (Fangoso means “muddy” in Spanish and Italian, which suggests that Pynchon considers it absurd that people would strive to live there.) Fangoso Lagoons demonstrates how consumer capitalism leads people to lose touch with reality by selling them a fantasy.

Having shown how modern America saps meaning from its citizens’ lives and turns the physical environment into a homogeneous wasteland, Pynchon depicts Americans trying to reclaim autonomy by seeking alternatives to the dominant consumer culture. But these alternatives inevitably fail: either they become integrated into mainstream culture, or they fizzle out completely. The most obvious examples of counterculture in this novel are the hippie band the Paranoids and the Tristero postal system. While the Paranoids smoke marijuana and promote free love, they are actually blindly copying the Beatles. The Paranoids’ so-called counterculture, then, is an accessory derived from the dominant culture rather than an actual reaction to it. In contrast, Oedipa imagines the Tristero system as a true alternative to the mainstream. As an underground mail system for secret communication, Tristero could help rebels organize alternatives to mainstream society by circulating pamphlets and petitions, planning protests, and bartering outside of the formal economy. The problem is that it might not exist—and even if it does, Tristero is so secretive that most people cannot use it. Still, the idea of Tristero represents Oedipa’s desire for this kind of underground alternative to her otherwise alienating and suffocating life in modern America. But the fact that she never proves Tristero’s existence suggests that this desire might be impossible to fulfill. The rebellious Yoyodyne scientist Mike Fallopian also develops an underground postal system in this book. But his system proves useless: its members drink together most nights anyway, so they have no reason to write one another letters. Designed to make a statement rather than actually change society, Fallopian’s system also does not present a meaningful alternative to the official mail system and the formalized, impersonal economy it represents. In fact, it outsources the actual distribution of mail to Yoyodyne, so rather than challenging the system, it actually requires corporate capitalism to function. Like all the other countercultural groups in this book, Fallopian’s collective never develops a real alternative to the status quo.

Pynchon critiques the ways in which American consumer capitalism, suburban expansion, and military technology transformed middle-class life into a homogenous, alienating, anti-intellectual slog, but he was not optimistic about the resistance movements of the 1960s. Rather, he saw that the backlash to the backlash (the extreme conservatism of the 1970s and 80s) would just ingrain consumer capitalism further. Now, its ingredients—highways, televisions, suburban homes, and office jobs—are a default lifestyle throughout the United States.

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American Modernity and Counterculture Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49

Below you will find the important quotes in The Crying of Lot 49 related to the theme of American Modernity and Counterculture.
Chapter 1 Quotes

One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity
Related Symbols: Drugs and Alcohol
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:

Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at […] Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity, Wendell “Mucho” Maas
Related Symbols: Cars, Smog, and Freeways
Page Number: 4-5
Explanation and Analysis:

There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair. […] In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity, Wendell “Mucho” Maas
Page Number: 10-11
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway. But it had been Pierce's domicile, and headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed, would set the spot apart, give it an aura. […] Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity
Related Symbols: Cars, Smog, and Freeways
Page Number: 13-4
Explanation and Analysis:

She made the mistake of looking at herself in the full-length mirror, saw a beach ball with feet, and laughed so violently she fell over, taking a can of hair spray on the sink with her. The can hit the floor, something broke, and with a great outsurge of pressure the stuff commenced atomizing, propelling the can swiftly about the bathroom. […] The can collided with a mirror and bounced away, leaving a silvery, reticulated bloom of glass to hang a second before it all fell jingling into the sink; zoomed over to the enclosed shower, where it crashed into and totally destroyed a panel of frosted glass; thence around the three tile walls, up to the ceiling, past the light, over the two prostrate bodies, amid its own whoosh and the buzzing, distorted uproar from the TV set. She could imagine no end to it; yet presently the can did give up in midflight and fall to the floor, about a foot from Oedipa's nose.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Metzger
Page Number: 24-5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Mike Fallopian (speaker), Oedipa Maas, Metzger
Related Symbols: Mail
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

High above the L.A. freeways,
And the traffic's whine,
Stands the well-known Galactronics
Branch of Yoyodyne.
To the end, we swear undying
Loyalty to you,
Pink pavilions bravely shining,
Palm trees tall and true.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity, Mike Fallopian, Stanley Koteks
Related Symbols: Cars, Smog, and Freeways
Page Number: 65
Explanation and Analysis:

“Patents,” Oedipa said. Koteks explained how every engineer, in signing the Yoyodyne contract, also signed away the patent rights to any inventions he might come up with.

“This stifles your really creative engineer,” Koteks said, adding bitterly, “wherever he may be.”

“I didn't think people invented any more,” said Oedipa, sensing this would goad him. “I mean, who's there been, really, since Thomas Edison? Isn't it all teamwork now?” Bloody Chiclitz, in his welcoming speech this morning, had stressed teamwork.

“Teamwork,” Koteks snarled, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.”

“Goodness,” said Oedipa, “are you allowed to talk like that?

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas (speaker), Stanley Koteks (speaker), Pierce Inverarity, Wendell “Mucho” Maas, John Nefastis
Related Symbols: The Nefastis Machine
Page Number: 67-8
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

“Communication is the key,” cried Nefastis. “The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in that box. The demon collects data on each and every one. At some deep psychic level he must get through. The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information. To keep it all cycling. On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving. One little movement, against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over and over with each power stroke.”

“Help,” said Oedipa, “you’re not reaching me.”

“Entropy is a figure of speech, then,” sighed Nefastis, “a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.”

“But what,” she felt like some kind of a heretic, “if the Demon exists only because the two equations look alike? Because of the metaphor?”

Nefastis smiled; impenetrable, calm, a believer. “He existed for Clerk Maxwell long before the days of the metaphor.”

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas (speaker), John Nefastis (speaker), James Clerk Maxwell
Related Symbols: The Nefastis Machine
Page Number: 84-5
Explanation and Analysis:

Looking down at San Francisco a few minutes later from the high point of the bridge’s arc, she saw smog. Haze, she corrected herself, is what it is, haze. How can they have smog in San Francisco? Smog, according to the folklore, did not begin till farther south. It had to be the angle of the sun.

Amid the exhaust, sweat, glare and ill-humor of a summer evening on an American freeway, Oedipa Maas pondered her Trystero problem. All the silence of San Narciso—the calm surface of the motel pool, the contemplative contours of residential streets like rakings in the sand of a Japanese garden—had not allowed her to think as leisurely as this freeway madness.

For John Nefastis (to take a recent example) two kinds of entropy, thermodynamic and informational, happened, say by coincidence, to look alike, when you wrote them down as equations. Yet he had made his mere coincidence respectable, with the help of Maxwell’s Demon.

Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of God knew how many parts; more than two, anyway. With coincidences blossoming these days wherever she looked, she had nothing but a sound, a word, Trystero, to hold them together.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, John Nefastis
Related Symbols: Cars, Smog, and Freeways, The Nefastis Machine
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:

“You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul’s talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet, señá, if any of it should ever really happen that perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle. Like your friend. He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage, redeemed —one of the people. Unmiraculous. But your friend, unless he’s joking, is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to an Indian.”

Related Characters: Jesús Arrabal (speaker), Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:

Oedipa spotted among searchlights and staring crowds a KCUF mobile unit, with her husband Mucho inside it, spieling into a microphone. She moseyed over past snapping flashbulbs and stuck her head in the window. “Hi.”

Mucho pressed his cough button a moment, but only smiled. It seemed odd. How could they hear a smile? Oedipa got in, trying not to make noise. Mucho thrust the mike in front of her, mumbling, “You’re on, just be yourself.” Then in his earnest broadcasting voice, “How do you feel about this terrible thing?”

“Terrible,” said Oedipa.

“Wonderful,” said Mucho. He had her go on to give listeners a summary of what’d happened in the office. “Thank you, Mrs Edna Mosh,” he wrapped up, “for your eyewitness account of this dramatic siege at the Hilarius Psychiatric Clinic. This is KCUF Mobile Two, sending it back now to ‘Rabbit’ Warren, at the studio.” He cut his power. Something was not quite right.

“Edna Mosh?” Oedipa said.

“It’ll come out the right way,” Mucho said. “I was allowing for the distortion on these rigs, and then when they put it on tape.”

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas (speaker), Wendell “Mucho” Maas (speaker), Dr. Hilarius
Page Number: 113-4
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment’s squall-line or tornado’s touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities—storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.

Might Oedipa Maas yet be his heiress; had that been in the will, in code, perhaps without Pierce really knowing, having been by then too seized by some headlong expansion of himself, some visit, some lucid instruction? Though she could never again call back any image of the dead man to dress up, pose, talk to and make answer, neither would she lose a new compassion for the cul-de-sac he’d tried to find a way out of, for the enigma his efforts had created.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis: