The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49

by

Thomas Pynchon

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Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Analysis

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.
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon

Throughout The Crying of Lot 49, protagonist Oedipa Maas searches for something to liberate her from her utterly boring life as a housewife. Indeed, this is why she gets fixated on the Tristero conspiracy, pursues an affair with a lawyer named Metzger, meets rogue scientists like John Nefastis, and obsesses over the will of her deceased ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, which she is supposed to execute. Although she never quite finds the renewed sense of purpose and identity she seeks, she does identify with what this salvation will require—in fact, Pynchon uses Oedipa’s quest to present an entire theory of change and redemption. He argues that anything people see as a closed system—like a person’s life, a particular society, or a physically sealed-off box—can only be changed by something outside it. It takes “another world’s intrusion into this one” for this world to fundamentally change. This is why Oedipa becomes fixated on things like trash, disinheritance, and marginalized people: she realizes that her salvation will come from the people and things that society discards and sees as external to its closed system.

Pynchon combines scientific and religious theories to present a vision of revolutionary change in this novel. Namely, he argues that a closed system cannot change unless something outside the system affects it. The concept of entropy becomes a metaphor for Oedipa’s dissatisfaction when she meets John Nefastis, a rogue engineer who builds a boxlike machine based on a thought experiment called Maxwell’s Demon. Nefastis believes that “sensitive” people can guess how the air inside the box is distributed and predict which of the pistons connected to the box will move. Essentially, entropy is a measure of disorder, and the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy does not decrease over time in a closed system. This means that heat spreads out evenly throughout a space, rather than all converging in one area. But Nefastis thinks that if someone can communicate with the box, its thermodynamic entropy can decrease. Hot air would collect in one part of the box, lifting one of the pistons. Oedipa tries and fails, but Nefastis’s principle of change becomes a key metaphor for her quest: entropy decreases only through the intrusion of something outside the system. A decrease in entropy means that things become more diverse rather than more homogeneous, just like Oedipa wants to give up the cookie-cutter life of a suburban housewife and instead define her own identity by doing something original. Later in the book, Oedipa rediscovers the same principle when she encounters Jesús Arrabal, an anarchist activist she first met years before in Mexico. She remembers Arrabal proclaiming that anarchy requires a miracle, which means that “another world’s intrusion into this one.” This offers a humanistic and religious parallel to Nefastis’s view of entropy: a closed system will not change unless something it excludes acts upon it.

Throughout the novel, Oedipa chases novelty and change by searching for people, organizations, and ideas that society has rejected—and that can act on the system from which they have been excluded in order to change it. Specifically, she tries to find value in the waste people discard and recover the legacy of people who are disinherited. The clearest example of this search is Oedipa’s quest for the mail conspiracy called Tristero, which forms the backbone of the novel’s plot. Oedipa first learns about Tristero through an underground mail system called W.A.S.T.E., a name that references its own marginalization. When Oedipa later follows a W.A.S.T.E. deliveryman, she sees him collect mail from an actual waste bin and eventually take it to John Nefastis’s house. W.A.S.T.E. is able to function in secret and challenge the dominant order precisely because nobody is looking for an antigovernment conspiracy in the trash, where people discard things that have lost their value or purpose. Similarly, according to the professor Emory Bortz’s elaborate theory of Tristero, the organization operates underground because it was forced into hiding. In the 16th century, a mysterious Spanish man named Hernando Joaquín de Tristero y Calavera claimed that he was the rightful heir to Thurn and Taxis, Europe’s predominant postal company. Tristero’s followers dressed in black and raided Thurn and Taxis mail carriers in order to fight their leader’s disinheritance. While many people saw these raids as a myth or random acts of God, in reality they were the disinherited Tristero’s response to the system that cast him out. While investigating Tristero, Oedipa also sorts through the scattered legacy left behind by Pierce Inverarity, her wealthy ex-boyfriend, who has no obvious heir. Oedipa realizes that, had they not broken up, she would be Inverarity’s heir. She is disinherited, but she is also putting together Inverarity’s estate and shaping his legacy—or the system that has cast her out. The novel is full of other references to the transformative power of the outcast and marginalized, like Jesús Arrabal’s name. “Jesús” explicitly recalls the Christian messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, and “Arrabal” is a Spanish word for a poor or informal suburb—the literal margin of a city.

At the novel’s conclusion, Oedipa has not found any miracles, but she finally recognizes that she needs one. Curiously, the stamp collector Genghis Cohen finally reveals what W.A.S.T.E. means: “We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire.” W.A.S.T.E. represents a faith in miracles, so it is only sensible that Oedipa searches for miracles in the trash. Just as she searches for redemption through the Inverarity will that she might have inherited, W.A.S.T.E. awaits redemption for the disinherited—Tristero—which is able to reclaim its rightful place in the world only because the world has cast it out and stopped paying attention. The novel ends with Oedipa searching for Tristero at the auction where these stamps are being sold. The auctioneer gestures like a “priesthood of some remote culture” or a “descending angel,” perhaps signaling that a miracle is about to arrive, and then Oedipa ends the novel the same way that readers begin it: “await[ing] the crying of lot 49.”

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Change, Redemption, and Marginalization ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Change, Redemption, and Marginalization appears in each chapter of The Crying of Lot 49. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Change, Redemption, and Marginalization 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 Change, Redemption, and Marginalization.
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:
Chapter 2 Quotes

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 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:

“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:

She remembered John Nefastis, talking about his Machine, and massive destructions of information. So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking’s funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned. She stared at it in wonder. It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Wendell “Mucho” Maas, John Nefastis, The Sailor
Related Symbols: The Nefastis Machine, Drugs and Alcohol
Page Number: 104-5
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

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.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Professor Emory Bortz
Related Symbols: The Tristero Muted Horn Symbol
Page Number: 131-2
Explanation and Analysis:

“It’s time to start,” said Genghis Cohen, offering his arm. The men inside the auction room wore black mohair and had pale, cruel faces. They watched her come in, trying each to conceal his thoughts. Loren Passerine, on his podium, hovered like a puppet-master, his eyes bright, his smile practiced and relentless. He stared at her, smiling, as if saying, I’m surprised you actually came. Oedipa sat alone, toward the back of the room, looking at the napes of necks, trying to guess which one was her target, her enemy, perhaps her proof. An assistant closed the heavy door on the lobby windows and the sun. She heard a lock snap shut; the sound echoed a moment. Passerine spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture; perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49.

Related Characters: Genghis Cohen (speaker), Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity
Page Number: 151-2
Explanation and Analysis: