Set in 1960s California, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 follows the unassuming housewife Oedipa Maas after she discovers that her ex-boyfriend, the wealthy real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, has recently died under mysterious circumstances and named her as the executor (or “executrix”) of his last will and testament. As she sorts through the assets that Inverarity has left behind, Oedipa gradually uncovers clues that point her to a centuries-long, anti-government conspiracy of mail carriers called Tristero (or Trystero). Although Oedipa dedicates all her time to figuring out these clues, she never figures out precisely what Tristero is, if it has anything to do with Inverarity, or if it even exists at all. Eventually, she realizes that she might have just become a paranoid conspiracy theorist, pursuing a fantasy with no basis in reality. However, Pynchon uses Oedipa’s fruitless investigation to show how everyone interprets the world just like Oedipa investigates Tristero and readers analyze literature. Namely, people select clues, extract significance from them, and weave meanings together into a narrative that forms their sense of reality. But Pynchon ultimately argues that these narratives are only ever subjective and tentative—while interpretation is an essential part of both living and reading, there can be no singular, authoritative truths about the meaning of life or art.
Oedipa Maas pursues the shadowy Tristero organization as a detective and reader would, identifying clues that she weaves together into a grand conspiracy theory. The Tristero conspiracy takes shape when Oedipa coincidentally discovers clues ranging from a symbol representing a muted horn (which she later learns is Tristero’s emblem) to a reference to a “tryst with Trystero” in the fictional 17th-century play The Courier's Tragedy. As Oedipa analyzes these clues, she convinces herself that a secret mail system called Tristero is delivering messages all around the world, and she starts treating everything with suspicion. For instance, when her husband, Mucho, sends her a letter with a typo on the envelope, Oedipa even wonders if he could secretly be part of Tristero. Like a detective investigates a crime or a dedicated fiction-reader looks for symbolism in a novel, Oedipa develops a theory about Tristero by interpreting clues and then connecting them to “project a world”—or build a story about their underlying meaning. By turning Oedipa into a literary detective, Pynchon clearly connects her search for Tristero to his reader’s search for meaning in this novel. While investigating different editions of The Courier’s Tragedy for inconsistencies, Oedipa meets Professor Emory Bortz, who tells her a plausible but unverifiable story about Tristero forming in 16th-century Europe. Like any elaborate conspiracy theory, Bortz’s explanation finally links all of Oedipa’s clues into a coherent story. But this does not automatically make it true—it is still just an unproven interpretation based on ambiguous clues that might not mean anything at all.
Oedipa eventually realizes that she will never learn the truth about Tristero and starts to question the very practice of interpretation, which she realizes can never lead people to absolute truths. Late in the book, Oedipa spends a night in San Francisco, where her experiences and dreams start blending together and she starts seeing the Tristero horn symbol absolutely everywhere. No longer able to distinguish real clues from imagined ones, she realizes that Tristero could just be a figment of her imagination—or even a complicated trick that Inverarity invented before his death. In fact, these interpretations are just as reasonable as Oedipa’s stubborn belief that Tristero is real, which shows that there are usually multiple, equally plausible interpretations of the same set of facts. Ultimately, Oedipa never solves the puzzle of Tristero. Rather, she learns to accept that “transcendent meaning” is unachievable, whether about Tristero or about anything else. In Pynchon’s view, people only make subjective guesses about the world when they interpret it, and they must eventually accept that they cannot know whether they have guessed right.
Pynchon also uses the novel’s language and style to show his readers that their interpretations are never certain or verifiable. Pynchon’s character names and allusions are famously satirical and opaque. Some are easy to interpret (“Oedipa Maas” references the Greek tragedy Oedipus), but it is never clear whether these references are meaningful. Others force multiple conflicting interpretations: “Inverarity” suggests “into variety,” “inverse rarities,” the Sherlock Holmes villain Moriarty, and more. Without definitive answers, readers must decide whether to view these names as significant, and if so, what to make of them. Pynchon specifically uses The Courier’s Tragedy to mock his readers’ search for meaning. The play briefly mentions Tristero, but its director Randolph Driblette insists that it “isn’t literature” and “doesn’t mean anything.” Although Oedipa tries to hunt down the origins of the play’s line about Tristero, only some versions of the script include it. Oedipa ultimately admits that it is impossible to distinguish the original version of the play from the deliberately altered ones. But Pynchon suggests that Oedipa’s paranoid obsession with interpreting the play, which leads her nowhere, is just as legitimate a way to approach a work of art as Driblette’s insistence that it “doesn’t mean anything” in the first place. People can view anything in the world—works of literature, events, coincidences, and so on—as meaning nothing at all, or as hiding a complex web of hidden meanings. But Pynchon argues that neither view is more correct than the other.
In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon reveals how people inevitably find and interpret clues in order to understand the world, but he shows that this process will never yield the “transcendent meaning” that people seek. By constantly shifting between absurd parody and serious narrative, Pynchon forces his readers to ask themselves whether his clues are meant to be taken literally at all. For good reason, critics have frequently characterized this novel as intentionally ambiguous and resistant to interpretation: in order to make some sense of it, readers must first give up on “getting it right” through a single interpretation at all.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning ThemeTracker
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49
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.
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.
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.
Outside a fugue of guitars had begun, and she counted each electronic voice as it came in, till she reached six or so and recalled only three of the Paranoids played guitars; so others must be plugging in.
Which indeed they were. Her climax and Metzger's, when it came, coincided with every light in the place, including the TV tube, suddenly going out, dead, black. It was a curious experience. The Paranoids had blown a fuse.
Things then did not delay in turning curious. If one object behind her discovery of what she was to label the Tristero System or often only The Tristero (as if it might be something’s secret title) were to bring to an end her encapsulation in her tower, then that night’s infidelity with Metzger would logically be the starting point for it; logically. That’s what would come to haunt her most, perhaps: the way it fitted, logically, together. As if (as she’d guessed that first minute in San Narciso) there were revelation in progress all around her.
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.
“You came to talk about the play,” he said. “Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn’t literature, it doesn’t mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare.”
“Who was he?” she said.
“Who was Shakespeare. It was a long time ago.”
Under the symbols she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world?
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.
