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.
Media, Communication, and Human Relationships Theme Icon

Throughout The Crying of Lot 49, protagonist Oedipa Maas constantly fights an overwhelming sense of isolation. The exaggerated characters she meets have plenty to say but very little interest in actually connecting with her, and she forms no meaningful relationships throughout the entire book. Pynchon links mass media to this breakdown in human connection by showing how it distracts people and prevents them from actually communicating with one another in purposeful, significant ways. Instead of developing reciprocal relationships with others, in the 20th century, people develop individual relationships to the mass media. When they do try to communicate with one another, the novel’s characters model this communication on the media, and they end up sending empty messages that only multiply their sense of isolation. For Pynchon, the rise of mass media clearly contributes to a broader social collapse in interpersonal communication, which in turn makes it difficult for people to form genuine relationships and ultimately leaves them isolated and unloved.

The Crying of Lot 49 is full of communication without content, which reveals the fundamental emptiness in characters’ relationships. Oedipa and her husband, Mucho, view each other primarily as annoyances—although Oedipa is away from home for most of the book, the spouses do not miss each other at all. Oedipa writes Mucho rambling, unsubstantial letters that communicate nothing but a sense of obligation. She does not mention the affair she has started with a lawyer, Metzger, but only because she assumes that Mucho “would know.” What goes unspoken proves far more important than the nonsense they actually do exchange, which shows how communication technology does not actually improve the quality of communication in this novel. Oedipa later meets the engineer Mike Fallopian, who runs an underground mail system that lets his coworkers write to each other in secret. This sounds like an innovative way to improve communication, but actually, the group just mails basic greetings back and forth because they have nothing to say to one another. While they want to be able to communicate in principle, they do not actually communicate in practice, which suggests that they seek a kind of human connection that they have forgotten how to cultivate.

Pynchon explicitly ties his characters’ lack of meaningful human communication to the growth of mass media, which cuts people off from one another and becomes a substitute for genuine, reciprocal relationships. At the beginning of the second chapter, Oedipa first meets Metzger, the lawyer who is supposed to help her execute the last will and testament of her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. In a caricature of Los Angeles entertainment culture, Metzger used to be an actor but gave it up to be a lawyer, which he says is practically the same thing. After briefly trying to have a conversation, Metzger and Oedipa get drunk and watch television instead. They stumble upon Metzger’s old movie, Cashiered, and Oedipa gets to know the man next to her more through the television than through an actual conversation. During the movie, Metzger repeatedly pesters Oedipa, who grows progressively more irritated until they have lackluster sex. But Oedipa and Metzger do not really connect: they used Cashiered as a substitute for communication, and both of them are really only interested in their individual sexual satisfaction. The television allows them to go through the motions of a one-night stand without actually communicating or putting in any effort. Similarly, when Oedipa reencounters Mucho later in the book, he immediately starts interviewing her on the radio as part of his job as a DJ. They share no affection and have no interest in reconnecting: Mucho even intentionally misreads Oedipa’s name as “Edna Mosh,” which dramatizes the distorting effects of mass media.

Oedipa spends the whole novel searching for an authentic connection with another person—preferably a man—but she is unsuccessful because everyone she meets has cut off communication with other human beings. In part because they cannot find an adequate medium for two-way communication, all the novel’s men live in isolation, without any meaningful relationships. In the novel’s opening sequence, Oedipa compares herself to Rapunzel, locked in a tower and cut off from the rest of humanity. She yearns to escape, especially through relationships with the novel’s male characters. But all of these men permanently lose their capacity for connection: Oedipa’s husband, Mucho, and her therapist, Dr. Hilarius, go insane; the theater director Randolph Driblette kills himself; Metzger disappears; and even an old sailor Oedipa briefly meets in San Francisco does not show her any sympathy. All of these men end up completely isolated, Oedipa realizes, because they are unable or unwilling to open legitimate reciprocal communication with other people. For instance, Mucho only talks at people on the radio, and Dr. Hilarius cannot stand listening to his patients’ problems all day without sharing his own worries and insecurities. In San Francisco, Oedipa meets a man who belongs to the Inamorati Anonymous, a group that views love as an unhealthy addiction and hopes to cure people of it. Its members live in total isolation and never form lasting relationships with anyone. In fact, they carefully restrict communication because they are afraid of falling in love. Although the Inamorati Anonymous is group is yet another example of isolation in the novel, their very existence shows that they understand how open lines of communication are also the solution to the lack of caring relationships in the world of this novel.

Pynchon does not argue that mass media alone explains the collapse of human relationships in 20th-century America, but he does draw a clear link between Oedipa’s fight to escape loneliness and her inability to form relationships that are not entirely structured by media (whether Mucho’s radio station, Fallopian’s secret mail service, or Metzger’s old movies). In a sense, the search for Tristero—a centuries-old service that enables two-way communication through mail—can be seen as a metaphor for Oedipa’s desire to reestablish genuine communication and make genuine human relationships possible in a world that has been emptied of both.

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The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Media, Communication, and Human Relationships 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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Media, Communication, and Human Relationships 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 Media, Communication, and Human Relationships.
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:

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

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.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Metzger, The Paranoids
Page Number: 29-30
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

“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:

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: