Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)

There's so much to talk about, I'll start by listing things I'll not talk about. One, the satire (it's super). Two, the language (also super, and unshowy despite its labyrinths, because the plot it draws and is drawn by is a labyrinth too). Three, America (I don't quite get how Inverarity's legacy is supposed to be this). Four, Freud. Yes, Pynchon names his heroine Oedipa and gives her a "shrink"; yes, this Dr. Hilarius speaks of "'[trying] to submit myself to that man, to the ghost of that cantankerous Jew.'" No, I'm not interested.

Things I am interested in: entropy and Maxwell's demon, metaphors and metaphor-making, words and the Word. And, plot, a notion or possibility or phenomenon against which are set reality, hallucination, and/or fantasy--such is Oedipa's enumeration. I'm not sure where paranoia might fit in this list.

Here's a summary (spoilers ahoy!). Oedipa Maas, Bay Area suburban housewife, learns she was named executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, former lover and California real estate mogul whose assets are vast and wide-ranging. Oedipa gamely sets out to perform her task, and in the process discovers the mysterious Tristero--an underground postal system centuries old which originated in Europe and now in America is used by its dispossessed, its outcast, its fringe elements right-wing and left. The question facing Oedipa, however, is whether The Tristero truly exists--or, put another way, how The Tristero truly exists. Does it exist objectively as the historical, infrastructural system her investigations have uncovered? Or, also objectively, as a massively complex hoax Inverarity designed around her? Or: does it exist only in her mind, a hallucination? A fantasy? Oedipa never answers the question, not in the pages of the book. On its last, Oedipa is at an auction. The forgeries in Inverarity's stamp collection--artifacts of The Tristero--are being sold as lot 49, and a mysterious and powerful bidder has expressed interest in it. Oedipa's there to find out who he is. The novel ends: "The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of Lot 49."

The fun and frustration of reading The Crying of Lot 49 is in its intricacy, and the summary above is as reductive as the writing of it was productive: I have a summary! What I don't have is a clear picture of how the elements I listed further above, from entropy to the Word to paranoia, fit together. But I know they do fit together. It's something to do with how information is knowledge, and knowledge is power, and power turns more information, ever faster, into more knowledge, and better knowledge. Something to do too with how words are power, and metaphors are power, because the more of each you have at your disposal the more sense you can make of the information all around you. ... You can't enact a plot--a coup, a hoax, a novel--without power--your guns, your money, your words. ...

I won't push the fancy farther, because however far I do push I'm not going to reach "the recognition, the Word." (Also because I want to post before midnight!) There's much to Randolph Driblette's metaphor of the planetarium. When Oedipa, having found him backstage after his production of The Courier's Tragedy, is a little too curious about his source text, he gets mad.

“You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but—” a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head—“in here. That’s what I’m for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also.”

(To quote one of Oedipa's fellow theatergoers after the curtain drops on act one: "Ick.")

But Oedipa takes the metaphor to heart. She writes in her notebook, "Shall I project a world?" I think this question might be the linchpin, but it's past! midnight and I shall send this post out into the aether. Or at least onto the interweb.

More posts anon (but probably not on this Pynchon)!

Notes on character: Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49

I actually do have a second, quick post on this novel. It's about Oedipa, because I like her. It took me till the last, sixth chapter though (the book is very short) to feel like I saw her, as more than just the bundle of pluck she's been throughout--has to have been, for Pynchon's plot to work. You'd think I would have seen her in the early scene in the motel room with Metzger, when she has the "marvellous idea" of retreating to the bathroom to put on every single item of clothing in her suitcase: Metzger has, after all, just proposed "'Strip Botticelli.'" Or I really should have seen her when, "shaking, tired," she approaches the old, broken sailor anyway and says, "'Can I help?'" Then sits down next to him, embraces him. "'I can't help,' she whispered, rocking him, 'I can't help.'"

She's lovely. Yet it wasn't either of these moments that made me see she's lovely, but rather two moments in chapter six, the first early on and the second halfway through. Both moments have to do with Winthrop Tremaine, the swastika armband supplier. The first, in his store--

He gave her an insider's wink. "Got this little factory down outside of San Diego," he told her, "got a dozen of your n[-----]s, say, they can sure turn them old armbands out. You'd be amazed how that little number's selling. I took some space in a couple of the girlie magazines, and I had to hire two extra n[-----]s last week just to take care of the mail."

"What's your name?" Oedipa said.

"Winthrop Tremaine," replied the spirited entrepreneur, "Winner, for short."

--is when she asks for his name. It's what she thinks of to say in response to--that: "What's your name?" Back in her car she censures herself, "You're a chicken, she told herself," but she wasn't. The second moment is when she christens Tremaine's store--actually a government surplus outlet--in her last conversation with Mike Fallopian (to whom Metzger, earlier: "You're so right-wing you're left-wing"): "If you need any armbands or more weapons, do try Winthrop Tremaine, over by the freeway. Tremaine's Swastika Shoppe. Mention my name." (To which Fallopian, obnoxiously: "We're already in touch, thanks.")

I can't explain just why these moments stand out to me as ones in which Oedipa is characterized, and characterized as lovely. Something about the matter-of-factness of "What's your name?", and the mock sweetness of "Mention my name." I suppose I might try to make something, related to my earlier post, of how both moments have to do with names (words, the Word), but instead I'll just stop here!

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

First things first. I love the first page with a passion:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought – frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

The prose (the balance of it), the bite (such observations so expressed), the snobbery (named for what it is): these paragraphs make me want to read Fitzgerald's letters. On the other end, I don't have the appreciation for the novel's last page that many other readers share, and the famous last sentence leaves me cold: "And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." But in Speaking of Beauty, Denis Donoghue quotes this last page (the novel's last four paragraphs) and then writes:

There is a problem with this passage. Nothing we have been shown of Nick Carraway makes it likely that he would be able to think those thoughts or entertain those visions. Not for the first time, Fitzgerald steps forward and takes over the narrative. He does Nick’s thinking for him.

I see that Donoghue isn't necessarily implying a value-judgment of Nick's mind, and I acknowledge that he and I are talking about different passages, but when I put the comment above next to another I've heard made of Nick--that he's a middling character from the Middle West--I get defensive on Nick's behalf. The novel is explicitly cast as an account he's writing, and I don't think that that first page is the product of a middling intellect whose most sophisticated thinking must be done by his author.

Plus, Nick is clever in dialogue! To Daisy's inquiry, "Do they miss me?" referring to her friends in Chicago, Nick replies: "The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there's a persistent wail all night along the north shore." Furthermore, considerations of cleverness, intellect, ability aside, I think Nick is very decent. It is true he does admit to a creepy imaginary stalking ("I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd...") and is not obviously being ironic when he ends the chapter a page later on a pompous note: "Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known." I phrased this last complaint as if it would be a higher virtue to be ironic when gravely claiming you're an honest person, but that might be just the thing that makes for his decency: his commitment to honesty, including the honesty of saying he's honest, without irony. And is there any gainsaying that Nick handles the aftermath of Gatsby's death with great decency?

Speaking of Gatsby. Speaking of Gatsby, what Nick has to say about Gatsby's smile is just stunning:

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

On the one hand, we've all seen this smile, at some point in our lives, on the face of someone we've consequently never forgotten (we might even have married them, in which case...); on the other hand, there is a way in which this smile is no more than a verbal construction. Of Nick's, I might emphasize. And I am not sure that Gatsby ever earns this smile, in anything he actually says or does. We just have to take Nick's word for it--Nick, who names his narrative "The Great Gatsby." (Writing the smile versus marrying it--poll time!) My complaint is parallel to Donoghue's, in fact, Nick hasn't earned his last page, Gatsby hasn't earned his smile.

What else? The fantasy of Gatsby's enormous wealth is so well rendered, by which I mean the fantastic quality, fantastic excesses, fantastic manifestations, of it. Vis-à-vis The Great Gatsby "fantasy" isn't elves or Freud--it's the dreamlike, drunk, unreal, super-real quality of his parties, or, to remove the vulgar element, it's the scene where Gatsby flings his closets wide open and tosses shirt after shirt before Nick and Daisy:

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher – shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue.

I don't trust my memory of how Baz Lurhmann filmed this scene, but what I remember is a positive rain of shirts, and lots of light, and Carey Mulligan's upturned, beaming face. Possibly there was slow-motion involved, but I hope not. I had been surprised, I recall, to learn that the movie was going to be made available in 3D--but I shouldn't have been. I should have remembered the fantasy.