In the entropic world of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa seeks to become a “sensitive”: literally, a psychic who can help sort molecules in a Demon Box, and metaphorically, a woman who can sort through the noise of misinformation to discern the true scope of Tristero. Although she fails at the literal application of the concept, her metaphorical pursuit of the truth is quite similar to Lauren’s hyperempathy. In their attempts to locate their selves within fragmented realities, both women must see and experience the worlds through others’ eyes as means of survival. No sooner does Oedipa learn of the existence of Tristero, then she starts to find evidence that it still exists on the streets of California: its symbol is a muted post horn, adding a mute to the horn of its traditional private enterprise rival in nineteenth century Europe, Thurn and Taxis. The Crying of Lot 49 follows Oedipa Maas, a disgruntled housewife living in the fictional Northern California suburb of Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, as she traces the footsteps of her deceased ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity and begins to uncover a vast conspiracy of renegade mail-carriers called Tristero. At the beginning of the novel, Oedipa receives a letter from Inverarity’s lawyer, Metzger, who explains that Inverarity has died and chose Oedipa to execute his last will and testament. A wealthy businessman who practically owned the sprawling, soulless Los Angeles suburb of San Narciso, Inverarity has left behind a gigantic estate of investments and real estate holdings. Oedipa is baffled: she last heard from Pierce a year ago, when he briefly called, greeted her in several absurd accents, and then hung up. The title and lyrics of the song "San Narciso" by Faded Paper Figures refer to the fictional city featured in the novel. [26] The main event that is echoed in the play is that a group is savagely murdered and their bones are sunk at the bottom of a lake. Weirdly, Oedipa has recently heard a story from Manny Di Presso about a bunch of American GIs who were massacred in Italy during World War II and who were thrown in a lake.

Oedipa, speculating to herself after seeing Roseman, realizes that she had always hoped to achieve some sort of escape through her relationship with Pierce. However, she never had actually escaped, and she now does not know what exactly she wanted to escape from. As the chapter ends, Oedipa imagines that she had been a type of Rapunzel trapped in a high tower waiting for someone to ask her to let her hair down. Pierce had tried to climb her hair up to her, but she imagines that he actually ended up falling down once her hair turned out to be only a wig. Analysis Tristero, also spelled "Trystero" throughout the book, is a (fictional) secretive organization of mail carriers. It has historical Roots in the Thurn and Taxis Postal System in the Holy Roman Empire. Thurn and Taxis was a real, private postal system run by a wealthy family in the 19th century. Pynchon takes this piece of history and creates Tristero as a counterculture alternative.The song "Looking for Lot 49" by The Jazz Butcher alludes to the novel in its title and theme of postal services. [11] 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. Oedipa’s pain is her constant worry that Pierce has manufactured a game for her, that her will has been, quite literally, bent toward his will. This might suggest another clichéd female character manipulated by a man, but the novel is more complicated than that. Readers looking for a dynamic female protagonist will be pleasantly surprised by Pynchon’s treatment of Oedipa: she is neither romanticized nor sexualized; in fact, her sexuality is a source of power. Thrust into the shadow of Tristero, a multinational postal conspiracy, she doesn’t waver. She fights. Arguably, Pynchon serves up a work that reveals more about method than it does about the subject matter of the quest, the world around us. An Executor is a person who inherits the assets and liabilities of a person (the Testator) on their death and has to distribute the net assets of their Estate (their "Legacy") to the Beneficiaries identified in the Testator’s Will (their “Last Will and Testament”).

I heard that," Pierce said. "I think it's time Wendell Maas had a little visit from The Shadow. " Silence, positive and thorough, fell. So it was the last of his voices she ever heard. Lamont Cranston. That phone line could have pointed any direction, been any length. It’s quiet ambiguity shifted over, in the months after the call, to what had been revived: memories of his face, body, things he'd given her, things she had now and then pretended not to have heard him say. It took him over, and to the verge of being forgotten. The shadow waited a year before visiting. But now there was Metzger's letter. Had Pierce called last year then to tell her about this codicil? Or had he decided on it later, somehow because of her annoyance and Mucho's indifference? She felt exposed, finessed, put down. She had never executed a will in her life, didn't know where to begin, didn't know how to tell the law firm in L. A. that she didn't know where to begin. The Phone Company (tpc.int), established by Carl Malamud and Marshall Rose in 1991, used the post horn of the Trystero guild as its logo. [17] The installation called the San Jose Semaphore, on top of the Adobe World Headquarters in San Jose, contained a riddle between 2006 and 2007 which, when solved, resulted in the text of the novel. [21] Oedipa’s husband Wendell “Mucho” Maas comes home and starts complaining about his job as a DJ at the KCUF radio station. Annoyed, Oedipa remembers that Mucho hated his old job as a used car salesman even more. In the middle of the night, Oedipa gets a call from her therapist, Dr. Hilarius, who asks her to take psychedelic drugs as part of an experiment. (She refuses.) In the morning, Oedipa’s lawyer, Roseman, advises her about the will. Oedipa reflects on how isolated she feels in her stagnant marriage and boring suburban life. She feels like Rapunzel, trapped in a tower, unable to escape. Pierce's handsome lawyer, Metzger, meets Oedipa in her hotel room. They watch a movie Metzger starred in when he was a child actor. During the movie, Oedipa sees commercials for some of Pierce's absurd business ventures, including a neighborhood specifically designed for scuba divers and cigarettes with filters made of bone.

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If the story seems all over the place and hard to follow, that's okay! It's important to remember that The Crying of Lot 49 is a postmodernist novel, so bizarre plot lines are to be expected. Postmodern literature became very popular in the 1960s and 1970s and is characterized by metafiction, historical and political references, intertextuality, unrealistic plots, and unreliable narration. Pynchon uses the apparently aimless plot to satirize both dominant culture and counterculture. Randolph "Randy" Driblette – Director of The Courier's Tragedy by Jacobean playwright Richard Wharfinger and a leading Wharfinger scholar; he deflects Oedipa's questions and dismisses her theories when she approaches him taking a shower after the show; later, he commits suicide by walking into the Pacific before Oedipa can follow up with him but the initial meeting with him spurs her to go on a quest to find the meaning behind Trystero. Given that this level of disorientation and confusion is something of Pynchon’s signature; that, as Richard Poirier has pointed out, it is unlikely that any of Pynchon’s characters could read – let alone write – a Pynchon novel, perhaps the most immediate mystery surrounding The Crying of Lot 49 is why anyone would ever wish to read the book at all. Or, to put it more crudely: if the mould on the oregano is there simply to demonstrate how everything in the novel is a possible dead end what, then, is there for the reader to pursue? The Simpsons does Pynchon