just finished Tolkiens "Silmarillion" and down for anything. still have two weeks before my George RR Martin stuff arrives

Yeah I think those are both great choices. I've read em both but only once and would like to re read them

great idea

good lecture on the book, if anybody is curious about the postmodernist context...

12. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Anybody finish this yet? I just finished yesterday. I thought we'd be reading the easier book by choosing the one with fewer pages but I was wrong.


SPOILERS BELOW



What do you think the point(s) of the book was? When Oedipa lists the possibilities of the situation as a conspiracy, elaborate joke, whatever, it all comes off as pretty hopeless. It's like somebody talking about the illuminati. There's a large organization out to get you, goes as high up as the government, maybe even god himself. At that point, does it matter trying to resist?

On that note, sparknotes suggests the book tries to capture the turbulence of the 60s. Is Pynchon suggesting the futility of the various resistance groups of the 60s? Or perhaps the futility of regular Americans trying to go back to regular life after the 60s?

If the latter, I thought it was fitting that the horn symbol was all over the place in San Francisco at that time. Oedipa wanders in a haze with these apparent symbols of resistance plastered all over the place, wondering if her experience there was even real, or what it was getting at. She sees it on bikers, veterans, gay people. While the groups all exemplify different ideologies, the lifestyle of resistance, hardship, or changing times is there in a unifying way.

Pynchon is post-modern.

not good with terms, but ya' know what I meant.

Ok. So this thread pretty much got me around to reading the book and I always wanted to read something by Thomas Pynchon. "Gravity's Rainbow", I thought, but then read this thread and got Crying of Lot 49.


SPOILERS AHEAD...


This thing had me laughing by the second page with the mention of the 'Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto' muzak playing in the background of the market. Like the woman in the lecture above said, there are a thousand things to talk about in this book.

From Wiki's article on Postmodernism: "It claims that there is no absolute truth and that the way people perceive the world is subjective and emphasises the role of language..."

And from page 105 of the book itself,   "...the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from.  The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was."

The title itself seems to be a metaphor of something, at first unknown.  The book deals with conspiracies, even though the word "conspiracy' is only seemed to be used toward the end of the book. Earlier there is mention of things being 'sub-rosa' and there is even a metaphor of it used to describe something Bortz says. From page 134, "...should Bortz have exfoliated the mere words so lushly, into such unnatural roses, under which, in whose red, scented dusk, dark history slithered unseen?" There are even actual conspiracy theories surrounding the title of the book itself, which could maybe go into one of the conspiracy threads.

There are so many allusions in the book to historical, literary, pop culture, icons, etc. that it's almost ridiculous since Pynchon seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all kinds of things from Jacobean drama to the minutia of American cartoons. But to anyone who didn't pick up on the mention of 'Humbert, Humbert' by one of the brit-pop band members in the novel, it's a reference to Nabokov's Lolita, which is mentioned in the lecture video above.

Probably one of my favorite moments is when Mr. Thoth (one of the many names 'redolent of meaning': Genghis, Caesar, Hilarius...) is describing his dreams about Porky Pig and the anarchist who appears as only a black figure with eyes, then later of Porky Pig aiding the war effort, appearing in all black. When he's talking to Oedipa, the idea of the Indian/Tristero/Spanish... being able to move at night and without being seen brings up the issue of anonymity, which I hear Pynchon pursued himself. He even appeared in an episode of The Simpsons with a paper bag over his head.



Great, great read.

Another thing are the constant signs (the horn with the trapezoid) and coincidences that Oedipa seems forced to deal with. 'Synchronicities', as it were, a concept first described by Carl Jung, who is somewhat antagonized in the novel by Dr. Hilarius. Although Freud, who the doctor preferred, himself seems to have had his theories discredited by modern critics.

With the synchronicities, coincidences, signs, what-have-you, there is the question of whether there is truth to any of it. Is there something (special) happening there at all? Or is it simply a form of delerium and monomania (Oedipa herself is shown having a hallucination related to Uncle Sam and a Rorschach image when talking on the phone with her therapist.) At the end Oedipa comes close to suicide trying to cope with it all, but she survives and continues her 'quest'. At the auction house she finds herself on the 'inside' of something, something alien to her, and possibly in the presence of what to her is a menacing figure that she pursued and at once seemed to conpire to pursue her.

That idea has definitely crossed my mind. Like he's trying to recreate the cacaphony of overstimulation that you might get simply by living in America, or maybe in any 'developed' country. The Muzak, television characters, pop music, etc. It's all in there. For example how would a foreigner reading the book think about Magilla Gorilla, or Porky Pig? Completely trivial, perhaps, if he/she were given the same context.

However, with Porky Pig, the character Mr. Thoth says that you can't escape it, "It comes into your dreams."(pg.73) It reminded me of the Mother series from Nintendo. This is just a random comparison, but in the Mother (Japanese) series, one of the main villains is a little kid called 'Porky', and he's supposed to be named after Porky Pig, since the creator of the series intended to load the game with references to Americana. But in the American version of the game, which became Earthbound, 'Porky' somehow got translated as 'Pokey', and that's how many Americans who played the game know the character's name.

In Crying of Lot 49 there's mention of how even the mundane can sometimes become something sublime, even transcendent. But like you said, it could also be a sort of test. Some of the references could be meaningless and not really get at the heart of the matter. So, I guess it could go both ways. Maybe it's up to the reader. An American reader, and in this case a Californian reader, might recognize some of the book's references instantly. Also, a more erudite reader might readily understand the context of the Jacobean drama while maybe thinking twice about the television and pop-music references. The book is about trying to come to grips with the unknown and what it means, to some extent. Oedipa, the protagonist, is a self-described Young Republican who's bounding about Southern California in the 60's, after all.

On one of the sites someone listed they come right out and say that a lot of the references, names, puns, etc. are probably just red herrings. Pynchon's way of commenting on how people might try to subtly load the names of people and places with meaning, so he puts it on full blast and it comes off as noise. The real commentary might have to do with communication, cultural/social change, science, and like you put it maybe higher forces that seem out of our control.

The Inamorati, who Oedipa meets anonymously under the name 'Arnold Snarb', shows people who intentionally pursue relationships where the possibiliy of love is rooted out since love became seen as 'the worst addiction' to them, and with Oedipa she seems to lose most of her relationships throughout the book. Maybe this kind of foreshadows the whole end to the 'summer of love' of the 60's. Then there's the fact that the group started with the founder coming across the symbol of the Tristero and whatever it seemed to inspire and communicate to him.

Towards the end of the book when she gets desperate she ends up calling one of the anonymous members of the dating group and tells him on pg.146, "You are...the only one I have." After she communicates to him everything she's learned up until that point  she expects him to reciprocate but he says, "It's too late...for me", for whatever reason. Then the conversation ends with"her isolation complete." On the next page she goes on to have her personal revelation that the legacy that Inverarity might have left behind 'was America.'