Background Information

As I began venturing Chapter 5 of Thomas Pynchon’s, The Crying of Lot 49, I knew I would need to have Wikipedia by my side in order to understand Pynchon’s words. It is simply too much information, that Pynchon’s narrator uses to build up his complex sentences, creating a unique paragraph out of simple, straight-forward content. As Oedipa runs away from Nefastasis’ home, Pynchon states that she “pattered down the steps into the street, flung a babushka over her license plate and screeched away down Telegraph” (87). What just happened to Oedipa is in essence simple, she ran away from the house of a man that was thinking of having sex with her, but Pynchon takes his readers to the next level. He incorporates a lot of background information.



I had already noticed in this sentence that I was kind of lost in Pynchon’s words. I concluded mid-sentence that I didn’t want to get lost as I had previously done in early chapters so I decided to not take the lame shortcut of continuing reading. I instead stopped and typed babushka in Wikipedia’s search engine. Babushka ended up being a headscarf scarf (as seen in the picture) or the title of a grandmother in Russia (as seen in the picture). This may seem to be one of the lame puns in the book, one that Pynchon wasn’t necessarily meaning to incorporate but it surely forces the young, unexperienced reader to use the available means in order to make sense out of his words.

Still, the sentence bothered me a little bit, I hadn’t quite deciphered everything I had the means to decipher. Telegraph was what was bothering me. I decided to type in Telegraph street in Wikipedia, finding out that it is a street “that begins, at its southernmost point, in the midst of the historic downtown district of Oakland, California and ends, at its northernmost point, at the southern edge of the University of California, Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California.” From experience, I knew Pynchon knew his way around words, history and literature. Pynchon actually chose a particular, important street in California to put the house of one of his secondary characters to live in. California is known for being as avant gard and weird as this writer.