A Grouping Of Concepts

As I continued venturing in Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, I tried to focus my attention on anything that seemed to be a satirical perception of Oedipa’s surroundings. As Oedipa travels to San Narciso, CA (obviously making reference to San Francisco) Pynchon states that it was “like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts – census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway” (13). This was my favorite sentence in the whole chapter because I felt it resembled my own way of thinking about people, events and objects. My brain, maybe all human brains, works by making a profile of the subject, which includes perceptions, characteristics and facts about it, thus making it easy to compare one subject to the other. It becomes a checklist kind of thing which works well when managing a database of a substantial quantity of the people I meet on a daily basis. The only difference with the description of San Narciso is that the author created a satirical over-simplification and generalization of a description, something Pynchon does exemplarily in this chapter.

This categorizing and grouping of concepts may be a too simplistic explanation for what we humans think about our species. It may be that our incapability to accept our simple, animal-like backgrounds which leads us to believe that we make decisions by completing difficult mathematical processes and tedious explanations to events. We expect humans to be of a complex nature to explain our superiority, but as I write these sentences I think we lean towards a simple brain framework which serves our cause-effect, grouped concepts kind of thinking. I like how Pynchon uses the grouping of concepts strategy to make fun of the monotonous feeling modernistic cities expel. The bottlenecked history of our world seems to be further closing, maybe even creating a single checklist of grouping characteristics. This may well be an explanation of the beauty of diversity.