Human Replacement

In Chapter 3 of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, I ventured through the difficult situations Oedipa Maas has now encountered when receiving her ex-boyfriend’s business and lawyer. Pynchon opens the chapter by characterizing Oedipa as a lonely person who was used by the men in her life, never making herself happy (Cinderella metaphor). The author says that “the stamp collection Pierce had left, his substitute often for her – thousands of little colored windows into deep vistas of space and time” (31). This subtlety used by Pynchon when informing the reader about the dwellings of his characters serves as a tool to get us inside the story, to make his words necessary instead of making long, useless descriptions. In one sentence, we are both informed of the poor relationships Oedipa has lived and of Pierce’s personality. It also helps us laugh about human replacement, an important target of Pynchon’s satire. He clearly makes fun of our materiality and selfishness, our poor relationships which he shows try to get something out of everything and everyone.

Another crucial moment in Chapter 3 happens after the end of the Jacobean play Oedipa and Metzger go to. Pynchon states that as Oedipa heard the word Trystero it “hung in the air as the act ended and all lights were for a moment cut; hung in the dark to puzzle Oedipa Maas but not yet to exert the power over her it was to” (58). Pynchon is clearly foreshadowing a crucial event in the book. An event I wasn’t able to not look up, I went on and typed Trystero in Google’s mighty search engine which swiftly turned up with results. My mouse went on and clicked on the first result, The Crying of Lot 49 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I immediately noticed that this Trystero business must truly mean something for Pynchon since it appeared in the first, introductory paragraph of Wikipedia’s article of the book. What I found really impressed me. Wikipedia stated that Oedipa found out about a conflict between the two mailing companies, “Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero (or Tristero). The former actually existed, and was the first firm to distribute postal mail; the latter is Pynchon's invention.” I wasn’t expecting this so I immediately closed my browser to not ruin the rest of the book, but now I am really wanting to open it up again, to take a shortcut into Pynchon’s climax.