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.

The Road To Immortality

In Chapter 4 of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 I noticed how the author targeted immortality and gave his insight about achievement-related immortality. Pynchon states that we are taught that America’s great inventors were those individuals which followed the rule of “only one man per invention“ (70).This idea of being taught that the big inventors received all the credit and that their lives revolved around these achievements ties with the idea of being left alone to discover, thus building up a perfect roadmap for inventors to follow. Pynchon shows that this is not true in the big companies, where great inventors get “stuck on some ‘project’ or ‘task force’ or team’ and started being ground to anonymity” (70). Pynchon makes fun of how we are an achievement-based society, where problems occur due to the necessity to be someone due to our actions, our obligation as individuals in a community to do something we are good at, hoping to receive all the credit for the innovative ideas we can come up with.

Pynchon also talks about how we think our death will make us immortal in a Gilgamesh kind of way, how we believe we will become immortal due to our actions. Oedipa states that it is as “if the dead even do persist, even in a bottle of wine” (79). It is this immortality belief, the patent-holder idea of achieving an immortal name which Pynchon talks about. His target is Oedipa who is characterized by her thinking simple concepts over and over again. We are shown how this whole thing of action driven immortality signifies nothing but a desperate, lame strategy to be something we can’t achieve otherwise, immortality. It is this kind of thoughts that build up Pynchon’s writing. The abstract reasoning and comical scenes build on a fact-based framework which gives the reader an opportunity to have a relaxed time with the book. How will Pynchon continue Oedipa’s adventures to become a business expert? What will become Pynchon’s satire main target?

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.

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.

Working Your Way Out

As the novel, The Crying Of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon began, I was lost in the multiple stories and non-linear narrations. As I realized that I was lost, halfway through the second paragraph, I decided to go back and try to give it a second shot. I then understood. The book is basically the story of a woman, Oedipa Mass, who just received a letter from a law firm about her ex-boyfriend’s death. His will, asked for her to manage his business, something she truly doesn’t know how to do, so she consults with her husband (who is a disk jockey). Pynchon then narrates that her husband recommends her to go to their lawyer, Mr. Roseman who suddenly asks her to run away with him, having no effect whatsoever on her.

These weird paragraphs captured my complete attention in a unique, torturous fashion. I never expected to be tormented by the words of a book that looked so simple, so weak and little, but it happened. Pynchon continued his narration with Oedipa, who now believes she was like Rapunzel and her ex-boyfriend, Pierce tried to climb up her hair but it was “when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell, on his ass” (11). Now I definitely knew something, Mrs. Mass was trying to run away from something that tormented her. She was trying to not let things build up so readily, so perfect and dreamed of. She was afraid of perpetuity, of living her whole life as the one who was rescued from the tall tower by the mighty, rich man.

Pynchon supports this conclusion in the next couple of sentences as he states that “all that had gone on between them had really never escaped the confinement of that tower” (11). It was this defining moment of the relationship between the two individuals that lead to their breakup. Pierce was simply too busy buying the world for Oedipa that she decided to leave him, but she was ironically left his business to manage. The fake hair became her way out of the unlivable, charmless situation she had gotten into with Pierce, and it was the mighty tower, the one which didn’t let him in, her powerful ego. I wonder where will Pynchon lead us with this story and what his final message is going to be. It felt a bit like reading a modern fairytale written by someone locked up in a mental institution.

The Unit Definition

The final chapter of The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, gives us new insight into what he targeted his book to do and the definition of the life units he uses to expose his thinking. As Dawkins talks about the relationship between parasitical individuals with their hosts he states that “a parasite whose genes aspire to the same destiny as the genes of its host shares all the interests of its host and will eventually cease to act parasitically” (245). It basically shows how the future, the immortality of a parasite, will make the dependant individual share and use his energy to fulfill the reproduction and living requirements of the other until they become an individual. This reminded me of the beginning of Michael Jackson’s, This Is It, where the artists that were casting to be part of Michael Jackson’s last performances in London expressed their idolizing feelings towards him. The obligation to make everything come out perfectly for Michael Jackson seemed to be one of the huge themes in the movie, a similar trait to the parasitical creatures Dawkins describes.

A concept that I found extremely interesting in this chapter was the idea of bottlenecked individuals which started and ended (when reproducing) in a single celled survival machine. Dawkins mentions that “vehicles that evolved a bottlenecked life prospered, and became more discrete and vehicle-like” (265). The species which were able to become bottlenecked individuals, those which reproduce by single cell identical duplication, work in an efficient unit-like fashion. This helps mutations to work their way through generations and maintain that unit idea in the living creature. The individual’s existence (what maintains genes from going back to the primeval soup environment) is the dependence of replicated cells to their cousin cells.

Defining key terms for this book, limiting his words for the reader to fully appreciate his descriptions, seem to play a vital role in Dawkins’ writing. One of the important concepts to understand is the unit he uses for life and evolution. In this concluding chapter, Dawkins explains how the community and individual reproduction are too general to observe the specifics in phonotypical traits and how the ultimate concept to understand life’s units is the replicators. As his description of the “immortal coils” ends, he states that “the only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator” (266). This statement doesn’t need any more explanation or supporting from Dawkins’ side, it has become obvious through the examples he exposed in his writing that we are truly empty membranes without these magical, but indeed selfish individuals.

Macbeth: The Example Of The Unfortunate Memes

The concept of memes that Dawkins gives his readers in Chapter 11, Memes: the new replicators, is one I truly enjoyed and closely related with the adventures of Macbeth. The definition Dawkins gives for memes, as being parts of culture which “propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (192). The idea of having a new evolutionary process in the concepts that surround us, even in our beliefs (as Dawkins so passionately explains his conclusions on believing in a God due to the immense psychological appeal) is something I find very interesting due to its modernistic approach to evolution.

Dawkins sticks to the needed characteristics he talked about in Chapter 2 in order for an entity to become a replicator, which are: “longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity” (194). The author goes through each one of these characteristics explaining how thoughts are truly a form of replicators. Dawkins is able to maintain a Formal-Informal register even as he talks of how it was troublesome to conclude how memes could have copying-fidelity. “Here I must admit that I am on shaky ground. At first sight it looks as if memes are not high-fidelity replicators at all” (194). He writes as if he is truly trying to think, in a conversational mode to the reader in order to decipher the concept. This makes the piece flowing, entertaining and engaging, giving us a moment to rest our racing, about-to-explode mind. At the same time unfolding how Dawkins comes up with the interesting conclusions we have enjoyed throughout the book. This break is short however, for we are immediately driven to continue moving our eyes and minds at higher velocities through explanations that bring Dawkins to conclude that memes are high-fidelity replicators. Our highly creative author states that you have to break thoughts into specific pieces and understand that a thought ends up being an interpretation of a previous idea which carries the essence but not the identical, specific details.

This immortality of ideas and concepts that the author explains is vastly more influential than the gene immortality for reproducing individuals. Dawkins states that if “a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on [. . .] if the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain” (192). This rapid movement of ideas is obviously more stable than genes which suffer a 50% loss in each generation. I began thinking of the meme immortality entity in the story of Macbeth where we see that the witches prediction influences not only Macbeth’s doings but those of his wife and his followers. The whole plot revolves along the communication of Macbeth’s future. The decisions that are made due to this predestination build up the tragedy which ultimately serves as an example of this same kind of immortality. The immortality of thought, the amazing power of all spoken and written means, the ultimate replicators of life.