The Crying of Lot 49 (published 1966), is a book in some respects simpler in structure to V., and therefore commensurately easier to read. (Pynchon though does not seem to prize the relative lucidity and economy of this work as much as many of his reviewers; in the introduction to Slow Learner he identifies The Crying of Lot 49 as a story "which was marketed as a `novel,' and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then.") The Crying of Lot 49 has only one protagonist, another quester with the quest-hero's resonant name of Oedipa, and only one line of action, which remains resolutely chronological. Readers are thus largely spared the task of making connections within the story and left to observe the spectacle of the hero making her own connections which is to say either discerning them in or projecting them onto a satirically envisioned landscape of Southern California at mid-century. The parodic quality of V. is if anything intensified in The Crying of Lot 49, where Oedipa Maas (the surname means "more" in Spanish and is close to "measure" in German) is joined by Manny DiPresso, Stanley Koteks, Genghis Cohen, and a rock group called the Paranoids. Manfred Puetz suggests in his study The Story of Identity that Pynchon's characters tend to be stereotypical and "curiously one-dimensional" precisely because of the interpretive dilemmas in which they find themselves: "they remain caught in their situations" and "act out the same obsessions in compulsive repetitiveness." Certainly the metaphors of entrapment that confine Oedipa also define her. She is most memorably a princess in a tower weaving a tapestry that comes to constitute the world. Like V., The Crying of Lot 49 is concerned with the "plot" of history, embodied in the force that might be behind a spectral underground association called the Tristero. The novel is also more explicit than V. in its assertion of decoding activities as characteristic of scientific thinking and to this end uses the concept of entropy as an aspect of both physics and information theory. As Ann Mangel notes in an essay appearing in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, "By building his fiction on the concept of entropy, or disorder, and by flaunting the irrelevance, redundancy, disorganization, and waste involved in language, Pynchon radically separates himself from earlier twentieth-century writers, like Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce." But this antimodernism becomes productive, a critique of the modernist rage for order and in the process an exemplary postmodernism, inasmuch as it sees in the order of closed artistic systems an analogue of the conditions for entropic rundown. Mangel continues, "the complex, symbolic structures [that the modernists] created to encircle chaotic experience often resulted in the kinds of static, closed systems Pynchon is so wary of." |
