Sold Out
Sold Out
Book Categories |
The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.
Title: The Crying of Lot 49 (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)
Sagebrush Corporation
Item Number: 9781417788958
Publication Date: October 2006
Product Description: Full Name: The Crying of Lot 49 (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition); Short Name:The Crying of Lot 49
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9781417788958
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9781417788958
Rating: 4.5/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/89/58/9781417788958.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
David Ferretti
reviewed The Crying of Lot 49 (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) on February 23, 2011Appetite for Deconstruction
Most readers approach a complex novel, like a scientist approaches the world or a detective approaches a crime - with an appetite for knowledge and understanding, and a methodology designed to satiate their appetite.
"The Crying of Lot 49" ("TCL49") presents a challenge to this type of quest for two reasons.
One, it suggests that not everything is knowable and we should get used to it.
Second, the novel itself fictionalizes a quest which potentially fails to allow the female protagonist, Oedipa Maas, to understand the situation confronting her.
Arguably, Pynchon serves up a work that reveals more about method than it does about the subject matter of the quest, the world around us.
Who Dunnit?
If this were a who-dunnit, we don't end up learning who dunnit.
It is all hunt and no catch.
If we are seeking the metaphysical truth, we do not find it.
The truth might even have escaped or got away.
It might never have been there in the first place.
Or there might not be something as simple as the truth.
To this extent, "TCL49" might be a novel about futility, rather than success.
Get It?
Inevitably, this affects the way any review approaches the novel.
It is not simply a matter of whether the reviewer "got it" and conveys this to their readers.
Even if you think you got it, there is no guarantee that your understanding reflects what Pynchon intended (behind the scenes).
You could be wrong. You might even be making the very mistake that "TCL49" might be trying to caution us against.
Pierce Inverarity's Will
The novel commences with Oedipa learning that she has been appointed Co-Executor of the Estate of California real estate mogul and ex-lover, Pierce Inverarity.
An Executor is a person who inherits the assets and liabilities of a person (the Testator) on their death and has to distribute the net assets of their Estate (their "Legacy") to the Beneficiaries identified in the Testator's Will (their "Last Will and Testament").
Often, people only find out that they have been appointed an Executor when the Testator has died and their Will has been located.
However, it is a good idea to let somebody know during your lifetime that you wish to appoint them as your Executor, because they might not wish to accept the burden after your death.
It is implied in "TCL49" that Pierce has actually died (the legal letter says that he died "back in the spring"), but it does not automatically follow from learning about your appointment that the Testator has died.
This is My Last Will and Testament
A Will is literally an expression of your intentions (your will) with respect to your property. You give instructions or directions to your Executor.
It is often called a Testament, the etymology of which is related to the Ten Commandments or Testimony issued by God.
In a very loose metaphorical way, the novel sets up Pierce's Will as the Will of God, something which Oedipa is and feels compelled to obey.
There is a potential clue in her reaction to the legal letter:
"Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible."
Whether or not Pierce might be symbolic of God, Oedipa's actions in the novel are dictated and driven by his Will.
Pierce Inverarity's Name
Pierce's name is also pregnant with implication, if not necessarily definitive meaning.
The noun "arity" means the number of arguments a function or operation can take; in logic, it determines the number of inferences that may be deduced from a particular fact.
"Verarity" is not a word in its own right, but it is quite close to "veracity", which has lead some commentators to infer that it suggests a concern with the truth.
When you add the prefix "in-" (as a negative) to it, the word could be concerned with the absence of truth.
When you add the first name, Pierce, to the equation, some have suggested that it implies the piercing of the truth (or untruths).
Alternatively, the prefix "in-" might mean "into" which might imply the piercing or penetration of the truth.
There are also suggestions that "Inver" might be a pun on the word "infer" or the process of inference.
Sign of the Times
I haven't seen any references to the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (different spelling) who made an enormous contribution to the field of semiotics (the study of signs and sign processes).
If there is any link, then Pierce's full name might imply "unreliable or untruthful signs".
Charles S. Peirce also recognised that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits (as long ago as 1886).
This concept is the foundation of "logic gates" and digital computers (of which, more later):
"All Manner of Revelations"
When Oedipa discovers her obligations as Executor, she is initially skeptical:
" '…aren't you even interested?'
'In what?'
'In what you might find out.'
As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations.
Hardly about Pierce Inverarity, or herself; but about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away."
Originally Oedipa saw herself as a pensive Rapunzel-like figure, waiting for someone to ask her, in the sixties, to "let down her hair".
Pierce arrives, but is not quite what she is looking for. Despite a romantic holiday in Mexico, she remains in her tower:
"Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.
"Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey.
"If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"
The Tristero System
Oedipa's appointment as Executor is the beginning of a series of revelations (or, in the Biblical sense, Revelations) that "end her encapsulation in her tower".
The trigger for these revelations is Pierce's stamp collection:
"… his substitute often for her - thousands of little colored windows into deep vistas of space and time… She had never seen the fascination."
The stamps turn out to be "forgeries", postage stamps used not by the official postal service, but by an underground rival or illegitimate shadow called "Tristero".
No sooner does Oedipa learn of the existence of Tristero, then she starts to find evidence that it still exists on the streets of California: its symbol is a muted post horn, adding a mute to the horn of its traditional private enterprise rival in nineteenth century Europe, Thurn and Taxis.
Her quest is to learn the significance of Tristero and how much Pierce knew about it.
"W.A.S.T.E."
Tristero's modern American manifestation is "W.A.S.T.E.", which we eventually learn stands for "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire".
It delivers correspondence between various disaffected underground, alternative and countercultural groups, bohemians, hippies, anarchists, revolutionaries, non-conformists, protesters, students, geeks, artists, technologists and inventors, all of whom wish to communicate with each other without government knowledge or interference.
The postal system confers privacy, confidentiality on their plots and plans.
Its couriers wear black, the colour of anarchy.
Yet, from the point of view of Tristero, it is not the content of the correspondence that matters, it is its delivery.
It's almost as if these companies are early proof that the medium is more important than the message.
All postal systems grew from early attempts to guarantee safe passage of diplomatic correspondence between different States and Rulers in Europe.
Indeed, Tristero's rival, Thurn and Taxis, was an actual postal service and is still an extremely wealthy family in Germany.
A World of Silence
Silence is important to any non-conformist or underground movement, not only from the point of secrecy, but in the sense that Dr. Winston O'Boogie (A.K.A. John Lennon) subsequently maintained that, "A conspiracy of silence speaks louder than words".
It is the desire for silence that unites the underground in opposition to the Government and the mainstream political culture:
"For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U. S. Mail.
"It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery.
"Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, un-publicized, private.
"Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world."
[Note the idiomatic but ambiguous use of the expression "God knows how many", as if God or Tristero or Pierce did actually know how many.]
From Aloof Tower to Underground
Oedipa is a relatively middle class, middle aged woman, who married a used car salesman and DJ for a radio station called KCUF, after her affair with Pierce.
Her quest drags her from her tower and exposes her to another side of life, just as life in America (well, Berkeley, San Francisco) was starting to get interesting (1966).
She is a stranger in a strange land, having grown up and been educated during the conservative, Cold War 50's:
"...she had undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat among not only her fellow students but also most of the visible structure around and ahead of them, this having been a national reflex to certain pathologies in high places only death had had the power to cure, and this Berkeley was like no somnolent Siwash out of her own past at all, but more akin to those Far Eastern or Latin American universities you read about, those autonomous culture media where the most beloved of folklores may be brought into doubt, cataclysmic of dissents voiced, suicidal of commitments chosen, the sort that bring governments down."
While Oedipa is ostensibly trying to get to the bottom of Tristero, she is actually going on a journey of self-discovery.
The narrative forces her down from her tower of withdrawal to street-level engagement and then ultimately into the underground.
Bit by bit, she ceases to define herself in terms of her husband or Pierce, but in terms of her own identity.
Like the symbol of Tristero, she has been silenced, her horn has been muted, she has had to stand by her man and be secondary.
Her adventure frees her from the chains of middle class conformity.
It is a preparation for a new life of autonomy.
Scientific Method
Oedipa's methodology is that of a flawed scientist or detective.
She uses logic to make sense of what she perceives.
She constantly asks the question "why?"
She builds and applies logical systems where she processes information in a simplistic binary "either-or", "zero or one" fashion (pre-empting computers), according to whether it proves a point or disproves it.
She applies the "Law of the Excluded Middle": "Everything must either be or not be." (Or the Law of Noncontradiction: "Nothing can both be and not be.")
She learns things and processes them as best she can.
But she misses opportunities and fails to investigate clues she ought to. She is human. She is fallible.
She reads old books with different typesetting and sees "y's where i's should've been".
"I can't read this," she says.
So she learns the limits of logic. And she learns the appeal of nonconformity and freedom and communication.
Despite the masculine nature of the metaphor, she removes the mute from her horn.
The Crying of Lot 49
The eponymous Crying of Lot 49 is the auction of the forged Tristero stamps that takes place in the last pages of the novel.
Oedipa discovers that a major bidder (possibly associated with Tristero) has decided to attend the auction personally, rather than bid remotely "by the book".
The novel ends with the anticipation of Oedipa and the reader discovering the identity of the bidder for the stamps.
Is it Tristero? Is it even Pierce?
Pynchon deprives us of this revelation.
This has frustrated many readers. However, it suggests that this was not the most important revelation that was happening in the novel.
The real revelation is Oedipa's discovery of herself.
She sees "I" where previously she has seen only "why".
At the same time, she discovers America and its diversity, which is far greater than the white bread community who are content with the U.S. Mail:
"She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America."
Ultimately, it is Pierce's and Pynchon's will that the novel and her journey end this way.
Login|Complaints|Blog|Games|Digital Media|Souls|Obituary|Contact Us|FAQ
CAN'T FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR? CLICK HERE!!! X
You must be logged in to add to WishlistX
This item is in your CollectionThe Crying of Lot 49 (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)
X
This Item is in Your InventoryThe Crying of Lot 49 (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)
X
You must be logged in to review the productsX
X
Add The Crying of Lot 49 (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition), , The Crying of Lot 49 (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) to the inventory that you are selling on WonderClubX
X
Add The Crying of Lot 49 (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition), , The Crying of Lot 49 (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) to your collection on WonderClub |