CoL49 (5) A Metaphor of God knows how many parts

[Robin Landseadel]

I have kept going back to this novel—more, much more, than any other  
book—due a defective response to all the "detective mystery" elements  
of the story. It's positively Pavlovian, the way I kept seeking  
resolution of the "mystery" of the book, as if there were something  
important at the bottom of it all, a riddle that must be solved.

In CoL49 we are presented with a veritable Cluster-Fuck of mysteries,  
all centered around the fictive word/signifier "Trystero"/muted  
posthorn and Oedipa Maas, the personified fictive center of the tale.   
These mysteries are set in two well-known sites for the classic noir  
fictions of the first half of the twentieth century—San Francisco &  
Los Angeles. The parallels between classic noir fiction and Oedipa's  
quest become particularly explicit in this chapter:

	She busrode and walked on into the lightening morning, giving
	herself up to a fatalism rare for her. Where was the Oedipa
	who'd driven so bravely up here from San Narciso? That
	optimistic baby had come on so like the private eye in any long-
	ago radio drama, believing all you needed was grit,
	resourcefulness, exemption from hidebound cops' rules, to
	solve any great mystery.

	But the private eye sooner or later has to get beat up on. This
	night's profusion of post horns, this malignant, deliberate
	replication, was their way of beating up. They‡ knew her
	pressure points, and the ganglia of her optimism, and one by
	one, pinch by precision pinch, they were immobilizing her.
	PC 100/101

It looks as if we are trapped without exit in an endless Perry Mason  
episode. As we re-trace our steps through San Narciso & San Francisco  
[over & over again, the reader seriously looking for clues, a guide  
post, a center] we reach the stage where we realize that all the clues  
are pointing away from the center:

	Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine
	chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike
	"clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make
	up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that
	might abolish the night.
	PC 95

	Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being
	presumed, perhaps fantasied by Oedipa, so hung up on and
	interpenetrated with the dead man's estate. Here in San
	Francisco, away from all tangible assets of that estate, there
	might still be a chance of getting the whole thing to go away
	and disintegrate quietly. She had only to drift tonight, at random,
	and watch nothing happen, to be convinced it was purely
	nervous, a little something for her shrink to fix. She got off the
	freeway at North Beach, drove around, parked finally in a steep
	side-street among warehouses. Then walked along Broadway,
	into the first crowds of evening.

	But it took her no more than an hour to catch sight of a muted
	post horn. . .
	PC 88

. . . and from this point on, things really do get curious.  John  
Johnson* points out how ". . . Oedipa encounters not only a series of  
signs she is obliged to decipher, but also a series of men whose role  
in the novel is hardly less important." Oedipa will encounter an  
anonymous agent of "IA" or Inamorti Anonymous who offers up the tale  
of the founder of IA, a Yoyodyne Executive who was replaced by a  
computer. This is followed by the scene of Oedipa's encounter with CIA  
member Jesus Arrabal before herself becoming a carrier/spy for the  
Trystero. The plot of the novel is branching outward. . .	

	Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of God knew how
	many parts; more than two, anyway. With coincidences
	blossoming these days wherever she looked, she had nothing
	but a sound, a word, Trystero, a to hold them together.
	PC 87

This is full of a sense of spycraft, the auras of secret disclosures  
embedded in the story's language as it shifts between a spy's or  
private eye's revelation of "plots" and the religious language that  
surrounds revelation. The reader [hopefully] realizes that we have  
entered a semantic trap, that the projector at the center of the  
planetarium has already started to malfunction,  projecting mythical  
and previously unknown constellations, perhaps made up of the same old  
stars in the same old places, perhaps not.  Resolution of the mystery  
at the center of the story is not possible because the central mystery  
of Trystero is its very lack of a center, its constant branching  
outward towards the unverifiable detail. Trystero is a fiction related  
in part to such fictions as Borges · and Italo Calvino. Like Borges'  
endless [or nearly endless] Library of Babel, Oedipa has entered into  
a mystery without end, a labyrinth without exit.

Strange to note how many echos of "Trystero" there are in Against the  
Day. Particularly notable is the presence and historical importance of  
the town of Trieste in that book. I suspect the historical trails  
Pynchon was pursuing in CoL49 are continued in AtD. I cannot explain  
why our beloved author puts so much energy into such arcane historical  
pursuits as philately or the anarchist activities of the turn of the  
century°—though it should be pretty obvious by now that the nominal  
"good guys" in his books are usually from the fringes and central  
control is usually demonstrated as fascistic and frowned upon in some  
way. Without pigeonholing the dude, i'd say it's safe to say that OBA  
rode in on the same bus as Kerouac, Ginsburg and Dylan even if he  
ended up tearing out of town in his own, now untraceable, mode of  
transport. In any case, the hallmarks of Trystero's enterprise—an  
alternate mode of communication that "they" can't get to and tales of  
the sort of folks in need of this alternate mode of communication— 
proliferates and expands and gets rather refined, detailed and  
specific in Against the Day.

Moving as far away as possible from quests for potentially relevant  
and specific historical conspiracies in The Crying of Lot 49 and  
sliding over to po-mo country, we return to John Johnson's "Toward the  
Schizo-Text: Paranoia as a Semiotic Regime in The Crying of Lot 49."  
This essay [anthologized in "New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49*]  
demonstrates the how and why of CoL49's enduring resistance to  
interpretation:

	As a text, however, The Crying of Lot 49 must keep open a set
	of logically disjunctive possibilities, which means that it must
	behave as if they were all simultaneously true: all the
	interpreter-priests are "right" about the nature of the reality they
	interpret; Tristero is, at once, a practical joke, an historically
	verifiable conspiracy, and a figment of Oedipa's imagination; it
	is both the underground system that opposes the capitalistic
	one which Pierce's empire represents, and it structurally mimes
	the dominant order. In this sense, Pynchon's novel is a schizo-
	text, and presents a disjunctive synthesis of diverse and
	incompatible views. It can do this, finally, because of its
	underlying coherence as a specific regime of signs, or a
	structure not dependent upon any particular point of view, but
	on the endless proliferation of signs calling for endlessly
	repeatable acts of interpretation.

It is the riddle of the Sphinx,  the Greek Way to paradox—away from  
the comfort and security of the psychologists couch and on to Oedipus'  
road of no return. Oedipa is blind to the center of the riddle because  
she is the center of the riddle.

Oedipa will wander into the night world of San Francisco, summer of  
'64, in search of Trystero, a metaphor of God knows how many parts,  
members, secret admirers. Thoughts of conspiracy boil in her head,  
full tilt mania looms:

	She knew a few things about it: it had opposed the Thurn and
	Taxis postal system in Europe; its symbol was a muted post
	horn; sometime before 1853 it had appeared in America and
	fought the Pony Express and Wells, Fargo, either as outlaws in
	black, or disguised as Indians; and it survived today, in
	California, serving as a channel of communication for those of
	unorthodox sexual persuasion, inventors who believed in the
	reality of Maxwell's Demon, possibly her own husband, Mucho
	Maas (but she'd thrown Mucho's letter long away, there was no
	way for Genghis Cohen to check the stamp, so if she wanted to
	find out for sure she'd have to ask Mucho himself).
	PC 88

In a few hours, Oedipa will be seeing the sign of the Trystero—the  
muted posthorn—nearly everywhere.

	So she got up after awhile and left The Greek Way, and entered
	the city again, the infected city.

	And spent the rest of the night finding the image of the Trystero
	post horn. In Chinatown, in the dark window of a herbalist, she
	thought she saw it on a sign among ideographs. But the
	streetlight was dim. Later, on a sidewalk, she saw two of them in
	chalk, 20 feet apart. Between them a complicated array of
	boxes, some with letters, some with numbers. A kids' game?
	Places on a. map, dates from a secret history? She copied the
	diagram in her memo book. When she looked up, a man,
	perhaps a man, in a black suit, was standing in a doorway half
	a block away, watching her. She thought she saw a turned-
	around collar but took no chances; headed back the way she'd
	come, pulse thundering. A bus stopped at the next corner, and
	she ran to catch it.

	She stayed with buses after that, getting off only now and then
	to walk so she'd keep awake. What fragments of dreams came
	had to do with the post horn. Later, possibly, she would have
	trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed.
	PC 94/95

Sorting is a lot more work than it's generally cracked up to be. Not  
being sure of what is real and what is being imagined starts up a  
particular mode of insanity, the manic mode—one whole hell of a lot of  
work, let me tell you. On one level or another Oedipa is cracking up,  
losing her boundaries, becoming permeable.

I'm reminded of the work of Iannis Xenakis, whose electronic  
assemblages often isolate and sample industrial noises, train-yard  
sounds, the grindings of heavy gears, brakes seizing, in an anti- 
musical sonic collage of post-industrial melancholy. Each sound, in  
its temporal isolation and constant repetition becomes a sign, signs  
that are then manically repeated:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTlKINcSTBE

Xenakis 's early musique concrete is among the first sampled musics.  
He said of one of his works that it was the attempt to musically  
demonstrate an onset of madness. What we are witnessing here is  
Oedipa's onset of madness, presented as an overload of signs, one sign  
in particular, the glyph of a sound-maker being silenced, a symbol  
that circles back to a central tenant of serious magic, one that our  
beloved author notes in his introduction to "Stone Junction":

	. . . by this point, all of these possibilities have become equally
	true, for we have been along on one of those indispensable
	literary journeys, taken nearly as far as Daniel -- through it is for
	him to slip along across the last borderline, into what
	Wittgenstein once supposed cannot be spoken of, and upon
	which, as Eliphaz Levi advised us -- after "To know, to will, to
	dare" as the last and greatest of the rules of Magic -- we must
	keep silent.

http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_essays_stone.html

====================================================

* http://tinyurl.com/l459mt

‡ Next post

° Though I find plenty of correspondences from Pynchon family history.  
Some—like William Slothrop/Pynchon—are relatively obvious, others—like  
the revolutionary era William Pynchon's diaries or the older Thomas  
Ruggles Pynchon of Trinity College might not be so easy to track.

http://books.google.com/books?id=H9ifxr5vvBIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=william+pynchon

http://tinyurl.com/ksc2xs

·Helpfully noted in "Borges and Pynchon: The Tenuous Symmetries of  
Art" by Debra A. Castillo, & included in "New Essays on The Crying of  
Lot 49", Patrick O'Donnell ed. , along with John Johnson's "Toward the  
Schizo-Text: Paranoia as Semiotic Regime in The Crying of Lot 49." See  
*, as above.