CoL49 (5) Inamorati Anonymous

[Robin Landseadel]

We start The Crying of Lot 49 in the center:

	He had believed too much in the lot, he believed not at all in the
	station. Yet to look at him now, in the twilit living room, gliding
	like a large bird in an updraft toward the sweating shakerful of
	booze, smiling out of his fat vortex ring's centre, you'd think all
	was flat calm, gold, serene.
	PC 6

As the book progresses, we move towards the margins. The book starts  
with Oedipa coming out of a relationship to big-time plutocrat Pierce  
Inverarity, having moved into the waiting arms of used-car salesman  
Mucho Maas. By the time we are settled into the novel's "present",  
Mucho [now a DJ at a top 40 radio station] is showing an unfortunate  
taste for jail bait. It is safe to say that Mrs. Maas is in an  
unstable marriage. As collateral damage in executing Inverarity's  
will, Oedipa slips and falls into a relationship with the oily lawyer  
Metzger. The next time we see Oedipa in a compromising position, John  
Nefastis [the ne plus ultra of the creepy nerd] offers to do it to the  
evening news:

	"It's OK," he said. "Please don't cry. Come on in on the couch.
	The news will be on any minute. We can do it there."

	"It?" said Oedipa. "Do it? What?"

	"Have sexual intercourse," replied Nefastis. "Maybe there'll be
	something about China tonight. I like to do it while they talk
	about Viet Nam, but China is best of all. You think about all
	those Chinese. Teeming. That profusion of life. It makes it
	sexier, right?"
	PC 86

Note that Pynchon applied for [and was refused] a position at U.C.  
Berkeley in the math department in 1964. This note is illuminating in  
several ways:

	"One letter from Mexico in 1964 details the profound effects of
	the Kennedy assassination on Pynchon’s mental state. A
	negative review of V. and his self-professed inability to plot
	have him questioning his worth as a writer, but rejection from
	Cal-Berkeley’s math department tips the balance back in favor
	of writing.

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

By the time we reach "The Greek Way", Oedipa has lost her "sexual  
relevance." She is drawn by her urge to uncover the mystery of  
Trystero to "a fag Joint", wandering onto a stop for a tourist tour  
through San Francisco: "If you're well behaved we'll hit Finoccio's  
next."

Oedipa is at her crossroads here, in the moment before she drifts into  
"The Greek Way":

	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.
	PC 88

It only takes  her an hour of drifting into the evening's first crowds  
before Oedipa runs into a muted posthorn:

	When things had calmed she was near the door with an
	unidentifiable drink in her fist, jammed against somebody tall in
	a suede sport coat. In the lapel of which she spied, wrought
	exquisitely in some pale, glimmering alloy, not another cerise
	badge, but a pin in the shape of the Trystero post horn. Mute
	and everything.
	PC 89

	It is at about this point in the play, in fact, that things really get
	peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in
	among the words.
	PC 55

It is about this point in the story where Oedipa seriously questions  
her own sanity:

	"Look, you have to help me. Because I really think I am going
	out of my head."

	"You have the wrong outfit, Arnold. Talk to your clergyman."

	"I use the U. S. Mail because I was never taught any different,"
	she pleaded. "But I'm not your enemy. I don't want to be."

	"What about my friend?" He came spinning around on the stool
	to face her again. "You want to be that, Arnold?"

	"I don't know," she thought she'd better say.

	He looked at her, blank. "What do you know?"
	PC 90

And, by this point, what has she projected, imagined, concocted on her  
own?

The anonymous gent with the posthorn pin happens to be part of  
Inamorati Anonymous, an organization of isolates who protect each  
other from the perils of falling in love. This is a nested story, the  
gent with the pin explains the presence of the muted posthorn in a  
story that points back to Yoyo/Rocketdyne. A computer [IBM 7094] takes  
over an executive's job in a company that makes ICBMs for doomsday  
devices. The former executive places an ad in the LA Times, asking if  
anyone could come up with a good reason not to commit suicide. The  
letters he receives that argue in favor of suicide happen to have  
muted posthorns on their envelopes:

	The stamps on some of the letters in his suit pocket had turned
	almost white. He realized that the gasoline must have dissolved
	the printing ink. Idly, he peeled off a stamp and saw suddenly
	the image of the muted post horn, the skin of his hand showing
	clearly through the watermark. "A sign," he whispered, "is what
	it is." If he'd been a religious man he would have fallen to his
	knees. As it was, he only declared, with great solemnity: "My big
	mistake was love. From this day I swear to stay off of love:
	hetero, homo, bi, dog or cat, car, every kind there is. I will found
	a society of isolates, dedicated to this purpose, and this sign,
	revealed by the same gasoline that almost destroyed me, will
	be its emblem." And he did.
	PC 93/94

On a certain level, flows and tracks of entropy are the signs [or the  
residue of the signs—the spoor] leading towards the Trystero.  
Accepting lovelessness as inevitable is entropic in its own special  
way. The trajectory of Oedipa's search for love [in all the wrong  
places] ends with her losing everyone she cares for.