Embattled Underground

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times Book Review
May 1, 1966
Embattled Underground
By RICHARD POIRIER
The Crying of Lot 49 By Thomas Pynchon


Thomas Pynchon's second novel, "The Crying of Lot 49," reads like an
episode withheld from his first, the much-acclaimed "V.," published
three years ago. Pynchon's technical virtuosity, his adaptations of
the apocalyptic-satiric modes of Melville, Conrad, and Joyce, of
Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Nabokov, the saturnalian inventiveness
he shares with contemporaries like John Barth and Joseph Heller, his
security with philosophical and psychological concepts, his
anthropological intimacy with the off-beat--these evidences of
extraordinary talent in the first novel continue to display themselves
in the second. And the uses to which he puts them are very much the
same.

The first novel, "V." was a designed indictment of its own comic
elaborateness. The various quests for "V." all of them substitutes for
the pursuit of love, are interwoven fantastically, and the coherence
thus achieved is willfully fabricated and factitious. Pynchon's
intricacies are meant to testify to the waste--a key word in "The
Crying of Lot 49"--of imagination that first creates and is then
enslaved by its own plottings, its machines, the products of its
technology.

Except for the heroin of "V.," Rachel Owlglass (she who can see wisely
without being a voyeur), and the heroine of this novel, Oedipa
Maas--lovable, hapless, decent, eager girls--both novels are populated
by self-mystified people running from the responsibilities of love and
compelled by phantoms, puzzles, the power of Things. No plot,
political, novelistic, or personal, can issue from the circumstances
of love, from the simple human needs, say, of a Rachel or an Oedipa,
and Pynchon implicitly mocks this situation by the Byzantine
complications of plots which do evolve from circumstances devoid of
love.

Gestures of warmth are the more touching in his novels for being
terrifyingly intermittent, shy, and worried. The coda of the first
novel, enunciated by the jazz player, McClintic Sphere, also serves
the second: "Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass
or publicizing it; keep cool but care." This is the stoical resolve of
an embattled underground in a world increasingly governed by Ionesco's
rhinoceri, to mention a vision markedly similar to Pynchon's. Efforts
at human communication are lost among Pynchon's characters, nearly all
of whom are obsessed with the presumed cryptography in the chance
juxtaposition of Things, in the music and idiom of bars like the
V-Note or The Scope, or merely in the "vast sprawl of houses" that
Oedipa sees outside Los Angeles, reminding her of the printed circuit
of a transistor radio, with its "intent to communicate."

Even the title of "V." was cryptographic. It was available to all
interpretations and answerable to none. Though "V." probably did not
have Vietnam as one of its meanings in 1963, the novel so hauntingly
evokes the preconditions of international disaster that Vietnam
belongs in the long list of other V's. Roughly half the novel is an
international melodrama of spying in the years since the Fashoda
incident of 1898. It shows how international, like personal,
complications accumulate from an interplay of fantasies constructed by
opposing sides, each sustaining the other's dream of omnipotence, each
justifying its excesses by evoking the cleverness of its opposition,
each creating that opposition and, in some mysterious and crazy way,
the moves and the successes of the other side as a provocation of its
own further actions.

"Plots" are an expression in Pynchon of the mad belief that some plot
can ultimately take over the world, can ultimately control life to the
point where it is manageably inanimate. And the ascription of "plots"
to an opposition is a way of explaining why one's own have not
achieved this ultimate control. Nearly from the outset, the people of
Pynchon's novels are the instruments of the "plots" they help create.

Their consequent dehumanization makes the prospect of an apocalypse
and the destruction of self not a horror so much as the finally
ecstasy of power. In international relations the ecstasy is war; in
human relationships it can be sado-masochism, where skin itself is
leather, leather a substitute for skin. The process is a party of
daily news, and no other novelist predicts and records it with
Pynchon's imaginative and stylist grasp of contemporary materials.

In "V." private life (the story of Benny Profane, his girl Rachel, and
the Whole Sick Crew) and international politics (involving the various
European and African manifestations of "V." from the 1890's to 1939)
are related only metaphorically. The characters in one plot take no
direct part in the other. Of much shorter length and narrower focus,
"The Crying of Lot 49" is located between Berkeley and Los Angeles,
and its events, historical as well as private, are filtered through
the career of one person, Oedipa Maas. Oedipa is introduced as a good
suburban housewife in Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, making "the twilight's
whiskey sours" against the arrival of her husband Wendell ("Mucho")
Maas.

At the outset her troubles are all manageable within the terms of
ordinary daily living. She has a not always potent husband who suffers
crises of conscience about his professions--formerly a used car
salesman, he is now a disk jockey--and about his teen-age tastes and
his taste for teen- agers. Also, she has a neurotic psychiatrist named
Hilarius, who wants her to take LSD as an experiment, and a former
lover, the tycoon Pierce Inverarity, who would sometimes call her,
before his recent death, at one in the morning, using Slavic, comic
Negro, or hostile Pachuco dialects.

As the novel opens, Oedipa learns, on her return from a party whose
"hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue," that she is
an executor, along with a man named Metzger, formerly the child movie
star known as Baby Igor, of Inverarity's will. The will was discovered
some months after his death, a period during which it was perhaps
tampered with in order to hide from Oedipa the revelations which his
network of holdings, her "inheritance," seem to communicate: an
America coded in Inverarity's testament. Before the novel closes,
Oedipa loses her husband to LSD, her psychiatrist to madness, her one
extra-marital lover, Metzger, to a depraved 15-year-old, and her one
guide through the mazes of her inheritance, a Ralph Driblette, to
suicide. In the final scene, accompanied by the famed philatelist,
Genghis Cohen, she enters the "crying” of Lot 49, a collection of
Inverarity's stamps.

The "crying of Lot 49" refers to an auction, but the phrase evokes the
recurrent suspicion on Oedipa's part that there is "revelation in
progress all around her," that the stamps, "thousands of little
colored windows into deep vistas of space and time," are themselves
"crying" a message-- not above Pierce Inverarity necessarily, or even
about Oedipa, but about "their Republic," about America, its
inheritances and what we inherit from it, including things like used
lots of stamps and used car lots. The "stamps" were often Inverarity's
substitute for Oedipa, just as Mucho sought communication less with
her than with his used cars or in the dancing of his teen-agers.

Oedipa's fascination with the possibilities of "revelation," in
inanimate things, and the curious patterns of connection among them,
is induced, at least in party, by the fact that "things" have stolen
from her the attention and love of both men. It is therefore possible
that Inverarity became connected with the famous Tristero System, the
central cryptograph of this novel as "V" was of the first, out of the
impulse not to communicate with her, or to communicate with her only
under cover of various disguises. It is also possible that the System,
participation in which allows a "calculated withdrawal from the life
of the Republic, from its machinery," from its forms of public
communication, is an elaborate hoax, a teaser arranged by Inverarity
to tantalize her away from home, love, and the open community, to
seduce her into such subsidiary organizations as the "Inamorati
Anonymous," an outfit she encounters in a queer bar in San Francisco.

Alternatively, the hints about a Tristero System could have been
planted in the will by interests anxious to prevent Oedipa from
discovering the whole network of Inverarity's holdings, including
those in Yoyodyne, an electronics and missile corporation, one
executive of which, retired by automation, founded the Inamorati
Anonymous. (Yo-yoing in "V." was the pointless, repetitive passage and
return on any convenient ferry or subway, usually the Times
Square-Grand Central run, for Benny Profane and his friends, and it is
characteristic of Pynchon's metaphoric translations of personal into
international idiosyncrasies that yo-yoing can also describe the
horror of nuclear exchange.)

Finally, Tristero may only be Oedipa's fantasy, an expression of her
need to believe that there must be something to explain the drift of
everyone she knows toward inhumanity. Otherwise she is either a
paranoid or America is Tristero and she an alien.

Between the opening scenes of domesticity and the closing scenes of
the "crying" of Lot 49, Oedipa is like the hero in a book of "The
Faerie Queene," tempted from her human virtues while on a quest that
takes her through all manner of seemingly prearranged weirdness and
monstrosity, all kinds of foreign "systems" thriving within an America
which is itself "a grand and so intricate enigma." Only the Tristero,
imagined as an intricate network of underground organizations, can
encapsulate what she would otherwise have to see as the drift of the
Republic itself toward "the glamorous prospect of annihilation."

This novel is a patriotic lamentation, an elaborate effort not to
believe the worst about the Republic. Patriotism for an ideal of
America explains the otherwise yawning gap in Pynchon's comic shaping
of his material. The Tristero System--it began in 1577 in Holland in
opposition to the Thurn and Taxis Postal System and is active now in
America trying to subvert the American postal system through an
organization called W.A.S.T.E.--is a masterpiece of comic invention.
It involves, among other things, one of the best parodies ever written
of Jacobean drama, "The Courier's Tragedy," and a perhaps final parody
of California right-wing organizations, Peter Pequid Society, named
for the commanding officer of the Confederate man-of-war "Disgruntled"
and opposed to industrial capitalism on the grounds that it has led
inevitably to Marxism. Its leader, Mike Fallopian, speculates in
California real estate.

The exuberance of such comedy softens the portents of national
calamity, but at the same time it makes it nearly impossible for
Pynchon to persuade the reader, as he anxiously wants to do, that the
whole System and the whole book have more meaning than a practical
joke. The same difficulty was apparent in "V.", where the author's
style at points of sincerity about love and youth was, by contrast to
the vitality of his comic writing, platitudinously limp and
sloganeering.

In this second novel, the difficulty is if anything more acute.
Pynchon chooses to have all the significance pass through the
experience of only one comically named character, Oedipa Maas, as if
he had chosen to have all of "V." assembled and assimilated by Benny
Profane or by Rachel Owlglass. In "V." a structure of metaphor and
cross-reference existed beyond the inquiry of many of the characters.
The result was a dimension secured from comedy and within which the
comedy could function as a form of what might be called local
ignorance of the issues on which it was commenting. In "The Crying of
Lot 49," however, the role given Oedipa makes it impossible to divorce
from her limitations the large rhetoric about America at the end of
the novel. This is unfortunately simply because Oedipa has not been
given character enough to bear the weight of this rhetoric:

"If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other
town, any other estate, then by that continuity she might have found
The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred
lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she'd
looked. She stopped a minute between the steel rails, raised her head
as if to sniff the air. She became conscious of the hard, strung
presence she stood on--knew as if maps had been flashed on her on the
sky how these tracks ran on into others, and others, and others, knew
they laced, deepened, authenticated the great American night, so wide
and now so suddenly intense for her."

What I think is happening at the end is that Pynchon desperately needs
to magnify the consciousness of his heroine, if he is to validate her
encounter with The Tristero System. Only by doing so can he maintain
the possibility that the System is distinguishable from the mystery
and enigma of America itself. To say that no distinction exists would
be to sacrifice the very rationale of his comic reportage: that he is
reporting not evidence about American so much as pockets of
eccentricity in it, fragments dangerously close to forming a design
but fragments nonetheless. Pynchon is reluctant to make all his people
submit to the pervasive grotesqueness of American life, though he
comes close to that, and he therefore exalts a character altogether
too small for the large job given Oedipa at the end.

In fact, Pynchon's best writing is often in his descriptions of
American scenery, of objects rather than persons. He shows at such
points a tenderness, largely missing from our literature since
Dreiser, for the very physical waste of our yearnings, for the
anonymous scrap heap of Things wherein our lives are finally joined.
The Pynchon who can write with dashing metaphoric skill about the way
humans have become Things, can also reveal a beautiful and
heartbreaking reverence for the human penetration of the Thingness of
this country, the signatures we make on the grossest evidences of our
existence. Indeed we do leave codes and messages, seen by the likes of
Mucho even in used cars:

"Yet at least he had believed in the cars, maybe to excess: how could
he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican,
cracker, a parade seven days a week, bring with them the most godawful
of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their
families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked
for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed,
rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to
depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopeless of
children, of supermarket booze, or two, sometimes three generations of
cigarette smokers, or only of dust--and when the cars were swept out
you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no
way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he
supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept)
and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons
promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising
specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads,
Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or
dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath
off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was,
a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over
just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad
of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body
wastes--it nauseated him to look, but he had to look."

Within this description is a haunting sequence of imagined human
situations, typical and pathetic ones, fused with the particularized
power that shows Pynchon's own obsession with the encoded messages of
the American landscape. What is also noticeable here, and throughout
the novel, is that the major character is really Pynchon himself,
Pynchon's voice with its capacity to move from the elegy to the epic
catalogue. The narrator sounds like a survivor looking through the
massed wreckage of his civilization, "a salad of despair." That image,
to suggest but one of the puns in the word Tristero, is typically full
of sadness, terror, love, and flamboyance. But then, how else should
one imagine a tryst with America? And that is what this novel is.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-lot49.html