Human Replacement

[Dave Monroe]

Sunday, November 8, 2009
Human Replacement

In Chapter 3 of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, I ventured
through the difficult situations Oedipa Maas has now encountered when
receiving her ex-boyfriend’s business and lawyer. Pynchon opens the
chapter by characterizing Oedipa as a lonely person who was used by
the men in her life, never making herself happy (Cinderella metaphor).
The author says that “the stamp collection Pierce had left, his
substitute often for her – thousands of little colored windows into
deep vistas of space and time” (31). This subtlety used by Pynchon
when informing the reader about the dwellings of his characters serves
as a tool to get us inside the story, to make his words necessary
instead of making long, useless descriptions. In one sentence, we are
both informed of the poor relationships Oedipa has lived and of
Pierce’s personality. It also helps us laugh about human replacement,
an important target of Pynchon’s satire. He clearly makes fun of our
materiality and selfishness, our poor relationships which he shows try
to get something out of everything and everyone.

Another crucial moment in Chapter 3 happens after the end of the
Jacobean play Oedipa and Metzger go to. Pynchon states that as Oedipa
heard the word Trystero it “hung in the air as the act ended and all
lights were for a moment cut; hung in the dark to puzzle Oedipa Maas
but not yet to exert the power over her it was to” (58). Pynchon is
clearly foreshadowing a crucial event in the book. An event I wasn’t
able to not look up, I went on and typed Trystero in Google’s mighty
search engine which swiftly turned up with results. My mouse went on
and clicked on the first result, The Crying of Lot 49 - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia. I immediately noticed that this Trystero business
must truly mean something for Pynchon since it appeared in the first,
introductory paragraph of Wikipedia’s article of the book. What I
found really impressed me. Wikipedia stated that Oedipa found out
about a conflict between the two mailing companies, “Thurn und Taxis
and the Trystero (or Tristero). The former actually existed, and was
the first firm to distribute postal mail; the latter is Pynchon's
invention.” I wasn’t expecting this so I immediately closed my browser
to not ruin the rest of the book, but now I am really wanting to open
it up again, to take a shortcut into Pynchon’s climax.

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