Summary of thoughts on COL 49 for group read 2024 part 1)

[Joseph Tracy]

There are aspects of the different summaries posted so far about  The Crying of Lot 49 that appeal to me  and hold insight, But overall I find them incomplete and not easily reconciled to the scope of key events of the novel .

Where I agree: 
1) I agree with Michael Bailey that COL 49 has to be seen as a self aware post modern novel and that the main character becomes increasingly conscious that she is manipulated by men and specifically by the deceased Pierce Inverarity but  ultimately by the author Thomas Pynchon who defines her and her quest. This contributes to the feminist tone of the novel significantly because the author takes a shared responsibility and is not merely posing as someone who opposes male privilege. However this also poses other questions about constructing fictional characters and worlds and those are still to be considered. After all, no character can awake from their fictional reality,  precisely because they are fictional, but real humans can escape cultural or personal fictions and that, being the point of the structure, asks the reader what is the reality of the fictions of concern in this novel?  
2) The novel is a feminist critique of various forms of machismo, particularly the dualism embraced by militarism and robber baron capitalism where enemies become convenient tools for accumulating wealth. One is also forced in this approach to consider the human flaws and cultural conditioning of the feminine heroine which may be somewhat limited by Pynchon’s own identity.  The particular structures of American and California  patriarchy are also under the microscope in the novel and need to be considered, as part of a feminist consideration of the novel. 
  3) It is about the search for what is real, and the concomitant quest to expose and abandon lies and self-deception. This is a pretty general theme of writing and a pretty generalized approach to this novel.  If there is an important revelation about reality in the novel, what is it? To describe that reality and forces that obscure that reality  becomes the task of a meaningful review of the novel. 



For the preceding and following key reasons  I propose a more multivalent intentionality to the novel.
All of the approaches above fail to address  these 3 elements : 
1)the larger  and more specific cultural and historic context of the novel, 
2) the murder mystery that is quite central to the novel, 
 3) the imaginary war over control over the postal system ( which I contend is an obvious  stand-in for all communication media)  is a power struggle which stretches through the history of all media. 

 These 3 elements combine and overlap to shape the core antagonist to Oedipa Maas and her quest.  A full sense of the novel seems to me to require a reckoning with the role of these elements. They comprise the prison tower which Oedipa and many others wish to escape from.

Attempted brief summary:

 Along with the feminist values and confrontations , I see the novel as addressing the post-traumatic mental state of America  after the JFK assassination, and more specifically the mental state of the westernmost coast which is in significant ways defining the national future. The story takes place in the 49er state where military contracts, aerospace, real estate, binary codes , and printed circuits are the new gold rush. The form of the novel is roughly a kind of post-modern allegory  or Greek drama replete with  a rock band called the Paranoids as the chorus , where Oedipa Maas represents a dissatisfied questioner of her role as a California housewife who is named executor of the estate of a prince of capitalism named Pierce Inverarity. He is  involved in, or has  at least been documenting,  an ancient power struggle over control of the postal system; this power struggle documented in his stamp collection slowly becomes evident to Oedipa as a defining and ongoing  core struggle of the actual world with its political and cultural landscape..  In a central ‘coincidence’  the postal questions along with questions about  bones from a WW2 massacre which were  sold to Inverarity by the Mafia, questions which are amplified and focused  by the Greek chorus of the Paranoids,  cumulatively lead her to attend a play about the murder of a duke and his rightful heir by a neighboring duke who uses the mysterious assassins of the secretive competing postal service called the Tristero (or Trystero) for that killing.  

It’s crucial to consider the temporal  context of the novel which is taking place  3 years after the JFK murder, and  also the references to that event  in the novel itself. These include the following:   the start of the student anti- Vietnam war protests, the CIA, Dallas,  one of the Dulles brothers, the growth of the extreme California right, Dr Hilarius is a character  representing  both the importation of Nazis into the CIA and the COINTELPRO CIA research into LSD , Yoyodyne defines the growth of power and influence from the MIC which Ike warned about  , and the similarity of the name of the evil duke in the play, Duke Angelo, to the operational leader of the CIA JJ Angleton. There is also  in the novel the mysterious deaths of those who know something about the fictional Tristero which has a parallel in the deaths of witnesses and investigators into the JFK murder.  Oedipa’s skeptical attention is first  drawn to contemporaneous oligarch/mafia criminality and then to a Jacobite  murder story of rival dukes and then to the postal war which groomed the murderers in the play. This serves as a way for Pynchon to avoid direct political attention, while following a path very similar to that of Dorothy Kilgallen and other JFK researchers.  Several of these  were first involved in Mafia investigations then the JFK  murder but ultimately it became obvious to many that the connection to Cuba and the mafia was also a connection the the CIA, their agent/patsy , and a deep murderous  power struggle over who would shape American foreign policy. 

The search for the fictional tristero and their chief rival  the historical Thurn and Taxis postal service becomes an historical search reaching back to Diocletian ,The Nicene Council,  Augustine and on through wars of the Holy Roman Empire and the nationalist and reformation wars between Catholics and Protestants. The Tristero then moves  to America as it began to nationalize the postal service. The Tristero is pure fiction but the war is real. It is the war over who will  control letters,  words,  language and ideas  and it sweeps through human history with all its bloodshed and comedy, pathos, kindness and tragedy. This history Pynchon affirms is ongoing and informs our time and place, our own tragedies, lies and truth-tellers.  There are also lots of good jokes , psychedelic visions and weird stories to relieve the density of information packed tightly into this brief book.
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Most of the characters strike me as very allegorical and fill out the landscape of California in 1966 with particular attention to political, pharmaceutical  and technological dreams.

to be continued… maybe