Temat: Paper: The Crying of Lot 49 As a Detective Story

The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel written by Thomas Pynchon in 1966. He is one of the major representatives of the period of postmodernism in American literature. This term refers to the times from the sixties to the present. Some other famous writers of this period are: Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller.
In this paper, I want to focus on the question whether The Crying of Lot 49 can be considered a detective story. In order to come to a conclusion, I decided to have a look at some sources, and they include: the book itself, and essays on The Crying... by Edward Mendelson, John Johnson as well as essays by Julie Campbell and Wolfgang Iser.
At the very beginning, I would like to explain why I have decided to write about this topic.
It is so because all postmodern works are open for various interpretations, as it is one of the features of this period in the U.S. literature, and, after reading the book, I was quite interested in what experts had to say about it. It is so because I had certain impressions starting to read it, and I felt slightly disappointed finishing it.
First of all, I would like to summarize the novel to make my paper more understandable. The protagonist of the novel is Oedipa Maas who finds herself in a situation where she is to be the executor of the will of Pierce Inverarity, her late ex-boyfriend, a “California real estate mogul.” Although being totally aware of her lack of knowledge as far as executing a will is concerned, she does not yet know of the complexities she is going to encounter trying to finish the case. Oedipa goes off to the town of San Narciso, the place where Pierce had lived and conducted his business. Going through his stuff, she stumbles upon Pierce’s stamp collection which attracts her attention:
Much of the revelation was to come through the stamp collection Pierce had left, his
substitute often for her-- thousands of little coloured windows into deep vistas of space and
time: savannahs teeming with elands and gazelles, galleons sailing west into the void,
Hitler heads, sunsets, cedars of Lebanon, allegorical faces that never were, he could spend
hours peering into each one, ignoring her.
While watching the play The Courier’s Tragedy, produced by Driblette, she hears the name Tristero, which freezes her up, although she does not yet realize why. From this point it becoms her obsession. It should be added here that the symbol of Tristero, the muted post horn, will often be encountered by Oedipa in various contexts as the novel progresses.
Examining the stamps with Genghis Cohen, a philatelist, she suddenly starts to realize that she is about to discover a conspiracy dating back to centuries ago, involving postal system, they decide, however, not to tell anyone about it: “’Do we tell the government, or what?’, I’m sure they know more than we do.’ He [Cohen] sounded nervous, or suddenly in retreat. ‘No, I wouldn’t. It isn’t our business, is it?’” We can see here that Pynchon tries to add a dose of mysteriousness, to increase tension.
Obsessed, wandering around San Narcisco, Oedipa starts to notice different signs and symbols, that may not refer to Tristero, and she begins to confuse reality with her imagings: “Decorating each alienation, each species of withdrawal, as cuff-link, decal, aimless doodling, there was somehow always the post horn. She grew so to expect it that perhaps she did not see it quite as often as she later was to remember seeing it. A couple-three times would really have been enough. Or too much.” This part of the novel is hard for the reader to follow as it is not clearly indicated what is real and what is hallucinated. As Mendelson puts it in his: “The Sacred, the Profane and The Crying of Lot 49:” “Certainly this is a book that needs a vade mecum: its reader finds himself continuously in a dilemma analogous to its heroine’s.” Johnson points out, in his essay: “Toward the Schizo-Text: Paranoia as Semiotic Regime in The Crying of Lot 49”, that the reader has to turn himself into an interpreter to understand the novel fully. This causes the opportunity for acutely broad interpretation and various perceptions of the book.
In search of help, Oedipa resolves to visit doctor Hilarius to have him tell her that the whole Tristero mystery is fiction: “She [Oedipa] wanted Hilarius to tell her she was some kind of a nut and needed a rest, and that there was no Tristero. She wanted to know why the chance of its being real should menace her so.” She is told that she should stick to her hallucinations as it is the only thing she has.
In the last chapter, at Driblette’s funeral ceremony, we can notice that Oedipa begins to give up feeling her inability to settle the whole issue as the only man who could tell her why he had put the name Tristero in his play committed suicide. Mike Fallopian, a member of the Peter Pinguid Society, is the first to make her realize that the whole Tristero mystery may be a huge prank played on her by Pierce: “Has it ever occurred to you, Oedipa, that somebody’s putting you on? That this is all a hoax, maybe something Inverarity set up before he died?” She does not, however, take this possibility into consideration saying that it is “rediculous.” With time, though, she begins to link all the symbols she had encountered and all the people, she had met, with Pierce: “OK, Oedipa told herself, stalking around the room, her viscera hollow, waiting on something truly terrible, OK. It’s unavoidable, isn’t it? Every access route to the Tristero could be traced also back to the Inverarity estate.”
One day, Oedipa is told that Pierce’s stamp collection is to be auctioned off as lot 49. She decides to go to the auction as she is told that C. Morris Schrift will act as the agent for a book bidder who will not be present at the action. There, she is informed that the mysterious bidder is actually present and she comes to realize that he can be the key to the whole mystery as he is called the “crier” (auctioneer) The novel ends with Oedipa waiting for the crying of lot 49.
We can see that the novel ends in a strange way, at least for me. As far as I am concerned, one of the characteristic features of any detective story is that the solution is always presented at the end.
In his novel, Pynchon uses certain games aimed at the reader. Wolfgang Iser, in his The Act of Aesthetic Response, describes the interaction between the reader and a text saying that: “it is in the reader that the text comes to life.” Judie Campbell, in ”Playing with the Reader and the Critic”, states that: “The ‘blanks’ or ‘gaps’ in a text invite the reader to fill them in by making connections between different parts of the text.” Iser calls it “creative reading”, and I think that this kind of reading is absolutely necessary as far as pleasuresome reading of a detective story is concerned. In “Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology”, Iser says that a text is “a playground between the author and the reader.” This comment can be applied to Pynchon, and it is also applicable to detective stories but in Pynchon’s case it went a little too far. Paul de Man, a literary critic, seems to take a stand here by suggesting that we should interpret the book in a more active way than traditionally.
Another thing worth attention here is the fact how Pynchon plays with his readers through the language games he uses. The novel is full of various characters’ names that are nonexistent, for example the name of the main protagonist Oedipa is not commonly used. We can, however, come to the conclusion that all these names are, to a certain extent, meaningful. Edward Mendelson has his own theory about the choice of the name by stating that: “The name instead refers to Sophoclean Oedipus who begins his search for the solution of a problem (a problem like Oedipa’s, involving a dead man) as an almost detached observer, only to discover how deeply implicated he is in what he finds.”
It is important to note here that Oedipus ends up successfully, solving his problem. For me, it could be a kind of “red herring” strategy used by Pynchon in order to mislead us and keep the readers in a false assumption of the positive outcome of Oedipa’s quest at the end of the novel, of course if one has a certain amount of knowledge about mythology. I must say that it is, or would be, a very encouraging and enticing factor to keep on reading. But the reader’s expectation is frustrated, John Johnson notes that: “Oedipa’s own name will obtrude as a sign, since it both echoes and differs from Oedipus.” Mendelson says that Pynchon takes some features from detective stories, but just in order to produce the opposite results. He gives some braoder explanation by stating that:
Where the object of a detective story is to reduce a complex and disordered situation to
simplicity and clarity, and in doing so to isolate in a named locus the disruptive element in
the story’s world, The Crying of Lot 49 starts with a relatively simple situation, and then
lets it get out of the heroine’s control: the simple becomes complex, responsibility
becomes not isolated but universal, the guilty locus turns out to be everywhere, and the
individual clues are unimportant because neither clues nor deduction can lead to the
solution.
I do not fully agree with Mendelson that the scheme of a detective story is that it always has to begin with things being complicated. I would state that the clues in detective fiction are to bring us closer to the solution, which does not take place in Pynchon’s novel and so determines that the novel is not detective fiction.
Mendelson as well directs our attention to the similarity between Pynchon’s novel and a novel by Borges “The Approach to al-Mutasim.” He states that: “the detective story and [the] undercurrent of mysticism-- all these are common to Pynchon’s novel and Borges’s novel-within-a-story.” From this statement we can draw the conclusion that there may be, or might have been, some slight split, or at least discussion over the detective features in The Crying of Lot 49.
While reading the novel I soon realized that nothing in it is certain. I suppose that Pynchon must have great fun playing with his readers and misleading them. For me, a certain level of uncertainty is necessary in a good detective story, but while reading it should decrease (some effort may, of course, be done on the part of the reader), and not deepen, as happened in Pynchon’s novel. Of this book we cannot say that it is an epistomological novel, as knowledge is not gained through observation. Through thorough observation you can, as a matter of fact, grow even more confused and perplexed.
There are, however, some features that speak for some detective story characteristics, e.g. time is not treated in a traditional way as there are many flasfbacks as well as flashforwards. What is more, it is written in the form of a journal-- those two factors could make a perfect detective story.
What is worthy of mention is the fact that the book itself is a mixture of genres (sometimes called an “anti-novel” ) and because of that, it has some features of a detective story.
All in all, in this paper I wanted to focus on the novel being a detective story. I decided to have a look at it from that perspective. I must admit that while reading it I thought it really was that kind of book. The resemblence carried on throughout most of the pages as at first I did not notice those distracters or, at least, did not take them into consideration, treating them as trivial. The mystery is presented at the very first page of the work, then more and more signs appear but their effect is opposite to the one found in conventional detective books. It is so because, instead of helping the main character, the clues lead her, as well as the reader, to more complexities and a state of confusion. They do not function as helpers but distracters. Writing detective stories also involves playing different games with the reader, but the signs or symbols have to be telling, at least telling something leading toward the solution of the case. The great success of any detective story among its readers (I am a fan myself) is the ability of the receivers to find themselves in those situations described in the books and being the detective himself, trying to solve the case. In Pynchon’s book, we are deprived of the possibility to see if we succeeded. We are deprived of the pleasure in the worst place ever-- at the very end of the novel, as nowhere in the book this kind of open ending is suggested.
I must say that for me The Crying of Lot 49 may be a great novel but it defenitely cannot be called a detective story.



















Bibliography

Campbell, Julie. Tradition and Postmodernity, English and American Studies and the
Challenge of the Future: Playing with the Reader and the Critic. Edited by Teresa Bela
and Zygmunt Mazur. Kraków: Universitas, 1999.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1978.
Iser, Wolfgang. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins Press, 1989.
Johnson, John. New Essays on “The Crying of Lot 49”: Toward the Schizo-Text, Paranoia as
Semiotic Regime in the Crying of Lot 49. Edited by Patrick O’Donnell. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Mendelson, Edward. Individual and Community: The sacred, the Profane, and the Crying of
Lot 49. Edited by Baldwin and Kirby. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1979.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. (originally published in 1966), London: Vintage,
1996.


author: Bartosz M. Kraszewski

American Studies Center, University of Warsaw