Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

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Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

• Lecture One A Plot Has Been Mounted Against
  You.
• Lecture Two Cult Pynchon Hypertexted,
  Hotlinked, and otherwise (Dis)Assembled
  Pynchonalia.

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Names

• Oedipa Maas Oedipus, the (child) detective
• Mucho Maas Much More.

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OEDIPA

• Young Republican
• Tupperware Party
• or she supposed executrix executing the will
  of

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San Narciso

• she thought of the time shed opened a
  transistor radio to replace a battery and seen
  her first printed circuit.
• (Chapter 2, 24)

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All that is solid melts into air Marx

• Pierce Inverarity a sprawling conglomerate
  persona, impersonation, incorporation
• Lamont Cranston, the Shadow knows
• Jay Gould, d.1892, the richest man in America.
• Oedipa executes the will of modernism
• the Fangoso Lagoon
• Networked, corporate identity
• Baby Igor
• The question of posterity

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Modernity how many plots?

• The Execution (Triumph) of the Will (testament)
• Cashiered (trial)
• The Couriers Tragedy (history fiction)
• Trystero W.A.S.T.E. (communication)
• Peter Pinguid (cold war meets civil war within
  and without)
• Inamorati Anonymous CIA (surveillance)

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Marshal Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air
The Experience of Modernity.

• Those who live in modernity are moved at once
  by a will to changeto transform both themselves
  and their worldand by a terror of disorientation
  and disintegration, of life falling apart. They
  all know the thrill and the dread of a world in
  which "all that is solid melts into air."
•        

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All that is solid

• To be modern is to live a life of paradox and
  contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the
  immense bureaucratic organizations that have the
  power to control and often to destroy all
  communities, values, lives and yet to be
  undeterred in our determination to face these
  forces, to fight to change their world and make
  it our own.

• It is to be both revolutionary and conservative
  alive to new possibilities for experience and
  adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to
  which so many modern adventures lead, longing to
  create and to hold on to something real even as
  everything melts.
• (Berman pp13-4)

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Revelation, just out of reach

• As things developed, she was to have all manner
  of revelations.  Hardly about Pierce Inverarity,
  or herself but about what remained yet had
  somehow, before this, stayed away.  There had
  hung the sense of buffeting, insulation, she had
  noticed the absence of an intensity, as if
  watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus,
  that the projectionist refused to fix. 

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Oedipa as Rapunzel fairy tale slapstick

• And had also gently connected herself into the
  curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl
  somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and
  salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to
  say hey, let down your hair.  When it turned out
  to be Pierce shed happily pulled out the pins
  and curlers and down it tumbled in its
  whispering, dainty avalanche, only when Pierce
  had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned,
  through some sinister sorcery, into a great
  unanchored wig, and down he fell, on his ass.

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Oedipa, perverse

• Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the
  painting and cried.  No one had noticed she wore
  dark green bubble shades.  For a moment shed
  wondered if the seal around her sockets were
  tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on
  and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. 

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Bordando el Manto Terrestre, 1961
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Remedios Varo

• 1908-1963
• Spanish, flees to Mexico City
• Paints Bordando el Manto Terrestre in 1961
• Pynchon in Mexico City mid-sixties after two
  years at Boeing (Yoyodyne) as a technical
  writer

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Refracted through those tears

• She could carry the sadness of the moment with
  her that way forever, see the world refracted
  through those tears, those specific tears, as if
  indices as yet unfound varies in important ways
  from cry to cry. 

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Away from nothing . . .

• She had looked down at her feet and known, then,
  because of a painting, that what she stood on
  had only been woven together a couple of
  thousand miles away in her own tower, was only
  by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had
  taken her away from nothing, thered been no
  escape.  What did she so desire escape from? 

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Lecture Two Pynchonalia

• Pynchon-world
• Pynchon the recluse
• Pynchon and the tube
• Pynchon hyperlinked
• Pynchons new novel
• Pynchon and the Simpsons

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Pynchon and The Simpsons Diatribe of the Mad
Housewife