Despite the ridiculous excuse for an ending, I enjoyed this book.  That being said, I was extremely let down by the ending.

After being told that I would not want to miss discussing the end of this book, I was looking forward to some sort of aha moment, or a big finale.  Let me just say I was thoroughly disappointed.   The last two chapters go through the trouble of showing the paranoia and downfall of so many characters just to end with an auction.  It becomes increasingly more evident that Oedipa doesn’t want to know what is really happening in the real world.  In the third and fourth chapter, and even a bit in the fifth chapter, Oed is searching for answers, and people to give her these answers, but towards the end of the fifth chapter and on into the sixth, she still seeks people out, but refuses to get closer to the answer.  The title finally makes sense… after 151 pages, on page 152, the reader is let in on the secret.  What I don’t understand is why Pynchon takes so much time and space coming up with such elaborate characters and events just to end with an auction for a lot of stamps.

Does this book really come down to a simple satire on communication disconnects, or is there something more that Pynchon is getting at?

This novel never ceased to be bizarre! What killed me was the unresolved ending. Actually, the ending is making me paranoid- which I suspect Pynchon wanted. Was it some random dude that we haven’t seen yet bidding on the stamps? Or, was it Pierce himself bidding on them? It started to feel like this whole Trystero/Postal Service conspiracy was really just fabricated. When we find out that the book store and theatre were both owned by Pierce it gets fishy to me. It seems like he could easily have set this whole thing up just to mess with Oedipa. Especially when we find out that he donated a lot to the university, making that professor she spoke to a possibly biased resource. Damn it, damn it, damn it. Pynchon has made me as paranoid as all the characters in his book! And it’s just so typical of the novel to end without telling us who really was bidding on the stamps! In a way though, I like that it’s never revealed who it is. It reminds me of Passing in the way that if we knew what “really” happened, it wouldn’t be as good as an ending. Letting the readers speculate to whether it was all a hoax arranged by Pierce (either dead or alive) or if it was all real evidence is what makes it all exciting!

After today’s class and the clarification that not everything in this novel is meant to mean something and that some of it is just Penchon having fun, I think I found one of my favorite funnies. The whole hostage situation with Dr. Hilarious was literally hilarious to me. First of all, he is shooting a rifle out the window of an office, I assume at no one in-particular, and it just so happens to zoom past Oedia’s head. Then she runs towards the building that that shots came from and is trying to break in to it. What kind of person does this? Obviously, she does. I did think is was brave of her to step up and try to calm Dr. Hilarious down. The funniest part of the entire situation, to me, was when the cops finally got there and they are outside the door of the office. The cop asks Oedia for her name, address, phone number, and then proceeds to tell her that if she could move the “scene” over by the window the News Media would like to get some good shots for the evening news. REALLY? I’m sorry, but if I am ever in a hostage situation, whether I have it under control or not, the cops better be trying to get me out of there. The next hilarious part, is when Oedia takes over the weapon and tells the cops to come in. The cop says, “it’s locked.” I seriously laughed out loud at this one statement. I know this is not a serious, deep reading of anything important, but if Penchon is going to make the reader read things that have nothing to do with the mystery at hand, then I think it is fair game to comment on.

This novel in short amazes me. Pynchon has managed to thread so many different aspects of society together in a novel that definitely has a linear plotline. In short it seems like this book is trying to analyze the aspects of society in the time period. The book analyzes colleges, theatre, hippies, medicine, conspiracy groups, and insanity. I would like to focus on the last aspect, insanity. Oedipa appears to be struggling with sanity issues, “Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being presumed, perhaps fantasized by Oedipa” (Pynchon 88). This book definitely is analyzing the thin line between reality and what our mind invents. I put stress on the “thin line” idea because as a human everything we see, experience and feel is a product of our mind. To me this most often relates to lucid dreams. Dreams in which the dreamer knows they are dreaming yet are conscious and can control the course of the dream. This of course is drastically different from a mind that projects non-worldly images into the reality of the person. In terms of the story it seems strange that Oedipa is most likely suffering from extreme paranoia and hallucinations which are causing numerous issues in her life, when the people around her aka Mucho are taking a drug to get that same effect. This debate is even more complicated when you bring the other concepts of psychosis presented by the story specifically Dr. Hilarious. The doctor rejects his previous teacher of Freud, which I feel connects the Oedipa in both her hope that everything she did was a dream. The connection of course is that some of Freud’s studies respected the power of dreams.

Something I’ve noticed when reading this book is that Oedipa seems to drink every day so far. In the first chapter, she’s coming back from a tupperware party where there was “perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue” (page 1). In the second chapter, she gets hammered with Metzger, drinking Wine, Tequila, and Whisky (great combo). Then, in the third chapter, she drinks with everyone after stealing the boat (“Oepdipa spread a blanket and poured booze into cups…”, page 44). In the fourth chapter, she drinks half a tumbler worth of whisky (page 72) and enjoys some dandelion wine with Cohen (page 79). In the fifth chapter, Oedipa gets drunk at the gay bar (“Oedipa, by now rather drunk…”, page 94), and then the trouble begins. . She talks to the man who has the pin on his lapel, who stood up to go to the bathroom, but never came back. She sees the horn on the sidewalk next to some sort of hopscotch game, a theme that returns when Oedipa talks to the circle of children (page 96), who claim that they were dreaming that they were gathering. These sort of encounters lead one to the conclusion that Oedipa might very well be hallucinating all of this. Maybe in her drunken (or just stressed past the point of mental soundness) state, she hallucinates all of these encounters. This was the first instance (for me) where I started seeing Oedipa as an unreliable narrator. After all of this confusion, I now don’t know if the horn symbol is representative of the I.A. (Inamorati Anonymous) or a secret postal system. Pynchon, I believe, transforms Oedipa into this unreliable narrator to put the reader into the same state of confusion Oedipa is clearly in. It just goes to lend to the mystery theme we covered in class. Is it some strange Illuminati-esque group who’ve been around for hundreds of years, providing secret postal services to dolphin-lovers who kiss their mothers with tongue (page 100), or is it something else? Who knows.

            So what is going on with the mail? I am confused by what Mike Fallopian has to say about the underground mail system. Then when Oedipa find the “Trystero” symbol on the bathroom wall, it only adds to the mystery. The “Trystero” is illustrated as a muted horn. This relates to mail, because it is also a silent form of communication. However, perhaps the fact that the horn is muted alludes to the underlying theme of communication barriers within the work. The system of underground mail could also highlight the importance of language, and maybe only through the written word is communication truly effective. Yet, it is also interesting how others characters, such as Driblette, consider words to be “rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers . . .” (62). I feel like I can definitely relate to what Driblette says when I read this book. There are so many words that do create a distracting “noise” when I read Pynchon’s work. Perhaps, the reader is a lot like the director in a play. We have to take these words and use our imagination to create a scene. Driblette claimes that the author “[supplies] words and a yarn. [He] [gives] them life” (63). So I guess this whole situation raises the question of which is more important, the actual written word, or the interpretation and creativity derived from the word?  I have a feeling that the “Trystero” is going to greatly influence The Crying of Lot 49, and that language and communication will continue to play a major within the work.

So far in this novel, The Crying of Lot 49, I have noticed a repetition of war. In the hotel room, while Oedipa and Metzger are playing their stripping game, the movie that is playing on the TV is involved in war. Also, when they go to the club, the people there seem to be having some kind of war themselves with the government. I wasn’t too clear on this, but I think they are a group that is rebelling against the government by not sending mail through the US post office in order to make a point about something that happened in the past, in a war. Also, the play that they go and see is all about a big war. I could be really wrong about all of this, but I am starting to get the feeling that war is a major part in this novel. I think that maybe the characters are involved in some sort of war, either among themselves or with a bigger franchise (like over the will or issues in the will). This is just an observation that I made; that war keeps reappearing in different ways. This could be a hint to the novel as a whole, because I know I am having a hard time keeping up with everything. I find myself getting lost in the details.

The other thing that I noticed is the creepy boy band and its “chicks” that keep following Oedipa and Metzgar around. I don’t understand why they keep reappearing in the novel. I don’t understand their importance yet. Yet being the key word, because surely they have to have a more important meaning that just being the creepy band. I suppose that is what Penchon might be trying to do; make me think about the book as a whole.

After discussing how miscommunication is a big part of this text, it was interesting to notice where it shows up in the next two chapters. I was also very amused that Oedipa is now obsessed with this secret postal service WASTE. In Strode’s Oepida is first exposed to it with a curious mail delivery and then she sees the symbol. Mike Fallopian (let’s try not to snicker) receives one of the letters and makes the comment, “You weren’t supposed to see that.” Then he explains that Yoyodyne uses a secret way of delivering mail because it is safer. What is so amusing is that this inter-mail delivery system keeps people in touch, therefore they have good communication. Oedipa’s obsession to discover the true meaning and connection of the secret postal service is ironic because she has poor communication skills. She begins an investigation, and is slowly connecting the pieces. The connection to the bones and the play The Courier’s Tragedy (ten pages of description… seriously??) is interesting, also. I am curious to see how it plays out in the end. Kotek knowing about the postal code, then the stamps Pierce had collected having the secret watermark add to Oedipa’s interest. I hope by the end of the text she will have learned of the secret postal service and gain knowledge on how to communicate properly. I feel like her confusion (and bad communication) disables me as a reader. Especially on page 75, but that is another blog post!

After talking about miscommunication in class on Thursday, it was easier to see other places where miscommunication occurred. In the beginning of chapter 3 when Oedipa is going through Pierce’s stamp collection she reminisces how Pierce never noticed her when he was looking at them. Oedipa said that “he could spend hours peering into each one, ignoring her.”

Then again a few pages later, Oedipa notices a misprint on her letter from Mucho where it says “Potsmaster” instead of Postmaster. That wasn’t a particularly meaningful point then but as the chapter goes on, the theme of the inconsistency of the postal system becomes prominent. The play that Metzger and Oedipa attended also carried of theme of miscommunication.

It seems that after this chapter, the book begins to be more and more absurd. Such as when Metzger and Oedipa go to Scope and notice “a couple-three nearer the door, who were engaged in a nose-picking contest, seeing how far they would flick it across the room.” Then in chapter 4 when Oedipa goes to the stockholder’s meeting for Yoyodyne and  sang hymns and other songs that are really strange (one of which called Hymn on page 65 also fit the Clemson’s alma matter tune- fun fact).

It was interesting when Oedipa found another symbol like she did in the bathroom at Scope in Stanley Kotek’s office and again on the ring that Mr. Thoth showed her. I wonder what else will happen with that symbol as the book goes on and how far the absurdities will go. It’s hard to believe that Pynchon could top the nose-picking comment.

After discussing chapters one and two of “The Crying of Lot 49” by Thomas Pynchon in class last Thursday I’m really starting to notice the theme of miscommunication throughout the novel even more as I read on. From the beginning of chapter 3, I started to find hints of continuing communication problems. Oedipa finds “much […] revelation was to come through the stamp collection Pierce had left” (31) It seems strange that Oedipa and Piece were previously engaged in a romantic relationship yet she seems left in the dark about certain things. Funny, it’s a stamp collection that seems to clue her in and yet at first, she had “no suspicion at all that it might have something to tell her” (31). In healthy relationships, people tend to openly communicate person to person—not object to person. At the same time, this portrayal of little ‘clues’ (like the ones found on the stamps) make the reader feel as if they are reading a bit a mystery novel with a still satirical twist.

Again, on page 32, there is miscommunication between Oedipa and Mucho. As Mucho writes Oedipa he tells of nothing of real importance, while Oedipa feels no need to confess her infidelity to him because she assumes that he must already know. What a great marriage.

I also think that Pynchon is purposely not providing information in the text in a direct way in order to further the theme of a lack of communication in his writing. I’m wondering if the various songs in the text were purposely used excessively in order to portray how sometimes music and lyrics can say what we can sometimes not express. I think that Driblette has this same idea when he basically tell Oedipa that the text means nothing without the meaning that he is able to give it onstage. Perhaps essentially communicating that actions often speak louder than words are able to.