Blue Pill or Red Pill? The Crying of Lot 49

The world is filled with coincidences. I usually see them as simple events that my mind relates together but in reality are not connected or are guided by some mysterious force. In the second chapter of The Crying of Lot 49 I felt particularly intrigued by the many coincidences and weird feelings occurring throughout the novel. It makes me feel like there is a mysterious actor in this novel, working in the shadows for unknown reasons. How Metzger is speaking about his young acting career and at that very moment one of the movies he filmed when he was just a kid was passed on television in the very channel Oedipa tuned into. Like she said, it was unbelievable. “Either he made up the whole thing, Oedipa thought suddenly, or he bribed the engineer over at the local station to run this, it’s all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot (pg 20).” That event was just strange and unexpected, yet its importance was great for the whole chapter. Another strange coincidence, maybe simply artistic in the novel, was the blowing of a light fuse by a band playing outside of Oedipa’s room just as her sexual relation came to a climax. The music and the intercourse being connected by an increasing crescendo of force and reaching their climax at the same time. Her climax and Metzger’s, when it came, coincided with every light in the place, including the TV tube, suddenly going out, dead, black. It was a curious experience (pg 30).” What importance do these coincidences have in the novel? Purely aesthetic and descriptive tools used by Pynchon, or do they hide a bigger meaning? I believe they have a higher meaning because Pynchon makes them stand out from other event, mentioning they were “a curious experience”. Hopefully their importance will become greater as the novel advances.

This reminded me of the movie The Matrix. Since the whole world is a program and humans are inmerssed in it, there shouldn't be errors and bugs. When Neo has a deja vu he takes it as a simple human mind trick, but his friends know its actually a glitch in the system. This strange look on coincidences and weird occurances gave me a similar feeling to what was happening on the novel.

This novel has given me a strange mood while reading it. Nothing has really happened but there is this feeling of “calm before the storm”, as if something big is going to happen. I especially felt this when Oedipa sees the whole city and has a strange event: “Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her; so in her first minute in San Narciso, a revelation just trembled past the threshold of her understanding (pg 14).” This whole analysis of a simple arrival of a city made me realize there is much more to these emotions than simple artistic devices, they must have a purpose and I am intrigued at what they could be.

I have noticed Pynchon uses a lot of commas in his sentences. “Either he made up the whole thing, Oedipa thought suddenly, or he bribed the engineer over at the local station to run this, it’s all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot (pg 20).” In this excerpt there are seven commas, including commas for lists and for joining clauses. His sometimes choppy thought reminds me of how a confused or scared person begins to think, ideas just rambling inside their minds at a fast speed. Pynchon achieved that effect in the excerpt as Oedipa is very confused and the sentence clearly makes the reader feel that. Still commas often make the sentences long and confusing, forcing me to read a sentence twice to fully grasp its meaning.