Get your facts right, check your sources.... The Crying of Lot 49

The fourth chapter of The Crying of lot 49 really begins showing the reader the alleged conspiracy brewing around Oedipa. In one of Inverarity’s companies, Yoyodyne, Oedipa meets Stanley Koteks who is drawing Tristero’s symbol in a folder. Oedipa begins talking with him and the conversation leads to patent laws and corporations in America. Koteks asks Oedipa, who tells him she is a stockholder, to reform patent laws so the individual get recognition like the inventors of old. He criticizes how now everyone is part of a “team” or “task force” and he is lost amongst the paperwork while the leaders of the corporation get all the credit. Ironically, Oedipa was at a stockholder meeting where everyone sang along to a song that called for teamwork and unity. “To the end we swear undying / Loyalty to you (pg 65).” Pynchon is probably showing this contradiction to criticize megacorporations in which everyone is just a number and nothing else, yet the call for teamwork. It is to note that the ones that sang were stockholders, some of the highest positions in the company, the ones that obtain the dividends and recognition and are the ones that urge teamwork because they profit from other people’s work. Stanley’s conversation makes Oedipa start to believe a giant conspiracy involving many different areas and people is underway. Stanley points Oedipa to a Berkeley scientist, John Nefastis, who has invented a perpetual motion machine. This machine however, can only work with “sensitive” people.

Oedipa gets a book with The Courier’s Tragedy in it and reads to find out more about Tristero. She finds some strange annotations from a Berkely publisher so she decides to go there and meet the publisher and Nefastis. On her way, she stops at a retirement home property of Inverarity and there she meets a random old man who tells her about his grandfather who rode at the time of the Pony Express. He narrates how he killed some fake-indians who carried rings with the Tristero symbol. Chilled, Oedipa goes back to San Narcisso to organize her thoughts. Could this be a strange coincidence or is it just Oedipa’s paranoia and underlying wish for a change in her life?

Her worries are worsened when she meets with a stamp expert who finds some strange stamps in Inverarity’s collection. There are some that have the Tristero symbol, some American and some German, and Oedipa now believes this is a bigger conspiracy and for time-spanning than she had thought. Still the strange versions of The Courier’s Tragedy, the fake-indian ring, and the fraudulent stamps make the fact of determining what is really going on a monumental task. Pynchon shows this issue to show how even today, with science and vast knowledge, truth is still uncertain. Can a machine (Maxwell’s Demon) defy an established scientific law? Who can we trust as a source? How do we relate events? This reminds me of what we are constantly told to do in school, “Get your facts right, check your sources.” The internet has given students countless of places to obtain information from, but which do we believe? Wkipedia? A blog? A newspage? Whatever we choose, information is always being monitored, changed and edited to suit different objectives. Could we be living as the citizens in 1984? Under the information from a “Ministry of Truth” that shows us what they want us to believe? Pynchon wants us to rethink our concept of truth. This theme greatly influences the overall them of he novel which is communication. After all, is it possible to truly communicate without the truth?