Policy of Truth -- Crying of Lot 49

The fifth chapter of The Crying of Lot 49 begins, for me, the really strange part of this book. Oedipa goes to Berkeley and finds John Nefastis. She tries his machine to find out if she is sensitive, attempting to give it energy through her concentration and eyesight. This is obviously highly unlikely, but with everything else that is going on, Oedipa is willing to try. She tries so hard, perhaps trying to make sense out of her life, to make it work that she ends up manufacturing a change, such a slight change that she doesn’t know if it really happened or it was just her head. “And there. At the top edge of what she could see: hadn’t the right-hand piston moved a fraction? Just like her, the reader is left wondering, but this is rebuked when Nefastis destroys all his credibility by telling her to have out-of-boredom sex. “Please don’t cry. Come on in on the couch. The news will be on any minute. We can do it there (pg 86).” This scene addresses many things. Pynchon could be showing that when one’s world is growing chaotic, we look for an escape, a scapegoat. Oedipa wanted that scapegoat to be her “sensitivity”, she was looking for order in her disorganized world, and much like Maxwell’s Demon allegedly did for his small universe. Having the Demon failed to organize her world, Oedipa can only hope that finding out more about Tristero will save her.

Pynchon also uses this event to satirize the loss of value that sex has in modern times. Much like when Oedipa cheated with Metzger, when Nefastis asks her for sex he is doing it out of boredom, not out of love. Sex is just another thing to do, before it was the ultimate expression of love between a man and a woman. Pynchon satirizes this by placing these situations in the most absurd occasions, such as viewing an old movie betting whether the character dies or not or having sex during the news.

After this strange event, Oedipa decides to drive off and clear her head. She ends up in San Francisco. As she wonder into what will be a very long night for Oedipa, she enters a gay bar and meets a man who has the Tristero horn symbol in a pin. He tells her its represents Inamorati Anonymous which helps love-stricken people. Later on she continues in a bus ride throughout the city and begins to see the Tristero symbol everywhere, mentions of W.A.S.T.E everywhere and even people talking about it. This is such a heavy hit upon her conscience that the reader can see that Oedipa cannot differentiate from reality and dreams. She ends up in a poor apartment building where she meets an old sailor who asks her to deliver a letter to his wife through the W.A.S.T.E system and gives her the address to one of the Tristero mailboxes. She follows the Tristero mailman from there in a trip that leads her back to John Nefastis’ house. More confused than how she began, she returns to her hotel.

This is one of the most confusing events in the whole novel. It’s as if Pynchon places us inside Oedipa’s head so we can experience the overload of stress and pressure just like she is feeling it. Pynchon uses this event to show us how the human mind is capable of dissolving the line between reality and imagination. When things get too chaotic, the brain will attempt to eliminate all that stress by making us dream. Many times this helps us relax for those precious minutes to get our act back together. In Oedipa’s case, Pynchon does the exact opposite (making fun of dreams?) by turning her dream into a living nightmare. Murphy’s Law has a statement that says, “Enough research will tend to support your theory.” When Oedipa looks everywhere for the muted horn, I was reminded of this. Between reality and dreams, Oedipa was persuaded to completely believe the existence of Tristero. Here the truth theme from my previous blog arises again, can she believe her findings? With this same event Pynchon satirizes the common detective novel. In those novels, as the plot moves on the clues tend to help the reader solve the crime, In Lot 49 the exact opposite occurs. As she sees more muted horns, more mails and even a W.A.S.T.E mailman, Oedipa gets more confused and even deeper into the problem, no where nearer to a solution.

There’s a very interesting event when Oedipa reaches her hotel. She is driven into a deaf-mute dance party where every couple dances to the rhythm the man has in his head. “But how long, Oedipa thought could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions (pg 107).” Despite their various rhythms, the couples never crash in their entropy, in their chaos. There is no apparent communication and they move amongst themselves harmlessly. Again, Pynchon shows the communication theme. Words are problematic. They create conspiracies, fights and can be hurtful. In a universe, the deaf-mute universe, no such problem appears to exist. This reminded me of a Depeche Mode song titled Enjoy the Silence. The lyrics say:

Vows are spoken
To be broken
Feelings are intense
Words are trivial
Pleasures remain
So does the pain
Words are meaningless
And forgettable

Both Pynchon and Depeche Mode allude to the same thing: words are not the most effective way to communicate, they generate confusion and have many interpretations; therefore they are meaningless.

Oedipa decides to return to her own town and talk with Dr. Hilarius to tell her she is imagining things. She doesn’t want to have to face the “reality” of Tristero, she just wants an explanation for everything that is going on around her. She finds that Dr. Hilarius has gone crazy, completely paranoid as his past has caught up to him. He kidnaps Oedipa and begins telling her how he used to do experiments on Jews during World War II. He is now afraid the Israelis are chasing him to punish him for his crimes. After a revealing conversation, the police arrest Hilarius and Oedipa is safe, but without answers. The character of Dr. Hilarius is a clear satire of many aspects. He makes fun of an apparently sane person, a psychiatrist by making him a paranoid freak who used to do experiment on Jews, how can someone trust him? Well he became a successful doctor with loyal clients, Oedipa herself. This makes the reader think to what extent can you trust others with helping you with your problems if they might have worse problems than yourself? He also mocks the apparent benefits of paranoia, “But I never took the drug, I chose to remain in relative paranoia, where at least I know who I am and who the others are (pg 111).” This is very ridiculous, yet many parts of society live that way. They buy guns for fears that might not exist, they hate people for reasons that might not be true, and in the end they live in permanent fear. Pynchon even attacks medicine by mocking the ridiculous use of LSD as a medicine in Dr. Hilarius’ clinic. This seems absurd, but the drugs used today as legal medicines are not that safer, they have serious side effects and, like LSD, blur reality and dreams.

After Oedipa leaves the clinic, she finds her husband, Mucho there and she meets him. She later finds out that he is taking LSD. Oedipa realizes she doesn’t really know her husband. Pynchon mocks the common junkie, they are like Mucho by saying the drug has helped them, that they can quit. In reality the drug is controlling them. After this event we can see that Oedipa has become almost completely isolated, Dr. Hilarius cannot help her, her husband is gone to drugs and the Demon didn’t give her answers. Isolation is the opposite of communication and it seems none gives benefits. Communication can lead to misinterpretations and fights, but isolation leads to paranoia like what happened to Dr. Hilarius. Which is better?