Study Questions
The Crying of Lot 49
2. San Narciso seems a natural place for a novel about self-centered perception (as well as the Echo Courts motel), but Saint Narcissus, an early Bishop who miraculously changed water into oil for vigil lamps, is also a recurring element of the novel. What uses does Pynchon make of this double image. Consider, as well, Oedipa's initial view of the city's streets as suggesting "a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate" and her later view of it as a desolate image of America. What (and how) does San Narciso mean?
3. The characters of Lot 49 often have possibly significant names, from Oedipa Maas herself, through Dr. Hilarius, Manny DiPresso, Genghis Cohen, and Emory Bortz, to Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks (not to speak of the radio station for which Mucho Maas is a DJ). Are these rather childish jokes, or do they serve a function in the novel?
4. As Oedipa reflects, late in the novel, all of the men with whom she has associated seem to have dropped away. In fact, most of them reflect one form or another of madness that Oedipa resists. Do their madness and disappearance constitute a comment on American masculinity (and, if so, what is the comment)? Are they related to Oedipa's actual or potential sexual relation to them?
5. Why is it important that Oedipa discovers that WASTE is an acronym? What is the relationship between reading texts (such as the text of "The Courier's Tragedy") and reading the world? What is the relationship between reading the world and executing the will of Pierce Inverarity? On the bridge between Oakland and San Francisco, Oedipa thinks about metaphors. What function to metaphors have in her interpretive process?
6. In the process of interpreting "The Courier's Tragedy" Oedipa becomes caught in the problems of the provenance, editions, and variability of texts. Beyond the problems unstable texts create for her efforts to discover the meaning of Tristero, what is the significance of texts within Pynchon's text.
7. Mucho Maas works for a radio station. Pierce Inverarity calls late at night. Entropy is important in communication theory as well as in thermodynamics. Tristero's empire is an empire of silence. Communication, especially failed communication, seems an important theme in Lot 49. What are the problems of communication, and how are they related to Oedipa's quest?
8. Oedipa's nighttime journey to San Francisco leads to many manifestations of WASTE, which emerges particularly as a means of communication among the dispossessed. What is Oedipa's reaction to what she finds? What does it tell her? Look in particular at her reaction to the old. dying sailor, perhaps the most moving and most important section of the novel. What is the significance of her attitude and understanding here?
9. Jesus Arrabal (is the name significant?) tells Oedipa that a miracle is "another world's intrusion into this one." Is such intrusion a frequent and significant element of the novel? When Oedipa dances with the deaf-mutes, she refers to the soundless dance as an anarchist miracle. Is it? What is the relation (similarity, difference) between an anarchist miracle and hierophany (a term repeated in the novel but used by the religious theorist Mircea Eliade to refer to the manifestation of the sacred)? In fact, the novel is packed with religious references, especially to the Pentecost. Is Tristero a sacred organization? Is Oedipa's quest actually a pilgrimage?
10. Inamorati Anonymous is one of the many groups that communicates by WASTE. If it does not yield much particular meaning for Oedipa's quest, it certainly seems significant to the thematic texture of the novel. Can we see Lot 49 as a novel about love, the lack of love, or the denial of love. Given Oedipa's failures in that regard, is she a closet member of IA?
11. History is important in Lot 49 (as it is all of Pynchon's novels). With the help of Emory Bortz, Oedipa discovers a great deal about the history of Tristero, but there are a number of other historical excursions-the story of Peter Pinquid, the Pony Express, the Gallipoli campaign, and others-some mostly factual, others mostly fictional. Is factuality in Pynchon's fiction also "another world's intrusion into this one"? Beyond its usefulness in supplying clues for Oedipa's research, what does the past inform us about the main satiric target of Pynchon's novel-America itself?
12. Lot 49 seems to include more than its share of madness, but it may be important to think about why particular characters have particular mental problems. What, in particular, is the relation between madness, illusion, and paranoia? Oedipa wonders whether she is, or will become, a victim of both illusion and paranoia. Does she? If not, how does she keep her sanity?
13. Oedipa has heard that excluded middles are "bad shit, to be avoided," but by the end of the novel she is trapped by binary forms. What is wrong with binary thinking, and why does it constitute a trap for Oedipa? Is there any way, intellectually or personally, for her to escape from that trap? Is the trap the same as the tower in which she feels imprisoned at the beginning of the novel, or has the trap replaced the tower?
14. The final paragraph of the novel is filled with promising religious imagery, but at the end nothing seems solved-or does it? What do you make of the ending of the novel-or, more accurately, its failure to arrive at any apparent resolution? If the novel does not leave us with a problem solved, what does it leave us with?