Chapter 3:

Chapter 3:

The Paradigm of Lot 49

In light of the critical perspective offered by the literary-instrumental language continuum, a reading of an exemplary text will aid in grounding the concepts presented in the previous chapters. The Crying of Lot 49 is ideal for this study, not only because it is a complex, highly polysemic text, but because the principal subject matter of the book is language and communication, especially as concerns metaphor, pun, and ambiguity. Judith Chambers includes Lot 49 among Pynchon's works in which he "experiments with style and language, using allegory, pun, parable, and parody to call attention to the transfiguration of language and to reinfuse it with mystery" (4). She then adds, "But each [work] also talks about loss and decline, talks about indeterminacy and paradox." In this sense, the novel may be read as a conversation about itself, a dialogue that encourages the deconstruction of the text. Thomas Schaub observes that this self-reflexivity also characterizes Melville's Moby-Dick; for example, the opening chapter of that novel, "Etymology," both talks about meaning and is itself a carrier of meaning. Lot 49 is more valuable to the present study only because it directly addresses contemporary communications issues, including the rudiments of information theory, both of which are central to the discussion of literary and instrumental language.

Lot 49 is further appropriate to a realization of the theoretical propositions of the previous chapter because the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is herself a type of reader. Expressing a view common to a majority of Lot 49 critics, Maureen Quilligan suggests that of all Pynchon's characters, Oedipa "is the protagonist who is presented most consistently as a reader" (200).^[1] This has the effect of fusing the reader's experiences with Oedipa's; as she attempts to read the text of her world (as well as a particular text in her world, The Courier's Tragedy) the reader is encountering the same text, and both Oedipa and the reader are simultaneously engaged in interpreting it. Moby-Dick again makes for an interesting parallel: Ishmael is very much a reader throughout the novel; one need only again recall his meditations on "whiteness." Ahab too is a reader, and his text is the eponymous whale itself. As a result, Schaub concludes, "Both books are about reading texts and the systems of understanding which characters read out of their central symbols" (118). Though specifically addressing Lot 49, Hanjo Berressem makes an observation that is also appropriate to both novels: "Rather than just show the dissemination of the (inter)text, Pynchon stages the confrontation of the mortal subject with the immortal, atemporal, and disseminating text" (88). In other words, both texts depict central characters wrestling with polysemic texts or symbols (the whale, Tristero) that are inhuman and infinitely powerful in their capacity for evading totalizing readings. In the case of Lot 49, the reader observes the encounter between Oedipa and her disseminating text(s) while undergoing the same experience with the text of Lot 49 itself.

These two qualities, the novel's explicit concern with language and communication and its readerly protagonist, make Lot 49 particularly suitable for a reading in conjunction with the study of literary and instrumental language. While the nature of complex texts makes them incompatible with totalizing readings, it is not too much to project a rough interpretive framework that highlights key connections between this study and the novel. Oedipa, in these terms, begins the novel as an instrumental reader of her world; she is soon "sensitized" to the polysemic messages all around her. She then quickly finds herself nearly paralyzed by an agglomeration of meanings, and begins to doubt whether all of them can be "real." By the end of the novel she is hyper-aware of communications systems and polysemies, but uncertain as to whether they have led her to an otherwise concealed community of the alienated, or into a state of "ontological" paranoia, as Berressem describes it (109).

For the purposes of this exploration of the novel, and to better parallel the reader's experience with Oedipa's, the hypothetical reader posited in the following discussion is an inexperienced one. That is, this reader is accustomed to texts that are principally instrumental in nature, and has not had any experience with complex literature or Lot 49 specifically. This is not, of course, to say that a knowledgeable reader with some background in the novel will fail to share in the same key experiences, but that with such a reader they will be less manifest. To fully mimic the progression of Oedipa's quest, one must share her initial assumptions about language and reality.

At the novel's opening, both Oedipa and the reader expect their texts (her world, the reader's copy of Lot 49) to be faithful to "reality," which in this case involves the direct and singular correspondence between messages and meanings. In Oedipa's case, this assumption is established less by the actual opening pages of the novel than by the resulting change in Oedipa over several chapters; this is perfectly reasonable, however, because if Pynchon had gone out of his way to establish Oedipa's instrumental perspective he would arguably have overcued the reader as to Oedipa's limited perceptions. He places Oedipa in a stereotypical middle-class milieu, suggesting that her world is prefabricated by the prevailing consumer-cultural powers; the opening sentence of the novel begins "One summer afternoon Mrs [sic] Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue . . ." (9). The now-classic Tupperware party is evidence of the vapid and form-driven nature of Oedipa's social reality. The Oedipa of later chapters would have wondered why there was too much kirsch in the fondue, and exactly who put it there.

There is, perhaps, better evidence of Oedipa's initial monosemic (or possibly asemic) vision in her understanding of Mucho Maas, her husband. A critically overlooked figure, he is in fact very similar to Oedipa; the significant difference is that his character progresses inversely to hers over the course of the novel. While Oedipa opens the novel unaware of the omnipresence of signs and meanings, Mucho is only too aware of the meaning-laden world around him. He suffers terribly from memories of working as a used car salesman, during which time he had become "so hyperaware of what that profession had come to mean that working hours were exquisite torture to him" (12-13). Now he can no longer look at sawdust, pencil shavings, or any viscous fluids because they all remind him of the tricks used by his former colleagues to make sick cars sound well. His symbolic network extends beyond the singular meanings normally ascribed to sawdust and honey. Mucho is also a reader, and his text is the lot and the cars that come and go. His interpretation of the trade-ins offered by his clients is both brilliant and terrible: the poor and broken form "a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like . . ." (13). Further, he cannot "accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life. . . . To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest" (14). He reads the cars and his customers as communicating multiple meanings ranging well beyond the conventional; each becomes a metaphor for the other. As if this were not evidence enough of his polysemic awareness, at the end of the novel the origin of the nightmares that have since plagued him is revealed: a "creaking metal sign" that hung at the lot, reading "N.A.D.A." (144). The letters are an acronym, identifying the lot as having membership in the National Automobile Dealers Association, but Mucho reads another meaning out of the sign (which is both literally and figuratively a "sign"); taking the sequence as a Spanish word, he arrives at a second possibility: "nothing."^[2] Thus the bleak horror of the sign saying "nada, nada, against the blue sky" as it swings.^[3]

Oedipa, in contrast, doesn't understand the nature of Mucho's suffering; nor does she appear to want to. Rather callously, she begins to think that it might have been better for Mucho to have served in a war, with "Japs in trees, Krauts in Tiger tanks, gooks with trumpets in the night," any of which he might have forgotten sooner than his experiences at the lot (15). The novel's opening scene further emphasizes Oedipa's failure; when Mucho comes home from work and begins unloading his troubles, Oedipa tells him, "You're too sensitive" (12). This is highly ironic, considering that later in the novel Oedipa will try to fulfill the role of a "sensitive," for the purpose of making a machine operate. Their role reversal is complete at the novel's end. Oedipa is initially immersed in a particular social reality, and is arguably undifferentiated from the other women in attendance at the Tupperware party; Berressem similarly concludes that at the beginning, Oedipa is "completely submerged within culture, a culture that is in turn completely submerged within itself" (94). She later comes to be extremely ego-centered, ready to "project a world" of which she herself is the center.^[4] Mucho, on the other hand, begins as a very distinct individual with a multi-layered awareness of the world around him; it is only at the end of the novel, after he has begun taking LSD under the guidance of Dr. Hilarius, that his ego dissolves and his awareness shifts from a plurality of meanings to a unified, panpsychic meaning. As Mucho's boss explains to Oedipa, "Day by day, Wendell is less himself and more generic. He enters a staff meeting and the room is suddenly full of people, you know? He's a walking assembly of man" (140). To Mucho's advantage, the "nada" nightmare no longer plagues him, but it is ultimately at the expense of his selfhood.

Although the text does not detail Mucho's progression from creative interpreter to passive consumer, Oedipa's increasing perceptions of polysemy and unusual communications media are in large part the substance of the book. Critics have generally identified one particular event as being key to Oedipa's "sensitization," the moment she understands that the world she knows is not the unified whole she takes it to be. This incident occurs early in chapter three, immediately following her tryst with Metzger, the co-executor of Pierce Inverarity's will. Oedipa has received a letter from Mucho, one that she suspects will be empty of meaning; this "intuition" prompts her to look more closely at the exterior of the envelope, which leads her to read the cancellation blurb on it, "Report All Obscene Mail To Your Potsmaster" (46). The seeming error "potsmaster" catches her attention, and tips her off to look for further subtle incongruities. According to Thomas Schaub, "This [event] is the beginning of her discovery of an alternative message service; once she acquires the McLuhanesque knack, she is quick to read the messages encoded in the medium of America, congruent with the ostensible signs it proffers" (25). Berressem goes further, suggesting that this is the "first break" detected by Oedipa, "shifting her attention from the signified to the signifier" (95). He explains:

The error is based on the smallest form of linguistic disorder, the

displacement of two phonemes, yet this minimal mistake is the first instance

in which the tissue of the complex and vast discursive network that makes

up Oedipa's reality begins to give way. (95-96)

Perhaps. The text of Lot 49, however, is less specific, identifying instead a locus of events that heighten Oedipa's awareness of communicative fissures and polysemies. As the narrator or Oedipa rather abstractly identifies it, she was "set up or sensitized, first by her peculiar seduction, then by the other, almost offhand things" (45).^[5] In the next paragraph it seems more certain, as the former possibilities are apparently dismissed: "It got seriously under way, this sensitizing, either with the letter from Mucho or the evening she and Metzger drifted into a strange bar known as The Scope." This indeterminacy is characteristic of the novel, and just as Oedipa reflects on her own sensitization and its ambiguous status, the reader simultaneously contends with this uncertainty without being given any privileged information by the text as to which is the "real" sensitizing event. It is clear that Oedipa's visit to The Scope, where she meets Mike Fallopian and discovers the W.A.S.T.E. system, does have at least one discernible revelation; following her conversation with Fallopian, the text reads: "So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero" (54).

There is another significant visionary episode much earlier in the novel, at the very beginning of chapter two. Driving into San Narciso in a rented Impala, Oedipa is struck by the "ordered swirl of houses and streets" she sees from atop a slope; the sensory impression recalls her experience changing a transistor radio's battery, exposing her to the micropatterns of a circuit board for the first time (24). This moment has a peculiar effect on her:

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 (if she had tried to find out); so in her

first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the

threshold of her understanding. (24)

It is appropriate that "in her first minute" she experiences the intimations of a revelation, because San Narciso is the heart of Inverarity's estate and the site of the remainder of Oedipa's "sensitizations." The character of this first oracle is announced as being of a rather high order, for "she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant." Given this textual evidence, it is arguable that this incident marks the first step in Oedipa's induction into the polysemic beyond.

Regardless of exactly when Oedipa's communicative consciousness is first awakened, the reader's own raised awareness is likely to follow shortly thereafter. The ambiguity of the "revelation," as well as the text's own undercutting of the "religious instant" (the phrase is used first as plain text; it then appears on the next page in quotation marks, suggesting its dubiety) will suggest to the reader the instability of the "reality" projected by the text. Indeed, the reader may already be questioning the text's reading of the Remedios Varo painting and its connection to Oedipa, which appears just at the close of the first chapter. The painting, "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," shows several girls embroidering a tapestry inside a tower, but the tapestry composes the contents of the world; as Schaub observes, it is an "inverse parable of creation" (33). Oedipa's conclusion calls attention to the artifice of personal narrative, as well as to the textuality of reality: "She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico . . ." (21). She is thus made aware of the potentially solipsistic nature of perceived reality, which by extension suggests to the reader that the world of the text may be a representation of Oedipa's own tapestry. Of course, some readers (certainly those with some literary background) are likely to be "sensitized" on the first page, upon encountering a character named "Oedipa."^[6] Similarly, Schaub suggests that the call letters of Mucho's radio station, "KCUF," are key to inducing in the reader the kind of "inquisitive alertness" later possessed by Oedipa. In his reading,

The call letters present the reader with a set of questions which parallel

those facing Oedipa: are these letters arbitrary or purposeful? have they a

literal meaning directly linked to specific plot and character, or are they

relevant only within the complex of meaning of the book? (113)

Or, one might wonder whether the arrangement is a joke, intended to push the reader out of the world of the text and force a confrontation with the text as text; for if Oedipa and Mucho do not recognize the encoded message, and it is not then a part of their world, it is a message intended only for the reader, and is in a sense only part of the text of the novel. This split reference establishes a tripartite tension: between the reader and the text, between the reader and Oedipa's world (as projected by the text), and between Oedipa's reading of her world and its actuality. In short, the reader must attempt to discern the particular destination(s) for each meaning elicited from the text; some exist only for the reader, some for the world of the novel, and some for Oedipa alone.

This initial sensitization, whenever it occurs, leads both Oedipa and the reader to pay more attention to potential communication systems and messages, which in turn reward this attention and heighten sensitivity. Following her encounter with Mike Fallopian and subsequent discovery of the W.A.S.T.E. postal system, Oedipa is led by the Paranoids to a Jacobean revenge play which she believes has some parallels to one of Pierce's concerns. It is in this play, The Courier's Tragedy, that Oedipa first encounters the word "Tristero," and in this context it is associated both with messengered communications and the transformation of human bones into ink; the latter Oedipa connects to Pierce's own investment in human bones for the lake at Fangoso Lagoons, as well as for the manufacture of cigarette filters. The increasing number of connnections that fail to lead to anything but more questions only draws Oedipa further in. She follows up with Fallopian and pursues the text of the play some, but these leads become only part of her newfound sensibility: ". . . these follow-ups were no more disquieting than other revelations which now seemed to come crowding in exponentially, as if the more she collected the more would come to her, until everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero" (81). Oedipa is on the borderline, if not over it, of a perceptual phase transition; she is, at this point, so sensitized to the potential density of meaning underlying the text of her world that everything has revelatory possibilities. Indeed, she eventually comes to the point that she avoids acquiring new information, for fear that her revelation may "grow larger than she and assume her to itself" (166). As Seed notes, this progression is an important part of the structure of the novel: "The more connections Oedipa makes, the more information she receives, hence further connections have to be made, and so on. Pynchon keeps the novel moving at a fast pace so that it becomes proportionally more difficult for Oedipa to organize the information she receives" (119).

The reader is likely to suffer the same uncertainty with Oedipa, as the text of Lot 49 does not provide the answers Oedipa so desperately craves; it too burgeons with meanings and possibilities, and is equally short on resolutions. J. Kerry Grant similarly argues that "The reader is inexorably caught up in Oedipa's predicament precisely because the experience of reading the novel so closely resembles her efforts to disentangle Pierce's legacy" (xvi).^[7] Just as with Oedipa, the proliferation of polysemies and the connections made among them lead to a perceptual phase transition in the reader; furthermore, the meanings seemingly specifically coded for the reader, such as "KCUF" or the names "Stanley Koteks" and "Mike Fallopian," offer the reader even more possibilities, ones unavailable to Oedipa; in this latter case, the reader is forced to wonder what (if any) meaning to draw from the apparent connection between two names that have associations with female sexuality.^[8] There are also the borderline cases, as with the group named "The Paranoids," whose ostensible meaning(s) may be available to both Oedipa and the reader, and whose meanings may be different for each.

The reader suffers a further challenge: differentiating "fact" from "fiction." Much of Lot 49 is composed of historical accounts of one sort or another, and they are generally presented rationally and thus believably. Even a moderately educated reader is likely to note that a number of these accounts appear valid, or are at least not immediately dismissible. Intertwined with these histories, however, are elements that are apparently unique to the novel, that are "fictional." As Seed observes of the Peter Pinguid history provided by Mike Fallopian, "the story combines plausibility with blatant fiction (the name of Pinguid, for instance) in a way which involves the reader in Oedipa's desire to verify, and the sequence of stories and information which she receives is carefully calculated to keep her and the reader guessing" (124). What makes this more disturbing for the reader is the fact that, while Oedipa's difficulties are at length removed from "the real world," contained within a fictional text, the reader has no such buffer. Schaub notes that these commingled histories effectively bind the reader's world to the text's. He uses the Maxwell's Demon metaphor to describe the reader's role:

The reader is the Demon inside Pynchon's world, sorting and "unpacking"

the facts. As their overt presence within the fiction is shown to correspond

to a covert presence in our world, the reader is engaged, like Oedipa, in a

transvaluation of the given understandings of his world. (116)

Not only, then, does the reader face the challenge of accounting for and totalizing a plurality of polysemies, he is also encouraged to identify those "facts" unique to Oedipa's world, the world of the text, and those shared by his own world.

This suspension of certainty leads to an evaluation of all information and a faith in potential meanings, no matter how improbable. The result of this phase transition is, in part, a generation of spurious meanings and connections, ones not intended by the author (or in Oedipa's case, not "real" in her world). While it is impossible to guess at the meanings produced by the average reader, there is a bounty of evidence provided by critics (unintentionally) as to the ease with which nearly absurd readings may be arrived at. For example, Robert Murray Davis identifies the name "Nefastis" as an anagram of "isn't safe" (368). Judith Chambers traces a winding path through Oedipa's last name; she looks "Maas" up in the Oxford English Dictionary (and notes that Oedipa is called Oed in the novel, thus O.E.D., another connection) and concludes that "A proper noun, it refers to 'Meuse,' a French river - an inconsequential fact. Pronounced 'my ooze,' however, Meuse is very likely a homonym for 'muse' and is, in fact, just one letter away from that word" (101). Schaub, normally a reliable commentator, has a unique reading of Pierce's first name; he asserts that it "derives from 'petrus' or rock," and goes on to explain that "As founder of San Narciso, Pierce is an inverse Peter, on whom is built the profane church of America" (33). He needed only go a step further and note the traditional Christian typology connecting Peter and Christ, and then assert that Pierce is the Antichrist. For sheer numbers, it is worth noting that in his Companion to The Crying of Lot 49, J. Kerry Grant lists approximately ten different interpretations of the name "Pierce Inverarity," and this is by no means exhaustive.^[9]

This is not to say that these readings are "wrong." On the contrary, they are in fact fascinating because they straddle the line of plausibility, and the connections they make are simultaneously intriguing and unbelievable. What is objectionable is the claim to truth implicit in these interpretations; they are offered as definitive explications of authorial intention. The jouissance of a polysemic text is precisely the play of meaning it affords, and the validity of a meaning is determined solely by the connections that can be made. The belief that one has found the meaning runs counter to the nature of the text.

Such a multiplicity of meanings, however probable one finds them, also demands that one admit the improbability that all of them are intended, and if one is in search of the "truth" this presents an obstacle; Oedipa and the reader must confront the possibility that some of the meanings in their texts are of their own manufacture. For the reader in pursuit of totality and the discovery of an authorial/authorized structure, this is a disconcerting fact to acknowledge. For Oedipa, it is terrifying, because her text is her world, and if her understanding of it is unpredictably altered by her perception of it, she cannot function. She is trapped in a self-imposed binary that resolves into two equally despairing possibilities: she is crazy, or the Tristero and all of the meanings and signs she has encountered are real. She does, on occasion, recognize that some of her perceptions may be flawed; this happens twice during the "nighttown" scene, when the city seems pulsing with signs. The first concession occurs following a bus ride, during which she falls asleep off and on and dreams of the post horn; the narrator suggests that "Later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed" (117). A similar line appears shortly thereafter: "She grew so to expect it [the post horn] that perhaps she did not see it quite as often as she later was to remember seeing it" (123-24).^[10] Yet these ambiguities do not lead Oedipa out of the binary; she remains in thrall to its two exclusive possibilities. For the reader, these two statements reinforce the potential unreliability of Oedipa's perceptions as well as suggest that the reader's own understanding of the text is infected by this unresolved ambiguity.

Oedipa's insistence on tracking down the "truth" about the Tristero mystery puts her in a role similar to that of her namesake, Oedipus. The novel is, in a sense, a quest for identity on multiple levels, and Oedipa plays at being a detective throughout. Berressem suggests that Oedipa's ultimately failed attempt to resolve known facts out of perceptions makes Lot 49 a "deconstruction" of the mystery novel genre. The text certainly provides a great deal of evidence on this score; Oedipa herself claims kinship to the stereotypical "private eye." Suffocating under the profusion of post horns in "nighttown," she compares her present "fatalism" with her former self:

That optimistic baby had come on so like the private eye in any long-ago

radio drama, believing all you needed was grit, resourcefulness, exemption

from hidebound cops' rules, to solve any great mystery. (124)

As if taking her cue from these radio dramas or cheap paperbacks, Oedipa believes that a mystery, of necessity, has a structure and form into which all clues ultimately resolve; further, that human perception has nothing to do with "reality," which can always be reconstructed according to the temporality of cause and effect via the evidence left behind. By using the classical model, Oedipa fails to allow for ambiguities and polysemies that are not connected to the mystery; she also does not understand that some mysteries (especially those of the real world) are unsolvable. Molly Hite makes an interesting observation on the nature of the traditional novel and its connection to Oedipa's type of approach:

One of Pynchon's central insights is that people tend to 'read' experience

the same way that they read books. A novel is traditionally a totalizing

structure that derives much of its energy from its promise to reveal the

intrinsic connections uniting apparently contingent elements. . . . A

conventional narrative is a process of putting things together, and the

satisfaction of closure involves the sense that everything has been wrapped

up. (17-18)

Oedipa, then, is a reader struggling with an atotal, polysemic text, who refuses to give up the dream of totality.^[11] To this end, Hite notes that the Tristero becomes Oedipa's "totalizing principle" (16). The only problem is that Oedipa is totally uncertain as to the true nature of the Tristero; indeed, she remains uncertain until the end as to whether or not it exists. As a totalizing principle, then, it solves no mystery, only encapsulates one.

Oedipa's detective-like approach to her "revelations" is emphasized by the language of the text (which may also be the language of her thoughts); at the opening of chapter three, just when things have begun "turning curious," the word "logically" is repeated three times in two sentences. The last of these is telling: "That's what would come to haunt her most, perhaps: the way it fitted, logically, together" (emphasis added 44). Logic, then, is a criterion for truth. Later, as Oedipa comes to terms with the binary that threatens to destroy her, she takes inventory of what she "knows" about the Tristero (109). In fact, she believes that only her ignorance stands in her way, and if she knew enough, the mystery could be solved (82). Logic and knowledge: the tools of Sherlock Holmes. The danger is that the reader is tempted to be caught up with Oedipa, imitating her methods, affirming her conclusions; doing so, however, only results in facing the same unresolved binary that she does.

There is one aspect of Oedipus' legendary quest that looms threateningly over Oedipa's: the solution to his mystery resulted in tragedy, as he discovered that the murderer he sought was in fact himself. As Eric Charles White points out, "Recapitulating the career of her namesake, Oedipa Maas may herself be the criminal she seeks" (270). One does not need recourse to the allusion, however, to make such a case. By executing Pierce's will, carrying out her self-appointed duty "to bestow life on what had persisted . . . to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning," she effectively imposes Pierce's will upon herself (82). Further, if the Tristero should actually be a creation of Pierce's, aimed at Oedipa, then ultimately all of her efforts will only return her to herself. There is another possibility as well; Schaub suggests that Oedipa may be at the heart (along with the Tristero) of her declining society (36). As evidence he cites Oedipa's experience at her hotel in Berkeley; in bed,

She fell asleep almost at once, but kept waking from a nightmare about

something in the mirror, across from her bed. Nothing specific, only a

possibility, nothing she could see. . . . When she woke in the morning, she

was sitting bolt upright, staring into the mirror at her own exhausted face.

(101)

This "possibility" just may be that she is her own nightmare, that her identity and that of the Tristero are somehow intimately linked. Of course, one need only recall her status at the novel's opening as a Tupperware party attendee to find support for the notion that Oedipa has been for some time responsible for the dispossession of so many and the vapidity of her culture.^[12]

At one point in her career as a private eye, Oedipa pursues a W.A.S.T.E. courier with the intention of discovering the nature of this underground communications system; the result, however, is that she is simply led back to Nefastis' apartment (131). This comic, almost burlesque (though Kafkaesque as well) outcome is characteristic of many of Oedipa's investigations; given her more successful pursuit of the text of The Courier's Tragedy, Oedipa seems to make a much better literary scholar than gumshoe detective.

Oedipa is first introduced to the play by the Paranoids, who mention it upon overhearing Oedipa and Metzger's conversation about Pierce's investment in human bones; they note that the play contains similar events. She then hears the plot, "related near to unintelligible by eight memories unlooping progressively into regions as strange to map as their rising coils and clouds of pot smoke" (64).^[13] These memories are the product of eight readers reading; distorted, perhaps idiolectical, they stand as evidence before Oedipa as to the factor that human memory and perception play in the processing of texts. Frustrated by their incoherence, however, Oedipa simply decides to see the play for herself; the lesson is lost upon her.

She and Metzger attend a performance of The Courier's Tragedy, and her intention is to discover the connection, if any, between the bones in the play and those of Pierce's estate. Her experience, however, both foreshadows her perceptual phase transition and pushes her closer to it, for the staged play itself dramatizes this transformation. The first three acts contain nothing unusual; they conform to the stereotype of the Jacobean revenge play. Well into the fourth act, however, the very essence of communication undergoes a radical alteration. Angelo, the Duke of Squamuglia, has just broken into a rage over the revelation that the rightful heir to the duchy of Faggio remains alive; what follows is worth quoting in full:

It is at about this point in the play, in fact, that things really get peculiar,

and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words.

Heretofore the naming of names has gone on either literally or as metaphor.

But now, as the Duke gives his fatal command, a new mode of expression

takes over. It can only be called a kind of ritual reluctance. Certain things,

it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud; certain events will not be shown

onstage; though it is difficult to imagine, given the excesses of the

preceding acts, what these things could possibly be. The Duke does not,

perhaps may not, enlighten us. (71-72)

The passage is especially difficult to explicate because it speaks of an ambiguity in equally ambiguous terms.^[14] In this sense it describes itself, at least as concerns the reader's experience; an ambiguity has quite literally entered the text at this point. Indeed, much of the sense of the passage can easily be turned back to the body of Lot 49. The "naming of names" is obviously significant throughout the novel, and some ("Mike Fallopian") are potentially metaphorical while others, notably the historical ones, are literal. The "ritual reluctance" describes perfectly the narrative's recurring cycle of approaching total revelation and then pulling back from it. The fact that the Duke "may not" have the capacity to explain this transformation provides for three readings. The first is rather obvious: if the "new mode of expression" is highly ambiguous, it naturally resists conventional modes of comprehension. There is, however, an interesting analogue to the Duke: Pynchon himself. Read this way, Pynchon's expression is the text of Lot 49; its polysemic nature and atotality means that even he cannot possess the ability to disambiguate his own words. Finally, if "may not" is read as "is not permitted to," the line resonates with the atmosphere of conspiracy and paranoia that the novel establishes.

This odd communicative event occurs a second time in a Faggio scene immediately following: "Again, as in Angelo's court, the curious chill creeps in. Everyone onstage (having clearly been directed to do so) becomes aware of a possibility" (72). This time, however, the surrounding text suggests that a sudden collective awareness of the Tristero is responsible for the transformation. If this is the cause of both radical shifts, then the Tristero is directly linked to ambiguity; it becomes, in a sense, a point of origin for ambiguity. Berressem points out that in both Lot 49 and the performance of The Courier's Tragedy the introduction of a mystery marks the point at which the discourse begins to break down (96). This mystery, this ambiguity, is the Tristero. Further, its name does not seem to occupy any known linguistic category in human communication; it is neither literal nor metaphoric, according to the first passage. This piece of language, if it is even that, forges a powerful connection between Oedipa's world and the reader's text; the Tristero disrupts both at precisely the same moment, so that it becomes impossible for either Oedipa or the reader to continue reading their texts as though they were instrumental. One might describe the Tristero as antilanguage, as its effect is to shatter conventional linguistic communication.

The play also contains another transformation, one that is equally radical; in this case, the change occurs in a text within the play itself. In the same act that the "ambiguity" of the Tristero disrupts the exchange between the characters, a letter written by Angelo undergoes an incredible conversion. Initially, it is "a pack of lies devised to soothe Gennaro" until Angelo can invade; by the end of the act, the very same letter has become "a long confession by Angelo of all his crimes" (73, 74). This "miracle," as the play describes it, is "A life's base lie, rewritten into truth" (74). It further explains that the transformation is the result of the combination of the innocent Niccolò's blood and the charcoal in the ink used to write the letter, which was made from the bones of murdered soldiers.^[15] In addition to the confession, the letter now expresses the word "Tristero" for the first time in the play, which is also the first time Oedipa encounters it in the world of the novel. The connection between the Tristero and the miraculous conversion of lies into truth is difficult to discern; both are obviously radical distortions of communication, but the Tristero appears responsible for Niccolò's death, to which the miracle is opposed. The fact that the miracle reveals the name of the Tristero, something no other character is able to do, further affirms this opposition. If the miracle is on the side of truth, then the Tristero seems to be on the side of lies. Yet there is a danger in holding to this dialectic too strongly; each transformation relies on the other. Further, it may be foolish to do as Oedipa does and expect the Tristero, whatever it is, to hold a consistent identity across the texts within the novel; the only certainty one may have about the Tristero is that it is maximally ambiguous.

Oedipa's experience in the theatre ultimately leads her to the study of an actual "text" within the text of her world. The obvious parallel between Oedipa's efforts to resolve the ambiguity of the play and the reader's efforts to resolve the ambiguities of Lot 49 provides Pynchon with the opportunity to comment directly on the reading process and the attention given to words and texts. Following the performance of The Courier's Tragedy, Oedipa goes backstage to inquire after the apparent connection between the bones in the play and those of Pierce's estate. She is diverted from her purpose, however, into a discussion of the script with the director, Randolph Driblette. From this dialogue Oedipa learns that Driblette no longer has a copy of the original, though he does tell her where she might find one. He simultaneously derides her for pursuing the text, because, as he says, the play exists only in his mind: "That's what I'm for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They're rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor's memory, right? But the reality is in this head" (79). He also provides her with a solipsistic metaphor she later applies to executing Pierce's will: he is the "projector at the planetarium."^[16] He then suggests that if he were to disappear, all that would be left are the things the play's author "didn't lie about," such as the historical Thurn and Taxis postal service (80).^[17]

If Driblette is correct, and the play exists only in his head, his character is in part a nod towards the idea that the communicative act of performing a play or reading a novel is what matters, and the words themselves are otherwise insignificant; conversely, the opposite may be true, so that the words are plurisignificant and therefore in need of performance, the making of connections, rather than study. His closing dig seems aimed directly at critical analysis, which is principally focussed on texts, not their performance; he says, "You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Trystero possibility the way they did . . . You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth" (emphasis added 80). It is rather telling that later on Oedipa concludes that the atmosphere in which she grew up, "a time of nerves, blandness, and retreat," made her "unfit perhaps for marches and sit-ins, but just a whiz at pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts" (103, 104). Both this comment and Driblette's appear to emphasize the questionable nature of literary scholarship.

A contrasting viewpoint is provided by Professor Emory Bortz, who naturally asserts the opposite; when Oedipa inquires after the "historical Wharfinger," Bortz, accompanied by several graduate students, tells her that he's dead. Bortz then instructs Oedipa to "Pick some words," because "Them, we can talk about" (151). His emphasis on words over historical reality runs exactly counter to Driblette's privileging of the communicative act; he does, however, comment positively on Driblette's performance of the play. In fact, his impromptu eulogy reveals a powerful approach to the interpretation of texts:

He was a peculiarly moral man. He felt hardly any responsibility toward the

word, really; but to the invisible field surrounding the play, its spirit, he

was always intensely faithful. (emphasis added 152)

It is dangerous but tempting to take this notion of an "invisible field" as characterizing Pynchon's own beliefs concerning interpretation; yet it fits his text perfectly. Though Lot 49 does not yield to totalizing readings, and even limited close readings have a tendency to fall apart, the novel as a whole seems to have its own continuity outside of the specific language used in it. This continuity is perhaps indescribable; in part it is probably idiolectical, composed as much of personal energy as textual; yet it is sensibly there. One might say that this invisible field characterizes all communication, for given the instability of language, something more must enable people to understand one another.

Oedipa, however, chooses not to partake of this invisible field; her affinities are with Bortz, as her research indicates. As Seed notes, she longs for "textual stability" (123).^[18] When Driblette dies, however, she begins to wonder whether he might have been right, and some part of her died with him; indeed, as she describes it, she feels like an "amputee" (161). This is further evidence that the novel as a whole favours a Driblettian field over the exacting pursuit of the unstable word.

This conflict between the obsessive study of texts and communicative activity is dramatized throughout the novel, and is arguably essential to an understanding of its "conclusion." The end of the novel is typically read as a commentary on excluded middles, the "bad shit" Oedipa has heard she must avoid.^[19] Ironically, however, though Oedipa is aware of the danger of excluding middles, she does exactly that and chains herself to the poles of a binary; either the Tristero is real, and she has discovered the "truth," or it is not real, and she is paranoid, crazy, or the victim of a plot. The reader will probably also chain himself to these poles if he has been seduced by Oedipa's detective-play; indeed, as Maureen Quilligan observes, the reader is ultimately faced with the same binary (201). There is a certain desirability in the binary, of course, because it enables Oedipa to deal with her world in a very draconian fashion; she does not have to involve herself with the real "sorting" of life, the process by which she would assume responsibility for some things and accept that others are beyond her control. Similarly, the reader is saved from sorting the variety of meanings within the text of Lot 49 and taking responsibility for his own conclusions by adopting an all-or-nothing approach.

The solution to Oedipa's binary is the same as that for the reader's; both must accept the fact only some of the meanings or communications they perceive are actually intended. When Oedipa questions authorial intentionality she has the capacity to free herself, but because she questions it in such a radical way she fails to see that limited authorial intention is a possibility; she does not allow for the fact that the Tristero may exist without all of the connections she perceives being "real." She believes that the solution lies outside of herself, that somehow the symmetry of choices will break down of its own accord (181). The result is a failure to act, whether it is out of a belief that she cannot act or that she need not act; the reader is led, in a similar fashion, to wait for the text itself to provide a conclusion. Of course, the reader may simply choose the "meaninglessness" half of the binary and, as Berressem suggests, enjoy the free play of meaning; it is an option Oedipa does not have because her text is her world, and the consequences of such a choice would be devastating.

Oedipa does not need to withstand the terrible ambiguity she faces, as Schaub has it, but must accept it as a part of human perception (41). By accepting it she frees herself to act, to stop searching for the single, unyielding "truth" in the text of her world (or of The Courier's Tragedy) and begin performing within the text, as part of the text. Seduced by the binary, she fails to really understand, even see, the text that does not conform to her Tristero interpretation. Judith Chambers, however, believes that the old man Oedipa succors in her walpurgisnacht is a sign of her potential to transcend her binary; ". . . at some point beyond the crying of lots she will understand that her search for the central truth gets her nowhere but inside the parameters of whatever tapestry she is weaving" (121). To be able to change her text, restore the disinherited, she must accept the middle: there is no absolute, prefabricated structure to her existence, nor is her world entirely of her own making; she must act, and in acting, she can create new meaning. Early in the novel, it is suggested that this is in fact the revelation she is to have: "As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations. Hardly about Pierce Inverarity, or herself; but about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away" (20).

The reader must also resist the binary, and in this case there are two significant reasons. If the reader plays the game with Oedipa and reads the novel with the intention of resolving the Tristero, he is likely to ignore or slight the vision of waste, loss, and human suffering that pervades the book, especially in the later chapters; studying the text for clues obscures the other very important meanings contained within it. Further, if the reader accepts only the two apparent "options" provided by the text, he will fail to act upon the text itself and make connections of his own; he will fail to fully participate in the creation of meaning, leaving the responsibility for that to the text and its author.

The ending suggests that to wait with Oedipa in the auction-house is to fail to understand the infinitely deferred revelation characteristic of the novel, as Berressem notes (114). Hite points out that this ending is ultimately more imitative of life than the traditional narrative conclusion many readers expect; for if life is structured like a narrative,

. . . it will reveal its significance only when it concludes, and this fact can

provide little comfort to characters who by definition cannot get outside

the text of their experience. And if life does not have such a narrative

form--if it does not build to a climatic insight--it is meaningless. Or so it

seems, once 'order' becomes synonymous with narrative order--or 'plot.'

(19)

Oedipa seems to subscribe to the narrative approach, for she closes out the novel waiting for that "climactic insight." The reader has a choice; he may abandon her at the auction and create his own understanding of the novel, arrive at his own conclusions. He may approach the world of the text as he approaches his own world, establishing a personal order within the chaos of competing orders, acting to create meaning rather than passively accepting a totalizing structure. For as Hite observes, as long as proliferating meanings do not converge at a totality, "further meanings are possible. The absence of a definitive synthetic unity is finally a condition for freedom, and Pynchon plays on a further conclusion: such an absence is also an enabling condition for language, and especially for the language of his novels" (21). George Levine expresses this even more forcefully, in a fashion that echoes several points of this study:

. . . we are driven by Pynchon's art into reconsidering

our fundamental assumptions about the way things connect. The

discontinuities, the surprises, the refusals of categories, the fake

mythologizing--these all confront us with the possibility that art is most

valuable, in a culture where power resides among the organizers, when it

rejects the tradition of organic coherence we take as a universal standard. .

. . Might it be that not order but anarchy is the most difficult thing to

achieve in this culture? The pressure toward anarchy, in a world structured

to resist anarchy at any cost, might release us, ironically, into a more

humane order . . . (117)

This, essentially, is what Pynchon's novel asks of its readers; the challenge contained within the text as well as the challenge of reading the text are a gesture towards change, whether it is the growth of the language or the dismantling of false and dangerous totalities. It is not about the pursuit of words, the search for truth in texts or interpretations, but about the act of making meaning, of interacting with the texts within and of our worlds.