Literary scholars often consider Thomas Pynchon’s unique novella, The Crying of Lot 49, meta-literature; that is, literature about literature. In that sense, his novella epitomizes postmodernism, yet viewing the novella from a singular theoretical lens underestimates its sheer complexity. Indeed, such a literary cacophony cries out for interpretation via multiple critical theoretical approaches. The following essay will explore Pynchon’s masterpiece primarily through Marxism, though a variety of alternative perspectives such as those of Psychoanalysis and Postmodernism (sprinkled with Formalism) will provide further insight when applicable.
Underlying Marxist themes are especially evident in the deceased—but no less central character—Pierce Inverarity. In the beginning, the reader learns that Pierce is a, “[…] California real estate mogul […]” of considerable wealth who names Oedipa Maas, his former girlfriend, executor of his vast estate (Pynchon 1). Pierce’s title of real estate mogul holds special significance from a Marxist standpoint and immediately notifies the reader that Pierce represents the bourgeoisie (among other things.) According to Marx, “[…] Modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few”(21). Thus Pierce’s status as an owner of enormous amounts of physical property lends him economic as well as social power. As the novel progresses, the reader learns that Pierce’s successful commercial real estate empire allows him exercise influence over a variety of other seemingly unrelated industries, such aerospace and tobacco, to name a few. This illustrates Marx’s assertion that concentrated property leads to political concentration because Pierce obviously presides over a massive monopoly, but somehow manages to avoid an anti-trust lawsuit (Marx, 12). The association between the government sponsored aerospace industry and a venture capitalist like Pierce also conveys the extent to which the military-industrial complex dictates the domestic and foreign policy agenda within 20th century America. Pierce, who does not hold political office, manages to manipulate the political process nonetheless by using his personal fortune to purchase power.
Indeed, Pierce’s character represents the prototypical American capitalist. As such, he symbolizes the American ruling class, which exerts disproportionate influence in American politics from the time of the founding up until the present day. For example, Oedipa recalls Pierce describing himself as a, “[…] Founding father […]” of a fictional Southern California town known as, “San Narciso” (Pynchon 15). The founding father phrase serves as an allusion to the mythical framers of the American Constitution. The identities and intentions of the men present at the various Constitutional conventions remain obscure, yet most Americans are under the false impression that the founders collectively have the common man’s best interest at heart. Political scientist Donald Lutz notes that the Constitution’s authors are virtually all members of the Federalist party, a party of wealthy, elite, property owners who design a government to better serve their interests (7-9). The early Federalists have much in common with their contemporaries (namely the Republican Party) in that they are a political entity that caters to the rich and powerful. Consequently, from a Marxist standpoint, the American Revolution ultimately amounts to the American bourgeoisie simply replacing their British counterparts, which hardly qualifies as progressive.
Furthermore, though the name San Narciso has obvious Psychoanalytic implications, it may also act as a parody of a fundamental component of capitalist ideology, that of rational self-interest. Capitalism presupposes the existence of enlightened agents capable of discerning what is in their self-interests. This assertion appears value-neutral, but is unquestionably value-laden as it substantiates greed and exploitation. However, the fact that this assumption functions to justify bourgeois dominance should not be dismissed as a purely accidental occurrence:
"What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural ‘levels’: the one that can be called ‘civil society,’ that is, the ensemble of organisms called ‘private,’ that of ‘political society’ or ‘the State.’ These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of ‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society and, on the other hand, to that of ‘direct domination’ or command exercised throughout the State and ‘jurisdictional’ government. The functions in question are precisely organizational and connective. The intellectuals are the dominant group’s ‘deputies’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government" (Gramsci 673)
According to Gramsci, an intellectual such as Adam Smith, pens his theories merely to validate the existence of bourgeois supremacy, which automatically enhances the authority of the preceding system in the mind of the body politic.
In Pynchon’s novel, hegemony can be seen in Pierce’s ownership of the entire town of San Narciso; as the town’s father, Pierce likely considers it made in his own image. At the same time, this notion becomes evident to the reader precisely because the town isn’t named after its founder. The hegemon (Pierce) needn’t overtly display his authority by naming the town after himself. Instead, his influence permeates the town subtly. For instance, the town contains a large, artificial body of water called, “Lake Inverarity” (Pynchon 41). Clearly, this establishes Pierce’s connection to the town, yet the reader never learns whether Pierce names the lake himself, or if the town chooses the name to honor him. The former case exemplifies Pierce’s role as hegemon directly whereas the latter case demonstrates a situation akin to the aforementioned intellectual’s role in reinforcing hegemony. The city government may have chosen the name Inverarity to signify its subservience to its wealthy master, which ultimately amounts to a passive endorsement of Pierce’s power in the public eye.
Speaking of the general public, the bourgeoisie cannot exist, even in a novella, without its binary opposite—the proletariat. If Pierce Inverarity represents the bourgeoisie, then his logical counterpart can be seen in Oedipa’s husband, Mucho Maas (Much Mass/Much More). Mucho quits his job as a used car salesman to become a radio deejay, but his abrupt career change affords him no relief: “He [is] a disc jockey who work[s] further along the Peninsula and suffer[s] a regular crisis on conscience about his profession. ‘I don’t believe in any of it, Oed,’ he could usually get out. ‘I try, I truly can’t’ […]”(Pynchon 4). Mucho’s lament seems quintessentially proletarian because laborers rarely (if ever) enjoy their jobs. Despite the fact that his job does not require strenuous manual labor, he still qualifies as a proletarian because he owns nothing and his job affords him no creative freedom. Mucho’s struggles echo Marx’s concept of estranged labor:
"This alienated labor, this labor, in which human beings alienate themselves from themselves, is a labor of self-denial and self-torture. Finally, the alienation of labor manifests itself to the laborer in that this labor does not belong to him, but to someone else; it does not belong to him; while he is doing it he does not belong to himself, but to another. . . . the activity of the laborer is not his own activity. It belongs to someone else, it is the loss of his self" (1).
As a deejay, Mucho’s experience of alienated labor seems especially intense as he is far removed from the music’s actual production and he speaks to an invisible audience, all while his boss monitors his every word. Basically, his job resembles a benign version of Foucault’s panoptical prison (553-556).
He despises his means of subsistence until he discovers Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD). Acid becomes the solution to Mucho’s estranged labor problem because the drug effectively allows him to become one with his otherwise alienated audience (Pynchon 115-118). Marx understands the proletarian’s desire to escape from the endless cycle of forced labor, hence his famous line equating religion with opium. It is important to note the novella takes place in or around 1965, before the federal government bans LSD in 1966 and classifies it as a Schedule I controlled substance in 1970. By definition, a Schedule I substance holds a high potential for abuse, so the federal government considers LSD’s addictive potential on par with that of pure opium (Stafford 58-59).
Mucho disagrees. When Oedipa mentions that he may be becoming addicted to LSD, he states flatly, “You don’t get addicted. It’s not like you’re some hophead. You take it because it’s good. Because you hear and see things, even smell them, taste like you never could. Because the world is so abundant. No end to it, baby. You’re an antenna, sending your pattern out across a million lives a night, and they’re your lives, too”(Pynchon 117-118). Mucho’s defense of his drug of choice embodies Marx’s theory because he denies being addicted—despite the fact that he now needs the drug to feel satisfied with the job he despises. In his drug-induced trance, he thinks he’s literally transformed into an antenna, so his job and his identity merge into a single entity. Oedipa, an LSD user herself, begins to see Marx’s point as she witnesses the drug’s effects on her husband: “She could not quite get it into her head that the day she’d left him for San Narciso was the day she’d seen Mucho for the last time. So much of him had already dissipated.”(118). LSD renders Mucho a happy, obedient laborer, but at the expense of his true self. Oedipa internalizes these events and disavows LSD; Marx would likely applaud her efforts to escape a drug-induced false consciousness.
At the same time, Oedipa’s various attempts to free herself from her illusions and delusions ultimately prove futile as she’s never able to fully grasp the truth about herself and/or her reality. Oedipa briefly passes through one quasi-religious experience while on the freeway traveling to San Narciso, but she merely teeters on the cusp of revelation and fails to reach a definitive conclusion (14-15). The overt metaphor of Oedipa driving headstrong into an uncertain future symbolizes the tumultuous political climate of the 1960’s. With the benefit of hindsight, most contemporary readers will recognize Pynchon’s attempt to make sense of the nonsensical, yet pivotal decade. Literary critic Joseph Slade delves into Pynchon’s literary labyrinth: “Here Pynchon perceives the emerging forces of post-industrialism[…] America and its industrialism have reached an impasse, ‘a cul-de-sac,’ an ‘enigma’ created by capitalism that has ordered its world so rigidly that only new and charismatic energies can forestall entropy and redeem American’s democratic promise”(55). Oedipa’s ride effectively depicts a young American attempting to navigate through a world shrouded in paradox, seemingly stranded in a limbo land of competing metanarratives.
The depiction of a collision of competing metanarratives and the resulting cultural impasse left in its wake may reveal Pynchon’s postmodernist proclivities. Lyotard defines postmodernism as, “[…] Incredulity towards metanarratives”(356). In that respect, Oedipa’s cyclical journey seems to demonstrate the abject failure of multiple popular metanarratives, and is therefore unquestionably postmodern. Pynchon, a definitively 1960’s counterculture writer, likely incorporates postmodern themes within the text to capture his generation’s discomfort with its awkward, transitional place in history.
Oedipa’s name itself signifies Pynchon’s attempt at critiquing the Psychoanalytic metanarrative. Freud and his adherents place emphasis on a psychological phenomenon known as the Oedipus complex. For Freudians, the Oedipus complex involves a male child’s mildly incestuous attraction to his mother, a taboo bond that is eventually broken by the father. The Oedipus complex and its ensuing resolution are seen as vital to the child’s healthy psychological maturity (Freud 438-439). At the same time, Freud distinguishes between the male child’s oedipal complex and its female counterpart, commonly known as the Electra complex. But Pynchon’s protagonist’s name makes no reference to the inverted female version of the Oedipus complex, so Oedipa is a female character named after a distinctly male stage of psychosexual development. In fact, the irony of Oedipa’s name may serve as a constant reminder to the reader that Pynchon can never be taken at face value, much like the metanarratives he parodies.
Oedipa’s name may also mirror the Lacanian Oedipal nature of the plot structure. The triangular relationship between Oedipa, Pierce, and Mucho mirrors that of the Laconia conception of the Oedipus complex, but with a Pynchonian twist. In this instance, Oedipa (an adult) symbolizes a maladjusted individual still struggling to resolve the tension caused by her simultaneous attraction to the father figure (Pierce) and his replacement sexual object (Maas). Moreover, by making Oedipa the executor of his will, Pierce’s character re-enforces his role as the paternal influence because, “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law”(Lacan 3). Essentially, Pierce forces Oedipa to finally assume her adult responsibilities and thus complete the process of social assimilation. Yet, in fulfilling her duties as executor, Oedipa repeatedly encounters petite bourgeois males, which leads to her having an extramarital affair with Pierce’s former lawyer, Metzger. Basically, Pierce’s plan backfires as Oedipa’s fractured psyche appears incapable of resolving her oedipal conflict, which parallels the novel’s postmodern interpretation of the Psychoanalytic metanarrative. Through his perpetually confused and disaffected characters, Pynchon demonstrates the short-comings within a supposedly universal explanation for human behavior.
Additionally, Pynchon focuses his sights on the short-comings within the two most prominent Modern socio-economic metanarratives—capitalism and communism. Pynchon uses irony to defamiliarize the allegedly diametrically opposed binary ideological structures fueling the Cold War rivalry between the United States and Russia. The supposed right-wing conspiracy theorist Michael Fallopian scolds the liberal lawyer Metzger for his inability to think outside of the artificially constructed ideological paradigm: “You think like a Bircher […] Good guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the underlying truth. Sure [fictional right wing icon Peter Pinguid] was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn’t it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror” (Pynchon 37). Pynchon purposefully inverts Marx’s model to mock the notion that the competing theories are inextricably linked even within Marx’s reactionary response to the capitalist metanarrative. The conversation between Fallopian and Metzger is therefore uniquely postmodern because the two men are so comfortable with the metanarratives they discuss that both tales become blasé.
Their subsequent conversation conveys a sense of utter postmodern futility. When Fallopian describes his opposition to the corporatization of the American inventor, Metzger asks, “How can you be against a corporation that wants a worker to waive his patent rights. That sounds like the surplus value theory to me, fella, and you sound like a Marxist” (Pynchon,71). This dialogue represents the complete breakdown of once powerful political discourse. Pynchon may be hinting that the partisan divisions within American politics are becoming so blurry they’ve all but disappeared.
Of course, Pynchon’s hazy portrait of 1960’s politics perfectly juxtaposes the idealistic love generation paving the way for the election of Richard Nixon. From a distance, the sharp ideological battle lines of the 1960s appear so rigid, yet they eventually gave way to the bland centrism of the present. Perhaps Pynchon’s postmodern stance predicts the diffusion of ideology in American political discourse. The consequences of the failure of metanarratives coupled with the decline of distinct political philosophies can be seen in the nation’s current healthcare debate, or lack thereof. The extreme members of both major political parties stand on the sidelines watching as centrists rule the roost. Occasionally, the extremists cause a stir, but within twenty-four hours, it’s back to status quo politics as usual, i.e., a deplorable corporatized healthcare system.
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