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Volume 24, Number 3 (1999) reprinted by permission Oklahoma City University Law Review CROSSING BOUNDARIES: SOCIAL BORDERS & ALTERNATIVE REALITIES IN THE CRYING OF LOT 49 SARAH FEDIRKA* Thomas Pynchon interrogates these questions in his novel The Crying of Lot 49. Believing that the present cycle of history has reached an advanced state of entropy, Pynchon presents his protagonist, Oedipa Maas, with the possibility of entering alternative realities. While Pynchon suggests that these alternatives are always available, Oedipa becomes sensitive to them only after her previously conventional lifestyle becomes destabilized. This Article argues that as the structure of Oedipa's normative lifestyle disintegrates, she becomes aware of cracks in the system structuring her reality and glimpses alternative realities. Once aware of the alternatives, Oedipa must evaluate each of them, weighing their benefits against the legal and social prices to be paid for crossing their boundaries. Additionally, Oedipa must determine how to broach the boundaries separating one reality from another. Here again, Pynchon presents her with several choices. The novel's dominant male characters, themselves embodiments of various aspects of patriarchal "law," present Oedipa with the traditional means of trespassing reality: madness, drugs, and hedonism. The Tristero, a clandestine mail-delivery system, operating outside of society and, therefore, outside of the law, represents a second way to move beyond the borders of traditional society. However, Oedipa must first decide if the Tristero Truly exists? And if so, what alternative does it offer? By entering it would she be simply deferring one "male" centered reality for another? Pynchon offers a final possibility of moving beyond the boundaries that govern society through the deaf/mute ball, which appears to present the best chance for staving off entropy. As this Article considers, the ball is the only non-linguistic reality presented to Oedipa. Is Pynchon suggesting that only by moving beyond the laws of language can individuals cross into a non-entropic reality? In June 1966, Thomas Pynchon profiled the Los Angeles suburb of Watts for The New York Times Magazine. Watts had made headlines the previous August after riots broke out following what The Times reported as "a routine drunken driving arrest." The Times' article describes Watts as "a normally quiet suburban- looking residential and shopping area," which "despite the low income of most of its residents, nonetheless retains a pleasantly suburban aura."1 In A Journey into the Mind of Watts, Pynchon describes a different vision of this suburb, a vision similar to the one he creates in The Crying of Lot 49, published the same year. In Watts, Pynchon found "the poor, the defeated, the criminal, the desperate";2 the same disinherited members of society who make up the fictionalcommunity of San Narciso. In both places, the residents' "real" and "emotional" landscapes are comprised of "busted glass, busted crockery, nails, tin cans, all kinds of scrap and waste."3 Not all residents of Watts share this reality, however. The Times' article illustrates that most middle-class whites are blind to "the panoramic sense of black impoverishment" easily seen "from atop the Harbor Freeway, which so many whites must drive at least twice every working day."4 They could afford the "luxury of illusion,"5 which hid the surrounding poverty and despair in plain sight. Through the Watts example, Pynchon suggests that though we may (choose) not to see something, it can (and does) still exist, raising troubling questions about the nature of reality. If what we see is not necessarily real, what is? Oedipa Mass, Pynchon's protagonist in The Crying of Lot 49, struggles with this question as she journeys off the "freeway" and into the reality of the disinherited and disenfranchised. She moves from the suburban world of Tupperware parties and Muzak to "the sunless, concrete underpinnings of the freeway," where she finds "drunks, bums, pedestrians, pederasts, hookers, walking psychotic."6 In making this journey, Oedipa crosses from one closed community, middle-class suburbia, into another, the American underclass. She discovers that each system has its own reality and its own laws for maintaining that reality. A solipsistic belief that theirs is the "true" reality keeps members of one system from crossing into the other, making reality a closed system. By the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy results. In both A Journey into the Mind of Watts and The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon's vision of America is that of a society in an advanced state of "entropic decline."7 Peter Abernethy argues in Entropy in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 that the novel's central theme is "that entropy in the closed system of American society is increasing rapidly and that we are beginning to experience a major failure in communications, an identity crisis that could lead to apocalypse."8 This apocalypse is one of "alienation and isolation," tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move ... from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness."10 Ironically, it is in this advancing state of decline, as social order erodes and laws destabilize, that we become most conscious of our existence in a closed system--most conscious of the boundaries fabricating our reality. As cracks appear in the structure of that existence, we begin to see the possibilities of alternative realities. Is Pynchon suggesting that crossing social boundaries and entering alternative realities allows us to escape entropy and prevent apocalypse? Oedipa's movement across the boundaries of her suburban reality begins when she is named the executor of Pierce Inverarity's estate. This event causes her to leave home physically and emotionally. Before departing Kinneret-Among-The-Pines for San Narciso, she moved unaware from trips to the market downtown to the "gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden, reading book reviews in the latest Scientific American, into layering of a lasagna, garlicking of a bread, tearing up of romaine leaves."11 This is her reality, and it represents "a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn't she be the first to admit it?) more or less identical."12 Oedipa's daily routine insulates her,13 creating the layers of her identity, and illustrating Judith Butler's theory that bodies are materialized through the reiteration of regulatory norms. Butler argues that through a process of naming, socially constructed norms become "regulatory law[s]," producing and governing the very bodies they name.14 Oedipa materializes as a suburban housewife because she has been named as such by her society. Once named, she reenacts the behavior (dictated by social law) associated with suburban housewives, continually earning her that label. According to Butler, "[t]he naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a norm."15 Oedipa exists in a closed system: her behavior creates her sense of self, while at the same time, it supports the normative values of 1960s America, which, in turn, create her behavior. Oedipa's repetition of regulatory law not only creates her limited reality, it blinds her to the possibility of alternative realities: this is her tower. Like the middle-class whites in Watts, Oedipa's "repeating, repeating" of the social dictum prevents her from "seeing."16 Too busy trying to maintain her own identity by upholding social norms, Oedipa cannot see the abject bodies that exist around her. She becomes, as David Cowart argues, "a mental Rapunzel, locked in a tower that is a state of mind, and, hence, ubiquitous."17 From within the tower, Oedipa fails to recognize that she is "her own knight of deliverance."18 She looks to the liberating knights of her fairy tale, Inverarity, Mucho, Hilarius, and Driblette to aid in her escape. Their efforts are ineffective, in part, because as men they benefit from existing patriarchal norms. Therefore, their help, though perhaps genuine, works within the existing system. Only Oedipa can subvert the regulatory laws constructing her tower and break free from her limited and entropic reality. Only she can cease the "repetitious activity" that prevents awareness.19 Oedipa is slow to, and perhaps may never, realize that she is her own salvation. She leaves Kinneret "with no idea she was moving toward anything new."20 Her first clue (and the reader's) lies in Remedios Varo's triptych, "Bordando el Manto Terrestre." In the central panel of this painting, several girls are held in a tower and are engaged in "embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void."21 The tapestry contains "all the waves, ships and forests of the earth"22--it is reality. Oedipa is moved to tears as she realizes that she too weaves her own reality and that the ground on which she stands "had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower."23 What Oedipa fails to notice is that one young woman embroiders her lover and her escape into the tapestry. In the triptych's final panel, on which Oedipa does not comment, leaving us to believe that perhaps she does not "see" it, the young woman, free from the tower, escapes with her lover. Oedipa's breakdown in front of the painting and her omission of its third panel suggest that, while she recognizes her complicity in creating her tower, Oedipa does not understand that she also creates her own freedom. Instead, she believes that she is kept in the tower by "magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all."24 This leaves her to wonder, "[i]f the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"25 Oedipa is offered three variations of "what else" by Mucho, Hilarius, and Driblette. Each of these male characters holds out to Oedipa an alternative reality; however, she must decide if accepting their offers means exchanging one tower for another. It is through Mucho that "suburban" Oedipa comes closest to the disinherited whom she will meet on her journey. As a used car salesman, Mucho saw "people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week."26 He sees them as "a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes" (an echo of the "Charcoal Alley" epithet given to Watts).27 The parade of decay and despair becomes too much for Mucho. He cannot accept "the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another."28 Ironically, Oedipa tells him he is "too sensitive"29 because he cannot immunize himself against the "unvarying gray sickness."30 Only later in the novel, through Oedipa's encounter with John Nefastis, do we learn that being "a sensitive" is one way to reverse entropy. Nefastis tries to eliminate entropy by bringing Maxwell's Demon to life mechanically. In this system, the Demon must release the information it collects on the molecules location. Only "a sensitive" is capable of receiving "that staggering set of energies" and replying in kind,31 creating a continuous transfer of communication. The movement of one piston is the only outward sign that this loop is active. Oedipa thinks she sees the right hand piston move a fraction when she attempts to communicate with the Demon, but she is not sure. Perhaps, "she had seen only a retinal twitch, a misfired nerve cell."32 Here, we return to the question of seeing and knowing. Did Oedipa see the piston move? Is she a sensitive? Like her clouded understanding of what creates her tower, Oedipa only partially understands what it means to be a sensitive. She fails to make the connection that being "sensitive" (compassionate) is a way to prevent apocalyptic isolation. Compassion requires that we move between the systems of self and other. Ironically, at the beginning of the novel, Mucho shows characteristics of the true sensitive, sympathizing with his customers, while Oedipa is more "sensitized" to her surroundings. As a used car salesman, Mucho exists on the margin of the dispossessed and disinherited; his interaction with his customers makes him a part of their reality. Disillusioned with that reality, Mucho must decide whether to nonetheless continue participating in it, trying to make a compassionate bond; to become immune to it, as Oedipa is initially; or escape it. In an act of social withdrawal, he chooses the latter, trading in the used car lot for the radio studio. When Oedipa sees him again near the end of the novel, he has withdrawn even further, this time into an LSD-induced reality; he offers this alternative to Oedipa. LSD appeals to him because with it he can "hear and see things, even smell them, taste like you never could."33 He is able to see the abundance in the world,34 the details and difference lost through entropy. Ironically, the drugs are making him "less himself and more generic,"35 a symptom of entropy. He loses his identity and his ability to communicate with others, which for Pynchon are connected. Without the ability to communicate Mucho "figuratively encloses himself in a tower of his own making."36 By entering his reality, Oedipa would simply exchange one tower for another. Oedipa's psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarius, also offers her the possibility of a drug-induced alternative reality. Hilarius tries to enlist her in his experiment on the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on suburban housewives. He calls the experiment "the bridge," suggesting that drugs might be a bridge between worlds. This possibility is undercut by the narrator, who renames the experiment, "The bridge inward."37 Oedipa associates Hilarius' invitation with the "[w]e want you" recruiting poster "that appears in front of all our post offices."38 The association between Hilarius' experiment and the government suggests that, though perhaps outside the realm of law, his invitation is tied to traditional power structures. Oedipa is being recruited into an alternative world that she had no part in creating. She is offered another gendered reality in which men dominate and women "serve." The post office reference also introduces the idea of The Tristero, suggesting that perhaps the alternative mail system is just another "male" system.39 In addition to drugs, Hilarius holds madness out to Oedipa as a means of escaping her tower. Returning to him for counseling, Oedipa finds Hilarius locked in his office with a shotgun. He believes that he is being hunted by Israelis, who want to make him pay for his Nazi past--symbolizing the ultimate transgression of compassion. His insanity seems, in part, brought on by his unwavering faith in Freud. He tells Oedipa that he tried "to submit [himself to that man, to the ghost of that cantankerous Jew. Tried to cultivate a faith in the literal truth of everything he wrote, even the idiocies and contradictions."40 Hilarius' faith in Freud suggests his complicity in the patriarchal system. Freud's theories provide the framework for the regulatory laws which structure society. Even Oedipa's name suggests that she is tied to the Oedipal myth, and, therefore, to the reiteration of compulsory heterosexuality, ideas of female lack, and the Law of the Father. Pynchon also uses Hilarius to raise the question of seeing and knowing. Hilarius forced himself to see linearity where there was disruption, truth where there was contradiction. He is like the Easterner who cannot see Watts as a slum because it is "clean and well tended," lacking "a pile of bricks with dirt in the streets and piled garbage cans." horizontally and vertically,"42 and move beyond our tower. Hilarius is imprisoned in a tower with walls made out of his own "entrenched habits and patterns of behavior."43 From behind these walls meaningful communication is impossible. Ironically, Oedipa goes to Hilarius hoping that he would "tell her she was some kind of nut and needed a rest."44 She wanted him to assure her that The Tristero did not exist, though Hilarius himself may be part of the Tristero system, because of the two--madness or The Tristero--madness was easier. It enables her to maintain the illusion of her reality, the very "luxury of illusion" found in Watts. Once she regained her sanity, she would be able to rejoin that world. Accepting the reality of The Tristero, however, would require a paradigm shift, a painful awakening of a new consciousness.45 One way to protect herself from the pain which comes from awareness is through suicide. This is the third alternative presented to Oedipa, one she considers accepting. The Inamorati Anonymous embody the novel's theme of suicide. The group's founder, who fittingly remains anonymous, attempts suicide after he is "automated out of a job": "Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death," his first thoughts after losing his job "were naturally of suicide."46 Locked in a closed system and rejecting love as "the worst addiction of all,"47 Inamorati Anonymous illustrates the isolation that accompanies the advanced stages of social entropy. Oedipa's own increasing isolation drives her to suicide. She remarks after Driblette's death, "they are stripping away, one by one, my men."48 Mucho, Hilarius, Driblette are all part of her insulation and without them she feels vulnerable. Without protection from the social norms they represent, Oedipa faces the void brought by a change in consciousness. Alone, she must determine whether The Tristero is truly a "secret richness"49 onto which she has stumbled or a hallucination, an elaborate plot mounted against her by Inverarity or the fantasy of a madwoman: "There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world."50 To kill the pain, Oedipa gets drunk and drives on the freeway with her lights out. Her suicide attempt fails. Later that same night, she duplicates Driblette's walk into the sea. Here too, she is unsuccessful. Losing her bearings, she turns around to find the sea and suddenly felt "[a]s if there could be no barriers between herself and the rest of the land."51 This comment suggests that Oedipa has moved beyond the walls of her tower. However, at that moment, San Narciso "became a name again, was assumed back into the American continuity of crust and mantle," giving up "its residue of uniqueness."52 Losing its uniqueness suggests that San Narciso has been enveloped by entropy. It has been absorbed back into the normative behaviors which create "American continuity." Leaving us to wonder has Oedipa escaped? Twice the narrator comments that "if only [Oedipa'd looked," she could have found The Tristero "through any of a hundred lightly- concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations."53 Will she look now? Or, will she share in the solipsistic realities offered her by Mucho, Hilarius and Driblette? In addition to a shared solipsism, these alternative realities share a connection to the Tristero, or at least Oedipa wants to believe they do: "Oedipa's continued hope and belief that an underlying force connects her clues is due in large part to her need for it to be so."54 If the clues connect, they would point to a final answer, the Truth. Oedipa believes that this truth is the key to her escape. Robert Watson suggests, "[o]ne of the very few points on which the book's critics agree is that Pynchon never reveals this 'central truth."'55 Instead he leaves it to Oedipa and the reader to decide if The Tristero exists, reinforcing the idea that reality is what we construct it to be. It is possible that the "reality" of The Tristero is "both a reflection of [Oedipa's] own evolving thoughts and desires, and simultaneously an actual political Counterforce, without contradiction."56 Oedipa's reality, however, denies such paradox; it embraces an either/or binary: "She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided."57 In this reality, Tristero must either be a "political Counterforce" or it must be a projection of Oedipa's mind--it cannot be both. When Oedipa tries to hold on to a clue in effort to divine the "true" nature of The Tristero, it slips or is "stripped" away from her. In this way, The Tristero is materialized like an animated image, an object created through a flip-pad: the image only appears to exist three dimensionally so long as there is movement. If one stops flipping to look at just one drawing, the "reality" of the object is destroyed. Thus, just as Oedipa's identity is constructed through a reiteration of social norms, so too, The Tristero materializes through repetition. And as in a flip-pad, the "reality" of The Tristero is drawn from varied components such as Pierce's stamp collection; the muted post horn symbol; W.A.S.T.E.; the stories and theories of Fallopian, Bortz, and Koteks; and The Courier's Tragedy. Yet, rather than solving the mystery, all of these clues leave Oedipa to wonder "whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself."58 Oedipa is constantly deferred from the truth, and her tower becomes a "slick labyrinth,"59 which has "no center, no periphery, and no exit."60 The maze of The Tristero becomes yet another reality confronting Oedipa on her quest. Like the realities of suicide, drugs, and madness, this alternative fails in the area of communication-- ironic since The Tristero operates an alternative mail system, an "800-year old tradition of postal fraud,"61 maintained by the disinherited and disenfranchised. Within the organization, there were "God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U.S. Mail."62 Oedipa sees their actions not as treason, but as "a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own."63 She realizes, "[since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world."64 The silence of this world is reflected in its symbol, the muted post horn. While W.A.S.T.E. "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire"65 gives voice to the disinherited, the novel calls that voice's legitmacy into question. Chambers argues "the Tristero traffics in the wasted word" and sees "the content of the messages delivered by the subversive W.A.S.T.E. system" as "'WASTE."'66 Fallopian's W.A.S.T.E. letters illustrates her point: "Dear Mike ..., how are you? Just thought I'd drop you a note. How's your book coming? Guess that's all for now. See you at The Scope." He confesses "'bitterly,"' "'[that's how it is ... most of the time."'67 W.A.S.T.E. mail does not link sender and recipient in a compassionate way; its messages are empty. Thus, Pynchon seems to be undercutting the marginalized's ability to resist. Though they have withdrawn from the Republic, "W.A.S.T.E. has lost the real force of resistance."68 The W.A.S.T.E. system fails, not because it exists on the margin, but because it is a system based on the "wasted word,"69 the very word used within the (entropic) culture at large. What is needed is not a secret system, but a "secret language," through which "we could communicate with ourselves"--a language the disenfranchised "can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves,"70 a language that connects experience with reality. Such a language is needed in Watts, where those manning "the outposts of the establishment," sent in to help the disenfranchised, are incapable of "any meaningful communication with their poor,"71 where what is said and what is meant are two different things. This is the final alternative presented to Oedipa, a reality constructed through a new language. Neither spoken nor written, this language enables actions to be communicated directly without temporal or spatial deference along a never-ending chain of signifiers. Words can, as Derrida claims, cause "a great deal of trouble, if, at least, we wish to understand each other."72 Thus, paradoxically, we can communicate more genuinely without words. Oedipa makes this discovery when she encounters "an old man huddled, shaking with grief she couldn't hear,"73 on the steps of a rooming house. When Oedipa agrees to mail his letter using the W.A.S.T.E. system, she crosses into his reality. No longer trapped in her own closed system, "[s]he was overcome all at once by a need to touch him."74 In a scene reminiscent of the Pieta, Oedipa takes the man in her arms, holding him, rocking him. Through this "spontaneous act of humanity," Oedipa has (temporarily) climbed down from her tower75--she has become (a) sensitive. This sense of connectedness is repeated in the deaf-mute ball. In this scene a weak and tired Oedipa is carried into a party being held for delegates to a deaf-mute convention. She is amazed to find that "[e]ach couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow's head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop"76 without collision. Still thinking binarily, Oedipa believes "[t]here would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined."77 Though it appears Oedipa has come upon another closed system, there are no signs of entropy. Each couple's dance is distinct. There are no collisions, yet there is no sameness. With no name for what she experiences, a "demoralized" Oedipa flees the dance.78 Oedipa is unable to "name" her experience because it exists outside of language, and therefore, outside of her reality. She thus seems to remain unaware that her reality, constructed by wasted language, is what traps her in her tower. The deaf-mute ball represents a means of communication without words, existing outside the Word of the Father, the Word of Law. Oedipa recalls that "[s]he was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus, everybody took a break."79 This same non-verbal choreography exists in Watts, where "the riot is being remembered less as chaos and more as art. Some talk now of a balletic quality to it." During those days, "everybody [knew what to do and when to do it without needing a word or a signal."80 Perhaps the appearance of non-verbal communication in both The Crying of Lot 49 and A Journey into the Mind of Watts suggests that Pynchon believes a "coordinated and graceful"81 dance underlies all reality--fictional and non. The challenge for the writer is to articulate this dance through a language you believe conveys "error and lie and distortion and noise."82 Pynchon attempts to solve this problem through play. In The Crying of Lot 49, he "experiments with style and language, using allegory, pun, parable, and parody."83 He does so both to articulate the unspeakable, and as Chambers suggests, "to call attention to the transfiguration of language and to reinfuse it with mystery."84 Through play, Pynchon can transcend the closed and increasingly entropic system of language. He can infuse words with a multiplicity of meaning, with ambiguity. He can, as Inverarity encourages, "[k]eep it bouncing."85 Oedipa shares Pynchon's belief that "there was that high magic to low puns."86 Punning and play are evident from the novel's start. Oedipa's "role as 'executor' punningly associates her with the Tristero assassins, especially since she is working to restore a heritage to the deprived."87 And "will" suggests both Inverarity's written testament and Oedipa's own agency. Through punning, Pynchon is able to continually defer meaning, much the way "the gemlike 'clues"'88 defer Oedipa from the "truth." She is left to wonder if they are "only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word."89 The open-ended ending forces us to consider that, perhaps, the Word never existed. Rather than face the void, we fill the world with wasted words. Perhaps, as Derrida argues in Differance, "there has never been, never will be a unique word, a master-name."90 Instead, there is a chain of signifiers (clues) pointing only to more signifiers. This chain calls into question "precisely the quest for a rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure"91--Oedipa's very quest. The text never satisfactorily answers whether the Word ever existed; there can be no "crying of lot 49." That would be to fix origin, to create a stable point of reference. Instead the text suggests that through our quest for the Word, we have become "[s]o hung up with words, words" that we fail to realize it is humankind that gives "the spirit flesh."92 We fail to realize that genuine compassion comes not from words, but from actions--from seeing, from creating, from touching the bodies that live beside, in, and among us. Pynchon found a reminder of this in Watts, where there is a literal tower built by Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant, who spent 30 years gathering up pieces of the neighborhood. Out of the "scrap and waste," he created the Watts Towers, which Pynchon describes as "perhaps [Rodia's own dream of how things should have been: a fantasy of fountains, boats, tall openwork spires, encrusted with a dazzling mosaic of Watts debris."93 However, "Simon Rodia is dead, and now the junk just accumulates."94 Pychon's comment reminds us that we create our own reality and our own tower; often they are one and the same. Waiting for revelation to come from the continually deferred "crying of lot 49," Oedipa may never gain full understanding of this idea and her freedom. |
