milque·toast
[milk-tohst]
noun ( sometimes initial capital letter )
a very timid, unassertive, spineless person, especially one who is easily dominated or intimidated: a
milquetoast who's afraid to ask for a raise.
A Raisin in the Sun
Mr. Linder—milquetoast?? Or the Devil?????
Making a pack with the devil—Dr. Faust (Goethe)
New version—resist temptation
How to make the connections??? Language of reading/grammar of literature (patterns/conventions;
codes/rules) comparison to painting—illusion of depth—not all feel necessary
Large set of conventions from which to draw
How do you learn to recognize??? PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE
ASK QUESTIONS Whom does this character resemble? Where have I seen this before? Etc.
MEMORY
SYMBOL
PROFESSIONAL READERS FROM THE NOVICES
PATTERN
--THREE ITEMS SEPARATE
A quest or not
When is a trip to the story a quest? Knight dangerous road a Holy Grail a dragon (or two) evil knight
a princess
A knight named Reuban a road through the Badlands a Holy Grail (Davy) a dragon (Andreeson) an evil
knight (Jape) a princess (Sara)
Real reason—Self-knowledge—Cryingof Lot 49
So…when a character hits the road…PAY ATTENTION—a quest has begun
Thomas Pynchon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dtqt0bXb4Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k_TNk2mtTA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pswect7Bf_c
Oedipa Maas, the young wife of a man named Mucho, lives in Kinneret, California. One day, she receives
a letter from a law firm telling her that her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, has died and named her the
executor of his estate. Oedipa resolves to faithfully execute her duty, and she travels to San Narciso
(Pierce's hometown) where she meets the lawyer, Metzger, assigned to help her, with whom she
spontaneously begins an affair.
As they go about sorting through Pierce's tangled financial affairs, Oedipa takes note of the fact that
Pierce owned an extensive stamp collection. One night, Oedipa and Metzger go to a bar called The
Scope, where they meet Mike Fallopian, a member of a right-wing fanatical organization called the Peter
Pinguid Society. In the bathroom of the bar, Oedipa sees a symbol that she later learns is supposed to
represent a muted post horn. Written below the symbol are the acronym W.A.S.T.E. and the name
"Kirby." Oedipa makes a note of all this info before returning to chat with Mike at the bar.
Oedipa and Metzger take a trip one day to Fangoso Lagoons, an area in which Pierce owned a
substantial amount of land. There, they meet a man named Manny di Presso, a lawyer who is suing the
Inverarity estate on behalf of his client, who recovered and sold human bones to Inverarity but did not
receive proper payment. Pierce wanted the bones to make charcoal for cigarette filters. A member of The
Paranoids, a hippie band that follows Oedipa around, points out that Manny's story is similar to that of
the 17th-century play The Courier's Tragedy. Oedipa and Metzger decide to see a production of the play
nearby. The play mentions the word "Tristero," a word that fascinates Oedipa because of its placement
within the play. She goes backstage to speak with the director, Randolph Driblette, who tells her to stop
overanalyzing the play. She resolves to call him back later.
After rereading Pierce's will later on, Oedipa goes to a stockholders' meeting for the Yoyodyne company,
a firm owned in part by Inverarity. After taking a brief tour, she stumbles into the office of Stanley
Koteks, who is drawing the muted post horn symbol on his pad of paper. He tells her about a scientist
named John Nefastis who has built a type of Mexwell's Demon, or a physically impossible machine that
allows for perpetual motion by violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Koteks encourages Oedipa
to meet with Nefastis.
Wanting to learn more about The Courier's Tragedy, Oedipa gets an anthology of Jacobean revenge
plays. She notices that the paperback copy has no mention of the Tristero, however, which puzzles her.
She decides to go to Berkeley to meet with the publisher. In the meantime, she stops by an elderly care
home that Pierce had owned, where she meets an old man with a ring depicting the muted post horn.
She also hires a philatelist (stamp expert) named Genghis Cohen to go through Pierce's stamp collection.
After doing so, Genghis tells her that some of Pierce's stamps have a muted post horn in their
watermark. Oedipa begins to realize that she is uncovering a large mystery.
Oedipa goes to Berkeley to meet with John Nefastis, who shows her his perpetual motion machine. It can
only be operated by people with special mental capabilities allowing them to communicate with the
machine, and he tells Oedipa that she has no such mental skills. He then propositions her, causing her to
run out screaming. Oedipa then begins a very, very long night of wandering around aimlessly all over the
Bay area. She encounters the muted post horn symbol almost everywhere, leading her to believe that she
may be hallucinating. Just before dawn, however, she encounters an old man who hands her a letter and
asks her to deliver it via W.A.S.T.E. under the freeway. After helping the man to his room, Oedipa finds a
W.A.S.T.E. facility under the freeway, drops in the letter and waits for the delivery man, whom she
follows to Oakland and back to Berkeley after he picks up the letters and delivers them. Oedipa returns to
her home in Kinneret to see her doctor, who begins shooting at her as she pulls up. He has gone crazy,
obsessed with the idea that Israelis are coming to kill him because he assisted the Nazis in World War II.
After he is arrested, Oedipa sees her husband, Mucho, and spends some time with him, although she
quickly sees that he has become addicted to LSD, making it difficult to communicate effectively.
Increasingly alone, Oedipa seeks out Emory Bortz, an English professor at San Narciso College who has
extensive knowledge of Jacobean revenge plays. With his help, she pieces together the history of the
Tristero, which dates back to mid-16th-century Europe. She learns that Driblette has died, which means
she will never know why he included the lines about the Tristero in his production of The Courier's
Tragedy (these lines are not ordinarily included in the play). Oedipa begins to give up as she realizes that
she is very lonely and has no real friends. She visits Mike Fallopian again, who suggests that the whole
Tristero mystery may be nothing more than a huge, complex joke played on her by Pierce. Oedipa will not
accept this possibility but realizes that every route leading to the Tristero also leads to the Inverarity
Estate. Meanwhile, Genghis Cohen helps her piece together some mysteries about Pierce's stamp
collection, which is to be auctioned off by a local dealer as Lot 49. Genghis has heard that a secretive
bidder will attend the auction to bid on Lot 49, but he will not reveal himself beforehand. Oedipa goes to
the auction, excited to find out who the bidder is, thinking that he may know the key to the Tristero. The
novel ends as Oedipa sits in the room waiting for the crying of Lot 49, when she will discover the identity
of the mystery bidder.
Overall Analysis
The Crying of Lot 49 was written in the 1960s, one of the most politically and socially turbulent decades
in U.S. history. The decade saw the rise of the drug culture, the Vietnam War, the rock revolution, as well
as the birth of numerous social welfare programs after the Democrats swept Congress in the 1964
elections. This was also the decade of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King's
assassination, Civil Rights, and, to some extent, women's rights. The novel taps into this explosion of
cultural occurrences, depicting a dramatically fragmented society. The Crying of Lot 49 contains a
pervasive sense of cultural chaos; indeed, the book draws on all areas of culture and society, including
many of those mentioned above. In the end, the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, finds herself alone
and alienated from that society, having lost touch with the life she used to lead before she began her
attempt to uncover the mystery of the Tristero. The drug culture plays a big part in this sense of isolation.
The world around Oedipa seems to be a world perpetually on drugs, manic and full of conspiracies and
illusions. And though that world is exciting and new, it is also dangerous: drugs contribute to the
destruction of Oedipa's marriage, and drugs cause Hilarius to go insane. Oedipa hallucinates so often
that she seems to be constantly high, and ultimately, this brings her nothing but a sense of chaotic
alienation.
Many of the problems with chaos found in the novel are tied in to the idea of communication. The major
symbol of order in the novel, Maxwell's Demon, cannot be operated because it requires a certain
unattainable level of communication. Letters in the novel, which should be clear and direct forms of
stable communication, are ultimately meaningless. The novel also contains a mail-delivery group that
requires its members to mail a letter once a week even if they have nothing to say. Indeed, the letter
Oedipa receives in chapter one may itself be meaningless, since it is the first step in what may be nothing
more than a big joke played on Oedipa. The religious moment Oedipa experiences in chapter two seems
for a moment to promise the possibility of some kind of communication being communicated, but the
process breaks down. Religion, language, science, all of the purveyors of communication, and through
that communication a sense of wholeness, do not correctly function in the novel.
Related to the theme of the problem of communication is the novel's representation of the way in which
people impose interpretation on the meaningless. It is very telling that Oedipa wants to turn the mystery
of the Tristero into a "constellation," which is not really an example of true order. Solar systems are
simply mankind's way of imposing an artificial but pleasing order on the randomness of outer space. It is,
furthermore, an imposition of a two-dimensional structure onto a three-dimensional reality. Oedipa's
quest to construct a constellation seems to indicate that she is only looking for a superficial system.
Indeed, she never succeeds in figuring out the meaning behind the Tristero, and, further, the novel ends
with the very strong likelihood that the mystery may hold no mystery at all. And just as she is unable to
piece together the puzzle of the Tristero, she is similarly unable to refashion her life after it begins to fall
apart. Even the United States government, which tries to impose an order on the world of mail delivery,
cannot prevent side groups from springing up to undermine its work.
There are two concepts underlying all this: puns and science. The novel is full of puns and language
games of all sorts. For instance, the odd names of the novel's characters are a type of play on different
words and their symbolic baggage. Another example is the concept of the word "lot" in the title, which
actually occurs several times in the book but does not relate to anything in the story until the last few
pages. Also, we see that Mucho's radio station spells "fuck" when read in reverse, forming another little
language game that does not have necessarily any inherent meaning but does indicate an interest in
manipulating language for intellectual enjoyment. Language is the means through which the story is
communicated, and Pynchon has chosen to use a language full of jokes, puns, and satires. Science seems
to stand in opposition to the chaos of language that all of Pynchon's manipulation suggests. Science is
ordered and coherent and offers a body of definite knowledge that all can study. And yet, even the
coherence of science is undermined in the existence of Maxwell's Demon and the figure of Dr. Hilarius.
Though pure science may offer coherence, the uses to which that science is put, the interpretations
imposed on that science, can scatter that coherence to the wind.
More than anything else, The Crying of Lot 49 appears to be about cultural chaos and communication as
seen through the eyes of a young woman who finds herself in a hallucinogenic world disintegrating
around her.
Bloom County