Postmodern Reality in The Crying of Lot 49
The difference between the modern and postmodern can be characterized by the shift from an individual to a collective reality that was largely influenced by the development of mass media during the twentieth century. First published when the world was still settling into this new, shared existence, The Crying of Lot 49 exemplifies what this change meant in both its story and in the structure of the text itself. The progression of the narrative and the narrative form are both centered around a proliferation of information; Oedipa weaves her way through chaos surrounding Tristero, an underground communication system, while Pynchon’s readers engage with the text in a similar quest for meaning. While the written word, the means of communication that is central to the novel on both levels, has not changed with the transition to the postmodern era, society has -- and so has the way in which it understands and utilizes this medium. The Crying of Lot 49 presents the idea that truth and reality in postmodernity are socially constructed out of a balance between order and disorder and asks its protagonist and its readers to create meaning out of chaos.
Oedipa’s quest for truth begins when she finds out that she has been named executor of the estate of an ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, with “assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary” (1). While she is confused and a bit daunted by this responsibility, she does not seem to regard it as a burden; rather, it is an opportunity for her to escape the routine -- the order -- that has come to characterize her life. In trying to think of an explanation for Pierce’s choice, Oedipa shuffles “back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn’t she be the first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer’s deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye”
(2). Her dissatisfaction with this monotony becomes clear as she considers what she might gain
1

2 in straying from it: she recollects her experience with the Remedios Varo painting “Bordando el
Manto Terrestre”, an image of “frail girls…prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world” (11). Oedipa interprets the artwork in a way that makes it reflective of her own situation as a “captive maiden” trapped in an incidental tower by “magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all” (11). This connection is the first of many Oedipa makes in her search for self-knowledge; the painting inspires her to take on an active role as her own conjurer, to seize control of the magic that has determined her fate thus far.
As she travels to meet Metzger in San Narciso she consciously takes on this role, reading into everything she sees: the “ordered swirl of houses and streets” remind her of the “unexpected, astonishing clarity” of a transistor radio’s circuit card (14). Both patterns convey “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” (14). Oedipa’s sensitization to everything from city plans to circuit cards leads to her discovery and exploration of the Tristero system which, regardless of its relevance or even its existence, brings an end to her perceived encapsulation in her tower (31). The progression of the story relies on Oedipa’s methods of close observation, drawing connections and coming to conclusions as a result of these observations and connections; however, the cliffhanger ending of the novel makes it clear that her careful organization of the information she has gathered is actually irrelevant. The point that the novel is driving towards is not, as it might seem, whether or not Tristero exists. It is that,

3 in an informationally entropic society, Oedipa is able to find so much proof of its existence. A surplus of information gathered through various forms of communication enables Oedipa to construct a collective reality that is meaningful to her, and it is only through a balance between order and disorder that her ideas about truth can continue to exist.
Pynchon’s narrative form makes the text itself just as proliferative as Oedipa’s story. The reader experiences a state of indeterminacy similar to the protagonist’s in the beginning of the novel -- the scattered ironic puns and pop culture references make the message of the text difficult to discern. Countless connections can be formed and meanings ascribed out of the allusions and implications embedded in the author’s language, which makes
The Crying of Lot
49 a kind of variation on Oedipa’s incidental tower. It is restrictive in that certain assumptions accompany the form of the novel, but these conventions are essentially the equivalent of
Oedipa’s “anonymous and malignant [magic] visited on her from outside and for no reason at all” (12). Defiance of restrictions -- that is, order -- by Oedipa and the reader enable the fictional character and the real person to do more with the information available to them.
Ironically, in the third chapter of this novel that is largely committed to the idea of selfawareness, Driblette basically denounces the written word. When Oedipa confronts him about the reference to Tristero in The Courier’s Tragedy , he answers her questions with one of his own: “’Why is everybody so interested in texts?’” (61). Oedipa, by this point completely absorbed in her own intricate Tristero narrative, takes this and Driblette’s “familiar smile” as evidence of his role in the reality she has constructed. She creates this link for two reasons: because she can, and because she needs to in order to maintain the entropy that fuels her quest.
Driblette’s elaboration when Oedipa persists does not provide her with any further relevant information, but the reader, for whom the conventions of the form of the novel carry along with

4 them certain inherent assumptions, finds a clue towards his or her own search for meaning within the text in the director’s rant: “’You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but…the reality is in this head. Mine.’” (62). Driblette, a scholar who has dedicated much of his life to studying Richard Wharfinger’s plays, is actually not particularly interested in the playwright’s intentions. Instead of assuming that meaning exists in
The Courier’s Tragedy and spending his time trying to discover just what that meaning is and how it works, Driblette takes on an active role and, like a magician with a deck of cards, conjures up a truth. “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. Wharfinger supplied words and a yarn. I gave them life” (62-63). His perspective encourages Oedipa to look even further outside her tower and asks the reader to do the same with the text.
Driblette is completely aware of the idea that reality is socially constructed and while
Oedipa has not yet grasped this concept she certainly utilizes it in choosing what to take out of this interaction. She envisions herself as an agent of truth with a duty “to bestow life on what had persisted…to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning” by taking on the role of
“projector at the planetarium,” as Driblette puts it (62, 64). The question that she continues to ask herself throughout the remainder of the novel, “
Shall I project a world?
” also compels an active readership in that the amount of information related in the last three chapters of the book seems to increase exponentially, forcing the reader to make conscious decisions about what is important for his or her deduction of meaning from the text. By the end of the novel, though, this all seems irrelevant. Oedipa’s quest has finally culminated in the realization of the massive

5 number of possibilities that have existed and will continue to exist outside of San Narciso, which has come to represent her tower:
She’d lost her bearings…San Narciso at that moment lost (the loss pure, instant, spherical, the sound of a stainless orchestral chime held among the stars and struck lightly), gave up its residue of uniqueness for her; became a name again, was assumed back into the American continuity of crust and mantle (147).
The “pure, spherical” loss of her bearings and therefore any sense of confinement shows that
Oedipa has recognized her intricately constructed reality as a projection of a world that is meaningful to her. She has arrived at the conclusion that truth can continually be built upon, and it is this deduction that provides the reader with a sense of closure at the end of the story regardless of the remaining uncertainty about the existence of the Tristero system.