Introduction
“The Crying of Lot 49” is constructed in such a way that new meanings are revealed with each reading. It has a love and a detective line, a bit of thriller or gothic, and a pinch of social protest and provocation. Similar to all of Thomas Pynchon’s later books, this novel is characterized by a chaotic narrative, an absence of clear structure, and a non-linear chronology. Thus, literary techniques and communicative theory should be applied to reveal the novel’s essential aspects.
A Comprehensive Explanation of Key Issues in the Novel
T. Pynchon’s novel “The Crying of Lot 49” is a typical example of the postmodern novel as a particular interdiscursive formation. Postmodern literature is characterized by the heterogeneity of reality and incorporates many different elements of human knowledge and culture into the single fabric of the text. For instance, the postmodern novel demonstrates more discourse heterogeneity than any other fiction text (Al-Khatib and Awad 13). The author interprets it as a symbol of the destruction and degeneration of Western civilization, the deadening of the intellect, and the degradation of human relationships.
However, this metaphor is not obvious in the novel because the author uses the technique of double coding the text. Suppose it becomes clear only to the dedicated, so-called aesthetic reader familiar with the philosophy of postmodernism and the prevalent ideas at the time. This suggests that the connotations of the novel can only be revealed by considering the subjective features of interdiscursive interpretation. In communication theory, entropy is a performance measure of a system, like a code or a language, in transmitting the information (Claude and Weave 3). Meaningful for understanding the meanings of the novel is the postmodernist feminist discourse, which refers to the destruction and imminent death of the old order of civilization of men and the emergence of women. Using the feminative “executrix” and its politically correct equivalent “executor,” the author actualizes the dilemma considered in feminist discourse about the appropriateness of using nouns denoting women and having suffixes such as -ess -ette and -trix (Ong 73). Thus, the terms of feminist and non-feminist discourse are juxtaposed, allowing the reader to understand that even though Oedipa herself was not initiated in the problems.
She worried about the adherents of the second wave of feminism in the United States, and the author insists on her independence and self-sufficiency. First, Oedipa is the only significant female character, and second, she is surrounded by weak, duplicitous, or superficial men. Feminist discourse in the novel affirms the autonomy and rationality of women and indicates the weakening of masculinity by interacting with the fairy tale discourse. The latter is represented through vocabulary typical of fairy tales, such as sorcery, tower, captive maiden, magic, and knight of deliverance (Al-Khatib and Awad 13). The violation of the classic plot of the fairy tale, the allusion to the painting, and the symbolic image of the tower also actualize feminist discourse. This is because it presents Oedipa as an independent woman who independently spins the tapestry of her destiny and Pierce as a symbol of fading masculinity.
It should be noted that the philosophical-political discourse of the time was permeated by the theme of the degradation of society and political systems that marked the end of history. Mainly capitalist society, in which everyone aspires only to profit. This idea is supported in the presented part of Metzger’s conversation with Oedipa, which raises such a problem as the transfer by an employee of the rights to his invention to the company in which he works most profitably for the capitalist without compensation. This idea is illustrated by the passage, “In school, they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor” (Pynchon 16). In this statement, the personal deixis, marked by the pronoun “us,” is one of the ways the author communicates with the reader, as it represents the author’s point of view on the problem.
It is essential to trace Oedipa’s adventures throughout the novel. Pynchon describes the attempt to deal with Pierce’s will as an example of the workings of Maxwell’s demon. The entropy principle is explained in the chaos that Oedipus discovers as he travels through California. At the same time, however, Pynchon supports the idea that information gathering is directly related to measuring disorder. Thus, it is aimed at demonstrating, through Oedipa, that the demon cannot function. In the novel, Oedipa Maas remains the executor of the will, dealing with unexpected inheritance, just as Maxwell’s demon is summoned to deal with the randomness of molecules (Beitzel 197). Oedipa finds a vast amount of chaos around her and begins to bring order to this chaos; she notices the horror of entropy in society.
This contributes to the fact that she begins her unexpected journey through California, symbolizing the entropy of molecules moving in casual directions. Accordingly, one can conclude that Oedipa’s representation of the demon indicates when she begins to disassemble symbols and codes in society, just as Maxwell’s demon begins to disperse molecules. Oedipa discovers considerable chaos in society by traveling to Cali in particular, the acronyms WASTE, DEATH, and NADA in the novel being examples of entropy in communication (Pynchon). With these words, Pynchon suggests that the randomness of language has disturbing potential. Oedipa encounters mass confusion when confronted with these words, and she notices the psychological impact these words can have on the people of California (Ong 31). Therefore, Oedipa is part of an interesting form of communication entropy.
Considering that an essential principle of communication entropy is the ability of noise to alter the message being communicated, Oedipa notices it. As a result, the woman attempts to unravel the mystery of Tristero. Interestingly, Mucho interviews Oedipa for radio and announces her name as “Mrs. Edna Mosh,” the sound will change through the entropy of communication. Later, Oedipa observes children playing with a jump rope on the streets. She realizes that they are humming the song “Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three, Turning taxi from across the sea…” (Pynchon 96) At the same time, the woman notes that they have misinterpreted the words from Thurn and Taxis. In this way, Pynchon again demonstrates entropy in the communication.
Another example of the communicative theory is the moment when Oedipa examines the play “The Tragedy of the Courier.” Then she notices that one line can be found in many different forms in different versions (Beitzel 198). In all of these instances, Pynchon introduces the concept of entropy in society and connects it to Maxwell’s idea of the demon through Oedipus. In this way, the author of the novel demonstrates that in “The Crying of Lot 49”, information gathering is directly related to entropy.
Interestingly, the more data the protagonist collects throughout the novel, the more confused she becomes. The author demonstrates that Oedipa can no longer distinguish between reality and dreams. A great deal of research on a specific subject can lead to less understanding. Through Oedipa, Pynchon argues that entropy exists throughout society; using Oedipa as an example of Maxwell’s demon proves that Maxwell’s demon will not work. Oedipa, receiving a lot of formation, only discovered that she created even more chaos (Claude and Weave 3). She has no answers, equally as Pynchon shows that Maxwell’s demon will not provide a solution to something that contradicts the second law of thermodynamics.
The entire structure of the narrative corresponds to the novel’s central metaphor of entropy, with Pynchon combining both kinds of entropy in the development of the plot. In terms of thermodynamics, Oedipa, going to meet his destiny, moves from inertia and inactive monotony to a state of the active unraveling of Tristoe’s mystery. Conversely, from the point of view of information theory, there is an increase in entropy in her movement (Claude and Weave 5). The amount of information it gathers about Tristoe advances, and at the same time, the final meaning of this information becomes increasingly uncertain.
Conclusion
Therefore, a repeated theme to be discovered in Thomas Pynchon’s novel, “The Crying of Lot 49”, is that chaos has a tremendous impact on society. Pynchon uses a dualistic method of literary technique to evoke an awareness of the influence of chaos on the world. In the same way that the character of Oedipa has to read a series of confusing clues to decipher reality, the reader needs to work through seemingly incomprehensible riddles to reach a meaning in the novel. Thus, to fully make sense of Pynchon’s novel, the reader needs to manipulate the massive reception of information to prevent entropy by deciphering meaningful clues from nonsensical ones.
Works Cited
Al-Khatib, Dina, and Yousef Awad. “Unfolding the Female Journey in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman.” International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2019, pp. 6-14.
Beitzel, Constance. “Mrs. Oedipa Maas: Motherhood, Originality, and Meaning in The Crying of Lot 49”. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol.51, no. 1, 2018, pp.197-220.
Claude, E. Shannon, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. U. Illinois Press, 1963.
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. Routledge, 2002.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Penguin, 2012.