“But this did not work.”

A Failed Experiment in Annotating Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

The experience of reading Thomas Pynchon is often a dizzying one. Skipping across the surface of his prose, propelled by an increasingly bizarre plot and humorous set pieces, one finds the way littered with glints of literary, historical and scientific references, sparkling things dropped like Atalanta’s apples along the story’s twisting path. One is constantly tempted to stop, pick up them up and examine. Perhaps this or that reference is the keystone to unlocking the ludic text, or perhaps it is just a joke made at your expense, literary fool’s gold.

Because he is so funny and obscure, Pynchon encourages a reading style that one might call “Encyclopedic.” Meaning, you had better have some sort of encyclopedia next to you as you read along, something for you to look up whatever splintered fragments of a line stops your wandering mind.

The rewarding thing about reading Pynchon is that these references do always come to mean something, something factual and politically significant. There are entire worlds of learning contained in these details: Jacobean Revenge drama, German genocide in colonial Africa, the international history of condiments, the physics of entropy and the mathematics of rocketry, anarchist bombings in the Colorado Rockies, the aesthetics of Surf Music, the deep net.

Judging Books By Their Covers: Chalk Symbols on the First Edition / The Swinging 60s Paperback Cover / The Attempt to Illustrate a Wacky Scene Cover

But Pynchon asks bigger questions than “did you catch that?” Instead his style and form question what it means to read; how language — no less than mathematics and science — works to represent the world, and what kind of deeper meanings can be created out of the omnipresent, overburdened, superficial act of interpretation that most of us think of as “consciousness.”

Is everything connected? Do literary texts contain hidden meanings? Can they reveal a secret history? Or is everything right there on the surface, a play of words acting upon our minds to suggest depth and shadow, locks and keys? Maybe the whole book is just what Pynchon sez it is: “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.”

Will Pete Campbell figure out the Crying of Lot 49?

We all know (or should know) that there is (or may be) a hidden gay sexual encounter in The Great Gatsby at the very end of chapter 2. If you don’t recall this from reading it in High School it is because our unreliable narrator conceals this encounter behind an ellipsis “…” while telling us that he is “one of the few honest people that I’ve ever known.” Maybe he was drunk, or maybe he just wants us to think he was drunk so he can lie about his less socially acceptable desires (and explain why his romance with Jordan goes astray).

But this is not what Pynchon does at all. In part because he never uses first person narrators. The Crying of Lot 49 is unusual in that it sticks so closely to Oedipa. More importantly, his writing recognizes no bounds of representation, resulting in a shameless wackiness. In Gravity’s Rainbow a band of survivors vanquish a castle full of German bankers and Nazi vampires using dirty jokes. Many of his characters — Tyrone Slothrop or Zoyd Wheeler or Doc Sportello — are stoned most of the time, which seems to impair their memory while turning them on to otherwise invisible connections and strange vibrations. It also improves their sense of humor.

“Come have your picture taken with a reclusive author” Thomas Pynchon on the Simpsons

Set up by our housewife turned detective, The Crying of Lot 49 almost immediately becomes too cartoonish to follow, with too many characters carrying ridiculous names (like Genghis Cohen and Mike Fallopian, pick your own favorite!) Oedipa’s investigation into a former lover’s will, a wealthy LA real estate mogul named Pierce Inverarity, sets her on the trail of the Tristero, W.A.S.T.E. and the Galactronics Division of Yoyodyne, Inc. The result is a theme-park map of the military-industrial-academic-hi-tech complex of mid-1960s California.

Pynchon left his deep eastern roots and moved west by the early 1960s, working at Boeing writing technical manuals before moving to the beach in LA. A string of distinctive California sub-countercultural “alternative universies” illustrate everything in The Crying of Lot 49, from mini-skirts and faux-Brit rock bands to right wing extremists. Oedipa walks across Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley campus. She beholds (through her car windshield) the great urban “printed circuit” that is the tech city of San Narciso. At every moment on her journey “a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.” And in the end Oedipa gets a bit, well… “they’ll call it paranoia.” The plot gets lost and the ending answers absolutely nothing.

I mean, go ahead, skip to the last line of the book, its got the only reference to the title anywhere in there so it feels like it should be “symbolic” of something. But if you think you can cheat the detective story and dig the big reveal… then the joke is on you. There is no big reveal only one enormous, ever elusive “revelation.”

Judging Books By Their Covers: The Lonely Sign Seeker Cover / The Worn Stamp Cover

Pynchon’s prose is dense with creativity, filled with puns, pitches and songs, because, quite simply, that is what our culture is actually like. His books don’t strip away perception and detail to tell a simple tale (not that everyone doesn’t love a good simple tale every now and then), but he writes as if the world were infinitely rich in suggestion. Which it is.

And that is why Pynchon’s writings are so difficult to get a hold of, to force into some sort of reductive awareness that we want to call “comprehension” or “understanding.” Rather, Oedipa herself poses the more relevant challenge: “Shall I project a world?” In the end, Pynchon’s prose, his books, his refusal to show his face in public, all serve to represent the basic mystery of reading the world itself: that Cosmos is the imposition of Psyche upon Chaos and that none of us — with the noted exception of Connor McCloud and Byron the Bulb — can ever know everything.

But that wont stop us from trying…
So here is our effort — via the form of Medium notes and working in collaboration with a crack team of students working under the publication THE SECRET HISTORY OF AMERICA — to annotate the first paragraph of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.

[NOTE: In the text of The Crying of Lot 49 this is all one paragraph. We have broken it up to facilitate reading the notes]

One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.

She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby; a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west; a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra; a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she’d always had the hovering fear it would someday topple on them.

Was that how he’d died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only icon in the house? That only made her laugh, out loud and helpless: You’re so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.