The Crying of Lot 49

Technology has long been recognized as a mixed blessing. Its up/downside nature was illustrated nicely in Walt Disney's Fantasia by the myth of the Sorcerer's Apprentice:not only does the "magic" of the machine produce what you desire, it often gives you much more than you can use--as Oedipa Maas, the heroine of this stark American fable, discovers on her frenetic Californian Odyssey. Information which strains to reveal Everything might well succeed only in conveying nothing, becoming practically indistinguishable from noise.But there is noise, and Noise. Many of the devices Pynchon uses to establish informational patterns in Lot 49 are metaphors for life in a mythic, fractionalized and increasingly noisy modern America.

Hapless Oedipa returns from an afternoon tupperware party to find she has been named executrix of immensely wealthy and fiendishly reclusive Pierce Inverarity's complicated estate.It is not a responsibility she desires; it is one she accepts.In doing so, she begins what is at first an active pursuit of information relating to Inverarity's eclectic holdings, but which soon metamorphoses into a passive role as a receiver of incomplete and contradictory data.Eventually, as Mendelson points out, she "receive[s] evidence far more frequent[ly] and insistent[ly] than she found when she was actually looking for it."Eventually, Oedipa becomes something of a receptive "coil" exposed to a communicative medium over-rich in signals.

Soon there grows a sinister urgency about Oedipa's urge to decipher, and she sacrifices all--life, husband, lover, stability--to what becomes her cause celebré:differentiating meaningful information from meaningless noise.And we come to understand that Oedipa's urgent meaning--that quality ...

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... must be recognized as the one piece of incontrovertible data Oedipa has received.That there is ìsome kind of dignityî about it remains, as does Inverarityís legacy, uncertain.Yet, the silent belief in the possibility of redemption, of individual, anarchic freedom from the isolated, paranoid, hellish desert of Noise uninhabited by the Mucho Maases--perhaps a personal, apolitical belief in such a freedom, is transcendent and redemptive in and of itself.

It is the potential for a Word, rather than a word proper, which offers this redemption.Belief in such a potential might be taken as a latter-day definition of faith; faith in the intrinsic worth of human contact and memory, in a wasteland of separation and fleeting images.Thus, Oedipaís Odyssey has become not a metaphorical search for material truth, but a lesson in the liberating power of spiritual uncertainty.