Pick Some Words. Them, We Can Talk About

            Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 emphasizes the importance of words throughout its pages, however never is its message more spelled out than on page 124. In discussing “the historical Wharfinger,” Bortz and his grad students point out that Wharfinger, Shakespeare, Marx, and Jesus are all “‘dead [so] What’s left?’” to which Oedipa answers “‘Words.’”

            This struck me for the reason that I am a writer and I can only hope that one day I leave behind a legacy of words, but also because truly, no matter the person, Bortz is right. The last trace left of a person is often the words on their tombstone, or else the words of their will or obituary. To contrast those physical markers left to keep record of someone, the essence of a person can only be memorialized through spoken word, through the stories told and memories shared by those who knew the deceased. Those words, varied from telling to telling and person to person, become a part of a person’s legacy just as much if not more than anything they ever said in life.

            Fallopian’s line on page 138, “‘Has it ever occurred to you, Oedipa, that somebody’s putting you on?’” addresses the risk of giving words such power to shape the perceptions of a person or a situation. Words can be deceiving, and can be altered. The advice which Oedipa is given, to “‘write down what [she] can’t deny…but then write down what [she’s] only speculated, assumed [to] see what [she’s] got’” (138) suggests that it is possible to sort out which words are original and which are altered.

Sometimes the altered words hold more resonance than the originals. Looking at a pop culture example, the phrase “I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto” was never actually said in The Wizard of Oz. The actual phrase is “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more.” In this case not much is lost in adopting the altered phrase, but in the case of the Tristero line in The Courier’s Tragedy, the altered couplet completely alters Oedipa’s understanding of the play.