Pynchon's Collision with Meaning

Near the middle of The Crying of Lot 49, after watching the performance of The Courier’s Tragedy, our heroine(?) Oedipa encounters the director of the play, Randolph Driblette, who tells her: “I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also” (62). This is the same kind of playful act Pynchon performs when he projects us, the readers, into the closed system of the world he has created. In this world he, like Pierce Inverarity to Oedipa, has agency to pull and tug readers in whatever direction he so chooses. Pynchon seems to use this ability, this freedom, with absolute glee. With this kind of overlordship of the narrative, he discards normal elements like continuity, coherency, and resolution and replaces them with pastiche, allusion to real and fictional cultural phenomena, and a general playfulness and close alliance to humor. All of this in an effort to reach a state of “pulsing stelliferous Meaning” (64). That kind of phrasing, taken along with the overall cartoony feeling of the narrative (Oedipa’s sexcapade with Metzger, Dr. Hilarius going insane, the poor imitation of The Beatles with The Paranoids), makes me think that what Pynchon is really trying to do with Lot 49 is collide himself, through his characters, with this strange entity called Meaning and attempt to prove to himself and to the reader that it doesn’t really exist. Like the other master narratives presented in the book, Meaning is just another construction waiting to be deconstructed by a Pynchon who is perceptive and contrarian to ways of creating meaning.

Lot 49 presents master narratives such as religion, science, gender, and history as avenues through which meaning can be created. People can move toward this end point of meaning by subscribing to the “truths” these narratives teach. This is where entropy fits into the book. Entropy states that energy of an isolated system (like this very book) tends to move in a particular direction, eventually culminating in a “heat death” in which the universe will cease being able to sustain life or movement. In Lot 49 entropy metaphorically takes the form of Oedipa as she moves through the narrative in search of a supposed end point, the discovery of meaning. Tristero takes the place of a combination of all master narratives: “as if the more [Oedipa] collected the more would come to her, until everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero” (64). Tristero becomes the end point of Oedipa’s narrative arc and it becomes her sole motivation. Here Pynchon pulls his trick—in becoming invested in Oedipa’s quest for meaning, we too start to believe that Tristero (and, thus, master narratives in general) has some deep secret to tell us, that it weaves some path the end of which will be life-fulfilling. Along with Oedipa, we slowly come to realize that the whole game might be rigged. What if everything that happened was planned, controlled by Pierce to give Oedipa something, anything, in the world to do? Will we spin in endless, meaningless circles awaiting the heat death of the universe? Maxwell’s demon may be able to sort out things into binary systems, but then what—where do the atoms go from there? The false story of meaning—and then order—that master narratives tell us is simply an act of dressing up chaos in a suit, a little less ugly to look at.