In his popular "cult" book The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan writes, "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication" (8). Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 takes on a cynical tone as it grapples with this new age of technological media. Pynchon's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is the executor of her wealthy late boyfriend's will. As she takes on that role, she stumbles upon an international conspiracy all seemingly signifiers of her ex Peirce Invararity's alleged master plan.
Oedipa becomes immersed in history and connections which captivate her. Inclined to find some deeper meaning or solution, She travels California with faith that she will solve the supposed mystery of the conspiracy with the aid of the quirky people she encounters. Oedipa's cause is motivated not by the content of the media, the history of the symbols for example, but by her own interpretation of the content so long everything lines up with an assumption she holds about the content; that it is all in some way related to her ex. However, as we discover more and more while the novel progresses, the content is not decipherable. The more "clues" she finds, the more complex her search becomes. Potential conclusions, not the fragmented content, push her forward. Oedipa's demise is brought about because she does not accept that there is no single conclusion. Only possibility and overlap; eternal intertextuality like hyperlinks on the internets. Her paranoia transforms to schizophrenia precisely due to the content of media having no apparent connection or unifying master narrative.
To bring McLuhan back into the picture, Oedipa's journey is shaped by the nature of media because she feels like she is on to something, slowly piecing together a myth that she herself invented. "We march backwards into the future" (75). Oedipa is navigating backwards during her journey to uncover what may or may not be a worldwide conspiracy, the plan of her late boyfriend Peirce Inverarity, or symptom of her own paranoia. Her eyes are in the past as her body moves forward through time, just like the rear view mirror image in McLuhan's book. Serge's Song in chapter 6, in reference to Nabakov's Lolita offers commentary on Oedipa's situation:
And the older generation/ Has taught me what to do--I had a date last night with an eight-year old, And she's a swinger just like me.
The song is a sardonic parody of generational inheritance. The Paranoids, cloaked with the venerable pop-rock Beatles look, cynically point out the redundancy of cultural ailment passing on through the generations. We are romantically linked with the idea of youth just as our predecessors but rather than our desires translating into hope and eventually progressive and adaptive results, our ideals again and again, create dysfunctional situations for ourselves. Oedipa's mystery is really all in her head. The outdated tools she brings to the situation are intended to create order from disorder but since the chaos that surrounds her is completely out of her control, she of course breaks down. Her will to bring order to the chaos can be understood as inherited from Pynchon's fictional original settlers of America. "Nothing ever happen by accident for the Scurvhamite, Creation was a vast, intricate machine" (155). Pynchon provides his reader with the fictional historical narratives so that the reader can draw parallels with past and present. We can surmise that Oepida's world is not conducive to thriving in the narrative's present environment.
It is clear that Oedipa knows no other paradigm other than the ontological. For this, Pynchon punishes his protagonist with her mental breakdown, leaving the reader with absolute possibility: "Oedipa settled back to await the crying of lot 49." Pynchon is clearly telling a story of extreme skepticism towards the age of technological communication as it relates to the generation from which the novel is born, unlike McLuhan who takes on a very coy and playful posture. "Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions" (McLuhan 8). Oedipa embodies social angst in a time of transition. She takes on "today's jobs" with "yesterday's tools" (McLuhan 9) with her insistence upon the existence of a single meta-narrative to organize all of the chaos she encounters then falling prey to the unnamed omniscient narrator's insistence upon entropy, rather than embracing the confusion.
As with most open endings, however, I am always inclined to feel that the author wishes to convey some questioning or doubt of the total pessimism we get up until this last sentence. The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon's period piece that leaves us feeling that the 60s cannot handle the new media transformation but over time the tensions of "cultural transitions" fade as the fire of technological revolution eventually cools down and the changes become the everyday.
No comments:
Post a Comment