The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon

the Big Bang

McHale

1966 / mid to late sixties

something changed in culture => postmodernism

Annus mirabilis

1922, “big bang” for modernism

the rise of literary criticism

Structuralism and poststructuralism => the onset of theory

• different way to look at knowledge, theory, and how unimportant it is

• the meaninglessness of language

  • because language is meaningless, it cannot represent reality

  • language can only construct realities

Poststructuralism

language does not and cannot represent reality

language constructs reality

both language and reality are constructs, nothing natural

meta-element in postmodernism

metalanguage: to talk about language

metafiction: to talk about fiction

Thomas Pynchon

reclusive, doesn’t get photographed often

=> image-building? or separating work from artist?

sold his archive to a library recently: out of character, he does want you to learn about the writer’s intention

Title Crying

the meaning os only revealed all the way at the end

but you still don’t know what happens after the crying

Circularity, and this the pointlessness of it all

Structure Crying

Traditional storytelling, straightforward

Blurring fictional and historical events in Crying

Tristero and Thurn and Taxis

• real events mixed with a made up story about the two

Peter Pinguid society (fiction)

• russian naval expedition

• fictional episode but grounded in real historical research

Dr Hilarius

• Fictional character but real concentration camp

San Narciso

• fictional town in real California

• referring to Saint Narcissus

Pastiche in Crying

Imitation, pure and simple

Mucho Maas

• ex second hand car salesman with a guilty conscience

Dr hilarius

• Shrink experimenting with LSD and losing grip on reality

the paranoids

• pastiche on the Beatles (popular in US since 1966)

Hollywood film: fictional

Courier’s tragedy

• reflection on the genre of Jacobean revenge plays

Language games in Crying

proper names

• mucho maas, Oedipa maas, dr hilarius, Metzger, …

metaphors

words is all we haveMu

Eclecticism in Crying

mixture of low and high culture

popular music

television

Nabokov and the paranoidds

Jacobean play and academic scholarship

subaltern world that uses alternative postal system

Loss of the original, simulacrum

Muzak

'“Live” electroic music

casino with "reconstruction of some European casino”

Pierce’s stamps are forgery

reproductions

Postmodernism properties of Crying

• blurring fictional and historical events

• pastiche

• language games

• mixture of high and low culture, eclecticism

• loss of the original

• sense of (personal) loss

Entropy

termodynamics

• a measure of disorder or randomness within a system, indicating the spread of energy and its availability for useful work

• has to do with the differences in temperature between two masses

comunication and information systems

• measure of the unpredictability of the state, or its information content

• “news value” of a message depends on the degree to which the content of the message is surprising