[Posted by JOHN and ELIZABETH]
Oedipa becomes increasingly obsessed with the image of the muted post horn as the story goes on. In her pursuit of learning more about it, both Oedipa, herself and readers are forced to decide whether or not the reoccurrence of this image is meaningful or just coincidence. In the reading of this text, are random occurrences and instances of chance intended to be found meaningful? Do you think the anticlimactic ending of the novel supports or opposes this type of meaning-seeking approach?
Random occurrences are subtle in this story, at least how I read it. You brought up the horn in your question and I find this to be an interesting example. When Oedipa first steps into the bathroom she sees the symbol. However she doesn't picture a horn. Instead she describes it as different shapes such as a triangle and a trapezoid. Then she proceeds to speculate about whether it's sexual or not. It's clear that she has little to no understanding of the symbol until later on when it is able to form into a horn. This books seems to be all about different forms of communications and how they can be faulty. The image was poorly communicating it's true form to her at first. This was just another example of how communication can become corrupted which was a major theme in the book. This goes along well with the more "anticlimactic" ending of the story. It is not often that anything is specifically pointed out. The book just flows and therefore the ending should just sort of ebb out.
ReplyDeleteThe Trystero conspiracy, as I saw it, is really where the novel goes from slightly bizarre to all but completely absurd, though intriguing, and the whole plot reminded me quite a bit of the VFD organisation from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. In that series, VFD is a mysterious group whose scope and implications are similarly conspiracy-like and larger than the characters in the story initially realise; they also have a cryptic symbol and there’s much speculation about what the acronym really means (e.g. ‘Very Fine Doilies’). The mystery surrounding Trystero, and the effort devoted to it as a plot, is similar to the VFD plot in the absurdist, fantastical quality it gives the rest of the novel – but in this same vein of absurdity, it (i.e. the story) and Pynchon put faith in the reader to just go along with everything. I believe that, in the world of the story, some or even all of the things Oedipa experiences actually occur, and are not wholly coincidental and without significance, like the reoccurrence of the image of the muted post horn. The Crying of Lot 49 is also satirical novel, though, and while I don’t believe that the entirety of the novel is just one big cheeky absurdist joke and Pynchon’s way of commenting or criticising the reader’s job of finding meaning in a text, I do believe that some things have less (or more, but more often than not, less) meaning than others.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, one of the biggest things I struggled with while reading this book was trying to distinguish what was supposed to be meaningful and what was just part of the joke – but maybe this doesn’t have to matter to us nearly as much as it does to Oedipa, who creates meaning within the story’s universe through her experiences regardless of whether we ourselves agree and see the same thing. In this sense, the story functions similarly to The Metamorphosis, and encourages or even requires us as readers to suspend our disbelief and take some things at face value, including the ending, which otherwise seems equally random. If we adopt a similar attitude to the events in The Crying of Lot 49 as we did to Gregor’s transformation into a hideous insect, the ending of Oedipa awaiting the auction of Pierce’s stamps may have meaning, or it may have none, or it perhaps doesn’t even matter, and is just that: Oedipa at an auction, and whatever that means to her.