[Posted by ABBY and TAYLOR]
How does Pynchon use language to blur the lines between real experiences and hallucinations? Does the reader know less than Oedipa or is she just as lost? What do these objective accounts of subjective points of view suggest about the nature of reality?
If I am understanding correctly, Trystero is more of a metaphor. We do not know what it is, and the author seems say that Oedipa thinks she may be hallucinating a hoax. It may seem that Oedipa is just as lost as the reader because she cannot distinguish what is real from what's not, whereas the reader can somewhat do that. Because of the difficulty distinguishing what is real from what is not, it is hard to say what is part of reality. As I read, I had difficultly making this distinction.
ReplyDeleteLanguage and communication, and the various modes we use to communicate with others and ourselves, plays a very important role in The Crying of Lot 49, and Pynchon seems especially interested in the ways communication is difficult or fails altogether. To begin with, the story reads a little like Nadja not just in its surrealist feeling, but also in that Pynchon’s sentences are very long-winded and meandering, and in a way that seems almost overwhelming to the reader; I often found myself having to go back and revisit pages in order to reorient myself. In the same way that Oedipa must navigate the world – and specifically, try to carry out the task of being the legal executor of Pierce’s estate, despite having no knowledge about wills – the reader is forced to navigate the world with her, if not because Pynchon’s actual language is perhaps deliberately confusing, then because even within the world of the story, characters’ experiences and the information they are offered are similarly questionable and puzzling.
ReplyDeleteOne interesting way we can start to see some of Pynchon’s work at blurring the lines of reality is in his description of San Narciso at the beginning of chapter two, which, “like many named places in California”, is “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts”; if there is any difference to it and the rest of Southern California, “it [is] invisible on first glance” (13, 14). Pynchon notes that as Oedipa drives into the city, “nothing was happening” (14). On the other hand, she seems to be in the midst of an “odd, religious instant”: she seems to hear, “on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of”, words being spoken, and imagines whether this is how Mucho feels at his job, watching a colleague “really tuned in to the voice, voices, the music, its message, surrounded by it, digging it” (14). This moment ends almost as quickly as it occurs, and seems to suggest Oedipa’s questionable mental state; that she is either hallucinating, or even just has an overactive, surrealist’s imagination – given that this is not the first time such a thing has been suggested (including the Trystero plot), it leaves the reader questioning the reality of any given point in the story, and arguably in a more lost position than even Oedipa is.
One way that Pynchon uses language to blur the division between reality and hallucination is through complex, long-winded, and somewhat rambling sentence structure. In using syntax of this sort, the narrative frequently slips from reality into hallucinations or other forms of imaginative rambling with no warning or indication. In my reading of the text, it was often not immediately obvious to me when the text changed gears from the realistic to the nonrealistic. One of the first times that this happened in the text that did so almost without me knowing was at the end of Chapter 1, when the narrative switches from Oedipa’s conversation with Roseman to a strange imaginative account of an interaction between Pierce and Oedipa in which she appeared to be like Rapunzel to him and that also included a description of some tapestry with a magical influence.
ReplyDeleteSo far in my reading, I am unsure of who is more lost: Oedipa or me. While I am uncertain of this, I am certain that one of Pynchon’s goals was to create a narrative in which reality is a subjective conception. While at times I think the reader might be more capable than Oedipa at discerning what is hallucination from what is reality, another part of me feels like it might not matter what is real or not real. When the division between these two blurs, or disappears, you are nonetheless left with another anomalous understanding of existence to base one’s perceptions off of. In this sense, there is no objective “reality” that is most real; rather, there are various subjective realities in which the distinctions about which are most real are irrelevant. Reality is subjective.
Reading this book is similar to stumbling over a bunch of tree roots. No matter how hard you try walking normally through the book just causes you to catch a root and trip up. Instead you have to change how you walk, similar to having to change how you read. Instead of reading this book normally I have to think about why Pynchon is writing this way. I have to decipher the purpose. I think the writing is written in this fast paced stumbling manner because the characters mind is restless. She is full of anxiety and can not calm down. The author is communicating this through the fast paced language in the book.
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