A review by novabird
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

5.0

“Shall I project a world?”

“She moved through it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternative universes it would take.”

“What better way to damn it eternally than to change the actual words. Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word.”

How does Pynchon give us both ‘world projections,’ and an argument against a close reading via postmodernism or deconstruction? Pynchon bridges these two counterintuitive frames by giving the reader multiple perspectives from which to project their own individual reading, giving us instead a reader responsive text.

Pynchon gives us a glimpse through Oed’s perspective. One that encompasses imaginative flights of mind, rationality, hallucinatory episodes, states of mind as disease forms; epilepsy, delirium tremens, and a world awareness that borders on paranoia.

It is this awareness that assumes precedence over other states of mind, however the lament that drives this awareness needs to be examined.

”She could carry the sadness of the moment with her forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry

There are references to crying included/indiced about 15 times, they approach a closure of them drying up and drawing to an end with,

“The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most tender flesh without a reflex or a cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew.”

Here is where, the conditioned land, of America no longer cries out against the Tristero’s of the world;

“If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other town, or other estate, then by continuity she might have found Tristero anywhere in her Republic. Through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she had looked. .. That America coded in Inverarity’s testament (estate), whose (land) was that? (Here Oed, looks over the common land and the common people of America; the squatters, the kids, the drifters – the disenfranchised) What was left to inherit? How many shared Tristero’s secret, as well as its exile?”

There are so many ways to ‘read,’ The Crying of Lot 49,” and to interpret it that I am left deep in thought. 5 I now want to read everything written by Pynchon to see if his relevant symbolism is present and as accessible in his other works as well.