Doublethink and Paranoia in a Misunderstood Life: The Crying of Lot 49

Although The Crying of Lot 49 uses satire in order to ridicule elements in society and create a humorous tone in the novel, Pynchon also employs many objects and people that serve as symbols to portray something important and relevant in society. The characters in the story generally bear names that are ironical, absurd, and contradictory, such as Dr. Hilarious, discussed in previous chapter. But what does this mean? Dr. Hilarious, a shrink, is supposed to cure society from all its pain and suffering; however, Hilarious is probably one of the characters that suffers the most because of his delirium and psychosis. What Pynchon may be trying to say through this individual is that society as a whole is pursuing the wrong purposes and taking the wrong paths in life, which will ultimately lead to nothing. Hilarious represents a person’s tool for achieving a goal, in this case sanity, which is way too corrupted to be able to heal humanity, thus making it achieve a false sense of security. Mankind is pursuing the wrong paths in life, ones that will ultimately lead to a false destination that is only a specter of what we wish to achieve or, as Orwell would have said in 1984, a manifestation of our ability to doublethink.

The Paranoids, another character in the novel, would generally be seen as a ridiculous boy-band that hangs out with girls and sings awkward songs; however, they behaved in a very peculiar and mysterious manner by following Oedipa wherever she went, possibly symbolizing something abstract and invisible but of great importance in her life. “Change your name into Miles, Dean, Serge, and /or Leonard, baby, she advised her reflection in the half-light of that afternoon’s vanity mirror. Either way, they’ll call it paranoia.” (p. 140). The Paranoids were more of a presence rather than a body, a feeling more than something tangible. They were permanently haunting Oedipa wherever she went, constantly reminding her that she carried a burden within herself that followed her everywhere she went, pursued her in her thoughts, and visited her in her dreams. The Paranoids started appearing when Oedipa began her quest of the Trystero and Pierce’s mystery, which is where all of her delirium, nervousness, and questioning about life originated; consequently, the Paranoids, as their name indicates, symbolize one’s psychosis when one decides to question the intricate web of “why’s” and “how’s” in life, ultimately leading to paranoia itself: “The toothaches got worse, she dreamed of disembodied voices from whose malignance there was no appeal, the soft dusk of mirrors out of which something was about to walk, and empty rooms that waited for her.” (p. 144).

Another symbol that caught my attention throughout the entire novel was the WASTE acronym, which is supposed to stand for We Await Silent Trystero’s Empire. Why did Pynchon decide to use the word “waste” as an acronym for the Trystero? One possible approach to this question may be found in what I discussed in my entry for chapter six, which you might want to refer to in order to possess a more complete idea of what I am talking about. The Trystero was a representation of God’s evil, or the Other, which corrupted the Word by establishing a secret web engaged in creating another truth people adhered to. The triumph of evil (Trystero) over good (Thurn and Taxis) fits perfectly into the definition of WASTE, which may be interpreted to signify the decline and deterioration of a civilization that has succumbed to the Other.

Finally, I would like to comment on the significance of Oedipa, the pillar on which the entire novel rested upon. Every time I used the Spell Check in Microsoft Word to revise my typos and spelling mistakes in my entries, I found that another option for spelling Oedipa was the word “oedipal”. This aroused a lot of curiosity in me, as the phonetics of these two words is very similar; besides, I believe that this “discovery” is not a coincidence, as the name Oedipa is not that common and there aren’t any other words that sound like it. The word “oedipal” is derived from Freud’s Oedipus complex, which can be understood as “The complex of emotions aroused in a young child, typically around the age of four, by an unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and a wish to exclude the parent of the same sex.” (Mac Dictionary). As the reader could notice, there weren’t any other major female characters in the novel besides Oedipa, who possessed and immense sex appeal towards men, such as Metzger. According to this theory and its relationship with Oedipa’s name, I can understand that this character behaves like a four-year-old. She has an naïve view of life, shattered when she became engaged in the complex Trystero mystery which, as I said before, tells the reader a lot about life as well. Oedipa may be the representation of those individuals that live a life in a carefree, superficial way (such as Mean Girls… no, I’m kidding). They don’t want to find answers, but once the mystery becomes a door she has to unlock in order to continue on with life, it becomes very difficult for her to arrive at the correct conclusion, never discovering the true reasons that make the mystery keep on going. “He might have written the testament only to harass a one-time mistress, so cynically sure of being wiped out he could throw away all hope of anything more. Bitterness could have run that deep in him. She just didn’t know. He might himself have discovered The Trystero, and encrypted that in the will, buying into just enough to be sure she’d find it. Or he might even have tried to survive death, as a paranoia.” (p. 148). Innocent people like Oedipa will never be able to understand the complexity of their own lives.