The Oxymoron in Opposites: The Crying of Lot 49, Chapter 6

It has always been said that in order for something to exist, its opposite must be created, too. For example, in the KJB the figure of God, or Light, came into existence; therefore, the opposite of light, dark, must have come alive simultaneously. A point of comparison must be established between opposite extremes in order for these to gain strength and credibility when compared to their adversary. In the Crying of Lot 49, the reader was presented with the figure of God, or goodness, and the Other, its evil opposite, represented by the Trystero postal system. “…the Scurvhamite part, ran off the will of God, its prime mover. The rest ran off some opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute automatism that led to eternal death… But the brute Other, that kept the non-Scurvhamite universe running like clockwork, that was something else again. Evidently they felt Trystero would symbolize the Other quite well.” (p. 128). By undermining the foundations of a postal system, which relies on other people’s written words in order to carry out its functions, the Trystero was impairing the importance of the Word, or God. There existed a complex web of secret letters and words which remained hidden from the world, and which in some sense corrupted the identity of the Thurn and Taxis system by concealing in itself another truth, another version of people’s accounts. In the KJB, the Word was the only light, the only reality people were expected to subject to; however, the evil and dark presence of the Other produced different words, a different and secret truth people began to adhere to. The Thurn and Taxis system declined with time, while the Trystero flourished in its own, private empire. “If Trystero has managed to maintain even partial secrecy, if Thurn and Taxis have no clear idea who their adversary is, or how far its influence extends, then many of them must come to believe in something very like the Scurhamite’s blind, automatic anti-God… It is their time’s ghost, out to put the Thurn and Taxis ass in a sling.” (p. 136). The Thurn and Taxis’ victory symbolized the triumph of an evil presence in the world, an unknown force that many times manages to absorb people into its reality, like it did to Oedipa. The contending identities of God and evil, subjected to eternal fighting, will someday come to an end with the triumph of the Other. Sins will continue to corrupt humanity, like the Trystero has done with Hilarious, Mucho, Metzger, and Driblette, until the end of the days.

Like the contrary existence of a good and evil force, reality and its opposite, nothingness, come alive in our world, too. “For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left…Ones and zeroes… Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the true ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Trystero.” (p. 150). Life is compared to the binary system of a computer, where ones mean “on” and zeroes mean “off”. It evolves around the concept of truth and nonexistence. Objects, feelings, and anything else tangible or intangible must be real in any of the worlds in which we inhabit, whether it be the world inside our minds or the external world. Therefore, nothing can be half-true; either it is or it isn’t. Like Hamlet’s over used, clichéd phrase explains, the overall question in life relies on whether “to be or not to be.”

Both people and their souls are real beings that inhabit the earth. Although the external body of an individual is able to carry out more functions in life because of the messages the brain sends to the other organs, the soul possesses the ability to break itself apart into infinite pieces and travel around from person to person and from memory to memory. “Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn’t vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing muscles that no longer existed…Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I’ve got.” (p. 133). People’s souls are composed of many small fragments that drift away once the individual has established a relationship with someone else. Sometimes people say that they will always carry each other in their hearts; however, the heart is a muscle that performs no other function than pumping the blood through our arteries and receiving the blood that comes from our veins. Although we depend upon it to live, our hearts do not possess the ability to love, which is contained in the subjective worlds inside our own minds. When two people share experiences together, a part of each of themselves will inevitably separate itself from the soul and come to inhabit the other person’s world inside his/her mind. This means that other individual’s souls, as well as our own experiences and thoughts, make us who we are. Our bodies are composed of one person, but our souls are composed of millions of individuals we encounter throughout life; therefore, the soul is much more powerful than the body.

The Crying of Lot 49 is composed of many symbols that talk about Oedipa’s and our own struggles with life. Its ending tells the reader a lot about life as well. These topics will be discussed in more detail in the next two entries.

Vocabulary:

Automatism: the performance of actions without conscious thought or intention.

Vertiginous: causing vertigo, especially by being extremely high or steep.

Cudgel: a short thick stick used as a weapon.

Addendum: an item of additional material, typically omissions, added at the end of a book or other publication.

Affluent: (especially of a group or area) having a great deal of money; wealthy.