Seeing the World Through Pynchon's Glasses: The Crying of Lot 49, Chapter One

Sometimes authors use characters’ names in order to convey a certain meaning or portray an important characteristic of the individual or the literary work per say. Thomas Pynchon uses satire in the names of the characters of the book The Crying of Lot 49 to reveal secrets about their true personalities and life styles. For example, as Natalia mentioned in her blog, the fact that Dr. Hilarious was trying to drug his patients with a substance similar to LSD does not seem hilarious at all; however, his personality and attitude is very unique and amusing. Doctors are supposed to care for the well-being of their patients, not use them as lab mice to test their own experiments. This is what makes Dr. Hilarious uniquely hilarious.

Mucho Maas, or “Much More” is also a very peculiar character. Like Billy Pilgrim, Maas is a social outcast who is seldom understood by others. His sensibility, like that of Billy Pilgrim, leads him to try to escape humanity’s vices.
“But the endless rituals of trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.” (p. 5).
By quitting his job at the used-car shop, Maas is trying to escape the hollowness of the modern world and the lack of individuality and consciousness present in each character. Like T. S. Eliot expressed in his poem The Hollow Men, humanity has become barren, void, and unable to construct a unique existence. Mucho Maas’ name suggests that there is much more inside this character than the apparent craziness and unbalance perceived from outside.

As strange and humorous The Crying of Lot 49 may seem, it actually conceals a huge amount of meaning. “She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way 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.” (p. 11). Sometimes in life we construct our own lenses, or points of view, to observe and interpret every situation we encounter. Similar to Billy Pilgrim and the fourth dimension, Oedipa Maas is trapped in her own world, in her own sadness. Like Gilgamesh, Jesus, and Winston Smith in 1984, Oedipa makes judgments and decisions in life hidden behind her tears. Events and occurrences are distorted by her vision and opinion about things, which leads her to think and act in a specific manner. I believe that this is what makes each of us unique and different. This reminds me of the saying “walk a mile in another person’s shoes,” which should be modified to say, “see the world through another person’s glasses.”

Finally, I would like to question the title of the book. Does lot forty-nine have anything to do with the lots Mucho Maas used to work in? Does the crying part relate in any way to the tears that refract each person’s view of the external world? What is the significance of the title of this work to the development of the story? Does it conceal any sort of meaning, like the names of the characters or the quotes in the first chapter?


Vocabulary:

Convoluted: extremely complex and difficult to follow.

Finesse: do something in a subtle and delicate manner.

Rapport: a close relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other’s feelings or ideas and communicate well.

Ambivalent: having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.