Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 10 Number 1, April 2009

___________________________________________________________________

Infinite Correlation in Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49

by

Terry Fairchild

Maharishi University of Management 

The arrival of Thomas Pynchon's small, celebrated novel of 60's cold war paranoia and flower child optimism spawned an ongoing critical argument that has never abated.  At its center exists contradictory questions: Are Oedipa Maas's revelations about the subversive Trystero system meaningful? Do they point to a universal symmetry undetected except by sensitives such as Oedipa? Or are all of Oedipa’s discoveries delusions that "reveal only the presence of our own desire to impose meaning on a meaningless universe"?[1] 

In one sense, any attempt to choose between these opposing positions is moot because The Crying of Lot 49 is no more reductive than say, "Young Goodman Brown." It is impossible to state without equivocation, for example, that Oedipa's emergence from the Yoyodyne’s maze, precisely at the desk of Stanley Kotecks who sits doodling the sign of the post horn, is a coincidence or a correlation. In Pynchon's world, opposite conditions not only exist, they exist within the same time and space. Philosophy and theology have always been able to account for simultaneity, and now so does modern physics through the concept of a layered universe. That is to say, a specific form of existence can be found at one stage of reality, perhaps at the molecular level, while something quite different, possibly even opposite, say on the material level. Oedipa, ignorant of this layered universe, finds herself driven towards some final unraveling of knowledge in the form of Trystero, which appears alternately as benign and malignant. 

Turning to physics to help unravel The Crying of Lot 49 is certainly nothing new. Pynchon, with his allusions to electromagnetic fields, the second law of thermodynamics, and Clerk Maxwell, almost demands it. What is new is an examination of Lot 49 through the most recent developments in quantum mechanics. In recent decades, quantum physics with its advanced mathematics has finally found the means to unify the various force fields, thereby coming close to proving Einstein's unified field, a vacuum state with "no definable shape,"[2] that unifies, upholds, and gives rise to all the unstable phenomena called life.[3]  Because a unified field is the same source for all action and all physical phenomena, a correlation between everything always exists, and the closer one comes to operating from this field the greater and more apparent the correlation becomes. A unified field is where physics and metaphysics merge, where objective matter is indistinguishable from subjective consciousness, a field that "underlies and interconnects all possible information. It is a field of infinite correlation in which an impulse anywhere is an impulse everywhere."[4]

Pynchon no doubt entertained the existence of a unified field, a possibility easily derived from his scientific background and his reading of such metaphysical texts as the Tibetan Book of the Dead that assumes a transcendental, absolute parallel to the unified field. More immediate evidence is, of course, the interconnected network of fictional particles that characterize The Crying of Lot 49 (and really all of Pynchon's novels), which behave uncannily as if a unified field supported its multifarious elements.  It matters not that a form of randomness can also explain these elements, because in Lot 49’s own layered universe, knowledge and behavior will differ from one layer to the next.

One of the features of a unified field most germane to the study of Lot 49 is the quality of infinite correlation.  Pynchon himself alludes to correlation in a debate between Fallapoian and Oedipa over whether or not Trystero agents disguised themselves as Indians to attack the Pony Express.  Fallopian reminds Oedipa that her suspicions cannot be verified.  "There's no way to trace it, unless you want to follow up an accidental correlation.  You think it's really a correlation?" (93) Oedipa asks.  Fallopian's statement is of course ironic because correlation is never accidental; coincidence is accidental but correlation is synergistic.  Correlation is a quality of natural law that explains the inherent connection between ideas, things, people, or events often mistaken for something else such as coincidence, conspiracy, madness, speculation, or paranoia.  In Pynchon's world, all of these indeterminate explanations for human and natural phenomena exist, but against their randomness stands correlation to cry meaningfulness among the novel’s seemingly chaotic events, even against the appearance of meaninglessness.   

This is Pynchon’s dual vision. It is not a question of meaningless versus meaningfulness.  It is a matter of endless possibilities that can accommodate both extremes.  This is what Lot 49 demonstrates and what modern physics has discovered. On the other hand, contemporary critical theory tends to believe that to unify something is to limit it to a single perspective, but by disallowing unity one limits perspective only to difference. The rub in all of this—at least for postmodernism—is that by including unity in a reading one must ultimately account for a meaningful universe that is only at times meaningless.  In physics this is simple enough.  Randomness exists on the surface, but as the temperature decreases according to the third law of thermodynamics, as activity becomes less, one finds increasing order at subtler levels of creation.  In Crying of Lot 49, perhaps more than any other novel, we find these dual characteristics of unity and duality, randomness and correlation, constantly overlapping, and until Oedipa learns that opposites can co-exist simultaneously, her quest for a final resolution can only end in death or madness.

Returning to San Narciso following her visits to San Francisco and Kinneret, Oedipa is greeted with such an information overload about Trystero, the muted post horn, the W.A.S.T.E. system, bone charcoal, and the masked marauders; it throws her into a physical and mental collapse, into a dark-night-of-the-soul.  As long as she can collect her esoteric data in small bites, no matter how spurious, Oedipa can proceed detective-like towards some intellectual or spiritual end.  By proving the existence of Trystero, an underground communication system at odds with the vulgar, egoistic, unfeeling world that surrounds her, Oedipa believes she will simultaneously discover her real Self and the inter-connectedness of all beings.  Ironically, however, once information about the Trystero and its associations mount exponentially, following the law of entropy according to information theory, she reaches an impasse, and "there is no way in which she can find out how much she is projecting, and how much she is perceiving or receiving."[5]  It is possible she is both projecting a world and perceiving it simultaneously.  Failing to fathom this possibility, Oedipa believes that instead of leading to the unveiling of arcane mysteries, her search has led her only to greater randomness and the verge of breakdown.

      In terms of contemporary theory, Frank Kermode in good Derridian logic explains that each of Oedipa's disclosures is simply a new signifier in search of a signified that multiplies itself into more signifiers,[6] an endless chain that results in her information glut.  Opposing this exitless labyrinth is Oedipa's demand for unassailable answers, marking her a Modernist, perhaps even a New Critic, in search of presence, unity, and closure in the postmodern world of Kinneret, San Narciso, America itself.  From one vantage point, her search consists simply of aimless play that only leads to exhaustion; however, the novel's ending surprisingly satisfies both Kermode's post-structuralist reading as well as Oedipa's modernist desire for closure.

This dual vision of Pynchon’s is in evidence everywhere, as Emory Bortz's discussion of the Scurvhamites demonstrates:  "Nothing for a Scurvhamite ever happened by accident . . . But one part of it, 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."[7]  Bortz's explanation of Schrvhamism conveys not only the weird caprice of Calvinism, it also exemplifies Pynchon's duality found at every moment of Lot 49 in its ideas, symbols, and characters: the muted post-horn suggesting both sound and silence, the swastika Vedic spirituality and Nazi evil, the transistor chip human communication as well as the hopes and abuses of modern technology.[8]  Among the novel's characters, we find this duality in the originator of Oedipa's investigation, Hernando Joaquin de Tristero y Calavera, who is "perhaps a madman, perhaps an honest rebel, according to some only a con artist" (159); in Mucho Maas, a morally-sensitive used car salesman who at KCUF lasciviously pursues young maidens; in Inverarity a hawker of military hardware and filtered cigarettes made from human bones who sets Oedipa on her spiritual journey; and in John Nefastis the inventor of a perpetual motion machine who enjoys sex to the chaos of the evening news.  Metzger, a sometime actor sometime attorney, expounds on the contradictory nature of human behavior in his elucidation of role-playing and "mirror-image theory" (162):

A lawyer in a courtroom in front of any jury, becomes an actor right?  Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor.  Me, I'm a former actor who becomes a lawyer.  They've done the pilot film of a TV series, in fact, based loosely on my career starring my friend Manny Di Presso, a one-time lawyer who quit his firm to become an actor.  Who in this pilot plays me, an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor (33).  

More than the two sides of the same coin, objects, ideas, and people are not clearly distinguished as things and their antithesis, rather in Pynchon's universe anything can and usually does contain multiple meanings or possibilities.  This is the nature of subjectivity.  Particle physics explains this phenomenon as "complimentarity" in the question, when is it possible to distinguish between a particle and a wave?[9]  The answer is when the observer chooses, when the observer decides s/he is looking at a wave rather than a particle or vice versa.[10]  Before then the particle/wave phenomenon resides in a state of potentia, perfectly content to be both particle and wave at the same time, just as a wave on the ocean is simultaneously limited, individual wave and vast, homogenous water.  Similarly, Oedipa coexists as housewife and ingenuous, young-Republican on the one hand, and as spiritual seeker and incisive, liberal-hearted socialist on the other. 

As readers, we may tend to believe that the one condition supersedes the other, but the novel clearly indicates an overlapping.  Metzger thinks of Oedipa as the latter even as she continues to think of herself as the former.  Katherine Hayles shows that this metaphorical overlapping in the novel is pervasive.  She gives the examples of Narcissus and Echo who convey Oedipa's ever vacillating consciousness: she is "on the one hand, being trapped like Narcissus in a solipsistic world that contains only the self and its reflection; on the other, dissipating outward like Echo until there is nothing left of the self."[11] 

      The need to read Crying of Lot 49 with Pynchon's dual vision is at no time more critical than at the novel's very end.  Finding that her pursuit of Trystero leads only to continuous loss, Oedipa is on the verge of giving over her quest until Genghis Cohen informs her a Trystero agent will bid on a lot of Trystero postal "forgeries," lot 49 of the Inverarity auction.  With "nothing more to lose," to bring her quest to finality, Oedipa attends the philatelist auction to confront "her enemy, her proof" (183).  Against overwhelming evidence that her pursuit is a mirage, Oedipa's decision to continue on strikes some as serendipitous, but as Don Delillo's Jack Gladney says, "' The nonbelievers need the believers.  They are desperate to have someone believe'" (Delillo 318).  In Oedipa's case, she can no longer not believe; she has reached a crossroads when acceptance of the America of her pre-quest is no longer viable.  Hence, she proceeds to the auction where "men in black mohair . . . [with] pale, cruel, faces" lock the doors. 

Are these men, whose faces may look cruel only to Oedipa, locking the public out or those in attendance in?  As readers we cannot say, but in Oedipa's mind their locking of the doors is the preface to that closure she has for weeks been seeking.  She sees in this moment the unveiling of her fate as one of the two great mysteries: revelation or death.  The Trystero, an underground communications system, a metaphor for a quantum level of intelligence that lies beyond the surface and beyond the reach of the ignorant insensitive world, will finally reveal itself to Oedipa. And because she can no longer continue in her ordinary world, Oedipa may join Trystero, or to protect its secrecy and maintain its existence Trystero may destroy her.  For Oedipa, these are the only two options, but for Kermode and the post-structuralists, another option is that the auction will end as inconclusively as everything else in the novel, as inconclusive as Oedipa's encounter with Maxwell's Demon, which neither proves nor disproves that she is a sensitive. 

From one viewpoint, Pynchon's ending ideally satisfies the ends of open-ended post-structuralism.  Oedipa may believe that all that is left to prove her circumscribed theories is for the last shoe to drop, for the Trystero agent to reveal him or herself, but that shoe will never drop.  The inconclusive ending, no matter how pregnant, seemingly validates a corresponding irresolution existing at every point of the novel, and in Pynchon's world this is a given.  This open-endedness, moreover, can be understood in two distinct ways.  The first is that the world is meaningless so that closure is impossible; the second is that Oedipa misunderstands her quest as aiming towards a specific space/time goal, when actually her journey of self-discovery is a process.  The self she doggedly pursues but never arrests is actually eternally dynamic rather than temporally static. 

The other possibility is that Pynchon is no more exclusively postmodern than he is exclusively modern, that he can no more be limited to unlimited variance than unified singularity.  All possibilities exist in his fiction; therefore, evidence for a unified, modernist reading simultaneously exists along side its unclosed postmodern counterpart.  With this in mind it is possible to read the indecisive ending not as the novel's final statement at all, but as an after thought, as a false ending that just happens to occupy the book's final position.  The real conclusion it can be argued actually takes place in Oedipa's journey to San Francisco.

Oedipa makes the journey north to trace the origin of the Trystero in The Courier's Tragedy and also to test her sensitivity against Maxwell's Demon.  Neither experience brings Oedipa the satisfaction she desires.  Her bibliographic search turns up only a Quarto edition and a variation of the line "Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero" (102), and her encounter with Nefastis perpetual motion machine leaves her only with the feeling that the picture of Clerk Maxwell might have registered a slight "retinal twitch" (107), not enough clear data to confirm communication.  The reason for Oedipa's apparent failures is that she actually succeeds according to certain criteria but desires confirmation according to another.  It is not enough for her that the Trystero exists somewhere in print; it must be substantiated again and again.  And when she first considers her exchange with Maxwell, she is much more assured: "It seemed, behind the beard, he'd begun, even so faintly to smile.  Something in his eyes certainly had changed . . . " (107).  In spite of the qualification "seemed," there is resolution in the adverb "certainly." At the beginning of the experiment, Oedipa operates with certainty in line with Nefastis' instructions:  "At some deep psychic level he must get through.  The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies and feed back something like the same quantity of information.  To keep it all cycling" (105).  The exchange between the sensitive and the Demon must take place on a "deep psychic level"; this is what Oedipa constantly forgets when she tries rationally to explain the cryptic events she encounters.  On the one hand, her intuition tells her that Trystero exists, that Maxwell's Demon has communicated with her, but then the voice of reason immediately counteracts her irrational, intuitive conclusions.

In spite of her doubts, Oedipa sees in San Francisco her first muted post horn within an hour of leaving Nefastis, and for the rest of the night she will find them everywhere she goes: in the window of a Chinese herbalist, on the sidewalk in an apparent children's game, on a bulletin board in a Laundromat, in the breath induced mist of a bus window, in a gambler's tally book, in a latrine as part of an AC-DC advertisement.  Correspondingly, she hears children jumping rope to "Tristoe, Tristoe," meets a former acquaintance of Inverarity's at a greasy spoon, sees the acronym DEATH—Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn—on the back of a bus seat, and over hears a woman admonishing her departing son, "Write by WASTE" (117-123).  The continuous repetition of the post horn and the allusions to Trystero or WASTE should be enough to convince Oedipa of their existence, but each occurrence is associated with either children or the dispossessed, never with anything or anyone socially acceptable such as the federal government, the AMA, or corporate America, the very institutions that Trystero attempts to circumvent or undermine.

As significant as the ubiquitous post horn is the protective aura that insulates Oedipa's Jungian night journey: At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her.  The city was hers, . . . she had safe-passage tonight . . . Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did.  (117-118) The connection between Oedipa's "safe passage" and the repetition of the post horn is critical.  Taken together they compose the benign qualities not of coincidence but of meaningful correlation. 

As the novel winds down, Oedipa becomes increasingly disturbed as the connectedness of things begins to proliferate, begins to threaten and overwhelm her and therefore become worthless, but on her night in San Francisco along with the repetition of post horn and its correlative events, Oedipa is enveloped in a sanguine protectiveness, an element that critics usually fail to recognize.  The scientific counterpart to this coherent, protective sheath is correlation that increases at deeper levels of creation and at the deepest level, in the vacuum state, becomes infinite correlation[12] where the entropy of the second law of thermodynamics is completely supplanted by the infinite order of the third law of thermodynamics.  Infinite correlation means that the correlation range is extended to infinity, that any impulse immediately affects everywhere else. 

Thomas Schaub says, "The Crying of Lot 49 is a book about loss, about the tragedy of what happens to the moment in the stream of time."[13]  This point is as true for Lot 49 as is it is for T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, but like Eliot's poem not all of the novel's action takes place in the stream of time, much of it takes place in "moments of being" when time is suspended.  In physics, the distinctions between time and space, between subject and object, between consciousness and matter blur at subtler levels of creation.  Approaching the vacuum state, the least active yet densest state of existence, from the direction of gross, material existence, consciousness becomes more orderly less materially bound at every level, and events experienced at such levels become increasingly more correlated.  Oedipa's thinking, away from the clotting influence of Kinneret and San Narciso, is thus freed enough from the limiting influences of solid, objective consciousness to "see" things more sharply, in a more correlative way.  Infinite correlation is a byproduct of Einstein's vision of a unified field:

All the components of the unified field are correlated in balanced coexistence with the unmanifest structure of the field itself.  There is thus a perfect interrelatedness, or coordination, or communication, among all the components in a system that is infinite and unbounded, beyond the boundaries of space and time.[14]

The import of infinite correlation and a unified field to Crying of Lot 49 cannot be over emphasized.  Not only does it scientifically validate Oedipa's sense of increasing interconnectedness, it also explains the dichotomy between her two sets of experiences: those that seem like profound revelations and those that seem mere happenstance or fantasy.  In physics, creation is layered; the material, the atomic, the sub-atomic, the molecular, and eventually the unified field of perfect order and interconnectedness, each is materially and structurally different as is reality at each level.  Correlation increases at deeper levels of existence where time/space distinctions dissipate, where individuality decreases and universality increases.  In the field of ordinary awareness, in the field of greatest relativity where differences dominate, there is a tendency towards disconnectedness, where entropy increases with the passage of time; and it is when Oedipa's thinking is in the grip of this field that her doubt towards Trystero increases.  At other times, however, when Oedipa's awareness is more coherent, less bound by temporality, less shaped by the restricted consciousness of others, as in San Francisco, the same information or the same kinds of events have a clarity, unity, and profundity not ordinarily available.  And it is the realness of these experiences, these moments of certainty—conveyed by the narrator who says, "Yet She knew, . . . That it was all true," and that the Trystero or the inner life it symbolizes might have been accessed "through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she'd looked" (179)—that keep Oedipa from ever renouncing her quest even when things are bleakest.

The culmination of Oedipa's night in San Francisco significantly takes place at dawn.  Walking past a rooming house she sees an old man sitting on the stairs in an open doorway.  The man is an alcoholic presumably on the last day of his life, a sailor, an Odysseus whose long odyssey has come to an end.  Like all of Pynchon's marginalized citizenry who communicate through the WASTE system, the old sailor bears the mark of the post horn, appropriately enough a tattoo on his hand.  Transformed by her portentous night, Oedipa greets the man with the simplest and most poignant words of the novel:  "Can I help?" (125) More than compassion, Oedipa is overcome by a need to touch this ancient mariner, to take him in her arms, and in an image of the Pietà or Mother Teressa she "actually held him" (126).  This is the novel's apotheosis when the distance between the skid row dipsomaniac and the suburban housewife disappears.  It is at this moment that Oedipa fulfills her spiritual journey, escapes from her self erected tower never to return.  At this moment when she selflessly reaches out to embrace the deep suffering of another human being in her a terrible beauty is born.  It is a selfless act that allows her to rediscover her genuine Self free from narcissistic absorption and technological detachment.

What follows this beatific moment is not the inexorable march towards the novel's dénouement, but rather the loss and self-doubt that will follow a spiritual experience that cannot be sustained.  Mucho, Hilarious, Metzger, Driblette, all are lost to Oedipa because her own prior life has been lost—sloughed off—in her transformation.  Since she is no longer who she was, they can no longer be to her what they were.  Her fears and deep sense of doubt, moreover, is the result not of a lack of communication but of a forgetting.  In her experience in San Francisco "she was meant to remember" (118) a more sanctified life beyond the inanities of Southern California and America, but back in narcissistic San Narciso she returns to her old field of egoism; a paradigm that no longer fits her.  Now at odds with the hollow environment that surrounds her, she suffers.  Returning to this literal world she forgets what she had learned on the morning after her night of post horns.  Through her pursuit of Trystero she had found a more authentic Oedipa and a more authentic America, and it mattered little then if Trystero existed or was an illusion, for in either case it provided the means for her Self-revelation.[15]  But mistaking the goal (Self-knowledge) for the path (unweaving her dark mystery), Oedipa at the end reverts to her need for a tangible identification with Trystero.  This is a regression. What she really needs is not confirmation that Trystero, the ultimate transcendental signified exists, but rather to relive once more her empathetic moment, the sublime experience of "the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night" (118).