Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research

University of Sousse

Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Sousse

English Department

Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as a Narcissistic Narrative

A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Masters in Literature

Prepared by: Rabeb Ben Hnia

Supervised by: Professor NessimaTarchouna

Academic Year: 2012-2013

Table of Contents

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………….1

First Chapter:

Theoretical framework: Towards a theory of narrative narcissism in literature

I. Contextualizing metafictional narcissism…………………………………..………...5

II. Towards a poetics of narcissistic literature: the Metafictional Paradox…..…..……..17

III. Narcissistic narrative: the introduction of the typology………………..…………….21

Second Chapter:

Strands of overt and covert diegetic narcissism in The Crying of Lot 49…………………..27

I. The parodic double-coding of Lot 49…………………………………………………29

1. Product and Process: Narcissistic takedown of Realism …………………….29

2. The lawlessness of genre: subverting the structuralist poetics………………..36

a. The detective genre …………………………………………………..37

b. The fantastic …………………………………………….……………41

3. Historiographic metafiction: from elitism to eclecticism ……..……………...47

II. The Narcissistic Anxiety of ‘non-influence’ …….………………….………………..56

III. The mise en abymic redoubling of Lot 49…………………………..………………...60

1. Visual redoubling in “Borolando el Manto Varo” ………..……………….…61

2. Televisual reduplication in Cashiered ………………….……………………63

3. The Theatre and its double: The Courier’s Tragedy …..……………………..65

Third Chapter

Strands of covert and overt linguistic narcissism

I. Overt linguistic narcissism in Lot 49…………………………………………………71

1. The Linguistic Demon ……………………………...………………………..71

2. The dysfunction of communication in Lot 49 ………………………………77

a. Indirect communication/ Telecommunication ………………………78

b. Direct communication ………………………………………….……84

II. The “Crying” for Silence: …………………………………………………….……..93

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….109

Acknowledgement

I dedicate this M.A thesis to anyone who has made its commencement and

completion possible, even with a smile .

I am deeply indebted to all my MA teachers who helped me sharpen my critical

standpoint and construct a self-confident and inquiring personality. They basically taught me

“how” to learn effectively instead of “what” to learn exclusively and this has certainly made all

the difference in my training. They have similarly armed me with a devotedly enthusiastic,

critical and challenging spirit that facilitated my entrance into the exhaustingly exotic area of

scientific research. To my supervisor and dear teacher professor Tarchouna, I feel most

obliged. Her valuable presence, pertinent feedback, ruminative silences, and even looks and

smiles were helpful guidance to me throughout my years of study and during my academic

research.

My gratitude goes also to all my first and second year MA classmates with whom I

savored the beauty and pain of Masters Studies. I am so grateful to Haifa Fairsy whose

kindness and benevolence has effectively reached me despite the long distance. To my best

friend and soulmate Fadwa: you added much zest to my experience…

I want to extend my thanks to all the members of my family and especially to my

mother Samira and my father Ayadi wishing that the defense day will answer all their

previous incessant questions. Yes I have gone through all that tiring work just to be here

today and to defend my own research.

To Mohamed Ali: Your precious presence in my life, continuous support, and extreme

devotion have certainly alleviated my occasional distress and lessened my incremental strain.

My debt to you is beyond words…

To koussay because your silence speaks more than any words in this world and

because you filled my heart with hope, vigor, and innocence!

Figure 1: The front cover of Linda Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narrative:

the Metafictional Paradox, designed by David Antscherl.

Figure 2: Remedios Varo’s painting: “Borolando el Manto

Terrestre” (Embroidering the Earth's Mantle), 1961.

INTRODUCTION

The course of literary history and criticism has been altered in accordance to the

incessant shifts in the nature of human thought and philosophical insights. The numerous

turns in the determination of the art-life relationship is the major premise behind these

changes of paradigms. This relation evolved gradually from a pure Aristotelian imitative

relation, to a representation of a universal monolithic truth, then to aestheticism and

separateness, and finally to mutual constructiveness. In fact, the art-life connection determines

the different strategies of writing and theorizing in the arts in general and in literature in

particular. With the advent of poststructuralist thought and the contemporary skeptical view

towards fixed life structures and towards language as a transparent medium of reality

representation, contemporary approaches have been primarily based on the decentralization of

the telos and the Western logocentrism, the playfulness of meaning, the view of language as

self-reflexive rather than representational of truth, and the deconstruction of all forms of

systematization. Henceforth, representation, reality, presence and mimesis have become some

of the preliminary notions to which poststructuralist and postmodernist thought works hard to

subvert through the introduction of self-referentiality, relativism of reality, the metaphysics of

absence, and the open-endedness of signification as the backbone of their agenda. One form

of writing which foregrounds an intense awareness of such an alteration of paradigms and

problematizition of ontological status is narcissistic narrative or metafiction. This kind of texts

is aware of itself as narrative or artifice, and of its functioning and its mechanisms of

construction, of its past conventions and its mutation, and of the contentious processes of

production and reception of fiction. The metafictional text follows critically and self-

consciously the tracks of the overall history of literary composition and criticism and of its

own metamorphoses from the past till the present moment taking as its main challenge and

aim the exercise of self-exposition, self-criticism and self-evaluation.

The emergence of literary narcissism is due to an incremental need for fiction to

reconsider its paradigms and to identify its stand in regard to the numerous suspect literary

concepts such as reality, language, and representation. In Narcissistic Narrative: the

Metafictional Paradox1, Linda Hutcheon explains that “the drive toward self-reflexivity is a

three-step process, as a new need, first to create fictions, then to admit their fictiveness, and

then to examine critically such impulses” (19). The insatiable rising of literary theories

starting from the 1960s has, in its turn, informed the theory-consciousness of most of the

literature of the time. Hence, this period has marked a substantial phase in fiction writing and

criticism. The Crying of Lot 492, written by the American novelist Thomas Pynchon and

published in 1966, sketches the ascending need for the literary text to uncover its identity in

full and to direct the criticism to its depths. It is of prime concern at this introductory stage of

the dissertation to provide a brief account of the text under study.

Lot 49 revolves around an American housewife named Oedipa Maas who is set in the

quest of executing a will left by her erstwhile boyfriend Pierce Inverarity -a California real

estate mogul. As it is her first experience as an executor, Oedipa has accorded to herself the

mission of amassing clues and seeking help from different persons starting from her lawyer

Roseman, to Pierce’s lawyer Metzger, to her psychotherapist Dr. Hilarious, then to a number

of other persons that she has never met before (the Paranoids: Miles, Dean, Serge and their

girls, Mike Fallopian, Manny Di Presso, Randolph Driblette, Stanley Koteks, John Nefastis,

Genghis Cohen, an Inamorati member, Mr. Toth, Emorty Bortz, Winthrop Tremaine, Jesus

Arrabal, Helga Blamm…). Once her objective is identified, Oedipa launches herself into the

quest of sorting out Inverarity’s estate. Eventually, it has never occurred to her that she has

only left San Narciso -her hometown- to find out that an ambiguous mystery is awaiting her

and that her quest is going to be neither straightforward nor painless. The mystery is, in fact,

enshrined in Inverarity’s stamp collection which introduces her to a clandestine mail system 1 Henceforth referred to as Narcissistic

2 Henceforth referred to as Lot 49

and which will be sold after in an auction under the label of “Lot 49”. During her execution of

the will, Oedipa travels from one place to another, meets a tremendous number of people, and

collects various disconnected clues, which lead her towards further ambiguity and endless

questioning. She assigns to herself the task of deciphering the truth lying behind a secret mail

system known as the Trystero related to a W.A.S.T.E. networking. Yet, the more clues and

signs Oedipa manages to assemble, the more puzzled she turns out to be, since these clues

keep leading her to other clues in an endless way revealing nothing but more ambiguity and

misdirection. After undergoing an extremely long baffling questing journey, Oedipa ends up

sitting in an auction room awaiting the lot to be cried by Loren Passerine, the finest auctioneer

in the West, with the mystery unresolved and the bewilderment heightened.

This dissertation probes an in-depth analysis of the novel from the lens of narrative

self-consciousness, in an attempt at exposing the mystery of its novelistic structure and at

questioning the art-life-relation. It aspires to determine to what extent is Lot 49 narcissistic or,

in other words, to what extent does the novel expose and thematize its own mechanisms of

meaning-construction. It will, therefore proceed according to a three-fold structure.

The first chapter serves as a theoretical background to the study offering most of the

key concepts and links between the various theoretical frames employed in the analysis. It

starts by contextualizing novelistic narcissism amid the panorama of emerging critical

theories. It then determines the main concern and strategies of actions of textual narcissism

and ends by eliciting the technical terms and taxonomies of the theory. Accordingly, the first

chapter is going to be the guiding thread as well as the point of reference for the subsequent

application of textual metafiction in Lot 49.

The second chapter focuses on the overt and covert strands of narcissism in the

diegesis. It relies basically on Hutcheon’s study of poetics, politics, and historiographic

metafiction of postmodernist texts. It reveals the narrative’s own consciousness and

exposition of the narrative techniques and narration processes. It shows how narration takes

over the narrated “transforming the process of writing to the subject of writing” (McCaffrey

15).

The third chapter dwells on the overt and covert traits of linguistic narcissism. It

probes the thematization of language and communication in the novel using a literary

pragmatic perspective. It simultaneously explores the playfulness of the structure of the text

and the aporia of regress in its systems of signification. It ascends accordingly to sketch the

postmodernist move toward a literature of silence.

One of the major premises of this dissertation is the blending of literary pragmatics,

postmodernism, and poststructuralism in the theoretical frame and analysis. Being theory-

conscious, the text lends itself perfectly to such a combinatory theoretical study. In fact, it

informs the theoretical ground itself through performing a participatory role in the creation of

a new poetics. It is, henceforth, a “theory-in-practice text”. Patricia Waugh elaborates on this

view in Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction asserting that “all

writing that is metafictional can be said to ‘explore a theory of fiction through the practice of

writing fiction’” (2, my emphasis). This theoretical frame informs this dissertation guiding it

towards an in-depth view of the narrative and linguistic structure of Lot 49 and helping it to

uncover its labyrinthine fabric and to determine its paradoxical ontological status.

First Chapter:

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: Towards a

Theory of Narrative Narcissism in Literature

Basic to this study of novelistic self-consciousness is the awareness that narrative

narcissism is neither a literary genre nor a thematic concern. It is a theoretical project that lies

under the postmodernist widespread metafictional corpus. Being primarily postmodernist in

its grounding and aspiration, narcissistic narrative bears within it most of the postmodernist’s

issues and paradoxes. Through the lens of postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches, this

chapter will attempt to perform a theoretical contextualization of metafictional narcissism at a

first stage, then a determination of its poetics and taxonomies.

I. Contextualizing Metafictional Narcissism:

The label “Narcissistic narrative” was first suggested by the postmodern Canadian

literary theorist Linda Hutcheon in her book Narcissistic in1980, to designate a type of fiction

that “includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity” (11).

Soon after, the use of such a label has become more common among other critics and theorists

like Robert Scholes, Lucien Dällenbach, and Patricia Waugh3. In her study of textual

narcissism, Hutcheon starts from the assertion that the term has to be approached in a neutral

way as devoid of any pejorative or psychological connotation (1). Narcissism, here, is a

figurative adjective that is “rather descriptive and suggestive as the ironic allegorical reading

of the Narcissus myth”, and is allotted to the work itself and not to the author (1). It is,

thereby, the fictional work which is exposed to its linguistic and diegetic double. While

narcissism is mainly a form of writing not restrictive to one particular period or literary genre,

it is worth noting that such a strategy has become rampant in the 1960s in Europe and the

United States, a period that witnessed the swift growth of numerous literary theoretical

discourses and the heyday of postmodernism (4). “In the criticism of the 70s the term

‘postmodernism’ began to appear to refer to contemporary self-conscious texts”, equating

3 While Robert Scholes has performed a thorough study on metafiction labeling it an “anti-narrative” or “stillborn literature”, Lucien Dällenbach has invested heavily on the study of the “mise en abyme” as a literary device basic to doubling the narrative structure. In 1984, Patricia Waugh published her meticulous study on the theory and practice of metafiction.

hence its theoretical approach and strategies with the metafictional narcissistic phenomenon ,

rendering narcissism a prime determining feature of most postmodernist fiction. It is

noteworthy that postmodernist texts are not altogether metafictional, nor do all metafictional

writings restrictively range under the postmodernist corpus. Narcissism has, in fact, surfaced

from the very rise of the novel tradition, through the use of authorial intrusions in the

narrative level and direct allusion to the reader, with works such as Don Quixote, Tristram

Shandy, and Vanity Fair (44). As it is outlined by the twisting nature of critical orientations,

“critical theories may influence art, but in this case the literary tradition of novelistic

development seems the more likely general force” (30). In a nutshell, its practice has long

preceded the theory though its use was ways less important and explicit than it actually is in

the contemporary context.

One of the major strategies of action of postmodernist narcissism is its critique of

realism. Laconically, the realistic novel reached its apogee in the eighteenth century and is

said to be the offspring of the Age of Reason that is the age of logic, progress, and

universalism as underlined in Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism4 (26). One of the major

premises of realistic literature is the mimetic view of art which accords to the latter the quality

of being “representational” of a pre-established transcendental truth (Abrams 7-8). Such a

view has its own repercussions in the definition of art, literary criticism, and reality in general.

The work of art acquires its importance from its being an aesthetic product originated by an

artist who takes upon his shoulder the exercise of representing “reality as it is”, or better say

“a slice of life” (McCaffrey 12). Subsequently, to write in the traditional realist vein is to

uphold criteria as “the order of the narrative, chronological plots, continuous narratives

relayed by omniscient narrators, [and] closed endings” (Barry 82). This paradigm has allotted

cardinal substantiality to the artist who is treated as the meaning-initiator and truth-mediator.

4 Henceforth referred to as Poetics

The artist becomes, in fact, the center who holds all the threads leading to the ultimate

meaning of the novel. According to this view, “literature turns out to be an item for

consumption” in which the sole role allotted to the reader is the passive reception of a “hidden

meaning” (Iser 4).

Realism has, in fact, gone beyond being a defining feature of a particular literary genre

or movement or a historical period to becoming a characteristic mode of thought governing or

better say monopolizing Western literary discourses until the end of the nineteenth century

(Hutcheon, Narcissistic 18). It advocates the mimetic view of art as representational of life

and universal truth, of reality as pre-existing language, and of language as transparently

mirroring the world (Abrams 33). This reductive view of language and its functions is the

central tenet behind the humanistic universalizing insight into literature as being “realistic”

and “referential”: realistic in the sense that it represents a transcendental reality as it is, and

referential in the sense that the words it uses have actual referents as objects in the real world

that is they refer to an external heterocosm transforming fiction to a mirror that reflects the

outer world (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 10). Based on conventional premises like verisimilitude5,

plausibility, authorial authenticity and on beliefs in the objectivity and truthfulness of the

historical discourse or “the chastity of history” as Fustel Coutages describes it, realist fiction

focuses mainly on the work of art as a product that works faithfully to aesthetically reproduce

an extraneous universal and orthodox reality (qtd. in Barthes, “The Discourse of History6” 3).

Its claims to the universality of truth and values, or what Barthes calls “the germ of the

5 Verisimilitude is “an attempt to satisfy even the rational, skeptical reader that the events and characters portrayed is very possible. ... Far from being escapist and unreal, the novel was uniquely capable of revealing the truth of contemporary life in society. The adoption of this role led to detailed reportage of the physical minutiae of everyday life -clothes, furniture, food, etc. - the cataloguing of people into social types or species and radical analyses of the economic basis of society. The virtues pursued were accuracy and completeness of description” (Childs and Fowler 198-9).

6 Henceforth referred to as “Discourse”

universal” and John-François Lyotard classifies under the category of “metanarratives” or

“grand narrative”, are put under ruminative scrutiny (34). The attack on such foundationalist

and essentialist ideas is an attack on the whole ethos of the Enlightenment humanistic

philosophy which was the leading force behind rooting such stances in literary criticism until

the mid-nineteenth century (35). Postmodernism is to be considered as one of the contesters of

such a view. It is an “incredulity toward metanarratives” working to subvert them and

highlighting that what realism has always presented is not reality but only its “guise or

illusion” since it overtly “masks art’s own conventionality” (Lyotard xxiv). Modern

philosophical thinking has, in fact, paved the way for such findings through initiating the

questioning of notions of truth, facts, and representation. For instance, Frederick Nietzsche’s

assertion that “there are no facts, only interpretations”, constitutes a battle cry that has marked

the shifting trajectory of philosophical and literary paradigms and the move towards a more

relativistic view of reality and universals.

The critical return to the past shows the metafictional critique of the classical view of

reality, especially the claims to objectivity, foundationalism, teleology, and transcendentalism

(Lyotard 37). “On the level of discourse,” as Roland Barthes argues for, “objectivity appears

as a form of imaginary projection, the product of the referential illusion” and “the ‘real’ is

never more than an unformulated signified, sheltering behind the apparently all-powerful

referent” creating no more than a “realistic effect” (“Discourse” 6). Deconstructive in intent

and critical in impulse, metafictional narcissistic texts veer towards a provisional view of

realities, a skeptical attitude towards language, a focus on the processes of literary production

and reception rather than on the final aesthetic product. Similarly, it relies upon the mechanics

of signification rather than those of imitation, and disbelieves the essentialist claims to

orthodox truth, universal values, and factual knowledge (Hutcheon, Poetics 89). The

deconstruction of the kernel of realism is further complicated by the problematic relation of

postmodernism to modernism.

The relation of postmodernism to modernism has always been contentious and

constantly questioned. Whether it is one of complicity or disjunction, it is ostensible that most

postmodernist theorists and artists7 relate their new perspectives to discussions and critique of

modernism. Chiefly, a distinction has to be drawn between the terms “modernity and

postmodernity” as denoting a historical period and “modernism and postmodernism” as

describing movements and artifacts in the cultural field (Best and Kellner 5). In this

dissertation and as the argument is going to further outline, postmodernism is considered as

both an extension of and a reaction to modernism.

As far as the literary scope is concerned, modernism is often identified with the works

of T.S. Eliot; Ezra Pound; and Ernest Hemingway in America, Gertrude Stein; D.H Lawrence;

and Virginia Woolf in England, and Mallarmé; Marcel Proust; and André Gide in France. It

carried an “aestheticized conception” of art that came to be known after as “art for art’s sake”

(Sim 135). The “fetishizing” of art and the hierarchical modernist distinction between “high

art” and “popular art” results in the elevation and “canonization” of some works over others

(136). This orchestrates the fact that modernism is elitist to the point that it illustrates “the

futility of all arts except the highest” (Ruland 256). This process of canonization is one of

selection and exclusion since it downgrades certain works and upgrades others. The vexing

questions interpolated by postmodernist theorist and writers in this context are mainly: who

sets the canon? Who possesses the authority to determine what is proper and what is

inappropriate? And does everyone have the same definition of aesthetic value? All these

debatable inquiries seem to agree upon the viewpoint that the canon is “exclusive and

hierarchical; artificially constructed by choices made by human agency [critics and writers]”

7 Some of these theorists are Jean-François Lyotard, Frederick Jameson, Jürgen Habermas, Ihab Hassan, Susan Sontag, Harry Levin, Irving Howe, Leslie Fielder (Best and Kellner)

(Selden and Widdowson 12). To this canonizing tendency, metafictional postmodernism

responds by the investigation and re-evaluation of popular culture so that “[t]he

postmodernism of the 1960s [is] therefore in part a populist attack on the elitism of

modernism” (Sim 147). It remains worth noting, though, that the merging of “high and pop”

is not a call for the “end of standards”, but rather a call for “rigorous… contingent standards”

(157). The violation of this boundary, in fact, refutes any attempt at stratifying literature and

culture in general, and aspires to a neutral view that avoids value judgment and downgrading.

Postmodernist metafiction searches a hierarchy-less space where the terms high and pop

culture “mean nothing more than culture liked by many people” (157, emphasis in the

original).

In addition, modernist poetics revolves around the self-sufficiency of the work of art,

and the possibility of rendering subjectivity and consciousness through the experimentation

with the novel writing strategies such as the stream-of-consciousness technique8,

fragmentation, and multiple focalizations9 (Genette, Narrative Discourse 266). Brian McHale

sums up the preceding standpoints as follows: “modernism foregrounds themes such as the

accessibility and circulation of knowledge and its limits through the multiplication and

juxtaposition of dissimilar perspectives, the focalization of all evidence through a single

‘center of consciousness’, and the use of structure as a compensation for the disordered

subjectivity” (Postmodernist Fiction10 9). Yet postmodernism diverges from modernism by

virtue of its “dominant” that is what Roman Jakobson defines as “the focusing component of a

8 The stream-of-consciousness is “a technique which seeks to record the flow of impressions passing through a character’s mind. The best-known English exponents are Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce” (Childs and Fowler 224).

9 Genette uses the term focalization “to avoid the too specifically visual connotations of the terms vision, field, and point of view. [He] take[s] up here the slightly more abstract term focalization which corresponds, besides, to Brooks and Warren's expression, ‘focus of narration’ (Narrative Discourse 189).

10 Henceforth referred to as Postmodernist

work of art” (qtd. in Mchale 9). While the modernist dominant is “epistemological” that is

focusing on “problems of knowing”, the postmodernist dominant is “ontological” and based

on “modes of being” (10, emphasis in the original). Related to such ontological issues are

postmodernist questions which bear “either on the ontology of the literary text itself or the

ontology of the world which it projects, for instance: what is the mode of existence of a text,

and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?” (10). However, this

claim does not deny postmodernist occasional raising of epistemological queries, yet these

inquiries remain backgrounded at the expense of ontological matters which are highly

foregrounded. Patricia Waugh asserts that the literary paradigm swings from modernist

“writing of consciousness” to postmodernist “consciousness of writing” itself (24). This can

be further clarified as follow: the modernist view of writing as reflective of the subjectivity

and selfhood of the writer is substituted by the postmodernist view of writing as reflective of

its own self. Postmodernism continues in a sense what Jürgen Habermas calls the “incomplete

project of modernism” which initiated the skepticism towards language, universal certainties,

the self-reflexivity of fiction and all forms of arts in general (qtd. in Best and Kellner 248).

Yet, it goes against modernist claims to the self-sufficiency and autonomy of arts,

ahistoricism, apoliticism, elitism, and fixedness of meaning in literature generating a “poetics

of unrest” (Hutcheon, Poetics 42). This unrest stems basically from the “inherent paradoxes of

postmodernism” and its rootedness in “duplicity” and perspectivism (23). There is not a single

unified postmodern theory therein, “rather one is struck by the diversities between theories

often lumped together as ‘postmodern’ and the plurality of postmodern positions” (Best and

Kellner 2). The pluralism of the theories of postmodernism necessitates a meticulous

determination of the theoretical framework to be adopted in this study which is basically a

postmodernist poststructuralist frame of reference.

The relationship of poststructuralism to postmodernism, as the subsequent analysis

will sustain, is one of adjacency and complementation rather than one of discontinuity and

conflict. Poststructuralism is to be considered as a part of an inclusive postmodernist

intellectual terrain. The major premise of these two theoretical projects consists mainly of “a

rejection of many, if not most, of the cultural certainties on which life in the West has been

structured over the last couple of centuries” (Sim VII). Throughout Writing and Difference11,

Jacques Derrida sketches many tenets of the earlier mentioned Western philosophy such as

the “metaphysics of presence”, “teleology”, “logos”, “closure”, “centralization”, “hierarchy”,

“binarism”, and “totality”. Both postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches are

consequently “partners in the same paradigm…together they are seen as exercising a joint

critique of ideas of order and unity in language, art and subjectivity as upending old

hierarchies and rattling political convictions” (Brooker 14). Poststructuralism is

simultaneously a continuation and a critique of structuralism which is based on the theory of

the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and marked by “a move toward systematicity” (Stam

9). Both approaches share as their starting point the Saussurean definition of language as a

system of signs where the sign designates the basic unity of meaning and unifies arbitrarily

the signifier and signified (De Saussure 67). Outlined by de Saussure, the signifier is the

“word image (visual or acoustic)” of the sign while the signified is its mental abstraction (12).

The sign is “arbitrary” and the relation between signifier and signified is regulated “by

conventions” (10). Another prime Saussurean distinction is the one drawn between “langue”

as “the collective system underlying any human signifying practice” and referred to as

“competence”, and “parole” as the “individual actualization of the codes and conventions of

the system” and referred to as “performance” (qtd. in Culler, Structuralist Poetics 6). The

structural object of study is namely the decoding of the different rules and semiotic

combinations in a given system in order to reveal the structure lying beneath, thus prioritizing

11 Henceforth referred to as Writing

competence over performance, or langue over parole (10).

This linguistic model represents the backbone of structuralist analysis or semiotics

which makes its paramount aim the demystification of the “intrinsic grammar” that governs

the operations of any system of signification (12). Such a study has become widely inclusive

referring to any signifying system besides language, for instance the system of clothing as

exemplified by Barthes in Mythologies, the system of myths as scrutinized by Claude-Lévi

Strauss, or the system of narratives as argued for by narratologists such as Gérard Genette and

Tzevtan Todorov. This semiotization of all signifying systems, which run rampant in the mid-

twentieth century, provides a sense of control to its users through offering them “a

methodological key to unlock the various systems that made up th(e) world” (Sim 4). The

major point of divergence between poststructuralism and structuralism lies in their diverse

apprehension of the signifier-signified relationship. While structuralist theories determine it as

a one-to-one relation similar to the back and front sides of a sheet of paper as illustrated by De

Saussure, poststructuralism argues for a more playful field of signification where to each

signifier relates an indefinite number of signifieds set in constant motion and regress (Derrida,

Writing XVİİİ). Language, and by implication, any system of signification are unstable vis-à-

vis the slippery nature of the signified and the playful aspect of signification (354). Since to

each signifier corresponds an indefinite number of signifieds, the possibility of the presence

of one “‘transcendental signified’, that is, a concept independent of language” becomes a

mythical one (xvi). Indeterminacy is therein an inherent feature of meaning which persistently

wavers in a field of free play of signifieds according to the logic of “Différance” (95).

Différance is, in fact, a neologism instigated by Jacques Derrida conveying the divided nature

of the sign and combining both words: “différence” and “deferral”. Signs “differ” in the sense

that they emerge from a system of differences and acquire meaning and value from their

differential relation to the other signs in the same system (370). They simultaneously “defer”

in the sense that they postpone the presence of any final meaning due to the free-floating

nature of signifieds and their operation through an “aporia of regress” rejecting any claim to a

complete fixed meaning or “closure of representation” (316). Therefore, poststructuralism is

directed against the propensity for systemization and toward the “revenge of Parole”

(Hutcheon, Poetics 82). Poststructuralism, as foregrounded in the works of Jacques Derrida

on deconstruction, shows a thoroughgoing distrust to centered, totalizing, and theological

truth, and calls into question the structuralist model of the sign (Derrida, Writing 7). Since

signifiers represent “the material vehicle of the sign”, the written text is, in a first place, “an

ensemble of signifiers”. Its “materiality” should not go unnoticed or downgraded as

structuralists tend to do in their analysis (264). The tendency to “sublimate” the text, that is, to

abstract it through the immediate translation of each signifier into a signified halts the

appreciation of the “body” of the work or of the materiality of the aesthetic object as such

(38). The resistance of this sublimation and the move towards silence instead of words in the

experience of reading literature gives a space for the savoring of the artificiality and

materiality of arts in order to avoid any subsequent mistaken view of art as the vehicle of

Truth (Sontag 1). In fact, the paraphernalia of fiction construction consists of words, material

signs, artifices, and not reality, actual referents or facts. Therefore, deconstruction goes in the

reverse direction to structural semiotization, since it focuses on the artistic performance as

such or the “parole” rather than in the internal overlaying structure subverting the fixed

correspondence of signs to meanings and charting the endless chain of signification,

performing in a way a sort of “desemiotization” of semiotics (Hutcheon, Poetics 82). In this

context Hutcheon opines that:

In the light of the structuralist focus on langue and on the arbitrary but stable

relationship between signifier and signified, postmodernism might be called the

“revenge of parole” (or at least of the relationship between the subject, as

generator of parole, and the act or process of generation). Postmodernism

highlights discourse or “language put into action”. (82)

The “desemiotization” and semiotization are antithetical yet complementary. While

the former assures the acquaintance with the “body” of the work as such that is the

performance through “desublimation”, the latter assures the distancing of oneself from the

performance and his or her launching in the critical activity (Pavis 215). As every discourse

creates its metadiscourse, each semiotization inaugurates its own desemiotization or else each

construction is followed by its deconstruction. Accordingly, the deconstructive practice

implies an ongoing skepticism towards language and reality, a resistance to any claim to a

final meaning or closure of signification, a subversion of previous hierarchies and binary

oppositions, a critical attitude towards the “metaphysics of presence” and the fixedness and

stability of any structure, and a rejection of “Western logocentrism” and “phonocentrism”

(Derrida, Writing 70).

The fundamental role that language plays in altering the approaches to literature is not

to be undermined in this discussion. The pre-Saussurean view of language as a “transparent

medium” that represents a pre-existing universal truth or what Roland Barthes describes as

“language that pretends not to be language, to be uncomplicatedly transparent -a

naturalization of language as a referential medium” (qtd. in Currie 7) has been shaken by the

structuralist reworking of the concept of language as rather “a constitutive part of reality,

deeply implicated in the way the world is constructed as meaningful” (3). Literature does not

represent the world yet “it is only possible for it to represent the discourses of that world”

(Waugh 41). Postmodernism does not, in fact deny the possibility of the existence of reality

yet it makes it as its prior premise the questioning of the identity of reality and its sources

which is never natural or given, yet always humanly constructed (28). Here, the logic of

representation is not totally denied but rather reworked to turn from a referential logic to an

external world to a self-referential one moving inward into the work of art in itself since

“language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique” (Derrida, Writing 358). Each

discourse, accordingly, carries within its bounds its metadiscourse. In other words, “it is not

that representation now dominates or effaces the referent,” as Hutcheon opines, “but rather

that it now self-consciously acknowledges its existence as representation, that is as

interpreting its referent, not as offering direct and immediate access to it” (The Politics of

Postmodernism12 34). The narcissistic text equivocally and unequivocally exposes the

processes of its own construction and its status as artifice and hence it admits the fictionality

of any simple connection between art and life or reality (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 47). Reality is

a human construct, thus a fiction or a narrative; Hans Bertens sums up this crisis of

representation stating that:

If there is a common denominator to all postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in

representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in

the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthetic, epistemological, moral,

or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer

be taken for granted. (qtd. in Heise 965)

The raising awareness of such a crisis has obviously its own effects on the theory and

practice of fictional writing. The evolving trajectory of the linguistic sign has, in its turn, its

own implications on the literary field of theory and criticism. Such a trajectory is traced by

Terry Eagleton who opines “first we had a referent” as suggested by realism, “then we had a

sign” as postulated by structuralism, and “now we just have a signified” announcing the

poststructuralist free-floating approach to the system of signification (qtd. in Brooker 205).

Hence the narcissistic narrative lies under the third category that of the problematization of

signifieds and their slippery nature, and goes beyond the postulations of realism, modernism,

12 Henceforth referred to as Politics

and structuralism veering toward a poetics of relativism, pluralism, and unfixedness.

II. Towards a poetics of narcissistic literature: the metafictional paradox

A major paradox of postmodernism is inherent in the very attempt to define it, for

postmodernism defies all claims to fixed and essential definitions. Postmodernism is rather a

skidding term that rejects all attempts to determine it, so “we need more than a fixed and

fixing definition,” as Hutcheon argues, “we need a ‘poetics’, an open, everchanging

theoretical structure by which to order both our cultural knowledge and our critical

procedures” (Poetics 14). While following its track, postmodernism proves to be the perfect

bearer of self-contradiction at its very core, since it implicitly celebrates its “duplicity” or

“doubleness” and persistently works within the very systems it attempts to subvert (180). For

instance, it is intensely “self-reflective” and “paradoxically historical” incorporating the

distinctive form that Linda Hutcheon names “historiographic metafiction” which puts under

subversive scrutiny both fictive and historical representation. Postmodernist historiographic

metafiction brings to the fore its historical, social, and political grounding alongside its

outright self-refrentiality (92). Metafictionality is, in a nutshell, fiction about fiction or the

awareness of the mandatory co-existence of language and metalanguage. This brings the

Derridean conception that each discourse carries within it its metadiscourse and each

metadiscourse has a meta-metadiscourse ad infinitum since “language bears within itself the

necessity of its own critique” (Writing 358).

Metafiction is defined by Patricia Waugh as “a term given to fictional writing which

self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to

question the relationship between fiction and reality” (3). It is hence related to the idea of

meaning and fiction as “constructs” rather than as having “representable essences” (Currie

15). The term was first introduced in 1960 by William Gass who sought a label for recent

fiction that thematizes its own fictionality (4). This postmodernist metafictional self-

reflexivity is further problematized by its alliance with historical grounding and referencing.

Part of the postmodernist fictional narcissism revolves around the works’ awareness of “the

presence of the past” which it critically rethinks and consciously reworks (Hutcheon, Poetics

12). The knowledge of the past is only textually possible since the past is palpable in the

present through its “traces” like records, documents and texts (81). The past becomes,

consequently, a textualized space that is inscribed in discourse or “semiotized” (97). Its

inscription in discourse implies its being socially and ideologically loaded (112). Therefore,

the “dialogism”13 that characterizes the fictional discourse, as suggested by Mikhail Bakhtin

in his study of the novelistic discourse, challenges any assertion about the objectivity and the

transparency of the historical discourse. As Roland Barthes notes in “Discourse”, the historian

is not so much a “collector of facts” as he is a “collector of signifiers” or a fabulator (147).

History creates a “realistic effect” and not transparent reality, since what it nominates as fact

has no more than a “linguistic existence” in “the shell of signifiers” (148). The historical

discourse is nothing more than “a form of ideological elaboration, an imaginary elaboration”

that depends on the narrative mechanisms of selection, ordering, and plotting in its

construction (147). Brian McHale perceives history and fiction as exchanging places so that

history becomes fictional and fiction becomes “true history” and “the real world seem(s) to

get lost in the shuffle” (Postmodernist 96). Accordingly, fiction and history become

interchangeable and complementary. Once again, essentialism, factuality and truthfulness

prove to be fallacious and hence put under question. Historiography that is the “narration of

what happened”, as Hayden White accounts for it, is a highly problematized process in

13 “Dialogism” is a term suggested by Bakhtin to describe the fictional language, which he sees as “inherently heteroglot”, i.e. formed of “diverse (hetero-), speeches (glossia)”. The language of fiction becomes a form of hetroglossia where “different discourses dialogically encounter”. Each word is thus loaded with different voices and ideologies that stratify it from within. Bakhtin opines consequently that the dialogic process of language constitutes a constant and simultaneous play between “centralizing and decentralizing forces of language” or what he terms as “centripetal” and “centrifugal” forces (Bakhtin 272).

narcissistic narratives which openly acknowledge the past’s “own discursive contingent

identity” (Hutcheon, Poetics 24). Each literary discourse is grounded in a context and

simultaneously uses a metatext to divulge this grounding. Therefore, “even the most self-

conscious of contemporary works do not try to escape, but indeed foreground the historical,

social, ideological contexts in which they existed and continue to exist” (25). Narcissistic

narratives foremost revealed criterion is that it is “art as discourse”, which is intensively

related to the ideological and even the political spheres (35).

Central to this return to the past is the abundant use of parodic strategies. As

correspondingly defined by Hutcheon in the Politics and Poetics, parody is as a form of

“revision or reading of the past that both confirms and subverts the power of the

representation of history” (95), and as “repetition with critical distance that allows ironic

signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity” (26). Parody occupies a twofold

position which imbues postmodernism with duplicity and paradoxes. It lies inside and outside,

“installs and destabilizes”, “uses and abuses”, “mystifies and demystifies”, identifies with and

distances from, foregrounds and backgrounds (23). Postmodern art therein parodies prior

literary conventions by divulging its functioning and operative strategies while opening the

way into new fictional modes of understanding and studying literature (Waugh 65). It has to

be noted, though, that the reprise of the past is not a purposeless or random reprise as opined

by the postmodern theorist Frederick Jameson who treats parody, pastiche, and intertextuality

as value-free and as “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of

random stylistic allusions” (17). This accusation is totally rejected by Hutcheon‘s study of

parody in A Theory of Parody which argues for the seriousness, aestheticism, and

functionality of parodic discourse stating that parody –also known as “ironic quotation,

pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality”- de-doxifies all taken for granted beliefs and

ideologies (22).

Intertextuality highlights the fact that every text is an “intertext”, a hybrid network of

quotations taken from prior texts (Barthes, Image Music Text 160). It ends in a way “the

anxiety of influence” and traces the “non-anxiety” from the “cult of unoriginality” (Bloom,

The Anxiety of Influence xi). The focus on irony in the reprise of the past is characterized by

its “critical distance” and not by “nostalgia” and this particular detail is of a paramount

importance in the differentiation of the postmodernist approach to the past to the prior

approaches (Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern” 6). Irony, here, is situated “at

the edge” between the voiced and the unvoiced; it is “the intentional transmission of both

information and evaluative attitude other than what is explicitly presented” triggering an

interactive relation between the text, the ironist, and the interpreter (Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge

11). The feature acquired by irony in this context is, in a way, reminiscent of Brecht’s epic

theater which seeks to distance the reader in order to raise his critical attitude and to avoid the

identification with the elements of the aesthetic work (Selden and Widdowson 81).

As a miscellaneous site of “dialogic encounter”, postmodernism goes on in its exercise

of mixing and blending contradictory scopes and fusing them into an all-encompassing

dialogic literary paradigm. The blurring boundaries between “popular art and high art”, of the

aesthetic and the theoretical, of “poetics and politics”, of “history and fiction”, of power-

holders and eccentrics, of old and new are distinctive features of narrative narcissism which

heighten its commitment to “duplicity” and “double-coding” (Hutcheon, Poetics 30). It is, in

fact, a patchwork of numerous and contradictory elements, which explain its owing the label

“the literature of unrest” par excellence (42).

Simultaneously, postmodernist texts draw upon any form of signifying practices

operative in a given culture. It incorporates, for instance, the discourse of media, visual arts,

music, cinema, architecture, newspaper, philosophy, literary theory and criticism, sciences,

sociology, psychoanalysis… This “polyphony”, to use Bakhtinian terminology, stresses the

ever-expanding intertextual network that denies any pretension to an original one-centered

discourse and argues for the “interdiscursivity” of the literary discourse (130). Hence,

intertextuality is, as Barthes opines, the indispensable condition of textuality (Image Music

Text 160). It should be noted here that the intertext in literary discourse is not exclusively

taken from the repertoire of literature but could emerge from any given historical, political,

and cultural discourse. In fact, “literature should not be analyzed as a form of expression

which simply sets its own traditions and conventions totally apart from those that structure

non-literary culture” (Waugh 28). The borderlines or the frontiers between discourses are no

longer tenable in a highly discursive literary web. Michel Foucault, who in his theory of

discursive formation sustains the view of discourse- or what he defines as “language in use”-

as a discursive practice, remarks that “the frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the

title, the first lines, and the last full-stop; beyond its internal configuration, and its

autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other

sentences, it is a node within a network” (qtd. in Hutcheon, Poetics 127). The

“interdiscursivity” of narcissistic texts flashes the mounting awareness of their cultural and

ideological inscription and of the impossibility of determining definite lines of separation

between the numerous discourses of a given culture (130). It does not seek in any sort of way

to camouflage these ontological lines as it really endeavors to highlight them. Such a narrative

occupies the borderline through positing itself on the edges of many oppositional poles, never

favoring or prioritizing one to another, nor ceasing to pose endless questions about them. The

narrative self-consciousness alludes to its own perpetual self-questioning and self-evaluation.

It never refrains from posing all kinds of queries about its ontological status aiming not at

clear-cut answers or compromises but rather at exposing its ambivalences and

“problematizing” the nature of all forms of writing and knowledge in general. Hence, one can

refer to the “problematics” of narcissistic narratives rather than to its “poetics” (222).

III. Narcissistic narrative: the introduction of the typology:

Studying narcissistic narratives that is fiction reflecting on its own genesis and

mirroring the strategies of fictional writing and fictive world’s construction entails a

movement inward to the recesses of the work itself. This analysis is chiefly based on Linda

Hutcheon’s study of poetics, politics and narcissism of postmodernist texts. Accordingly,

Hutcheon outlines two levels of metafictional underpinning, one is “diegetic narcissism”

occurring at the level of narration and narrative techniques and the other is “linguistic”

indicating an awareness of the medium used in fiction which is language, and of its power as

well as its limits (Narcissistic 23). In relation to both levels, there are two varieties of

narcissism: “overt and covert modes” (56). Thereby the four main categories of narcissistic

texts are as follows: “overt diegetic narcissism, overt linguistic narcissism, covert diegetic

narcissism, and covert linguistic narcissism” (23). Overt narcissism is palpable diegetically

through the fictive self-awareness of the narrative status as a literary artifice and the laying

bare of its fiction making processes using self-reflective devices such as parody, mise en

abyme and intertextuality (25).

Parody, one of the major literary devices in postmodernist writing, conforms to the

very nature of narcissistic narrative, since it enacts self-reflexivity through the double

movement of “appropriation” and subversion (128 my emphasis). “Parodic art”, as Hutcheon

outlines, “is both a deviation from the norm and includes the norm within itself as

backgrounded material” (50). The dual ontological status of the narrative is pointed out

through parody which works to background a given convention in an attempt to foreground

the “new creation” and the way in which it may be “measured and understood” (Hutcheon,

Theory of Parody 31). New literary conventions evolve in fact from previous ones and

postmodern texts in particular acknowledge such a give-take movement through setting a

dialogue with these conventions and criticizing them in order to aspire to new forms of

literary construction. Henceforth emerges the view of parody as a “prototype of the pivotal

stage in that gradual process of development of literary forms” (35). Hence metafictions

cannot mirror their own mechanisms of construction while ignoring previous literary

productions since their own emergence is due to their dialogic relation with the past in

general. Such a dialogue is given legitimacy through the employment of parody which is

“both a personal act of suppression and an inscription of literary-historical continuity” (35).

This continuity is marked mainly by the use of irony which signals out that this return is not

an innocent “nostalgic return”, yet it is rather triggered by an intensive “critical awareness”

(Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern” 3). Umberto Eco has, for instance, called

this ironic postmodernist twist “the age of lost innocence” where “the postmodern reply to the

modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its

destruction leads to silence, it must be revisited, but with irony, not innocently” (qtd. in Currie

174). Hence, the use of parody reflects a consciousness of the mechanisms of literary

constructions and their evolvement in accordance to each other and never in isolation. It does

not conceal as far as it reveals past conventions in its formation of a new poetics.

Using Genettian terminology to account for the meaning of mise en abyme, it can be

said that the latter device refers to the embeddedness of a “second degree narrative or meta-

diegesis”14 in the “first degree narrative” or diegesis (Narrative Discourse 231). Palpably, this

writing device works on the level of the diegesis. In order to further clarify this concept, it is

substantial to go through Lucien Dällenbach’s thorough study on metafictional texts and what

he calls “its mirrors”. In “Reflexivity and Reading”, Dällenbach defines mise en abyme as “a

doubling which functions as mirror or microcosm of the text” (435). He goes further in

outlining three types of mise en abyme: “simple reduplication, repeated reduplication, and

14 In order to determine the narrative level to which an event relates, it has to be considered that “any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level immediately higher than the level at which the narrating act producing this narrative is placed” ( Genette, Narrative Discourse228).

aporistique doubling” (qtd. in Hutcheon, Narcissistic 54). According to Dällenbach, “simple

reduplication” operates at the level of the storytold or enoncé15 (54). It is a narrative fragment

that replicates the plot of the story that contains it (54). “Repeated reduplication” implies that

the narrative fragment “bears within it another mirroring fragment and so on” ad infinitum

(56). This regress displays that the enoncé or the narrative as such reflects on the

enunciation16 or the narration itself that is in the process of production carried by the producer

as well as the receiver. The “aporistique doubling includes the work in which it is itself

included” and here accordingly both levels, the linguistic and diegetic, are reduplicated (56).

These different types of mirrors, often incorporated in the work of fiction, take the form of

novel, story, movie, drama, musical, TV serial…

Overt linguistic narcissism, on the other hand, is depicted through the “thematization

of language” and linguistic issues in the narrative. This explicitness works to position

fictionality, the mysteries of language and language use, and the self-consciousness at the core

of postmodernist fiction as well as to place the reader in a bewildering space where he is

overtly taught his or her contributory role through the thematization of the act of reading itself

(71). On the other hand, covert narcissism can either be structuralized or “internalized”

within the text and necessitates “actualization” on the part of the actively participating reader

(7). Such implicitness requires an active response to itself through the “process of

actualization” that takes place at the act of reading and transforms words into fictive and

literary worlds (Iser 20). Here, “the dyadic interaction” that relates the aesthetics of

production and response are triggered in order for meanings to be “optimized” (85),

“concretized” (178), and “actualized” (66) through the reader’s interactive response to “the

15 The enoncé “signifies what is uttered (the statement, the proposition)” in speech or writing (Barthes, Image Music Text 9).

16 The enunciation “signifies the act of uttering (the act of speech, writing or whatever by which the statement is stated, the proposition proposed)” (Barthes, Image Music Text 9).

verbal structure” of the text. The reader is no longer a passive agent who reads in order to

decode the message that the author has encoded in the text, he is rather an active force which

participates in the process of meaning construction (41). “Page by page the reader creates the

meaning of the text, reshaping, and reordering former unities into new ones as he proceeds”,

transforming the text from a mere aesthetic object to an elaborate performance ( Hutcheon

Narcissistic 145). The authorial intention and objectivity are no longer tenable in a

postmodernist self-critical and discursive context and hence the assertion of the centrality of

an “enunciating subject” is overtly denounced. The concept of subject, self, and subjectivity

are, therefore, highly criticized in a center-free postmodern context (Selden and Widdowson

177). Enunciation, which is the focal point in narcissistic narratives, requires an enunciating

producer and a Brechtian receiver, and the communication between both parts in a context-

dependent situation. For instance, Iser opines that “the pragmatic nature of language” which

depends on the act of enunciation as such “has developed concepts which, although they are

not meant to be applied to fiction, can nevertheless serve as a starting point for our study of

the pragmatic nature of literary texts” (54). The trajectory of meaning actualization has shifted

from the enoncé to the act of enunciation, from the product to the process, from langue to

parole, from fixed codes and conventions to ever-changing performance, and from

semiotization to pragmatism. This pragmatism puts into consideration what Benveniste calls

“language put into action”, that is the contextual and situational underpinnings of language

(qtd. in Hutcheon, Poetics 82). Lyotard sums up this view saying that “a self does not amount

to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex

and mobile than ever before… A person is always located at ‘nodal points’ of specific

communication circuits” (15). Since literary language operates in the same way as everyday

speech and implies a performative function, it could be subject to pragmatic interpretation.

Searle, for instance, views literature as an imitation of a speech act (60). The aim of literary

language here does not revolve around “what it says” that is the content itself, but rather

“what it does” that is how it affects the receiver and constructs meaning (Iser 26).

Wolfgang Iser’s theory of “aesthetic response” or “dyadic communication” which

treats the text as a performative act and Wayne C. Booth view of literature as an “art of

communication” seem to be the closest and the most relevant to the needs of metafictional

criticism (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 147). To read is “to act” and consequently to perform

thereby opposing any claim to a fixed structure or a unilateral kind of response (Iser 62).

Since no performance can be repeated in the same way, each reading becomes an anti-

representational force in the sense that it cannot proceed in a similar unique way making from

the end of one reading the beginning of another one. Narcissistic texts, therefore, rely on both

productive-responsive aesthetics in order to “concretize” its meanings and in the “endless

unfixed systems of signification” to construct its open uncontrollable processes.

The theoretical framework of this thesis offers a laconic approach to metafictional

narcissism in general, a definition of its major key concepts, and an exploration of its major

topoi. Indubitably, this chapter serves the upcoming analysis by providing the key parameters

that back up the dissertation as a whole. Accordingly, Lot 49 lends itself perfectly to the

metafictional narcissistic approach as the study of its diegetic identity is going to reveal in the

second chapter.

Second Chapter:

STRANDS OF OVERT AND COVERT

DIEGETIC NARCISSISM IN

THE CRYING OF LOT 49

The self-consciousness of literary texts is not a simple one-sided task that exclusively

requires the text to be a connoisseur of its own literary ground; it is rather highly problematic

demanding constant negotiation between disparate fields of study. The problematizition stems

chiefly from the paradoxical nature of postmodern narcissism which aspires to go beyond the

confining claims of self-sufficiency and autonomy of the work of art. The narcissistic text

overtly acknowledge its pluralistic, cohesive and symbiotic ontological status as a literary text

existing indispensably in a context, consisting of an intertext as well as a metatext17, grouped

according to paratext18 and hypertext19, resulting in a multifaceted zone of cross-fertilization.

This criss-cross pattern has numerous implications on the definition of literature, history, and

reality in general as it is going to be argued for in the forthcoming analysis. Hereupon,

metafictional texts chart the history of artistic creation or poesies20 in tandem with the poetics

and theories of criticism while adopting a critical standpoint. Novelistic narcissism,

consequently, implies the self-awareness of the “intramural textual level” as well as

“extramural” processes, showing the encounter and the permissible co-existence of multiple

paradoxical fields into one inclusive literary text (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 19).

17 Metatextuality refers to “the transtextual relationship that links a commentary to ‘the text it comments upon (without necessarily citing it)’”. In Architexte, Genette remarks that “all literary critics, for centuries, have been producing metatext without knowing it” (82). (Paratexts: Threshold of Interpretation xix).

18 Gérard Genette defines the paratext as “a threshold. It is an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world's discourse about the text), an edge, or, as Philippe Lejeune put it, “a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one's whole reading of the text” (Paratexts: Threshold of Interpretation 2).

19 The hypertext denotes “the ‘literature in the second degree’: the superimposition of a later text on an earlier one that includes all forms of imitation, pastiche, and parody as well as less obvious super impositions” (Genette, Paratexts: Threshold of Interpretation xix).

20 Poesis is defined by David Lodge as follows “art as making, a contrivance for affecting the methods- the ‘Skill or Crafte of making’ as Ben Jonson called it… [are] comprehended under the term poesies” (qtd. in Abrahms 12). Hutcheon puts it more straightforwardly in Narcissistic as “the process of making” (20).

As this chapter aims at studying the diegetic narcissism, an account of the meaning of

the word “diegesis” is of cardinal necessity at this level. Derived from the Greek verb

“diegeisthai”, diegesis means “‘to lead/ guide through’ … which came to mean ‘give an

account of’, ‘expound’, ‘explain’, and ‘narrate’” (Halliwell 3). It actually refers “in the Greek

origin, to the narratorial discourse, that is to the act of telling, rather than to the story (the

muthos)” (Phelan 40). With the advance of narratological studies, diegesis comes to be known

as “the universe in which the story takes place” (Genette, Narrative Discourse 17). In

Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method, Gérard Genette distinguishes between “story”,

“narrative”, and “narration”. According to his thorough study, story designates “the signified

or narrative context”, narrative stands for “the signifier, statement, discourse or narrative text

itself”, and narrating refers to “the producing of narrative action and by extension the whole

of the real or fictional situation in which that action takes place” (27). Drawing on this

distinction, diegesis encompasses both categories of narrative and narration coming to mean

the narrative text and its processual production. It is also multifaceted since it includes the

category of “narrative level” (intradiegetic, extradiegetic) as well as that of “person”

(homodiegetic, heterodiegetic) (215). The choice of the word diegesis over narrative shows

the intentional inclusive impulse and intent of this study and its “rejection of the split between

process (the storytelling) and product (the storytold)” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 5).

Lot 49 is an exemplar of narcissistic metafiction since it displays most of its features

mainly through its implication of self-reflexivity at the level of diegesis and its exploration of

the processes of reading and writing. This narcissism is present in the novel and takes both

forms overt and covert; overt in its use of parody, mise en abyme, and intertextuality and

covert in its embedding of metafictionality, self-mirroring and its calling for the actualization

of these elements through the “dyadic interacti[ve]” act of reading (Iser 59). The first chapter

aims at analyzing both forms while endeavoring to stress how postmodern fiction is an art of

sincerity which brings deliberately its own processes and mechanisms into light.

I. The Parodic double-coding of Lot 49:

The study of parody aims at double-coding the text through the exploration of both the

subversive as well as the conservative aspects of parody. Lot 49 parodies, in fact, the realistic

mimetic view of art, the structuralist strict generic classification of literary works, and the

modernist ahistoricism of literature.

1. Process and Product: Narcissistic takedown of realism

Thomas Pynchon’s turn away from realism is marked by his parodic treating of the

tenets of this literary trend. Lot 49 aims at reworking realist conventions, especially those

concerning the prominence of the aesthetic product, the completeness and closedness of the

novel, the linearity and causality of the plot, and the ability to represent external truth. The

direct result of this critical reworking is the deconstruction of the fiction-reality relationship

and the employment of fragmented non-linear narrative commensurate with the contingent

pluralistic view of reality. The literary realist world of “ontological certainties” (Mchale 66)

and “aesthetic fetishizing” is, therefore, decentralized by postmodernist contingency and

constant questioning (Hutcheon, Poetics 66).

As accounted for in the introduction of this dissertation, the summary21 of the novel

accentuates the on-going quest for truth that is the process of meaning-making rather than the

resolution of the mystery itself that is the final product of the quest. At the end of the

narrative, the quest remains unvoiced and the denouement of the mystery unresolved, leaving

the end open. Seemingly, Lot 49 abides by the realist convention of narrative linearity,

drawing causal relationships between some of the occurrences at the very beginning. The

novel starts in “one summer afternoon” in Kinnert, exposing a casual day of an American

housewife, who has been in a Tupperware party and arrives home to find out the news of

21 See the Introduction of this dissertation p. 3-4

Inverarity’s death and her nomination as an executrix of his estate. Events flow after in a

logical way:

[t]hings then did not delay in turning curious. If one object behind her

discovery… were to bring to an end her encapsulation in her tower, then that

night’s infidelity with Metzger would logically be the starting point for it;

logically. That’s what would come to haunt her most, perhaps: the way it fitted,

logically, together. (Pynchon 31, my emphasis)

Soon after, this logic veered toward an escalating non-logic, showing Oedipa’s oscillation

between interconnected events and unexpected happenings. To her, everything “seemed to

come crowding in exponentially, as if the more she collected the more would come to her”

(64). She is, in fact, put in the middle of nowhere and doomed to get to an indeterminate

destination through following the path of infinite open possibilities as suggested by the surfeit

of disparate occurrences. Whenever she seems to approach an end, more events and

information come to her resisting any claim to a logical denouement and opening itself “to all

the possibilities” (148). Oedipa’s entrapment in this labyrinthine endless structure where

events pile up in an infinite way reflects Lot 49’s continuous stratification and structural

redoubling. Lot 49, in its turn, “is about to be broken up into lots” resisting any claim to

progression toward an ultimate meaning (32). It is a narcissistic narrative that acknowledges

its fragmented nature and “byzantine plot full of improbable coincidences and outrageous

action” (McCaffrey 22).

In opposition to realistic texts, narcissistic texts do not exclusively direct their readers’

attention to the finish, but instead they usher them to the broader and tendentious space of end

and process. In this context, Hutcheon assumes “in metafictional narcissism the focus [on

product] does not shift, so much as broaden” to encompass the process of meaning-production

(Narcissistic 27). Oedipa begins her journey penchant for hearing the “cry that may abolish

the night” (Pynchon 95, my emphasis), yet she ends up waiting for the “crying of lot 49”

(152, my emphasis). The choice of the “–ing” verb form wittingly shows the continuous

deferral of the end since whenever Oedipa succeeds in finding some clues, the latter lead her

to other ad infinitum clues depriving her of any possibility of attaining comfort through a

consolatory sense of an ending. Hereupon, the “–ing” form that denotes progression and

incompleteness of an action is the most commensurate with the postmodern narcissistic

theoretical framework which remains “an unfinished project” that defies any claim to a fixed

definition or to a determinate set of poetics. Narcissism is still at the stage of “theorizing/

modeling/ limiting/ decentering/ contextualizing/ historicizing” as the titles of the chapters of

Hutcheon’s Poetics show, or is still in the stage of construction as Mchale study Constructing

Postmodernism outlines. This emphasis on the processes of fiction making is, in fact,

reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s “Epic Theater”22 which assigns to the literary performance a

subversive force capable of discomforting the receiver and directing him or her towards the

conscious exercise of interrogation and criticism (Selden an Widdowson 79). Similar to the

Brechtian theater, narcissistic texts “place the receiver in a paradoxical position, both outside

and inside, participatory and critical” (Hutcheon, Poetics 219). Directing the focus towards

the narrative process rather than to the finish raises the audience awareness of the artificiality

of art through the “alienation effect” which denounces any possible act of identification with

fictional characters and hence keeps their eyes wide open and their minds critical of what they

receive (Selden and Widdowson 79). Accordingly, value is attributed to the demystification of

the processes of artistic production and reception rather that to a “fetishized fixed meaning”.

22 “‘Epic theater’ means, simply, a theater that narrates, rather than represents… Brecht felt that to foster a state of relaxation in the theater – an atmosphere in which reason and detachment, rather than passion and involvement, were to predominate – was to subvert the established theater and ‘Aristotelian’ plays that were performed in it… The ensemble of these measures is to produce the famous Verfremdungseffekt or ‘alienation effect’. This concept… shifts critical attention from ‘affekt’ to ‘effekt’ …. The emphasis of Brecht’s work is upon discontinuity. No chain of events is held together by a natural or self-evident logic; the spectator is to experience the constant disruption of narrative structure, as one device undercuts another” (Childs and Fowler 70-2, my emphasis).

Lot 49 therein brings to the fore its own processes of “artistic and aesthetic production23”, or

those of writing and reading a literary text (Iser 21). This “self-demystifying” process

palpably foregrounds that “the ‘narration’” ultimately “invades and pervades the ‘fiction”

(Hutcheon, Narcissistic 35). The traditional realistic interest in fiction as an aesthetic product

is decentralized and highlighted by an overt turn away from the storytold, the focalized, and

the narrated to the constructive realm of storytelling, focalization, and narration (35). What is

of cardinal interest for the writer as well as for the reader in a literary work is not what the

text is about, but rather how the discursive constituents of the fictional universe are co-

created, constructed, and actualized. Subsequently, the focus twists from the “what” to the

“how”.

The text draws attention to the creative processes of fiction writing and reading

attributing particular importance to the reader as an active meaning processor rather than

passive receiver as Hutcheon assumes “the novel no longer seeks just to provide an order and

meaning to be recognized by the reader… It now demands that he be conscious of the work,

the actual construction that he is undertaking, for it is the reader who… ‘concretizes’ the work

of art and gives it life” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 39). In realistic literature, the authorial

intention24 and full omnipotence of the narrator insures the centrality of meaning in the pole

of the artist who grants the accessibility of truths and the attainability of factual knowledge

(Waugh 43). The view of the author as a generator of meaning and reflector of truth has its

own repercussions on the view of the role of the reader and the reading experience in general.

It sustains the epistemological approach according to which the novel is seen as the medium

through which an “objective world [is] mirrored in the receptive mind of a passive subject”

23 In The Act of Reading, Iser opines that “the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author's text and the aesthetic is the realization accomplished by the reader” (21).

24 A realist literary convention that views the textual meaning as encoded according to the intention of the narrator who is the unique originator and encoder of meaning in a literary text.

(Best and Kellner 83). Lot 49 eschews this traditional view which entraps the reader in an

elusive as well as exclusive web in which he or she is cast as a compliant receiver whose sole

mission is to disentangle the message encoded by a god-like narrator (Waugh 42). Interpreted

from the lens of metafictional narcissism, Oedipa can be seen as a surrogate reader and the act

of reading is thematized along the narrative and equated with the protagonist’s challenging

journey. Since meaning is no longer a stable and absolute pre-established entity located at the

end of the novel and depending on the reader’s unraveling of the author’s intention, “the

process of actualization” takes over as the by-product of “the dyadic interaction” between the

text and the reader (Iser 60). The metamorphosis of the reader’s status is charted in the text

through the analogous transformation of Oedipa from being a passive detached meaning

decipherer to becoming an active meaning-optimizer25 (85). In the first chapter, Oedipa

describes herself as being metaphorically enclosed in a tower. Upholding a realist

conventional view, this metaphor can likewise be applied to the reader’s imprisonment in the

experience of passive reception and platitude (41). Oedipa’s attempt to go beyond the

confines of the tower in the subsequent chapters and her resolution to take part in the act of

construction and projection of her own world is simultaneous to the twist in the reader’s role

in contemporary reader-oriented theories26 (Selden and Widdowson 4). The reader is no

longer imprisoned in the author’s or narrator’s “tower”, he or she is liberated and invited to

effectively take part in the process of the construction of that tower. This projection is tied up

with the reader’s awareness of his task of “bestow[ing] life on what had persisted” and of

“project[ing] a world” as well as with the text’s awareness of its dependence on a reader in

25 “The repertoire forms an organizational structure of meaning which must be optimized through\the reading of the text. This optimization will depend on the reader's own degree of awareness and on his willingness to open himself up to an unfamiliar experience” (Iser 85)

26 Instances of reader response theories are Stanley Fish’s “affective stylistics”, Iser’s theory of “aesthetic response”, Gadamer’s “hermeneutical phenomenology” (Selden and Widdowson 52)

order for its meanings to be actualized (Pynchon 64).Thus, the act of reading is substantial

and participatory and the meaning of the text is not at the disposal of the author, nor is it

enclosed in the textual entities. Accordingly, the focus shifts from “what the text means” to

“what the text does”, or in other terms, from literary realism to literary pragmatism (133). In

this context, the Pynchonesque text becomes rather a site of communication between the

reader and the narrator where the former is rendered an active participant in the process of

meaning concretization rather than a follower of some ordered fictive patterns or a decoder of

a previously encoded meaning. Meaning does not emanate from the author or the text itself, as

held by the mimetic and expressivist theoretical orientations; it is rather the outcome of the

conflation of the three main elements of the enunciantive situation which are the enoncé, the

process of enunciation, and the enunciator (Hutcheon, Poetics 74). Hutcheon reiterates that

meaning is “encoded into the enunciative act itself… renew[ing] aesthetic and theoretical

interest in the interactive powers involved in the production and reception of texts” (77). This

twist in the aesthetic experience has its own implications in the representational view of the

art-life relation. Unlike the Western classical humanist view which delegates to art the

expression of truth and “the imitation of real life”, postmodernist art defies such a

representational logic and argues instead for the highly contentious nature of this relation.

Thus, the literary discourse does not “represent” the world as far as it “reflects” its own

ontologically tendentious status. In this context, Hutcheon opines that “what narcissistic

narrative does do in bearing its fictional and linguistic systems to the reader’s view, is to

transform the process of poesies, into part of the shared pleasure of reading” (Narcissistic 20).

Therefore, narcissistic narrative does not only mirror its own diegetic identity, but it goes far

to acknowledge its substantial need for an active reader to finalize the process of literary-

building.

The reading exercise necessitates certain awareness and a critical stance on the part of

the reader who has to question every detail in the narrative. The comfort provided by the

consolatory sense of finding a final answer is, accordingly, asphyxiated by narcissistic texts.

Oedipa, for instance, keeps oscillating between open options that deprive her from any sense

of determinism or certainty. She is continuously interrogating everything: “could it all be

true?” (Pynchon 148), “what if Inverarity has only died, nothing else”, “either you have

stumbled indeed… onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly

communication…. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted upon you. … Or

you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull”

(140-1), “which one was her target, her enemy, perhaps her proof” (152). Henceforth,

Oedipa’s questions pile up unanswerably from the very beginning until the end. These

questions are sterilized to the point that they raise doubts about the substantiality of their

existence as such. Pynchon’s interest in Lot 49 seems to direct us to the prominence of

questions over answers. In the text, questioning turns out to be more prominent than finding

the answer itself, since there is no final attainable answer but only “symmetrical alternatives”

(141). The unanswerable cluster of questions prevents the narrative from progressing

logically to a clear end resulting instead in the creation of a “zigzag form” of open-ended non-

linear fragments (Kermode 43). Thus, Lot 49 lurks behind a space of constant questioning

denouncing any inclination towards logical progress, linearity, and wholeness, ranging under

what Catherine Belsey categorizes as “interrogative text” (qtd. in Hutcheon Poetics 220).

Additionally, Lot 49 contains numerous realistic instances. It refers to real names of

cities such as California/ San Narciso/ Arizona/ Texas/ Kinnert/ New York/ Florida/ Delware/

Mazaltan, persons such as Abraham Lincoln/ Shakespeare/ Jay Gould/ Remedios Varo, and

other illustrations such as Maxwell Demon/ Cornell University/ Tupperware… Though the

setting and some characters prove to be real, Lot 49 seems to insist on its artificiality and

fictionality through juxtaposing such elements with fictional stances such as Wharfinger/ The

Scope/ Echo Courts/ Cashiered/ The Courier’s Tragedy/ the phantom/ the shadow. These

allusions criticize realist literature’s constant masking of its artificiality as well as its bogus

treating of reality as representable. The classical ideal that “art should conceal its own

processes (ars celare artem)” is directly challenged in narcissistic texts and “we are made

constantly aware how artifice constructs or forges the ‘reality’ presented to us” (Selden and

Widdowson 34). This juxtaposition aspires to deconstruct the binary realist view of fiction-

reality and to expose “the ultimate futility of the realistic, ‘slice-of-life’ approach”

(McCaffrey 12). The paradigm shift in literary criticism reveals that “Art is a way of

experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important” (Selden and

Widdowson31).

Through its parodic take on realist conventions of well-made plots, causality, the god-

like narrator, reader receptive role, Lot 49 goes beyond stasis revealing itself as a co-

dependent discursive “gradual building of a fictive universe” where the text, reader, and

producer interact in order to “actualize meaning” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 28).This argument

triggers Peter Cooper ‘s classification of Thomas Pynchon as a “counter-realist” who

“recognizes that there’s no Reality- only subjective realities, or mental constructions of the

world made from unique and imperfect vantage points” (qtd. in Wallen 26). Realism proves to

have imbued the novel with a transcendental illusionary sacred position according to which it

is accorded the prerogatives of mirroring reality (Abrams 31). From the lens of narcissistic

texts, realism is nothing but “the paradise lost of the novel” since it unmasks all its illusionary

claims to attaining any transcendental universal truth following the potency of the logos

(McCaffrey 19). Can this paradise be ever regained remains the unfavorable possibility that

narcissistic texts try hard to object, since writing from the realistic perspective becomes rather

a dogmatic writing incommensurate with the contemporary changing literary paradigms.

2. The lawlessness of genre: subverting the structuralist poetics

Subverting the conventions of detective and fantastic genres in Lot 49 implies a

subversion of a whole structural critical thought keen on “systemization” and codification of

literary devices. The prior structural thought shows an eager inclination towards taxonomies

and systems where any artful production works with regard to determinate codes which come

to be known as “the grammar of literature” (Culler, Structuralist vii). In accordance to this

view, the reader is supposed to have a number of expectations when reading a particular

literary text that generate from his knowledge of the pre-established rules of literary

production in general. However, in metafiction “it is the fulfillment as well as the non-

fulfillment of generic expectations that provides both familiarity and the starting point for

innovation” (Waugh 64). Lot 49’s parodic position aims at playing with the genre

expectations of the readers and at thwarting them in order to downgrade any claim to a logical

processing towards an end.

a. The Detective Genre:

Approaching Lot 49 from the angle of detective story requires, at first, a skeletal

framework of the genre as such. Tzevtan Todorov’s structural work on detective fiction

conventions tremendously serves the objective of this study. Todorov asserts that the detective

novel or the “whodunit” contains “not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story

of the investigation” (“Typology of Detective Fiction” 139). The story of the crime ends

before the story of investigation begins, and in the latter “characters…do not act, they learn…

the pages that separate the discovery of the crime from the revelation of the killer are devoted

to a slow apprenticeship: we examine clue after clue, lead after lead” (139). The detection,

thus, terminates at the unraveling of the mystery of the crime. Hence, it revolves around an

epistemological inquiry consisting in the knowledge of the truth of the crime and of the

criminal. Lot 49 opens up with the story of the crime which announces the death of Pierce

Inverarity, conforming partly to the conventions of detective story where Oedipa plays the

role of the detective figure who strives to carry the investigation and resolve the mystery. She

is a “questor-figure” (Bran 93) travelling from one place to another, collecting the “gemlike

clues” and evidences, and investigating every detail or person she may come across (Pynchon

95). As far as this is concerned, the naming of the protagonist turns out to be quite telling as

some critics agree27. The name “Oedipa” recalls Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex, where

Oedipus is set as a detective protagonist working to solve the riddle of the Sphinx and to find

the killer of his father (Selden and Widdowson 110). Similarly, from the beginning Oedipa

sets for herself the mission of solving the secret death of Inverarity. However, in the last

chapter, Oedipa and the reader by implication, figure out that they are possibly entrapped in a

labyrinth where a tremendous number of clues and information are revealed but remain

mostly purposeless and leading to a vacuum of meaning. The suspense as well as the

excitement of seeking truth withers gradually, in consideration to the array of endless clues

which render the researcher “less excited than she might have been a week ago” (Pynchon

143). Soon after, the story of investigation transforms to become rather the stories of

investigations. The primary quest veers toward other new quests multiplying in an infinite

manner and the clues that are supposed to lead to the resolution and to further clarification

become other potential sites of investigations. For instance, the investigation of Inverarity’s

death ushers the protagonist to the investigation of the stamp collection and its origins which

subsequently guides her to the investigation of the Trystero postal system, then to the

W.A.S.T.E network and the Yoyodyne incorporation, which in their turn take her to probing

The Courier’s Tragedy original version, Mucho’s insanity, Driblette’s sudden death, Dr.

Hilarius’ suicidal attempt, ad infinitum. The investigation keeps refracting in tandem with the

narration showing the impossibility of ascending to an ultimate resolution. The story closes

with Oedipa sitting towards the back of an auction room all alone “looking at the napes of

27 Some of these literary critics are Hartmas 1975, Grossvogel 1979, and Frank Kermode 1986

necks, trying to guess which one was her target, her enemy, perhaps her proof” (152). Yet,

nothing is revealed, and Oedipa, so as the reader, end up “awaiting the crying of lot 49” (152).

In addition, Lot 49 starts seemingly as an epistemological inquiry revolving around the

knowledge of the causes of Inverarity’s death through following his estate and investigating

the clues that may lead to this revelation. In the course of the inquiry, the crime changes its

status transforming to a “larger, more ramified, more sinister- a conspiracy” (Mchale,

Postmodernist 23) plot with “endless repetitions” (Pynchon 22). Hence, the continuous

regression of the quest and the unattainable resolution of the mystery displace the interest

from the object of the quest to its processing. The inquiry shifts accordingly from an

epistemological to an ontological one and this twist is marked by Oedipa’s transition from the

quest of revealing the mystery of Inverarity’s death to the attempt at defining the nature of the

plot that she felt herself entrapped in. In several occasions, she voices that “it’s all part of a

plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot” (20). Oedipa becomes rather a wanderer in a “Kafkaesque

world” whose laws remain unknown instead of being a regular detective who charts a

patterned resolution of a given crime (Waugh 85). The parody of the detective genre sketches

that this genre allows its revisitation and that its firm dependence on logic and reader’s

expectations represents a challenging point that metafictionists like Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet

and Borges tend to subvert (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 74). Edward Mendelson in his essay “The

Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49” sums up this viewpoint saying that:

Pynchon’s novel uses mechanisms borrowed from the detective story to

produce results precisely the opposite of this in the model. Where the object of

a detective story is to reduce a complex and disordered situation to simplicity

and clarity, and in doing so to isolate in a named locus the disruptive element

in the story’s world, The Crying of Lot 49 starts with a relatively simple

situation, and then lets it get out of the heroine’s control: the simple becomes

complex, responsibility becomes not isolated but universal. (21)

In a nutshell, Pynchon foregrounds the problem-solving process over the solution of the

mystery itself. He, in fact, sacrifices the question of “‘who the criminal is’ by the question

‘what truth and world are’, ‘how they may be re-constructed’, and ‘what follows from that

construction’” (Chotiudompant 75).

The story leaves the reader in limbo, providing nothing but further complications and

ambiguity. Whereas classical detective fiction shows that the world is patterned by the laws of

causality and predominated by the triumph of reason over chaos at the end, Pynchon’s world

reveals that these laws are mere constructs that show nothing but “how we tend to mediate

and manipulate our own realities” (80). Reversing the path from chaos to order, from

confusion to status quo is one of the objectives attained by the use of parody and the main

trait that qualifies Lot 49 as an “anti-dective” story as Cawelti terms it (qtd. in Chotiudompant

81). Michel Holiquist reiterates that “instead of familiarity,” Lot 49 “gives strangeness, a

strangeness which more often than not is the result of jumbling the well-known patterns of

classical detective stories. They are not an escape, but an attack” (qtd. in Chotiudompant 81,

my emphasis). In this sense, Lot 49 aims at “de-doxifying” the generic strong conventions of

the detective story. It denounces the latter’s claim to the attainability of an ultimate truth due

to the logic of reason as well as to the extreme control and entanglement exercised on the

reader.

Lot 49’s parody of the conventions of detective fiction shows the latter bogus

contentions especially the assumption “that man could solve the puzzle of nature- and of

literature- if he examined the ‘clue’ carefully enough” (McCaffrey 10). The appropriation of

the detective formulas by postmodernist texts is useful as far as the quest for truth is

concerned. Unlike classical detective fictions which revolve around two stories: one of crime

and the other of investigation of that crime, narcissistic narrative proves to have only one

story which is one of investigation, not of a crime but instead one of investigation of the

fictive patterns of construction. It charts the discovery of the ontological status of the fictional

work rather than the epistemological disentangling of a pre-given mystery. It thereupon

presents itself as the object of investigation as well as the investigator taking upon its

shoulders the challenging exercise of unveiling its own ontological mysteries. At the end of

the novel, the detective-like figure, Oedipa Maas, and the reader come to the conclusion that

the process of searching truth is more important than truth itself. Hence, Lot 49 tends to be an

outright query of the detective genre and its rigid conventions through ironizing them rather

than ranging passively under their formulaic patterns. Likewise, the parodic reworking of

genre classification is further explored through the installation of elements of the fantastic in

the novel, or better say through the “postmodernization” of the fantastic (McHale,

Constructing Postmodernism 112).

b. The Fantastic:

The fantastic, as outlined by Tzevtan Todorov in his structural study of this literary

genre, is identified as “the duration of uncertainty between illusion and reality” (The Fantastic

25). This hesitation has to be experienced by the character or the autodiegetic narrator in the

narrative and then transmitted to the reader whose first reading is rather an act of

“identification” while the second reading is a “meta-reading” in the course of which he or she

“note(s) the methods of the fantastic instead of falling under its spell” (90). In the fifth

chapter, after going to and fro various fantastic places, meeting new and even strange people,

and experiencing marvelous events, Oedipa acquired a kind of “trouble sorting the night into

real and dreamed” (Pynchon 95). This stage of hesitation that accompanied her and the reader

throughout the novel rendered her unable to determine whether such things as the Trystero,

Nefastis Demon, the carriers in the dark suits in the underways at night, the people in the

deaf-mute assembly, Pierce Inverarity himself, and San Narciso as a whole are real or some

phantasmagoric creations. To her, they are “ambiguous”, “anarchist”, and “miraculous” (107).

The hesitation apparently starts as only epistemological but it turns out soon after to reveal

itself as an ontological hesitation concerned with the status of things rather than with the blind

quest of knowing what lies behind them. Brian Mchale sums up this view saying that in Lot

49 “one remains hesitating between the epistemological and ontological lines of expectation,

without finally resolving the hesitation; hence the ‘fantastic’ effect” (Postmodernist 24). Here

the text appropriates elements of the fantastic in order to subvert them and in order to imbue

this genre with “an ontological poetics” in an attempt to render it congruent with the

postmodernist set of poetics in which it is installed (76). The parody of the structural approach

to the fantastic, as outlined in the analysis, triggers a revision of the definition of this genre in

general and of the peripheral position it used to occupy in literary criticism. It keeps

reminding the reader that the exercise of reading is a complex one that depends partly on the

reader’s abilities to order, arrange, and construct and that what he reads is a mere artifact.

Thus, while reading, he or she is “force[d] to read with his imaginative and ordering faculties

alert and at work” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 82). It questions the earlier definition of reality as a

pre-established entity since any text resorts to a number of techniques in its construction of its

own subjective reality. Hence, “such narcissism brings to the reader’s attention the fact that

fantasy is not a deviation from either reality or the conventions of realism” but an active

constituent of reality as such (82).

The supernatural elements that surface at the very beginning, especially that of the

“Shadow” of the dead man “that had phoned at random during the darkest slowest hours”

(Pynchon 3) and promised to pay Oedipa a visit soon, and also of the places which “seemed

unnatural”, altogether set the fantastic temper that characterizes most of the narrative (15).

The Shadow, from Carl Gustav Jung’s perspective, represents “the instinctive side of the

personality” or what Freud calls the “unconscious” and Jacque Lacan terms as the “Other”.

The shadow, thus, becomes something internal to any character, so far from being extraneous

or supernatural. Contrariwise, it is a constitutive element of any identity. The shadow

becomes within us, yet differs from one to another by its degree of restriction and exposition.

The more self-expository the shadow is, the more narcissistic the self becomes. In this sense,

being narcissistic does not mean displaying exclusively the good part but it rather implies an

ascendency over revealing the shadowy state of things. Pierce’s Shadow becomes, thus, the

catalyst that furthers the unraveling of the narrative identity through putting every detail into

motion as well as the boundary-crosser that denounces the dividing line between the real and

the fantastic. His Shadow has the power to dislodge Oedipa from her own complacent life of

typical housewifery and passive reception of means of telecommunications (T.V set, radio,

CDs). It takes her then to a more self-involving and self-aware life where she discovers that

her mechanisms of appreciation and interpretation are no more than hindrances that set her

from seeing the pluralistic and contingent nature of reality. The Shadow keeps bumping into

the scene, whenever a sensation of revelation approaches in the narrative, constantly

reminding the “evil” side of the discovery which is the destined indeterminacy and

indefiniteness of each text. The mirror-like moment where the one is exposed to his or her

dormant double, perpetuates a sense of betrayal and paralysis at first. The bewildering

discovery astonishes her to the point that she hallucinates “perhaps her mind would be

betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb” (133). Yet it is,

in fact, another kind of revelation, an ontological revelation about the duplicitous nature of

beings. The same procedure occurs by analogy to the narrative which progresses gradually

toward more self-consciousness and liberation and acknowledges its in-between position

amidst the real and the fantastic. The hesitancy and self-questioning that takes place at the

moment when the self is exposed to its double marks, in fact, the road towards self-knowledge

and narcissism. Hence Lot 49 is narcissistic and this narcissism stems from its being highly

hesitant, or better says, fantastic. In fact, “all writing is hesitant now” since the boundary

between the real and the fantastic is no longer traceable (Mchale, Postmodernist 74).

Another feature of fantasy in the novel can be detected through the dark and gloomy

atmosphere that surrounds every detail related to the Trystero. For instance, the Trystero

postmen are clothed in black and their work occurs always at night and in the heart of

darkness in the underways. The color constantly associated with the Trystero is “black to

symbolize the only thing that belonged to them [Trystero’s members] in their exile: the night”

and in some other instances to embody “death” and apocalypse (Pynchon 132). Pynchon goes

even to overtly warn the reader to “notice the figure of Death hovering in the background”

(127). In addition, the prevalence of the fantastic is also marked by “another world’s intrusion

into this one” (97) where “the chance of its being real would menace her [Oedipa]” in a way

(107). As long as the state of hesitation is unresolved on the part of the protagonist and the

reader, the fantastic persists in the narrative. It should be noted that the state of hesitation and

uncertainty prevailing in the narrative defies any propensity toward the “marvelous” or the

“uncanny”, the two genres in the edges of which the fantastic is located (Todorov 41). It,

hence, conforms to the structural norms of these genre boundaries, yet still ironizing its very

nature and components. Mchale affirms that “the solipsism that accompanied Oedipa all along

the narrative and perplexed her vision about the reality of the Trystero, or any other

alternative comforting reality remains the domineering mood and the Trystero ‘remains only a

possibility’” (Postmodernist 24). The fantastic, in Todorov’s sense, is primarily a zone of

“epistemological hesitation”; a hesitation that occurs between the natural and supernatural

explanation. Yet, in Lot 49 what emerges as an apparently epistemological quest turns out to

be predominantly ontological, embodying a hesitation about the identity of the narrative, that

is the way in which it is constructed and the validity of its statements. Henceforth, Mchale

concludes that “the postmodern fantastic has been co-opted as one of a number of strategies of

an ontological poetics that pluralizes the ‘real’ and then problematizes representation… [It]

can be seen as a sort of jiu-jitsu that uses representation itself to overthrow representation”

becoming therefore a hesitational zone between “this world and the world’s next door” rather

than between the uncanny and the marvelous (75).

From the lens of Todorov’s structuralist fantastic, the pre-established distinction

between “matter and mind” or “object and imagination” tends to collapse and the “physical

and abstract world” seem to interpenetrate (The Fantastic 118). In the novel, however, these

boundaries are rather highlighted, then wittingly transgressed in order to show the degree of

awareness of the novel of its own literary codes and its direct call for the reader to be

conscious of the difference between the natural and the supernatural. This “frame-breaking”

strategy serves to foreground the narrative self-knowledgeable nature, since it employs

framing then immediately breaks and demystifies the frame in which it is constructed (Waugh

32). Such a strategy triggers the reader to keep distance and to avoid any kind of possible

identification with some supernatural and imaginary elements. Similarly, Oedipa has to

struggle in order to bridge the gap between appearances and reality through questioning the

validity and reliability of each of her sources of information. As the delegation of exerting

particular effects on the reader such as “fear, horror, or simply curiosity” withers, the fantastic

proves to be no longer valid, nor resistant to the hybridization with other genres (Todorov,

The Fantastic 92). This is akin to Oedipa whose curiosity and excitement wither gradually

when reaching toward the end, instead of flowering. What is of importance, here, is not the

effect that the text has to trigger on the reader, but instead the response of the latter to an

extremely hesitant text.

Consequently, the elements of the fantastic conflate with the elements of the crime

genre as argued for in the former analysis. In fact, the generic fluid boundaries in the novel

are enlarged by encompassing features of historical narratives, science fiction, and

metafiction, as is going to be outlined in the forthcoming analysis. What remains worth noting

for the time being is that Lot 49, as a patchwork of various parodied genres, or what Mchale

names “worlds in collision”, defies any definite structural categorization and abiding by “the

law of genres” where “genres are not to be mixed” (Derrida, “The Law of Genres” 55). This

collision can be read from the standpoint of postmodernist writers as a re-evaluation of the

generic taxonomies in general and as an upgrading of some literary subgenres that used to be

under-viewed and that used to “occupy [a] peripheral position” (Todorov, “The Typology of

Detective Genre” 139). These subgenres, mainly the detective fiction, the fantastic, and

science fiction, are granted new equal position as the other literary genres by dint of parody.

Hence, the narrator works within the very generic conventions he or she attempts to subvert

denying accordingly the despotic clear-cut lines of demarcation that has long served as laws

of genre classifications of pieces of writing. Derrida ironizes this view in his essay “The Law

of Genre” saying “thus, as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must

not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (57).

Textual narcissism serves, here, as a reaction to the rigid aesthetic norms and processes of

institutionalization such as those which govern the realm of genres, asserting its own

possibility to be a zone of collision and of democratic fusion where it relies on the text as such

rather than on the generic expectations and normative analysis on the side of the reader.

Consequently, the unique law that it seems to abide by, is the law of lawlessness or

unconventionality which permits the pre-occupation of both sides of the pre-given lines of

demarcation. This generic hybridization foregrounds what Lyotard calls a “justice of

multiplicities” (qtd. in Best and Kellner 162). Justice, here, consists in “working at the limits

of what the rules permit, in order to invent new moves, perhaps new rules, and therefore, new

game” (162). Thus, playing with the remnants of the already produced forms highlights the

idea that the old conventions do not deny or negate the former ones as far as they reinvent

them anew. The critical approach to the strict norms of generic categorization and the

democratic fusion of paradoxes are further orchestrated by the conflation of the fictional self-

reflexivity and history. Since narcissistic texts tend to be interrogative texts that defy any

structural classification or epistemological knowledge, they tend to mould the forms that are

congruent to this view. Historiographic metafiction, as suggested by Linda Hutcheon, seems

to appeal to this request perfectly.

3. Historiographic metafiction: from elitism to eclecticism

It is noteworthy that metafictional techniques do not represent an innovation in

postmodernist writing. They are, in fact, reworked in another paradoxical way that allows

their conflation with other extraneous non-literary realms such as history and politics

(Hutcheon, Politics 15). Hence, the ahistoricism and apoliticism of modernist literature is

trespassed by Lot 49’s outright recourse to history. Ranging under the mode of

“historiographic metafiction”, Lot 49 probes the ontological status of literature and history,

their mode of representation, and queries their distinctness. It permits an exploration of one of

postmodernism unresolved paradoxes and an assertion of its “duplicitous poetics”, throughout

the employment of the technique of frame and frame-breaking.

In her theorizing about fiction’s self-consciousness, Patricia Waugh relies on the

Oxford English Dictionary for the definition of frame as “a construction, constitution, build;

established order, plan, system… underlying support or essential substructure of anything”

(28). According to her study, all the literary works and historical discourses are organized

through frames in order to be set apart and distinguished, and consequently “[n]othing is

unframed; everything is framed in life or in novels” (28). This framing process is laid bare in

this form of metafiction showing that the lines of separation are human constructs and never

natural. In fact, the frames are “disguises” that permit the illusionary distinction between

certain discourses such as fact and fiction or history and literature (32).

While looking for the reality of the Trystero, Oedipa goes ways back to its history that

is its origins, stages of development, and relics in general. In her research, she relies on

archival materials, historical documents, and past articles in order to trace the history and to

learn the truth about the Trystero, the muted post horn symbol, and the W.A.S.T.E. system.

Her sources are numerous and various encompassing “a listing in an outdated Zumstein

catalogue”, “a typescript”, “a translation of an article from an 1865 issue of the Bibliothèque

des Trimbrophiles”, “the journals of the Comte Raoul Antoine de Vouziers”, Inverarity’s

stamp collections, the 1893 Columbian Exposition Issue, some articles from Zapf’s Used

Books, Blobb’s Peregrinations brought by Emory Bortz, an ambiguous footnote in Motley’s

Rise of the Dutch Republic, a book of sermons by Blobb’s brother Augustine, a compilation

entitled Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur, and Wharfinger, and Bortz’s 1957 preface to

Jacobean Revenge Plays in its Folio Edition (Pynchon 107). These documents represent, in

fact, fragments of religious, literary, historical, and mythological texts. In order to create a

holistic historical picture of the Trystero, Oedipa has to fill in the gaps and to arrange the

fluctuating information she gets from this array of documents. Yet this extraction proves to be

highly exhausting and difficult vis-à-vis the indeterminate and plethoric flow of data she

collects and the suspicious nature of the references. For instance, “Blobb inquired around

about the Trystero organization, running into zipped mouths nearly every way he turned. But

he was able to collect a few fragments. So, in the days following, was Oedipa” (30). The

questing heroine gradually comes to the conclusion that the textual material she relies on is no

more than “traces, fossils. Dead, mineral, without value or potential” (62). Though she

manages to collect numerous data relating to the Trystero and its existence in the past, she

could not determine whether her data are truthful and reliable or mere illusions and bygone

lies. All the connections and linkages that she could possibly draw, at the beginning of the

quest, are only “fatigued brain cells between herself and the truth” (74). At the end she is “left

with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central

truth itself” (76). Lot 49 is, therefore, a historiographic metafiction that tends to question the

ontological status of factual knowledge, historical documentation, and truth itself.

In fact, Oedipa is introduced to a large amount of viewpoints, each approaching or

explaining history differently and subjectively. For instance, the history of Henando Joaquin

de Tristero y Calavera is recorded differently in each book. In the novel, De Tristero y

Calavera is the one who is said to have opposed the Thurn and Taxis monopoly in the

northern provinces of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century as well as the one who

declared a guerrilla war against the Grand Master threatening the latter’s stability. According

to the various resources, y Calavera is seen each time from a distinctive optic “perhaps a

madman, perhaps an honest rebel, according to some only a con artist” or just an illusion that

has dubiously ever existed as many others claim (131). The slippery and inconsistent nature of

historical facts brings into question the idea of the objectivism and teleology of the historical

episteme. “History, as all the other discourses, is textual and written in a certain context in

order to argue for certain detail. Hence, it is always subjected and subjective” (Mchale

Postmodernist 96). Oedipa, in her turn, concludes that history is perspectival and processual,

and starts subsequently to question its status as factual and truthful in general.

The presence of the past through the incorporation of the historical fragments in the

narrative further problematizes the metafictional postmodernist text which is highly self-

conscious of its own fictiveness. Accordingly, the insertion of history in the Pynchonesque

web implies, in a way, “the textuality of history” and “the historicity of fiction” (Montrose

20). The textuality of history makes it less reliable and truthful, since what comes to be

known as fact is accessible only through the historian’s text which processes in a similar way

as fictive narrative that is through collecting events, selecting different details, and arranging

them in order to fill in the gaps and blanks of the Trystero’s history (White 62). The use of

ordering patterns for the creation of historical and factual discourse shows that “history is

[basically] contaminated by textuality, fictionalization, narrativization, and interpretation”

(Hutcheon, “Postmodern Paratextuality” 312). Historiography and literature share, in fact, the

same mechanisms of meaning-production, basic to which is “emplotment”. Hayden White

explains that “histories gain part of their explanatory effect by their success in making stories

out otmere chronicles, and stories in turn are made out of chronicles by an operation called…

‘emplotment’” which means “the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as

components of specific kinds of plot structures, in precisely the way that Frye has suggested

in the case with ‘fictitious’ in general” (83). Similar to fiction, historical texts are emplotted in

various ways so as to supply different meanings and interpretations to its events. What Oedipa

tries to do through her collection of historical documents about the Trystero is to know more

about this mysterious system, yet what she ends up doing is the creation of another history

through the subjective selection of some events and the personal arranging of the fragments

into a meaningful story since “[b]eyond its origins, the libraries told her nothing more about

Trystero” (Pynchon 134). By so doing, she turns out to perform some of the historian’s main

functions since “to write the past as either historian or novelist seems to be a matter of

constructing and reconstructing” (Hutcheon “Postmodern Paratextuality” 312). Subsequently,

Oedipa’s role shifts from being a history-explorer to becoming a history-reconstructor and a

textual and historical fragments collector. This constructive function proves to be highly akin

to the functions of the narrator who selects, arranges, and projects the fictive macrocosm. In

his study of narrative and narrators, Gérard Genette accords to the latter five narratorial

functions. These functions are the narrative (“narrating events”), directing (“the internal

organization of the narrative”), communicative (“the narrator’s orientation toward the

narratee”), testimonial (“the orientation of the narrator toward himself and toward the text”),

and ideological (“the narrator’s intervention, direct or indirect with regard to the story”)

functions (Narrative Discourse 255-6 ).These functions bring close the status of the narrator

of fiction to that of a historian who performs more or less the same above-mentioned tasks.

Driblette’s metaphoric description of his function as a playwright backs up this angle of view,

since he tells Oedipa “[t]he reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium,

all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes,

sometimes other orifices also” (Pynchon 62). Facing a tremendous amount of historical

unconnected fragments, Oedipa hopelessly demands “shall I project a world?” that is to say

“to try what Driblette was, the dark machine in the center of the planetarium, to bring the

estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning” (64). Thus, Oedipa admits that narrating history is

similar to narrating fiction since both are mere projections of a subjective view in accordance

to a particular story or event. This is mainly what makes her incessantly wonder “if the

articles [are] legitimate” (144). Hence, whenever she is asked about the validity of her

resources she prefers not to answer or better say she does not really have the right

straightforward answer: “well, what about her sources! She was avoiding the question, yes”

(139).

It should be noticed, at this stage, that the novel’s return to the past is not an innocent

or nostalgic return, it is rather a critical one signaled out by the implementation of irony. The

narrator ironizes, in fact, any claim to factual knowledge as expressed by Randolph Driblette

and Jesús Arrabal in the novel. Both characters can be interpreted as the mouthpieces of the

author who declares “another world’s intrusion into this one” and warns the reader:

If I were to dissolve in here… be washed down the drain into the Pacific, what

you saw tonight would vanish too. You, that part of you so concerned, God

knows how, with that little world, would also vanish. The only residue in fact

would be things Wharfinger didn't lie about. Perhaps Squamuglia and Faggio, if

they ever existed. Perhaps the Thurn and Taxis mail system. Stamp collectors

tell me it did exist. Perhaps the other, also. The Adversary. But they would be

traces, fossils. Dead, mineral, without value or potential. (62)

The addition of historical references stresses the idea of the illusion of factuality and the status

of history and fiction as ideologically-grounded discourses, that is to say, as human constructs

depending on narrative techniques (White 62). Accordingly there cannot be a single reality or

truth but multiple constructions that depend on the viewpoint of the constructor. Oedipa

notices that the discourse of the official authorities or the “Grand Master” as referred to in the

novel, seems to monopolize most of the discourses reaching into history to which they refer as

their own property, silencing consequently the voice of the minorities (Pynchon 132).

The history that Oedipa comes to learn about is, in fact, the alternative history or the

other muted side of the story, the Trystero’s history. When this arcane system is brought to

the fore, it has definitely threatened the “grand narratives” through denaturalizing them and

“totalized history” through “de-totalizing” it (Hutcheon, Politics18). It represented, at the

time, the Empire’s “time’s ghost”, which worked hard to suppress it yet its traces remained

ill-concealed (Pynchon 136). Subsequently, “over the next century and a half, the paranoia

recedes, as they come to discover the secular Trystero. Power, omniscience, implacable

malice, attributes of what they’d thought to be a historical principle, a Zeitgeist, are carried

over the now human enemy” (136). In an attempt at disempowering the counter-resistant

systems, the hegemonic powers of Thurn and Taxis tried to mute the other by either effacing

them completely from the scene or using violence to destruct them immediately. Presumably,

Bortz (one of Oedipa’s allies) is quite aware of this process of historical effacement since he

resorts to explaining the history of the Trystero from the Thurn and Taxis perspective

signaling that every period of disturbance in the official system parallels a period of affluence

in the opposing system. For instance, the latter “held to a mirror-image theory, by which any

period of instability for Thurn and Taxis must have its reflection in Trystero’s shadow-state”

(134). According to the past documents and to what Nefastis has provided her with, the

Trystero system came as a resistant counter-discourse that opposes the hegemonic

normalizing power of the Thurn and Taxis mail system- the official delivery system in the

protestant northern provinces of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. It gives a voice to

the peripheral outcasts since its “constant theme [is] disinheritance” and represents the “flame

of revolution” (134). The view that history is “discursive”, “provisional”, and “narrativized”

informs the novel showing that the very pillars of Western humanist thinking, especially those

of “universalism” and “hierarchy”, are put under scrutiny (Derrida, Writing 107). History is

woven by the voices of the homogenizing and totalizing systems of Thurn and Taxis which

defend logic, monism, control, and monopoly. This voice strives to be the only voice to be

heard as Arnold Snarb explains to Oedipa “I use the U.S. Mail because I was never taught any

different”; he goes on to affirm that “[he] never thought there was a history to it [Trystero]”

(Pynchon 90). In fact, all the textual fragments that Oedipa has collected from the various

libraries, people, and churches do not seem to give the legitimate history of the Trystero. As

far as her quest is concerned “beyond its origins the libraries told her nothing more about

Trystero. For all they knew, it had never survived the struggle for Dutch independence. To

find the rest, she had to approach from the Thurn and Taxis side. This had its perils” (134).

Accordingly, behind the walls of historical references provided by the hegemonic official mail

system, lies the devoiced history of Trystero, a “dark history slithered unseen” (134). It should

be noted that even if it remained silent, it had surely once existed. Supplying that “void” in

history is the major issue that faces Oedipa who becomes puzzled and at times unable to fill in

the numerous accumulative historical lacunae (106). Yet the only hint she seems to possess is

that history is as much full of truths as it is of lies, and that there can never be one “history”

but only perspectival “histories” instead (Hutcheon, “Postmodern Paratextuality” 305, my

emphasis). Since the Trystero members form the disinherited and underprivileged social

strata, they “could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the

separate, silent, unsuspected world” (Pynchon 101). This different version of history supplies

another perspective of history and not another more truthful history, the history of the ex-

centric or the “excluded middles” as Thomas Pynchon calls them (150). What Trystero’s

members strive at, is to assimilate this version to the well-known hegemonic totalizing

perspective supplied by power-holders. In her attempt to “de-totalize” the “totalized historical

narratives”, Linda Hutcheon opines that “the center no longer holds, and from the decentered

perspective, the ‘marginal’ or the ‘ex-centric’ takes on a new significance in the light of the

implied recognition that our culture is not really the homogeneous monolith (i.e. middles,

male, white, heterosexual, Western)” (Poetics 12). Going beyond binary opposition and

concealing hierarchies paves the way for a heterogeneous and inclusive poetics that resists the

homogenizing tendencies of the late capitalist American society. Oedipa has, in fact, “heard

all about excluded middles; they were bad shit to be avoided; and how had it ever happened

here, with the chances so good for diversity?” (Pynchon 150). The Trystero members

aspiration is not to monopolize or take the place of the official system; it is to pluralize the

past and the present through “merg[ing] with [their] old enemy Thurn and Taxis” so that their

“network could unify the Continent” (135). Trystero’s users covet the chance for the “politics

of diversity” or “micropolitics”, where no matter how disparate the groups and their lifestyles

are, they manage to survive in the same soil with fair opportunities and considerations (Best

and Kellner 128). They yearn to fuse in a harmonious mosaic where complementarities and

communication take over conflict and suppression. This view emerges from another

completely different zone, one that encompasses all and works within the “politics of

inclusion”, instead of the already known zones of hierarchies and binary oppositions, the

zones of “ones and zeroes” (Pynchon 150). Hence, the “either- or” logic is transformed into

“both- and” logic that opposes exclusion, sameness, and binarism (Hutcheon Poetics 49). It

creates “a third hybrid space” according to which all clear-cut lines of division fuse and a

“third route excluded by these contradictory ones” takes shape (Derrida, Writing 161).

Frederick Jameson insures in this context that the outcome of such an all-encompassing

tendency is a norm-free zone, hence “if the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant

ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of

stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm” (qtd. in Currie 27). The boundaries

between true and false, “fact and fiction”, “high culture and mass culture”, “art and life” are

subsequently violated. By the end of the novel, Oedipa’s bewilderment and trepidation

heighten making her unable to extract fantasy from reality and historical certainties from

fictional history. Thus “either Oedipa is in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia or a real

Trystero” (Pynchon 150). She even has trouble asserting the legitimacy of her resources and

their intellectual value vis-à-vis the plethoric combinatory nature of what has been known as

“elitist culture” emanating from literature and “mass culture” emerging from popular genres

and embodied in TV serials, pop music, cinema, and social media (Butler 64). Hence Lot 49

fits perfectly well the patterns of historiographic metafiction which is intensely self-reflexive

and historically grounded in the discursive cultural patterns. The ironical return to the past

insures a self-critical position within which the narrative clearly stands and works to subvert

revealing the paramount metafictional paradox of narcissistic narratives. This recourse to

historiographic metafiction maps the newly-established “liminal zone” in which the literary

narcissistic text becomes a space of “hybridity” rather than hegemony, of “negotiation” rather

than “negation”, and of “inclusion” rather than “exclusion” (Hutcheon, Poetics 218).

The above-analysis shows that history is textual, and hence incommensurate with the

principles of teleology and universalism. Second, the historian’s functions are similar to the

narrator’s one. Third, the literary text itself is “historicized” and overtly acknowledges its

“historicity” announcing that “writing and reading are always historically and socially

determinate events, performed in the world and upon the world” (Montrose 23). Thus, the

poetics and politics of postmodernism are highly interlinked and symbiotic. The text’s

outright call for a “third liminal space” that includes all disparate groups and histories is, in

fact, a call for a politics of plurality and differences and a poetics of discursive hospitability

that welcomes paradoxes and dissimilarities (Bhabha 51).Yet, while some discourses are

inserted in order to be ironized and hence criticized, others are consciously inserted in order to

emphasize the inclusiveness and the mosaic-like and dialogic nature of the literary text.

II. The Narcissistic anxiety of ‘non-influence’:

Lot 49 represents a “multidimensional space” in which “a variety of writings, none of

them original, blend and clash” (Barthes, “The Death of the Author” 2). It encompasses, in

fact, a number of intertexts ranging from literary, historical, scientific, religious, to cultural

intertexts resulting in the construction of a patchwork of discourses and styles. As far as the

literary intertexts are concerned, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Vladimir Nabokov are

some of the most recurrent references in Lot 49. To start with, the title of the novel The

Crying of Lot 49 recalls presumably a passage in Joyce’s Ulysses especially in this instance:

“the lacquey by the door of Dillon’s auction rooms shook his handbell twice again and viewed

himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet. Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard

the beats of the bell, the cries of the auctioneer within four and nine. Those lovely curtains”

(Ulysses 304). Here the references to the auction, its crying, and to the numbers four and nine

are akin to Lot 49. This Joycean similarity and other references in the narrative reveal the

strong influence that the latter has on Pynchon’s text. The Pynchonesque space whereby

political, socio-economic, and intellectual vectors intersect echoes Joyce’s complex allusive

style and labyrinthine narratives. Even in terms of critical reception, both novelists seem to

have a lot in common. Academic critical essays has proliferated to the point that scholars

“speak, self-deprecatingly, of a Pynchon industry or ‘Pyndustry’ analogous to Joyce industry”

(Mchale et al. 1). Moreover, the use of myth such as the Oedipus myth in the naming of the

heroine is similar to Joyce’s texts which combine medleys of voices. The dialogism and high

allusiveness to other literary as well as non-literary texts define Pynchon’s intertextual

relation to Joyce.

Likewise, the acronym “N.A.D.A” recalls Ertnest Hermingway major post-war literary

themes which dominated the American scene at that time. It brings back in the same way F.

Scott Fitzgerald earlier thematization of the decline of the American Dream28, social

corruption, and lethargy that monopolized the American literary topoi in the 1920s. Mucho

Maas, Oedipa’s husband explains once “we were a number of the National Automobile

Dealer’s Association. N.A.D.A. Just this creaking metal sign that said nada, nada, against the

blue sky. I used to wake up hollering” (Pynchon 144). Nada is the German word for

“nothing” and it reveals in this context the collapse of all human quests for meaning and

cohesion to indeterminacy and void. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for instance, illustrates

that:

despite the optimism of the era, the dreams of status-seeking Long islanders

soon become nightmares. Using Jay Gatsby to exemplify the rise and fall of the

American Dream, Fitzgerald’s novel traces the arc of a life as it begins in

wonder, reaches for the stars, confronts society’s spiritual emptiness and

gratuitous materialism, and ends in tragic death. (Tunc 74)

The incessant disenchantment with the bogus achievements of the American society and

policy is the common ground that unites these texts and the advocator of complacency and

28 “The American dream is a social vision in which, as James Truslow Adams put it in 1931, ‘each man and each woman shall be able to attain . . . the fullest stature of which they are innately capable’ (374)… In a dictionary of ‘picturesque expressions’ published in 1985, American dream is defined as consisting originally of ‘the vision of attaining maximum security and fulfillment of opportunity as an individual without concern for social distinctions’” (Tyson 5-6).

pessimism among many American writers29. According to Castillo, “the echoes of

Hemingway’s stoics and Fitzgerald’s famous billboard (the eyes of T.J. Eckelburg in The

Great Gatsby)”, are palpable “in this homage to the urban novel of high modernism. The

reader in search for profound meaning will find exactly what Pynchon has already offered

openly: nothing” (31).This sign asserts the novel’s oscillation between the thrust of meaning

and meaninglessness, the propensity for reaching profound truth and the truth of “emptiness

and void” (Pynchon 141). Hence, Mucho tries to escape from the nihilistic void granted by the

simulated versions of reality he is entrapped in while working and by the LSD pills that he

becomes addicted to.

Wendell Mass is, in fact, a disk jockey in a radio station who “suffered regular crisis

of conscience about his profession” (3). He does not “believe in any of it” since “all the bits

and pieces coaled uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed

exhaust, dust, body wastes- it made him sick to look, but he had to look” (5). Being a disk

jockey, Mucho tends to live in within simulated versions of music and images and within

commercialized unethical practices of the media. For instance, he once interviews Oedipa

after the scene in Dr. Hilarious office and lies about her name on air, an untruthful act that

surprised Oedipa intensely:

‘Thank you, Mrs Edna Mosh,’ he wrapped up, ‘for your eyewitness account of

this dramatic siege at the Hilarious Psychiatric Clinic. This is KCUF Mobile

Two, sending it back now to ‘Rabbit’ Warren, at the studio’. He cut his power.

Something was not quite right. ‘Edna Mosh?’ Oedipa said.

‘It’ll come out the right way,’ Mucho said. ‘I was allowing for the distortion on

these rigs, and then when they put it on tape.’ (114)

He even resorts to drugs, namely the LSD, in order to grant himself some solipsism and to

29 Some of these writers are Pynchon, Hermingway, and Fitzgerald.

evade the lethargic monotonous “generic” life of South California.

Another overt allusion to Nabokov’s Lolita is employed in the text and modeled by

Metzger -Oedipa’s lawyer- who left her at the very apex of the execution to run off to Nevada

with a nymphet. Accordingly, Serge’s Song draws a parallelism between Metzger and

Humbert Humbert -Nabokov’s autodiegetic narrator-; it says “what chance has lonely surfer

boy/ For the love of a surfer chick/ With all these Humbert Humbert cats” (120).

Apart from the literary intertext, non-literary ones are of equal substantiality to the

textual fabric of Lot 49. The constant use of scientific discourse, technical words, and

quantum theories denotes the importance of the scientific intertext. In the Pynchonesque

fictive network “we move… beyond psychology, beyond the human, and confront… the

world atomized and vacant” (Castillo 22). A major scientific metaphor in Pynchon’s text and

one of the most recurrent motifs in his numerous other writings, is “entropy” which he

explores from two different scientific stands: the theory of thermodynamics and information

theory. As outlined by Nefastis in the text, thermodynamic entropy studies the relations

between heat and the different forms of energy and the forms of unbalances in the distribution

of energy in a given system. Oedipa, in fact, reaches the stage of perplexity when trying

Nefastis’s machine, since she is incapable of receiving the information transmitted to her

through the demon. It is noteworthy here that “thermodynamics gives no support to the

assumption that the universe is running down. Gain in entropy means loss of information and

nothing more” (Allen and Maxwell 815). Pynchon resorts to physics in many other instances

in the novel referring in a way to his educational background and scientific advanced

knowledge since he majored in physics before having recourse to literature. Richard Pearce

goes on to assert that “Pynchon’s mind is imbued with quantum mechanics” (Krafft 35). The

juxtaposition of scientific and non-scientific references can be noted as a criticism of the

Western humanist rational view that considers science as being exact and factual. The

discourse of sciences is trivialized and ironized by Nefastis’s hazy and superficial

explanations. In the novel, science turns out to be provisional and highly depending on the

receiver and his or her sensitivity.

The intertextual site of Lot 49 is intensively miscellaneous and heterogeneous where a

medley of distinct discourses intermingle stressing what Bakhtin calls “heteroglossia” or

“dialogism” in the narrative (7). The Pynchonesque narrative is, thus, a pastiche that conflates

different styles, voices, discourses aiming at showing the openness of the literary text to other

discourses and the divergence of interpretations which emanates from different perspectives.

Laurence Rosenhein adds that “Pynchon’s mind is imbued with a lot of things –from world

history to opera to the New York Subway System” (qtd. in Krafft 35). In fact, Inverarity’s

emblematic advice to Oedipa “‘keep it bouncing’, he told her once, ‘that’s all the secret; keep

it bouncing” is Pynchon’s implicit advice to his readers which triggers them to never set limits

and rigid boundaries that separate disciplines in any given discourse aspiring to an

interdisplinarian all-encompassing approach (Pynchon 148). Pynchon, thus, expands his

intertextual fictive web into non-literary realms: technical, historical, mathematical, physical,

televisual, cinematic, ad infinitum. The novel becomes consequently a pastiche or a

“privileged arena where languages in conflict can meet, bringing together in tension and

dialogue, not only opposing characters but also different historical ages, social levels, drawing

realities of human life” (Brooker 243). Generally, narcissistic fiction turns out to be a

“harbinger of a multipolar and multicultural worlds” or a favorable arena for the “dialogic

encounter” (134).

III. The mise en abymic redoubling of Lot 49:

The story-within-story technique is a recurrent device in Lot 49 which goes on to

resemble the Russian matryoshka doll with its multiple layering. It embeds narrative

fragments into the fictive macrocosm in an attempt to holistically or partially mirror the larger

narrative. This device is extensively displayed in Lot 49 through the intrusion of visual arts,

cinematographic narratives, dramatic texts, and musicals. Such embedded segments, which

constitute a “second degree narrative”, are similar in a way or another to the first narrative and

are constantly reminiscent of the fictionality of the text through their emphasis on their own

artificiality and constructedness (Genette, Narrative Discourse 231).

1. Visual redoubling in “Borolando el Manto Varo”:

At the end of the first chapter, Oedipa recollects the details of her attendance of an

exhibition of paintings once in Mexico City in the company of Pierce. At that time, she felt

captured by a painting entitled “Borolando el Manto Varo” by a Spanish exile named

Remedios Varo30. The painting in front of which she has long stood and stared contains:

a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair,

prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry

which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the

void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships, and forests

of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.

(Pynchon 11)

The painting and its meticulous description mirror in a way the protagonist’s own status as

she describes it herself: imprisoned in her own tower until Pierce “lock[s] on her tower door

and come[s] up the conch-like stairs” (11). As the narrative accounts for, Pierce has come to

liberate Oedipa and take “her away from nothing” in order to make her embrace the magic of

getting outside her confines (11). Yet when she goes beyond the tower and its void, she

discovered that the world is not a consolatory ordered cosmos, but rather an indefinite

patchwork of puzzling constructions. “Having no apparatus except gut fear and female

cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field

30 See fig. 2 in the opening pages of the dissertation

strength, count its lines of force”, Oedipa cries seeing the world “refracted through those

tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to

cry” (11-12). This mirror-like moment echoes Oedipa’s journey which takes her from a clue

to another until she ends up in a dark auction room awaiting the crying; a distinguishable

crying that may bring the comfort she is looking for. Before Pierce’s will, Oedipa was living

comfortably in her own housewifery complacent life with Mucho for “a fat deckful of days

which seemed (wouldn’t she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the

same way subtly like a conjurer’s deck” (2). Has Pierce not mentioned her name in the will,

Oedipa will never go outside her confining tower. The life she is entrapped in takes the form

of “the void” or the N.A.D.A as expressed by her husband and metamorphoses after when she

is launched in her quest for a “Stelliferous Meaning” (64).This inquiry unleashes Oedipa’s

dormant curiosity and energizes her former passivity making her realize that “the world is

abundant. No end to it” (118). Hence Pynchon’s famed and most quoted citation “the act of

metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you are: inside, safe, or

outside, lost” has its own implication on the life of the heroine herself (105). The tower

accordingly stands for the conventional lethargic and compliant thinking according to which

one lives in mere illusions, never touching upon the truths of being. If one positions oneself

within the confines of the classical complacent thinking, he or she will remain ignorantly

comfortable. Contrariwise, if one goes beyond these bars, he or she steps out of conformity

and lies. It is noteworthy, though, that this departure from compliance and lethargy is not an

unproblematic exercise since it does not clarify nor simplify truth as much as it complicates it.

The “act of metaphor”, as outlined by above-mentioned quotation, is akin to the act of

reading and to the classical approaches to reading as an experience of decoding an ultimate

meaning. Reading from this classical perspective will be a comfortable experience since it

does not include the reader in any of the puzzling exercises of “meaning optimization” (Iser

85). With the advent of the new pragmatic approaches to reading, the reader becomes

entrapped in the middle of infinite meanings and endless interpretations (22). The

communication with the text aims at involving the reader and consequently at emptying him

or her from the illusionary comfort they used to enjoy before. The approach becomes one of

“construct[ing]” rather than of “reflect[ing]” truth (Waugh 53).

“Varo’s painting”, in Nancy Miller’s term, “is an inescapable textual web”, through

which the text is refracted (Castillo 39). Consequently, “Oedipa has looked down at her feet

and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together

a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and

so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d been no escape” (Pynchon 11). Fleeing

the lethargy invading Southern California with the help of her lover, Oedipa is taken aback by

a painting that tells her that the process of artistic production is never a complete process. It is

rather constantly constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed according to the variable

responses of the receiver to it. “Caught up in a web of her own weaving, in an ecstasy of

discovery and reordering, Oedipa passes almost imperceptibly from fabrication; she is taken

into her desiring machine and lost” (Castillo 40). The painting, accordingly, reduplicates the

story of Lot 49 showing that visual art is a “text”, or a form of narrative that provides the main

narrative with its replica.

2. Televisual reduplication through Cashiered:

Oedipa has, first, met Metzger -Inverarity’s lawyer- in Echo Courts motel, where they

watched a movie called Cashiered. Surprisingly enough for Oedipa, Metzger has acted in this

movie when he was a child playing the role of little Baby Igor. The movie revolves around a

father cashiered from the British Army, who was expelled for cowardice despite the fact that

he was just covering up for a friend. In order to redeem himself, the father follows the old

regiment to Gallipoli, where he builds a midget submarine and navigates weekly in the

Dardanelles sneaking into the Sea of Marmara and Torpedo, accompanying with him his son -

Baby Igor- and dog. Such a cinematographic narrative mirrors, in fact, a part of the first

narrative in its production and reception generating a repeated reduplication at the level of the

enunciation. Here the enoncé of the movie reflects on the enunciation as a whole, that is the

narrated reflects on the narrative. Baby Igor’s song which is embedded in the movie: “‘Gainst

the Hun and the Turk/ Never once do we shirk/ My daddy, my doggie, and me’”, is, in its

turn, similar to Beaconsfield Charcoal story as well as to the Trystero story (Pynchon 19). The

main aim behind the father’s infringement of the law and stepping beyond the legal

boundaries to the Turkish sea is to prove that he is not a coward as he is accused of in the

army. Redemption, for him, can be reached only through “going to the bottom, trying to get

under the net” (21). This recourse to creating a clandestine alternative program that opposes

the official one is akin to the Trystero’s members who resort to the creation of a secret

network that includes the underprivileged in order to counter-act. As he becomes an outcast or

one of the “E class subs”, the father chooses to be different and to go beyond the frontiers.

This structural doubling that reflects the Trystero earlier history and development serves as a

constant reminiscent to the readers of the artificiality of the cinematic narrative and by

implication of the Trystero history which is itself nothing but a part of a larger fictive

macrocosm. Metzger or Baby Igor, the lawyer-actor, suggests to Oedipa to play a game where

she takes off her clothes gradually whenever he gives her a piece of information concerning

Cashiered. Oedipa agrees to play this game since she yearns to reach the final meaning of the

movie. She puts on as much clothes as she can so that she could get more information about

the movie. Whenever she takes something off, Metzger supplies her with a new detail about

Cashiered. This is, in fact, a telling scene in Lot 49 since it is analogous to the movie’s

revealing of its layers and its processing toward the end. The narrative itself, by analogy,

takes off its disguises and covers gradually proceeding towards intentional informative

bareness. In the case of Oedipa, the movie did not proceed exactly in the same way as

Metzger informs her. Thus, she feels betrayed by the latter’s plot so she “leaped to her feet

and run across to the other wall to turn and glare at Metzger. ‘They didn’t make it! She

yelled” (30). Likewise, the first narrative goes in a similar pattern regressing constantly

without attaining any final consolatory meaning. Metzger, the narrator of the movie, is similar

to the first narrator who stuffs the reader with information that proves to be useless at the end.

This plethora of information turns out to be misleading for the reader and thus similar to what

Genette terms as narrative “snares” (Narrative Discourse 77). Being a lawyer, Metzger

claims that his job as a lawyer is akin to being an actor and is by implication similar to being a

narrator. Even real life conversations which are based on the exercise of ordering and

selection are narratives. In this case, Metzger emphasizes the act of storytelling resulting in

letting the “narration” take over the “narrated” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 57). Hence, the mise

en abymic structure endeavors to show that the text is rather constructed through the outright

inclusion and exclusion of narrative fragments and overt out-speaking of its own narrating

methods. The regress into narration is further emphasized by the “aporistique” doubling of

The Courier’s Tragedy -the play-within-story.

3. The “theater and its double”: The Courier’s Tragedy

“‘The Courier’s Tragedy,’ said Miles, ‘she’s right. The same kind of kinky thing’”

(Pynchon 48). This textual instance shows the text’s own revealing of its own embeddedness

of doubling in Lot 49. It resembles the narrative on the linguistic, story, and narrative levels

showing that it contains within its own frames other minor mirroring fragments that redouble

the structure in an aporetic way. Not only does it mirror the narrative, but it goes on to claim

its own narcissism as well as the narrative self-consciousness through commenting on its

production-reception aesthetics and mechanisms of construction in general.

Within the play, the narrator installs some of the Jacobean drama conventions to

rework them and their critical reception as well. In her way to look for the significance of the

Trystero, “a concept, a system, or just a word” that she has recently come across when

inquiring about the post horn symbol in the ladies restroom in The Scope, Oedipa learns about

the play and grows keen in attending it (87). The Paranoids, a musical band that Oedipa met at

her arrival to Echo Courts motel, informed her about the play when they heard her discussion

with Metzger about the human bones used in one of Inverarity’s companies as a cigarette’s

filter, assuming that the play has a similar plot to that of the history and development of this

business industry. The Courier’s Tragedy revolves around the tragedy of the Thurn and Taxis

mail system. Angelo, the duke of Squamuglia murdered the duke of Faggio by poisoning the

feet on an image of Saint Narcissus “which feet the Duke was in the habit of kissing every

Sunday” (49). Pasquale, the illegitimate son takes over as “regent for his half-brother Niccolo,

the rightful son of the good Duke” (49). Together with Angelo, he devises to kill Niccolo; yet,

the latter is saved by Hercole, a henchman. Niccolo grows up and hides on Angelo’s court and

“masquerades as a special courier of the Thurn and Taxis family, who at the time held a postal

monopoly throughout most of the Holy Empire” (50). Meanwhile, Angelo refused to employ

anyone but his own messengers to carry his communication with Pasquale. Domenico,

Niccolo’s friend who knows the surreptitious plan of Hercole and Niccolo, tries to reveal to

Angelo the secret yet he is stopped by Ercole and cruelly punished: beaten, burnt, castrated,

hung, tongue-torn, and mutilated. In the third act, Angelo starts to distrust his messengers and

decides to send Niccolo with a message. Soon after, he discovers Niccolo’s secret and decides

to “dance his masque as if it were the truth” (55). In his way back from Faggio, Niccolo is

murdered by the lake. Angelo kills all his men and throws them in the same lake. Later on,

“their bones were fished up again and made in charcoal and the charcoal into ink, which

Angelo… used in all his subsequent communications with Faggio” (57).

Elizabethan theatrical conventions are inscribed in this merely Aristotelian five-act

tragedy. Oedipa, as one of the audience attending the performance, relies heavily on the

dramatic text in order to get the meaning of the play. When she felt as if entrapped in a maze

of meaninglessness after the end of the play, she looked for Driblette, the director of the play,

to clarify things for her. Yet Driblette’s answer has just furthered her confusion and ironized

her willingness to know more about the play. He criticizes her one-dimensional reception of

the play which revolves uniquely around the textual part wondering “why… is everybody so

interested in texts?”(61) Presumably, she ignores all the other meaning potential theatrical

signs. He likens her tight relationship and complete dependence on the text or written script in

order to actualize the meaning of the performance to Puritans relationship with the Bible and

to their tendency to elevate the text to a sacred status. This recalls the idea of “Western

logocentrism” where the written word is regarded to be superior to speech (Derrida, Writing

246). This common approach to theater infuriates Driblette who tells Oedipa “‘you don’t

understand,’ getting mad. ‘You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the bible. So hung up with

words, words’” (Pynchon 62). The error that Oedipa has committed, is seeking meaning in the

written script whose versions keep on changing from a library to another as well as from the

director of the play whom she searched off-stage. The dramatic text represents only one

segment of the performance and not its totality. Here, the narrator parodies basically the

classical critical reception of the theatrical performance which reduces the performance with

all its various elements such as stage directions, light, music, props, movement, tone, and

actions to the verbal and textual structure, to just “words, words” (62). Such kind of

monopolist criticism diminishes the importance and the participation of all the other

constitutive parts of the performance in the construction of an overall meaning ignoring the

peculiar function of theater in general. What the audience need to embrace and rely on for

their understanding of theater is “the totality of the performance” or the ensemble of systems

which are basically organized in “the mise en scene” (Pavis 203). Yet what Oedipa does, as a

classical receiver is a “mise en pieces” that tends to segment and abstract the performance

producing accordingly what Patrice Pavis calls a “butchered effect” (204). The materialization

of the performance or what is technically termed “sublimation” means the immediate

translation of every received sign into a signified that is into an abstracted meaning (215).

What the spectator needs is to resist the reduction of the performance to a univocal written

trace, and the tempting inclination to finding a final transcendent meaning. The focus shifts

here from the product that is the aesthetic object –the denouement or the ‘what’ to the process

that stresses the ‘how’, raising the awareness of the audience to the status of theater as an

artifact through the “alienation effect” that allows them a critical distance from the play (qtd.

in Selden and Widdowson 80). This marks the Brechtian shift from dramatic theater that

centers on the plot and implicates its receiver in the linear evolvement of the plot to epic

theater that focuses mainly on the narrative process itself with all its complexities turning the

reader into an active participant in the process of meaning construction (80). Thus, the

audiences have to liberate their minds from the constant will to translate the signifiers, the

physical entities, into signifieds and to sensitize the body of the performance on stage, the

material side of it (Pavis 215). This resistance is, in fact, a “desublimation [that] helps the

audience savor ‘the erotic in the theater process’” as Lehmann explains it (qtd. in Pavis 214).

Any aesthetic medium should first acknowledge its own aestheticism in order to sensitize the

reader to the substantiality of the awareness of the artificiality of the medium. Hence Driblette

informs Oedipa that his aim is “to give the spirit flesh” because he is aware that the

audience’s approach to theater is mostly based on the dramatized text since they tend to “hung

up with words” (Pynchon 62). He even insists that “[the] play exists, not in that file cabinet,

not in any paperback [Oedipa] is looking for, but-” only in the mind of the audience whose

response is part of the performance and part of the potential meaning as well. Theater

criticism becomes hence an interactive experience that relies on the production in the same

way as it relates to reception and its language aspires to be “a speech outside words” in

Antonin Artaud’s words, since non-verbal gestures themselves speak without the use of words

(68). This is mainly what Driblette longs for: to develop a feel for “the spirit of the play, not

necessarily the words” (Pynchon 127). The spectators are themselves aware and constantly

reminded of the artificiality of the play and hence they are part of the overall performance.

The text is only one “vector” among an open and various network of “vectors” that allow for

an all-encompassing dynamic critical view of theater (Pavis 226). This foregrounds the

dynamism of the performance as a whole and paves the ground for the emergence of a

“theater of energy” from the Lyotardian perspective or a “theater of cruelty” from the

Artaudian standards, whose language speaks outside of words and whose audiences

complement the energetic open-ended meaning of the performance (qtd. in Derrida, Writing

315).

The performance of The Courier’s Tragedy, as the text shows, relies heavily on the

dramatic text of Wharfinger that Oedipa kept looking for from Zapf’s library yet each time

she finds the script, she finds out that the text is modified and this, in a way, doubles her

confusion especially that she exclusively looks for meaning in the dramatic text. Here comes

Driblette’s warning “the words, who cares? They are rote noises to hold line bashes with, to

get past the bone barriers around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head”

(Pynchon 62). This parodic passage is a call for theater to recreate itself through its extraction

from logocentrism and its subjugation to the text, and through its distancing from imitative

pretensions since it does not imitate life and reality yet it does construct its own reality

through repetition and interactive processes of meaning construction (Derrida Writing 17).

Oedipa and the reader, by implication, transform from being “just a whiz at pursuing strange

words in Jacobean texts” to active meaning-processors (Pynchon 83). When Oedipa learns

that Driblette has committed suicide, she panics since, as an Aristotelian spectator, she

depends vitally on the director who represents to her the indispensable pole that insures the

attainability of a transcendental final meaning. Subsequently, this depiction changes and

Oedipa gradually finds out that searching the significance of the play and of the Trystero in

general remains an elusive process that necessitates more than words to be fathomed. Such

use of theatrical mise en abyme structure serves to parody through installing the very

conventions of Aristotelian theater the dramaturgical analysis that preceded performance

theories in an attempt to rework and subvert them. This technique helps increase

consciousness about the very state of theater and legitimize an alternative criticism based on

the interactive dynamic experience of “desublimation and sublimation” or else “construction

and deconstruction” which “decentralizes” words or the dramatic text in general and defends

the “vectorization” that permits the calling back of the idea of a total theater, “turning theater

into a function rather than an intellectual experience” (Artaud 70). The play does not embed

or encode truth within itself as much as it problematizes it, so does the narrative as a whole.

The study of the strands of overt and covert diegetic narcissism in Lot 49 shows the

inscription of the text in doubleness and reveals the narcissistic text as self-, reader-, theory-,

and criticism- conscious. The text acknowledges its outright call for the reader to actualize its

optimized meanings and to sensitize the emergence of a new poetics of contingency and

plurality. Lot 49 is, therefore, a sincere text that displays its means of construction and

attempts an adjustment of its means of appreciation. Subsequently, the third chapter is going

to concentrate on the linguistic means of fiction construction since “in the first case, the text

presents itself as diegesis; in the second, it is unobfuscated text, language” (Hutcheon,

Narcissistic 23).

Third Chapter:

STRANDS OF OVERT AND COVERT

LINGUISTIC NARCISSISM IN

THE CRYING OF LOT 49

The linguistically narcissistic text generates a mirror to its own verbal construction

through the high self-consciousness of its existence as words (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 62).

This self-awareness influences the view of art as reflector of reality and mediator of truth

since this literary form chooses to turn its mirrors toward its own mechanisms of construction

which consist mainly of words (46). The linguistic narcissism of Lot 49 is going to be elicited

in the forthcoming analysis in an attempt to determine to what extent the narrative is

linguistically aware. Upholding the lens of poststructuralist and literary pragmatic theories,

this study will proceed from probing the overt traits of linguistic narcissism which are

displayed through the thematization of language, to analyzing features of covert linguistic

narcissism which demand a process of meaning actualization on the part of the reader.

I. Overt linguistic narcissism in Lot 49:

In Lot 49, the linguistic tool is overtly thematized all along the narrative showing its

inscription in words and its consciousness of the very medium it uses in its fictive world-

building (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 25). The subsequent analysis is going to be based on Mikhail

Bakhtin’s theory of language which maintains the idea that language is “the creation of its

user” and that it is a “social construct” ideologically-grounded (12). Pynchon often uses his

characters to warn against words and their manipulative nature, and to outline the potency as

well as the limitations of language in general. Language, which is an extensively contentious

subject in a postmodern context and a suspect concept within a poststructuralist frame of

reference, proves to be a conspicuous thematic concern in the Pynchonesque fictive web.

1. The linguistic Demon:

“Entropy” is a recurrent theme in Lot 49 as well as in many other Pynchonesque texts

such as Entropy, V., Gravity’s Rainbow. It carries many implications to communication and to

the system of language in general. To elicit the meaning of entropy, one has to undergo a

highly complex process of sorting out the origin of the word and its different usages. In the

text, this term is introduced and explained by John Nefastis, an engineering physicist who

owns the Maxwell’s Demon machine. Trying to provide Oedipa with rejoinders concerning

her interrogations, Nefastis “began then, bewilderingly, to talk about something called

entropy. The word bothered him as much as ‘Trystero’ bothered Oedipa” (Pynchon 67, my

emphasis). The main problem that surfaces, when explaining entropy, is the polysemous

nature of the word as such. Being a technical term, entropy acquires different meanings within

the theory of thermodynamics, the theory of information, Maxwell’s Demon, Lot 49, and in

culture in general. In his short story Entropy, Thomas Pynchon explains that entropy is “the

measure of disorganization for a closed system” (74). In Encarta 2009, entropy is defined

according to the second law of thermodynamics which provides a laconic definition of this

property:

Entropy can be thought of as a measure of how close a system is to equilibrium;

it can also be thought of as a measure of the disorder in the system. The law

states that the entropy- that is, the disorder- of an isolated system can never

decrease. Thus, when an isolated system achieves a configuration of maximum

entropy, it can no longer undergo change: It has reached equilibrium.

According to thermodynamic theory, the terminal state in which energy and temperature

stagnate and motions cease is, in fact, that of entropy.

Yet, this term acquires a different meaning according to the different contexts in which

it is employed. In communication theory, “entropy refers to the measure of uncertainty in a

system” (Grant 44). It should be noted in this field that “the higher the degree of

disorganization, noise, uncertainty, the more possibility for new signals and new information”

(44). Thus, the more spontaneous, coincidental, and random the information is, the more

entropic communication becomes. Entropy proves to be an adequate metaphor that applies to

certain phenomena in the world such as “galaxy, engine, human being, culture, whatever-

must evolve spontaneously toward the Condition of the More Probable” (Pynchon, Entropy

73). Entropy therein diminishes any pretension to fixed objective and factual certainties and

permeates a degree of indeterminacy and non-closure to all the systems in life. It denounces

any possible recourse to determinism, stability, and factuality through veering towards

contingency, probability, and plurality.

The two fields of study, information and thermodynamics, are hugely dissimilar

“except at one point: Maxwell’s Demon” (Pynchon 84). In the fifth chapter, Oedipa heads

toward Berkeley to see John Nefastis after she learned about him and his machine from

Stanley Koteks. The latter tells her about the Nefastis machine in order to back up the idea

that the Yoyodyne incorporation encourages invention and provides patents to new inventors

such as Nefastis who is considered as a:

Scotch scientist who had once postulated a tiny intelligence, known as

Maxwell's Demon. The Demon could sit in a box among air molecules that

were moving at all different random speeds, and sort out the fast molecules

from the slow ones… Since the Demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn't have

put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law

of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing, causing perpetual, motion.

(68)

Thus, the Demon operates only according to a dyadic movement. It demands an addresser and

a receiver and a mutual exchange of information between both poles. Therefore, the work of

the machine depends totally on the response of its user. The Demon as well as the receiver

should go through a symbiotic exercise of sorting out molecules. If this sorting is unbalanced

between both poles, the operation becomes one-dimensional and the disequilibrium

predominates generating an entropic state. Oedipa sees the work of the Demon as a complex

yet futile one since she could not identify the purpose behind the use of such an operation.

While she sees that “sorting isn’t work”, Koteks interprets it as a worthwhile “mental work”

(69). In fact, when she gets to Nefastis apartment inquiring about the machine, Nefastis

explains to her:

‘Communication is the key,’ cried Nefastis. ‘The Demon passes his data on to

the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of

molecules in that box. The Demon collects data on each and every one. …The

sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feedback something

like the same quantity of information. To keep it all cycling. On the secular

level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving. One little movement,

against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over and over with

each power stroke. (84-5)

The box allows for the exercise of sorting out information and balancing communication. In

fact, in Maxwell’s Demon, “the decrease of thermodynamic entropy is balanced by an

increase in information entropy, thereby making the whole thing possible when a person

whom Nefastis calls a ‘sensitive’ transmits information to the Demon that Nefastis believes he

is actually in his machine” (Bloom, Thomas Pynchon 25-6). Oedipa spends half an hour

staring at Clerk Maxwell’s picture in the box, striving to sort out the Demon, yet nothing

occurs, and the machine remains static.

The theoretical amalgamation of two disconnected fields is quite complicated for

Oedipa and Koteks’ as well as Nefastis’ explanation of the work of the box further obfuscates

the mechanism. When she asks for further clarification crying “help! You’re not reaching

me”, Nefastis chooses to switch registers and to rely on the literary instead of the scientific

discourse (Pynchon 84). Attempting at clarifying his stance, he asserts that “‘entropy is a

figure of speech, then …a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of

information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally

graceful, but also objectively true’” (85). Oedipa, growing skeptical towards the machine as

well as towards the metaphor, sees this figure of speech as a “language barrier”, whereas

Nefastis proves to be a “fanatic about the Demon’s reality” (85). Whenever Oedipa’s

skepticism and perplexity heighten, Nefastis “smile[s]; impenetrable, calm, a believer” (85).

He, in fact, believes in the machine and in the metaphor as such, holding up to the view of the

metaphor as an “ornament of reality” (Barthes, The Rustle of Language18) since the Demon

“makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true” (85). He holds to

the pretension that words are truthful and that reality is objectively transmitted through the

paradigmatic dimension of language. This paradigmatic pole of language is, as Patricia

Waugh explains, “the metaphorical dimension of language, the vertical dimension through

substitution.” It is opposed to the syntagmatic dimension which denotes “the metonymic

plane, horizontal dimension that works through combination” (53). According to Nefastis,

metaphoric substitution is, therefore, a consolatory trustworthy medium for mediating truths.

The communication between the Demon and human beings occurs only if the person is a

“sensitive” and a “believer” in the power of the metaphor and the metaphoric equations. The

novel, in its turn, tackles entropy as “extracted from its scientific context, and injected into

aesthetics” (Leland 45). Hence, “the language of sciences” blends with the “language of

spirituation” resulting in a metaphoric compensation of one over the other (Mendelson 26).

Nefastis’s fanatic belief in entropy, in the analogy between thermodynamic entropy and

information entropy, and consequently in the potency of metaphor, is his major hubris. This

leads him to mistake language for reality and to mistake Maxwell’s machine for life. He has a

blind “faith in his metaphor, and believes that the truth of that faith can objectively be

demonstrated and confirmed” (26). According to Nefastis syllogistic reasoning, metaphorical

language becomes a faithful mediator of truth and advocator of certitudes. It has neutral,

objective, and explanatory tendencies. Thus, this physicist does not only believe in the

factuality an absolutism of the scientific discourse, but he goes on to state the objectivism and

truthfulness of the literary discourses. The Demon is, consequently, elevated to the status of

“reality by physicists and information theorists who have sought to protect the validity of the

Second Law of Thermodynamics” (Leland 49). This claim baffles Oedipa who dubiously

inquires “but what… if the Demon exists only because the two equations look alike? Because

of the metaphor?” (Pynchon 85). Oedipa, therefore, questions the possibility of any actual

existence of entropy besides its linguistic existence as a word. She grows suspicious to the

representational capacity of language and to the objectivism of scientific reality in general.

Reality appears only as an “absurd play of words” where “our attempts to find

coherence beyond the order of words are doomed to failure” (Leland 49). It can be

linguistically valid, but it can never be able to represent reality as such. The Demon, therefore,

proves to be a linguistic Demon rather than a real one. The common point between

thermodynamics, information theory, Lot 49, and literature in general is not the Demon but

rather language. No matter how disparate the fields of inquiry and systems are, only words

can provide them with a common ground in which they can intersect and fuse. Oedipa’s role

becomes accordingly surrogate to that of the reader. As she strives to supply a pattern and a

“Stelliferous Meaning” to the random flow of information that continuously bump into her

way, the reader searches to pattern the chaotic and excessive interpenetration of information

provided by the narrative. Yet the Pynchonesque fictional web is reluctant to any attempt at

organization and ordering to the point that it denies any possible connection in the plot.

Analogous to the Demon, Oedipa “operates as an agent of order in a system of random

occurrences. She wishes, that is, to increase order, and to decrease entropy in the system

which is the life around her” (Poirier 159). The reader, by implication, goes through a similar

sorting out of linguistic signs in accordance to the randomly dispersed information in the text.

The common space between the reader and the protagonist is language or the words on the

page, since “the only boundaries in a novel are words” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 62). In the

Pynchonesque self-aware linguistic fabric, characters and readers transform to “a species of

sorting Demons” (Poirier 160). Pynchon, in his turn, loads the text with a huge number of

random and disparate signs and “snares” denying his readers any chance to a comforting

reading experience. He, in fact, exhausts them with his rapidly changing focuses, slippery

concepts, and information-laden text. The overabundance of details in the narrative goes on to

haunt the reader and make him or her lose any sense of control and direction. Thus, Pynchon

can be considered as “a Demon for sorting random sounds that pass through the cultural

environment carrying information with them” (161). Lot 49, hence, outlines the plethoric flow

of information in the world and the discursive intersection between the social, scientific,

literary, and cultural discourses.

The thematization of entropy in the novel engenders the entropic nature of the text as

such. Henceforth, the novel is “not only about entropy but is itself entropic” (Leland 47). It is

an information-laden space unwilling to articulate anything besides this non-informative load.

Metaphor is not a transparent medium for representing truth; it is rather a linguistic ornament

that affirms the linguistic ontological existence of words (Leland 50). Therefore, the relation

between reality and language should not be treated as interchangeable or similar; it has rather

to be problematized since the novel overtly acknowledges its identity as “a construction-inr-

words”. As this part of the dissertation interrogates the capacity of words to communicate

truth, the upcoming analysis of overt linguistic narcissism is going to question the role of

language in the social interactions between the different characters in the text.

2. The Dysfunction of Communication in Lot 49:

The questioning of the communicative aspect of language gains an incremental appeal

amongst many postmodernist writings31. In the same way, communication bears cardinal

31 Some of these writers are John Barth, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Norman Mailer.

importance to the thematic texture of Lot 49. Be they direct (through dialogues and everyday

conversations) or indirect (letters, TV, telephone), the different means of communication

show an ability to reveal meaning as well as to mask it. The analysis of communication and

telecommunication means probes into the power and limitations of verbal messages and of

language in general. It seeks to determine the role that language plays in transmitting and

exchanging ideas and perspectives.

a. Indirect communication or telecommunication:

Telecommunications is defined as “a technology concerned with communicating from

a distance” (Anttalainen 1). Inserting the study of telecommunication in a literary critical

texture primarily requires its justification. Thus, it should be noted that “the influence of that

huge growth in media communication by electronic means which Marshall McLuhan in the

1960s called the ‘electronic village’” has reached into literary texts and inscribed itself within

its parameters (Butler 3). These means of telecommunication can be categorized into

“unidirectional means of telecommunication” which involve a one-way transmission of

information and “bidirectional means of telecommunication” which involves an exchange of

verbal information between two or more communicating poles (Anttalainen 2). Like post,

telegraph, and telephone, TV is a unidirectional means of telecommunication which works to

transmit a given televisual message to a receiver. Hence, it does not require an immediate

answer or exchange of information on the part of the addressee. In the text, the allusions to

TV are numerous. The latter is most of the time personified to the point that it can be

considered as a character that performs a given action and possesses a voice in the diegetic

universe of the novel. This is palpable through the allusions to the TV as having “greenish

dead eye” (Pynchon 1), making “terrific explosion” (17) and “uproars” (22). The

personification triggers the view of TV as a character in the text which permeates the

linguistic structure of the novel and “‘mediates’ the lives of the characters not only in the

sense that they compulsively consume TV, fantasize about it, model their behavior and

expectation on it, and so on, but also in the sense that the reader’s access to the character’s

lives is by way of a verbal medium itself saturated by TV” (McHale, Constructing

Postmodernism 118).

The voice of the TV is portrayed as cacophonous one intruding constantly in most of

the scenes in Lot 49. In numerous instances, TV seems to talk to itself, having no attentive

receiver of the messages it mediates. In Echo Courts motel, Oedipa

came back in to find Metzger … fast asleep with a harden and his head under

the couch. …On the screen New Zealanders and Turks were impaling one

another on bayonets. …Her climax and Metzger's, when it came, coincided with

every light in the place, including the TV tube, suddenly going out, dead, black.

(Pynchon 29-30)

Hence, the voice of the TV intrudes in the scene pervasively, loading it with empty messages

and indiscernible signs.

In addition, when Oedipa tries to sort out the molecules of the Maxwell Demon in

Nefastis apartment, she is interrupted continuously by the “high-pitched, comic voices issued

from the TV set” (86). Hence the supposedly seriousness of the scene is interrupted by the

trespassing voices breaking the flow of authoritative narratorial storytelling and highlighting

the profusion of voices in the narrative. The inclusion of such a deafening, cacophonous, and

aimless voice in the narrative, intends to occasionally interrupt the flow of the narrative. Thus,

the voice of the narrator or the characters becomes constantly trespassed by the pointless

voice of TV. This, in fact, defies any attempt toward a full omniscient monologic standpoint.

The perspective of the narrator, for instance, represents what Bakhtin describes as “the point

of view that ‘another’ takes toward us—which we take into accounts, and by which we

evaluate ourselves—functions as the source of vanity, vain pride, or as the source of offense.

It clouds our self-consciousness and our powers of self-evaluation; we must free ourselves

from it” (145).The voice of the narrator becomes no longer the God-like voice, whose words

are the most truthful and audible ones in the narrative. The voice of TV is a substantial one

since it continuously intrudes on the narration and on the story sustaining the dialogic nature

of the novel and eschewing the reader from succumbing to any particular unilateral voice.

Henceforth, no discourse is monologic or absolute and any attempt to create a monophonic

narrative, either on the part of the characters or on the part of the narrator, proves to be an

ultimately failing attempt vis-à-vis the extreme multivoicedness of the fictional fabric. The

profuse intersection of voices is, in fact, a warning to the narrator and to the novelist himself

that the pursuit of absolutism and monism is, in fact, an unattainable bogus pursuit. This

similarly foregrounds the characters’ awareness of the presence of voices surrounding them

from everywhere as well as the awareness of the novel of its inscription in words and

composition by a myriad of voices. This also demystifies the composite nature of language

and fiction in general.

In the above-mentioned scene, Nefastis asks Oedipa to “come on in the couch. The

News will be on any minute. [They] can do it there… I like to do it while they talk about Viet

Nam, but China is best of all. You think about all those Chinese. Teeming. That profusion of

life” (Pynchon 86). TV becomes a verbal tool that interpenetrates the fictive heterocosm.

Although the content of the mediated message is totally ignored, the presence of this message

turns out to be substantial providing the listener with linguistic “noises” or what Roland

Barthes calls “stammering”, rather than efficiently communicating with him or her (The

Rustle of Language 76). In fact, McHale notices in Constructing Postmodernism that

“Pynchon’s characters fall asleep in front of the TV, smoke dope in front of the TV, watch TV

with the audio turned off … watch TV while listening to the radio, or even while driving a

car” (17). At times, even when interest is put on the verbal message, the mediated linguistic

message arrives as a fragmented one and as constantly broken by the disparate voices of

commercials which intrude into the televisual message and discomfort the audience. Oedipa,

for instance, “heard commercials chasing one another into and out of the speaker of the TV.

She grew more and more angry, perhaps juiced, perhaps only impatient for the movie to come

back on” (Pynchon 23). The linguistic structure of the narrative of Cashiered -the movie that

Oedipa watches with Metzger- comes out as a highly stratified and fragmented structure. This

discontinuous and discomforting interference highlights the “desirability of commodities and

a consumerist ideology” at the expense of interaction and effective communication (Sim 113).

In fact, “the blurring of the distinction between advertising and other forms of programming

illustrates the commercial imperative which underpins television in a postmodern consumer

culture” (114). TV becomes a means of taciturn interference rather than an informing means

of communication. The implementation of TV in the novel, therefore, mirrors the

fragmentariness of narrative structure showing its “high degree of excess, fragmentation,

heterogeneity, hybridization, aestheticization, stylization, [and] intertextuality” (117). This

reveals “the dysfunctions of language” which transforms to an empty “auditory sign”, a mere

“noise”, or “stammering” (Barthes The Rustle of Language 76). In Lot 49, the verbal

messages mediated by TV or radio shape the parameters of a noisy language that keeps

interfering in the scenes, interrupting any fluid interchangeable message, and stripping away

any possibility of communicative exchange. Therefore, TV communicates only the pathos of

the failure of communication.

Likewise, the telephone -another means of bidirectional telecommunications- proves

to be an intruder into the temporal and spatial deictic32 dimensions of Lot 49. At the beginning

of the novel, Oedipa recalls the memory of a phone call that she received a year before: 32 “Deictics are ‘pointing’ words. They include tensed verbs (temporal deixis), personal pronouns, demonstratives (these, this, that), and time and place expressions such as now, then, here, yesterday, today, and so forth. These words relate our linguistic expression to the current situation. They are bridges between language and the world. They take their basic meaning from the so-called canonical situation of discourse” (Black 4).

At three or so one morning there had come this long-distance call, from where

she would never know (unless now he'd left a diary) by a voice beginning in

heavy Slavic tones as second secretary at the Transylvanian Consulate, looking

for an escaped bat; modulated to comic-Negro, then on into hostile Pachuco

dialect, full of chingas and maricones; then a Gestapo officer asking her in

shrieks did she have relatives in Germany and finally his Lamont Cranston

voice, the one he'd talked in all the way down to Mazatlan. (Pynchon 2-3)

The voice transmitted through the phone is refracted into numerous conflicting voices

rejecting any attempt at clarity, definiteness, or fixedness. In this instance, the voice

communicates nothing except some fragments or noises devoid of any informative message.

The plethora of information transferred to Oedipa through the call conceals the identity of the

caller as well as the content of the call as such. Had Oedipa not read it the diary, she would

never find out that her anonymous caller that night was Peirce Inverarity. The telephone

interferes at any time interrupting another space and permitting hollow words to be

articulated. It creates another cacophonous atmosphere “buzz[ing] on and on, into

hollowness” (71). Unable to detach herself from this incessant cacophony in which she is

entrapped, Oedipa surrenders to this invasive control excreted upon her by the non-

communicative telecommunication means.

Additionally, lettering represents another means of bidirectional telecommunication

alluded to in the novel in order to be obfuscated. Oedipa discovers, in her quest, that many

American citizens have deliberately chosen “not to communicate by U.S Mail” (101). On the

evening she and Metzger are in The Scope -a bar in San Narciso-, Oedipa receives a letter

from her husband Mucho. Oedipa’s attention veers, in fact, toward the outer envelope of the

letter rather than toward the content of the letter itself:

like all their inabilities to communicate, this [the letter] too had a virtuous

motive. It may have been an intuition that the letter would be newsless inside

that made Oedipa look more closely at its outside, when it arrived. At first she

didn't see. It was an ordinary Muchoesque envelope, swiped from the station,

ordinary airmail stamp, to the left of the cancellation a blurb put on by the

government, REPORT ALL OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POTSMASTER.

(33, my emphasis)

Much emphasis is put on the extramural side of the letter, to the point that the protagonist

notices a spelling mistake in the stamp. Postmaster is, in fact, spelled as “potsmaster” and this

minor typographic mistake perplexes Oedipa who keeps checking the reasons behind such a

misprint. What matters to her most is not the mediated message or the words in the letter

which she assumes as empty, but the medium itself. She even throws the letter after

disregarding its content. Accordingly, the letter is meant to remain taciturn and invaluable. In

another instance, when Oedipa starts her execution of the will and travels to San Narciso, she

writes a letter to her husband because she feels impelled to do it and not because she wants to

communicate something to him. The content, as usual, is not as substantial as the act of

sending a letter is. Actually, “the letter itself had nothing much to say, had come in response

to one of her dutiful, more or less rambling, twice-a-week notes to him” (32). In another

instance, Mike Fallopian -a friend of Metzger- informs Oedipa that he, as many other

employees of the Yoyodyne incorporation, uses the Yoyodyne’s inter-office delivery.

According to this network:

‘Each member has to send at least one letter a week through the Yoyodyne

system. If you don't, you get fined’. He opened his letter and showed Oedipa

and Metzger.

Dear Mike, it said, how are you? Just thought I'd drop you a note. How's your

book coming? Guess that's all for now. See you at The Scope. ‘That's how it is,’

Fallopian confessed bitterly, ‘most of the time.’(39)

The letter is so short, having practically nothing new or informative to be appreciated by the

addressee. Once again, the words contained in the letters are neither important nor functional

at all. However, the act of writing the letter is the most substantial since it keeps the postal

system at work. Here the process is notably more significant than the product. The crisis in

communication has reached into most of the mail system since most people transmit empty

messages just for the sake of insuring the survival of the mail networks at the expense of

communication.

Incapable of understanding the value of letters anymore, Oedipa spent a whole night

tracking a mail carrier in an attempt to find out how this complex system works:

The carrier led her across Market then over toward City Hall. …She tailed him

all the way back down the littered, shifty, loud length of Market and over on

First Street to the trans-bay bus terminal, where he bought a ticket for Oakland.

So did Oedipa. They rode over the bridge and into the great, empty glare of the

Oakland afternoon. …The carrier got off in a neighborhood Oedipa couldn't

identify. She followed him for hours along streets whose names she never

knew… One by one his sack of letters emptied. At length he climbed on a

Berkeley bus. Oedipa followed. …She was back where she'd started, and could

not believe 24 hours had passed. (106)

Oedipa seeks to know more about the mail system, the transmission of letters, and the usage

of stamps. Yet, this search proves to be null since it encloses her in a tedious circle. Scouting

how the means of telecommunication work distance the one from the prime objective of these

means which is communication. Therefore, telecommunication nullifies communication.

b. Direct communication:

The analysis of verbal communication in Lot 49 is primordially based on the premise

that the study of literature is “the study of language in context” (Black 2). The literary text

creates its own context according to which all conversations can be interpreted and

understood. Being loaded with dialogues and monologues, the text is therein amenable to

pragmatic analysis. Upholding the perspective of literary pragmatics, the analysis is going to

probe the verbal interactions and conversations that often take place between the characters in

the narrative. It tackles the individual utterances and speech acts of the characters at the

diegetic level, aiming at determining the relation between them, their strategies of

communication, and the contribution of language in general. A reliance on a number of

pragmatic tools and their application in the literary fabric of Lot 49 is quite substantial,

especially to the interpretation of speech presentation (through direct, indirect, free direct, and

free indirect discourses). Basic to this approach are Searle’s and Austin’s speech act theory,

Brown’s and Levinson’s politeness theory, and Grice’s cooperation theory. Therefrom the

application of these theories to the text helps divulge numerous instances of the defectiveness

of verbal exchange.

The protagonist, for instance, suffers numerous breakdowns in communication with

most of the characters that surround her. As Leland remarks “the problems of discourse and

correct understanding are dramatized in the numerous communicative exchanges between

Oedipa and other characters in the novel” (52). The focus, in this part of the dissertation, is

placed on the linguistic interaction between the characters and on the paralleled “futile effort

to find in language a non-linguistic map of reality” (52). Speech acts, which are “actions

performed via utterances”, depend heavily on “the speech event” or circumstances or context

surrounding it (Yule 47). Oedipa’s conversations with Mucho show most of the time the low

degree of cooperation and involvement. After receiving Peirce’s will, Oedipa undergoes an

extreme state of frustration during which she feels an utmost need for help. Incapable of

understanding his wife’s instantaneous requirements, Mucho keeps bombarding her with his

tautologous conversations informing her about his “regular crises of conscience about his

profession. ‘I don't believe in any of it, Oed,’ he could usually get out. ‘I try, I truly can't’”

(Pynchon 3). By so doing, he blocks her initiatives for communication and obliges her to

succumb to hear all his monotonous repetitive utterances; “way down there, further down

perhaps than she could reach” his words “often brought her near panic” (3). Even when she

attempts to get involved in the conversation and take “the turn”, he does not allow her the

floor: “‘Mucho, baby,’ she cried, in an access of helplessness. Mucho Maas, home, bounded

through the screen door. ‘Today was another defeat,’ he began. ‘Let me tell you,’ she also

began. But let Mucho go first” (3). He disregards most of his wife’s attempt at a cooperative

conversation where both of them share the “floor”33 in an appropriate and equal way (Yule

72). Therefore, Mucho succeeds in obliterating the conversation before it even starts resulting

in the creation of a linguistic impasse “like all their inabilities to communicate” (33). In a

similar instance, after Oedipa starts the execution of the will, she goes with Mucho to a bar in

order to inquire about the stamp on the letter that he sent in San Narciso. As usual, Mucho

keeps talking about numerous uninteresting things such as LSD, Dr Hilarious, his

hallucinations, the National Automobile Dealers’ Association, human generic voices, and the

radio station never letting his wife finish a single proposition. Consequently, “Oedipa sat with

her forehead resting on the steering wheel and remembered that she hadn't asked him about

the Trystero cancellation on his letter. But by then it was too late to make any difference”

(119). Mucho’s utterances are uncooperative since he intends to speak even if his words are

tautologous, uninformative, and long-winded.

Since cooperation is regarded as the natural primary reason for conversations, Paul

33 In a conversation, the right to speak is called the “floor”, the control of speech is called “turn”, and having the control of the speech at a given time is called “turn-taking”. “Because it is a form of social action, turn-taking operates in accordance with a local management system that is conventionally known by members of a social group. … Any possible change-of-turn point is called a Transition Relevance Place, or TPR. Within any social group, there will be features of talk (or absence of talk) typically associated with a TPR” (Yule 72).

Grice bases his theory upon this pragmatic principle (qtd. in Yule 35). The cooperative

principle can be summed up as following “make your conversational contribution such as

required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk

exchange in which you are engaged” (Grice 45). It is based on four “maxims” which are “the

maxims of quality, quantity, relation, and manner” (45). Interpreted from the lens of the

Gricean theory, Mucho violates “the maxim of quantity”34 since he is more informative than

required, “the maxim of relation”35 because his words are irrelevant, and “the maxim of

manner”36 because most of his utterances are tedious, unordered, and ambiguous. He does not

even pay attention to “backchannels or backchannel signals”37 that is the gestural and vocal

indications that show that his “conversational partner” is listening to him. Instances of these

indications are “head nods, smiles, facial expressions” or verbal answers which provide

feedback to the speaker insuring him that his message is received (Yule 75). Yet, Mucho turns

deaf ears to any of these indications disregarding any interactive response on the part of his

addressee. He rather gives cardinal importance to the huge amount of information at the

expense of communication as the absence of backchannels indicates. He supplies numerous

details yet empties them from any communicative value. Oedipa’s conversations with Mucho

show the uselessness of all the protagonist’s communicative attempts. Therefore, the transfer

of information is focalized at the expense of communication itself.

Mucho’s conversations with Oedipa are somehow analogous to the narrator’s

34 In the cooperative theory, the maxim of quantity requires the speaker to “make [his or her] conversational as informative as is required (for the current purposes of exchange)” (Grice 45).

35 The maxim of relation requires the speaker to “be relevant” (Grice 46).

36 The maxim of manner requires the speaker to “1. Avoid ambiguity of expression 2. Avoid ambiguity 3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity) 4. be orderly” (Grice 46).

37 “Within an extended turn, speakers still expect their conversational partners to indicate that they are listening. These types of signals [backchannel signals] provide feedback to the current speaker that the message is being received. They normally indicate that the listener is following and not objecting” (Yule 75, emphasis in the original).

communication with the reader. It has to be noted, in this sense, that the literary text is a site

of communication between the narrator and the “narratee”38 in the extradiegetic level (Prince

7). The narrator addresses the narratee through the linguistic medium that is the only medium

at his or her disposal. Rimmon Kenan remarks that “the term narration suggests a

communication process in which the narrative as message is transmitted by addresser to

addressee and the verbal nature of the medium used to transmit the message” (2). In Lot 49,

the narrator burdens his reader with a tremendous amount of indices that stem from every

possible field of knowledge. He reveals himself as a cognoscente or as a connoisseur of

disparate realms and different subjects. Yet the surfeit of information he provides comes at the

expense of the communication with the reader. The more information he provides, the more

puzzled and confused the reader gets especially when the given information proves to be

pointless at the end of the story. The narrator’s words become, therefore, a linguistic barrier to

the reader. They conceal meaning rather than unveil it. The words of the author are

manipulative and distrustful since they tend to obfuscate the response of the reader and to

disrupt his search for “the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that may abolish the night” (Pynchon

95). The narrator communicates to the reader the impossibility of any access to an absolute

word or ultimate truth and announces the bogus representational dimension of language.

Thus, the viewpoint that “each clue that come is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine

chances for permanence” no longer holds, and Oedipa keeps wondering “if the gemlike

‘clues’ were only some kind of compensation” (95, emphasis in original). Words no longer

serve as “clues” that reveal truth and imbue the text with meaning; they are rather “linguistic

entities” that carry their avowals of their inability to communicate (Hutcheon, Narcissistic

132). The “cry that may abolish the night” can be interpreted as the ultimate truth that Oedipa

and the reader attempt to ascend to through charting the linguistic sings and aspiring to a 38 The term narratee is introduced by Gerald Prince to designate the receiver of the narrative or “the one who is narrated to” (7). He opines: “if there is at least one narrator in any narrative, there also is at least one narratee and this narratee may or may not be explicitly designated by a ‘you’” (7).

revelation in which an “epileptic Word” reveals the mystery (Pynchon 95). This analogy

between the Word and absolute truth is parodied by the narrator and referred to as “lost”.

Since the concepts of monism and absolutism are shaken and no longer valid, the “gemlike

‘clues’” come as “some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct,

epileptic Word, the cry that may abolish the night” (95). The non-closure of signification and

open-endedness of meaning generated by the fertile linguistic signifieds, render the “cry” an

incessant “crying” that defies any possibility of closure and fixedness (Derrida, Writing 364-

5). Words are, in fact, manipulative, misleading, and uncommunicative; they erase, lie,

imprison, and asphyxiate reality. “For Pynchon,” as Leland opines, “language has become

man’s source of alienation and the prison which locks him within the hallucinatory possibility

of words” (40). Eventually, the more involved in verbal exchange Oedipa gets, the more

estranged and solitary she becomes. Lot 49, therefore, overtly problematizes the nature of

words and their capacity to communicate.

Having no prior experience as an executive, Oedipa goes to see her lawyer Roseman

who tells her everything about his favorite night-shows especially “The Profession vs. Perry

Mason/ A Not-So-Hypothetical Indictment”, but offers her nothing as far as the execution is

concerned (Pynchon 9). He even answers her sarcastically when she demands “‘I have to

execute a will,’… ‘Oh, go ahead’, said Roseman, ‘don’t let me keep you’” (9). Ironically

enough, Oedipa resorts to Roseman in order to help her and inform her about the legal

processing of the execution, yet he behaves as if he has nothing to do with such lawful

matters. As a lawyer, Roseman’s answer should have been extremely different since he is

more knowledgeable of the legislative matters. He even “trie[s] to play footsie with her under

the table” not endowing his client’s words with the minimum amount of consideration and

attention (10). In fact, Oedipa undergoes the same problem of breakdown of communication

with Peirce’s lawyer -Metzger. The latter leaves her at the peak of the execution and elopes

with a young girl.

In Echo Courts motel, Oedipa converses with Miles, a member of a musical band

called the Paranoids. She learns that they are new on the musical scene. Bearing in mind the

“principles of politeness” in a social interaction, Oedipa speaks benevolently with Miles. For

instance, she tries to display a “positive face”39, that is a polite social behavior which shows

an awareness of the addressee “face”, by telling him “my husband's a disk jockey, it's only a

thousand-watt station, but if you had anything like a tape I could give it to him to plug” (17).

Oedipa, in this utterance, performs “a positive face act” showing her “need to be accepted,

even liked by others, to be connected” (Yule 62). In Brown’s and Levinson’s “politeness

theory”40, a “face” is a technical word meaning “the public self-image of a person” (60). It is

needed to describe the type of politeness within an interaction. This positive form of

politeness shows the awareness on the part of the speaker of the social and cultural politeness

strategies as well as her willingness to communicate. Yet, Miles’s answer does not pay back

the “face wants” that is the speaker’s “expectations concerning the public self-image” (61).

He, in return, “closed the door behind them and started in with the shifty eye. ‘In return for

what?’ Moving in on her. ‘Do you want what I think you want? This is the Payola Kid here,

you know” (Pynchon 17). This reply is shocking to Oedipa who expects Miles to thank her for

her generous and considerate offer. In fact, “within their everyday social interactions, people

generally behave as if their expectations concerning their public self-image, or their face

wants, will be respected. If a speaker says something that represents a threat to another

individual’s expectations regarding self-image, it is described as self-threatening act” (Yule

39 “A person’s positive face is the need to be accepted, even liked, by others, to be treated as a member of the same group, and to know that his or her wants are shared by others. In simple terms, negative face is the need to be independent and positive face is the need to be connected” (Yule 62).

40 “Brown and Levinson (1987) develop a widely accepted theory of politeness, which they consider is cross-culturally valid. Briefly, it holds that people are motivated by their need to maintain their ‘face’ (in the sociological sense, developed by Goffman 1967), the need to be approved of by others, and to maintain a sense of self-worth” (Black 72).

62, emphasis in original). Accordingly, Miles performs a “face threatening act” since his

utterance mismatches the speaker’s expectations in regard to self-image. His utterance is in

fact “a bald on record” since it addresses the other interlocutor in an inconsiderate manner

(63). This bald on strategy surprises Oedipa who “pick[s] up the nearest weapon, which

happened to be the rabbit-ear antenna off the TV in the corner” and tells him “you are a

paranoid” (Pynchon 17). Applying the politeness theory to this short interaction shows that

most of Oedipa’s impulses at setting a considerate and communicative interaction are doomed

to failure. Eventually, most of her interlocutors are portrayed as being uncooperative,

unsociable and uncommunicative.

Oedipa suffers a crisis of communication even with the random people that she bumps

into during her quest. When John Nefastis explains to her his invention -Maxwell Demon-

using the diction of chemistry and sciences reaching to metaphors and religious diction,

Oedipa gets more and more frustrated telling him “‘help,’ … ‘You’re not reaching me’” (85).

Thus, this highlights the non-communicational and manipulative nature of language. Oedipa

addresses Randolph Driblette, the director of The Courier’s Tragedy, in order to grasp the

meaning of the play. She asks him: “what made you feel differently than Wharfinger did

about this, this Trystero” yet “at the word, Driblette's face abruptly vanished, back into the

steam. As if switched off. Oedipa hadn't wanted to; say the word. He had managed to create

around it the same aura of ritual reluctance here, offstage, as he had on” (62). The “off-

record” or the “say nothing” strategy obliterates the flow of the conversation and shows

Driblette’s disrupt communication (Yule 63). Soon after, Oedipa learns that Driblette

committed suicide so she apprehensively attends his burial and sits on the ground trying to

communicate with him and to elicit any detail. Yet, Driblette remains unapproachable, “she

waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette,

she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with

Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist” (Pynchon

134). This reveals, in a way, the threnodic dimension of linguistic communication.

On the other hand, Dr Hilarious -Oedipa’s psychiatrist- runs a project concerning the

American people and names it “die Brücke” which means “the Bridge”. This bridge aims at

lessening the stress and enhancing the routes of communication between people through using

the LSD drug. Yet, this experiment practically shows that all its premises are bogus and most

of its objectives are unattainable. It instead furthers the breakdown of communication turning

Hilarious into a mad man and Mucho into an incomprehensible generic voice. “The bridge” is

an attempt to connect the different voices and to assure an adequate communication. Yet this

bridge dramatizes any claim to a valuable interactive exchange of conversations showing a

disabled desirability for cooperative social bridging. Instead of being a linguistic bridge, it

becomes a linguistic barrier. This failure of communication is viewed by some postmodernist

critics such as Baudrillard and Habermas, as a resultant postmodern crisis that threatens

postmodern societies. In this context, Butler affirms:

Postmodernist skepticism was also directed to the very means of rational

communication itself. Jürgen Habermas … is not alone in pointing out that it is

very dangerous indeed to take the postmodernist turn, and abandon the ideal of

communicative… He thinks that we should aim at an ‘ideal speech situation’; a

means of communication which is so far as is possible undistorted by

Foucauldian effects of power, and at just that consensus and sense of social

solidarity of which postmodernists are so mistrustful. (61)

The overt thematization of the inadequacy of communication between the different

characters in the novel reflects, in fact, the inadequacy of language itself in mediating

feelings, thoughts, and standpoints. The above mentioned analysis of the dialogue between

characters allows the use of the social perspective in the study of linguistic forms showing the

dependence of words on their users. In Lot 49, words block communication and silence takes

over language illustrating that silence communicates more than words do.

II. The “Crying” for Silence:

In postmodernist literature, silence permeates numerous literary productions such as

the theater of Pirandello; Genet; and Beckett, and the fiction of Miller; Burroughs; and Barth

(Hassan, “Almost the Voice of Silence” 6). The postmodernist turn towards silence emanates

from the incessant need for communication as well as from the recognition of the failure of

language to appropriately perform such a communicative role. Accordingly, it can be said that

literary postmodernism

aspires to silence, to the kind of nonexpression and noncommunication that

occurs when, living in a Babel of verbal noise, words come to lose the

meanings we expect them to have. Turning against itself, the literature of

postmodernism shows us that the more we talk, the less we communicate, that

silence, because it leads to a pure, uncontaminated preverbal state, ironically

begins to do what we want language to do. (Fitz 435)

Accordingly, narcissistic texts acknowledge a certain inclination towards silence through their

self-awareness as well as their continuous questioning of language and its potency in general.

As accounted for in the beginning of this chapter, the character’s dialogues not only fail to

communicate but also estrange the protagonist by dint of lying, isolating, imprisoning, and

manipulating. Using the same linguistic medium, Pynchon sensitizes his readers to the failure

of words to communicate and translates this vision through Randolph Driblette who overtly

announces his distrust of language and disenchantment with any text-based approach to

theater and to literature in general. Driblette interrogates the tight relationship between the

spectators and the words or the dramatic text. When Oedipa asks him about the script of The

Courier’s Tragedy, he presumably inquires rhetorically “why… is everybody so interested in

texts?” (Pynchon 61). He likens those who totally rely on words or script in their

understanding of literature to Puritans’ reliance on the Bible. The view of the written words as

sacred and as the unique generator of meaning is rejected by Driblette who denounces the

audience’s and reader’s subjugation to texts. The elevation of words to a sacred status is

similarly expressed in the text by Bortz who informs Oedipa “what better way to damn it [the

script] eternally than to change the actual words. Remember that Puritans were utterly

devoted, like literary critics, to the Word” (128). The egocentrism of the written words refers,

in fact, to the Anglo-American tradition of criticism which displays an obsession with the

“text itself”, or “the words on the page” (Selden and Widdowson 12). Basic to this tradition

are the New Critical41 and Formalist42 theoretical approaches to literature. Focusing only on

words in the appreciation of a theatrical performance or fiction ruins the aesthetic experience

of the spectator or the reader. Antonin Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” proclaims this view

assuming theater’s utmost need for a “speech outside words” (68). Artaud goes on in

explaining this stand saying “instead of harking back to texts regarded as sacred and

definitive, we must first break theater’s subjugation to the text and rediscover the idea of a

kind of unique language in between gesture and thought” (6). The liberation of the theatrical

performance from this linguistic egocentrism goes in tandem with the introduction or

recovery of a “spatial language” that is the corporeal language of movements, sounds, and

gestures (69). The aesthetic experience has to be, first and foremost, sensual which means

based on the appreciation of the performance through the senses leaving all kinds of Brechtian

reasoning and criticism temporarily aside. The theater of cruelty therein tends to create a

“language outside words” that “captivates and bewitches our sense” (69).

41 “American New Criticism emerged in the 1920s and became dominant in the 1940s and 1950s. Its main concern is with the ‘text itself’, with its language and organization. It does not attribute any value to the historical, biographical, social context of the text or author” (Selden and Widdowson 16).

42 “Like new criticism, Russian formalism aims to explore what is specifically literary in texts. It is primarily concerned with the linguistic structure of literary works” (Selden and Widdowson 27).

Basic to this theater is the outright display of elements of cruelty on stage in order to

reach the spectator’s mind through their bodies (77). Upholding the Artaudian’s perspective to

theatrical performance, Driblette’s theater attempts in a way to redefine the function and

response to theater in general. The fact that he displays some extremely violent scenes on

stage is a case in point. In The Courier’s Tragedy, Ercole’s punishment to Domenico in regard

to his disloyalty is reported as follows:

Ercole binds his hands and feet with scarlet silk cords, lets him know who it is

he's run afoul of, reaches into the box with a pair of pincers, tears out

Domenico's tongue, stabs him a couple times, pours into the box a beaker of

aqua regia, enumerates a list of other goodies, including castration, that

Domenico will undergo before he's allowed to die, all amid screams, tongueless

attempts to pray, agonized struggles from the victim. (Pynchon 51-2)

Staging violence is an innovative technique as Bortz remarks saying that “no Puritan ever got

that violent” (127). Moreover, “every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man …

is employed” (58). It has to be noticed, though, that the use of violence in the performance is

not purposeless or nonfunctional; it is rather a highly conscious act. Driblette, accordingly,

informs Oedipa “that was my own [touch]… that and actually bringing the three assassins

onstage in the fourth act. Wharfinger [the Elizabethan playwright] didn’t show them at all,

you know” (61). Emory Bortz, in his turn, pinpoints this theatrical inclination toward spatial

language and violence briefing to Oedipa that Driblette “might have looked at a lot of

versions, to develop a feel for the spirit of the play, not necessarily the words” (127). The

propensity for corporeal language and taciturnity is similarly expressed in one of the verses of

the embedded play which says “and Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn” (58). The horn in

this instance refers to the Trystero mute horn, its symbol, and to the silent nature of this

system in general. Therefore, Driblette aspires to render the theatrical performance and

criticism or the theatrical language one that “speaks outside words”, as Marleau Ponty puts it

(80). Subverting the classical Aristotelian tradition of theatrical criticism which announces the

egocentrism of the dramatic text and the verbal account of violent scenes off-stage through

the chorus is one of Driblette’s, and by implication Pynchon’s, prime concerns. Their

approach is one that disturbs such a classical view and accords a relative substantiality to the

sensual and bodily aesthetic experience of arts. The argument here shows that the body has a

great potential to communicate, a potential that equates or even goes beyond the verbal

language potential to communicate. Thus, what remains tacit or silent does not obfuscate

communication as much as it furthers it.

Similarly, the recourse to body language is employed by Dr. Hilarius –Oedipa’s

psychiatrist- in his therapies. His therapy relies heavily on the response of the patient, “his

theory being that a face is symmetrical like a Rorschach blot, tells a story like a TAT picture,

excites a response like a suggested word, so why not” (Pynchon 9). He holds the belief that

facial expressions are very therapeutic. This theory could have helped Oedipa in her

trepidation if it only relied on silence. Yet Hilarius misuses this functional treatment by

naming it. For instance, many of the “faces” he employs “hav[e] like German symphonies

both a number and nickname” (9). In his attempt to translate silence to words, the latter’s

efficacy immediately withers. Many of Hilarius’s patients feel the bizarre nature of this

corporeal therapy. They consult him in order to talk and to be listened to carefully, yet he only

responds to their wordy speeches by displaying his “faces” and ruminative silence. When

Oedipa asks him “could we talk?” he ironically answers “I’m sure you’d all like that” (109).

He therein epitomizes the postmodernist retreat from language and the “craving for… the

silence beyond speech” (Sontag 4). Yet this kind of therapeutic discourse did not reach

Oedipa at the beginning for she believes in a verbose theory of comforting endless talk. She

even notices that Hilarius is “full of these delightful lapses from orthodoxy” (Pynchon 8).

What Oedipa is unable to elicit in the first place is Hilarius’s outright call for some silence.

Eventually, she menaces the psychiatrist by endeavoring to elucidate any linguistic response

on his part. She wanted “to tell him all” and “wanted Hilarius to tell her she was some kind of

a nut and needed a rest and that there was no Trystero” (107). Not even sign, the psychiatrist

leaves her questions unanswered and clues indiscernible. At the beginning, Hilarius’ silences

and faces angers Oedipa and furthers her anxiety to the point that she accuses him of being

insane. She tries hard to elucidate words because she strongly believes that only words can

save her from the conundrum she is entrapped in. Not until the end did Oedipa realize that

Hilarius’s silence is loaded with significance and consolation. The absence of Hilarius, the

suicide of Driblette, and the departure of Metzger and Mucho frustrates her, and makes her

wonder in a disenchanted way “they are stripping from me, she said subvocally- feeling like a

flattering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out over the abyss- they are

stripping away, one by one, my men” (125-6, my emphasis). This “subvocal” stage to which

Oedipa, and by implication, Pynchon have reached proves to be a necessary comforting stage

in front of the torrential flow of words that bombards them. Consequently silence becomes

more than a thematic concern; it is a writing style or a narrative self-aware choice. The

novelist who is himself betrayed by his own plethora of words and their non-communicative

aspect resorts to silence as a “preverbal state” of purity. He is aware that his text

communicates to his readers through words as much as through indeterminacies43. Another

significant outcry for consolatory silence in the novel can be detected from the Trystero itself.

The Trystero system is indubitably grounded in ruminative silence. It is a clandestine

network that portrays “the separate, silent, unsuspected world” (Pynchon 101). All the

43 According to Wolfgang Iser’s theory of aesthetic response, indeterminacies refer to the gaps and blanks inherent in any literary text. In fact, these indeterminacies “enable the text to communicate with the reader” (13). The latter goes through a “meaning-actualization process” during which he or she attempts to fill in these gaps and blanks by dint of the “repertoire” (53). In poststructuralist criticism, as well, indeterminacies refer to the gaps and absences in the literary text that imbue it with the pluralism and unfixedness of the textual structure.

elements of this network are endowed with a non-verbal aspect especially that its members

work at night carrying the mail from a place to another and exchanging it with other carriers

without uttering a single word. The symbol of the Trystero, in its turn, is designed in a way

that preserves the silent core of this body. It chooses not to range under the realm of words

and to maintain “the silence, [and] the secrecy” (78). At the sight of the mute post horn

, Oedipa reproduces it in her notebook inquiring: “God, Hieroglyphics” (38). The

“W.A.S.T.E.” mail which binds together the Trystero system has also a penchant for silence.

Oedipa spent a whole day pursuing the work of this system in San Narciso. “With her own

eyes,” Oedipa “had verified a WASTE system: seen two WASTE postmen, a WASTE

mailbox, WASTE stamps, WASTE cancellations. And the image of the muted post horn all”

(107). As far as the protagonist is concerned, WASTE is no more than another ambiguous

word that impels her to investigate further. Yet, when she pronounces this acronym as one

word, Stanley Koteks’s face “congealed, a mask of distrust” (69-70). This distrust is, in fact,

the distrust of language as such and of its semantically confusing pluralism. Since language

has a potential to mislead human beings, silence takes over while providing a sense of

serenity. The possibility that Oedipa mistakes this acronym for the word “waste” will

definitely lead her to misinterpret the whole desired significance of the WASTE system. This

possibility frightens Koteks who immediately corrects to her “it’s W.A.S.T.E. lady … an

acronym, not ‘waste’ and we had best not go into any further” (70). His refusal to go any

further in the conversation about WASTE can be explained by the scarcity and ambiguity of

information about this system as well as by the non-verbal character of this network. Nothing

has been said about it before nor is it going to be articulated after. By the end of the novel, the

acronym W.A.S.T.E. appears to abbreviate the expression “We Await Silent the Trystero

Empire” enhancing the text’s outcry for silence (139, my emphasis). Being the opposing force

of the Thurn and Taxis Empire, the Trystero system chooses to delve into silence and to have

recourse to an alternative means of communication or to another language which is the

language of silence. This choice is the outcome of the strong belief of the disinherited

members on the power of language to empower and upgrade some groups at the expense of

other ones. Since language promotes injustice and hierarchy, then silence becomes a desirable

leveler. It has to be noted though that the recourse to silence does not mean the absence of a

voice. Instead, it is the creation of another complementary stentorian voice, the voice of

silence. Thus, “silence is not simply the work’s epigraph, nor is it, as concerns language and

meaning, outside the work. Like non-meaning, silence is the work’s limit and profound

resource” (Derrida, Writing 66). Neither silence nor words can stand as such; they have to

converge in order to be functional. The analysis crystallizes the embeddedness of the Trystero

network in silence and its conviction that silence is as much communicative and empowering

as words are.

Being laden with verbose conversations and empty messages all along her journey,

Oedipa chooses to direct her quest for meaning to the “uttering” silences of the city. At this

stage, Oedipa is not the only one to realize that words fail to communicate. In front of the

torrential and anarchical nature of wordy information, the reader experiences the same

linguistic anxiety as the protagonist. Pynchon, in his turn, overtly admits his own awareness

of the inefficacy of language to express anything but its inner noisy dilemma. In Lot 49,

whenever language ends up blocking the channels of communication, silence interferes to

provide a certain balance and comfort to the protagonist, the reader, and even the writer. The

significance accorded to spatial deixis translates the idea that silence communicates in the

same way or even better than words. As Barthes emphasizes in his essay “Semiology and

Urbanism”, the view of the “city as discourse” and the existence of “the language of the city”

have to be, first and foremost, extracted from the “purely metaphorical stage” (415). The

exercise of emptying this discourse from metaphoric meaning permits the shift from metaphor

to the “analysis of this language” (415). This is palpable through Oedipa’s geographical

journey from Kinnert to the farthest point in the South of California. Oedipa Maas, actually,

lives in Kinnert, a place “full of nothing” as Mucho puts it (Pynchon 109). At the beginning of

the execution, she heads towards San Narciso where the largest part of Inverarity’s estate lies.

San Narciso is depicted, from the very start, as a meaning potential space full of connections

and mysteries. It “lay[s] further south, near L.A” and it has an ability to communicate a sense

of mystery and meaningfulness (13). Having “an intent to communicate,” San Narciso “had

sent them all into silence and paralysis” (15). Every sign in this place seems to be there for a

reason. For instance, the “road… [is] this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into

the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent,

protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain”. The geography and

architecture of San Narciso are therein reminiscent of the history of this city. The reference to

pain in this instance recalls, in fact, California Gold Rush44 which began in 1849. When gold

was first discovered at the time, masses of immigrants came to California in an attempt to

look for gold and were called “forty-niners” in reference to their year of arrival (Wikipedia).

An analogy is to be drawn here between the title of the novel and the history of Gold Rush.

Lot 49 echoes the rush in so far as it displays most of its events in the state of California and

partakes of the searching process as its main theme. Interpreting her travel to San Narciso to

look for the estate of the magnate, Oedipa can be seen as a “forty-niner” in the sense that she

is a fortune-seeker. Thus, the pain detected in the city stems from the difficulty of the process

of searching and from the numerous hardships that encounter the searcher. Some of the

44 “The California Gold Rush began at Sutter's Mill, near Coloma. On January 24, 1848 James W. Marshall, a foreman, found shiny metal in the tailrace of a lumber mill…. Soon, waves of immigrants from around the world, later called the ‘forty-niners’, invaded the Gold Country of California or ‘Mother Lode’. San Francisco had been a tiny settlement before the rush began. When residents learned about the discovery, it at first became a ghost town of abandoned ships and businesses, but then boomed as merchants and new people arrived. The population of San Francisco exploded from perhaps about 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 full-time residents by 1850” (Wikipedia).

drawbacks of the 1849 Gold Rush are “the attacks on Native Americans, who were forcibly

removed from their lands. An estimated 100,000 California Indians died between 1848 and

1868, and some 4,500 of them were murdered”, the “environmental harm to rivers and lakes”,

and the overpopulation of California (Wikipedia). The historical pain merges with Oedipa’s

painful pursuit of meaning in the city highlighting the toughness and complexity of any

searching process. Yet, unlike the “forty-niners” who mostly succeeded in attaining their

goals, Oedipa’s quest remains unfulfilled and her pursuit continues as unattainable one. Due

to this highly communicative aspects of the place, San Narciso is viewed as “less an

identifiable city than a grouping of concepts” (13). The geography and architecture of the

place carry within its bounds the historical records of the past. Time and space converge and

conjure up a sense of silent communicability. Oedipa therein feels “the centrifugal coolness

of, words being spoken” (14). Her journey is, consequently, not only a geographical journey

but also and foremost a historical one. Its “outward patterns” palpable through “the ordered

swirl of houses and streets” carry, in fact, a “hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning” (14).

The architecture of San Narciso as portrayed in the novel bespeaks a mystery, a sense of the

fantastic as outlined in the first chapter of this dissertation. While traversing a highway,

Oedipa crosses “a neighborhood that was little more than the road’s skinny right-of-way,

lined by auto lots, escrow services, drive-ins, small office buildings and factories whose

address numbers were in the 70 and then 80.000’s. She had never known numbers to run so

high. It seemed unnatural” (15). Thus, every spot in San Narciso bears within it traces of

ambiguity injected through the “thoughtful silence” that monopolizes the atmosphere.

Ostensibly, the streets are viewed as “utterly silent” (81). The inhabitants fit, in their turn, to

the semiology of San Narciso as Oedipa remarks: “there was this je ne sai quoi about the

Scope crowd, they all wore glasses and stared at you, silent” (34). What Oedipa tries hard to

fathom in what she considers as a communicative silence is the possibility of the presence of a

“Stelliferous meaning” (64). She works hard to put this silence into words ignoring the

specificity of this “semiological urbanism” (Barthes, “Semiology and Urbanism” 415). The

imposition of a linguistic medium upon this nonverbal structure is Oedipa’s prime flaw. The

oxymoron “utterly silent” is, therefore, not a paradoxical expression as much as it is a

realizable one since silence complements words. Silence in San Narciso communicates as

such without the need of any verbal structure to translate it. Oedipa misses at some occasions

the opacity of this silence because of her blind pursuit of linguistic signs. She views silence as

having a deceptive power on her and she immediately panics at its prevalence. In the

California Deaf-Mute Assembly in Berkley hotel, Oedipa “found the lobby full of deaf-mute

delegates” so she “tried to struggle out of the silent, gesturing swarm, but was too weak”

(106-7). She is therefore extremely befuddled by the reigning silence because she limits her

search for meaning to words. According to her, whenever verbal signs are absent, meaning

simultaneously vanishes. In the same way the silence of the streets, the buildings, and the

inhabitants of San Narciso threatens her at the very beginning. Yet she soon realizes that

whenever her quest of meaning in language is suspended by the pauses of the city, a

revelation instantaneously nears her. The city is depicted as the place where Oedipa

undergoes a “religious instant”, having a near revelation (14). Only in San Narciso has Oedipa

experienced a possibility for attaining a resolution to her mystery. San Narciso is accordingly

a text and so a meaning-potential space where Oedipa works hard to elicit meaning. Yet she

always comes near revelation yet never attaining it finally. Thus, the city communicates

further mystery and ambiguity to the protagonist. It is an “endless structure of signification”

where each sign leads to another one ad infinitum refusing to offer a fixed meaning (Derrida,

Writing 352). San Narciso in fact portrays the “playfulness” and “non-fixedness” of

signification through its constant deferral of any sense of final meaning. It always brings

Oedipa close to revelation, then strips away any sense of possible comforting ending, leaving

all her questions unanswered, her revelation unattained, and her riddle unresolved. As the text

outlines, Peirce seems knowledgeable of this unfixedness of signification of the labyrinthine

structure of San Narciso. “His need to possess, to alter the land, to bring new skylines,

personal antagonisms, growth rates into being” makes him realize the open-ended number of

possibilities offered by the land (148). Thus, he advises Oedipa once to “‘keep it bouncing

…that's all the secret, keep it bouncing.’ He must have known, writing the will, facing the

spectre, how the bouncing would stop” (148). Eventually, Peirce would have better known

that the “bouncing” will never come to an end. Yet, Oedipa recalls this advice only by the end

of the novel when she faces the certitude of the absence of a single ultimate “Stelliferous

meaning”. There is no single meaning to each structure; there are plural possible meanings

and their attainment and flourishing depends heavily on “keep[ing] bouncing”. The bouncing,

in fact, would never stop, since it always keeps opening up new possibilities. San Narciso

demystifies the view of silence and urbanism as subjects that can be endowed with meanings

only when translated into a verbal system. Silence possesses in itself a voice, one that

welcomes plurality and openness and that offers new possibilities of regeneration vis-à-vis the

linguistic exhaustion (Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion” 64). This voice does not strive to

devoice language or to totally conceal it. It rather acknowledges their complementary role in

the fictional or literary fabric. Lot 49 becomes a site of interfusing plural and endless systems

of signification. Through overtly dealing with the theme of language and silence, it shows its

self-consciousness of its pluralistic nature that stems from the complexity of language and of

its unfixedness of meaning. The sense of plethorically playful meanings is epitomized by the

sea and its all-encompassing nature in the text.

Each time Oedipa feels a sense of disrupt communication with one of the characters in

the novel, she immediately resorts to the seas and rivers of San Narciso aspiring to a kind of

revelation to come up and to end the labyrinthine maze in which she is entrapped. In all the

textual instances, water expresses silence, consolation, purification and the only recluse for

the protagonist. Growing more repulsive to trivial verbal exchange, the protagonist resorts to

the sea in search for peaceable comfort. She attempts to attain the sublimity of “words she

couldn’t hear” (16). The wordiness and triviality of verbal exchange lead her to further

ambiguity and meaninglessness and befall her in a linguistic and ontological anxiety. Oedipa,

in fact, “believe[s]… in some principle of the sea as redemption for Southern California…

some unvoiced idea that no matter what you did to its edges the true Pacific stayed inviolate

and integrated or assumed the ugliness into some more general truth” (41). In fact, the

redemptive force accorded to the sea and the sacred aspect that endows it conjure up through

the numerous references to water, sea, and rivers in the novel. For instance, in The Courier’s

Tragedy, Angelo has murdered all his men and thrown their bones in the river. He uses their

saturated charcoal after as ink in his communications with Faggio in an attempt to redeem

himself from the murders he committed. The same procedure occurs in the YOYODYNE

incorporation where they extract the charcoal from the sea and use it in some of their

products. They extract ink from the bones of the drowning men of Thurn and Taxis as well as

from the Trystero network. Hence the continuous forceful struggle between both societies and

the rigid division between the Thurn and Taxis as the official monopolizing force and the

Trystero as the peripheral mute one is nullified and solved by the boundless comprehensive

power of the sea. Though they have never merged together before, the sea succeeds in

bringing these two extremely opposing poles into a hybrid interfusing zone. Thus all the

hierarchies are demystified through the homogenizing redemptive silence of the sea. The sea

becomes an all-encompassing or a hybrid site that welcomes all diverse kinds of human

nature and offers the chances for consensus and pluralism. Using Bhabhaian terminology, it

can be seen as a “third space” that advocates “liminality” and “hybridization” (qtd. in

Rutherford 210-1).

Similarly, in Cashiered Baby Igor’s father chooses to spend the rest of his life sailing

in the Sea of Marmara and Dardanelles in order to compensate for his previous wrongdoings

in the army. The diction employed in the depiction of the sea foregrounds the sacredness and

spirituality accorded to water. It even evokes the biblical reference to water as a purifying and

redemptive force. The sea, in fact, fuses the discourse of the “sacred and the profane” in the

novel showing the symbiotic relation between silence and words. Oedipa “stood between the

public booth and the rented car, in the night, her isolation complete, and tried to face toward

the sea… As if there could be no barriers between herself and the rest of the land” (146-7). Be

them social or linguistic, all kinds of barriers dissolve vis-à-vis the sacred silence of the sea.

When she starts the execution of the will, Oedipa relies heavily on the words of Peirce

Inverarity, the written documents, and the verbal conversations with the other characters. She,

soon after, figures out that this quest is beyond her reach and that the mystery stems from the

complexity of the system of language itself. She then turns out her quest to the mystery of

words themselves to discover the potency of silence. At first, she strongly believes that she

can “solve any great mystery” by dint of “grit, resourcefulness, exemption from hidebound

cops’ rules” (100). When she realizes that tremendous number of written information is

purposeless and language is meretricious as its users are, Oedipa starts looking for the

“unvoiced idea” or the “unheard messages” (149). The only voice that she apprehends as

communication among the wordiness of the spoken voices is the mute voice of the sea. It has

successfully reached her in the strongest moments of despair, trepidation, confusion, and

solitude. When she experiences linguistic anxiety and distrustfulness, Oedipa usually

soliloquizes her utter desolation. For instance, she wonders when she found no one to talk to

“they are stripping from me, she said subvocally… they are stripping away one by one, my

men. My shrink… my husband…my one extra-marital fella… my best guide to the Trystero

has taken a Brody. Where am I?” (126).Whenever this pandemonium reaches its apogee in the

novel, silence prevails shattering the noisy presence of words.

If the sea embodies the voice of silence and carries a redemptive force, then silence

itself can be interpreted as redemptive. This syllogism implies the efficacy and sacredness of

the discourse of silence in Lot 49. The choice of the name Richard Wharfinger as the

Elizabethan fictional playwright of The Courier’s Tragedy can be therefore interpreted as a

telling and ruminative one. Wharfinger refers to the owner of the wharf which is “a flat

structure built beside the sea or river where boats can be tied up” (OED). In the novel,

Richard Wharfinger “felt hardly any responsibility toward the word, really; but to the

invisible field surrounding its spirit, he was always intensely faithful” (Pynchon 125, my

emphasis). He accorded some salient importance to all the elements of the play, be them

linguistic, non-linguistic, or tacit. Similarly, Thomas Pynchon himself is a Wharfinger who

attributes symbiotic significance to “form” and to “antiform” that is to the “freedom of

language to seek some purposeless and inclusive antiform” (Hassan, “Almost the Voice of

Silence, 18). Consequently, form refers to the linguistic signs present in the text while

antiform signifies the mute sings or the “absences” and indeterminacies in the text (Derrida,

Writing 7). As Derrida asserts, “absence attempts to produce itself in the book and is lost in

being pronounced; it knows itself as disappearing and lost, and to this extent it remains

inaccessible and impenetrable. To gain access to it is to lose it; to show it is to hide it; to

acknowledge it is to lie. ‘Nothing is our principle concern, said Reb Idar’, and Nothing -like

Being- can only keep silent and hide itself” (83-4 my emphasis). Absence becomes

henceforth the indispensable condition of language. Such assertion attempts to subvert the

Western “metaphysics of presence” which is based on agency, presence and verbal

presentation (268). Silence here turns out to be not just an overt narcissistic theme concerned

with the linguistic structure of a work of art but a style of writing and a determining feature of

the language of the artist. If silence is sacred and speech is profane, then fiction acknowledges

its merging of the sacred and the profane. In fact, this interfusion becomes a source of

regeneration to the linguistic structure. The language of fiction aspires to redeem itself from

the “exhaustion” and wordiness through acknowledging its extreme need for silence (Barth,

“The Literature of Exhaustion” 64).

In this closing chapter, the study of Lot 49 from the lens of linguistic narcissism

reveals that the novel bears within itself covert as well as overt strands of linguistic

metafictionality. It is overtly self-conscious of the linguistic medium used in literature in

general. Words are, in fact, the only property of artists and their only time- and space-bridging

medium with the reader. Yet, both the writer and the reader have to be aware that this medium

is neither totally trustful nor uncomplicatedly transparent. It is, contrariwise, so complex and

contentious. First, the complexity stems from the playfulness of signifiers in the linguistic

system of signification which prevents signifier any comforting recourse to a single

consolatory signified (Derrida, Writing 158). Second, language can fail, deceive, and estrange

since it depends heavily on the pragmatic dimension of its users. Third, the language of fiction

depends on the written as well as “the non-written”; it depends on the presence as well as the

absence of words (10). All these conditions are endemic to the linguistic structure of Lot 49.

The analysis of the dialogues, monologues, and telecommunicative voices foregrounds the

fact that language fails its users and even the writer himself by its incommunicability. The

text uses language and simultaneously comments on and criticizes this usage. It questions

language and its problematic relation to reality and to the world. Words do not represent the

world as much as they obfuscate it. The protagonist and the writer, conscious of the

ineffectiveness and shallowness of words, resort to silence in order to grant language full

freedom. Being linguistically narcissistic, the text acknowledges the fact that “to write is to

draw back… To be grounded far from one’s language, to emancipate it or lose one’s hold on

it… To leave speech. … to let it speak alone… To leave writing is to be there only in order to

provide its passageway, to be the diaphanous element of its going forth: everything and

nothing” (Derrida, Writing 85). Thus, The Crying for Lot 49 becomes an outright crying for

silence, or a battle cry for a poetics of silence in literature.

CONCLUSION

The salient point of focus in the dissertation, as been perceptibly set is the introduction

of this study, is to what extent is Thomas Pynchon’s Lot 49 a narcissistic text. The analysis of

this text lends itself to the irrevocable conclusion that it is narcissistic to the vein.

Encroaching on the diegetic and linguistic structure that constructs its totality, the text yields

an ostensible commentary on and criticism of its narrative mechanisms of construction and its

language in general. Going through the findings of each analytical chapter, these concluding

remarks terminates at the prominent synthetic finding that Lot 49 is a palpably diaphanous

text.

By outlining the skeletal theoretical matrix of the analysis, the opening chapter of the

dissertation serves as the referencing point for the forthcoming analysis. It elaborates on the

view that narcissistic texts are underpinned in a highly paradoxical postmodernist and

poststructuralist ground. Thus, the narcissistic text becomes an expository text that

deliberately brings attention to its conundrum-like nature. It similarly sketches the most

salient topoi of textual narcissism in an attempt to bring to the fore its main defining and

distinctive features.

In the second chapter, the study of parody, intertextuality and mise en abyme divulges

the diegetic metafictionality of Lot 49. Not only does it reveal the strong parodic grounding

of the narrative, but it also pinpoints its highly double character through being a discourse of

“negotiation” between past and present and even within the bounds of present conventions

themselves. Postmodernist metafiction does not exclusively turn its parodic mirrors to

realism, modernism, and structuralism, yet it goes further to “use and abuse” its own

postmodernist underpinnings (Hutcheon, Poetics 20). It parodies the politics and poetics of

postmodernism showing the antithetical and problematic nature of its current parameters. The

analysis of intertextuality shows the incessant inclination towards an aesthetic of “inclusion”

that injects the seeds of pluralism and democracy and denounces exclusion and hierarchy. The

text is therein a polyphonous text which grants a voice to whoever wants to speak. Mise en

abyme, in its turn, foregrounds the multipolarity of the text which presents itself as a

combinatory site of “dialogic” encounter depending on different poles in its construction.

Therefore, the writer, reader, and narrative or the enunciator, the receiver of the enunciation,

and the enoncé collide in the process of meaning-construction. The literary text becomes an

“enunciative act” or a performance rather than a mere object of enunciation or a product. In

addition, the narrative reveals itself as only being narrative demystifying its prior

identification as mediator of reality. The only reality it evokes is its own fictionality and

artificiality. It is, therefore, a “mimesis of fiction” rather than a “mimesis of life” since it

proves to be incapable of imitating life, it turns to imitate its own self. Thus, the narcissistic

text is pluralistic, polyphonous, and performative text.

Being the prime concern of the final chapter, language is disclosed as a complex sytem

of signification that is devoid of any ability to represent the world. Language, in the

postmodernist scene, is even unable to represent itself, thereafter intervenes the propensity for

a discourse silence. The move toward silence in narcissistic texts has a twofold realization. It,

first, announces the existence of a crisis in regard to language, and then admits its

straightforwardness in making an outright exposition of such a crisis. In numerous

contemporary literary works, silence presents itself as the redemptive state which yields the

regeneration from the absurdities of language. It is noteworthy to conclude that silence is not

an act of withdrawal and self-effacement as much as it is an act of self-involvement and

recognition. Through overtly acknowledging its leap in silence, the narcissistic text divulges

its high degree of ripeness and knowledgeable self-evaluation. The outright “cry” for the

inclination toward silence in metafictional texts necessarily emanates from the maturity of

these texts rather than from the ruins of the novel. Consequently, narcissism does not

announce the “asphyxiation” or “decay the novel” as much as it declares its actual

regeneration (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 18).

Narcissistic texts attempt to reveal all its literary problematics, its ontological doubts,

and its byzantine literary constructions. Thus, narcissism in fiction is a stage of maturity, a

form of resistance, and an art of sincerity. It is mature insofar as it self-informingly places its

own fictional mechanisms in the position of self-exposition and evaluation, resistant since it

defies any inclination towards conformity and subjugation, and sincere because it denounces

any pretention to disguise its own fictionality.

This research mainly aims at showing the validity of narcissism as a challenging form

of writing in the postmodern context. Yet it should be noted that narcissistic texts stipulate a

narcissistic reading fully aware of its unattainable partiality for fixed, monolithic, and closed

parameters of interpretation. Following the same tracks of narcissistic writing, this narcissistic

reading has to be mature, resistant, and sincere. It has to be mature in the sense that it self-

consciously questions itself, resistant to any temptation for attaining what Thomas Pynchon

calls a “Stelliferous meaning”, and sincere in the way that it overtly acknowledges its

pluralistic, multifarious, and playful exercise. Therefore, narcissistic writing and reading

interpenetrate showing that each construction is followed by a deconstruction, each

semiotization is tracked by desemiotization, and each presence is pursued by a necessary

absence.

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