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BOOK CLUB: The Crying of Lot 49

07:16 / 07.12.01

As I remember, we agreed to discuss this book some time ago...

So who's read it? What did you think of it? How does it (as a fairly obvious forerunner) compare to the Illuminatus! trilogy? Is it really the greatest American novel of all time? Has it changed or altered your perception of life or reality? Was it too short? Too long?

C'mon people... (especially you, Rothkoid)

The Return Of Rothkoid

08:33 / 07.12.01

Fortuitously, I've almost finished my current book, so I can burn through this one again before commenting. Generally, I think it's a good intro to Pynchon's work - short, headfucking and labyrinthine - but I think <spoilers!> that the ending is a bit too much of a cop-out, though there really is no way to get out of the corner into which he's painted himself.

Given the choice between Illuminatus! and this, I take this - it's the same interconnectedness, only without the dodgy jokes and filler, some of which creeps into Pynchon's later work, I think.

08:36 / 07.12.01

I started reading this about a month ago, and almost immediately various insignificant events conspired to prevent me from continuing. Until about two weeks ago, when, just before falling asleep, I opened the book randomly and starting reading. The first thing I noticed was the "trumpet" symol, and the page detailed a discussion between Oedipa and... some security guard(?), regarding WASTE (is that right?)

Look, I realise this is entirely unhelpful, I'm just trying to stall you, until I've managed to finish reading the book (this weekend, this weekend) and offer some genuinely useful insights. Or, far more likely, annoying questions.

08:36 / 07.12.01

I read this when the possibility of discussing in on Barbelith was first announced .. and that was so long ago that I've nearly forgotten about it.

Not that I have a goldfish memory, you understand, but it's the kind of book it's hard to maintain any coherent thoughts on for more than a few minutes..

general vapid comments:

i)I loved the way it kept wondering of into bizarre .. what's the word for a story within a story? kind of sub-stories - loads of fun diversions. The constant stream of weird characters, telling weirder stories .. often when writers do that sort of thing it comes over as self indulgent or 'wacky' or like they've just tacked a load of short story ideas together and hoped for the best - but it this book it really worked.

ii)I also loved the conspiracy / search for the truth that isn't there elements, but then I'm a sucker for that sort of thing anyway.
The inexplicably odd events - and the touches of almost obsessive academic attension to random - BUT STRANGELY VITAL - elements..

iii) The cool kitsch touches, which made it massively entertaining to read - the creepy theme motel, the deranged submarine movie, the Paranoids! On a purely aesthetic level, about half of this book was an absolute blast.. whilst the other half was strangely frustrating..

iv) The strange moments of enlightenment scattered throughout - the moments when suddenly the stream of chaos stops for a minute and we're presented with some baffling, almost spiritual observation that explains why everything makes sense. The first one of these I remember is the bit where Oedipa first arrives in ..can't remember the name of the town.. and observes that the outlines of the streets and buildings resemble a circuit board...

So, overall, a pretty intriguing read. Pynthon's obviously a man with more ideas than blood cells, but I'm sorry to admit that, often, his writing style just annoyed the hell out of me .. so I'll pass on his huge novels if it's ok with you..

That wasn't too bad off the top of my head, was it?

[ 07-12-2001: Message edited by: Rizla Year Zero ]

10:07 / 07.12.01

enjoyed it immensely especially all the nearly meanings

The underground mail system that uses bins etc. is W.A.S.T.E. not waste

Oedipa's name a female equivelent to oedipus- only the female equivelent is electra. Her husband, Mucho is not macho. in many ways this is avery post structurialist book- with meaning always being deferred and confounded.

10:09 / 07.12.01

Indeed. That was an element I enjoyed. Once I figured out that it was deliberate.

10:52 / 07.12.01

Thumbnail sketch:

The Crying of Lot 49 is in many ways an "anti-detective" novel. Oedipus, in Sophocles' plays, is the uber-rationalist/nominalist, going along, accumulating clues to his puzzle, until finally the truth reveals itself indisputably.

Contrast this to Oedipa, who goes along, accumulates clues, which only make the puzzle more nebulous and ill-defined until she's no longer sure if there was a puzzle to begin with.

I'm fairly certain the book is a veiled critique of "cybernetic"/rational models of knowledge/epistemology. San Narciso (Saint Narcissus) is the figure who is hypnotized, not with himself as most interpreters would have it, but with the imageor representation of himself. The grid of the city of San Narciso is compared to an integrated circuit, the building blocks of computation. San Narciso stands for the recursive, navel-gazing nature of what passes for scientific/philosophic thought in the age of computation.

The Natural Way

11:15 / 07.12.01

Glassonion may turn up and have a spunk about it any second......

Delicious, crisp onion shell with a thick and smooth spunk centre. Crunch and slosh.

21:37 / 09.12.01

I think I actually preferred Illuminatus! to this.

While I appreciate the possibility that Pynchon is critiquing modern rationalist society or strains of thought, both this and (what I've read of) Gravity's Rainbow seemed more of a knee-jerk response to the fragmentation of rationalism occurring in the sixties. It seems a conservative response: his books are full of the fear, loneliness and disassociation produced by uncertainty. He has no hope for a resolution or even a possible path forward. Characters are destroyed by drugs, by their internal demons, communication is rendered futile and meaningless, relationships are arbitrary and corrupt, everything is falling apart and the main character's detective-style pursuit of truth is rendered as ultimately impossible and cosmically ludicrous. Everyone was so alienated from each other and each character was such a poorly sketched caricature as to be incapable of being genuinely amusing in any of their 'humorous' little 'idiosyncracies'. 'A-ha! This guy puts on these silly voices and this guy pulls faces and has a secret terrible face - and this guy has a perpetual motion machine that no-one can work (including himself). Ho-ho!'. And then there's the names 'Oedipa Maas', 'Mucho Maas', 'Pierce Inverarity' - they're all 'comic' they're all 'ludicrous', but I felt that they were also unconscionably heavy-handed. Hm. This may be personal taste. Did no-one else wince at the chuckle-icious radio station name, 'KCUF'? I just got this feeling that the writer was constantly patting himself on the back for being clever (like Robert Anton Wilson) but felt no relationship or respect for the reader (unlike Robert Anton Wilson).

I did like the Jacobean revenge play, though.

21:41 / 09.12.01

I loved the doctor with the terrible secret face..

One thing I forgot to say earlier - this book did make me laugh, quite a lot, in some quite unusual ways.

The Sinister Haiku Bureau

14:21 / 10.12.01

Okay, I've not read the thing, but... I love illuminatus, and I read Gravity's rainbow expecting something similarish, only to find a book which in theory I should have loved, only to find it, i dunno, a little turgid? for want of a better word. So, how does COL49 compare to GR? Should I have read this one first instead of Rainbow?

The Return Of Rothkoid

14:45 / 10.12.01

Yes, and how.

Gravity's Rainbow is great, but it's far too overblown. The Crying Of Lot 49 is bite-sized, and doesn't exhaust you.

09:25 / 11.12.01

Waitaminute... Some doctor with a secret face? huh? where is that in the book? it's not in my copy.

The Sinister Haiku Bureau

09:25 / 11.12.01

Cheers Rothkoid, I'll maybe get a copy roundabout christmastime... hopefully this thread'll still be going by the time i finish it...

09:25 / 11.12.01

Interestingly enough, i just started reading this the other day. Will report back when done. I'm defintely enjoying it thus far.
b

09:25 / 11.12.01

i think i might have to reread this over Christmas - it's been a long time, and I keep gettng distracted. plus I want to get back into Pynchon so that I can actually accomplish V or Gravity's Rainbow without collapsing half-way through...

16:26 / 11.12.01

There's a good Pynchon site here: http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/index.html
Covers all of his works. Interesting annotations of 'V', little bit on 'Crying of Lot 49'.

21:46 / 11.12.01

I think one of the more interesting elements incomparing these two works is that 'The Crying of Lot 49' is very definitely dressed as 'literature' while 'Illuminatus!' is dressed as 'pulp sf' while neither are what they appear to be and neither classification is particularly helpful in describing them.

In many ways Pynchon in 'Lot 49' seems to pose as an adolescent Johnny Rotten, all hawking phlegm and caustic sneers of: 'It's all meaningless. It's all shit!'

Wilson meanwhile adopts the guise of the fool and capers and japes and falls on his arse a lot and proclaims that: 'It's all meaningless! It's all fun!'

That while Pynchon sees his learning and education as fundamentally useless in the face of the bleak opaqueness of the universe, Wislon sees them as an ongoing function of himself, as a process.

Still, the world needs it Johnny Rottens. And I'm not totally averse to a bit of bleak cynicism (he says, thinking of his record collection for a start). Still pondering...

[ 12-12-2001: Message edited by: ephemerat ]

Murray Hamhandler

15:32 / 12.12.01

I don't know what I think of Pynchon. I read Crying several years back and remember liking it all right, but then I read most of V recently and just stopped, much like I have w/GR several times. Something about him really intrigues me and and really kind of almost turns me off at the same time. Don't know what it is. At any rate, yes I've read The Crying of Lot 49, but it was something like four years ago, so good luck trying to get me to remember anything important from it.
Arthur Sudnam

20:32 / 12.12.01

heh surely the most important consideration when comparing crying and illuminatus is that crying clocks in at 127 pages while illuminatus clocks up more than that in a single volume...

06:52 / 13.12.01

Hah. Forgot my micrometer measurements of thickness, again...

The Return Of Rothkoid

06:52 / 13.12.01

Well, I think that's the point: Crying gets the message across in the afternoon. Whereas Illuminatus takes a lot longer. Though it does make a more interesting sound when throwing it across the room in disgust...

Ahem.

10:52 / 13.12.01

Bah. I disagree.

Both reveal the essential meaninglessness of our interpretations of life, but Illuminatus! offers some kind of solution, a consolation or a potentially transcendent philosophy whereas Lot 49 simply finishes. Brevity isn't automatically a good thing.

[ 13-12-2001: Message edited by: ephemerat ]

The Return Of Rothkoid

14:01 / 13.12.01

I think that's because Pynchon isn't spoon-feeding, or using the text to highlight how smart he is. That's the feeling I got from Illuminatus. Transcendental? I didn't get that from it at all, frankly. It was nearer to toothache, I feel.

I'm not saying that brevity isn't automatically a good thing; but in this case, Lot 49 comes across to me as a refined version of the "question everything!" idea inherent in both books. The fact that it ends as it does doesn't strike me as some kind of nihilism; it's more an attempt to get the reader to engage a little more than by going "fnord" occasionally, and to try and get them to figure things out off their own bat. It's a different approach, and in terms of these two texts, I think it's the one that works properly.

Now if we were comparing GR and Illuminatus, the wank-versus-value argument would be a bit more evenly-matched.

Murray Hamhandler

17:33 / 13.12.01

quote:Originally posted by ephemerat:

Illuminatus! offers some kind of solution, a consolation or a potentially transcendent philosophy whereas Lot 49 simply finishes.

Which, okay, I know this is slightly off-topic but only because it relates to other authors than just Pynchon. Have any of you read much pomo fiction? For a while, I was incredibly frustrated by these books that just sort of...stopped w/o wrapping up (D.F. Wallace's Broom of the System being the most hurling-across-the-room-ly frustrating example), but now I've gotten to the point where I'm actually surprised by a work of fiction that ties its narrative threads together in a tidy package by the end (which I thought White Teeth was doing at the end in a way too tidy manner before realizing that it wasn't...which I think was kind of th' point, maybe). And I can't help but feel, now, that it often seems just a little forced...
Just an observation, yo.
Arthur Sudnam

11:17 / 14.12.01

quote:Originally posted by The Return Of Rothkoid:
I think that's because Pynchon isn't spoon-feeding, or using the text to highlight how smart he is.

I'd claim that Pynchon uses the whole damn book to highlight how smart he is.. in fact he comes over like a complete smart-arse.

You can almost hear him going "aaah .. I bet you didn't spot that Latin pun back there, did you? Or all the classical allusions I've cleverly worked into all the character and place names.."

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
It's quite fun in fact.

Disco is My Class War

12:01 / 20.12.01

Has anyone read 'Vineland'? I think it's a little less pretentious than the Crying Lot, and certainly shorter and hipper. But quite dark, in ways. It's sort of about independent media. And spies. And the stupid American paranoid psyche. Very good writing, though.

13:31 / 20.12.01

I've always seen Lot 49 to be Pynchon-lite. It demonstrates what he is capable of but never gives him time to expand which V or Gravity's Rainbow do. It is a very clever, very funny book (The Courier's Tragedy is the most superb de-lineation of the overblown Jacobean Revenge Tragedy ever written and I really want to put it on somewhere

) but it does not have the breadth that allows it to unfold.

This is superb intro to Pynchon and it is a great book to read but given the choice I prefer the huge mindfuck of GR or Illuminatus. They have more to them and, whilst I admit this also means they are sometimes slow, often digress, become confusing, and often lead to you tuning 400 pages back to work out who the fuck the character everyone knows but you don't rememeber is, but this is part of the point. The books lead you gently down an ever steeper slope into madness and wierdness whilst supplying you the information you need to keep up (Adam Smith? Rocket parabola calculations?). With the larger books they can take the time to explore ideas, as opposed to just give you sound-bites of cleverness.

Incidentally, if your ever stuck for an English essay or something to do on winter nights compare GR to Shakespeare's Cymbeline. I personally can remember little of why this works as we were very fucked at the time of the conversation, but I am assured it does.