Exploring the Tapestry: Oedipa’s Embrace of the Journey in The Crying of Lot 49
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Recognizing the Fantasy: Capitalist America Oedipa slowly recognizes the symbolic nature of the overriding Californian consumer culture and the dissenting voices such a culture hides. Oedipa’s reluctance to face the instability of the system can be partially explained by her past relationship with Pierce Inverarity. Inverarity represented the ideal citizen of the consumer society. Indeed, he was a millionaire who virtually built the city of San Narciso; he owned the major company that employs the city’s citizens as well as most of the land on which they live. More importantly, Inverarity is never presented above the symbolic level in the novel. The reader, and perhaps Oedipa, never encounters a real person in Inverarity. In fact, one of the few direct depictions of his character is a phone conversation with Oedipa wherein Inverarity takes on the personas of a Transylvanian Consulate, a comic-Negro, a Gestapo officer and Lamont Cranston (Pynchon 2-3). Nothing in the novel indicates that Inverarity ever used his real voice. Without an individual persona, Inverarity exists entirely in the fantastical world of capitalism. Oedipa’s run-in with Mexican anarchist Jesús Arrabal later in the novel supports such a reading. Upon meeting Arrabal on vacation in Mexico, Inverarity once again played a part, this time that of “the rich, obnoxious gringo.” From this collision of ideals, Arrabal describes Inverarity as a miracle, “another world’s intrusion into this one…he is too exactly and without flaw what we fight…as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to an Indian” (Pynchon 97). Inverarity is the perfect capitalist with no holes, no gap, no void in his persona that would question such a system. Within the company of Inverarity’s pure fantasy, Oedipa is stifled by the ideology he represents. Mark Conroy finds the repetition of consumer culture in Oedipa’s relationship with both Inverarity and Metzger. In a capitalist system, “the ideal self-image is in its essence the functional equivalent of someone else’s ideal image, which the consumer then appropriates for his or her own” (Conroy 49). Such is the case with Inverarity: he does not have a distinct image but instead takes on stereotypes present in the prevailing society. This image is then
moore
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 depicts a society based upon an elaborate system dependent on language to regulate people’s wants and desires. Oedipa, the novel’s heroine, confronts fantasies that both support and attempt to undermine the predominant capitalist system. While sifting through these conflicting narratives advanced by the men in the novel, Oedipa faces the theory that all fantasies contain flaws or voids, what Lacanian psychoanalysis designates as the Traumatic Real. Though she recognizes the reality of the latter concept, Oedipa renounces both the other characters’ fantasies and the philosophy of embracing the Real as a source of truth. As Oedipa begins to assert her own desire into the symbolic order, Pynchon contends that the search for meaning and truth is the vital aspect of existence.
aegis 2004
Teresa Moore
