High-school yearbook the last photograph.

Entered Cornell University to study engineering physics

Left college for two years in the Navy; returned as an English major; studied with Nabokov.

1960-62: works on the Bomarc air-to-ground missile at Boeing, Seattle.

Drops out to become a writer and recluse, living in California, Mexico and New York.

1963: publishes V.

1966: The Crying of Lot 49.

1973: Gravity’s Rainbow.

Later novels: Vineland, Mason and Dixon.

Oedipa Maas: the heroine, engaged in a basic fairy-tale motif, the Quest–but with a difference.

Oedipa: female version of Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx (if you failed to solve it, the Sphinx killed you and ate you).

Maas: most likely Mas, Spanish for more, with an extra "a." Cf. "mucho mas" or "much more" for her husband (the word "more" appears in the first sentence). The central problem of the novel: the world gives us more information than we can handle (i.e. sort).

Pierce: either a US President who tried to build a trans-continental railway, but failed; or G.W. Pierce, who wrote Principles of Wireless Telegraphy. A pioneer of communication theory.

Inverarity: either inveracity, or a rare stamp printed inverted, or the opposite of rarity (i.e. that which is most common, or entropic).

Jay Gould: robber baron who tried to corner the gold market, controlled the Union Pacific railroad and Wester Union.

His statue is an ikon: "A representation of some sacred personage, itself regarded as sacred, and honoured with a relative worship."

Like Oedipa, we are faced with the task of "sorting it all out": creating order out of disorder by imposing a pattern. The central place where things are sorted in our society is the Post Office, hence the importance of postal systems in the novel.

There are two overlapping fields concerned with sorting and the establishment of order in Lot 49:

Thermodynamics, with its three laws:

1. You can’t win.

2. Things are going to get worse before they get better.

3. Who says they’re going to get better.

"Maxwell’s Demon" proposes to beat them by sorting, and thus avoid the end of the universe by "heat death" or a condition of maximum entropy.

Communication theory, which aims to sort the signal from the noise, and thus preserve meaning in the face of too much random information.

Before discussing these, two words on Postmodernism:

Modernism tends to continue the Romantic myth of organicism, and therefore to be hostile to science. It looks to the past, before society became technologised, when mythic or religious systems of belief dominated.

Musil is a scientist, but Young Torless focuses on the limitations of the scientific world-view, and tries to find shelter in humanism.

Postmodernism may well have a dystopian view of science and technology; but it gives them a kind of respect as the "gods" of the world we now live in. What postmodernists like Pynchon often do is to make science the source of myth: to bring together the "rational" and the "irrational" into a paradoxical coexistence. The Victorians imagined that science would gradually create a rational world and drive out old superstitions, especially religion. Instead, both have flourished in our society and become more extreme. At the limit, as with nuclear warfare or death camps, scientific rationality and destructive irrationality reach simultaneous peaks (another of our "horseshoe" phenomena).

A second feature of postmodernism is the mixing of cultural levels. Modernism tends to preserve elite values, and to make a sharp distinction between high and low culture, the intellectuals and the masses. Postmodernism tends to be fascinated by low or popular culture; writers like Pynchon (and also De Lillo) like to play with popular culture and exercise their intelligence on it, instead of despising or dismissing it.

In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon takes the most ordinary ingredients, such as used car lots, subdivisions, or the postal service, and turn them into complex puzzles, with deep philosophical significance. This extends to the underside of the social system, where Pynchon is fascinated with waste, disorder, insanity, and those who are excluded from the American Dream. One scientific term for this disorder is entropy, which Pynchon uses as a term for both thermodynamic and communicative waste.

68, 84, 135: Maxwell’s Demon

"heat death" in thermodynamics equals noise and the most probable in communication theory.

[Picture of Maxwell’s Demon]

The story "Entropy" makes the parallel between heat death and cultural death under consumer capitalism.

A soft dystopia: totalitariansim by consent that turns people into happy robots. But because they are happy, resistance can only be a kind of madness: you escape from the closed world of consumerism into a solipsistic world of paranoia, where you are locked up and tormented by your own fantasies.

The US Postal system: fear is of a monopoly that can send out false messages or substitute noise for signal.

"Since postal systems control much information, they have great social implications. Money and power derive partly from information, particularly when communications are poor. . . . in the era before electronic communication a very high percentage of the information transmitted traveled by way of the postal system. Hence, it makes some sense to expect an alternate postal system to help overthrow the forces that dominate a society." (John O. Stark)

This only makes sense if the post is part of a larger, capitalist conspiracy that controls the entire culture: if it exists, Pierce Inverarity was one of its main organisers. History then becomes a struggle between the forces of monopoly (in Puritan terms, the Elect) and the forces of diversity (in Puritan terms, the Preterite or "those passed over").

In the Middle Ages, those forces founded a secret society called the Tristero, to fight the official monopoly held by the Thurn & Taxis family (50) (building in Vancouver).

The Courier’s Tragedy shows a world where there is nothing but conspiracy, false messages, torture and assassination. Jacobean plays really are like this; Pynchon makes fun of them, but also raises the possibility that things like this are still going on, in a less visible form. The great plot that sets off the sixties is never mentioned, but provides a context for everything: the Kennedy assassination, 22 November 1963.

The Peter Pinguid Society (35ff), is a parody of the Cold War, which was a regime of universal suspicion. Specifically, it parodies the ultra-right John Birch Society (36), named after a missionary killed by the Chinese communists in 1945 and thus the first casualty of the Cold War. Pinguid is not killed, but leaves the Navy and becomes a real-estate speculator in southern California; as such, he anticipates Pierce Inverarity.

p. 39: US government fights rival postal services in 1861, setting off the Civil War. Official history and secret history. (The French Revolution explained, p. 136)

Now there is WASTE, operating at the Scope (which is the subversive underbelly of Yoyodyne). This may be a harmless, eccentric hobby; or a front for continuing actions by the sinister Tristero; it may resist Yoyodyne, or be part of Inverarity’s grand scheme.

Sometimes said that modernism is about neurosis, whose main symptom is anxiety, and postmodernism is about psychosis, whose main symptom is delusions.

Paranoia and conspiracy are central themes of postmodern fiction: the world as it is becomes too much for you, you create a private world that makes sense, but only to you. All it takes is to make a different set of connections between phenomena.

To be paranoid is to be a projector (62, 64). Projection is a classic Freudian symptom of psychosis: attributing to other people feelings and intentions that they don’t really have.

The paranoid’s dilemma: everything confirms your suspicions, but no one will validate them.

Character Stencil in V: "a hole that creates a pattern" (OED)

Oedipa goes to San Narciso & stays at Echo Courts.

Narcissus refused Echo’s love and died by his own reflection.

Echo was punished by Hera by only being able to repeat the last few words said to her. She pined away for love of Narcissus until only her voice was left.

"In long-distance telephone lines electric waves traveling through the wires echo the speaker’s own conversation back to him, and must be suppressed to avoid confusion." (Columbia Encyclopaedia)

Is Oedipa hearing true messages about Inverarity’s conspiracy, or is she insane and only hearing her own fantasies echoed back to her? The Remedios Varo painting (9-10).

Story of Rapunzel:

A witch takes a child and shuts her up in a tower when she is twelve years old; the tower has no door and only one high window.

The Prince saw the old Witch approach and heard her call out:

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your golden hair."

Then Rapunzel let down her plaits, and the Witch climbed up by them.

"So that's the staircase, is it?" said the Prince. "Then I too will climb it and try my luck."

So on the following day, at dusk, he went to the foot of the tower and cried:

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your golden hair,"

and as soon as she had let it down the Prince climbed up.

But on the evening of the day in which she had driven poor Rapunzel away, the Witch fastened the plaits on to a hook in the window, and when the Prince came and called out:

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your golden hair,"

Two interpretations of Rapunzel and Remedios Varo:

1. Salvation by romantic love. Pierce is the first Prince, but he falls on his ass instead of saving Rapunzel. She is left with solipsistic tears in front of the painting–a version of the Echo myth of unrequited love. Mucho is an inadequate husband, and Metzger shows love as a stripping away, but with no revelation at the end, only sex (cf. The striptease metaphor, p. 40). The Prince delivers the heroine out of isolation into the real world.

2. The philosophical problem of solipsism: how to prove that the world exists as more than an individual dream or delusion. The Cartesian curse. Standard solution is consensual validation, but Oedipa only gets more and more impressions, without any coherence except for what she herself supplies (the hermeneutic circle).

The faithlessness of Oedipa’s lovers is responsible for both her emotional and philosophical distress–and they may be worse than faithless.

In the Puritan tradition, salvation comes from the Word, which is God’s manifestation in the world (p. 128; & note parallel with literary critics). But, in a fallen world, the word is corrupted too–like the texts of The Courier’s Tragedy, which stand for the loss of scriptural meaning.

Ambiguity of the Word appears in Pynchon’s fascination with a postmodern phenomenon, the acronym: a word that only substitutes for other words, and is thus a second-order sign, twice removed from a referent. Further, in Lot 49 acronyms are deprived of their stable meanings and often point in opposite directions, instead of aiding Oedipa’s quest. They are a kind of verbal entropy; if "communication is the key" (84) as Nefastis says, acronyms are the wrong key for the lock one is trying to open (which is worse than having no key at all).

83: FSM, YAF, VDC

91: IA - a fragment of CIA

96: CIA.

Bakunin’s miracle (97):

98, 99: DEATH and ACDC

Climax of the series is NADA (118).

If any exists, it comes from a collective rather than a personal quest. Two great visions of collective America, one negative, one positive:

4-5: Mucho’s used cars are a nightmare vision of an entropic society - "unvarying gray sickness." Consumer society recycles goods endlessly, so that one longs for the trumpet-blast of the day of judgement, when the "epileptic word" (95) creates a discontinuity. Also, driving a used car represents exclusion from grace, in a society where consumption is the principal religion.

102-104: the sailor’s mattress, another American nightmare of waste and futility; also entropic, because it’s information can’t be recovered.

149: America’s salvation lies in the Preterite, who one day may speak the Word, if only by chance.