The Crying of Lot 49 & it's Tower.

[ionicinstinct]

For those that don't know, TCL49 (how I'm choosing to abbreviate it) is a novella about a woman by the name of Oedipa Maas, a suburban housewife, being named executor for her ex, a multimillionaire who owns all of San Narisco. She leaves for the city, has an affair, and slowly discovers a conspiracy theory dating back to medieval times regarding the US postal service and its hidden rival - Trystero. The novella is set in the 60s and feels ripe with the culture of back then - the fashion, the sleekness of postwar America's new riches, television and phones and Hollywood, a Beatles ripoff band called the Paranoids trying to make it big and singing thematically relevant numbers in the background. Take for example:

What chance has a lonely surfer boy

For the love of a surfer chick,

With all these Humbert Humbert cats

Coming on so big and sick?

For me, my baby was a woman,

For him she's just another nymphet.

References to Nabokov's Lolita are present throughout, but this one is my favourite.

Predetermination rings through, the illusion of freedom is referred to in different ways - the freedom a car promises is contrasted against the roads like 'hypothermic needles' determine its path, movies play at the perfect time and are predictable, the same story repeats in several places (plays, legal cases, urban myths), everything falls rather too perfectly in place. Oedipa is trapped in a city haunted by her former lover that owned almost every part and lords over her like a god. At the start of the book, she recalls seeing a piece by Remedios Varo that brought her to tears:


>By the end of the novel, it becomes more clear how relevant it was to her.

Her conspiracy isolates her but strengthens her all the same. She goes from idle housewife to someone determined to find a truth so glaringly clear yet impossible to grasp. One by one, the men in her life disappear: her ex lover, the one to start this, is dead, her pedophile husband gets addicted to LSD, her ex-Nazi therapist goes insane and gets arrested, her lover leaves her for a teenager (see the Paranoids quote above). Her determination allows her to go on when all else collapses around her.

She meets more people than ever before, a homosexual anonymous love assosciation, discredited scientists, feeble minded elderly, mysterious playwrights, yet when she is alone - she ponders on a disused mattress, of all the sweat, piss, spit, and cum that are embedded into it, carrying the memory of all the homeless that had slept upon it, yet off to be burned once considered trash. So is she, imprinted upon by all those people, carrying their memory, yet they are annihilated from her life one by one, leaving only her crashing forward into this conspiracy.

In a sense, there is a reality that is theirs, and a reality that Tristero brings. There are two grroups of communciation - TV, phones, radio (her husband is a DJ), film (her lover was a child actor), mail. And then there is Tristero - omnipotent, omnipresent, yet completely unknown. Oedipa is caught between the two realities that communication constructs, the two metaphors.

What is the tower then? There's two ways to see it - it is the source of the fabrication of reality; it is myth by media constructed into a 'lifestyle' it is America, it is those trapped by the illusion of freedom that indulgence in materalism promises, yet all it does is 'cover' what is 'real', and the figure is the powers that be dictating this - communication MASS communication.

Or perhaps, Like the girls in the tower, her conspiracy theory has caused her to construct a reality that makes more sense than the one she lived in, trapped as she may be on the inside [isolation]. The figure is fate itself, maybe Tristero, maybe her ex lover.

Here is a song I listened throughout reading it, particularly at the end and during the play segment. I hope you will enjoy it.

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