Oedipa’s Trystero: Understanding Communication in The Crying of Lot 49
What is the Trystero? This is the question that Oedipa Mass, the heroine of Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49, tries to answer with the various threads of information given to her. In fact, the novel centers itself around Oedipa's quest for the Trystero. Written in 1965, The Crying of Lot 49 explores the fragmented society of the 1960’s with its rise of the drug culture, the VietNam War, the JFK and Martin Luther King’s assassinations, and the fight for civil rights. It was a turbulent decade far from the happy peaceful suburban nucleus of the American 50’s. This turbulent chaotic world is what Oedipa Maas journeys into in order to piece together the mystery of the Trystero system. As the Cold War world is disjointed, so is the information presented to Oedipa in her quest, leaving the reader thinking whether Trystero is real or only in her imagination. As Dr. Nefastis, a person to whom she went to seek the answer about Trystero, points out, she must be sensitive enough for the information. What she needs is a clear channel of communication. However, communication, the transmission of this information, in The Crying of Lot 49 is all “muted”, lost in the crazy mist of Oedipa’s mind. Oedipa’s quest for Trystero in the turbulent world of the 1960’s and the structure of the novel itself works together in Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49, to present a fragmented view of information suggesting that a pathway for comprehensible communication is needed in order for the receiver to understand the sender’s information.
Oedipa is a women of 28 years, bored with her life. She feels as if she is trapped in the mundane world of the suburb and she wants to break out of her “Rapunzel’s tower”. She needed a mystery. This is what Trystero gives her: the mystery to free her from her shell. As Oedipa embarks on the journey to execute her dead lover’s will, she uncovers a conspiracy of the postage system of Trystero that grows ever wider. The first moment she encounters the Trystero mystery when she sees is a scribbling on public bathroom stall that reads, “Interested in sophisticated fun? You, hubby, girl friends. The more the merrier. Get in touch with Kirby, through WASTE only, Box 7931, LA” (38). One would want to ask, why take note of a meaningless message on a bathroom stall? It has no relevance to Oedipa herself or the task of executing Inverarity’s will. Another peculiarity is the fascination she specifically takes of the word “Trystero” because of its usage in the play, The Courier’s Tragedy:
But Gennaro ends on a note most desperate, probably for its original audience a real shock, because it names at last the name Angelo did not and Niccolo tried to…Trystero. The word hung in the air as the act ended and all lights were for a moment cut; hung in the dark to puzzle Oeidpa’s Maas, but not yet to exert the power over her it was to (58).
Trystero, in the play is Niccolo’s assassin. He ends up leaving a letter that confesses all of the sins of the Angelo, the play’s villain who took over the throne. Due to this letter of confession, Oedipa takes an interest in Trystero and its position in the postage system conspiracy. However, the reader would have to note that it is a play nonetheless, and therefore can very well be fiction. It can also change with each time it is presented, and indeed it does. Talking to Dribblette, the director of the Courier’ Tragedy, leads her to Zapf’s Use Books. There she finds a written version of the play with just a reference of Trystero in the text. There is no fix answer to Trystero in the copy of the play. “Trystero” here is fleeting and loosely connected to anything. It is but a word. To Oedipa her interest in Trystero seems something of an accident with all these signs appearing to her. Yet, at the same time it is can it be just a coincidence? Accident or not, Oedipa needed a mystery and Trystero gives her one.
In her course to solve the mystery of Trystero, she came to Dr. Nefastis who is working on his Maxwell’s Demon machine. He explains to her:
“Communication is the key,’ cried Nefastis. ‘The Demon passes his data onto the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind…The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information…On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving’ (85).
Dr. Nefastis explanation of the Maxwell’s Demon mirrors Oedipa’s fragmented journey. He is right: Communication is the key. It is the key to Oedipa’s journey. She needs a clear pathway of communication to detect all the nuances in the information presented to her in order to solve the Trystero system. She must be sensitive enough. In meeting Dr. Nefastis, it propels Oedipa’s out into the street of San Francisco, “sensitive” to all the signs of Trystero around her. In the streets she sees all different kind of people who, when telling her the pieces of their lives, seems miraculously to connect to Trystero. In a gay bar, she stumbles on an Inamorati Anonymous that uses the mail system’s post horn as the group’s symbol. The children playing in the dark chant of “Turning Taxi” that she takes to be Thurn and Taxis, the legal mailing system in England. The old man has the post horn tattoo on his arm. All of these, are pieces of fragmented information with no connection to the others. Their connection is only what Oedipa sees in her mind.
Decorating each alienation, each species of withdrawal, as cufflink, decal, aimless doodling, there was somehow always the post horn. She grew so to expect it that perhaps she did not see it quite so often as later was to remember seeing it. A couple–three times would really have been enough. Or too much” (100).
Oedipa does not even know if what she sees in the street of San Francisco is real or not. She sees information all around her and connects it with the mystery of the Trystero system. However, the information is all fragmented taken from chaotic scenes of California and unfortunately, there is no clear communication, no clear transmission of these information for Oedipa to figure it all out. She can only piece together what information is presented to her with muted communication, with the muted line of transmission.
Communication too is muted in the information that the novel presents to its reader. Although written not in first person narrative but in a third person narrative, the novel follows Oedipa’s consciousness as she tries to find out about Trystero. All the information that the reader is allowed to know is what Oedipa knows. The reader is on the quest to find out about Trystero as much as Oedipa is, and in fact is left to wonder the mystery of Trystero more than Oedipa herself. The information that California presents to Oedipa is already fragmented: The bathroom stall’s message, The Courier’s Tragedy, the people she meets, none of them are relevant to each other. They are but only “aimless doodling”(100). This leaves the reader in a state of quandary, not knowing whether one should believe in Oedipa’s sensitivity and her Trystero system or not. Is Oedipa coming to the right conclusion concerning Trystero, that it is indeed a conspiracy? Another aspect of the novel that plays into the theme of fragmentation is how the novel ends. The last line of The Crying of Lot 49 reads, “The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa sits back, to await the crying of lot 49” (152). As Oedipa sits and waits, Thomas Pynchon leaves his reader wondering whether the Trystero system is real or the stuff of Oedipa’s imagination. There is no clear answer to this question and this is Pynchon’s way of reinforcing his novel by leaving his reader hanging. Information is fragmented and this is what he presents to the reader through Oedipa’s quest. Without any clear communication, information will remain fragmented . There is no way to know.
Both Oedipa’s quest for Trystero and the structure of the novel clearly emphasize the needed for communication in order to reach an understanding, considering the lack of it confuses Oedipa and the reader to what the meaning of Trystero is. Pynchon puts it best when he has Dr. Nefastis explain to Oedipa about the Maxwell’s Demon and the sensitive. Oedipa is a sensitive to see all the clues to the Trystero. The question is: Should we trust Oedipa’s sensitivity in regards to Trystero? After all, she is a desperate housewife who needs a mystery. Is her sensitivity all in her mind or is it out there in the world waiting for her to decipher? Are we sensitive enough to understand the novel and in turn, Oedipa’s quest? She makes sense of Trystero out of bits and pieces of disjointed lives that seemingly connects when they hardly know each other at all. All that is known of the Trystero is through her. Thomas Pynchon, mirroring the disjointed 60’s, where all is isolated and meaningless, left his reader to wonder what is the meaning his novel? Why have Oedipa goes on this journey to find Trystero and not answer the question in the end? Pynchon creates a world without much meaning and left the reader to make sense of it all in his or her own imagination, just as Oedipa tries to make sense of Trystero. As Dr. Nefastis said, “Communication is the key”.