/lit/ - Literature

>just confirm or deny the existence of global conspiracy and you'll be happy

come on, pynchon

The postmodern work is the one which, by the last page, has torn every preceding one from its spine and left you alone with a flapping empty paperback cover. The Crying of Lot 49 is this exactly. Drenching itself in what passes in literary academia for comedy, Lot 49 tries its very best to hide itself among its fellow satires, with characters like Fallopian and Hilarius camouflaging a novel with something to say as one that says nothing at all, or vice-versa? Ironically, Pynchon manages both. Like her namesake, Oedipa is presented with a riddle. Unlike him, Oedipa ostensibly has no sphinx, save for the titular subject, and reaches no conclusion. She has only, by the end of the novel, the riddle itself, which may or may not even exist, which may or may not be a hallucination, which may or may not be a cold-hearted prank.

The novel is /exactly the same/. Pynchon tells you exactly what he plans to do to both Oedipa and you, the reader, at various points throughout; in the first place, Oedipa notices the visual similarity between the circuits of radio and the circuitry of San Narciso, ready to reveal something to her if only she takes the time to study it. Pynchon here turns his gaze to his reader: 'Here is /your/ circuitry,' mockingly, 'now make sense of it.' So much of the circuitry is bundled into his second gambit, being The Courier's Tragedy. The plot of the play, mirroring that of the 'actual' conflict between Turn & Taxis and The Tristero, is what first drags Oedipa out her "tower" and plunges her head first into the "tapestry" of the conspiracy, if there is one.

And that is the question indeed: Is there anything more to it than a series of coincidences? As Oedipa asks this question of the evidence she finds, so to does Pynchon ask it of the novel as a form: Is any novel, really, anything more than plot? Is there ever a hidden message in the circuitry, or is it circuitry for circuitry's sake? Is there a Demon sorting this disparate information, and if so, can only the "sensitives" of academia reach him? Or does it all amount to so much "crying?" Pynchon was in fact criticized by the New York Times for coming up short to suffuse the novel with meaning by way of Oedipa's musings on the railroad tracks in the final chapter; I should think this was all part of the act.

Personally I'm unsure of Pynchon's stance; on the one hand he seems critical of those who meander through life devoid of meaning, love, and actual living, yet on the other, he suggests that any actual meaning is impossible, if not unreachable by the mind that is un-sensitive, unaltered by drugs, or, at perhaps his most desperate, alive.

What do you think, /lit/? I'll be the first to admit I am a novice to his work but I'm utterly captivated. Moving on to either Gravity's Rainbow or Bleeding Edge next, having wrapped up Inherent Vice before Lot 49 (entertaining, but a void by comparison to the implosively dense Lot 49, the latter being less than half the length of the former).

What the fuck is this? Is Pynchon writing in some form of cryptic English?

Or is this >2deep4me?

i read this recently, it blew me away

>>5383286

was she being trolled or is it real?