The Crying of Lot 49

Oedipa Maas is a typical suburban housewife in 1960s California. She is introduced to the audience as she returns from a Tupperware party and then prepares her husband's dinner. Once she is made executor of Pierce Inverarity's estate, however, she is thrown into a world of strange conspiracies. As she begins to piece together the estate and the nature of society itself, Oedipa engages in an act of pattern recognition and interpretation. She begins to see familiar faces, shapes, and ideas as they recur in vastly different contexts. The Tristero mail system, the muted post horn, and other ideas and institutions repeat throughout the novel. They become like symbols in any novel, except these ones are difficult to interpret and seem only to multiply as Oedipa recognizes them.

Once Oedipa sees them, she begins to notice them everywhere. Conspiracies are rampant throughout the text. From wars fought between competing mail services to right-wing organizations such as the Peter Pinguid Society, Oedipa comes to realize that her simple domestic life bore little resemblance to the realities as experienced by other people. The contrast between the unassuming domesticity of Oedipa at the beginning of the novel and the fraught, distressed investigator who attends the auction demonstrates the dangers of pattern recognition. Uncovering the truth about the world does not help Oedipa or make her happy. Instead, she learns to see conspiracies everywhere. The patterns that she comes to recognize only teach her to recognize more patterns, creating a self-perpetuating problem of paranoia and alienation. The novel asks if it is possible to find answers in a postmodern world, as further details, further investigation, simply lead to more details and questions. As Oedipa’s search becomes her life, and as she uses it to define or find answers to her life, epistemological concerns also become ontological concerns, as the limits of her quest for this truth become the limits of any quest for truth, of the search for meaning in life.

Oedipa's investigation closely resembles literary analysis. In this sense, her actions mimic those of the reader. As Oedipa searches for patterns in society, the reader searches for patterns in the text. When Oedipa studies the text of The Courier's Tragedy, these two parallel investigations merge; Oedipa is analyzing literature to uncover a truth while the audience analyses Oedipa's analysis. Everything, from a typo on Mucho's letters to a scientific invention that breaks the laws of thermodynamics, could be a clue in the investigation as well as forms part of the text.

Oedipa stops attempting to determine the boundaries of fact and fiction, as the lines are too closely blurred together to do so. Instead, she begins to weave together a story. Oedipa's investigation is a story within a story, a nested narrative in which she attempts to discern the secret, underlying story that forms the foundation of the world around her. Her search for patterns, her investigation, is both the plot and the theme of the novel. The more she searches, the more she uncovers. The more she uncovers, the more she realizes that the patterns blur into a maelstrom of chaotic and confusing information. Society is simply too disordered and subjective to discern a single metanarrative or objective truth. Patterns cannot be recognized. The novel suggests that there is no universal order, no God in a way or master plan, and that all clues to meaning are simply red herrings. In an ontological sense, this speaks to questions of destiny, as Oedipa believes she is part of some grand conspiracy, a quest that only needs to be figured out, but is really creating meaning when it isn’t there. The novel asks if such larger questions are simply projections or overanalysis, if they are hallucinations, in a countercultural sense.

When Oedipa brings her investigation to Driblette, he asks her, "[W]ho cares?" (58). The lines of the play are not worth analyzing this closely, he tells her, as they are just noises to smash together in the moment. Further to this, Oedipa's pattern recognition brings her no closer to the truth. At the end of the novel, she is still searching for information about the Tristero as she sits down at the auction. The act of pattern recognition has consumed her life, propelling her forward into the unknown, filled only with a perpetual desire for more. Oedipa cannot solve the puzzle because there is always more information. This is the pattern that she must recognize, a pattern of behavior in which she is caught in a self-repeating loop of unsatisfying investigation. Moreover, the pattern revolves around two warring mail companies, mail here being a pun on “male.” In a countercultural sense, the novel suggests that the “meaning” of society, the pattern of it, is simply a petty and meaningless war between men, its patriarchal motivations being no concern to women. As Oedipa leaves her life as a suburban housewife, she begins analyzing the makeup of society, learning that, as a liberated woman, it has nothing to do with her and is only the endless, arbitrary defining of truth by various patriarchal factions.