Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 - Essay Example

English Literature 28 November Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 The of the main heroine is Oedipa, which is a reference to the quest for meaning, the quest that, like Oedipus’s investigation, turns against the person who started it. The more details she discovers about the “Tristero mystery”, the less she “knows”. Pynchon seems to pose the questions whether “knowledge” is so important and what is the nature of human inquiry; he does this in a very intricate way. The first theme Pynchon playfully addresses is meaning itself. More specifically, this is the conflict between the “high” understanding of meaning prevalent in the past and the polycentric notion of knowledge allowing for different “meanings” present in the Pynchon’s 60s. The examples may be found throughout the whole novel. One is the opposition between “high” theatre and entertainment in the dialogue between Oedipa and Driblette: “You came to talk about the play," he said. "Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isnt literature, it doesnt mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare." "Who was he?" she said. "Who was Shakespeare. It was a long time ago” (Pynchon ch. 3) Both of the literary traditions, the high and the entertaining, tell nothing to Oedipa. The “lower” one even seems to tell her more, though it is supposed that the quest for meaning is the function of the “higher” one. The same paradox arises when Bortz talks about different editions of the book of Jacobean plays: to him, “The book in the Vatican is only an obscene parody” (Pynchon Ch. 6). The ironical usage of the concept of pornography is notable here: to the publisher and the attentive researcher/detective, pornography is not in content but in “senseless” formal details. The book is about the age when information begins to undermine its own value; the encyclopedia entries and occasional plot lines are the style elements that brilliantly complement the plot of senseless investigation. From the beginning and until the end, Oedipa is not sure about herself (sometimes she feels like she is hallucinating). The world of absurdity and distorted perceptions (sometimes the distortion is caused by quite objective reasons like drugs), the world where hospital staff drinks hot water from the tap and the only scientist is mad, seems to be meaningful for itself, not for some external transcendent Reason, the “mystery” of “the lot 49” and the connection of all things (Pynchon). The only thing left to Oedipa is to find her individual “meaning”. The open ending suggests the same thing for the readers. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Content and Style) As a postwar writer, Hemingway addresses the problem of the consequences of war for the people involved in it. These consequences are especially tragic in Hemingway’s masculine world where stronger people continue to get everything, as though the war never ended. Jake is the most important character for the depiction of this problem. Not mentioning his exile and supposed impotence, he also displays the other signs of the loss of sense of life. He is not fully a Catholic, unable to perceive his pains calmly. He often expresses disregard of some practices in journalism, such as “graceful exits” from friends (Hemingway ch. 2). However, Jake is a strong and persuasive character, as he is complex. Not enjoying his own life, he enjoys the life as a global process, the order of nature: “Floating I saw only the sky and felt the drop and lift of the swells…. The water was buoyant and cold. It felt as though you could never sink” (Hemingway ch. 19). Additionally, Jake happens to be in the position that allows him to see the weaknesses of his friends who seem to have more luck, like Brett and Robert Cohn: Jake happens to see both of them crying and uncertain. Such traditional American values as mobility become unimportant for the desperate people of “the lost generation”: “Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that” (Hemingway ch. 2). A number of places with romantic connotations turn out to be not only glamorous but also brutal, like a famous corrida episode when the dialogue of Jack and Brett resembles bullfighting, which is very ironic. The sense of being broken is especially appealing when communicated directly and by different characters: “Listen, Jake,” he leaned forward on the bar. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?” (Hemingway ch. 2). The style is plain but elaborated. It seems more colorful than that of the war novels, maybe because Hemingway’s main character is a proficient writer. The most important style elements are personal narration and the plot twists, while the formal elements are often a necessary supplement but not a dominant stylistic attraction. Ellison’s “A Party down at the Square” (Literary Style) Sometimes the plot does not strike the reader as much as the style or narration. “A Party down at the Square” is the case in point. The language of a neutral witness of real nightmare speaks louder than the event happening. Ellison’s short story is written in first person, in colloquial language: there are the contractions typical for oral speech (“it wasn’t circling around”, “cause”), the swearwords and deliberately impolite language (“nigger”, “Somebody said that he’d better shut his damn mouth, and he shut up”), and numerous colloquial expressions ( “There had been a cyclone all right”, “my guts were gone”), especially emphatic (“a hell of a shape”, “That Bacote nigger was some nigger!”) (Ellison). Sometimes the words are misspelled (“in a minnit”) and the author does not follow the grammar rules (“hisself”, “I stayed right there”) strictly to create the impression of a person speaking. The overall impression is that the narrator delivers the story immediately when it is perceived, so the narrative is unmediated by literary or social conventions. The only factor that stands between the event and the account of it is the narrator consciousness, and Ellison implies this by the following self-reflection: “It was some party too. I was right there, see. I was right there watching it all. It was my first party and my last”. It logically follows that, having the full subjective account of such events as a plane crash and a homicide on the racial ground, readers would expect at least some signs of the speaker’s attitude, his opinion of the event. However, no evaluation comes, and all that is left is the list of immediate impressions followed by the comparisons appealing to the sensual perceptions, like in a media report: “It made a loud crash. It sounded like the wind blowing the door of a tin barn shut” (Ellison). The culmination of the plot, when the “nigger” is burning, has even some touch of tragicomedy: “Every time I eat barbeque I’ll remember that nigger. His back was just like a barbecued hog” (Ellison). The story is not a media report, and the comparisons are quite vivid, even personal: the comparisons with jumping chicken or “the wind blowing the door of a tin barn shut” (Ellison) are taken from individual experience and for a personal account of the story. There is no “distance” between the reader and the subject, but the reader’s attitude to the narrator remains opened. Some readers would be astonished by the fact that the narrator feels nothing about the event but fear. Even his disgust is expressed with the plain statement of the fact that he vomited. Thus, there is moral detachment from the event, perhaps provoked by fear. From the stylistic perspective, it is Ellison’s combination of involvement and detachment that makes the story a literary work rather than a personal account or a media report. Works Cited Ellison, Ralph. “A Party Down at the Square”. Elecronic. Web. 28 Nov. 2012. . Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Elecronic. Web. 28 Nov. 2012. . Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Elecronic. Project Gutenberg. Web. 28 Nov. 2012. . Read More