The Crying of Lot 49: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Mike Fallopian’s bizarre story is actually based on surprising elements of fact (like Russian ships being in California in the 1860s). In other words, while Fallopian’s story violates all common assumptions about historical events, his conspiratorial interpretation of reality can actually be justified. Similarly, Pinguid’s reasoning about capitalism and communism is counterintuitive yet common: he considered both systems unjustifiably cruel, so he totally gave up on changing the world and became the thing he originally most hated. There is no question that men like Pinguid and Inverarity are principally responsible for the soulless landscape of cities like San Narciso. Finally, Pynchon specifically relates the battle that may or may not have occurred in the Peter Pinguid myth to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that largely precipitated the American involvement in the Vietnam War in 1964, the same year that Pynchon wrote The Crying of Lot 49. Famously, the Gulf of Tonkin attack was in large part a fabrication invented by the American government to justify intervening in Vietnam. At the time, however, its truth had not been widely established, so it was plausible but unproven, just like Fallopian’s whole theory. Of course, the fact that the United States government would launch a war based entirely upon self-interested lies shows that Pynchon understands the genuine appeal of conspiratorial thinking, which can never be proven but always might be true.

The message on the bathroom wall is not obviously suspicious—the only reason it becomes an important plot point in the novel is that it just so happens to catch Oedipa’s attention. In a sense, it is the least absurd thing she sees in The Scope, and this is why she pays attention to it: the lettering is too conventional and the message too predictable for Kirby to be sincere.

Fallopian’s underground postal system, which reflects his search for an alternative to mainstream institutions and systems of government, is highly contradictory. The postal system is one of the most functional, mundane, and broadly accepted aspects of American government: there are myriad other causes for legitimate rebels to take up in the 1960s. The fact that Fallopian and his colleagues exchange empty messages shows both the pointlessness of their system and the emptiness of their relationships. Additionally, although it is supposed to be an underground alternative to ordinary institutions, the postal system actually relies completely upon Yoyodyne, the massive militaristic defense corporation that Fallopian himself works for. Accordingly, while Fallopian and his colleagues pretend to be rebels, they are actually supporting the system they are rebelling against.

Although the reader still has not been acquainted with the Tristero, Pynchon again foreshadows its role in the novel’s plot. By self-consciously comparing Oedipa’s belief in the Tristero to a performance, the novel again calls attention to the similarity between the construction of a narrative (like this very novel) and the process of developing a theory or perspective about the world. It's deeply ironic that Fangoso Lagoons is totally artificial when it is right next to the Pacific Ocean: this suggests that people are choosing cheap, spruced-up imitations of reality over reality itself. Accordingly, Oedipa and her crew are deprived of a day in nature, at the beach, and instead end up in something closer to an amusement park. Built to imitate reality, Fangoso Lagoons ends up actually debasing or devaluing it.

Manny Di Presso literally jumps into the novel without warning or context, and he briefly turns the story into an exaggerated parody of a Hollywood mob movie. Similarly, Tony Jaguar’s dispute with Inverarity over bones parodies the cruelty of profit-minded businesspeople, whether real estate tycoons or mobsters. Di Presso’s appearance—like those of Fangoso Lagoons, Beaconsfield cigarettes, and so many other coincidences—is utterly absurd and implausible outside fiction. In fact, it serves to parody the very tropes of fiction. The novel is a kind of closed system in which everything seems to be connected but nothing can explain why. In this way, the plot itself mirrors Oedipa’s feeling of being trapped and confused in a tower, like Rapunzel, suggesting that objective meaning or truth is impossible to deduce.

Both of the theories about the source of the Beaconsfield bones are equally outrageous and inhumane: they violate people’s common sense that the dead are sacred and should not be tampered with. If the bones are the remains of the past, then Tony Jaguar and Inverarity are essentially selling history out for the sake of their profits. At the same time, the novel makes it clear that this kind of exploitation is a principle of the post-World War II American economy. Indeed, the notion that soldiers’ bones are being turned into consumer goods can be taken as a metaphor for the way in which the horrible violence of World War II ended up jumpstarting the American economy, eventually creating millionaires like Pierce Inverarity. It starts to look like the whole system profits from violence.

The connection between the Beaconsfield cigarettes and The Courier’s Tragedy again suggests a deeper, more sinister meaning to Oedipa. Ironically enough, Di Presso is frantically paranoid, while the actual Paranoids are totally relaxed. As always, there is no genuine connection between the novel’s characters here: everyone is living in their own world, and while these different worlds coexist, they do not seem to affect one another at all. Of course, the exception is that Di Presso strands the rest on the island—but fortunately, they do not seem to care much.

Too high to get their story straight, the Paranoids again embody stereotypes of 1960s counterculture. In fact, this counterculture became part of the mainstream only because so many people (like the Paranoids) started imitating it. After leaving the Paranoids behind, Oedipa gets “transplanted” into another exaggerated stereotype of the past: a Shakespearean-type drama by a fictional playwright. Readers are likely to assume that, as with any story-within-a-story, Wharfinger’s play will make some symbolic commentary on the novel as a whole. It’s clear that Oedipa also sees Cold War America as “preapocalyptic [and] death-wishful,” but it will be up to her (and the reader) to determine how much of the rest of the play is truly meaningful, and how much is simply distracting.

Although The Courier’s Tragedy is Pynchon’s satirical take on Jacobean literature, it certainly resembles real plays from the early 17th century. In particular, it likely reminds many readers of struggling through Shakespeare—who is famously remembered for using the play-within-a-play technique to make metafictional commentary on his own works. Like the novel itself, the plot of The Courier’s Tragedy is rife with twists that are hard to follow. It dares readers to make connections and look for clues linking Niccolò’s disinheritance and resistance to Oedipa’s quest, but any such connections will ultimately be tenuous and unproveable.

Mistaken identity, disinheritance, sexual taboos, and, above all, mail end up being major tropes in The Courier’s Tragedy, just like in the novel as a whole. It is possible to draw easy comparisons between the play and the novel—Angelo’s secret postal company is like Mike Fallopian’s, for instance, and Niccolò fighting for his birthright mirrors Oedipa’s attempts to sort through Inverarity’s will, which she would have inherited if she’d married him. But it is much harder to tell whether these parallels are meaningful or just red herrings (misleading clues).

These scenes of violence add little to the play besides brutality—they seem purposefully excessive and gratuitous. Interestingly, like in Cashiered, all the violence in The Courier’s Tragedy dramatized onstage, in full view of the audience. But in the rest of the novel, violence is hidden or presented as something more noble than what it is. For instance, Yoyodyne displays huge missiles outside its headquarters, Manny Di Presso runs off to confront his pursuers, and Pynchon constantly makes veiled references to the Vietnam War. Later incidents of violence both happen “off-camera,” so to speak, as Oedipa hears about the events from someone else. Although their environment is built to carefully hide it, Pynchon’s characters are really surrounded by violence—both physical conflict and the gradual erosion of humanity due to everyone and everything becoming a source of profit. 

The cryptic message and the strange moments of silence onstage are examples of signs that draw Oedipa in and practically beg to be incorporated into her conspiracy theory. But precisely because these things are intangible to the audience, she does not know what they mean—whatever Angelo and Gennaro reference seems to be somehow outside the closed world of the play. But the weight that they give this mysterious figure suggests that it has to mean something.

The Courier’s Tragedy starts revolving around the mysterious character or force that nobody is willing to name. When Angelo gets killed, it becomes impossible for the audience to fully understand what is happening without understanding who the mysterious men are—accordingly, Oedipa starts to feel like everyone else is “in” on a conspiracy that only she doesn’t know about.

Although Oedipa finally gets to witness the rehashed version of Manny Di Presso’s story that the Paranoids first told her about, now she is confronted with a far more pressing mystery. At last, the reader hears a version of the name that the narrator has repeatedly argued will be central to the novel’s plot: “Trystero.” Neither Oedipa nor the reader seems to understand why Trystero is so important, but both must proceed with the assumption that it is—and that it’s their job is to figure out why. In other words, the reader’s sense of the novel’s world is now anchored around the central concept of Trystero. Acting as literary detectives of sorts, Oedipa and the reader now know that Trystero is somehow the answer to their question—they just have to figure out what question they are supposed to be asking.

After the play returns to the gratuitous violence of its earlier scenes, Oedipa returns to the unresolved coincidence that initially brought her to see the play. It is significant that the lone survivor is at once the director, the actor who spoke the line about “Trystero,” and a character who gets the Dukedom that everyone has been fighting over, but whose relationship to the rest of the characters is never actually defined. This contrasts with Oedipa’s own storyline: while she’s tasked with distributing Pierce Inverarity’s estate according to his legitimate will, the play ends with Gennaro inheriting something that should not be his at all. Although never fully explained, this rogue corruption of normal inheritance procedures in the play suggests that Oedipa, in turn, might have the power to do more than just blindly fulfill the procedures set out for her as executor.

Oedipa assumes that, as the play’s director, Driblette must have some insight into its fundamental meaning. However, Driblette totally ridicules Oedipa, talks past her, and rejects her idea. He insists that his creative control does not give him a monopoly on deciding the work’s meaning. At the same time, he also rejects Oedipa’s presumption that the absolute meaning of a play must instead reside in its original written script. In fact, by boldly suggesting that that his play “isn’t literature” and “doesn’t mean anything,” Driblette offers a theory of meaning and interpretation that is completely opposite to Oedipa’s. While Oedipa thinks that the clues she encounters hold some definite meaning that needs to be uncovered, Driblette thinks that people interpret works of art however they want—but this does not make them any one person more or less right than anyone else. Pynchon clearly wants the reader to ask the same questions of his novel: should it be treated as literature, and does it mean anything at all?

Even after disavowing the very notion of meaning in literature, Driblette explicitly takes credit for the play’s greatest mystery. But he frustratingly refuses to explain himself, just like his actors did throughout the play. This sets off Oedipa’s mental alarm bells: where everyone else says that there is nothing, she sees a hidden conspiracy. So when Driblette says that she will “never touch the truth,” he seems to be saying that there is no truth—but in this message, Oedipa hears that the truth is buried so deep that she will have to go to great lengths if she wants to uncover it. In fact, this very misunderstanding shows how all language is inevitably open to distortion and multiple interpretations. Meanwhile, it’s significant that Metzger is listening to Mucho on the radio: it draws an explicit link between the two men, who seem to treat Oedipa with equal amounts of indifference and disdain. Additionally, Oedipa’s husband seems to only drop into her world through his job in the media. Much like Oedipa first got to know Metzger by listening to him talk incessantly about his movie, this shows how Oedipa and Mucho’s marriage is also largely dependent upon mass media (the radio station), which acts as a kind of buffer or mediator between them.