In The Crying of Lot 49, the most significant symbols of how modern consumerism hurts humanity are cars, the freeways laid down for them, and the smog they leave behind. In the novel, Oedipa get everywhere by car, and practically everything in California is designed around driving, reflecting the rise of American consumerist culture in which modern comfort like cars and freeways are deemed more important than the aesthetic beauty or climate of an entire city. Additionally, driving represents the double-sided nature of empowerment that comes with modern comforts: on the highway, Oedipa feels free but rootless, both empowered to act for herself (or go wherever she wants) and totally rootless, without any clear goals to fulfill or places to go in her life. Her mind clears up when she drives, but the world gets obscured by a thick layer of smog that seems to separate her both literally and figuratively from the rest of reality. And while all of Southern California becomes an endless concrete jungle full of unfamiliar places to explore, it is horrendously ugly and there is nothing at all worth seeing. To rebuild the world for cars, nature and history have to be paved over, like the city tears up a cemetery to build the East San Narciso Freeway. And by the end of the novel, building a world for cars seems to mean building a world that is not suitable for people to live happy, fulfilling lives.
Cars, Smog, and Freeways Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49
Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at […] Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.
San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway. But it had been Pierce's domicile, and headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed, would set the spot apart, give it an aura. […] Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.
High above the L.A. freeways,
And the traffic's whine,
Stands the well-known Galactronics
Branch of Yoyodyne.
To the end, we swear undying
Loyalty to you,
Pink pavilions bravely shining,
Palm trees tall and true.
Looking down at San Francisco a few minutes later from the high point of the bridge’s arc, she saw smog. Haze, she corrected herself, is what it is, haze. How can they have smog in San Francisco? Smog, according to the folklore, did not begin till farther south. It had to be the angle of the sun.
Amid the exhaust, sweat, glare and ill-humor of a summer evening on an American freeway, Oedipa Maas pondered her Trystero problem. All the silence of San Narciso—the calm surface of the motel pool, the contemplative contours of residential streets like rakings in the sand of a Japanese garden—had not allowed her to think as leisurely as this freeway madness.
For John Nefastis (to take a recent example) two kinds of entropy, thermodynamic and informational, happened, say by coincidence, to look alike, when you wrote them down as equations. Yet he had made his mere coincidence respectable, with the help of Maxwell’s Demon.
Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of God knew how many parts; more than two, anyway. With coincidences blossoming these days wherever she looked, she had nothing but a sound, a word, Trystero, to hold them together.