The Crying of Lot 49

by

Thomas Pynchon

A post horn is a brass instrument similar to a French horn that postal workers often carried in the 18th and 19th century, so that they could announce their departure or arrival. Now, post horns are frequently used as iconography to represent postal services. Thurn and Taxis’s symbol was a post horn, and the novel’s famous Tristero symbol is a modified version of this horn, with a mute added.

Post Horn Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49

The The Crying of Lot 49 quotes below are all either spoken by Post Horn or refer to Post Horn. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
).
Chapter 3 Quotes

He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew
Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn,
And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.
No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,
Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.

Related Characters: Randolph Driblette (speaker), Gennaro (speaker), Angelo, Niccolò
Related Symbols: The Tristero Muted Horn Symbol
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

“Then the watermark you found,” she said, “is nearly the same thing, except for the extra little doojigger sort of coming out of the bell.”

“It sounds ridiculous,” Cohen said, “but my guess is it's a mute.”

She nodded. The black costumes, the silence, the secrecy. Whoever they were their aim was to mute the Thurn and Taxis post horn.

[…]

“Why put in a deliberate mistake?” he asked, ignoring—if he saw it—the look on her face. “I've come up so far with eight in all. Each one has an error like this, laboriously worked into the design, like a taunt. There's even a transposition—U. S. Potsage, of all things.”

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas (speaker), Genghis Cohen (speaker), Wendell “Mucho” Maas
Related Symbols: The Tristero Muted Horn Symbol, Mail
Page Number: 77-8
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

It may have been some vision of the continent-wide power structure Hinckart could have taken over, now momentarily weakened and tottering, that inspired Tristero to set up his own system. He seems to have been highly unstable, apt at any time to appear at a public function and begin a speech. His constant theme, disinheritance. The postal monopoly belonged to Ohain by right of conquest, and Ohain belonged to Tristero by right of blood. He styled himself El Desheredado, The Disinherited, and fashioned a livery of black for his followers, black to symbolize the only thing that truly belonged to them in their exile: the night. Soon he had added to his iconography the muted post horn and a dead badger with its four feet in the air (some said that the name Taxis came from the Italian tasso, badger, referring to hats of badger fur the early Bergamascan couriers wore). He began a sub rosa campaign of obstruction, terror and depredation along the Thurn and Taxis mail routes.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Professor Emory Bortz
Related Symbols: The Tristero Muted Horn Symbol
Page Number: 131-2
Explanation and Analysis:

Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream […] Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you […] all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.

Those, now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the alternatives. Those symmetrical four. She didn’t like any of them, but hoped she was mentally ill; that that’s all it was. That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity, Professor Emory Bortz
Related Symbols: Mail, Drugs and Alcohol, The Tristero Muted Horn Symbol
Page Number: 140-1
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Crying of Lot 49 PDF

Post Horn Term Timeline in The Crying of Lot 49

The timeline below shows where the term Post Horn appears in The Crying of Lot 49. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
...carrier from 1300 to 1867, and he shows Oedipa the stamp’s watermark, which is a post horn very similar to the W.A.S.T.E. symbol. In fact, the W.A.S.T.E. symbol just has one more... (full context)
Chapter 5
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
...linking her and Jesús together. She notices an old anarchist newspaper from 1904 with the post horn symbol on it, and Jesús comments that this paper has somehow made it to him... (full context)