The Crying of Lot 49

by

Thomas Pynchon

Tristero / Trystero Term Analysis

Tristero—or “Trystero,” as it is spelled for most of the book—is the mysterious conspiracy about a shadowy organization of mail-carriers that’s at the center of The Crying of Lot 49’s plot. Oedipa Maas spends most of the novel trying to unmask or at least understand Tristero. By following Tristero’s muted horn symbol, Oedipa gradually pieces together a theory about the secretive organization in the novel’s middle chapters. But she eventually realizes that while the Triestro could be a real conspiracy, it could just as easily be an elaborate made-up plot designed by Pierce Inverarity to harass her or drive her crazy after his death. The unknowability of the truth about Tristero represents Pynchon’s central argument that any one interpretation is only ever subjective and tentative—there is no absolute truth.

Tristero / Trystero Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49

The The Crying of Lot 49 quotes below are all either spoken by Tristero / Trystero or refer to Tristero / Trystero. 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 1 Quotes

There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair. […] In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity, Wendell “Mucho” Maas
Page Number: 10-11
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity
Related Symbols: Cars, Smog, and Freeways
Page Number: 13-4
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Things then did not delay in turning curious. If one object behind her discovery of what she was to label the Tristero System or often only The Tristero (as if it might be something’s secret title) were to bring to an end her encapsulation in her tower, then that night’s infidelity with Metzger would logically be the starting point for it; logically. That’s what would come to haunt her most, perhaps: the way it fitted, logically, together. As if (as she’d guessed that first minute in San Narciso) there were revelation in progress all around her.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Metzger
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis:

“It’s the principle,” Fallopian agreed, sounding defensive. “To keep it up to some kind of a reasonable volume, each member has to send at least one letter a week through the Yoyodyne system. If you don’t, you get fined.” He opened his letter and showed Oedipa and Metzger.

Dear Mike, it said, how are you? Just thought I’d drop you a note. How’s your book coming? Guess that’s all for now. See you at The Scope.

“That’s how it is,” Fallopian confessed bitterly, “most of the time.”

Related Characters: Mike Fallopian (speaker), Oedipa Maas, Metzger
Related Symbols: Mail
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:

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:

“You came to talk about the play,” he said. “Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn’t literature, it doesn’t mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare.”

“Who was he?” she said.

“Who was Shakespeare. It was a long time ago.”

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas (speaker), Randolph Driblette (speaker), Tony Jaguar, Richard Wharfinger, Angelo
Page Number: 60
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Under the symbols she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world?

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Randolph Driblette, Stanley Koteks
Related Symbols: The Tristero Muted Horn Symbol
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:

“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 5 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, John Nefastis
Related Symbols: Cars, Smog, and Freeways, The Nefastis Machine
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:

“You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul’s talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet, señá, if any of it should ever really happen that perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle. Like your friend. He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage, redeemed —one of the people. Unmiraculous. But your friend, unless he’s joking, is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to an Indian.”

Related Characters: Jesús Arrabal (speaker), Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity
Page Number: 97
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:

“It’s time to start,” said Genghis Cohen, offering his arm. The men inside the auction room wore black mohair and had pale, cruel faces. They watched her come in, trying each to conceal his thoughts. Loren Passerine, on his podium, hovered like a puppet-master, his eyes bright, his smile practiced and relentless. He stared at her, smiling, as if saying, I’m surprised you actually came. Oedipa sat alone, toward the back of the room, looking at the napes of necks, trying to guess which one was her target, her enemy, perhaps her proof. An assistant closed the heavy door on the lobby windows and the sun. She heard a lock snap shut; the sound echoed a moment. Passerine spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture; perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49.

Related Characters: Genghis Cohen (speaker), Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity
Page Number: 151-2
Explanation and Analysis:
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Tristero / Trystero Term Timeline in The Crying of Lot 49

The timeline below shows where the term Tristero / Trystero appears in The Crying of Lot 49. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
The narrator explains that Oedipa gradually learns about the “Tristero System,” which might help her overcome the feeling that she is trapped in life, like... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
...narrator explains that this conversation with Mike Fallopian is Oedipa’s first taste of the mysterious Tristero. The truth unfolds for her over time, like a performance. Its continues with a trip... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
...soldiers say a prayer, and Gennaro laments that Niccolò has died after a “tryst with Trystero.” Oedipa realizes that this is the name nobody was willing to say, but she doesn’t... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
Media, Communication, and Human Relationships Theme Icon
...Oedipa the same way that the actors looked at one another instead of naming Niccolò’s assassins—Trystero. (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
Media, Communication, and Human Relationships Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
Oedipa asks about the mysterious silences surrounding Trystero, and Driblette explains that it was his idea. In fact, the assassins did not even... (full context)
Chapter 4
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
...The Courier’s Tragedy, other elements of Oedipa’s world will gradual start becoming “woven into The Tristero.” After looking over Pierce Inverarity’s will, Oedipa decides to visit Yoyodyne. She attends a stockholders’... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
...not the only one to look for it. Oedipa looks to the passage that mentions Trystero and sees a note in pencil about a variant in the 1687 edition of the... (full context)
Chapter 5
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
...she eventually finds a copy in their warehouse later that afternoon. But the line about Trystero is gone, replaced with a totally different couplet. A footnote in the book explains that... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
...and she starts to try and connect the web of evidence she has assembled around Trystero. She knows it functioned in parallel to Thurn and Taxis, battled Wells, Fargo and the... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
Media, Communication, and Human Relationships Theme Icon
...the rest of the day in San Francisco and see if she can totally forget Trystero for awhile. While she is walking around, a man gets off a tourist party bus... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
Media, Communication, and Human Relationships Theme Icon
...with a drink, chatting with a man who is wearing a lapel pin of the Trystero horn symbol. She asks him about Thurn and Taxis and the U.S. Mail service, but... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
...leaves the bar and spends the evening searching San Francisco for any sign of the Trystero horn symbol. She sees one on the sidewalk but notices a man in a suit... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
...also that dreaming and being awake are the same thing. Oedipa asks them about the Trystero symbol, and they explain that they jump rope in the different parts of the symbol... (full context)
Chapter 6
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
...are nothing but words left from him. Oedipa quotes the line about the “tryst with Trystero,” and a stunned Bortz asks if she has been in the Vatican library. Oedipa shows... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
...explains that Driblette was following Bortz’s own version, which did not include the couplet about Trystero. Oedipa insists that this couplet was spoken, but Bortz says that Driblette, who spoke the... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
...he argues that the line about God redeeming nobody who has had a “tryst with Trystero” was a way of talking about something morally irredeemable. Trystero must have stood for whatever... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
Oedipa asks Bortz what Trystero was, and Bortz explains that it’s an ongoing question he addresses in his next book,... (full context)
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American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
As Oedipa continues investigating Trystero over the next several days, she pieces together enough fragmentary information to get a basic... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
...of his life. Oedipa wants to know if his death had something to do with Tristero, if she could have saved him, and why he added the last two lines to... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
Oedipa cannot find any more information about Tristero, but Bortz speculates about its history. During a weak period for Thurn and Taxis in... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
Oedipa gradually gives up on the Tristero story. She does not follow up with Genghis Cohen, Mr. Thoth, or the publisher of... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
...with the muted horn symbol that reveals the true meaning of W.A.S.T.E.: “We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire.” This stamp is not in Cohen’s catalogue, but it appears on a mysterious a... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
...put on The Courier’s Tragedy. Inverarity is the common denominator in every aspect of the Tristero story—he even funded the college where Professor Bortz teaches. Oedipa wonders whether Inverarity could have... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
...but the auction house has refused. Cohen wonders if this secret bidder might work for Tristero and want to cover up the evidence of its existence. (full context)
Media, Communication, and Human Relationships Theme Icon
...introduces herself as Arnold Snarb, and she tells the man everything she has learned about Tristero since she met him in San Francisco. She asks if their meeting was arranged by... (full context)
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
...to pester her, to take revenge? Did he want to pass on the secret of Tristero? Or is he just dead, and is it a total coincidence that he led Oedipa... (full context)
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
...ones throughout the country. The squatters living in the abandoned trains and delivering mail for Tristero probably don’t even know what Tristero was supposed to inherit. So many Americans are forced... (full context)
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Oedipa yearns to join Tristero, because she, too, is waiting for a new version of the world. There must be... (full context)