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Inamorati Anonymous
Yoyodyne is an enormous aerospace company that also appears in Pynchon’s earlier novel V. In The Crying of Lot 49, Yoyodyne’s Galactronics Divisions factory is located in San Narciso and partially owned by Pierce Inverarity. While disillusioned Yoyodyne engineers like Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks reluctantly spend their lives building new missile technologies for Yoyodyne, the company’s out-of-touch stockholders sing childish songs about the company’s beautiful weapons. A dystopian parody of the American military-industrial complex (the Cold War in particular), Yoyodyne shows how corporate capitalism saps people’s creativity and how science gets transformed into a tool for apocalyptic destruction. It also demonstrates Pynchon’s view that people in power are often absurdly incompetent and unfit for rule, selected for their positions by sheer nepotism and luck rather than merit or ability.
Yoyodyne Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49
The The Crying of Lot 49 quotes below are all either spoken by Yoyodyne or refer to Yoyodyne. 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:
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Chapter 3
Quotes
“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.”
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Chapter 4
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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.
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“Patents,” Oedipa said. Koteks explained how every engineer, in signing the Yoyodyne contract, also signed away the patent rights to any inventions he might come up with.
“This stifles your really creative engineer,” Koteks said, adding bitterly, “wherever he may be.”
“I didn't think people invented any more,” said Oedipa, sensing this would goad him. “I mean, who's there been, really, since Thomas Edison? Isn't it all teamwork now?” Bloody Chiclitz, in his welcoming speech this morning, had stressed teamwork.
“Teamwork,” Koteks snarled, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.”
“Goodness,” said Oedipa, “are you allowed to talk like that?
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Chapter 5
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“Communication is the key,” cried Nefastis. “The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in that box. The demon collects data on each and every one. At some deep psychic level he must get through. The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information. To keep it all cycling. On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving. One little movement, against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over and over with each power stroke.”
“Help,” said Oedipa, “you’re not reaching me.”
“Entropy is a figure of speech, then,” sighed Nefastis, “a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.”
“But what,” she felt like some kind of a heretic, “if the Demon exists only because the two equations look alike? Because of the metaphor?”
Nefastis smiled; impenetrable, calm, a believer. “He existed for Clerk Maxwell long before the days of the metaphor.”
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Yoyodyne Term Timeline in The Crying of Lot 49
The timeline below shows where the term Yoyodyne appears in The Crying of Lot 49. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2
...stream of unassuming beige industrial buildings. She also passes the huge missiles standing outside the Yoyodyne company’s huge Galactronics Divisions factory, which she remembers that Inverarity invested in. Disillusioned by the...
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Chapter 3
...they start doing so in the closet as a precaution). The Scope is full of Yoyodyne employees, who awkwardly stare at Oedipa and Metzger. The bar only plays avant-garde electronic music;...
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...his group has been developing an alternative postal system, in part by sending letters through Yoyodyne. The problem is that they have nothing to send or say to one another—Fallopian shows...
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Chapter 4
...becoming “woven into The Tristero.” After looking over Pierce Inverarity’s will, Oedipa decides to visit Yoyodyne. She attends a stockholders’ meeting full of old men who spend an hour talking business...
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...and then explains that she’s a company stockholder. He asks if she can get the Yoyodyne management to stop taking patent rights away from engineers. Hoping to provoke him, Oedipa declares...
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Chapter 5
The founder of the Inamorati Anonymous is a high-ranking Yoyodyne executive who did not know what to do when he lost his job. Unable to...
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