Want to Know The Meaning of Life? It's Nothing.

       Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 takes a pessimistic and despairing worldview about humanity’s effort to find meaning in their individual lives. This is evident through the fairytale analogy of Oedipa and Pierce’s relationship, Oedipa’s initial skepticism about Metzger and Driblette’s frustration with Oedipa’s obsession over the meaning of Trystero. The uncertainty over whether Trystero is real at the end of the novel ultimately shows how the novel is implicitly accepting the status quo of hopelessness.

       The Rapunzel analogy in the beginning of the novel highlights the hopeless perspective of trying to find happiness in life through Oedipa’s reflection of her past relationship with Pierce. While comprehending the process of executing Mr. Inverarity’s will, Oedipa notes the lack of intensity in her past life with Pierce:

“[She] had also gently conned herself into the curious Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl…When it turned out to be Pierce she’d happily pulled out the pins and curlers and down it rumbled in its whispering dainty avalanche, only when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell on his ass” (Pynchon, 11).

This analogy shows how Oedipa’s love for Pierce initially “conned” her into thinking the relationship was a deep, happy love but eventually Pierce falls “on his ass” and into unhappiness before she can be rescued from her prison, leaving her trapped in disappointment. Neither Oedipa or Pierce take responsibility for the cause of this disappointment in their relationship but instead blame it on “some sinister sorcery” or outside influence for their eventual lack of love and happiness with each other. This reflects the idea that no matter how much effort and emotion a person initially puts into their relationship, it is always going to fail because the universe (or in the analogy’s case, gravity and “some sinister sorcery”) is working against them. In the end, Pierce and Oedipa are left helpless to the power of fate and its choices, witnessing their love turn “into a great unanchored wig” and watching it crash into the reality that they are unsatisfied. According to this analogy, any effort to find meaning in life – like through happy relationships with others – is futile and cruel because it gets someone’s joy and hopes up only to let them sink into sadness.

       Furthermore, Oedipa is taken aback when “[the lawyer Metzger turns] out to be so good-looking she [thinks] at first They, somebody up there, [are] putting her on. It [has] to be an actor” when they first meet each other (Pynchon, 17). Oedipa is in such disbelief and lacks so much self-esteem that she believes she is being “[put] on” since a handsome man would never come into contact with her. After her previous relationship with Pierce, Oedipa pities herself and adopts a hopeless, almost satirical viewpoint of her life, doubting she will ever find anything satisfying in romantic relationships. By calling Metzger an “actor,” it is being noted that he is playing a character as a performance and is adopting a character’s behavior and personality, thus becoming ingenuine to a certain degree by not showing his real personality. Furthermore, the idea that “somebody up there” is the cause for such ingenuine portrayals and twisted humor, not Oedipa or Metzger, points out how the world is despairing because it plays cruel games with people’s lives. Cosmic fates push people into a pessimistic mindset due to their letdowns in love and false personas, causing them to search for true meaning in life elsewhere.

       After watching the performance of The Courier’s Tragedy, Oedipa becomes infatuated with the concept of Trystero and seeks to know more from the play director, Mr. Driblette. After becoming increasingly annoyed with her persistence, Driblette tries to explain that sometimes there is no inherent meaning in things:

“‘So hung up with words, words. You know where the play exists, not in the file cabinet, not any paperback you’re looking for, but—’ a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head— ‘in here…The words, who cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor’s memory, right?’” (Pynchon, 62).

This reinforces how the novel has a pessimistic worldview since Oedipa tries to find meaning in the phrase Trystero but is disappointed at the simplistic response of “The words, who cares?” and rejects his oversimplification, believing some things have implicit meanings in life. Although Oedipa continues to try to find meaning in her life by unravelling the Trystero mystery, the novel (much like Mr. Driblette) accepts that there is no meaning in the world by saying “the play exists [in the director’s head as a figment of imagination]”. This mimics the novel since sometimes novels only exist in the authors’ heads as figments of imagination and only the critics of the novel apply meaning where there sometimes is none. Therefore, critics’ “paranoia” over finding hidden meanings in the details of novels is reflective of Oedipa’s obsessive paranoia of the Trystero mystery, which acts as humanity’s desire to find meaning in their life (whether that be through relationships, mysteries, careers, and so forth).

       By calling words “rote noises to hold line bashes together”, Driblette is essentially saying words are insignificant sounds with no meaning whose sole purpose is to create sentences that may be potentially meaningful to the speaker and the listener. Words are only special because they act as a trigger for people to remember not only how they physically acted (“bone barriers”) but also how they emotionally and mentally felt in their past memories. The novel accepts the primarily functional role and lack of explanation behind words, and therefore life, by having the plot end with the Trystero mystery unsolved. It essentially says that, like Trystero, the mystery of life’s meaning will never be fully solved and that is okay.

Word Count: 984