Conditions of the Postmodern World: Alienation in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 by RUTH HALL
I chose Marxism for my theory, knowing perfectly well this novel is postmodern above all else, because I knew there was something there, something that compelled me. If The Crying of Lot 49 (Lot 49)’s postmodernism is intrinsically linked to Marxist thought, like Jameson suggests, a Marxist analysis of the text is not only appropriate but obligatory. Lot 49 does not focus much on money or class, but the novel deals overwhelmingly with alienation, which Barbara Foley notes, for Marx, has its material basis in “the fragmentation and purposelessness” of capitalist modernity (51). In this paper, we will look at one of the four types of alienation identified by Marx: alienation from our species-being via the reification of sexuality, and Pynchon’s use of entropy.
The bulk of the alienation to be analyzed in this novel does not come from a relationship to product or production, but instead to what Marx called alienation from our Gattungswesen, or our “species-being.” In “Estranged Labor,” Marx essentially likens species-being to consciousness, but it’s more complicated than that — he also writes: “The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character,” (n.p.). What separates man from animal is not only consciousness, but a thirst for fulfillment. As people, we want to be creative; we want to be interconnected; we want to feel like our lives have meaning, even if it is only to us and the people we love. When our work is menial, when it alienates us from the products we sell or the process of making those products, work becomes mind-numbing. The worker is then unfulfilled, exploited, lonely, disconnected from herself. The conditions of late capitalism, which have saturated every facet of our existence with advertising, demanded our hours on and off the clock, and forced us to work starvation wages for basic goods at luxury prices, have embedded fragmentation, purposelessness, and alienation into the framework of society. I would like to highlight two ways this alienation from our species-being takes form in the novel: the commodification of sexuality and the notion of entropy.
The commodification of sexuality is a perfect example of alienation from species-being. It creeps its way into just about every corner of Lot 49, but most obviously in the way Oedipa interacts with her own sexuality. Over the course of the novel, Oedipa has almost no sex or flirtation that is not transactional in its nature. The relationships in which she might completely escape this framework exist off-screen, with the late Inverarity or her husband Mucho, who is absent for much of the novel. This transactionality materializes first in her bet with Metzger (Pynchon 21). A wager is an obviously transactional interaction, and Oedipa’s contribution (not at her suggestion) is her own body. Most of the time, her involvement in these sexualized transactions is not even of her own volition. She is felt up, hit on. Both Metzger and Nefastis, the latter of whom Oedipa seeks out for information about Maxwell’s Demon, expect sex from her after they provide her with the clues she needs (21, 79). This idea speaks to the work of prominent Marxist thinker Georg Lucakz, his concept of reification. Reification, to explain it incredibly briefly, relates to commodity fetishism, and is the transformation of complex phenomena or experiences into things. For the worker, this may look like the fragmentation of the Self or a self-commoditization for the sake of labor. And indeed, for Oedipa, her conception of her own sexuality, through a fragmented understanding of her Self, and a fragmentation imposed upon her by the Other (the men around her), becomes outside of her, separate. Oedipa’s sexuality becoming something she can trade for information or leverage makes it into a good. And I say good and not service, because its role in the novel ultimately has nothing to do with her enjoyment in it, or even her active participation in it. She is expected to trade sex as a commodity, not an experience. This is the reification of her sexuality.
Similarly, we see a reification of gay culture in the novel. Oedipa visits a gay bar called The Greek Way where she encounters someone leading tour groups (83). Here, we see gay culture transformed on the page as something to consume from the outside. It is obvious how a reification of queer culture, especially in a time when homosexuality was illegal, would negatively impact those queer people going to gay bars to find connection and community, only to find themselves gawked at and dehumanized. Pynchon’s — an ostensibly cis straight white man’s — choice to include the reification of gay culture in his novel speaks the relationship between marginalized communities and Marxist thought. Marginalized communities, including the queer community, represent an opposition to the cultural hegemony of the ruling class. That opposition is a threat. Reifying the cultures of these “subversive” communities may effectively stunt them, limiting their ability to combat hegemonic power structures. In the novel, the tour groups passing through The Greek Way immediately call to mind a zoo or a circus; the exhibit inside being the people. This is obviously dehumanizing, but it also shifts the way a spectator might think about queer culture. Instead of belonging to a plurality of people with their own traditions, practices, and differences, queer culture becomes an exhibit. Reducing it to entertainment renders it unserious. Its unseriousness then, in turn, makes all queer people appear ridiculous. Ultimately, it becomes easier to dismiss their political goals as ridiculous, too. Reification here alienates queer people from their species-being at a cultural and political level.
As a final example of this commodification of sexuality, I want to look at some examples of the sexualization of non-sexual figures as a way the reification of sexuality is then used for profit. Once sexuality becomes a thing and not an experience, superimposing it elsewhere becomes a way to make those things marketable. This appears many times in the text, and I will briefly touch on two examples:
First, the motel where Oedipa stays, Echo Courts, shows a nymph with “giant vermillion-tipped breasts and long pink thighs” with a smile “not quite like a hooker’s” (15). While the word nymph does draw to mind “nymphomaniac,” and the place of the nymph in the public consciousness is sexual, the Echo in the motel’s name refers to the myth of Echo and Narcissus. The Echo of Greek myth is not typically characterized as an overwhelmingly sexual creature; in fact, her personal tragedy comes in the form of humiliation around her sexuality. She is spurned by Narcissus, and unable to respond beyond repeating his last words back to him, a very embarrassing “enjoy my body” despite his refusal of her (Ovid, n.p). The Echo in the myth is herself sexualized out of context, and Echo Courts capitalizes on her likeness despite the content of her myth.
Second, Serge of the Paranoids sings a song alluding to Nabokov’s Lolita. He refers to his sexual competitors as “Humbert Humbert cats” who see his potential love interests as “nymphets,” (112). Later in the song, he sings “And the older generation/Has taught me what to do –/I had a date last night with an eight-year-old,” (113). The song is almost certainly hyperbolic and indeed a criticism of the sexualization of children. However, the song still draws on this reified notion of sexuality in order to criticize it. In the context of this song, we see sexuality superimposed where it does not belong; the original (a child who is developmentally without a concept of sexuality) is visible underneath the sexualized image (a child having sex on a football field [113]), and the contrast there is meant to upset us. I would argue that regardless of the good intentions or the quality of the satire here, the sensationalization of reified sexuality is still making this song incredibly marketable. Sex sells, but so does outrage — and even better when put together.
These major examples of reification of sexuality pertain to alienation from our species-being, in part, by divorcing sex from intimacy. We have established that this kind of alienation creates a self-commoditization, encouraging a transactional framework between people. If sex and sexuality are reified, commoditized, on a large scale everywhere you can see — in music, in advertising, in movies — one’s conception of their own sexuality fragments. It must exist in two ways: it is the thing you experience privately, something you share in a moment of vulnerability with another person, and it is the reified mode of sexuality which shapes what you purchase; which defines the insecurities you inherit from corporations marketing to you; which encourages you to view other people’s sexuality like a thing and not an experience, too. The dichotomy here is confusing, almost nonsensical — a veritable breeding ground for miscommunication. It estranges the individual from a conception of sexual intimacy that connects them to other people.
Returning to the collapse of social cohesion under late capitalism, I want to turn now to Pynchon’s exploration of entropy. There are two kinds of entropy elaborated in the text. One relates to communication and one relates to physics. In information theory, entropy has to do with the transfer of information, and in particular with the tendency for communication to involve an abundance of meaningless signs; it suggests the inevitability of disorder in communication (OED, n.p.). In physics, it has to do with thermal energy being unable to be converted into mechanical energy, but it can also be interpreted as a level of randomness or disorder in a system (OED, n.p.). Both Oedipa and Mucho interact with entropy in their respective arcs as they themselves attempt to function as their own kind of Nefastis Machine, an invention in the text that allows for the evasion of entropy through the sorting of molecules in exchange for information. In the text, a Nefastis Machine can only be operated by a “sensitive,” (Pynchon 79). Each Maas tries and fails to combat entropy in their own way.
For Oedipa, beating entropy is about constructing a coherent narrative about the Trystero. Oedipa struggles to learn how to identify meaning in the mass of signifiers she encounters on her journey. She becomes haunted by the Trystero, derailing her life to find meaning within all of it, and tying much of her fulfillment to the conclusion of the mystery. After a night walking through San Francisco gathering information about the W.A.S.T.E system, she tells herself, “I am supposed to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chance for permanence,” (89). She needs to believe there is a bigger truth behind all of the information — and that it has a specific relevance to her life. Later, in the last chapter of the book, she goes through a period of doubt and paranoia when she starts to believe the Trystero conspiracy she had been investigating was invented by Inverarity. She says to herself:
Either you have stumbled indeed [...] on to a secret richness and concealed density of dreams; [...] maybe even onto the real alternative to exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. (131)
The mystery of the Trystero holds something larger to the narrative; it is Pynchon’s vessel to discuss the listlessness of life under late capitalism. The abundance of signifiers Oedipa laments parallels something Jameson referred to as “depthlessness” in media. In the postmodern era, texts produced may become superficial, without any deeper meaning, holding only aesthetic value (Jameson 60). These same texts are generally produced en masse, creating a proliferation of depthless signifiers in the world. The depth lost has to do with whether works have a historical foundation, community, and/or culture. Oedipa’s investigation of Thurn and Taxis has taken her through history, across California, and introduced her to multiple subversive communities involved in the W.A.S.T.E mailing system. She has discovered something much bigger than herself, and something not lacking in profundity. If Oedipa is unable to prove anything about Thurn and Taxis, or the whole of Trystero, it would create a horrible depthlessness to the world around her. The notion of disorder, randomness and coincidence -– entropy -– relating to the proliferation of signifiers she encounters about the mystery of the Trystero is enough to make her feel distraught or even physically unwell. This depthlessness (particularly, for Oedipa, as it relates to the situation of life within history) exacerbates the aforementioned “fragmentation and purposelessness” Foley describes as being part of Marx’s conception of the material basis of alienation.
For Oedipa, there was either “transcendent meaning or only the earth,” (Pynchon 140). But for Mucho on LSD, “only the earth” is not even an option. Mucho’s relationship to entropy is much different than Oedipa’s, even if the symbolic role of “sensitive” sorting through information is effectively the same for both of them. Towards the end of the book, it is revealed Mucho took Oedipa’s spot in a clinical trial for the medical use of LSD. While on drugs, Mucho has the ability to create a kind of synthetic harmony, finding abstract but comprehensive meaning in the proliferation of signifiers, regardless of depth. He is able to construct a narrative, or even multiple, in relation to the world around him. His trips are an attempt at the opposite of entropy. Instead of inevitable disorder, he perceives the world as having that transcendent meaning Oedipa longs for. The meaning he extracts while on LSD is nonsense, of course, but it doesn’t feel that way to him.
Mucho’s outcome here, haphazardly creating universal truths to Beatles songs (110), strikes me as especially interesting when we consider him earlier in the book. He already had the ability to coherently and critically extract meaning from signifiers in his life. His overwhelmed feeling from working at the used car lot speaks to this. Mucho sees in the used cars arriving to the lot a kind of symbolic cultural junk yard for America, but he also literally sees the effects of commodity fetishism first hand (4-5). Living through such upsetting alienation from the product he sold and its production, Mucho’s drug use attempts to circumvent not only the economic alienation he experiences as a working class person in America, but also the cultural alienation. By using LSD, he finds “transcendent meaning” and that aforementioned synthetic harmony as it relates to species-being — thus escaping the fragmentation of disorder and randomness in the proliferation of signs, but also the cultural condition of fragmentation as a consequence of alienation.
Having elaborated the connection between alienation from our species-being and Lot 49, I want to briefly return to the idea of what makes a text worth looking at from a Marxist lens. Barbara Foley, in Marxist Literary Criticism Today, writes,
One of the tasks of Marxist criticism is to distinguish between and among works that treat alienation as an inevitable feature of relations; those that ground it in historically specific social relations; and those that gesture toward the possibility for dialectical inversion to supercede those social relations through the revolutionary abolition of classes. (51)
This quotation intrigues me with respect to a novel like Lot 49 because its connection to Marxist ideology, while spanning the breadth of the novel, is quite specific. Pynchon makes little points here and there relating to Marxism beyond alienation, but the most comprehensive and exciting Marxist analysis of the text comes from this one idea of alienation from our species-being. The text’s relationship to alienation also only truly fits the second of Foley’s categories here. While the first category almost fits, Pynchon does not argue that alienation is an inevitable feature of relations on the whole; instead, he’s suggesting that it is the material conditions of late capitalism that inevitably create a culture of alienation and fragmentation. The novel is firmly situated in an historical moment — postmodernism — and its relationship to social relations comes in a discussion about their degradation. Again, we see the specific connection between postmodernism and Marxism.
Having looked at Marx’s explanation of alienation from our species-being and lined it up with two major themes in Lot 49, we can see how a Marxist analysis of the text is incredibly useful — not only on its own merit, but as a means of amplifying the postmodern analysis of the text. In regards to the reification of sexuality, we examined the implications of this phenomenon relating to alienation in various ways. The self-fragmentation and self-commoditization of Oedipa’s sexuality speaks to the troubling conceptions of sexuality in late capitalism. The specific commodificaiton of queer culture represents marginalized voices, the reificaiton of which encourages the maintenance of cultural hegemony through rendering marginalized people ridiculous. And we saw how reification allows for sexuality to be superimposed where it does not belong for the sake of engagement or profit. In terms of entropy, we examined how the ubiquity of meaninglessness speaks directly to the conditions of late capitalism, and we looked at the ways each of the Maases attempt to find something bigger than themselves — a historic foundation or transcendent meaning — in the interpretation of signifiers. Together, these concepts speak to the way social cohesion collapses under late capitalism. Interpersonally, we lose the capacity for true intimacy; our cultures become disrupted; our conceptions of the Self fragmented and commoditized. The abundance of signifiers as a result of mass production means we seek the means to overcome this disconnected purposelessness in our world through the development of a hermeneutic framework, but ultimately, this cannot change the conditions of late capitalism or our alienation within it.
Works Cited
Foley, Barbara. Marxist Literary Criticism Today. Pluto Press, 2019.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991, https://web.education.wisc.edu/halverson/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2012/12/jameson.p
df. Accessed 6 March 2022.
Marx, Karl. “Estranged Labour.” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 1959
(1932). marxists.org,
"entropy, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2022,
www.oed.com/view/Entry/63009.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Vintage, 1996.
RUTH HALL is a junior pursuing a degree in English with a Spanish minor. Selected by Toby Widdicombe.