The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract

Each Pynchon novel begins by taking up a loose end from the previous work, showing itself to be part of a continuing project. The early chapters of V. rework, as has been noted, material from the major short stories. The ‘crying’ of the last sentence of Lot 49 becomes the ‘screaming’ with which GR begins, the Rocket which screams being perhaps the literal manifestation of that which is figured in the ending of the earlier novel. In Lot 49 itself, the woman’s perspective, the choice of a female narrative centre, is the attainment of something sought after, at different levels, through­out V.. When Roony tells Rachel disingenuously that he ‘wanted a woman’s point of view’ (V. 223), explaining his need to confess to her, he also speaks for Stencil the novelist-surrogate, whose ultimate aim is to merge with the woman V. in imagining her point of view, her thoughts. And this in turn is an elaborate parody both of the real author’s problems of characterisation, and of the ethical tendency of his novel, which desiderates exposure to and growth into the cool-caring ‘sanity and aloofness’ (V., 283) of a woman like Rachel Owlglass.

Patients of this sort [paranoids] complain that all their thoughts are known and their actions watched and supervised; they are informed of the functioning of this agency by voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person (‘Now she’s thinking of that again’, ‘now he’s going out’). This complaint is justified; it describes the truth. A power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions, does really exist.

(Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’)¹

For many years, in books now happily forgotten, I tried to copy down the flavour, the essence of the outlying suburbs of Buenos Aires … Then, about a year ago, I wrote a story called ‘La Muerte y la brújula’ (‘Death and the Compass’), which is a kind of nightmare, a nightmare in which there are elements of Buenos Aires, deformed by the horror of the nightmare. There I think of the Paseo Colon and call it rue de Toulon; I think of the country houses of Adrogué and call them Triste-le-Roy; when this story was published, my friends told me that at last they had found in what I wrote the flavour of the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

(Borges, ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’)²

My scheme called for the suggested nearness (to all our apparently ordered life) of some sinister anarchic underworld, heaving in its pain, its power and its hate; a presentation not of sharp particulars, but of loose appearances, vague motions and sounds and symptoms, just perceptible presences and general looming possibilities.

(James, Preface to The Princess Casamassima)³