Re: Essay on "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon
Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2016 11:26 pm
So this apparently gay man is taken in by Oedipa's appearance. In an underground world where gender roles are turned topsy-turvy, Oedipa is turning those roles even more than the gay males are comfortable with. But she decides to use man-in-woman's body ruse to try and get his story:
“If you tell me where you got your lapel pin,” said Oedipa.
“Sorry.”
She sought to bug him: “If it’s a homosexual sign or something, that doesn’t bother me.”
Eyes showing nothing: “I don’t swing that way,” he said. “Yours either.” Turned his back on her and ordered a drink.
Oedipa took off her badge, put it in an ashtray and said, quietly, trying not to suggest hysteria, “Look, you have to help me. Because I really think I am going out of my head.”
“You have the wrong outfit, Arnold. Talk to your clergyman.”
“I use the U. S. Mail because I was never taught any different,” she pleaded. “But I’m not your enemy. I don’t want to be.”
“What about my friend?” He came spinning around on the stool to face her again. “You want to be that, Arnold?”
“I don’t know,” she thought she’d better say.
He looked at her, blank. “What do you know?”
She told him everything. Why not? Held nothing back. At the end of it the tourists had been whistled away and he’d bought two rounds to Oedipa’s three.
“I’d heard about ‘Kirby,’” he said, “it’s a code name, nobody real. But none of the rest, your Sinophile across the bay, or that sick play. I never thought there was a history to it.”
“I think of nothing but,” she said, and a little plaintive.
“And,” scratching the stubble on his head, “you have nobody else to tell this to. Only somebody in a bar whose name you don’t know?”
She wouldn’t look at him. “I guess not.”
“No husband, no shrink?”
“Both,” Oedipa said, “but they don’t know.”
“You can’t tell them?”
She met his eyes’ void for a second after all, and shrugged.
“I’ll tell you what I know, then,” he decided. “The pin I’m wearing means I’m a member of the IA. That’s Inamorati Anonymous. An inamorato is somebody in love. That’s the worst addiction of all.”
“Somebody is about to fall in love,” Oedipa said, “you go sit with them, or something?”
“Right. The whole idea is to get to where you don’t need it. I was lucky. I kicked it young. But there are sixty-year-old men, believe it or not, and women even older, who wake up in the night screaming.” “You hold meetings, then, like the AA?” “No, of course not. You get a phone number, an answering service you can call. Nobody knows anybody else’s name; just the number in case it gets so bad you can’t handle it alone. We’re isolates, Arnold. Meetings would destroy the whole point of it.”
“What about the person who comes to sit with you? Suppose you fall in love with them?”
“They go away,” he said. “You never see them twice. The answering service dispatches them, and they’re careful not to have any repeats.”
How did the post horn come in? That went back to their founding. In the early ‘60’s a Yoyodyne executive living near L.A. and located someplace in the corporate root-system above supervisor but below vice-president, found himself, at age 39, automated out of a job. Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executive’s first thoughts were naturally of suicide. But previous training got the better of him: he could not make the decision without first hearing the ideas of a committee. He placed an ad in the personal column of the L.A. Times, asking whether anyone who’d been in the same fix had ever found any good reasons for not committing suicide. His shrewd assumption being that no suicides would reply, leaving him automatically with only valid inputs. The assumption was false. After a week of anxiously watching the mailbox through little Japanese binoculars his wife had given him for a going-away present (she’d left him the day after he was pink-slipped) and getting nothing but sucker-list stuff through the regular deliveries that came each noon, he was jolted out of a boozy, black-and-white dream of jumping off The Stack into rush-hour traffic, by an insistent banging at the door. It was late on a Sunday afternoon. He opened his door and found an aged bum with a knitted watch cap on his head and a hook for a hand, who presented him with a bundle of letters and loped away without a word. Most of the letters were from suicides who had failed, either through clumsiness or last-minute cowardice. None of them, however, could offer any compelling reasons for staying alive. Still the executive dithered: spent another week with pieces of paper on which he would list, in columns headed “pro” and “con,” reasons for and against taking his Brody. He found it impossible, in the absence of some trigger, to come to any clear decision. Finally one day he noticed a front page story in the Times, complete with AP wirephoto, about a Buddhist monk in Viet Nam who had set himself on fire to protest government policies. “Groovy!” cried the executive. He went to the garage, siphoned all the gasoline from his Buick’s tank, put on his green Zachary All suit with the vest, stuffed all his letters from unsuccessful suicides into a coat pocket, went in the kitchen, sat on the floor, proceeded to douse himself good with the gasoline. He was about to make the farewell flick of the wheel on his faithful Zippo, which had seen him through the Normandy hedgerows, the Ardennes, Germany, and postwar America, when he heard a key in the front door, and voices. It was his wife and some man, whom he soon recognized as the very efficiency expert at Yoyodyne who had caused him to be replaced by an IBM 7094. Intrigued by the irony of it, he sat in the kitchen and listened, leaving his necktie dipped in the gasoline as a sort of wick. From what he could gather, the efficiency expert wished to have sexual intercourse with the wife on the Moroccan rug in the living room. The wife was not unwilling. The executive heard lewd laughter, zippers, the thump of shoes, heavy breathing, moans. He took his tie out of the gasoline and started to snigger. He closed the top on his Zippo. “I hear laughing,” his wife said presently. “I smell gasoline,” said the efficiency expert. Hand in hand, naked, the two proceeded to the kitchen. “I was about to do the Buddhist monk thing,” explained the executive. “Nearly three weeks it takes him,” marvelled the efficiency expert, “to decide. You know how long it would’ve taken the IBM 7094? Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced.” The executive threw back his head and laughed for a solid ten minutes, along toward the middle of which his wife and her friend, alarmed, retired, got dressed and went out looking for the police.
The executive undressed, showered and hung his suit out on the line to dry. Then he noticed a curious thing. The stamps on some of the letters in his suit pocket had turned almost white. He realized that the gasoline must have dissolved the printing ink. Idly, he peeled off a stamp and saw suddenly the image of the muted post horn, the skin of his hand showing clearly through the watermark. “A sign,” he whispered, “is what it is.” If he’d been a religious man he would have fallen to his knees. As it was, he only declared, with great solemnity: “My big mistake was love. From this day I swear to stay off of love: hetero, homo, bi, dog or cat, car, every kind there is. I will found a society of isolates, dedicated to this purpose, and this sign, revealed by the same gasoline that almost destroyed me, will be its emblem.” And he did.
Oedipa, by now rather drunk, said, “Where is he now?”
“He’s anonymous,” said the anonymous inamorato. “Why not write to him through your WASTE system? Say ‘Founder, IA.’”
“But I don’t know how to use it,” she said.
“Think of it,” he went on, also drunk. “A whole underworld of suicides who failed. All keeping in touch through that secret delivery system. What do they tell each other?” He shook his head, smiling, stumbled off his stool and headed off to take a leak, disappearing into the dense crowd. He didn’t come back.
Here we have a tenuous but interesting connection between the founder of IA and Inverarity. I had stated earlier that the Urban Dictionary defined Inverarity as a chubby, smiling man whom I compared to a type of Buddha figurine:
In the inamorato's story, the founder of IA decides to immolate himself Buddhist monk style. Seated on the floor Buddha-style, he starts laughing when the ex-coworker points out why he was fired in the first place--slow decision-making. So his story becomes legend and he is elevated to the status of a savior. A Buddha is one who is enlightened. A bodhisattva is one who forestall his enlightenment to help others reach enlightenment first. The founder of IA was about to become literally enlightened by setting himself on fire but he held off to help untold numbers of others to reject the idea of clinging to others or to material possessions which is a form of misery. The whole thing is facilitated by W.A.S.T.E. So we start to see what W.A.S.T.E. is doing: it is an underground movement linking all the various underground movements together. This makes the mega-movement strong and connected. IA was founded to defeat the idea of being in love with anything and that would include money. So did Pierce see W.A.S.T.E. as a threat to his empire and his love for material things? Or did he decide like Andrew Carnegie that money and wealth was a curse and should be dispersed through society philanthropically and was leaving it to Oedipa figure it out or die trying?
“If you tell me where you got your lapel pin,” said Oedipa.
“Sorry.”
She sought to bug him: “If it’s a homosexual sign or something, that doesn’t bother me.”
Eyes showing nothing: “I don’t swing that way,” he said. “Yours either.” Turned his back on her and ordered a drink.
Oedipa took off her badge, put it in an ashtray and said, quietly, trying not to suggest hysteria, “Look, you have to help me. Because I really think I am going out of my head.”
“You have the wrong outfit, Arnold. Talk to your clergyman.”
“I use the U. S. Mail because I was never taught any different,” she pleaded. “But I’m not your enemy. I don’t want to be.”
“What about my friend?” He came spinning around on the stool to face her again. “You want to be that, Arnold?”
“I don’t know,” she thought she’d better say.
He looked at her, blank. “What do you know?”
She told him everything. Why not? Held nothing back. At the end of it the tourists had been whistled away and he’d bought two rounds to Oedipa’s three.
“I’d heard about ‘Kirby,’” he said, “it’s a code name, nobody real. But none of the rest, your Sinophile across the bay, or that sick play. I never thought there was a history to it.”
“I think of nothing but,” she said, and a little plaintive.
“And,” scratching the stubble on his head, “you have nobody else to tell this to. Only somebody in a bar whose name you don’t know?”
She wouldn’t look at him. “I guess not.”
“No husband, no shrink?”
“Both,” Oedipa said, “but they don’t know.”
“You can’t tell them?”
She met his eyes’ void for a second after all, and shrugged.
“I’ll tell you what I know, then,” he decided. “The pin I’m wearing means I’m a member of the IA. That’s Inamorati Anonymous. An inamorato is somebody in love. That’s the worst addiction of all.”
“Somebody is about to fall in love,” Oedipa said, “you go sit with them, or something?”
“Right. The whole idea is to get to where you don’t need it. I was lucky. I kicked it young. But there are sixty-year-old men, believe it or not, and women even older, who wake up in the night screaming.” “You hold meetings, then, like the AA?” “No, of course not. You get a phone number, an answering service you can call. Nobody knows anybody else’s name; just the number in case it gets so bad you can’t handle it alone. We’re isolates, Arnold. Meetings would destroy the whole point of it.”
“What about the person who comes to sit with you? Suppose you fall in love with them?”
“They go away,” he said. “You never see them twice. The answering service dispatches them, and they’re careful not to have any repeats.”
How did the post horn come in? That went back to their founding. In the early ‘60’s a Yoyodyne executive living near L.A. and located someplace in the corporate root-system above supervisor but below vice-president, found himself, at age 39, automated out of a job. Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executive’s first thoughts were naturally of suicide. But previous training got the better of him: he could not make the decision without first hearing the ideas of a committee. He placed an ad in the personal column of the L.A. Times, asking whether anyone who’d been in the same fix had ever found any good reasons for not committing suicide. His shrewd assumption being that no suicides would reply, leaving him automatically with only valid inputs. The assumption was false. After a week of anxiously watching the mailbox through little Japanese binoculars his wife had given him for a going-away present (she’d left him the day after he was pink-slipped) and getting nothing but sucker-list stuff through the regular deliveries that came each noon, he was jolted out of a boozy, black-and-white dream of jumping off The Stack into rush-hour traffic, by an insistent banging at the door. It was late on a Sunday afternoon. He opened his door and found an aged bum with a knitted watch cap on his head and a hook for a hand, who presented him with a bundle of letters and loped away without a word. Most of the letters were from suicides who had failed, either through clumsiness or last-minute cowardice. None of them, however, could offer any compelling reasons for staying alive. Still the executive dithered: spent another week with pieces of paper on which he would list, in columns headed “pro” and “con,” reasons for and against taking his Brody. He found it impossible, in the absence of some trigger, to come to any clear decision. Finally one day he noticed a front page story in the Times, complete with AP wirephoto, about a Buddhist monk in Viet Nam who had set himself on fire to protest government policies. “Groovy!” cried the executive. He went to the garage, siphoned all the gasoline from his Buick’s tank, put on his green Zachary All suit with the vest, stuffed all his letters from unsuccessful suicides into a coat pocket, went in the kitchen, sat on the floor, proceeded to douse himself good with the gasoline. He was about to make the farewell flick of the wheel on his faithful Zippo, which had seen him through the Normandy hedgerows, the Ardennes, Germany, and postwar America, when he heard a key in the front door, and voices. It was his wife and some man, whom he soon recognized as the very efficiency expert at Yoyodyne who had caused him to be replaced by an IBM 7094. Intrigued by the irony of it, he sat in the kitchen and listened, leaving his necktie dipped in the gasoline as a sort of wick. From what he could gather, the efficiency expert wished to have sexual intercourse with the wife on the Moroccan rug in the living room. The wife was not unwilling. The executive heard lewd laughter, zippers, the thump of shoes, heavy breathing, moans. He took his tie out of the gasoline and started to snigger. He closed the top on his Zippo. “I hear laughing,” his wife said presently. “I smell gasoline,” said the efficiency expert. Hand in hand, naked, the two proceeded to the kitchen. “I was about to do the Buddhist monk thing,” explained the executive. “Nearly three weeks it takes him,” marvelled the efficiency expert, “to decide. You know how long it would’ve taken the IBM 7094? Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced.” The executive threw back his head and laughed for a solid ten minutes, along toward the middle of which his wife and her friend, alarmed, retired, got dressed and went out looking for the police.
The executive undressed, showered and hung his suit out on the line to dry. Then he noticed a curious thing. The stamps on some of the letters in his suit pocket had turned almost white. He realized that the gasoline must have dissolved the printing ink. Idly, he peeled off a stamp and saw suddenly the image of the muted post horn, the skin of his hand showing clearly through the watermark. “A sign,” he whispered, “is what it is.” If he’d been a religious man he would have fallen to his knees. As it was, he only declared, with great solemnity: “My big mistake was love. From this day I swear to stay off of love: hetero, homo, bi, dog or cat, car, every kind there is. I will found a society of isolates, dedicated to this purpose, and this sign, revealed by the same gasoline that almost destroyed me, will be its emblem.” And he did.
Oedipa, by now rather drunk, said, “Where is he now?”
“He’s anonymous,” said the anonymous inamorato. “Why not write to him through your WASTE system? Say ‘Founder, IA.’”
“But I don’t know how to use it,” she said.
“Think of it,” he went on, also drunk. “A whole underworld of suicides who failed. All keeping in touch through that secret delivery system. What do they tell each other?” He shook his head, smiling, stumbled off his stool and headed off to take a leak, disappearing into the dense crowd. He didn’t come back.
Here we have a tenuous but interesting connection between the founder of IA and Inverarity. I had stated earlier that the Urban Dictionary defined Inverarity as a chubby, smiling man whom I compared to a type of Buddha figurine:
In the inamorato's story, the founder of IA decides to immolate himself Buddhist monk style. Seated on the floor Buddha-style, he starts laughing when the ex-coworker points out why he was fired in the first place--slow decision-making. So his story becomes legend and he is elevated to the status of a savior. A Buddha is one who is enlightened. A bodhisattva is one who forestall his enlightenment to help others reach enlightenment first. The founder of IA was about to become literally enlightened by setting himself on fire but he held off to help untold numbers of others to reject the idea of clinging to others or to material possessions which is a form of misery. The whole thing is facilitated by W.A.S.T.E. So we start to see what W.A.S.T.E. is doing: it is an underground movement linking all the various underground movements together. This makes the mega-movement strong and connected. IA was founded to defeat the idea of being in love with anything and that would include money. So did Pierce see W.A.S.T.E. as a threat to his empire and his love for material things? Or did he decide like Andrew Carnegie that money and wealth was a curse and should be dispersed through society philanthropically and was leaving it to Oedipa figure it out or die trying?