The Brooklyn Rail

“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

–L. Frank Baum, (Dorothy in) The Wizard of Oz, as cited in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, “Part Three”

Thomas Pynchon’s serious jeu d’esprit begins with its leading character, Mrs. Oedipa Maas—an experienced woman and yet a type of ingénue and sensitive soul—situated in one San Narciso’s Echo Courts Motel. Her sadness is patent: the first two of Pynchon’s six chapters end with her crying amidst the tearfulness of things. The last ends with her waiting for another “Crying,” and about to cross a Rubicon “with all the freightage of eternity”: hanging on to the auctioning of the stamp collection of one Pierce Inverarity.

Charles S. Peirce is the source of the phrase quoted, regarding assent or subscription to “the hypothesis of God’s reality.” Peirce wrote at length upon David Hume on miracles; he also theorized signs, semiosis, probability, and truth-as-information. In one episode, Oedipa encounters a Pentecostal convention of deaf mutes, each of them dancing individually differently to the same tune, rather than a million rubes saying in unison with her radio announcer husband’s “rich chocolaty goodness.” This Pentecostal consensus, one can show, has a precursor in a text in Peirce.

Like the philosopher, Oedipa must construe the meaning and “material quality of the sign.” In her case that means the iconic muted posthorn of a historic alternative mail system known as the Trystero (think of the French, tristess). Pynchon’s meditation on communications and information theory (reversing thermodynamic entropy by multiplying information) keeps company with Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (reviewed by Umberto Eco only a year after Lot 49 was published). In McLuhan, as in Pynchon, virtually everything, from light on down, is potentially information, or else just Babylonian noise: either/or, like the internet in prognosis.

Lot 49 is a shaggier dog story than any in Jorge Luis Borges—such as Lot 49’s outline in “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim” (Edward Mendelson has shown the relation): because Pynchon’s tale is more hirsute in length than apparatus. But they share their conjectural and detective story ilk. Being multiplicitly episodic, Pynchon’s is a novel of education. It leads its protagonist from identity solipsism to the threat of madness and the grip of an otherness—or delusional paranoid projection—represented by the Trystero as an intrusive conspiracy of suspicious coincidences.  

Moreover, Pynchon’s tale converges upon a “hierophany”: either the “epileptic Word,” or merely a safe return to the humdrum reality of the ordinary world, as with the protagonist of Borges’s “The Aleph.” Lot 49’s original locale is fictional San Narciso, south of Los Angeles (angels means messengers). Its name conceals the revelation at the core of the book’s transformation of the quest for the meaning of its messages and signs, in a scene demonstrating Oedipa’s piety and charity—the latter extended to a nearly moribund sailor in a flophouse. Oedipa and her patient form an unlikely kind of pieta. In Lot 49 everyone but the sailor has a striking name. But presiding over his mattress is an image of a saint who turns water into lamp oil. Namely: the first bishop of the Church of the Gentiles in Jerusalem: “the thirteenth from the Apostles.” So Church historian Eusebius.  

Saints may be converted sinners, and usually they perform miracles. It was Bishop Narcissus who changed the date of Easter so Christ could rise on Sunday—oddly enough, the auction of Inverarity’s estate is held on Sunday.  Eusebius also provides the following information: 

Once, at the great all-night vigil of Easter, the deacons ran out of oil…so Narcissus told those responsible for the lights to draw water and bring it to him.  Then he said a prayer over the water, and instructed them to pour it into the lamps with absolute faith in the Lord…in defiance of natural law, by the miraculous power of God the substance of the liquid was physically changed from water into oil.

(Some of it was preserved—and as it were consecrated like a Grail relic of Christ’s blood—to Eusebius’s own day.)  Here’s the actual miracle as elsewhere defined by Mexican anarchist Jesús Arrabal in one encounter in our pilgrim’s wayward progress: “another world’s intrusion into this one”—from the sacred into the profane (Mendelson cites Mircea Eliade’s formulation). Saints like Hippolytus and Thaïs had their pre-Christian avatars, before joining the medieval Church’s Golden Legend, but Bishop Narcissus was not among them. Oedipa, however, is an investigator like Sophocles’s character: he too was the answer to the riddle he once had solved, having been the same incestuous royal as the patricide he was trying to discover. But only in Pynchon’s novella, and against the grain, does the classical Oedipus verge upon rebirth, transformation, and conversion into a Christian one. Hard-boiled American detectives are typically no saints, yet kind-hearted Oedipa has become something less profane (and more theological) than a lachrymose Rapunzel letting down her tresses, or a mere literary Echo, with her billowing chiton only pregnant with a dynamo’s artificial breeze.