The Crying of Lot 49

         After studying White Noise, I was able to identify similar marks of postmodern thought in Thomas Pyn The Crying of Lot 49. For example in both television is pervasive, as in the homes of many Americans at the time. Like Jack Gladney who tries to “[f]ind the codes and messages” in television, Oedipa Maas tries to unravel the significance of Metzger’s/Baby Igor’s film Cashiered and later that of W.A.S.T.E. and The Tristero. Neither is able to make the necessary connections that would make sense of these perceived codes and messages, a reflection of postmodern thought which insists on the absence of absolutes. If even science is suspect, religion a conspiracy to numb/dumb the population, and government to be feared, only paranoia remains. All authorities, such as historians and sacred texts are shown to have no founding. For instance, the recounting of the skirmish between the Confederate man-of-war “Disgruntled” and Russian cruisers is “not too clear”: “One of them may have fired, if it did then the other responded; but both were out of range”. Here authoritative text is also deemed unreliable: “If you believe an excerpt from the “Bogatir” or “Gaidamak”’s log ... now somewhere in the Krasnyi Arkhiv” the “Disgruntled” vanished during the attack. Similarly Maas is never able to find the definitive version of the Courier’s Tragedy. There is no original, only copies of copies like Metzger’s analysis of an actor playing a lawyer who, in front of a jury, “becomes an actor”. In the bio-pic of Metzger’s life, a one-time lawyer plays “an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor”. Although the pilot to the film is in a climate-controlled vault in a Hollywood studio so that it is indestructible, the version they are watching has the reels out of order. Likewise nature is imitated as an “artificial windstorm” blowing a statue’s dress in front of the hotel and the artificial island surrounded by the fake Lake Inverarity.