A Hallucinated Escape (The Crying of Lot 49 Chapter 1)

Before I start my analysis, I’d like to question why would Thomas Pynchon decide to maintain anonymous? Most of the people, when they become famous, decide to show themselves as much as possible in contrast to what Pynchon is now doing. Maybe he doesn’t feel that the capitalist world in which we live in deserve to know him. I don’t know, there may be hundreds of reasons; anyway, I hope he reveals his true identity before he dies.

Oedipa Maas has a husband, Mucho Maas, which currently, to my opinion, lives in a constant emotional crisis where nothing satisfies him or consoles him. Mucho Maas is working in a radio station (KUCF) where he greatly detests his boss and dislikes his job; however, Mucho Maas had once a job as a cars salesman, but had to quit the job as soon as it became unbearable since he saw a persons life through the cars.

…he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest. (Pynchon pg.5)

Mucho Maas couldn’t help seeing what a person was through their cars. By demonstrating this, Pynchon tells the reader that an object’s condition actually demonstrates, no matter how hard you try to look at them objectively, the way their owners are. And once that object has been naturally modified by the owner’s attitude, there is no way to replace it. This is why Mucho Maas was so disgusted when the owners of the cars changed the car’s original parts. Pynchon may also want to reflect through the crisis in which Mucho Maas constantly lives in as the way how the capitalist bosses in America, and the world, suppress their employee’s opinions.

Talking about capitalism, I believe Thomas Pynchon referred, in a mocking kind of way, the form in which the rich capitalist society solves their problems. Pynchon does this mockery through the image that Oedipa has of her life and the life of Pierce.

And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say her, let down your hair. When it turned out to be Pierce she’s happily pulled out the pins and curlers and down it tumbled in its whispering, dainty avalanche, only when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great unanchorched wig, and down he fell, on his ass. But dauntless, perhaps using one of his many credit cards for a shim, he’d slipped the lock on her tower door and come up the conchlike stairs, which, ha true guile come more naturally to him, he’d have done to begin with. (Pynchon pg. 11).

This excerpt of the book was how Oedipa pictured herself. Now, the parody here is how, after plotting the problem, which is not being able to climb the tower through Rapunzel’s (Oedipa’s) hair, he has to recur to money as the way to solve the problem. Pynchon also does this to mock how everything in this world, even love at times, can be bought with money.

In this chapter I also noticed a certain similarity between this book, and the book of Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim uses time traveling as a way of escaping his life, while in this book Oedipa uses Pierce as a way of escaping her confinement in her tower (her life). “… that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d be no escape.” (Pynchon pg. 11).