What Are You Saying? (The Crying of Lot 49 chapter 4)

“…and in view of other details—the hatching, number of perforations, way the paper has aged—it’s obviously a counterfeit. Not just an error (pg 78).

“I’ve come up so far with eight in all. Each on has an error like this, laboriously worked into the design, like a taunt” (pg 78).

These quotes both show how the stamps of the U.S. mail system have been tampered on purpose. First Oedipa saw in the letter she received from Mucho a “typo” in which Postmaster was spelled Potsmaster, and then this? For now, I really don’t know what to expect; however, I think that Pynchon wants the reader to understand that communication (mail) is really what controls every human being. In the book for example, the unhappy workers of Yoyodyne are carrying out a boycott against the government through the company’s mail system. This fact makes me think that maybe the author wants to show us the importance of the mail system, long-distance communication, in the human world.

This postal boycott made by the Yoyodyne workers is very similar to a conclusion brought up by Cohen about a watermark: “The black costumes, the silence, the secrecy. Whoever they were their aim was to mute the Thurn and Taxis post horn” (pg 78). The fact that some secret, disguised people wanted to “mute” the post horn of the postal service Thurn and Taxis reflects the situation of the workers clearly. The workers are trying to take some of the power that the government has by boycotting the mail system, just like the black bandits. What does this analogy mean? What is its purpose? It is very strange how Pynchon relates these two topics with no apparent reason; however, I can’t draw any final conclusion before ending the novel.

In years past, an invention was attributed to its single, or most distinguished, creator. For example, the light bulb is attributed to one man, Thomas Alva Edison, while in the present a creation is credited to a whole company. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon does a slight allusion to this my mentioning the patent laws: “Koteks explained how every engineer, in signing the Yoyodyne contract, also signed away patent rights to any inventions he might come up with” (pg 67). With this said I believe that Pynchon is stating how massive, capitalist corporations take the knowledge of their employees and exploit them without giving them any credit. This could be an attack made by Pynchon towards a capitalist nation, or it could be an attack to communism by stating, that if people (by their own will) submit themselves to these types of unfair jobs in corporations, how would the force labor of communism be? I imagine a hardcore communism as a big patent law stating that the nation created something, not a single citizen, which is even more general than a single company. While in a capitalist society an engineer may say, I work in Yoyodyne where the nuclear bomb was created, in a communist nation a person says I live in China where the camera was created. In a communist nation, even more credit is taken off from the real creator.