Thomas Pynchon &

This uninvited collaboration between Mr. Pynchon and myself explores the original text of The Crying of Lot 49, with the added narrative of the dead Pierce Invararity throughout. This voice acts almost as Oedipa Maas’s conscious, suggesting that he lives on in her mind while the story unfolds. He also speaks to the audience and to other characters within the book (who, of course, are completely oblivious). I tried to derive from the original text as much as I could about Pierce, deeming him obscenely rich, manipulative, and pompous. This, as you will see, becomes very apparent rather quickly.

The Crying of Lot 49

Edward Steel

martian1138

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, 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 take her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

The Crying of Lot 49 quotes

Join the club