Selling San Narciso: Pierce Inverarity as Insider-Innovator in The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract

This paper puts social networking theory into conversation with ideas from Michel de Certeau and Michel Serres, in order to explore the agency of Pierce Inverarity, whose death sets in motion Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Pierce—a 1960s war profiteer, maker of soulless cityscapes, and master manipulator—is justifiably seen as a villain. But he is also the novel’s most effective agent; he manipulates the culture he discovers and cultivates instabilities from which he profits. Lot 49’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas, habitually looks for central managers in control of the culture, but Pierce is not that. Instead, he is an often subtle persuader who designs ephemeral spaces that invite the agency of outsiders. He counts on the creative misuses people may find for his products. He does not have his community’s best interests at heart, but he demonstrates what it means to come alongside a community and foster gradual change. Pynchon—by making his villain an effective community change agent—sharpens his critique of middle-class complacency: Oedipa recoils from the decentralized cultural complexity that Pierce welcomes. Pynchon suggests that so long as Oedipa and her clever, educated cohort think of society as the product of other powerful ruling minds, agents like Pierce will have the advantage, as they diffuse their self-serving innovations through the networks of contemporary life, unchecked.