The Economic Wonderland of Thomas Pynchon’s the Crying of Lot 49

Abstract

ABSTRACT Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is often read through the lens of psychoanalysis and taken as a model of postmodern fiction with its indeterminable, norm-subverting, hermeneutic narrative. Yet, as Pierce Inverarity, the ultimate capitalist, stands as the absent center of the mystery, this paper re-approaches Lot 49 and proposes that buried beneath its detective/mystery threads is a potent critique of the political-economic milieu of the sixties California. The various tropes, from the captive Rapunzel, Remedios Varo’s triptych, the duplicitous Trystero, to the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, knit out a world that is consolidated by economic activities and above all commodity fetishism. The article contends that Lot 49 is a reply to the sociopolitical discourses and the civil movements of the sixties. Drawing on economic and communication activities, Lot 49 breaks down the conventional binary distinction and demonstrates a complex interplay of capital, credit, and rhetoric that fabricates a postmodern world of which “all that is solid melts into air.”