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monopoly) and the silencing of the phallus, the silence of inversion and
death. For if the enigma of the Trystero System compels Oedipa to recognize a
world larger and more significant than her own, demands that she realize
otherness, its sign, the muted post horn, is also the chosen emblem of the
Inamorati Anonymous , an odd fellowship of solipsistic exlovers who have
forsworn passion, who deny the value of the other. Oedipa's Sphinx is a
mysterious and aptly named American industrialist, Pierce Inverarity , whose
riddle , a puzzling will, requires that she enter history
to
resolve it. Thus she
sets out to discover the nature of her inheritance , but where is the correct
entrance , whose theory of the past ttuly explains what happened and what is
happening? She encounters a series of couriers, a series of texts and messages
(most notably a cryptic]acobean play,
The Courier's Tragedy)
whose diverse
meanings are at once indefinite and equivalent , reducible only to the
Wittgensteinian proposition in
V.
The text of that ambiguous play, strewn
with double meanings and strange allusions, will say whatever she wants it
to
say, so she is told at one point, but this is not what Oedipa wishes to learn. Like
Melville 's Pierre Glendinning , she desires to be embraced by the truth ,
whether dark or radiant , and in that embrace escape the isolation of private
and reiative meaning .
It is system-making, the thinking and writing of history , that concerns
Pynchon
inLot49 .
Like the Abbe Breuil in the caves at Altamira or Alexander
Marshack in those at Pech Merle , Oedipa tries
to
read the writing on the wall,
but in her case the writing is on the wall of a john in southern California or
spray-scrawled on traffic signs. It is, seemingly, a futile quest. All the clues
and signals given her do not lead to her demystification . The plot of
Lot 49
does not unravel. Like an old Hollywood serial, the novel merely breaks off at
. a climactic moment, suspends itself in the midst of mystery. The tragedy of
the courier is compounded by a double deceit. We cannot trust the veracity of
his information nor can we trust ourselves. That play and this fiction finally
constitute the same text, the text rewritten as it is read : Kinbote's
Pale Fire ,
Menard's
Quixote .
Interpreting Oedipa's interpretation , the reader is drawn
into her enchantment . But how is this maze constituted? Using as his
paradigm the postal system devised by Francis von Taxis in the sixteenth
century , a system that soon cast its network across the Netherlands, Germany ,
Austria, Italy and Spain, Pynchon invents an antagonistic system , the
Trystero , a synoptic heretical and revolutionary underground that intercepts
and subverts the official system of communication. Discourse in the form of
the document is thus fatally compromised at its source (both historically and
artistically) since its intentionality is always questionable . Who speaks in this
letter, a fat and prosperous Tirolese burgher or a frantic concealed member of
the Trystero? Because it determines the transmission of language , the sending
