Maas En Abyme

On Thomas Pynchon's 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49, this presentation was given for the Narrative 2020 conference put on by the International Society for t...

Abstract

      After having followed Oedipa Maas through the first third of The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon’s shortest novel by far – the reader is then, suddenly, subjected to a remarkably pedantic, ten-page summary of a fictional play called The Courier’s Revenge. While, indeed, the performance has within it thematic echoes of the novel that surrounds it – even serving as the ratification to Oedipa’s Tristero conspiracy – it is nevertheless a substantial narrative digression in a novel comprised by only 152 pages.

         Known as ‘mise en abyme’ – literally, to ‘place into abyss’ – this formal technique (compared to the reflection of a mirror in a mirror) of placing a story within a story has a rich history, most notably with The Murder of Gonzago in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As a result, the employment of mise en abyme opens up a new, discrete diegetic space, affording – if not requiring – a meta-analysis of the text. Such is clearly the case for Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, where the narrative affiliation of The Courier’s Revenge to the surrounding text is tenuous even on face value.

         Thus, it would seem that, given the historical usage of mise en abyme, should one discern (or, specifically, interpret) the ‘meaning’ of the story within a story, the scope of the story in which it is ensconced can be ascertained. However, the central conflict of The Crying of Lot 49’s main tale, the ontological status of the Tristero System, is never ultimately resolved – no narrative closure is ever offered – leaving the reader, like Oedipa, in a state of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘interpretosis,’ or, stuck in paranoiac interpretation. As it will be seen, this is not an effect of some insufficiency in Pynchon’s ‘semiotic regime,’ but rather, a complete self-sufficiency thereof.

With reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizations of ‘semiotic regimes’ and Lacaninan conceptions of non-Aristotelian signification, it will be seen that the status of interpretation in The Crying of Lot 49 is an intentional aporia; interpretation does not stand in the way of the ‘meaning’ of the text – it is itself the novel’s ‘meaning.’