Berresem, Hanjo. Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. [Chapters on Lucan, Derrida, and Baudrillard, the theorists here applied to Pynchon's novels, introduce chapters on V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland. The theoretical concerns are combined with an intelligent reading of Lot 49. "The apocalypse is not a final cataclysm, it is inherent in every sign. It is not their destruction that is apocalyptic, but their growth and continuation."]
Brownlie, Alan W. Thomas Pynchon's Narratives: Subjectivity and the Problems of Knowing. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. [The treatment of Lot 49 (pp. 39-62) is less epistemological than political. The novel is analyzed in terms of cold-war culture. Thus thermodynamics is treated as a metaphor for American society, whose politics tend towards energyless equilibrium. "The opacity in the narrative, its strategic silence, parallels the silent communications of the dispossessed, and their silence is the weakened whisper of dissent within social uniformity. If readers are engaged with the novel, if they can hear the whispering, they will recognize the possibility of adding energy to the system."]
Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. [Looks at Lot 49 in terms of the paintings of Remedios Varo. Tristero is important for Oedipa, whether she has made it up or not, because it forces her to be responsible. Her most important discovery is of the disinherited. "As in Varo's Bordando el Manto Terrestre, the plight of a Rapunzel-like young woman comes to reflect the paralysis of a whole culture."]
Eddins, Dwight, "Closures and Disclosures: The Quest for Meaning in The Crying of Lot 49." In The Gnostic Pynchon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Pp. 89-108. [Tristero has a troubling double function: it is a deadly and inhuman empire and the communications system by which the dispossessed created by that empire struggle to communicate. The central paradox of the novel is "the adumbration of a spiritual norm strongly tainted by the demonic." "One of the things Oedipa must decide is whether the transcendence offered by Tristero's gnosis affirms or negates the human and humane equilibrium she prizes." The novel may conclude with "a continuing religious quest" rather than "the final record of a secular search that has ended in undecidability."]
Grant, J. Kerry. A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. [A page-by-page, line-by-line explanation of details in Pynchon's novel. The entries are key to both the Bantam and Harper Perennial editions of the novel, but since the Harper edition has changed its pagination since 1986, careful realignment is now needed. Some of the entries are brief identifications, but others (such as the discussion of "entropy," pp. 81-95) amount to full essays. The result is a useful if not essential interpretive guide. One of its most useful accomplishments is to record the various interpretations of symbolic details by a number of critics. The effect is that the "explanations" turn out to be more suggestive than authoritative, and they do not amount to a "reading" of the novel. But perhaps that is a good thing.]
Hite, Molly. "Purity as Parody in The Crying of Lot 49." In Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983. [Lot 49 parodies a mystery or quest novel but moves forcefully towards a conclusion that never comes. The problem is that the ideas of totally meaningful world and a completely random one both account for Oedipa's experience. But the problem may lie with Oedipa's absorption in her quest; in her search for total meaning and community she neglects "the elements of her experience that signal meaning and value in her own world." What is revealed is the suffering and alienation of America itself.]
Kharpertian, Theodore D. A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. [Reads Lot 49 as a Menippean satire that encompasses "the genre's four essential formal and functional conventions: attack, variety, fertility, and delight." The objects of attack are both America itself and "a sterile uniformity of communication," while Tristero signifies "the ultimate possibility of an anarchic plenitude of communication." Pynchon parodies detective fiction, but unlike the rational detective, Oedipa uses metaphor as the means of apprehension. She moves "from a condition of unknowledgeable certainty to one of knowledgeable uncertainty." The novel depicts America "as a nation that necessitates the insanity of its citizens if they are to survive in a meaningful way."]
Kolodny, Annette and David James Peters. "Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: The Novel as Subversive Experience." Modern Fiction Studies 19.1 (Spring 1973): 79-87. [Yes, Oedipa, there is a Tristero. "The very recognition of one's alienation, or disillusionment, or disaffection is a key to freedom; any infidelity to the 'norms' of our socialization is itself the seizure of a new possibility. And the totality of all the clues, the intuitions, the dreams of new possibilities, the alternate worlds and modes of awareness whose existence Oedipa couldn't quite grasp--all these are summed up in Tristero." An aggressively optimistic reading of the novel.]
Madsen, Deborah L. "The Typology of the Tristero: The Crying of Lot 49." In The Postmodern Allegories of Thomas Pynchon. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991. [Despite her annoyingly alliterative chapter titles and her tendency to write in critspeak, Madsen does have a point. Oedipa's encounter with Tristero forces her to a different, unconventional mode of understanding that reads the world as if it implied meaning like a text. WASTE, after all, is not a word but an acronym. "The failure of the quest for 'deep' meaning to reveal anything beyond the cultural determination of subjectivity and the ideological inscription of meaning leads the postmodernist allegoric heroine to realize how the expectation of a transcendental source of meaning obscures the real nature of the world."]
Mattessich, Stefan. Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Works of Thomas Pynchon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. [The section on Lot 49 reads it in terms of the Varo triptych, which it sees as emblematic of the novel itself. Sees Lot 49, in turn, as emblematic of the counterculture of the sixties. Written in critspeak.]
McHoul, Alec and David Wills. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis. Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1990. [A deconstructive treatment of Pynchon that includes two chapters on Lot 49, the first of which ("PLS RECORD BID LOT 49 STOP J DERRIDA") compares it to the work of Derrida. "The Crying of Lot 49 becomes thus the story of the hermeneutic bind, when the will to know comes up against the manoeuvres of a permanently assured, yet ceaselessly deferred, truth." The next chapter ("Anti-Oedipa") raises questions about the relation of semantics to ethics in Oedipa's problem and whether there can be "an ethics-without-a-thesis." The chapter takes a number of approaches to the second issue (moving beyond Oedipa's situation itself) and concludes that it remains a problem.]
Mead, Clifford. Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Meaning. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1989. [Lists bibliographical entries alphabetically, through 1988; it is thorough but not annotated. Appends material from Pynchon's high-school yearbook.]
Mendelson, Edward. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978. [Includes essays, previously published, on the writings through Gravity's Rainbow. The major essay on Lot 49 is Mendelson's "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49 (112-46), which takes a decidedly religious approach to the novel. The Trystero is "always associated with language of the sacred and with patterns of religious experience." The meaning of the plot is religious, and the novel is mysterious because religion is mysterious. "Hierophany," the manifestation of the sacred, occurs throughout the novel, and Oedipa encounters a number of false religions. Her experience of aesthetic works should guide the reader's interpretation of the novel. The collection includes a shorter essay, "Pynchon's Paraclete," by James Nohrnberg (147-61) that lists references to the Holy Spirit. Frank Kermode, "Decoding the Trystero" (162-66) asserts that the novel imitates the texts of the world and their problematic quality.]
Newman, Robert D. Understanding Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986. [A clear and perhaps simplistic walk through the novel that nonetheless identifies important themes and issues. As Oedipa continues her quest, the clues, unlike that of a detective story, multiply alternatives instead of supplying a solution. "Like all of of Pynchon's major characters Oedipa must walk the fine line between establishing connections to organize and make sense of experience and allowing these connections to become rigid systems that interpret new information in a static fashion, yielding entropic stagnation." The lack of an ending allows meaning to continue to grow.]
O'Donnell, Patrick, ed. New Essays on the Crying of Lot 49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. [O'Donnell's introduction presents a sketch of information on Pynchon, a good overview of the early reception of Lot 49, and summaries of the five essays in the collection (from which I borrow). That of Debra A, Castillo focuses on how metaphor elucidates the processes of signification. John Johnston sees interpretation in the novel as a political activity leading to paranoia. Bernard Duyfhuisen looks at cultural heritage, at the ways that heritage is transmitted, and at the interpretive void we face when those stories break down. Katherine Hayles considers metaphor as a way to construct ambivalent meaning. Pierre-Yves Petillon "effectively shows how Pynchon's fiction is a layering of texts and contexts, or a kind of cultural palimpsest that reveals American attitudes towards time, expectancy, and the wilderness."]
Palmeri, Frank. "Neither Literally nor as a Metaphor: Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and the Structure of Scientific Revolution." ELH 54.4 (Winter 1987): 979-99. [A usefully clear explanation of the scientific background of the novel. Lot 49 exploits the situation of uncertainty described in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which one intellectual paradigm is no longer capable of explaining data and a new one has yet to be accepted. Pynchon similarly uses puns "to think about the paradigms rather than within them." Narcissus (Saint Narcissus, San Narciso, Freudian narcissism) is an example. Tristero itself has double meanings in the areas of politics, religion, and economics and is a metaphor for the alienated. The novel is situated "between tragedy and satire, parody and allegory . . . . In plotting the course of Oedipa's paranoid sanity, her refusal to be bound by comforting myths and paradigms, Pynchon cries our lot too."]
Schaub, Thomas H. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. [The chapter on Lot 49 focuses on the major themes of Oedipa's quest: the Narcissus myth (the escape from solipsism), entropy in thermodynamics and information theory (the unresolved metaphor), sacred language and the possibilities of creation, and the revelation of loss and death. Tristero is itself a metaphor, and the novel is "a parable of perception."]
Seed, David. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988. [The chapter on Lot 49 usefully traverses the novel and the issues it raises. It sees the novel not as religious but as seeking a revelation that never comes. Pynchon uses the communication theory of Marshall McLuhan, and the media form the substance of many of Pynchon's metaphors.]
Slade, Joseph W. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Lang, 1990. [A reissue of Slade's 1974 book. The long chapter on Lot 49 moves perceptively through the plot and the central issues. "Pynchon appears to be saying that good and evil are dialectic partners, mirror images of each other that can be transcended. Inverarity may symbolize that transcendence, and for that reason may be devil and deity. . . . The Tristero may be evil, or it may not; such terms, with excluded middles, may not apply. As an anti-world, its energies predestined, it may intersect with our world only to remind us that a clock is ticking smoothly, perpetually."]
Tanner, Tony. Thomas Pynchon. London: Methuen, 1982. [An introduction to Pynchon's first three novels. Tanner is a sensitive and perceptive critic, and these qualities are apparent in his brief chapter on Lot 49, which he sees as a reverse detective story. Oedipa encounters a world in which "performance" and "historical figuration" become interchangeable. "Oedipa is mentally in a world of 'if' and 'perhaps,' walking through an accredited world of either/or. It is part of her pain, her dilemma and, perhaps, her emancipation."]