Hanny Herrera

English 25

5/11/22

Oedipa’s Rapunzel Tower

As societies have advance, so has their communication systems become more complex.

From oral culture to technology, humans had to change and adapt in order to survive in our

systems of communications. In the novel, The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon creates a story

of a young woman named Oedipa that takes on an investigation about finding the truth about

“Tristero”, which is an underground mailing system. In this novel, Oedipa goes through

revelations and truths that change the perspective of her world to represent the same journey the

people in the real world go through.

Oedipa starts in a Tupperware world, where everything is organized and uniformed.

However, every time she finds new truths and realizations, she feels herself go crazy and more

isolated. In the novel, when she gets pulled in the homosexual bar, she finds a guy with a pin of

the Tristero symbol on a button on his coat. With some convincing from Oedipa, he reveals that

it represents Inamorati Anonymous, which is a form of rehab for people who are addicted to

falling in love. This only leaves Oedipa ever more confused because it brings the possibility that

the symbol represents two different groups. After the guy leaves, Oedipa feels alone now that she

feels like no one understands her obsession with “tristero”, as her husband and her shrink would

no longer listen to her. She wonders outside the bar, where she continues to see the symbol

everywhere, from a sign to chalk on the floor. This only makes Oedipa feel more isolated and

crazier because the symbol seems to be everywhere, yet she can’t seem to get any closer to the
truth. Never reaching the truth seems to be one of the themes of these novel because the message

itself is not important, but how the message is delivered is.

It could be that Oedipa never reaches the truth because there is no truth to be reached. At

the beginning of the novel, she receives a letter about the death of Pierce and of how the estates

is in a tough situation. With the letter, she begins to have unusual images like comparing herself

to Rapunzel in hopes of Pierce coming to save her from the tower. Yet, as he is now dead, she

images him falling as her long hair turns out to be a wig. The hopes of her being free is now

slipping away as Pierce took it with his death. Going back to the idea of her world first being a

Tupperware world, which means that her world has order and organization. From the outside, it

may seem perfect as Oedipa is a happy housewife with a good husband. She quickly realizes her

unhappy life as she saw her affair with Metzger meant nothing to her husband. Also, the men in

her life are no help in finding the truth about “tristero.” She is all alone because no one seems to

care about her or the importance of find what the symbol means. With Claude E. Shannon’s

ideas from “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” her Tupperware world can be

explained as closed system where no energy is getting out, which means that it is becoming

unorganized. There is so much noise now inside of her from her new realizations and truth, it can

be overwhelming to organize new information. Her world is now falling apart because of her

determination of finding the truth. As Pierce was her hope of getting out of this close system, she

is holding onto the idea of these investigation to bring her order and organization. Her life has

always been based on being organized and order, so she believes she will find it again in the

truth of “tristero”. She doesn’t want to believe that this investigation could truly be a complex

joke played by Pierce on her. However, since there is no truth reveal, this could be inferred as

life not being able to be close system, as it does not work because it eventually ends with
disorder and chaos. Her going after the truth places her in the same position as the girls in the

painting she saw in New Mexico. The girls have the illusion of being outside, when, their outside

is the tower of which they are capture in. There is irony in how her solution is truly the reason of

her problem.

Marshall McLuhan, in “The Medium is the Message,” declared that the format of the

information being delivered influences the receiver more than the information itself. The novel

is the medium and readers acknowledging Oedipa’s journey representing the struggle of

understanding reality is the message. The Crying of Lot 49 is a detective novel, however

Oedipa’s investigation never had a resolution as it abruptly ends in the middle of the auction.

This places more significance on the journey of Oedipa’s investigation for the reader, as the

reader will probably go back to the novel to find their own truth. It is a messy ending, but that is

because our communication systems are becoming messy year after year. There was so much

information happening in the real world during the novel’s time, that people’s lives were

changing. Both Oedipa and real people must go through that transition that communication itself

can sometimes not have meaning. Oedipa was become obsessive in finding the meaning of the

“tristero” symbol, yet Pynchon never gave it meaning. During that time, people were finding that

their lives had no meaning because they were ignoring the other American. In the 1960s, when

the novel was written, there were social movements, wars, political chaos, and more. More

people were waking up to the real side of the American. It was a hard transition because they

wanted to uphold the image of America being the best. As communication increased in our

society, so did the access of seeing the other side of American. The information or

communication itself was not as important as understanding where its coming from and what it is

representing. This also happen to Oedipa as she meant new people during her traveling to find
new information. Oedipa also had a hard transition of finding the other America but not the

meaning of “tristero”. One example of her meeting the Other America was when she embraced

the sailor. She no longer judges him for his drunkenness or hallucinations but saw him as another

human being. She was looking for the answer in the letters as “tristero” is a mailing system, but

she found revelations in the people.

In this novel, Oedipa thought she was looking for a truth of what is this mysterious

underground mailing system. However, during her investigation, she found this other world that

change her perspective of her life. Using the medium of detective novel, the readers were able to

see a character get out of a closed system to a world full of unknown and chaos. Within that

world, the unknown and chaos comes from our communication system. There is so much

communication happening daily that it is hard to organized everything. There is no one solution

that can handle our communication systems. To this day, humans are still learning how to

manage it because understanding communication systems is the backbone our society.

 Citation

C. E. Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", The Bell System Technical

Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948.
https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf

McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. The Medium Is the Massage. New York:
Bantam Books, 1967. Print.