Shouting Lot 49

• Oedipus Maas is the main character of the novel. After her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarty, dies and she becomes the co-owner of his property, she discovers and begins to unravel what could be a worldwide conspiracy.
• Inverarty Pier is a former Oedipus guy and a wealthy California property owner. The reader never meets him directly; at the beginning of the novel he is already dead: all references are shown through Oedipus's memoirs.
• Wendell "Macho" Maas, Oedipus's husband, used to sell used cars, but has now become a disc jockey on KCUF radio in Kinneret, California (a fictional city). Toward the end of the novel, his nascent addiction to LSD alienates him from Oedipus.
• Metzger is a lawyer working for the law firm Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus. He was appointed to help Oedipus with Pierce's property design.
• Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard are four members of the Paranoid Group, American teenagers singing with a British accent.
• Dr. Hilarius is an Oedipus psychiatrist who prescribes to her, like other housewives, an LSD that she does not accept. Toward the end of the novel, he goes insane and claims to be a Nazi doctor in Buchenwald , where he worked in a program aimed at inducing experimentally-induced psychosis in Jews. He swears that he can use facial expressions as a weapon, and once made a grimace that drove the patient crazy. Hiding in his office, but peacefully surrendered to the police when Oedipus disarmed him.
• John Nefastis is a scientist obsessed with the idea of ​​perpetual motion. Invented the type of Demon Maxwell in an attempt to create a perpetual motion machine . Oedipus visits him to see the mechanism, learning about it from Stanley Cotex.
• Stanley Cotex is an employee of Yoyodyne Corporation who knows something about Trystero. Oedipus met him when she wandered into his office while visiting a factory.
• Randolph Driblet is a lead scientist and production director at Wharfinger. Dribblet commits suicide before Oedipus before she can get any useful information from him, but a meeting with him prompts her to continue searching for the truth about Trystero.
• Mike Falopian - Oedipus and Mike Metzger meet him at Fallopian in The Scope, a bar that Yoyodyne employees usually visit. He tells them about the Peter Girno Community.
• Genghis Cohen, the most prominent philatelist in Los Angeles , was hired to inventory and evaluate the deceased's stamp collection. He and Oedipus discuss stamps and fakes.
• Professor Emory Bortz - currently teaching in San Narciso, has written an editorial introduction to Wharfinger's work. Oedipus follows him to learn more about Trystero.

The novel tells of Oedipus Maas, a Californian housewife who gets embroiled in historical secrets when her former lover dies and defines her as co-owner of his property. The starting point of Oedipus's adventure is a set of stamps that can be used by the secret postal service, Trystero (or Tristero).

According to the historical narrative that Oedipus brought together during his travels throughout San Francisco, Trystero was defeated by Thurn und Taxis - the real postal system - in the 18th century, but he went underground and continued to exist until the 1960s. years. Their mailboxes were disguised as garbage containers, which often depicted the abbreviation WASTE, the acronym for We Await Silent Tristero's Empire (We Quietly Wait for the Tristero Empire), and their emblem, a silent mail horn. The existence and plans of this secret organization are being revealed gradually, or, again, it is entirely possible that Tristero does not exist at all. The main character rushes between faith and not faith in their existence, finding no unequivocal evidence to either one or the other. Tristero may turn out to be a conspiracy, a joke, or even its hallucinations.

Among the characters found by the heroine, the main one is the Trystero emblem - a postal horn with a loop. Originally seen on the coat of arms of Thurn und Taxis, Oedipus finds him in the bar's closet, where he adorns a graffiti ad group of polyamorists . Later, he appears among the doodles of an engineer, as part of a children's game with a skipping rope, among Chinese characters in a shop window, and in many other places. Later, the horn symbol (both in the original and in the Trystero version) will appear on the cover of many TCL49 publications, as well as in artwork created by fans of the novel.

Critics considered the novel both “exemplary postmodern” and a direct parody of postmodernism. Pinchon himself spoke dismissively of him, writing in 1984: “As is clear from the inconsistent curve of my development, it would be too much to expect long positive and professional writing from me. My last story was the novel “Lot 49 is being shouted out,” and in it I seem to have forgotten everything that I think I knew so far. ”

As always, Pincher’s novel is full of cultural references, the knowledge of which greatly enriches the understanding of his work. J. Kerry Grant tried to catalog these references, but his list is neither final nor complete.

The Beatles

"Lot 49 is shouting out" was published shortly after the Beatlemania and the "British invasion" that took place in America and other Western countries. Indeed, contextual keys indicate that the action took place in 1964, the release year of A Hard Day's Night . Pinchon gives a wide range of allusions to the Beatles . The most important are Paranoids, a group of funny marijuana smokers whose vocalist, Miles, has been kicked out of high school. All members of the group speak with an American accent, but sing with a British one, and the guitarist is forced to refuse to drive a car, as he cannot see clearly because of his long hair. It is not known whether Pincheon knew about the nickname that the Beatles themselves used for themselves - "Los Para Noias"; since the novel abounds with references to other paranoia, Pincheon may have chosen the name of the group for other reasons.

At the end of the novel, Macho Maak, a disc jockey at KCUF, describes his experience of opening the Beatles. He talks about the early song “ She Loves You, ” and also alludes to themes that the Beatles will reveal later. Pinchon writes:

“Whenever I put on my headphones now, I really understand what I’ve found in them. When these children sing“ She loves you, ”you know, she loves, she’s any: the number of people in all space and time, different colors , size, age, shape, term to death, but she loves. And "you" is everything. And she herself. Oedipus,: human voice, you know, this is a miracle that turns your world. " His eyes filled with tears, reflecting the color of the beer.

“Baby,” she said, helplessly, knowing that she could do nothing, and fearing for him.

He put a clean plastic bottle on the table between them. She stared at the pills in it, and then realized. “Is it LSD?” She said.

Vladimir Nabokov

Pinchon was a student at Cornell University , where he attended a course of lectures on literature from Nabokov (Literature 312). (Nabokov himself does not remember him, but Nabokov’s wife, Vera, recalls Pincher’s examination papers due to his handwriting, “half-handwritten, half-printed”). The year before Pincher’s release, Nabokov ’s novel Lolita was released in the United States. In the 1961 Lolita movie adaptation, Stanley Kubrick introduced the concept of “nympho” for the first time to describe sexually attractive girls between the ages of nine and fourteen. In subsequent years, the main use of this concept has been expanded, but Pincheon presents early examples of its canonical use in the literature. From Serge, the counter-tenor of the Paranoid, his girlfriend leaves for an elderly lawyer. He expresses his longing in the song:

What chance has a lonely surfer boy

For the love of a surfer chick,

With all these Humbert Humbert cats

Coming on so big and sick?

For me, my baby was a woman,

For him she's just another nymphet.

Remedios Varo

At the beginning of “Lot # 49 Shouts Out,” Oedipus recalls a trip to an art museum in Mexico, where she met the painting “Weaving the Earth's Mantle” by Remedios Varo . The painting depicts eight women inside the tower, where they are allegedly captured. Six of them weave a tapestry that hangs from a window. The tapestry seems to depict the world outside the tower. Oedipus' reaction to the tapestry gives us some idea of ​​her difficulty in determining what is real and what is not.

California Gold Rush

The meaning of the number 49 in the novel cannot be accidental, and since the novel concentrates on the topic of communications, perhaps 1849 was the reason for choosing the name. 1849 was the second year of the California Gold Rush when a huge amount of telecommunications equipment, including a private postal system, was deployed in support of those in a hurry to California.

• Yoyodyne, which first appears in V., is also mentioned in The Adventures of Bakaru Banzai: Through the Eighth Dimension , where she is the manufacturer of the ship in the Star Trek universe.
• Angel , the spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer , mentions Yoyodyne, although this may be a reference to the movie Bakaru Banzai.
• ABC created the website of the fictitious company PB-Sales, in connection with their television show Lost , PB-Sales specializes in managing and controlling other corporations, including Yoyodyne and Daystrom Data Concepts (reference to the Star Trek episode "The Ultimate Computer").
• The GNU General Public License uses the name "Yoyodyne, Inc" in the example for copyright disclaimer.
• Radiohead and Yo La Tengo incorporated Pincher’s motifs into their works, including themes from TCL49. Yo La Tengo recorded the track “Shouting Lot G” for the album “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out”. Radiohead also refers to the novel in the name of its online store and WASTE mailing portal (which originally sent out physical mail, making the hint more straightforward).
• 1993 Nicholas Meyer 's novel “The Canary Trainer” describes a fictional picture of the famous impressionist Degas , which depicts Sherlock Holmes playing the violin at the Opera Granier . To explain why this work did not make it to the art gallery, Meyer adds flimsy footnotes that the painting was bought by the Marquis de Tour et Taciss and then auctioned off by his widow. The name of the fictional aristocrat (sounds like "Thurn and Taxis") clearly refers to Pincheon.
• In William Gibson's novel Count Zero (1986), the multinational corporation Maas Biolab is named after Oedipus Maas.
• In 2003, the peer-to-peer WASTE program, developed by Justin Frankel, appeared as a reference to the dark WASTE mail service from the book.
• In the opening shots of the episode "Lady Lazarus" of the series Mad Men (season 5, episode 8), Peter Campbell reads the novel.
• Impressed by the novel, the toL group created the anime Tamala2010 , which is an extremely distant adaptation of the original work.

• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, reviewed by Ted Gioia (Postmodern Mystery)
• Crying of Lot 49 Wiki
• ThomasPynchon.com