Forgetting Pynchon: Rick Moody on the Crying of Lot 49.

Like many writers my age, in 1985 I pored over the introduction to Slow Learner, the authorized bootleg edition of Thomas Pynchon's early stories, as if it were the Rosetta Stone, as if whole civilizations could somehow be founded on its disarmingly accessible and humble pronouncements.

One sentence really set me back, though: "The next story I wrote was 'The Crying of Lot 49,' which was marketed as a 'novel,' and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then." I read and reread this passage, trying to arrive at an interpretation different from the manifest one, namely, that Pynchon is somehow critical of his own short novel.

I, too, know what this impatience about juvenilia feels like, especially when that work gets an undue share of attention. And yet, since my reading life was completely remade by The Crying of Lot 49 (before Pynchon: Vonnegut, Brautigan, Heinlein, Irving; after Pynchon: Borges, Beckett, Garcia Marquez, Burroughs, Coover, Gaddis), it seems severe for Pynchon to hold that novel to the high standards of, say, Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon.

To make sure, I reread the novel last week. From the first page, with its unsettling "greenish dead eye of the TV tube," straight through to the apocalyptic auctioneer on the last page ("Passerine spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture"), this slender volume hurtles along, deadly serious, totally hilarious, by turns sacred and profane, despairing and joyful, and completely resistant to easy interpretation.

So much is outrageously good about The Crying of Lot 49: the pitch-perfect parody of the seventeenth-century drama, The Courier's Tragedy, at its center; the great constellation of conspiracy theorists who variously beset the protagonist Oedipa Maas, like the members of Inamorati Anonymous and the Peter Pinguid Society; and, of course, the fascinating and intensely complicated use of thermodynamic and informational entropy that undergirds much of the novel's action.

While it's true that Pynchon's fascination with entropy turns up in an eponymously named early story collected in Slow Learner, the idea really gets its first deluxe presentation in The Crying of Lot 49, and it's fair to say that American fiction, at least the speculative wing of it, has never quite recovered. You could spend a long time turning over this pivotal scene in the novel, which has Oedipa, in the company of a sleazy inventor, attempting to turn a piston just by looking at it. Especially murky is the function of "the sensitive," the role Oedipa attempts to play in the scene, in a union of hard science and countercultural mysticism, as explicated by the inventor John Nefastis: "Communication is the key ... The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in that box. The Demon collects data on each and every one. At some deep psychic level he must get through. The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies and feed back something like the same quantity of information. To keep it all cycling. On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving."

Some of what's unsettling in this passage has to do with one of the most enduring planks of Western empiricism, namely, the second law of thermodynamics. But some of it also has to do with Nefastis and his belief that communication can still confer on speaker and auditor a sense of uniqueness and presence that enables these individuals to avoid the isolation and poverty of consciousness that otherwise seem to afflict the citizens of California in The Crying of Lot 49. To put it another way, the idea that communication is what it appears to be--and that there is not some other sinister conspiracy happening beneath and within it, emblematic here in the postal conspiracy variously known as "the Tristero" or "the Trystero"--is an idea whose only unyielding proponent in this novel is a nerdy inventor who thinks that it might be possible to turn a piston just by thinking. What an unforgettable scene!

Wait, is unforgettable the right word? Unforgettable? If, as the book seems to suggest, knowledge is in some way impossible, if knowledge is incapable of conferring certainty upon Oedipa, as she goes about her search for the origin and dimension of the Tristero conspiracy, then is not forgetting somehow an integral part of The Crying of Lot 49? Isn't it the case that everyone else in the novel either dies or manages to turn their face away from the scale of the threat? Don't they in some way forget the conspiracy, despite Oedipa's growing desperation? "For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America, and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia." If intellectual or psychological mastery is impossible, then isn't forgetting somehow a logical, even crucial, strategy in the creation and maturation of identity?

I haven't looked up all the available verb forms-forget, forgets, forgetting-but some relative of the word forgotten appears forty-three times in Pynchon's output. I have given you the problematic example from the front matter of Slow Learner, but since the word appears multiply in every book the author has written, a brief catalogue is perhaps in order. From another of the stories in Slow Learner: "The Sirdar had retaken Khartum, the outrage was avenged, but people had forgotten." From V.: "The barrenness of that place howled around me, like a country the demiurge had forgotten. There could have been no more entirely lifeless and empty place anywhere on earth." From The Crying of Lot 49: "Were the squatters there in touch with others, through Tristero; were they helping carry forward that 300 years of the house's disinheritance? Surely they'd forgotten by now what it was the Tristero were to have inherited; as perhaps Oedipa one day might have." Gravity's Rainbow features a great helping of forgotten items. Some of them are arrestingly beautiful, e.g., "... toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are." Or, "But this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence--some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve." In Vineland, with its bittersweet recollections of the ferment of the '60s, we have, "Damn Fool Zoyd. Sent so gaga by those mythical days of high drama that he'd forgotten he and Prairie might actually have to go on living years beyond them." [All italics mine.]

Forgetting is as American as apple pie. Forgetting is integral to getting through the day, surviving it, in just the way that Maxwell's Demon, the presumptive molecule sorter, in the entropy passage of the novel, has to find somewhere to throw off the heat it receives from sorting molecules hot and cold. The Demon has to get rid of the heat or he will be destroyed by it, and that's where the sensitive comes in. The sensitive has to feed back some of that wasted energy, as Nefastis describes it. There's a cycle being enacted. It's not hard to see that Maxwell's Demon is both Oedipa herself trying to sort through the evidence of the Tristero conspiracy, and Pynchon himself, trying to sort through the detritus of California, for this gem of a book. And that, dear reader, makes you the sensitive, the one who completes the cycle. You are the one who devises a hermeneutics of Pynchon.

When I encountered the quotation from Slow Learner this time around, I finally had a new way to read it. I began to feel as though the author, so judicious about the particulars of his words, was saying something different from what I'd first imagined. First, Pynchon says that he seems to have forgotten what he'd learned, which implies, of course, that there is no forgetting at all. Second, he remarks that he has forgotten "most of what I thought I'd learned up till then," which suggests that, as a then young writer (he was twenty-seven when The Crying of Lot 49 was issued, in 1965, and had already written V. and the stories in Slow Learner), what he thought he'd learned was not as important as previously imagined, especially since, as the title to Slow Learner suggests, it's not as if these early stories are the greatest part of his legacy. Third, since forgetting is a self-protective trope in a great portion of the quotations catalogued above, one that is crucial to the formation of identity and purpose, an essential gesture in the bittersweet pursuit of life here in the Gnostic, entropic wasteland, maybe Pynchon is saying that it was only the forgetting that made possible the beautiful, luminous, unearthly, and deeply scary Crying of Lot 49.

Rick Moody's novel The Diviners will be published by Little, Brown in September.