Inheritance and False Accusations

This is the last blog post on the Crying of Lot 49 and the first on Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

The ending of the Crying of Lot 49 left me wanting. What happens to Oedipa? Does she return to Mucho and her life as a boring housewife? The end of this novel is rushed. For the entire book Oedipa has been gathering evidence and more evidence, and everything is summed up in the final chapter. But we never actually find out any real truths. We learn the secrets of the Trystero and the history of disinheritance. The theme of disinheritance shouldn't really be a theme all that present within the novel, seeing as how it is never really said who will get what remains of Inverarity's estate and his shares. Although the mystery can be contrived to be understood as what Oedipa is receiving from his possessions. Was this mystery set up for her by Pierce? No, there are way too many common place occurrences which couldn't have been foreseen enough for Pierce to be able to rig them into some big joke. So what did Oedipa inherit from Inverarity? I would have to say that she inherits a sense of control over her life, which she wasn't able to grasp before the mystery was revealed. But in this way Pierce is able to maintain a hold on Oedipa's mind even after his death.

Act One of The Crucible is one that I have never ceased to hating, even since my first reading it as a freshman in high school. The constant bickering of the villagers reminds me of bugs that continue to fly in your face even after they have been swatted away. This is actually how I feel about most of the play as a whole. I have a lot of respect for Arthur Miller as a writer, especially in the case of Death of a Salesman, but though this may be one of his most popular works I would disagree against its entertainment value. Especially because of the naiveté of the Salem villagers in believing every case of accused witchcraft, and condemning innocent people to death. This first chapter, with the little girls calling out the names of those women they have "seen" with the devil, is especially frustrating. If I am meant to like it as a reader, I must claim it to be a character flaw on my behalf.

N.A.D.A

"Just this creaking metal sign that said nada, nada, against the blue sky (144).

N.A.D.A is an acronym for the National Automobile Dealers' Association and it is just one of the many acronyms Oedipa encounters throughout the novel. This particular one is presented when Mucho and Oedipa are talking about his reoccurring nightmare at the car lot. He just keeps seeing the initials, nada, which in Spanish means nothing. But it is just one of the nothings that Oedipa finds on her mini journey away from San Narciso.

Then there is the one that constantly hangs over Oedipa's head, which in Chapter 5 she still has no idea what the initials represent. WASTE. She first found this acronym on the stall wall at The Scope. Interesting, a scope, which is used to see things far away, close up, and yet she still has not been able to recover the meaning of WASTE. In fact it seems that The Scope just provides her with more of a mystery, than giving her more information. Or maybe it is a play on words, as in "widening her scope" or giving her a bigger perspective on life which she has not been able to find elsewhere.

LSD, KCUF, DEATH, FSM, YAF, VDC, IA, CIA, AC-DC, TWA. Pynchon's novel is so full of initials it can make ones head spin, and if fact, it drives Oedipa half crazy; driving her back to Kinneret to see her shrink. It seems that Pynchon was fond of acronyms, and embedded them in his novel. Poor Oedipa, if I was caught in this onslaught on initials I would probably go nuts too. But many Pynchon is trying to tell us something, perhaps, only that things have meaning if we force it on them, or else it's just a bunch of mixed up letters which no one is able to understand.

The interesting origins of Thurn and Taxis, Pierce Inverarity...just a name?

When Pierce Inverarity dies Oepida Maas is made one of the co-executors for his estate. Inverarity seemed to dable in many things, mostly real estate but we also find that he was involved in the creation of charcoal filters for cigarettes made from human bones. I decided to see if I could find a definiton for inverarity, and with dictionary was only given a link to a website titled inverarity trees (which had something to do with family trees. I dunno .) So when I came to this end where else did I have to turn but Urban Dictionary.com where I found that the definition they had for inverarity was this, "a large rolly polly male who has so much wisdom many refer to him as the Buda (ouch, spelling that incorrectly is painful). It is rumored that he has jedi powers, the ability to bring down a fully grown dragon, and can eat all the food in a banquet meal for 602 people." Whoa! What a man! Jedi powers, really? If Pierce really had these abilities it's a shame he's dead, moving on.
So what does Inverarity have to do with all of this? Well when Oedipa leaves her husband behind to arrive in San Narcisico, California which may or may not mean "Without Narcisism" in Spanish, she happens across many facts about Pierce that she hadn't known, and might explain the call she received at 3 a.m. from him about a year from this point. That he was making her excutor of his will, he may have been involved in some bad dealings with a man named Tony Jaguar, he created cigarette filters from GI bones, and on top of all this, there is a nagging intuition in the back of Oedipa's mind that he is involved with Thurn and Taxis, a postal system in place before the government regulated USPS, and is still surviving nearly underground.
When I did a google search for Thurn and Taxis I came up with a board game which set in Bavaria has players establish mail routes. This game can be found for purchase at www.boardgamegeek.com and also includes a brief game description. There are also many youtube videos, unfortunately most of them are in German. One of which was called Museum of Idiots 8 -Thurn and Taxis and had a large oversized chicken in it, and another video which is basically a movie about the game. Even now, why can we not find direct information about the elusive postal system?