Crying of Lot 49 Chapter 5
This book certainly has its fair share of strange, and Chapter 5 definitely continues with this weirdness as Oedipa tries to piece together this mail conspiracy theory. A message that I believe Pynchon develops throughout this chapter is a rebuttal of her qualifications as a detective.
This mail-conspiracy mystery is occupying an increasingly large amount of Oedipa's attention, which is ultimately causing her to become obsessed. This is clear when she, after talking with the guy with the post-horn badge, starts seeing things/hallucinating/dreaming/something that isn't clearly explained. She hears little kids saying "Thurn and Taxis"(119) in their games, makes up conversations she overhears others having to be about the conspiracy and WASTE, and sees the post-horn symbol pretty much everywhere(123). Oedipa is unable to grasp all various clues she encounters throughout this novel, so she is starting to become mad (insane) just by thinking too hard about them.
This night walk is basically her thinking about all her experiences with an expectation in mind -- that She was meant to remember (118). Oedipa is trying to play the detective, but Pynchon shows us just how ill-equipped she is to solve this mystery. Oedipa has the unnatural expectation that she should be solving this case like a real detective - using clues and evidence to formulate pathways of thought because "each clue that comes is supposed to have its clarity, its fine chances for permanence"(118). However, the plot doesn't move toward in a logical progression; instead, clues and references are thrown out in a way that Oedipa (and the readers) cannot sort out. This harkens back to Nefastis's machine that was built to break the second law of thermodynamics. Oedipa tried to determine whether she was a "sensitive", or someone who had the acuity to operate the machine and separate the different energies ... blah blah; the science isn't important, rather the important part is how Oedipa is trying to fill the role of someone who sorts and organizes. Her inability to think like a "sensitive" parallels her inability to sort like a detective. She is driven primarily on instinct and intuition rather than making logical deductions and analysis like typical detectives, such as when she was pursuing all these random references to the Tristero System. This chapter almost seems like a reverse of a detective story, where the main "detective" is making the plot more complex and convoluted instead of narrowing down the possibilities and discovering the truth. I hope that in Chapter 6 we may be able to draw a more definitive and nuanced comparison between Oedipa and a detective, but so far it seems like Oedipa is the worst possible detective in this mystery story.
This mail-conspiracy mystery is occupying an increasingly large amount of Oedipa's attention, which is ultimately causing her to become obsessed. This is clear when she, after talking with the guy with the post-horn badge, starts seeing things/hallucinating/dreaming/something that isn't clearly explained. She hears little kids saying "Thurn and Taxis"(119) in their games, makes up conversations she overhears others having to be about the conspiracy and WASTE, and sees the post-horn symbol pretty much everywhere(123). Oedipa is unable to grasp all various clues she encounters throughout this novel, so she is starting to become mad (insane) just by thinking too hard about them.
This night walk is basically her thinking about all her experiences with an expectation in mind -- that She was meant to remember (118). Oedipa is trying to play the detective, but Pynchon shows us just how ill-equipped she is to solve this mystery. Oedipa has the unnatural expectation that she should be solving this case like a real detective - using clues and evidence to formulate pathways of thought because "each clue that comes is supposed to have its clarity, its fine chances for permanence"(118). However, the plot doesn't move toward in a logical progression; instead, clues and references are thrown out in a way that Oedipa (and the readers) cannot sort out. This harkens back to Nefastis's machine that was built to break the second law of thermodynamics. Oedipa tried to determine whether she was a "sensitive", or someone who had the acuity to operate the machine and separate the different energies ... blah blah; the science isn't important, rather the important part is how Oedipa is trying to fill the role of someone who sorts and organizes. Her inability to think like a "sensitive" parallels her inability to sort like a detective. She is driven primarily on instinct and intuition rather than making logical deductions and analysis like typical detectives, such as when she was pursuing all these random references to the Tristero System. This chapter almost seems like a reverse of a detective story, where the main "detective" is making the plot more complex and convoluted instead of narrowing down the possibilities and discovering the truth. I hope that in Chapter 6 we may be able to draw a more definitive and nuanced comparison between Oedipa and a detective, but so far it seems like Oedipa is the worst possible detective in this mystery story.
I agree that this story is much different from the other stories we have read in the sense that Oedipa does not know how to solve a mystery. I think this idea connects to the idea of real and false clues. In the Valley of Fear, Holmes could identify what was a real clue and a false clue. It seems to me that Oedipa's problem lies in her inability to identify which is which. She sees clues wherever she goes, and she does not know what to believe.
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