Cry of lot 49

    Over the course of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas struggles to solve the mysteries surrounding the word, “Tristero,” (sometimes spelled, “Trystero”). The word and a peculiar hieroglyph or logo that seems to be associated with it appear everywhere Oedipa goes. The hieroglyph is said to depict a muted post horn – a horn used to signal the arrival of a mounted mail courier or a mail coach in olden times, only here the horn is muffled with a mute. What can this mean? And what’s it got to do with Oedipa? How is her former lover, Pierce Inverarity mixed up in all this? And why did he name Oedipa as one of the executors of his will? Oedipa soon finds herself in the grip of an obsession. She can’t let go of these mysteries until she’s untangled them. And this obsession only gets worse when various people whom she has questioned about the Tristero begin to die or disappear under suspicious circumstances. Could she be next? Will solving the mysteries in this novel save her or condemn her? She doesn’t know, but she can’t give up her quest for knowledge. In her efforts to unlock the secrets of “Tristero,” Oedipa makes several appeals to reason. She’s trying to convince herself to accept one of various, competing hypotheses that she’s formed regarding this strange word and its symbol. (She sums up four of these hypotheses on pages 140-1 of the novel.) In this essay, I want you to analyze the particular proofs, that is, the particular appeals to reason, that Oedipa draws upon in her attempts to confirm one of her hypotheses while dis-confirming the others. At various points in the novel, Oedipa ultimately draws upon all six of the appeals to reason that we’ve considered in this class. Let’s review them again here: She appeals to the logic of evidentiary induction as she collects various clues that seem to point towards the probability of one or more of her hypothesis, hoping to convince herself that one of them is most probably correct. She appeals to inductive analogies (paradigms, as Aristotle called them), as she finds parallel accounts of what the Tristero seemed to mean at various points in the history in order to draw conclusions about what it probably means now. She consults with various authority figures, experts in various fields, in order to get their take on various aspects of her investigation. If she can trust these established authorities, their expertise will make their conclusions probable and unravel at least pieces of the puzzle for her. She dries to deduce various conclusions about the Tristero by starting from major premises – Ie, widely established and commonly held beliefs. She sometimes phrases these beliefs in conditional grammar (if-then sentences that launch proofs by modus ponens or modus tollens) and sometimes in disjunctive (either-or sentences that launch proofs by modus tollendo ponens). And then she applies observations of her own immediate situation to those major premises. These observations are called minor premises. She thereby hopes to deduce confirm or dis-confirm that a particular thing is true or not-true regarding the Tristero. Of course, Oedipa never quite states that she’s using this or that form of induction or deduction. She never says, “this is my major premise here.” It’s up to you to extract and label the particular forms and the parts of her appeals to reason (logos). You’re basically paraphrasing and outlining particular moments of her thinking when you analyze her appeals to reason. One last note: Don’t forget to analyze the final proof that’s left unfinished at the end of the novel. When the auctioneer is preparing to “cry” lot 49 (ie, call for bids for Pierce Inverarity’s peculiar stamp collection), Oedipa believes she can appeal to logic once again to help her conclude that one of her hypotheses is or is not the case. Figure out and explain how that appeal to logic might or might not bring her closer to the true meaning of the Tristero.