Hassan Rezaei - Salman Farsi University of Kazeroon

Thomas Pynchon studied Engineering Physics at Cornell University and his knowledge of science has provided him with metaphors applicable to his art of writing. The chaotic world of his The Crying of Lot 49, unlike classical Newtonian view of the systems, cannot be explained in terms of matter and force, i.e. its system is so chaotic that understanding its future behavior seems entirely impossible. Therefore, Oedipa’s search for order is never fully accomplished. She tries to make sense of the signs proliferating around her, but either these signs bear no meaning or she cannot sort out the meaningful signs from the ‘noise’. She takes it for granted that every message should necessarily contain some kind of meaning. However, in her Oedipus-like quest, she tries to make sense of the signs and clues around her to solve the enigmatic riddles she is faced with, but she finds this revelation elusive. She finally comes to this conclusion that the meaning she is pursuing is that there is no meaning at all. Along with Oedipa, the reader undertakes uncertain attempts first of all to make sense of the novel’s initial text, Inverarity’s will, then of the textual variants of ‘The Courier’s Tragedy’, and eventually the whole bewildering miasma of cryptic signs of the whole novel.This resistant ‘uncertainty’ seems to be a characteristic of the postmodern science that has appealed the literary critics like Jean François Lyotard who employs it to discredit the meta-narratives that he believes has dominated the human thought in most parts of history. Through discussion of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which asserts that it is impossible to specify simultaneously a particle’s location and momentum, or in other words, we can never get to ‘know’ the location and the direction of an electron simultaneously because experiments can only measure one of those things at a time, this article will show that The Crying of Lot 49 is Oedipa’s attempt to achieve certainty (order) but her absurd pursuit of meaning ends in a feeling of paranoia. The aim of this article, in a nutshell, is to argue that Thomas Pynchon’s metaphors, derived from postmodern science, parodies the assumptions of American Dream that can be considered a kind of meta-narrative that Lyotard talks about.

Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, Uncertainty, paranoia, Lyotard, Heisenberg