When we read a Pynchon text we may be disconcerted by it, but we usually find ourselves comfortable with at least one of its elements: setting. In fact, Pynchon's mise en scène may be the only reason for calling his books novels. He is as archeologically precise about places and things as Flaubert, although he should probably be compared to the Flaubert of Salammbô. In that text, Flaubert transports Emma Bovary's problems back to Carthage, rendering both Emma and the setting abstract. Pynchon, on the other hand, creates a false familiarity in the mind of the reader which makes him forget that what he is reading is not a study of people in a historical setting but the clash of personified ideas surrounded by the things of the twentieth century. Flaubert and Pynchon are opposites that converge: Flaubert makes the alien familiar by recreating the problems of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in Carthage and Pynchon makes the familiar strange by having his personifications collide in a setting we know only too well.

This disjunction between character and setting is the first indication that Pynchon is a satirist, that he is reworking satire as a modern-day disciple of Petronius, Apuleius, or Voltaire might. In addition to this use of a pasteboard, trompe-l'oeil setting, there are three other aspects of his work that support a reading of them as satires: his characters are associated with ideas or idées fixes, his scenes take precedence over his plots, and his characters' psychological development is reduced to a minimum. The difference between satire and, for example, novel may be seen in two areas: character and plot. Novelistic plots, as Fielding suggests in Tom Jones, both echoing and modifying Cervantes, tend toward history writing, and it would not be unreasonable to suggest that the particular form of history used as the model for novelistic plots is the developmental sort we associate with Hegel. (pp. 555-56)

We cannot become "intimate" with characters in either satire or romance because they never acquire psychological depth. In both genres, character is subordinated to some greater concept, either ideas, in the case of satire, or archetypes, especially those associated with fertility, death, regeneration, or sterility in the case of romance. In both genres, characters are impenetrable, not human, and this alien quality is only mitigated by occasional outpourings of sentiment or flashes of wit. The relationship between satire and romance, with regard to character, is interesting because of the antithetical nature of the two genres: romance tends toward the noble, the heroic, and the superhuman, while satire tends toward the roguish or ordinary. (pp. 556-57)

The juxtaposition of romance and satire is also important for understanding Pynchon's esthetic enterprise because he appropriates one of romance's principal plots, the quest, and uses it for satiric purposes….

All three of Pynchon's texts are ironic quests, but V, his first, is the most mysterious. It is a search for something or someone, V, but what V is is never made clear. The search ends in mystery and death, and all the reader knows at the end is that the enigma concerns the existence or nonexistence of something "out there," something that either possesses meaning or not. But whatever it is must be at all costs ascertained, and this idea of a mystery-to-be-resolved is what defines the reader's situation in all three of Pynchon's satires. V is arranged in such a way that, as a totality, it seems to be defying the reader to find a system of meaning. This dare, this either/or crux, is in fact the result of yet another juxtaposition, that of faith and paranoia, and it is through this juxtaposition that Pynchon makes his readers participate in his texts as though they were characters. (p. 557)

The reader of V, or so it would seem, cannot help but create meaning as he reads. Despite what may be warnings to the contrary, the reader will inevitably forge both meaning and unity, a plot that signifies, out of a series of chapters from disparate but related stories. The fact that the text is bound as a volume virtually guarantees this creation of meaning, although this very act is one of the pitfalls the author is preparing for his meaning-bound readers. The book begins in 1955 and ends in 1919, a reversal which suggests that time in the text does not have the same relationship to space and meaning it has in romance, where plots are often, as in Parzifal, linked to the changes of the seasons….

There are, naturally, other texts that resemble V, other texts in which episodes are heaped together in such a way that it is the decision of the reader to determine the presence or absence of meaning. Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza, Marc Saporta's Composition Number 1, Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, or Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers might be examples. In all of these books, as in V, the reader is the most important character, whose principal problem is the invention or discovery of meaning in the text. Whether he will exist in doubt and disregard the problem of meaning completely, or whether he will postulate a meaning for the text, is his dilemma. (p. 558)

The clash of faith and paranoia, grace and fulmination is the subject of The Crying of Lot 49. Gravity's Rainbow takes an element present in both V and The Crying of Lot 49, the international corporation, and identifies it as the occult, meaningful system "out there," although while the system is supposed to possess meaning, it is never made clear just what its meaning is, as if meaning could be divorced from intentionality. All we learn in the three books is that the corporation, the Yoyodyne corporation which appears first in V and reappears in the other two texts, stands on both sides of all political, social, and ethical fences. In Gravity's Rainbow, the protagonist discovers he is actually the "product" of the company, and in The Crying of Lot 49 we learn that Pierce Inverarity, the dead man who may be the invisible force behind Oedipa Maas's quest, is an owner of Yoyodyne Inc….

The Crying of Lot 49 reveals both Pynchon's sense of literary genres and his attitude toward meaning in literature. This slim volume mediates between two very large-scale enterprises, V and Gravity's Rainbow, and may be taken as the ironic rewriting of the romance plot of enlightenment (a parody of either The Golden Ass or perhaps La Nausée) or as a detective fiction in which the detective, like Oedipus, is both the investigator and the object of investigation. Whether by chance or by design, The Crying of Lot 49 stands as a pivotal text in Pynchon's oeuvre: it restates the central issue of V, to make order of confusion or remain in doubt, in the shape of a classical satire, a narrative interspersed with verse interludes, here in the form of songs. This model provides the structure for Gravity's Rainbow, the spectacular difference being that of scale. (p. 559)

The most typical of all the devices in Pynchon's repertoire is his use of trick names: how are readers supposed to react to a woman named Oedipa? The Sophoclean or Freudian association is inevitable, and baffling, but an understanding of the device as a device and not as the knot which, once unraveled, opens the way to some deeper meaning, may make Pynchon's esthetics more comprehensible. Our task is to understand the device, not to decipher it. Pynchon's onomastic punning produces a kind of Brechtian "alienation effect," reminding the reader that what he is reading is a fiction, that the words here are only words. (pp. 559-60)

Pynchon seems to have modeled his text on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" (1935) from the Ficciones (1944) collection…. Borges's story is a bogus book review in which Borges, or his narrator, pretends to be writing about The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, by one Mir Bahadur Alí, "the first detective novel written by a native of Bombay City," a text damned (apocryphally) by the English essayist Philip Guedalla as "a rather uncomfortable combination of those allegorical poems of Islam which rarely fail to interest their translators and those crime fictions which inevitably baffle John H. Watson and refine the horror of human life in the most irreproachable hotels of Brighton" (translations mine). The copy Borges reviews also bears a spurious prologue by yet another English literary figure, Dorothy Sayers, just to make its credentials all the more "irreproachable."

The plot is simple: an Islamic Indian kills a Hindu in a riot. He flees and while hiding finds a horrible man who mentions in passing a few mysterious names. The next day the unnamed protagonist sets out to investigate those names. The search, the quest for whatever lies behind those names, which would seem to be the "good", leads the protagonist, like Kim, over all of India, to all levels of life. In the last scene he approaches the final name, Al-Mu'tasim, an encounter Borges does not describe. He does note that in the second, revised edition, the one he reviews, the text is rendered allegorical: Al-Mu'tasim becomes a symbol of God, the search a search for Him. Pynchon appropriates this story or plot summary and fleshes it out, although it seems he prefers the earlier, less obviously allegorical version, where Al-Mu'tasim's identity is still ambiguous. (pp. 560-61)

Unless we revise The Crying of Lot 49 and make it too into an allegorical quest for God, we must be content with uncertainty. We can never, if we eschew allegorization, know if Tristero and the W.A.S.T.E. system are good or evil, and we accept the fact that we will never know who is bidding for lot 49 at the end of the narrative. We agree that there is nothing more to the story than unresolved mystery.

Borges resolves the "lady or the tiger" crux Pynchon leaves undecided because he wants to maintain the pose of the book reviewer and because he wants to show the disponibilité of any literary plot, its susceptibility to interpretation. Both Pynchon and Borges deploy their material in their own way, but both are rewriting the same plot, the quest. (p. 561)

One way, then, of approaching The Crying of Lot 49 is to dismiss the reader's quest for meaning from the inquiry. Instead of dispelling ambiguity for the sake of coherence or intellectual security, the reader would focus his attention on how the text deploys its devices and how it translates the satiric tradition. We might begin with character: Mucho Maas, Metzger, Hilarius, and the others stand as foils for Oedipa Maas; she is chosen to be Pierce Inverarity's executrix, they are not. None of them is meant to be the pharmakos…. These characters are only updated types. For the Panglossian pedant of traditional satire, Pynchon substitutes the mad psychoanalyst. The rest of Oedipa's male companions embody one or another profession, from lawyer to disc jockey, each in his way caricaturing all members of his profession. The rock groups and the Yoyodyne chorus stand as ironic commentators on the action, their traditional role in satire.

Another fixture of satire reworked here is the relentless outpouring of information. Pynchon includes an inordinate amount of scientific knowledge about such matters as entropy and the calculus theorem abbreviated as "dt" or "delta-t." Entropy, divorced both from physics and communication theory and translated into literary speculation, defines the relationship between a text and a tradition. A text may simply reiterate the given patterns of a literature as long as there is enough energy in the system, the complex relationship between readers and writers, to sustain it. But somewhere in the business of literary production the system begins to lose energy—epics, for example, are today only sporadically written and even more rarely read. In order to revitalize the process, some agency recombines elements present in the tradition so that work may go on. This would seem to be the role of the individual author: he cannot contribute new elements to the process, but he certainly can recombine them in a new way, or, more importantly, infuse new power into the system by means of irony. (pp. 562-63)

The importance of irony in this revitalization cannot be overemphasized. And Pynchon's irony is derived primarily from juxtaposition: he wants romance and satire to clash and to create a situation in which the reader will realize that both genres are nothing more than fictions, not mirrors of the age or imitations of life….

In this sense, Oedipa Maas is a metaphor for the reader, just as Pierce Inverarity may be understood to represent the artist. His name, as suggestive as hers, renders both roles sexual, the artist being the masculine, the reader feminine. His given name, Pierce, complements this sexual division of labor by evoking the phallic stylus violating the white purity of the page, while his last name, Inverarity, hints at such concepts as inveracity and inversion, the illusory or lying aspect of writing. The text constitutes the communion of these two archetypes, the writer who leaves of himself only the misleading traces of his will …, and the reader who executes it, seeing it in an extraordinarily dark glass. Oedipa follows Pierce's map, and it is through this act that the calculus concept becomes a literary metaphor: she charts his course as if it were the trajectory of a projectile instead of a literary plot…. She sacrifices her life in order to carry out his ambiguous will, but without her sacrifice, entropy would once again threaten the system. Without the participation of the reader, the text would cease to exist. (p. 563)

Oedipa's role as reader and interpreter is alluded to throughout The Crying of Lot 49, but perhaps the most significant instance occurs at the beginning of chapter 2, when she first comes to San Narciso, Pierce Inverarity's city in southern California. She associates Pierce's realm, as she observes it from above, with a printed circuit: "there were to both [San Narciso and the printed circuit] outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate."… What the actual message is, what the meaning is of the circuit or city, which both stand as signs in an unknown script, is the plot she sees spread out before her. Just as in one version of Borges's story the search is its own justification and not the outcome of the search, the searcher, in this case, the reader, would seem to be the real object of the quest. Oedipa, in the same passage, senses the adumbration, the shadow of Pierce …, and the narrator calls it "an odd, religious instant," vaguely horrifying yet wonderful. Suddenly the geometry of the scene changes: instead of looking down on San Narciso, Oedipa is in the middle of things, the eye of a hurricane…. Oedipa is variously looking down at a man-made landscape, an artifact as artificial as a literary plot, or standing at the center of a silent whirl, excluded from communication, divorced from the Word, yet tantalized by the possibility both may exist. Fixtures taken from a literary tradition concerned with producing awe through language are here made grotesque: if there is a divinity in this text, it is Pierce Inverarity, Proteus, wearing one more disguise.

Another romance device revitalized through irony here is the interpolated tale. Here it is Richard Wharfinger's Jacobean drama The Courier's Tragedy, a bogus text worthy of comparison with Mir Bahadur Alí's The Approach to Almu'tasim. We notice that the play constitutes a gathering point for two of The Crying of Lot 49's principal themes, the Echo and Narcissus relationship between Oedipa and Pierce (which is a motif: San Narciso, the Saint Narcissus of Wharfinger's play, and Echo Courts, the motel in San Narcisco where Oedipa stays), and the concept of language as a failed system of communication, one which has only a shadow existence, an "intent to communicate" (just as road systems, printed circuits, urban design all seem to be attempts to say something, although what that may be is unknown), while true communication can only take place between those linked by bonds other than language, those who have been initiated into secret societies. Of course, what is communicated among the initiates is not a message but the fact of communality, which would make them like circuits through which an electric current would flow. Wharfinger, much sicker than his namesake "Sick Dick," member of yet another rock group, wrote, according to Driblette, his twentieth-century director, another "reworker" analogous to Borges and Pynchon, only to entertain…. The interpolated play, like its traditional counter-parts, reflects and comments on the major action: The Crying of Lot 49 is entertainment and it entertains, like Gothic romance, by posing mysteries, enigmas not to be resolved but to be enjoyed for their own sake.

It is perhaps as entertainment that all satires should be read instead of being defined, as they have been, as literature's commentary on society's foibles. Satire may use its didacticism as an apologia pro vita sua, but to reduce Swift, Pope, and Peacock to the level of censor is to trivialize their texts as esthetic enterprises. What Pynchon attempts to do in his writings is to create a literature that destroys the concept that art must mirror life. His texts constantly point out their own artificiality, their identity as literature, and consistent with this mockery of the dictates of literary realism is a turn toward intellect, to the mind as creator of unreal systems, especially philosophy and theology. (pp. 564-66)

The ideology of satire, as Pynchon writes it, is not to reform the reader, who would then, presumably, reform the world, but to reclaim for literature one of the purposes essential to all rhetorical exercises: to delight. (p. 566)

Alfred Mac Adam, "Pynchon as Satirist: To Write, to Mean," in The Yale Review (© 1978 by Yale University; reprinted by permission of the editors), Summer, 1978, pp. 555-66.