Ana Rull Suárez The Journey as Pictorial Metaphor in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
This paper deals with the relationship between literature and the visual arts, by taking into consideration a novel by Thomas Pynchon and a selection of paintings by Remedios Varo. Although pictorial and symbolic elements are important in all of Pynchon’s works, they stand out particularly in The Crying of Lot 49. The entire novel, from beginning to end, is coloured by pictorial aspects and its organisation and narrative techniques often rely on references from painting. The structure of the novel is framed both by the landscapes and by the protagonist’s visual memory, which are interrelated in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish reality from the internal visual framework in which the protagonist acts and moves. Thus, Pynchon’s novel becomes a symbolic work of art that tries to communicate a certain unity between art, transcendence, and ordinary life. In this regard, the novel’s parallelism with painting, namely with paintings by Remedios Varo, may be truly enlightening.
The intimate liaison between The Crying of Lot 491 – published by the postmodern American writer Thomas Pynchon in 1966 – and surrealist painting deserves special attention. In his introduction to Slow Learner, a collection of short-stories, Pynchon acknowledges his fascination with the concept of metaphor as the key aspect of the surrealist movement:
I had been taking one of those elective courses in Modern Art, and it was the Surrealists who’d really caught my attention. Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of the movement, and became fascinated instead with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects. 2
Accordingly, not only does Pynchon’s novel display many points of contact with surrealist theory, but it also, more pointedly, shows direct connections with specific paintings from that period, namely those by Remedios Varo (1913-1963), a Spanish artist exiled in Mexico from 1941 on. The relationship between Varo’s paintings and the text becomes quite evident
1 Henceforth Lot 49. 2 Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner: Early Stories (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1985), p.20. The idea that both life and art can be the result of infinite combinations strengthens the perception of reality as an arbitrary collision of objects that convey fragmentation and disorder as well as a tendency towards chaos that Pynchon expressed through his use of the term ‘entropy’. 362 Ana Rull Suárez right at the beginning of the novel when, in an ekphrastic digression,3 Varo’s Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (1961) is thoroughly described.4 In this paper, I intend to analyse the similarities between the atmosphere and the settings depicted in Pynchon’s novel and in Varo’s paintings, by examining the iconography existing in both and the significance of certain elements: the post horn; a woman alone as the main character; the feeling of being observed; the symbol of the wheel and the tower; certain key words from the novel such as ‘Tristero’ and ‘W.A.S.T.E.’; the reinterpretation of myths; the presence of science; and, finally, the use of parody and black humour. I would like to start by referring to a painting called Invocation (1963), ‘possibly the most intriguing of Varo’s paintings’, as David Cowart points out.5 In Varo’s painting, the main character is always a woman. Accordingly, in Invocation, a girl, holding a post horn, stands alone facing a strange world. Surrounded by odd figures that seem to be spying on her, the girl strongly resembles Oedipa Maas in Pynchon’s novel. Some critics have actually suggested that Pynchon acquired this painting and that he was possibly inspired by it when writing Lot 49. Furthermore, it is known that Varo represented in her paintings characters and situations drawn from her own life. Thus, the paranoid fear of being constantly under surveillance may well be the result of her experience as an exile in Mexico. As Janet Kaplan observes, Varo’s work, which tends to juxtapose reality and fiction, was deeply affected by her family context and their political enemies.6 In Lot 49, Oedipa Maas shares this paranoid feeling of being observed and fears that a plan or carefully thought trap has been set by a superior entity to control her: ‘They are watching! With binoculars!’ / ‘she looked around him for reflectors, microphones, camera cabling.’7 All kinds of technological devices (machines, radios, TV sets) are seen as a threat, for Oedipa feels the eyes of others looking at her everywhere, and the deep agony that this feeling of being watched arouses in her evokes several paintings by Varo.
3 Cf. Stephan Mattesich, ‘Ekphrasis, Escape and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49’, Postmodern Culture, vol. 8, no. 3 (May 1998). 4 Interestingly, Pynchon’s short novel, though laden with meaning, could itself work as a painting or a postcard, as has suggested by Bill Brown in ‘Playing the Postcard of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49’ (24 February 2004)