The auction of No. 49

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The auction of No. 49 , original English title The Crying of Lot 49 , is a 1966 novel by the American writer Thomas Pynchon (* 1937 ). It is considered to be one of the major works of American postmodernism .

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Rather narrow in scope, the book tells the story of Oedipa Maas, who was appointed executor by her former lover Pierce Inverarity . Inverarity had amassed considerable fortune, largely through property speculation, and upon his death, regardless of his equally substantial losses, left enough money to be worth tracking his numerous investments.

Oedipa met Inverarity in Mexico City before she met and married disc jockey Wendell, known as Mucho Maas, from San Francisco . Before his death, Inverarity had announced “a little visit from the shadow” (p. 11) in a nightly phone call . Inverarity now becomes a “shadow” for Oedipa as she goes to San Narcisco, a settlement in California , to break down his legacy and execute his will.

In this role as the administrator of the estate, Oedipa Maas is looking for a mysterious secret organization, the Tristero, which operates the alternative communication network WASTE (an acronym for We Await Silent Tristero's Empire ). Tristero evidently emerged from a fight against the postal monopoly of Thurn und Taxis centuries ago and also created a network in America that was able to subvert the monopoly of the US postal service. On a foray through San Francisco, Oedipa Maas discovers "mailboxes" and advertisements with a muffled post horn emblazoned on them - the alleged symbol of WASTE .

With every clue that Oedipa finds, however, the question increasingly arises whether Inverarity was just laying the wrong track to drive Oedipa insane. The question of whether Tristero actually exists remains unanswered for Oedipa Maas as for the reader. She walks into the auction room, expecting a Tristero bidder to turn up at the auction of Pierce's stamp collection, lot number 49. The novel ends abruptly with the call for object 49.

Interpretative approach

In The Crying of Lot 49 already from Pynchon's first novel appears V. known Voyodyne Corporation back to factory as the center of San Narciscos. In analogy to San Francisco, another essential setting in the novel, this new Californian settlement got its name from Narcissus , who is in love with his reflection .

For the protagonist Oedipa, from whose perspective the events are depicted, the efforts to decipher the legacy of Inverarity become a desperate attempt to decipher herself. Her name refers to Sophocles ' tragic hero Oedipus , who searches for the truth without regard to himself , while the name of her late lover Inverarity has an ambiguous relationship to the truth.

In Mexico City, the protagonist had previously noticed the picture entitled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre” in an exhibition of surrealistic paintings by the Spanish exiled Remedios Varo . This painting shows “a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces as prisoners in the top room of a round tower, decorating a kind of wall-art carpet that falls out of the window slits into a void and hopelessly fills the void” ( “a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faches ... prisoners in the top room of a circular tower which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void " p. 21). The tapestry also contained “all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth ... and was the world” ( “all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world ”, p. 21).

In view of this painting, Oedipa becomes aware of her own situation, namely that “everything she stands on was woven together in her own tower only a few thousand miles away ... only by chance known as Mexico, and so Pierce had brought her out of nowhere, there was no escape "( " what she stood on had only been woven together a couple of thousand miles away in her own tower, ... only by accident known as Mexico, there's been no escape ", p. 21 f.)

Oedipa realizes "that her tower, its height and architecture, like her ego only exist by chance: what really keeps her where she is is magic , anonymous and malicious ... for no reason at all"; she can " fall back on superstition or take up a useful hobby, or go crazy, or marry a disk jockey" (" her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic." , anonymous and malignant ... for no reason at all ", p. 21 f.).

The metaphorical portrayal of this image of the world as a carpet that she has knotted herself indicates that Oedipa's attempt to bring order to the legacy of her former lover is an attempt to "bring order into her own world and determine herself".

The name WASTE with an encrypted address strikes her in the toilet of a pub that is also used by Voyodyne employees. The address is accompanied by the sign of a post horn extended by a second funnel (a combination of the sign of the post office and of being deaf and dumb, p. 52). In this context, Oedipa comes across the “ Tristero System ”, as she calls it. She then encounters this sign in different contexts, especially in the text of an Elizabethan revenge tragedy and in a collection of forged stamps that Inverarity left her. Her research goes back a long way into the past, to the time of the freedom struggle of the United Netherlands against Spanish rule. Again and again they encountered the name Tristeros and WASTE - Code .

Tristero appears as a historical personality who wanted to break the monopoly of the Thurn-und-Taxis-Post and founded a secret post as a rival company, which has survived through various vicissitudes and in different forms to the present day.

After the protagonist has found the first clues about the meaning of the signs, the code and Tristero, she finally believes she will meet them again everywhere and feels, as it were in a paranoia, more and more persecuted by them: "Possibilities for paranoia become abundant" (p. 165 ).

She believes she can see inverarity behind the whole Tristero-Post system and feels that it has entrusted her to carry on his legacy. So, when an acquaintance tried to talk her out of Inverarity's will as a mere joke, she decidedly rejects such a possibility. She believes she has come across a communication system that mysteriously controls the entire world. This system evades, as it appears to her, the "lack of freedom of public transport"; or she has fallen into a trap that Inverarity has set up for her.

Oedipa wonders whether she is just imagining one or the other, but cannot decide on any of the alternatives. In her dilemma she only experiences again the emptiness that she hoped in vain to fill by knotting patterns in the carpet (p. 171).

Finally, Oedipa is hoping for a final clarification from the auction of the stamps (“lot 49”) . The stamps have attracted a prospective buyer who is still hiding his identity for the time being, but wants to appear at the auction. The novel ends with the start of lot 49 ; In the end it remains open who is hiding behind the stranger and what possibilities the protagonist will reveal themselves with his appearance. The previous closing of the heavy doors and windows of the room could, however, possibly indicate that Oedipa remains locked in with her problem.

For her part, Oedipa is not prepared to submit to the "system of the established political and social order, into which most of the people she encounters flee for fear of the uncanny of the Tristero system." The protagonist perceives this established order as emptiness that equates to death. For them, reality is only possible in the assumption of the Tristero system as a delusion, i.e. H. From their point of view, a reality that makes sense for the individual now only consists of paranoia.

As with V. , at the end of the novel, Pynchon leaves the question open whether the auction of No. 49 a world is designed from a paranoid point of view, or whether his work presents a world in which to live inevitably leads to paranoia.

reception

The auction of No. 49 is Pynchon's shortest novel and is considered the least pynchonesque because of its linear plot . It is his most widely read novel for both reasons.

The literary scholar Heinz Ickstadt sees the novel as an attempt at a cultural psychological analysis of the United States and considers it to be one of the most important works of contemporary American literature.

The Americanist Hubert Zapf also rates The Crying of Lot 49 as a “classic” of postmodern American literature, which, in the protagonist's search for meaning, addresses not only communication problems but also “American religion and history” as essential parameters. According to Zapf, Pynchon's novel contrasts "the divine plan of salvation proclaimed by the Puritans ... historical contingency and human inadequacy".

In his analysis of Pynchon's work, the renowned British literary scholar Paul Antony Tanner, mostly known as Tony Tanner , also describes Oedipa's search, which corresponds to the reader's search for the meaning of the novel, as an “anti-detective novel”.

The intentional uninterpretability of this novel (“unless the reader would make a personal and perhaps arbitrary decision”) is reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka , according to the American literary critic Harold Bloom .

expenditure

  • The Crying of Lot 49 . JB Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia 1966. (American first edition)
  • The auction of number 49 . German by Wulf Teichmann. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1980, ISBN 3518019503 . (German first edition; all later editions appeared under the title The auction of No. 49 )

Secondary literature

  • J. Kerry Grant: A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 . 2nd, revised edition. The University of Georgia Press, Athens GA 2008, ISBN 978-0820332086 .
  • Patrick O'Donnell (Ed.): New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1991, ISBN 978-0521388337 .
  • Franz Link: "The Crying of Lot 49, 1966" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 343-345.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Franz Link: The Crying of Lot 49, 1966 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 343.
  2. ↑ Harold Bloom : The Art of Reading. How and why we should read . C. Bertelsmann, Munich 2000, p. 272. In addition to the negating prefix in , the name Inverarity contains various tonal allusions, for example to the Latin word “ veritas ” (German: “truth, honesty, openness”), but also to the English Expression "rarity" (German: "rarity, rarity").
  3. ↑ See Franz Link: The Crying of Lot 49, 1966 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 343 f.
  4. ↑ See Franz Link: The Crying of Lot 49, 1966 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 344 f.
  5. ↑ See Franz Link: The Crying of Lot 49, 1966 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 345.
  6. ↑ See Franz Link: The Crying of Lot 49, 1966 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 345. See also Hubert Zapf : Postmodernism (60s and 70s) - Thomas Pynchon . In: Hubert Zapf u. a .: American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 354-358, here pp. 356 f.
  7. ↑ Michael Cohen: Pynchon, Thomas. In: In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia . ABC Clio, Santa Barbara, Denver and London 2003, Vol. 2, p. 602.
  8. ^ Heinz Ickstadt: The Crying of Lot 49 . In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . dtv, Munich 1986, vol. 13, p. 10591.
  9. ↑ a b Hubert Zapf: Postmodernism (60s and 70s - Thomas Pynchon) . In: Hubert Zapf u. a .: American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 354–358, here p. 356.
  10. ↑ Harold Bloom: The Art of Reading. How and why we should read . C. Bertelsmann, Munich 2000, p. 273.