Disordered Reality, Diseased Cities and Desperate Detectives in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice
Disordered Reality, Diseased Cities and Desperate Detectives in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice

Summary/Abstract: Unlike in classical detective stories, reconstruction of the hidden plot or crime and subsequent reordering of reality is not possible in postmodern novels such as Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice owing to the textual indeterminacy caused by a surfeit of information and excess of meaningful cues, which instead of connecting, over-saturate the possibilities of coherence and order. Like Oedipa Maas’s clues connecting weirdly from an underground postal system to a Jacobean tragedy to Maxwell’s Demon, Larry Doc Sportello’s trail leads to an elusive entity named the Golden Fang, which might be a nefarious sailing ship, or a fraudulent celebrity rehabilitation center, or a secretive consortium of dentists or even a dangerous Indochinese heroin cartel. Fraught with doubt, paranoia, and conspiracy, their trails soon link up to every sub/counter-cultural activity that is inherently Californian and prototypically American. California representing the final frontier of the American Dream, Pynchon’s psychedelic detectives reveal the “stuff” that such dreams are made of. Unlike Oedipa who hopelessly awaits another array of cues at the end of The Crying of Lot 49, Doc drives through the fog that covers and paralyzes the freeways of Los Angeles in Inherent Vice: both entropic movements without any progress typify a universal desolation and cultural mayhem.

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