The Crying of Lot 49 doesn't exactly present the kind of vision of California that the Golden State would use in its tourism campaigns. Pynchon's view of California history (and, really, all of U.S. history) is super-paranoid.
The Tristero conspiracy is a conspiracy about the nature of America and the relationship between the counterculture and the mainstream. This book is both a parable about and a parody of America in the 1960s… but the times haven't changed as much as you might think.
Questions About Visions of America
- How is the Tristero conspiracy a conspiracy about the nature of America? What role does paranoia play in American history?
- What would be the significance of a centuries-old tradition of postal fraud? Why postal fraud?
- To what extent is Lot 49 a product of its times: a book about America in the 1960s? To what extent is it still relevant today?
- Why does Oedipa Maas feel so alienated from America?
Chew on This
In The Crying of Lot 49, we see that the existence of a counterculture is absolutely essential to the health of America because America is a country founded around a paranoid vision about centralized power.
Oedipa Maas's vision of America is superficial. At the end of the novel, she simply superimposes her own senses of claustrophobia, unhappiness, and paranoia onto the country as a whole.