خلاصة:
Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) is an artistically convoluted narrative in which parallel, alternative worlds interpenetrate consistently and continuously, providing a fine instance of what, in Chaos Theory, is called an open system. The discovery of the chaotic connections in this narrative is in harmony with effecting a sense of indeterminacy, plurality and uncertainty which prevails all through the story and keeps flustering Pynchon’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas. Oedipa, engulfed by the chaotic flux of information which most tenaciously and purposefully resists any linear, causative ordering, struggles to fabricate, against all odds, an orderly nexus among the bizarre set of incidents that she encounters through resorting to paranoia. Paranoia, in Oedipa’s case, becomes therapeutic and constructive since fantasizing a conspiracy would warrant an escape from insanity which is an intrinsic attribute of chaos. The two consequential determinants in this narrative, therefore, are chaos and paranoia the convoluted interactions of which create an intriguing, chaotic, postmodern tale. Unlike the dominant trend of considering paranoia merely as a prevalent thematic concern in Pynchon, this study seeks to provide a new reading of the mentioned narrative in the light of the dynamic interplay of chaos and paranoia and its function in portraying Oedipa as the one who projects, author-like, a world of her own which, though still governed by the regulations and principles of chaotic, open systems, guarantees sanity, existence and authority.
ملخص الجهاز:
Unlike the dominant trend of considering paranoia merely as a prevalent thematic concern in Pynchon, this study seeks to provide a new reading of the mentioned narrative in the light of the dynamic interplay of chaos and paranoia and its function in portraying Oedipa as the one who projects, author-like, a world of her own which, though still governed by the regulations and principles of chaotic, open systems, guarantees sani- ty, existence and authority.
192) For Thomas Pynchon as well as the inquisitive protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Mass, it is not hard to imagine that storytelling, the age-old at- tempt to fabricate an underlying narrative connection that is necessitated by the paranoid implications of existence, and breathing are of equal congeniality to the soul and a means of survival, as well.
The actual, historical world of Thurn and Taxis (whether history is knowable and capable of being objectively and meticulously recorded and rendered itself is a controversial issue), the textual universe of Pynchon’s narrative, the narrative that Oedipa retraces regarding Tristero, the varied and assorted stamps in Inverarity’s con- troversial stamp collection (“thousands of little colored windows into deep vis- tas of space and time” (Pynchon, 1965, p.
Oedipa’s universe could best exemplify this attrib- ute and through such purposeful blend of the incongruities, and in the face of the seeming chaos of the fictional worlds, Oedipa strives to draw the attention to the narrativity of the unrelatable incidents and the process of discovery as well as the ultimate open-endedness as the points of inducing order.