Abstract

Toward the end of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas reflects on the America her involvement with Pierce Inverarity's will has revealed to her. Those on the margins, disenfranchised, include the kids in immobilized railroad cars listening to their mothers' pocket radios, the squatters living in makeshift lean-tos behind highway billboards and in junkyards, drifters speaking their American language "carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else invisible yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in" (180). And Oedipa, as she wanders through the "hieroglyphic streets," finds herself likening it to "walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left" (181).

How to Cite:

S. Baker, J., (1993) “A Democratic Pynchon: Counterculture, Counterforce and Participatory Democracy”, Pynchon Notes , 99-131. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/pn.218