Loss in the Mail: Pynchon, Psychoanalysis and the Postal Work of Mourning

“Sorting isn’t work? . . . Tell them down at the post office, you’ll find yourself in a mailbag heading for Fairbanks, Alaska, without even a FRAGILE sticker going for you.”

—Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

But to psychoanalysis mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back.

—Sigmund Freud, “On Transience”

All the rest is a postscript.

—Harry Mulisch, The Assault

The question of mourning constitutes a central but, until recently, relatively little studied aspect of Thomas Pynchon’s fiction.¹ From the “spherical loss” that envelops Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 (147) to the “Hyperthrenia” or “Excess of Mourning” (25) of the widowed land surveyor Mason in Mason & Dixon and, more recently, the grief of paternal loss traversed—in psychological as well as geographical sense—by the four sibling protagonists of Against the Day, Pynchon creates characters who are confronted with what Freud calls “the bonus [Prämie] of staying alive.”² Left with the intolerable gift of survival, his characters often find themselves, much like Hamlet, at once intimidated and urged on by the ghostly demands of the work of mourning.³ Oedipa memorably articulates this predicament in her angst-ridden query, “Shall I project a world?” which resonates throughout Pynchon’s other novels and invites direct comparison to Hamlet. Occasioned by her being named the executor of a will—that gift that death bestows upon the survivor—Oedipa’s all-but-rhetorical question comes at the end of a long, self-interrogating passage in which she considers her obligations to the deceased. Oedipa regards the will of her former lover, Pierce Inverarity, the self-styled California “founding father” (15), with much of the same emotional ambivalence that characterizes the prince of Denmark in his most famous soliloquy:

If [the will] was really Pierce’s attempt to leave an organized something behind after his own annihilation, then it was part of her duty, wasn’t it, to bestow life on what had persisted, to try to be what Driblette was, the dark machine in the center of the planetarium, to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her? If only so much didn’t stand in her way: her deep ignorance of law, of investment, of real estate, ultimately of the dead man himself . . . Under the symbol she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world?

(64)

To project or not to project, that is the question. The crisis of mourning that this internal soliloquy registers is one which, as in Hamlet, hinges on the character’s felt inadequacy for the task of filial coping. At the same time, both Oedipa and Hamlet intuitively acknowledge the moral urge to make action (or in this case execution) prevail over inaction. Or, in Hamlet’s words, not to let “conscience” (meaning reflection) “make cowards of us all” (III.i).

 
By contrast, in this essay I intend to elaborate what distinguishes the two soliloquies. I am referring to the curious vocabulary and method—projection, dark machine, planetarium, the act of writing—that in the four centuries that separate The Crying of Lot 49 from Hamlet have come to be attached to the discourse on mourning. That discourse has been primarily shaped by Freudian psychoanalysis, a discipline that not only developed the now common “economic” understanding of mourning as a kind of “work” (or “bonus”), but also introduced such terms as projection (and introjection) into the critical vocabulary on grief, and even the idea that such work can be said to resemble the labor of a (dark) machine.⁴ At first sight, this might seem a counterintuitive approach. Is Oedipa truly grieving for Inverarity? Is it accurate to describe her response in the terms of (personally felt) loss when the novel evokes her so often as a kind of secondary witness even to her own past, shared with a person whom she refers to generically as “the dead man”? Given Oedipa’s self-ascribed “ignorance” of him, one may legitimately wonder if mourning Pierce is in fact what she does.
 
In what follows, I argue that Oedipa’s response to Pierce’s death should be identified in terms of mourning, albeit a very specific and as-yet untheorized kind. If, as Freud famously argues, mourning consists of a (symbolic) “incorporation” of the deceased whose existence is thus “continued in a psychological sense” (“Trauer” 432), then how does this process of symbolic cannibalization proceed when the object to be ingested is in fact empty or nearly devoid of content? There is a rich psychoanalytical literature on those moments of melancholic arrest when the object of mourning is so large that ingesting it causes appetite to diminish, as Freud points out. Such is the case with Hamlet, whose refusal to take part in the banquet celebrations described in Act I Scene 2 is, in the end, also a refusal to eat. In The Crying of Lot 49, however, we encounter something like the dialectical opposite of this melancholic loss of appetite. Oedipa’s memories of Pierce have long lain dormant under a “quiet ambiguity” which, until the arrival of the letter, “[had taken] him over . . . to the verge of being forgotten” (3). Her knowledge of Pierce is so minimal that incorporating him, as the experience of loss now urges her to do, is more likely to leave her hungry than it is to cause indigestion. Indeed, Oedipa’s immediate reaction to the news of Pierce’s death, as “she tried to think back” (2; emphasis added), is to go shopping for food and to occupy herself with supper preparations, including “the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden, . . . the layering of a lasagna, garlicking of a bread, tearing up of romaine leaves, eventually, oven on, . . . the mixing of the twilight’s whisky sours” (2). A plethora of other ingredients and side-aliments complement the multilayered lasagna, a filling and heavy dish in its own right. The lasagna thus becomes a still life cornucopia of sorts, a nature morte, whose connotations of death reinforce its status as a complementary meal meant to still the hunger left by the all-too-light serving of the deceased.
 
It follows that Oedipa’s eventual agreement to act as co-executor of the will can be regarded as a similar substitute (or replacement meal) for the unbearable lightness of Inverarity’s (in)corporate(d) persona, except that here the traditional direction of mourning is reversed. Unable to substantially incorporate (or introject) Inverarity, Oedipa projects her mourning outward onto the personal objects presumably included in his will, such as a Jay Gould bust he kept over the bed—“Was that how he’d died, she wondered?” (1)—and Inverarity’s stamp collection, “his substitute often for her” (31). There is an element of poetic justice to the stamp collection’s becoming Oedipa’s substitute for Inverarity. Its centrality to the plot also forms a part of a larger analogy that is central to Pynchon’s novel, that between the work of postal sorting and the work of mourning. The slowest of the many communication media that Pynchon thematizes in The Crying of Lot 49, the post mirrors the inefficient and wasteful process of mourning through the mailman’s commitment to non-productive, individual labor.
 
This analogy is particularly suggestive in the case of the Tristero, the secret mailing organization whose underground existence Oedipa uncovers and whose “constant theme, disinheritance” (132) resonates with one who herself has been disinherited from the opportunity to mourn.⁵ It is one of the central ironies in this novel that the same legal letter that names Oedipa as co-executor of Inverarity’s estate is also the one that bars her from mourning Inverarity. This inability to mourn does not originate in her relative ignorance of the deceased, however, or in the ambivalence with which a now-married housewife is bound to receive the news of a former lover’s death, but in the delay of several months with which the news of Inverarity’s death reaches her. This belatedness makes mourning Inverarity both impossible and traumatic for Oedipa at the same time as it forces her to mourn mourning itself, a process that is interminable precisely because it cannot begin.
 
Two separate moments in the novel’s opening chapter may serve to illustrate this point about the interminability of Oedipa’s mourning for Inverarity: one is Oedipa’s instantaneous recognition, as she tries to subdue the range of ambivalent emotions that has been released by the news of Pierce’s death, that “this did not work” (1). The other is a phone call the following morning by her psychoanalyst, Dr. Hilarius, who asks her “How are the pills, not working?” (7). In keeping with Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the inoperative community, one might say that both of these moments evoke the work of mourning as a work that does not work, that is, a work at which one works rather than a work that produces tangible or felicitous results. “[W]hoever . . . works at the work of mourning,” Nancy’s late mentor Jacques Derrida argues contra Freud, “learns . . . that mourning is interminable, inconsolable. Irreconcilable” (Work 143). Yet to apply these more recent insights to a novel that, historically speaking, precedes the poststructuralist boom of the 1970s by at least a decade is to misrecognize the fact that not all of Oedipa’s experiences of loss are interminable. In what follows it will therefore be important to draw a clear distinction between those moments of loss which are endless and those which are not.
 
As many critics have pointed out, Oedipa’s experience of loss in the novel is multifaceted and includes elements of the personal as well as the historical and the socio-political. As a self-styled “young Republican” in the sixties (59), confronted with the early avatars of that decade’s rebellious spirit, she bemoans a bygone era when “daft numina” such as Joseph McCarthy and Secretaries James and Foster “[had] mothered over [her] so temperate youth. In another world” (84). By the same token, the ever more ruthless uprooting of the California landscape, which takes out cemeteries in order to accommodate new highways and housing projects, fuels Oedipa’s pastoral nostalgia for “a land where you could somehow walk and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones could still rest in peace . . . no one to plow them up” (79). Both literally and figuratively, one might say, Oedipa inhabits a kind of “post-humous” landscape, one that is shaped by the loss of Pierce and where any remaining trace of the soil (or “humus” in Latin) is rapidly giving way to the real estate developer’s “need to possess, to alter the land, to bring new skylines” (148).
 
On the more strictly personal level, Oedipa is moved to tears by a Remedios Varo painting depicting “frail girls with heart-shaped faces” (11) locked inside a tower. The painting prompts her to reflect on her own suburban imprisonment: “She had looked down at her feet and known then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d been no escape” (11; emphasis added). As with the inanis pictura or “mere picture” that moves the Trojan warrior Aeneas to shed his well-known “tears of things” in Book One of The Aeneid—a canonical scene of ekphrastic mourning to which Pynchon obviously alludes in his extensive description of the Varo painting—this passage registers surprise at the power of a visual medium to elicit such a strong personal response from its viewer.⁶ Indeed, Oedipa’s grief-stricken reaction to the Varo painting is all the more marked if one compares it to her rather more subdued response to the news of Pierce’s passing, which remains devoid of any tears: she “stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work” (1). Oedipa stood: if the stasis (and her calling on God) recalls that of the Virgin standing at the cross in the late medieval hymn known as Stabat Mater, then the subsequent references to TV and drunkenness characterize Pynchon’s heroine all too obviously as a member of that mid-twentieth-century leisure class well-adept at drowning its sorrows in alcoholic or televisual bliss.
 
And yet, as the final sentence’s acknowledgment of ergonomic failure indicates, there is something particularly unsettling about Pierce’s passing, something that sets it apart from the other sensations of loss and that makes it so that it “doesn’t work.” This unsettling quality has less to do with his actual death, however, than with the curious fashion in which this news reaches Oedipa, in a bureaucratic letter sent several months after Pierce expired:

The letter was from the law firm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, of Los Angeles, and signed by someone named Metzger. It said Pierce had died back in the spring, and they’d only just now found the will. Metzger was to act as co-executor and special counsel in the event of any involved litigation. Oedipa had been named also to execute the will in a codicil dated a year ago.

(2)

What is unsettling and traumatic—in Freud’s sense of the term—about the news of Pierce’s passing is Oedipa’s belated learning of it. She must cope with the haunting knowledge that a once beloved passed away months earlier and with the knowledge that, until now, she had no idea that he had ceased to exist. As Freud points out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this inability to respond at the moment itself marks an event as traumatic, and often forces the traumatized individual to re-live the unassimilated experience in a compensatory strategy described by the psychoanalyst as the compulsion to repeat: “[The patient] is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past” (19).

 
American readers have long been familiar with this logic of belatedness via the condition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (a term coined in the 1970s with regard to a war on foreign soil that coincides with the novel’s setting), or via William Faulkner’s well-known quip in Requiem for a Nun (1951) that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past” (533). Published midway between these two equally resonant coinages, The Crying of Lot 49 may be said to occupy a mediating position between the mythical haunting of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha past and the all too actual post-war syndrome of the Vietnam veteran. Indeed, one way to account for The Crying of Lot 49’s liminal position with regard to the movements of modernism and postmodernism lies precisely here, in the way in which Pynchon’s second novel oscillates between the mythic “persistence of memory” of its modernist predecessor V. (1963) and the “traumatic delay” of the V2 rockets, which “explode first, a-and then you hear them coming in” (23) in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).7 To some extent, the Vietnam war may itself be used as a means to chart this transition, as it moves from being a passing reference (to the burning monk Thich Quang Duc) in The Crying of Lot 49 (92) to what Christina Jarvis has called the “Vietnamization of World War II” in Gravity’s Rainbow.
 
Even so, Oedipa’s experience of trauma remains curiously distinct from the experience suggested by either one of these two models. In her case it is the process of mourning itself, i.e., that which generally serves as a remedial or suturing strategy to overcome trauma, that acts as the source of trauma. Her traumatic mourning therefore mirrors not the condition of the Vietnam veteran haunted by combat scenes upon his return home but the predicament of the (Vietnam) war widow who, often after a similar (epistolary) delay, is left wondering, as does Oedipa in her initial reaction to the letter about Pierce’s passing, “Was that how he’d died?” (1). Seen in this light, the tears shed in front of the Varo painting—which Oedipa recalls soon after receiving the news of Pierce’s passing—already serve as a substitute for her inability to mourn him in the present. In the same way, Oedipa’s execution of the will, although it may be the closest that she comes to a commemoration of Pierce, is more precisely a re-enactment of this first, missed opportunity to mourn. The feeling that she is missing something indeed haunts Oedipa throughout the novel. There is the vague “sense of buffering, insulation” (11) that she intuits when first coming upon the Varo painting; there is the “ritual reluctance” that she perceives in a performance of The Courier’s Tragedy, where “[c]ertain things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud; certain events will not be shown onstage; though it is difficult to imagine . . . what these things could possibly be” (55); and, finally, there is a more general reflection on what she comes to regard as her epileptic condition:

She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals . . . as the epileptic is said to—an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.

(76)

What Oedipa here construes as a future possibility that the “central truth” regarding Inverarity (and his will) might forever be kept from her is itself already a re-enactment of the trauma of having been denied the initial opportunity to mourn him. The “overexposed blank” that she intuits is therefore at once trauma and coping strategy. On the one hand it refers her back to the shock she experienced upon receiving the letter about Pierce’s death; on the other hand, by putting herself repeatedly into situations of exclusion and thus denying herself the comfort of closure, she seeks to re-claim this event as hers.

 
This growing (and gradually more specific) sense of exclusion reaches its apex in Oedipa’s supposed uncovering of the Tristero. The organization’s syncopated Latin domination—“tristis ero”: “I will be sad”—may be said to capture the interminability of her grieving process at the same time that it highlights the uncanny parallels between the sorting work of mourning and that of the postal services. If, as Freud points out, mourning consists of a re-arrangement of psychic energy in which “every single one of the memories and expectations by which the libido was entangled with the [lost] object is adjusted and hyperinvested (“Trauer” 432), then its work is distributive rather than productive. Like the postal worker who distributes the mail along predetermined mail routes within a particular precinct, the mourner is absorbed in what Freud calls “interior work” [“innere Arbeit”] (“Trauer 432) that does not trespass beyond the precinct of his own mind. In the same way that Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” essay proceeds via the method of “comparison” [Vergleichung] and “analogy” [Analogie] (“Trauer” 428), explaining the mourning process in juxtaposition with the state of melancholia or depression, Pynchon’s novel approaches mourning from an allegorical angle by linking it to the sorting labor of the post. It follows that both Freud’s essay and Pynchon’s novel provide the reader with allegories of grieving, parables of loss whose indirect (Oedipa might say “buffered”) approach to the subject is ultimately a reflection of the indirectness to which the work of mourning compels its workers. In the absence of the departed, the mourner turn to the departed’s possessions and letters as substituted tokens behind which, as in allegory, the deceased’s actual presence must be intuited.
 
This implied analogy between mourning and mailing is made most explicit when Oedipa learns about Maxwell’s Demon, a hypothetical, mechanical sorting device that would overturn the universe’s tendency towards disorder:

The Demon could sit in a box among air molecules that were moving at all different random speeds, and sort out the fast molecules from the slow ones . . . Since the demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn’t have to put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing, causing perpetual motion.

(68)

Oedipa’s immediate response to this seeming disavowal of labor—“Sorting isn’t work?”— indicates to what extent she has come to identify her own coping for Inverarity’s death within the Freudian terms of work and thus also with the demon. In its association of mental and machinic labor, the passage anticipates (and takes literally) Jacques Derrida’s post-Freudian suggestion that “[one works] at mourning as one would speak . . . of a machine working at such and such an energy level, the theme of work thus becoming [its] very force, and [its] term, a principle” (Work 143). These Freudian parallels are further reinforced by the Demon’s sedentary labor inside a closed-off box, which echoes Freud’s description of mourning as “interior work” that does not spill over to its surroundings.

 
On the intradiegetic level, the Demon’s “perpetual motion” mirrors the interminability of Oedipa’s mourning. Indeed, her inability to work (i.e., communicate) with the Demon, described in a later chapter, is yet another example of the exclusion that Oedipa re-enacts throughout the novel. Unlike the ghost in Hamlet, who speaks and identifies himself, the Demon maintains a mute and anonymous silence in her presence: “Are you there, little fellow, Oedipa asked the Demon, or is Nefastis putting me on . . . For fifteen more minutes she tried; repeating, if you are there, whatever you are, . . . show yourself. But nothing happened” (85–6). The figure of the specter, which could still dominate Hamlet as a real and tangible presence, has, under the influence of psychoanalysis and its discontents (among which one might certainly count Derridean deconstruction), been demoted to a mute and mechanical Demon, a ghost in the machine. That the specter is committed to the interminably bureaucratic labor of sorting rather than to haunting indicates to what extent the literary conceptualization of grief has changed since the Elizabethan era.
 
It also signals that Pynchon, like Freud, understands the riddle value of mourning in economic terms, as an aberration of labor lost, and not in an epistemological sense, as a disguised form of truth waiting to be uncovered. Like Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch’s 1982 The Assault, The Crying of Lot 49 relies heavily on the detective novel’s epistemological thrust only to ultimately disavow its readerly expectations of truth revelation. Both novels have open endings: Oedipa is awaiting the crying (the auctioning off) of Pierce’s prized stamp collection (the titular “lot 49”), and Mulisch’s protagonist Anton Steenwijk walks figuratively through the post-holocaust ash that symbolizes his grief. Both remind readers of the Freudian point that mourning is no maieutic operation where the truth can be delivered via the midwifery of Socratic dialogue or psychoanalysis, but rather an energy-wasting process that can lack a productive or didactic outcome. “Your gynecologist has no test for what [Oedipa] was pregnant with” (144), the narrator states, echoing Freud’s description of mourning as a “vast riddle . . . one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back” (“On Transience” 306). In “Trauer und Melacholie,” Freud writes:

Normally, the respect for reality wins out. However, its command cannot be fulfilled at once. It is carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and occupying energy and so the lost object is continued in a psychological sense . . . Why this compromise enforcement of the reality command, which is carried out bit by bit, should be so extraordinarily painful cannot be easily explained from an economic point of view [in ökonomischer Begründung]. It is curious that this suffering-unease strikes us as normal.

(430)

In keeping with Derrida’s machinic simile, one might say that mourning here appears as a Geistguzzler, as the SUV of mental processes whose wasteful spending of psychic energy runs counter to what Alessia Ricciardi, in a commentary on this same passage, calls Freud’s own “utopian faith in the resilience and self-sufficiency of the psyche, in its ability to work as quickly and efficiently as a modern machine” (25).

Yet a distinction should be drawn between mourning that takes a long time and those cases of what Freud calls “pathological mourning” (“Trauer” 434), in which the grieving mind somehow finds itself arrested without the possibility of closure. In these cases, the process of mourning cannot come to an end because it cannot begin. Freud attributes this interminability to a certain “ambivalence” [Ambivalenzkonflikt] (“Trauer” 436) in the mourner’s relationship to the deceased, one that prevents the process of mourning from taking place. Oedipa’s grieving for Inverarity belongs to the latter category. Like other canonical texts of grieving such as Antigone and Hamlet, The Crying of Lot 49 is more a work about the crisis of mourning than it is about the process of mourning proper. With no funeral to go to and no known grave site to visit, Oedipa—like Antigone—is stripped of the two preconditions without which, as Derrida points out, no mourning process can begin: “[Mourning] consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead” (Specters 9). Sophocles’s heroine is forced to mourn mourning after being denied the knowledge of her father’s final resting place and the right to bury a fallen brother. Oedipa faces a similar predicament.
 
The parallels between Oedipa and Antigone—Oedipus’ daughter and thus an “Oedipa” in a filial sense— are worth exploring in more detail, because both characters also foreground the political nature of grieving. In the case of Antigone, this political thrust constitutes what Hegel famously saw as the fundamental dialectic structuring the play: urged on by the divine and unwritten laws of family duty, Antigone blatantly defies a state edict that forbids her to bury her brother, a former traitor to the polis. In a similar manner, Oedipa’s melancholia, which at times resembles the more cautious approach of Antigone’s sister Ismene, has a decidedly political and even subversive undertone. This political tone emerges once one takes into account the setting for Oedipa’s identification with the perpetual sorting of Maxwell’s Demon in the passage discussed above. That setting is the power plant of the missile manufacturer Yoyodyne, “San Narciso’s big source of employment, . . . one of the giants of the aerospace industry” (15), where Oedipa has gone to attend a stockholders’ meeting. At the power plant, she learns about the Demon from one of Yoyodyne’s employee who, “as it turned out . . . wasn’t working, only doodling with a fat pencil [the] sign [of the Tristero]” (67). As these sentences make amply clear, what frames the passage about Maxwell’s Demon right from the start is an emphasis on work and the distinction that this same employee, Stanley Koteks, will soon draw between, on the one hand, the non-work of his doodling, the postal labor of the Tristero, and the sorting of the Demon, and on the other, the production-driven teamwork of the Yoyodyne plant.

“See,” Koteks said, “if you can get [the company board] to drop their clause on patents. That, lady, is my ax to grind.” . . . Koteks explained how every engineer, in signing the Yoyodyne contract also signed away the patent rights to any inventions he might come up with. “This stifles your really creative engineer,” Koteks said, adding bitterly, “wherever he may be.”

(67)

Significantly, Maxwell’s Demon and the machine that includes it are created extra muros, outside of the teamwork economy of Yoyodyne, by one John Nefastis, “who’s up at Berkeley now. John’s somebody who still invents things” (68). That Oedipa in turn associates her own process of grieving with the Demon’s sorting indicates that a larger dialectic is at play in this passage and indeed in the novel at large, one that pits the non-productive and solitary labor of mourning, doodling, and sorting against the productive teamwork of the Military Industrial Complex, as represented by the Yoyodyne plant.⁸ Koteks’s last name, a reference to a well-known brand of menstrual pads, reinforces the sterile nature of the latter three activities, which work but do not produce. By the same token, the solitary nature of Nefastis and the Demon’s labor serves as a mirror image for the inalienable privacy of the work of mourning, arguably the only form of labor that we may never get to outsource. “Can’t I get someone else to do it for me?” Oedipa asks upon learning that she has been chosen to co-execute Inverarity’s will (10). Pages later, she finds out that, much as the mailman or mailwoman carries sole responsibility for his or her particular route, the sorting work of mourning cannot be assumed by others.⁹ Like the Tupperware party from which she returns in the novel’s opening line, Oedipa’s work of mourning constitutes a counter-economy of solitary, non-productive work that exists outside of the officially sanctioned economy of the Military Industrial Complex.

 
That Oedipa’s mourning is interminable makes it all the more subversive to a system that relies on the timely and efficient delivery of goods and products.¹⁰ Capital, as Pynchon has never ceased to remind readers, does not like perpetuity or idleness in its workers or its products. Hence the unfortunate fate bestowed upon the eternally burning light bulb Byron in Gravity’s Rainbow, a reprise of sorts of the Demon’s perpetual sorting. The Tristero’s violent history of attacks on governmental mail carriers may thus serve as a metaphor for the terrorist raids the work of mourning makes on society. Mourning depletes society of its economic resources, suspends consumer desire and/or career ambition, and gradually replaces any kind of productive labor for what Emily Dickinson—in a proto-Freudian fashion—already calls “the solemnest of industries.”¹¹
 
Seen in this context, Oedipa’s “I will be sad” constitutes more than a melancholic cul-desac. It acquires an unexpected revolutionary potential. It recalls the “I would prefer not to” of Melville’s Bartleby, a character that Pynchon, in his essay on sloth, has described as “bearing a sorrow recognizable as peculiarly of our own time” (“Nearer my Couch to Thee” 57). Like Bartleby’s refusal to carry out any work but copying, Oedipa’s “I will be sad” articulates a political stance in its defense of non-productive forms of labor, as most clearly expressed in her insistence that physical and mental sorting most certainly is work. Considering that the unfortunate Bartleby ends up in a dead letter office, “assorting [letters] for the flames” (Melville 672), one might even argue that The Crying of Lot 49 begins where Melville left off, with the arrival of a dead letter. In both texts, the postal medium highlights the extent of Oedipa’s and Bartleby’s sorrow. For the post is the slowest, and therefore most slothful, of all the modern communication media, a point that Pynchon’s novel raises rather explicitly by referring to a Tristero-delivered newspaper which may have been in the mail for sixty years (98). What makes both Bartleby and The Crying of Lot 49 so recognizably and peculiarly of our own time, then, is the fact that both explicitly raise enabling questions about the place and possibility for mourning in (post)modernity. In a way this question already dominates Antigone, where “the new man” Kreon is said to tamper with the ancient rites (and rights) of mourning. It also haunts Hamlet, whose new ruler Claudius is quick to fault his nephew for his “unmanly grief” (I.2). Yet both Melville and Pynchon take these reservations one step further by showing how the question and possibility of mourning has become all the more urgent within a corporate-consumerist environment. In The Crying of Lot 49, any lingering presence of the dead is either successfully neutralized via the clinical treatment of psychoanalysts like Dr. Hilarius, buried under the buzzing comfort of “perhaps too much kirsch” (1), or literally turned into consumption products, as with the human-bone charcoal used in Beaconsfield cigarettes (45). Even the “wake” (125) for Randolph Driblette, the unfortunate stage director of “The Courier’s Tragedy,” assumes the form of an afternoon bacchanal complete with “dirty pictures” (127) and “an astounding accumulation of empty beer bottles” (124) scattered on the lawn.
 
Oedipa’s persistence in mourning Inverarity’s death beyond either one of these recognized mourning models (and in holding her own private wake by returning to Driblette’s grave at night) thus reveals a fundamental disharmony that is as compelling in The Crying of Lot 49 as in Antigone. The ultimately private process of mourning, something to be carried out at one’s own pace and in one’s own fashion, is dissonant with the public observances—funeral, therapy, prayers, monuments—through which one is expected to channel such grief. Pynchon captures this tension lexically through the double meaning of the verb “to cry,” which can refer both to a personal, emotional response—Oedipa’s tears—and to “auction off.” Although the auction at the novel’s end can be regarded as a belated memorial service of sorts for Pierce (with lot 49 fulfilling the role of the proverbial empty casket), the narrator’s assertion that Oedipa “sat alone, toward the back of the room” (152) indicates that even then she maintains her distance from the public cooptation of private grief. It is highly doubtful therefore whether the messianic vision that is hinted at in these last pages will in fact truly come to pass.
 
The shift from standing to sitting that thus characterizes Oedipa’s postural development over the course of the novel—from her Stabat Mater-like standing in the living room to the “pieta” of her holding the sailor in her arms (102) to her final sedentariness at the auction—highlights the extent to which she has come to be weighed down by Pierce’s legacy. In a way, this final sedentary pose reinforces her connection to the grieving Virgin who in most canonical visual representations of the Stabat Mater has already sunk to the ground by the time the painter presents her in her moment of mourning.¹² This emphasis on the physicality of grieving, on its various postures as well as on its economic and incorporating qualities, clearly reflects the influence of psychoanalysis on Pynchon’s rhetoric of grief at the same time that it distinguishes this rhetoric from the psychologism of Hamlet.
 
The change from standing to sitting can also be read as a prophecy of the (American) economy in a more literal sense as it moves from a production-driven, standing-at-the-assembly-line economy (represented by Yoyodyne) to a sedentary post-Fordist service industry in the 1970s. In a way, Pynchon’s evocation of grieving as sorting work presents the mourner as a white-collar worker committed to the reshuffling of (internal) documents. Yet there can be little doubt that the slothful nature of the work of mourning makes it hardly any more compatible with, or hardly any less subversive of, the post-industrial society of late capitalism in which one is typically given just a few days’ leave in order to assimilate the loss of a significant other.
 
The question of loss in Pynchon is a complicated and compelling one because his novels tend to reverse the traditional imbalance between banality and gravity that has been a part of the western literature of trauma at least since the Renaissance. Rather than offering his readers comic relief after long, sustained sequences of dramatic tension—as Shakespeare does in the porter scene following Duncan’s murder in Macbeth, for instance—Pynchon’s picaresque narratives proceed in the opposite direction. The mindless pleasures that constitute the bulk of his novels are characterized by long, episodic passages that detail the often banal travails of a numbing plethora of flat characters. These alternate with brief moments of introspection that function as something like melancholic relief. For it is in these brief moments that we are reminded that we are dealing with human beings after all, and not with puppets at the mercy of some evil demiurge. Although I have highlighted them in this essay, the relative infrequency of such moments in The Crying of Lot 49 helps explain why this novel continues to be read almost invariably as a mock (or postmodern) detective novel about a character faced with the bewildering qualities of the emergent information age. Such readings have little to no consideration for the experience of loss that Oedipa is going through. That Oedipa’s experience of loss is so easy to miss, however, may already be the point in a novel which itself thematizes precisely such a missed encounter with mourning.