“Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949) Arthur Miller

Outline of Aristotle’s Theory of Tragedy in the Poetics

The treatise we call the Poetics was composed at least 50 years after the death of Sophocles. Aristotle was a great admirer of Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, considering it the perfect tragedy, and not surprisingly, his analysis fits that play most perfectly.

Definition of tragedy

“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its katharsis of such emotions…every tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality–namely, plot, characters, diction, thought, spectacle, melody.”

Tragedy is the “imitation of an action” according to “the law of probability or necessity”

Aristotle indicates that the medium of tragedy is drama, not narrative. According to Aristotle, tragedy is higher and more philosophical than history because history simply relates what has happened while tragedy dramatizes what mayhappen, “what is possible according to the law of probability and necessity.” History thus deals with the particular, and tragedy with the universal. Events that have happened may be due to accident or coincidence; they may be particular to a specific situation and not be part of a clear cause-and-effect chain. Therefore they have little relevance for others. Tragedy, however, is rooted in the fundamental order of the universe; it creates a cause-and-effect chain that clearly reveals what may happen at any time or place because that is the way the world operates. Tragedy therefore arouses not only pity but also fear, because the audience can envision themselves within this cause-and-effect chain.

Plot is the “first principle,” the most important feature of tragedy

Aristotle defines plot as “the arrangement of the incidents”: i.e., not the story itself but the way the incidents are presented to the audience, the structure of the play. According to Aristotle, tragedies where the outcome depends on a tightly constructed cause-and-effect chain of actions are superior to those that depend primarily on the character and personality of the protagonist. Plots that meet this criterion will have the following qualities.

1. The plot must be a “whole,” with a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning, called by modern critics the incentive moment, must start the cause-and-effect chain but not be dependent on anything outside the compass of the play. The middle, or climax, must be caused by earlier incidents and itself cause the incidents that follow. The end, or resolution, must be caused by the preceding events but not lead to other incidents outside the compass of the play. The end, therefore, should solve or resolve the problem created by the incentive moment. Aristotle calls the cause-and-effect chain leading from the incentive moment to the climax the “tying up,” in modern terminology the complication. He therefore terms the more rapid cause-and-effect chain from the climax to the resolution the “unravelling” in modern terminology the denoument.
2. The plot must be “complete,” having “unity of action.” By this Artistotle measn that the plot must be structurally self-contained, with the incidents bound together by internal necessity, each action leading inevitably to the next with no outside intervention, no deus ex machina. According to ARistotle, the worst kinds of plots are “‘episodic’, in which the episdoes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence”; the only thing that ties togther the events in such a plot is the fat that they happen to the same person. Playwrights should exclude conindicences from their plots; if some coincidence is required, it should “have an air of design,” i.e., seem to have a fated connection to the events of the play. Similarly, the poet should exclude the irrational or at least keep it “outside the scope of tragedy,” i.e., reported rather than dramatized. While the poet cannot change the myths that are the basis of his plots, he “ought to show invention of his own and skillfully handle the traditional materials” to create unity of action in his plot.
3. The plot must be “of a certain magnitude”

Essay

In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words it is most often implied.

I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were. On the face of it this ought to be obvious in the light of modern psychiatry, which bases its analysis upon classic formulations, such as the Oedipus and Orestes complexes, for instance, which were enacted by royal beings, but which apply to everyone in similar emotional situations.

More simply, when the question of tragedy in art is not at issue, we never hesitate to attribute to the well-placed and the exalted the very same mental processes as the lowly. And finally, if the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it.

As a general rule, to which there may be many exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing–his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggles that of the individual attempting to gain his “rightful” position in his society.

Sometimes he is one who has been displaced rom it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity, and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.

In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale always reveals what has been called his tragic flaw, a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the character, is really nothing–and need be nothing, but his inherent willingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status. Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are “flawless.” Most of us are in that category. But there are among us today, as there always have been, those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them, and in the process of action everything we have accepted out of fear or insensitivity or ignorance is shaken before us and examined, and from this total onslaught by an individual against the seemingly stable cosmos surrounding us–from this total examination of the “unchangeable” environment–comes the terror and the fear that is classically associated with tragedy.

More important, from this total questioning of what has previously been unquestioned, we learn. And such a process is not beyond the common man. In revolutions around the world, these past thirty years, he has demonstrated again and again this inner dynamic of all tragedy.

Insistence upon the rank of the tragic hero, or the so-called nobility of his character, is really but a clinging to the outward forms of tragedy. If rank or nobility of character was indispensable, then it would follow that the problems of those with rank were the particular problems of tragedy. But surely the right of one monarch to capture the domain from another no longer raises our passions, nor are our concepts of justice what they were to the mind of an Elizabethan king.

The quality in such plays that does shake us, however, derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what or who we are in this world. Among us today this fear is as strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was. In fact, it is the common man who knows this fear best.

Now, if it is true that tragedy is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly, his destruction in the attempt posits a wrong or an evil in his environment. And this is precisely the morality of tragedy and its lesson. The discovery of the moral law, which is what the enlightenment of tragedy consists of, is not the discovery of some abstract or metaphysical quantity.

The tragic night is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which surpasses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man’s freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies. In no way is the common man debarred from such thoughts or such actions.

Seen in this light, our lack of tragedy may be partially accounted for by the turn which modern literature has taken toward the purely psychiatric view of life, or the purely sociological. If all our miseries, our indignities, are born and bred within our minds, then all action, let alone the heroic action, is obviously impossible.

And if society alone is responsible for the cramping of our lives, then the protagonist must needs be so pure and faultless as to force us to deny his validity as a character. From neither of these views can tragedy derive, simply because neither represents a balanced concept of life. Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.

No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit or custom as being either everlasting, immutable or inevitable. In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination. Which is not to say that tragedy must preach revolution.

The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of their ways and return to confirm the rightness of laws. And Job could face God in anger, demanding his right and end in submission. But for a moment everything is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in this stretching and tearing apart of the cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the character gains “size,” the tragic stature which is spuriously attached to the royal or the high born in our minds. The commonest of men may take on that stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in his world.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker’s brightest opinions of the human animal.

For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity. The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force. Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief–optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man. It is time, I think, that we who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time–the heart and spirit of the average man.

Long Day’s Journey into Night (1953) Eugene O’Neill

Introduction

In inscribing the manuscript to Carlotta, O’Neill wrote that he had faced his dead in this play, writing “with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the haunted Tyrones.” His treatment made it impossible to blame any of the characters for their suffering they inflicted on the others; each Tyrone was both a victim and an oppressor. The Tyrones are at the mercy of the past, and the word ghosts recurs throughout the play: ghosts of those they remember, those who influenced them, their younger selves, their dreams and ambitions, and their disappointments. O’Neill handled the emotionalism of his theme with rigorous dramatic formalism, designing the play as a series of encounters–each character is placed with one, two, or three of the others, until every combination is worked through. Long Day’s Journey observes the classical dramatic unities of time and space, following the family’s various configurations through one day, from the pretense of conventional family life in the morning to the tragic truth of their night. The audience then witnesses a literal day in the lives of the Tyrones, as well as the journey through life toward death.

Summary

The play is set in the summer home of the Tyrone family, August 1912. The action begins in the morning, just after breakfast. We learn as the first act unravels that Mary has returned to her family recently after receiving treatment in a sanatorium for morphine addiction. Edmund, meanwhile, has in recent weeks begun to cough very violently, and we learn later on in the play that, as Tyrone and Jamie suspect, he has tuberculosis. Throughout the course of the play, we slowly find out that Mary is still addicted to morphine, much to the disappointment of her family members.

The gradual revelation of these two medical disasters makes up most of the play’s plot. In between these discoveries, however, the family constantly revisits old fights and opens old wounds left by the past, which the family members are never unable to forget. Tyrone, for example, is constantly blamed for his own stinginess, which may have led to Mary’s morphine addiction when he refused to pay for a good doctor to treat the pain caused by childbirth. Mary, on the other hand, is never able to let go of the past or admit to the painful truth of the present, the truth that she is addicted to morphine and her youngest son has tuberculosis. They all argue over Jamie and Edmund’s failure to become successes as their father had always hoped they would become. As the day wears on, the men drink more and more, until they are on the verge of passing out in Act IV.

Most of the plot of the play is repetitious, just as the cycle of an alocholic is repetitious. The above arguments occur numerous times throughout the four acts and five scenes. All acts are set in the living room, and all scenes but the last occur either just before or just after a meal. Act II, Scene 1 is set before lunch; Scene 2 after lunch; and Act III before dinner. Each act focuses on the interplay between two specific characters: Act I features Mary and Tyrone; Act II Tyrone and Jamie, and Edmund and Mary; Act III Mary and Jamie; Act IV Tyrone and Edmund, and Edmund and Jamie. The repetitious plot also helps develop the notion that this day is not remarkable in many ways. Instead, it is one in a long string of similar days for the Tyrones, filled with bitterness, fighting, and and underlying love.

Act I

Long Day’s Journey into Night takes place in the Tyrone family summer home during a single day and night in August. James Tyrone was once a successful actor and has been married to his wife, Mary, for 35 years. Mary has suffered from an unspecified problem (later revealed to be a morphine addiction) since the birth of their youngest son. Their sons, Jamie and Edmund, live with them. Jamie is a hard-drinking cynic who fights a summer cold. His younger brother Edmund traveled the world and worked as a journalist. Now he is home, sick with what his mother claims is a summer cold. Jamie and Tyrone believe Edmund has consumption (tuberculosis).

Members of the Tyrone family have their disagreements. Tyrone disapproves of his sons’ taste in politics and literature. Everyone criticizes Tyrone for being miserly and Jamie for being a drunk. All three of the men worry about Mary, who has recently come home from being treated for her “illness.” She is looking healthier, but now her worry about Edmund is causing some troubling behaviors, things which in the past were signs of drug abuse. While they are alone, Jamie expresses his concerns to Tyrone. He also worries Tyrone will choose less expensive care options for Edmund and suggests Tyrone’s choice of an inexpensive “quack” doctor is what led to Mary’s addiction.

When Mary returns, Tyrone leaves to work in the yard. Jamie tells Mary they are proud of her progress, but she gets angry with him for suggesting Edmund is seriously ill. Jamie leaves to work with Tyrone. Edmund comes in. Mary is frantically nervous as she cares for him. She complains of being lonely, but becomes defensive when Edmund suggests her own problems may be partially responsible for their isolation. She says they are all suspicious of her and heads upstairs, supposedly to take a nap.

Act 2, Scene 1

It is lunchtime. Edmund reads a book while Cathleen, the servant, brings a tray of drinks before the meal. Edmund has one before Jamie steps inside. Then Jamie sneaks one before Tyrone comes in. Edmund and Jamie worry about what Mary is doing upstairs. Edmund insists it does not matter, but Jamie is unconvinced.

Mary enters. She is affectionate but acting strangely. Jamie’s suspicions are confirmed. Edmund does not notice at first, but Mary’s odd comments and detached manner make him suspicious too. Jamie confronts Mary, but she denies it. Edmund defends his mother and asks her to reassure him, but she cannot. As Tyrone approaches, Mary heads to the kitchen to make sure lunch is ready.

Tyrone and the boys argue about drinking. Tyrone sees they are unhappy and assumes it is Jamie’s fault. Mary appears and Tyrone sees her condition for himself. She is chattering frantically and will not meet anyone’s eyes. Tyrone says he was a fool to believe in her. Mary attacks him for drinking more than usual, then begs for understanding, saying she is worried about Edmund. Tyrone will not accept this excuse. They go in to eat lunch.

Act 2, Scene 2

After lunch, Mary fidgets and talks incessantly. The other three look angry, ill, or both. The phone rings and Tyrone answers. It is the doctor with bad news. Tyrone insists Edmund go see the doctor, but Mary explodes into a tirade. Speaking to Tyrone, Mary says the doctor Edmund will visit is the same as the one “who first gave you the medicine–and you never knew what it was until too late!” Mary goes upstairs, and they know she will take more drugs.

After Edmund leaves the room, Tyrone confirms to Jamie that his brother has consumption. Jamie and Tyrone argue over the cost of Edmund’s care. Jamie leaves and Mary returns. Tyrone speaks to Mary about her addiction, but she alternately denies her addiction and blames it on others. When Edmund returns, Tyrone suggests he talk to his mother. Edmund asks him for money and Tyrone gives him $10, which is unusually generous. Tyrone leaves and Edmund talks to Mary. She will not discuss her addiction but instead asks him to skip his doctor’s appointment. Edmund refuses and leaves with the others. Mary is alone. She laughs, saying she is glad they left, then cries about being lonely.

Act 3

At dinnertime, the men are not home. Mary has invited the servant, Cathleen, to drink with her. Cathleen is nice, but Mary is in her own world and does not listen. Cathleen complains about how she was treated when she went into the drugstore to fetch a prescription for Mary. The drugstore man treated her suspiciously until he learned who she worked for. Mary does not care–or does not understand–what bothered Cathleen. Mary talks about her youth: her convent education, her plan to become a nun, and how she met Tyrone. Cathleen leaves to help with dinner. Mary tries to pray but cannot. She hears the men returning.

Edmund and Tyrone are home. They have both been drinking but conceal it well. They observe Mary and can tell the state she is in. Mary talks energetically about the boys’ childhoods and their other brother, Eugene, who died at age two. She shifts between reminiscing and blaming everyone around her. Repeatedly one of the men protests her savage statements, and the other says not to bother arguing with her. Mary is lost in memories of her adored father and how he spoiled her, particularly about her wedding. She wonders where her beautiful wedding dress is now stored. When Edmund challenges Mary, she furiously blames him for her condition. She became addicted after a doctor gave her medicine to help her recover from Edmund’s difficult birth. Edmund attempts to tell Mary about his diagnosis, but she will not listen. Upset, he leaves the house. Then Mary bursts into tears because she fears for Edmund’s health. She believes Edmund is ashamed of her. Tyrone encourages her to eat dinner, but she heads upstairs, presumably to take more drugs. Tyrone is left alone and sad.

Act 4

It is midnight. Tyrone is drinking and playing solitaire when Edmund comes home. Edmund is drunk. They discuss their differing tastes in literature and poetry. They talk about Mary, and Tyrone says man of Mary’s stories about her childhood, her father, and her marriage are not based on reality. Edmund is still inclined to trust his mother’s version of things.

Neither Tyrone nor Edmund wants to go upstairs while Mary is awake, so they begin playing cards and continue talking. Tyrone shares details about his childhood and his acting career. He claims he had a great start to his career, but he took an easy role to make money and lost his chance to become a great actor.

Jamie comes home after visiting the town brothel. He is very drunk. Tyrone leaves to avoid a fight. Jamie insults their father, but Edmund wants to give Tyrone the benefit of the doubt. When Jamie snears at Mary, Edmund hits him. Jamie says he deserved it and begins to cry. He had been so hopeful that Mary was going to beat her addiction, and now he knows she will not. He expresses his worry about Edmund and simultaneously warns Edmund against his himself. He admits he is sometimes jealous of Edmund and has at times given Edmund bad advice. But he still expresses deep love and affection for his younger brother. After a confrontation with Tyrone, Jamie dozes off, and a few minutes later Tyrone sleeps too. But when someone is heard playing the piano, all three men sober up.

Mary wanders in, carrying her wedding dress. She does not recognize the men at all. She believes herself to be a convent girl again and talks about her dream of becoming a nun. Even Edmund shouting his diagnosis at her does not break through. She falters for a minute, then goes back to her memories. She talks about marrying Tyrone and being “so happy for a time.” Tyrone “stirs in his chair,” and Jamie and Edmund “remain motionless” as the play ends.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) Harper Lee

Summary

To Kill a Mockingbird takes place between 1933 and 1935 in Maycomb, a fictitious small town in Alabama. Jean Louise Finch, better known as Scout, is the inquisitive and imaginative tomboy daughter of lawyer Atticus Finch. Although narrator Scout is grown, she tells her story through the eyes of her six-year-old self.

Scout’s narration begins with an imaginative view of her family. She introduces her father, Atticus, a widower who is raising his children with the help of Calpurnia, the family cook. Although an employee, Calpurnia is treated as a member of the family and a sort of surrogate mother to the kids. As the story progresses Scout introduces the residents of Maycomb. She and Jem soon meet Dill, the small, white-haired six-year-old nephew of Miss Rachel Haverford, the Finch’s next-door neighbor.

While Scout is initially apprehensive of Dill, Jem accepts him into their group after discovering he’s seen the movie Dracula. Dill soon grows bored of putting on plays with Jem and Scout and becomes fascinated with the sensational stories about Boo Radley, their reclusive neighbor who, according to Jem, “dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch.” Dill’s fascination soon grows into obsession as he plots to lure Boo outside with help from Jem and Scout.

Summer ends and Dill is sent back home to Mississippi. Scout is looking forward to her first day of school. At this point Scout’s classmates are introduced–a unique group of characters who set the tone for the social division seen throughout the rest of the book.

One day while Scout is walking home from school, she sees something shiny in the knothole of an oak tree in front of the Radley house. This turns out to be two sticks of gum in tinfoil wrappers. Who left them is a mystery, but when she and Jem subsequently find more treasures left in the tree it becomes apparent that the gifts are meant for them, and they suspect that Boo Radley is the gift giver.

Jem and Scout’s lives become more complicated when Atticus agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of raping Mayella Ewell, the 19-year-old daughter of Bob Ewell. Although many of Maycomb’s more enlightened residents are certain of Tom Robinson’s innocence, the community’s pervasive racism means that Tom has little chance of a fair trial. Despite knowing he cannot win the trial–a matter his children don’t understand–Atticus knows he must nonetheless defend Tom.

During the trial it becomes apparent that Mayella’s father is the true criminal, having physically and sexually abused her. Ewell is enraged that Atticus has directed the community’s attention toward him, even though Tom is convicted Ewell publicly threatens Atticus. When Tom Robinson is killed trying to escape from prison Ewell says, “one down and about two more to go,” referring to his plan to kill Scout and Jem.

The two plots converge when Ewell finally makes his move. Drunk and angry, he stalks Jem and Scout one evening as they make their way home after a school play. Still in costume as a ham, Scout is defenseless when she and Jem are attacked by an assailant in the dark cover of the trees just outside the Radley house. After the scuffle escalates she hears Jem cry out in pain. That’s when she sees a silhouette of a second man–not the attacker–carrying Jem toward the Finch home.

Sheriff Tate discovers Bob Ewell dead from a stab wound where the attack occurred. Although it is clear that Boo Radley is the mysterious figure who saved Jem and Scout, Atticus and Sheriff Tate cover for Radley by saying Ewell fell on his own knife. Boo stays with the Finches that evening until he knows Jem is safe from harm. He then asks Scout to walk him home, and she does, her hand resting gently on his arm like a lady escorted by a gentleman. When Boo enters the Radley house and closes the door, that is the last she sees of him, but the lessons that he, Tom Robinson, and Atticus have taught her will resound across her lifetime.

Invisible Man (1952) Ralph Ellison

There were similar developments in Black fiction; following on from Richard Wright, the Black too became an image of the existential and displaced hero, the dark other in American culture. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, owing clear debts to Dostoyevksy’s Notes from the Underground, evoked the namelessness and exposure felt by the modern Black, but not only the Black (‘Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’). Ellison’s outstanding novel mixed naturalism, expressionism, and surrealism; while a novel of liberal sympathies, it is also a novel about the disappearance of self and the collapse of moral perspective, and it ends in an apocalyptic riot that both expresses and seeks to purge American disorder, as if in response to the narrator’s comment that ‘the mind that has conceived a plan for living must never lose sight of the chaos against which the pattern was conceived.’ The book explores moral problems, yet, says the unnamed narrator, ‘When one is invisible, he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending upon who happens to be looking through him at the time.’ Ellison’s obvious successor was James Baldwin.

An unnamed narrator speaks, telling his reader that he is an “invisible man.” The narrator explains that he is invisible simply because others refuse to see him. He goes on to say that he lives underground, siphoning electricity away from Monopolated Light & Power Company by lining his apartment with light bulbs. The narrator listens to jazz, and recounts a vision he had while he listened to Louis Armstrong, traveling back to the history of slavery.

The narrator flashes back to his own youth, remembering his naivete. The narrator is a talented young man, and is invited to give his high school graduation speech in front of a group of prominent white local leaders. At the meeting, the narrator is asked to join a humiliating boxing match, a battle royal, with some other black students. Next, the boys are forced to grab for their payment on an electrified carpet. Afterward, the narrator gives his speech while swallowing blood. The local leaders reward the narrator with a briefcase and a scholarship to the state’s black college.

Later, the narrator is a student at the unnamed black college. The narrator has been given the honor of chauffeuring for one of the school’s trustees, a northern white man named Mr. Norton. While driving, the narrator takes Mr. Norton into an unfamiliar area near the campus. Mr. Norton demands that the narrator stop the car, and Mr. Norton gets out to talk to a local sharecropper named Jim Trueblood. Trueblood has brought disgrace upon himself by impregnating his daughter, and he recounts the incident to Mr. Norton in a long, dreamlike story. Mr. Norton is both horrified and titillated, and tells the narrator that he needs a “stimulant” to recover himself. The narrator, worried that Mr. Norton will fall ill, takes him to the Golden Day, a black bar and whorehouse. When they arrive, the Golden Day is occupied by a group of mental patients. The narrator tries to carry out a drink but is eventually forced to bring Mr. Norton into the bar, recover from his fainting spell, but insults Mr. Norton with his boldness.

Shaken, Mr. Norton returns to campus and speaks with Dr. Bledsoe, the president of the black college. Dr. Bledsoe is furious with the narrator. In chapel, the narrator listens to a sermon preached by the Reverend Barbee, who praises the Founder of the black college. The speech makes the narrator feel even guiltier for his mistake. Afterward, Dr. Bledsoe reprimands the narrator, deciding to exile him to New York City. In New York, the narrator will work through the summer to earn his next year’s tuition. Dr. Bledsoe tells the narrator that he will prepare him letters of recommendation. The narrator leaves for New York the next day.

On the bus to New York, the narrator runs into the ex-doctor again, who gives the narrator some life advice that the narrator does not understand. The narrator arrives in New York, excited to live in Harlem’s black community. However, his job hunt proves unsuccessful, as Dr. Bledsoe’s letters do little good. Eventually, the narrator meets young Emerson, the son of the Mr. Emerson to which he supposed to be introduced. Young Emerson lets the narrator read Dr. Bledsoe’s letters, which he discovers were not meant to help him at all, but instead to give him a sense of false hope. The narrator leaves dejected, but young Emerson tells him of a potential job at the factory of Liberty Paints.

The narrator reports to Liberty Paints and is given a job assisting Lucius Brockway, an old black man who controls the factory’s boiler room and basement. Lucius is suspicious of his protege, and when the narrator accidentally stumbles into a union meeting, Brockway believes that he is collaborating with the union and attacks him. The narrator bests the old Brockway in a fight, but Brockway gets the last laugh by causing an explosion in the basement, severely wounding the narrator. The narrator is taken to the factory’s hospital, where he is strapped into a glass and metal box. The factory’s doctors treat the narrator with severe electric shocks, and the narrator soon forgets his own name. The narrator’s sense of identity is only rekindled through his anger at the doctors’ racist behavior. Without explanation, the narrator is discharged from the hospital and fired from his job at the factory.

When the narrator returns to Harlem, he nearly collapses from weakness. A kind woman named Mary Rambo takes the narrator in, and soon the narrator begins renting a room in her house. The narrator begins practicing his speechmaking abilities. One day, the narrator stumbles across an elderly black couple that is being evicted from their apartment. The narrator uses his rhetorical skill to rouse the crowd watching the dispossession and causes a public disturbance. A man named Brother Jack follows the narrator after he escapes from the police. Brother Jack tells the narrator that he wishes to offer him a job making speeches for his organization, the Brotherhood. The narrator is initially skeptical and turns him down, but later accepts the offer.

The narrator is taken to the Brotherhood’s headquarters, where he is given a new name and is told that he must move away from Mary. The narrator agrees to the conditions. Soon after, the narrator gives a rousing speech to a crowded arena. He is embraced as a hero, although some of the Brotherhood leaders disagree with the speech. The narrator is sent to a man named Brother Hambro to be “indoctrinated” into the theory of the Brotherhood. Four months later, the narrator meets Brother Jack, who tells the narrator he will be appointed chief spokesperson of the Brother’s Harlem District.

In Harlem, the narrator is tasked with increasing support for the Brotherhood. He meets Tod Clifton, an intelligent and skillful member of the Brotherhood. Clifton and the narrator soon find themselves fighting against Ras the Exhorter, a black nationalist who believes that blacks should not cooperate with whites. The narrator soon starts to become famous as a speaker. However, complications set in. The narrator receives an anonymous note telling him that he is rising too quickly. Even worse, another Brotherhood member names Wrestrum accuses the narrator of using the Brotherhood for his own personal gain. The Brotherhood’s committee suspends the narrator until the charges are cleared, and reassigns him to lecture downtown on the “Woman Question.” Downtown, the narrator meets a woman who convinces him to come back to her apartment. They sleep together, and the narrator becomes afraid that the tryst will be discovered. The narrator is summoned to an emergency meeting, in which the committee informs him that Tod Clifton has gone missing. The narrator is summoned to an emergency meeting, in which the committee informs him that Tod Clifton has gone missing. The narrator is reassigned to Harlem. When he returns, he discovers that things have changed, and that the Brotherhood has lost much of its previous popularity. The narrator soon after discovers Clifton on the street, selling Sambo dolls. Before the narrator can understand Clifton’s betrayal, Clifton is shot dead by a police officer for resisting arrest. Unable to get in touch with the party leaders, the narrator organizes a public funeral for Clifton. The funeral is a success, and the people of Harlem are energized by the narrator’s speech. However, the narrator is called again to face the party committee, where he is chastised for not following their orders. The narrator confronts Brother Jack, whose glass eye pops out of its socket.

Leaving the committee, the narrator is nearly beat up by Ras the Exhorter’s men. Sensing his new unpopularity in Harlem, the narrator buys a pair of dark-lensed glasses. As soon as he puts on the glasses, several people mistake the narrator for a man named Rinehart, who is apparently a gambler, pimp, and preacher. The narrator goes to see Brother Hambro for an explanation of the Brotherhood’s dictates. Hambro tells the narrator that Harlem must be “sacrificed” for the best interests of the entire Brotherhood, an answer the narrator finds deeply unsatisfying.

The narrator, disillusioned by Hambro’s words, remembers his grandfather’s advice to undermine white power through cooperation. The narrator plans to sabotage the Brotherhood by telling the committee whatever it wants to hear, regardless of the reality. He also plans to infiltrate the party’s hierarchy by sleeping with the wife of a high-ranking member of the Brotherhood. The narrator meets Sybil, a woman who fits the bill, at a Brotherhood party. However, Sybil knows nothing, preferring to use the narrator to play our her fantasy of being raped by a black man. While Sybil is in his apartment, the narrator gets a call that a riot is going on in Harlem.

The narrator rushes uptown to find that Harlem is in chaos. The narrator falls in with a group of looters. The looters soon escalate their violence, burning down their own tenement building to protest the poor living conditions. The narrator runs into Ras the Exhorter again, now dressed as an Abyssinian chieftain. Ras sends his men to try to hang the narrator. The narrator barely escapes from Ras’ men, only to meet three white men who ask him what he has in his briefcase. When the narrator turns to run, he falls into a manhole. The white men seal the narrator underground, where the narrator is forced to burn his past possessions to see in the dark.

The narrator returns to the present, remarking that he has remained underground since that time. The narrator reflects on history and the words of his grandfather, and says that his mind won’t let him rest. Last, the narrator says that he feels ready to end his hibernation and emerge above ground.

Giovanni’s Room (1956) James Baldwin

Summary

Part 1

At the start, David is alone at a rented house in the South of France. He has been sharing the house with Hella, his ex-fiancée, now on her way back to the United States. His ex-lover, Giovanni, is in prison, awaiting execution by guillotine, scheduled for the next morning. David ruminates over the events that got him here: his Brooklyn childhood, his macho father, his first male lover (his high school friend Joey), and the night he met Giovanni.

After two years in Paris, where he went to “find himself” after a stint in the army, David is finally out of money. His father, who wants David to come home and settle down with a nice girl, won’t send him any more money. On the same day that David is evicted from his apartment, he goes out for drinks with Jacques, an older, wealthy gay man he doesn’t really like but from whom he borrow money when necessary. Giovanni is the new bartender at Guillaume’s bar, where Jacques and David go. Jacques immediately develops a crush on Giovanni, but Giovanni prefers David, who insists unconvincingly to all who will listen that he is straight. After a predawn breakfast with Jacques, Giovanni, and Guillaume, in a working class neighborhood far away from the dazzling shine of Guillaume’s bar, David goes home with Giovanni.

Part 2

David and Giovanni are inseparable after that first night. They share the tiny maid’s room that Giovanni calls home. Located in a building on the outskirts of the city, the room is messy, dirty, and filled with the remnants of Giovanni’s previous life. Very much involved with Giovanni, David waits a full month before telling him about Hella, David’s girlfriend who has been traveling in Spain (David neglects to mention that he proposed to Hella and she went to Spain to ‘find herself’). Giovanni isn’t too concerned, not seeing any problem with having more than one romantic involvement at the same time. But then he loses his job. He makes David–who has just learned that Hella has accepted his proposal and will return to Paris soon–promise never to leave him. Feeling oppressed by the room and the relationship and wanting to get out, David keeps the news about Hella to himself.

David is delighted by Hella’s return and leaves Giovanni’s room without a word. He and Hella spend her first three days and nights back in the city together, making love and planning their future. On the third day, they run into Jacques and Giovanni at a bookstore. Giovanni is a wreck. He had no idea where David was or what he was doing, and he had no one but Jacques to comfort him. David and Giovanni, who loves David, have one final confrontation the next night, during which Giovanni claims that David will never truly love anyone.

This is the last time David speaks to Giovanni. David sees him around town, first with Jacques and then with the effeminate street boys, and then he eventually hears that Giovanni is getting his old job back. A week later, Guillame is murdered. The police look for and capture Giovanni, who confesses to committing the crime. This news only hastens the demise of David and Hella’s relationship. Even though they have relocated to the South of France, David can’t get Giovanni out of his mind and is now repulsed by Hella. One night, after not knowing where he has gone, she finds him in a gay bar with a sailor. David and Hella break up, and she leaves for the United States the next day. A week later, on the day of Giovanni’s execution, David leaves too, intending to take the train back to Paris.

Herzog (1964) Saul Bellow

Overview

The hero is another down-and-out, a professor-intellectual, a student of Romanticism and of the glorification of Self, which Herzog believes both modern life and modernist literature have been undercutting. At the same time he is a comic and pathetic victim of marital disorder; like all Bellow’s heroes, Herzog has a terrible time with women, yet cannot live without them.

The turn into the Sixties brought another change in Bellow’s work. The liberal moral novel was under growing pressure from a rising sense of historical absurdity; a number of his own contemporaries like Philip Roth and Norman Mailer changed sharply in form, or fell into silence, as did J.D. Salinger. Bellow noted in an essay that the modern novelist now appeared to feel defeated by a vast public life which dwarfed him as an individual, encouraging him and his characters to become giants in loathing or fantasy; the humanism of the novel was, he complained, being dislodged. Picaresque self-assertion now seemed less possible; in Herzog, which still seems Bellow’s best novel, Moses Herzog is a ‘suffering joker’ caught in a ‘shameless and impotent privacy,’ a state of comic but desperate madness. He is a distressed Jewish scholar and intellectual with a complex family and marital history, moving through New York and his home town Chicago, and quarreling, in letters addressed to the great dead (‘He wrote to Spinoza, Thoughts not causally connected were said by you to cause pain. I find that is indeed the case…‘) and the not so great living, with their pessimistic answers to the problems of the world, their abstract historicism, their darkening humanism. Herzog’s attempt is to resist the apocalyptic thoughts of late romanticism, to throw off the ‘reality-instructors’ who would explain to us the need to claim the inalienable modern therapeutic right to alienation, conspicuous suffering, psychic extravagance. Yet Herzog is a man of great inward pain; desiring, in Bellovian fashion, to be ‘a marvelous Herzog,’ or prince, he is fatally attracted to the city of destruction. In this learned and self-demanding book, Bellow sets himself no less a task than that of defining a modern selfhood that does not yield to fashionable romanticism, the ‘five-cent syntheses’ offered by a troubled age. Herzog suffers in history, modern boredom, pluralism, and despair, all moving in formless motion through his own mind; this is a book set primarily within consciousness, and there is a parallel formlessness or oblique design in the novel’s structure–until, finally, both Herzog and the book transfigure the plurality of words and explanations into significant silence. Bellow ends the book on a new affirmative transcendentalism, a balanced contentment to rest in human occupancy and to know the oneness in things; Herzog ends it in silence, his letters, for the moment, lapsed, his mind at peace.

Plot Summary

Part I

Herzog opens with Moses Herzog at his country house in Ludeyville, MA, in the Berkshires, in midsummer. He is described by the narrator as having “fallen under a spell,” and as a result has been writing letters to “everyone under the sun,” including family–dead and alive–friends, exfriends, and historical figures. While there, he thinks back over his life, focusing especially on the past few months. His memories of this short period make up the narrative of the rest of the novel until the story returns, at the end, to the present time, with Herzog in Ludeyville. He has recently learned that his ex-wife, Madeleine, is living with his friend Valentine Gersbach and that the two had been lovers while she and Herzog were still married. Herzog writes the letters because of his overwhelming need “to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.”

The first line of the novel is given to Herzog, she admits, “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me.” The narrator notes that some people thought he was “cracked” and “though he still behaved oddly, he felt confident, cheerful, clairvoyant, and strong.” He soon goes back in time to the beginning of his “trouble” a few months ago, when he had been teaching classes in New York City. Gradually, he noticed his mind starting to wander during class. He then shifts back further into the past, reviewing his life and the choices he has made. In the past, he was considered to be a noted scholar, but “his ambitious projects had dried up,” including a study on romanticism.

His memory then turns to his relationship with Madeline. He claims that he quit his teaching position to write, after encouragement from her, and so he buys the house in the country. There they meet Valentine and his wife, Phoebe. Herzog claims that soon, “Madeleine considered herself too young, too intelligent, too vital, too sociable to be buried in the remote Berkshires” and so convinced Herzog to move to Chicago, where she could finish her graduate studies in Slavonic languages. In Chicago, Herzog returns to teaching. One year later, Madeleine announces that she wants a divorce.

Feeling that he is “going to pieces” after the divorce, Herzog first moves to Europe for six months and then returns to New York. There he meets and begins a relationship with Ramona, an attractive businesswoman, who is a student in one of his classes. Although Herzog considers her to be “full of charm,” “problems” soon develop. She quickly becomes serious about him, but Herzog is annoyed by her frequent lectures on his sterling capabilities and his future.

Part II

Herzog decides to take a break from Ramona and his thoughts about Madeleine and spend some time with friends in Martha’s Vineyard. However, his depression throws him into an agitated state, and he immediately returns to New York. There, he receives a letter from a former student who is now working as a babysitter for Madeleine. The student writes that one night she found Junie, his daughter, locked in a car outside Madeleine’s house while she and Valentine were arguing inside. Crying and shaking, Junie explained that Valentine had put her there.

Deeply concerned for his daughter’s welfare, Herzog asks Simkin, his lawyer, to help him gain custody of her. Simkin, however, warns him that he would most likely fail in his attempts to get his daughter away from her mother. Herzog’s frustration turns into a rage against Madeleine and Valentine “so great and deep, so murderous, bloody, positively rapturous, that his arms and fingers ache to strangle them.”

When Herzog appears at the city courthouse where he is scheduled to meet Simkin, he sits in on a few court cases that are being tried that day. As he watches testimony about a mother who beat her son to death, he becomes incensed and runs out of the courtroom. He determines that “New York could not hold him now,” and so flies to Chicago to see his daughter and to confront Madeleine and Gersbach.

As soon as he arrives in Chicago, he goes to his father’s house, where he reminisces with his stepmother, Tante Taube. He remembers that at one point his father had wanted to shoot Herzog because of his “look of conceit or proud trouble. The elite look.” He soon leaves with his father’s pistol in his pocket.

At Madeleine’s house, he watches Gersbach tenderly giving his daughter a bath. As a result, his anger dissipates, and he insists, “firing this pistol was nothing but a thought.” At this point, he realizes “only self hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was ‘broken.'” Not yet giving up on his plans to get custody of Junie, he tries to convince Phoebe to sue her husband for a divorce, offering evidence of his adulterous relationship with Madeleine. He insists that together “we could nail them.” Phoebe, however, refuses to help him, and suggests he “get away from this now.” After leaving Phoebe, Herzog picks up his daughter and spends the afternoon with her. Their time together is cut short, however, when they get into a car accident. At the scene, the police find his father’s gun in his shirt and take him to the police station, where they book him for a misdemeanor. When they call Madeleine down to the station to pick up Junie, the police ask her whether Herzog has given her any trouble. Madeleine replies that while he has never physically harmed her, he has a terrible temper and his psychiatrist has warned her about him.

Part III

After the police determine that Herzog poses no threat to Madeleine, they put him in a cell until his brother, Will, comes to bail him out. He then decides to leave Chicago and go to his house in the Berkshires, which he considers fixing up and selling. There, he begins to experience a measure of contentment as he determines that he has freed himself of his “servitude to Madeleine.” Beginning his final week of letter writing, Herzog writes to his son, Marco, asking him to come for a visit. When Will arrives, he tries to convince Herzog to spend some time in a mental hospital, but Herzog assures him that he is finally finding some peace.

Ramona soon arrives in a neighboring town looking for Herzog. When she calls, he invites her for dinner, even though it “troubled him slightly.” As he waits for her, he determines, “I am pretty well satisfied to be…just as it is willed,” for “whatever had come over him during these last months, the spell, really seemed to be passing, really going.” The novel concludes on the note that “at this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.”

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) James Baldwin

Overview

David Baldwin, son of a slave, was a lay preacher rigidly committed to a vengeful God who would eventually judge white people as they deserved; in the meantime, much of the vengeance was taken out on James. His father’s “unlimited capacity for introspection and rancor,” as the son later put it, must have had a profound effect on the sermonizing style Baldwin developed. Just as important was Baldwin’s conversion and resulting service as a preacher in his father’s church, as we can see from both the rhythm and the message of his prose, which is very much a spoken prose.

Plot Summary

Baldwin’s first novel opens with John’s recollections of church and his church community. The first part, “The Seventh Day,” shows John’s anger toward his stepfather, Gabriel (particularly given Gabriel’s obvious favoritism for his brother, Roy), and follows him to church, where he meets Elisha, an older boy who encourages him to turn his trouble over to God. In Part Two, “The Prayers of the Saints,” the prayers of Gabriel, his sister Florence, and his current wife (and John’s mother) Elizabeth. Part Three returns to the church service, where John has a dream vision which results in his religious awakening. John’s terrifying dream vision of Hell leads him to conclude that “the heart was a fearful place,” a statement which might be used to summarize the novel’s overall theme.

Over the course of the novel, the familial relations are revealed: John is Elizabeth’s child by Richard, her lover in New York who was falsely arrested for robbery, who committed suicide after realizing how doomed he was in the system. In Gabriel’s section, we learn that he fathered a child named Royal (not the one in the first section, who was stabbed) by a woman named Esther, and that he was also married previously to a woman named Deborah, who died barren. Gabriel fathered Royal while Deborah was still alive, and refused to help Esther once she discovered she was pregnant.

The novel addresses themes of righteousness, desire, and forgiveness through strong biblical allusions, especially in character names such as Gabriel, Esther, and John, and uses rhythmic language which is often evocative of the cadence of sermons. There’s also a recurrent subtle theme of homosociality which comes just to the edge of homoeroticism, in John’s persistant references to the sin of Ham and seeing his father’s nakedness, and his relationship with Elisha. Throughout John’s nightmare vision, Elisha prays for him, which John senses, such as when “In his heart there was a sudden yearning tenderness for holy Elisha; desire, sharp and awful as a reflecting knife.”

Notes of a Native Son (1955) James Baldwin

Notes of a Native Son established Baldwin as a major essayist. All of his essays amount to meditations on race and reflections on slavery’s ongoing repercussions for human connection today. He offers these meditations by discussing the most mundane things that everyone can relate to–death, love, family, popular culture, fear, and desire. Baldwin’s essays closely connect to his own lived experience–which was both typical and atypical for a Black person in mid-twentieth century America. He grew up poor in Harlem, exposed to many of the cultural institutions central to that historic Black neighborhood in New York City. He also had an inimitable talent and drive for writing about the human condition as he experienced it. This led him to travel to Paris to find his way as a writer. While Most Black people were not able to go this route, Baldwin was following a path laid out by Black writers and artists in the generation immediately preceding his. The New Negro Movement of the 1920s was also known as the Harlem Renaissance because Harlem was in many ways the cultural epicenter of his major development in Black History.

Overview of Essays

In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin criticizes Uncle Tom’s Cabin, coining it as a “protest novel,” a uniquely American literary genre. While the intention of the genre is to help the oppressed, he believes the novel perpetuates the agenda of White liberals using stock characters that don’t accurately portray the experiences of slaves as complex human beings. Baldwin explores another novel of this genre, Native Son, in “Many Thousands Gone.” The title of the essay references the deaths of thousands of slaves, and Baldwin argues that the novel, and society, refuses to move past slavery, and the Black community alienates Black people who try to overcome segregation.

In “Carmen Jones: The Dark is Light Enough,” Baldwin criticizes the musical film Carmen Jones, which took the plot from the opera Carmen and gave it an all-Black cast. Baldwin points out that the American public tends to sexualize the Black body and the film doesn’t better the opera’s message. He also notes that the actors are all very light-skinned, making them “light enough” for Hollywood.

In “The Harlem Ghetto,” Baldwin portrays his neighborhood in New York City, along with the racial oppression therein, and he considers that interracial understanding might be possible. In “Journey to Atlanta,” he tells the story of his brothers’ quartet, The Melodeers, whom the Progressive Party sponsored, but then abandoned in Atlanta. Baldwin points out the party’s attempt to gain the favor of Black voters, though they had no interest in helping the Black community.

“Notes of a Native Son” discusses Baldwin’s father’s life history and death, their strained relationship, and the generational pain that caused his father to be distant from his family. “Encounter on the Seine,” centers on the interactions between Black Americans, White Americans, Black Africans, and Black American entertainers in Paris. Baldwin suggests that Black Americans, displaced by slavery, have no heritage or roots as Europeans do. In “A Question of Identity,” Baldwin posits that Americans’ sense of time, understanding of society’s limitations, and skewed concept of freedom, leave American students in Europe without a sense of identity.

“Equal in Paris” tells the story of Baldwin’s arrest for using a friend’s bedsheet, which the friend had stolen from a hotel. Baldwin notes that his jailers were no better or worse than their American counterparts. In “Stranger in the Village,” Baldwin relates how the people of a Swiss village, who had never seen a Black person, treated him as a novelty–they did not intend to be unkind, as a contemporary White American might, but their reactions were dehumanizing.

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) Thomas Pynchon

Overview

This short, controlled novel teases us and itself with questions about the meaning of our American heritage, as embodied in the form of the mysterious legacy left to its heroine, Oedipa Maas. (The jokey yet portentous name exemplifies Pynchon’s way of playing at “significance.”) What is the connection between this legacy and the mysterious alternative to the US Postal System on which Oedipa believes she has stumbled? Is there a secret network of alienated citizens carrying on their lives outside the ordinary systems and institutions of American life? Or is it all Oedipa’s delusion, her private paranoia? These questions are considered through a style that continually surprises and unsettles us, though it is less discontinuous than V.‘s. In Pynchon’s world everything serious has its silly aspects (inspired by the Marx Brothers and countless other comic acts), while bits of trivia and foolery are suddenly elevated, through the style, into objects of sublime contemplation–as at the novel’s end, when Oedipa thinks of “squatters” who “slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman’s tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages.” Often Pynchon’s sentences enact the daring freedom he admires, in contrast to the institutions of a technological society.

Pynchon moved to a tighter, funnier mode of tragic farce. Set in the hyper-technological, hyper-therapeutic society on the lapping edge of the non-human or inanimate Pacific, it is the story of a suburban California housewife, Oedipa Maas, who leaves the world of Tupperware parties to decipher and execute the cryptic will of her dead ex-lover Pierce Inverarity, a tycoon in San Narcisco. Active in various technological enterprises, Inverarity has been mysteriously implicated in the affairs of a complex underground conspiracy and postal system variously known as WASTE and the Tristero, the meaning of which may be America itself. Lot 49 can be seen in the line of earlier surreal-absurdist California fiction. But the book is itself a decadent-enigmatic object; just as Oedipa is caught, through Pynchon’s image of the Mexican tower, in the narcissistic possibility that we construct from our subjective imprisonment the tapestry of the world, so Pynchon himself creates images of self, story, and history that are stripped towards their enigmatic but possible empty centre. Oedipa’s paranoia arises from her entry into a world where the laws of the fantastic dominate but will not necessarily yield significance, as Pynchon creates but does not resolve the possibility of arriving at sign or meaning through penetrating the web of musical codes, historical system and counter-system, plays and signals. Oedipa moves through randomness without reaching revelation, wondering whether ‘the gemlike “clues” were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.’ But Pynchon ends the book at an auction before the crying of the possibly revelatory Lot 49, and it remains in its ambiguity, ‘another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none.’ Language, sign, and cipher work in the book, as in cybernetic America itself, towards mystery which is redundancy, towards sophisticated forms containing insignificance. Yet Pynchon also raises the possibility of ‘underground’ recovery from the empty, personless space, through alternative frequencies, such as, perhaps, the oblique codes of his own book.

Plot Summary

The novel follows a postmodern parody of a conspiracy as the main character, Oedipa Maas, pursues what starts as a simple will executor duty into a labyrinthine conspiracy involving underground mail delivery which dates back to eighteenth century Italy. Following clues in play, in stamp watermarks, and a mysterious symbol of a muted horn which appears in stamps, bathroom graffiti, and doodles, Oedipa is driven near madness as she attempts to find order in this chaos, attempting to discover constellations among the clues. The meaning of the enigmatic title is not revealed until the novel’s end, when one of the “lots” being auctioned off in the estate of the late Pierce Inverarity, Oedipa’s former lover whose vast estate she has been put partly in charge of. Lot 49 contains the postage stamps which contain clues to the conspiracy; the “crying,” or auctioning, of this lot may reveal the authenticity of the conspiracy. The novel ends with the crying of Lot 49, never revealing the ultimate answers with Oedipa has sought.

One of the most metatextual elements in the novel is the play within the novel, the production of the Jacobean revenge play The Courier’s Tragedy, described by members of the Paranoids and attended by Oedipa and Metzger. The ridiculously complicated plot, so typical of a Jacobean play, itself forms a commentary on the very nature of plot itself. Until this point, the plot of The Crying of Lot 49 has seemed rather outlandish: with this embedded narrative, the novel seems less postmodern and more in keeping with a much longer tradition of story-telling–“It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse.” More specifically, the description of a particular moment in the plot of The Courier’s Tragedy, when “an ambiguity begins to creep in among the words,” could also be describing the novel at this point: “Heretofore the naming of names has gone on either literally or as a metaphor. But now,…a new mode of expression takes over. It can only be called a ritual reluctance. Certain things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud; certain events will not be shown onstage; though it is difficult to imagine, give the excesses of the preceding acts, what these things could possibly be.”