“...there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth... another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting of a true paranoia or a real Tristero”. This quote came from The Crying Of Lot 49 written by Thomas Psychon. Oedipa on her journey of trying to figure out this conspiracy she finds truth in people who are often marginalized, without the truth but confusion within herself. To find change within there has to be an intrusion from the outside and Oedipa has to execute what is holding her back from change and anything around her that will prevent her from moving forward, to the answers. Oedipa searches for a deeper meaning than society has given her, a deeper truth in things that ordinary people don’t usually search for.
In search of Oeidipa’s revelation, came destruction. As a detective Oedipa will always connect and disconnect pieces of this mystery, trying to make an understanding of everything. Find some type of reason, and direction depending on just this, getting sucked into the system, there isn’t always a reason. And Oedipa disconnects herself from what she sought to be her answer. “Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being presumed, perhaps fantasied by Oedipa, so hung up on and interpenetrated with the dead man’s estate (Page 88). The stamps represent and revolve around, always searching for an answer. Tristero may only be Oedipa's fantasy, an expression of her need to believe that there must be something to explain the drift of everyone she knows toward inhumanity. “Metaphor... was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending on where you were” (chapter 5). Otherwise, she is either paranoid or America is Tristero, and she an alien.
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There seems to be a mystery with these stamps but the paradox is that there isn’t a solution, but a paranoia that there is. “Oedipa wondered whether...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 blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly” (Page 95). One truth and a lie per se. The Demon becomes the channel that carries the message from the transmitter to the receiver. Whatever information is contained within the channel will be accurate and truthful, but what information leaks out during the transmission will be lost. In its place may be a lie, the lie that Oedipa may have based her life around. The system lost it’s value and including the time that Oedipa wasted on Tristero. “Everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow be woven into the Tristero” (Page 65).
“Transcendent Meaning” almost translucent, she can almost see right through this theory but the actual meaning stuns Oedipa. The stamps that Oedipa was trying to find the meaning for the whole time, were a paradox, a metaphor within; however, the information is obtained. “But as with Maxwell’s Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist” (page 134). Her own demons, her own self-discoveries, an obsession around the mystery that doesn’t have the truth. The machine is beyond comprehension, causing it to be transcendent and abstract but truth and chaos inside and outside, not being able to communicate or “reach” herself. The tower that Oedipa is in fact stuck in, waiting for someone to help her escape, is everywhere she goes, the transcendent function, must come not from consciousness, but unconsciousness it comes not from within the tower, but from without it, in need of escape and yet separate from her. Oedipa can’t escape her paranoia of this concept that was left, causing lessons of fear, rather than evidence of love, as they are two sides to the same coin. “A hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate”, but the “revelation trembled just past the threshold of understanding” (Page 24). And Truth, like the entropy of information theory, irreversibly destroys the meaning of its own message. In this paradoxical state, Oedipa's quest for the truth about Tristero, and her subsequent attempt to escape from her tower of thermodynamic entropy are useless, because they bring her back to the same quantity of heat energy. Oedipa is stuck in a 'cycle' of wasting energy trying to find out information that loses its value over time and ending up in the highly probable state of uncertainty over Tristero.
Oedipa wasn’t given a concrete reason, what the stamps were as they were theoretical like abstract truth, as they were very difficult to understand. The complication to her journey is that all communication, truth, and meaning, is founded in entropy, on a waste of force that alone makes abstract truth possible. “…Entropy is a figure of speech...it connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The machiene uses both. The demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true” (Page 85). A simple method of taunting Oedipa, leading right into peirce’s pathway in making her believe, but only emotionally responding, with imagination and perspective. With multiple realities, and no absolute truth left available,only objective. “Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of god knew how many parts; more than two, anyway” (page 87) With how abstract and confusing this “conspiracy” is, was a lie, and to understand Oedipa will have to alienate herself from anything involved. “...some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia” (Page 151).
Not everything is how it seems until Pynchon’s audience looked deeper inside, and inside was destruction, chaos, and what came with those, was no answers given. But an obsession and paranoia around what was, or what would be, what was left for Oedipa to “find her answers”. There were revelations everywhere, but Oedipa couldn’t find hers, chase her constellations or her dreams because of the paradoxical world with a meaning that she wasn’t looking for. Oedipa searches for a deeper meaning than society has given her, a deeper truth in things that ordinary people don’t usually search for.
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