(October, 2015)
Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 relies heavily on metaphor to create the seemingly unfathomable depth of complexity for which the novel is known. One of the more pervasive metaphors of the text appears through Pynchon’s repeated references to “furrows,” “plowing,” and “grooves.” Drawing on the common lingo of the “groovy” 60’s, The Crying of Lot 49 reconstitutes the “excellent, very good” or “hep” as a signifier for the modern conditions of atomization, paranoia and ennui. Through a consideration of the physical structure of a furrow, and a close analysis of one iteration of this metaphor, this paper will explore the ways in which Pynchon’s analogy functions within the text. The mechanism of the furrow seems to communicate not only Oedipa’s struggle to find meaning beyond the borders of her own consciousness, but also to articulate a sense of loss, a feeling that our world increasingly lacks a place for meaningful human contact between the invisible lines dividing our respective lives. The Crying of Lot 49 signifies this loss with the sterile organization of an agricultural field, with grooves made in the dirt.
Insofar as a furrow is a “narrow trench made in the earth with a plough,” it represents a space with entrapping walls, where movement is only possible in one direction — the plow must move forward through the dirt, creating the furrow as it goes. The very act of plowing is not only the monotonous creation of the furrow itself, but also the creation of the walls that divide each furrow from the next in the field. In this sense, the inhabitant, or plower of a furrow is isolated, hedged in from other plowers by walls of his or her own making. This isolation and unidirectionality seems to hold within it a sense of incommunicability, a sense that experience occurring within the furrow may never adequately be transcribed or projected beyond that tract, or beyond the self or ego. The very structure of a furrow defined equally by trenches and ridges replicates the structure of Derridean binaries within the text: a furrowed field is a space of contrast between highs and lows, the trenches and ridges utterly dependent on each other for their definitions. Though Pynchon’s use of the furrow or groove metaphor varies between iterations, the analogy consistently seems to point to furrows as the mode in which most lives are lived, and the deterioration of, or removal from a furrow seems to represent a breach from the norm.
Oedipa encounters just such a breach when she meets an aging alcoholic sailor crying in the doorway to a tenement building in San Francisco. After offering to mail a letter for him by WASTE, she seems to envision his life, thinking, “Cammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city’s waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered?” Here, the word “cammed” plays a pivotal yet problematic role: though the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers a definition for the noun, “cam,” a “ridge [or] long, narrow earthen mound … on which a hedge is planted or the like,” no verb form for this noun seems to exist in common usage. The reader must guess what to be “cammed … out” would be like. In the context of the sentence, it seems to suggest a removal from the comfort of a furrow, from the “safe[ty]” of habit and structure, to be outside of the way lives are normally lived, adrift amidst a field of others all still “set virtuously to plowing.” In the context of the novel, this removal from the furrow may be signified by the sailor’s use of the WASTE system, as “a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery.” Because, for Oedipa, the WASTE system seems inextricable from the sense of conspiracy that she pursues throughout the novel, she seems intrigued by the sailor, projecting a vision of his life, wondering about “what rich soils [he had] turned, what concentric planets uncovered.” Pynchon’s use of the words “each night” suggest that the sailor’s removal from “that safe furrow” is temporally dependent; he nevertheless experiences the atomization that the furrow metaphor seems to entail upon “waking each sunrise,” and accordingly, Oedipa will never really be able to understand the richness, the substance of his experience.
If the “rich soils” of Pynchon’s metaphor seem to make intuitive sense as describing a depth and profundity inaccessible to all except furrow’s own plower, the language of “concentric planets” seems initially opaque or inscrutable. The OED defines concentric as, “of geometric figures or objects, having a common center or central axis,” similar to the way the planets move concentrically around the axis of the sun. Though this initial reading seems to make the most literal sense, it fails to shed light on the metaphor of furrows in a helpful way. Pynchon’s use of “virtuously” seems to draw upon the Aristotelian concept of virtue, a middle ground between extremes of excess and deficiency, dualistically mirroring the structure of furrows. If this should be the case, then “concentric planets” may be read in the terms of Aristotle’s anthropocentric model for the universe, where planets move concentrically around the earth. Placed within the context of Pynchon’s language of paranoia, a still clearer and still more narcissistic reading of this line emerges: Pynchon writes, “the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself.” The language of “spheres” and “central” calls to mind the idea of “concentric planets,” constituting the sailor’s concentric planets not as literal celestial bodies but as otherness, as paranoiac distinctions between what lies within and outside his “safe furrow.”
If this reading of Pynchon’s furrow metaphor seems justified by the text’s more general focus on themes of paranoia and atomization, it also seems to help draw together disparate pieces of the text into a more coherent whole. Oedipa’s experience of being trapped “in her own tower” seems to mirror the furrow’s isolating effect just as the Echo Courts motel draws on the Greek origins of self-obsession and entrapment to point out its relevance to our contemporary society. At the same time as an understanding of the furrow metaphor as furthering themes of paranoia and atomization helps to draw the book together, it bespeaks something frightening underlying the bulk of Pynchon’s novel. How can meaning be constituted in the furrow’s social vacuum? What loss has occurred that we live our lives entrapped within trenches, incapable of fully reconciling our experiences with those of our neighbors, our fellow plowers?
WORKS CITED:
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966. Print.
Collected Writings of Nolan Bishop 