Toward the end of Thomas Pynchon's 1965 novel, The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist Oedipa finds herself at a crossroads after having attempted to unravel the mystery of WASTE, a conspiratorial clandestine postal system, without finding many tangible results. “It was now like walking among the matrices of a great digital computer,” Pynchon writes, “the paired zeros and ones above…Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would be either transcendent meaning or only earth.” (Pynchon 181). Earlier in the novel, however, this divergence is not represented as a simple binary. A few pages earlier, while questioning the validity of his suspicions, Oedipa said to himself: “Either you have stumbled upon... a secret wealth and the hidden destiny of a dream... Or you are hallucinating it. Either a plot has been hatched against you… Or you are imagining such a plot” (170-171). Oedipa equates the existence of WASTE with "transcendent meaning" and "secret wealth", but given the later binary description, does this mean she sees the other three options as simply more mundane parts of “only the earth”? Even aside from the possibilities of hallucinations or an incredibly elaborate prank, the only thing that can make the world more meaningful to Oedipa is the existence of something as unimpressive as a system of secret mail? Pynchon combines the obscure imagery of computers and the mundane imagery of much older, more transparent forms of technology to demonstrate the futility of the search for meaning in an increasingly technologized world, particularly through technology itself . Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay. Oedipa also evokes imagery of dark modern technology much earlier in the novel, as he heads towards San Narciso. Lost in thought, she thinks back to the time she "opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and saw her first circuit board", and discovers that "the orderly swirl of houses and streets...has jumped out at her now with the same unexpected and astonishing effect. as clear as the circuit board…there was in the two exterior patterns a hieroglyphic feeling of hidden meaning, of intention to communicate” (24). Here again the word “hieroglyphic” appears, representing this “intention to communicate” which she cannot decipher. But while in this section she compares the layout of the circuits to that of a neighborhood, by the end of the novel this comparison changes, and the imagery of complex technology comes to be applied to a conspiracy centered around the postal system , an ancient postal system. and a seemingly mundane form of technology whose workings should pose no mystery to anyone. Even in the 17th-century play The Courier Tragedy which appears in the novel, a character "poses to be a special courier of the Thurn and Taxis family who...held a postal monopoly throughout most of the Holy Roman Empire" in order to be able to appear less suspicious, showing that if the postal system was considered a normal part of life in the 1600s, it should be considered even more commonplace in the time of the novel, when electronic computers were relatively inventions news (66). However, Oedipa still makes the existence of the “transcendent sense” dependent, and even equates it with the existence of a hidden system of letters, even in the face of newer and more secret technologies. It is also important to note that the postal system Service is not thefirst ancient technology to which Oedipa applies a form of “transcendent meaning” in the novel. The first, quite early in the novel, is an even older craft, the loom. Before traveling to San Narciso, Oedipa remembers a painting she had seen in Mexico, “Bordando el Manto Terrestre” by Remedios Varo, in which “there were a number of frail young girls…prisoners in the upper room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry that flowed… into the void, desperately seeking to fill the void” (21). This makes Oedipa realize “that what she was standing on had only been woven a few thousand miles away, in her own tower… and so Pierce,” her ex-lover, “had taken her away from nothing , there had been no escape. » Here, Pynchon sets a precedent for Oedipa's later obsession with mail, connecting the ancient and relatively simple technology of weaving not only to the idea of ​​an obscure hidden meaning, but also to the idea of uselessness, represented by “emptiness”. While the weavers of the painting attempt to fill it with their embroideries, Oedipa attempts to fill the void of meaning in her life by unraveling a postal conspiracy, perhaps something she too has unknowingly woven for herself , but like the attempts of the weavers, the weavers try to fill it with their embroideries. goals can be just as “hopeless.” The imagery of weaving actually returns later in the novel. Examining new information that she believes is proof of the truth of the plot she is pursuing, Pynchon writes that "everything she saw, felt, dreamed, remembered, would one way or another end." other by being integrated into the Tristero”. The choice to bring back the imagery of weaving reinforces the idea that Oedipa “weaves” this conspiracy herself, to parallel the women in the painting and fill the void in her own life (81). To say that these things "ended up being woven" into the conspiracy implies that they were not part of it before Oedipa herself made the connection, that Oedipa herself created this conspiracy rather than unraveling a conspiracy that already existed independently of its weaving. From the mysterious nature of modern technology to the perceived transcendent nature of ancient technology at the end of the novel, Pynchon more often describes the ways in which modern technology makes life more meaningless instead of attributing to it a "secret richness" . This further explains Oedipa's constant attempts to find the same type of transcendent mystery present in modern technology in older, less mysterious technologies. This also allows Pynchon to show that Oedipus is not the only person negatively affected by the advancement of modern technology. For example, a man Oedipa meets at a club tells her an anecdote of a man who was "automated out of a job," which ultimately led to a suicide attempt (113). When his wife and her lover discover him about to burn himself alive, the lover says: "It takes him almost three weeks... Do you know how long it would have taken the IBM 7094?" Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced” (115). Obviously, the machine that replaced the worker has removed the meaning of his life by taking away his job and his wife, but the lover's implications are far more sinister than that. The machine was superior to man, according to him, because it would have come more quickly to the conclusion that life is meaningless and not worth living, implying that the emptiness of meaning is not simply a consequence of modern technology. On the contrary, emptying meaning is one of its objectives. It is also important to note that, from the beginning, in addition to the persistent references to "weaving. 49.