The Sound of a Lot of Furious Crying
...in The Crying of Lot 49 "connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow" (106); it applies a controlled, scientific objective to the sprawling, aesthetic subjective. But Pynchon's culture is not one haunted by the ghosts, except for the ghosts in Hamlet and Scooby-Doo. Faulkner's landscape is tortured by the tragedy of the South. In his view, the land is cursed because of two of the white man's presumptions: that he could own other men, and that he could own the land. Focusing on the microcosm of the fallen Compson family, Faulkner details the extent to which various family members are saddled by past loss and how they confront their searing memories. In what has canonized The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner recreates the temporal confusion of the Compsons in the narrative, as well, through a non-sequential chronology and through sentences that combine past, present, and future tenses. Despite the occupational differences between the two authors, they share a surprising wealth of concerns, namely in the ordering of chaos. Pynchon's order, however, remains a fruitful one of universality and coherence, while Faulkner contends that there is no real possible way to order memory, that each event is singular (indeed, he wanted the different times of the novel printed in corresponding colors), and that loss permeates the present despite attempts at reassessment or separation of the past. The first sentence of The Crying of Lot 49 introduces "Mrs Oedipa Maas" (9). Her name immediately and forcefully conjures up for the reader all the cultural baggage associated with the name Oedipa. It is, of course, the Latinate feminine of Oedipus, the tragic Greek hero who was fated to murder his father and sleep with his mother. Yet the female version of Oedipus is not Oedipa, but Electra....