The Crying Of Lot 49: First Clues

In chapter three of The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa the main character stats finding answers or clues to the will of his former boyfriend. The chapter’s most important part describes a play that might be a representation of some acts that Pierce did while he was alive. The play is called the courier´s tragedy, and in this play a couple of people find some bones in the bottom f a lake. This same act had been done by Pierce who had found bones that where supposedly from Italians in the bottom of a lake. This maybe a clue for Oedipa or it might be a way for Pynchon to show the importance of this event in Pierces life.

This chapter is where she starts having revelations in relationship to her task as executor: "As if (as she´d guessed that first minute in San Narciso) there were revelation in progress all around her" (page 31) her trip to San Narciso was key to her research.

This chapter also mentions a possible meaning to the title for when she is looking at Pierce´s collection of stamps she thinks about them: "About to be broken into lots, on route to any number of new masters?" (Page 32) What could the meaning of the title be?? Is it related to the stamps or to the lots that "Mucho" Maas used to work in?

Not only in chapter three but throughout the novel I have seen that Mucho and Oedipa don´t have a good relationship which is confirmed in this chapter when Pynchon says: "Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuos motive." (Page 33) Not only this but Oedipa betrayed Mucho with Metzelger, something I would never expect because of the very uncomfortable relationship they both had.

The music theme continues through this chapter too but it starts up in a very funny satiric way: The bartender said:

"Come on around Saturdays, starting midnight we have your Sinewave Session, that´s a live get-together, fellas come in just to jam from all over the state, San Jose, Santa Barbara, San Diego-" "Live?" Metzger said, "Electronic music, live?"
"They put it on the tape, here, live, fella." (Page 34)

This is a very funny satire for the modern music that is done in computers and in which there is no true art. There is no use of instruments or vocals which are the bases and the most important things of music. In the rest of the chapter we can see those songs that have been present in the whole novel that have a very shallow meaning or no meaning at all.

A new character shows up in this chapter called Mike fallopian, he talks about the most stupid and pointless organization I have ever read about, called the Peter Pinguid Society. This society talks about what they think was the first combat between Americans and Russians in a naval attack in which absolutely no body or even a ship was damaged and that nobody ever knew about. This could be a mock against all those organizations that have started developing around the most awkward and strange people. This reminded me of a documental I saw in the discovery channel about a group of people that live with rats and worship them. They have a temple and a religion based on rats.

Another strange character appears called Di Presso, he is running away from a man that seems very dangerous known as Tony Jaguar. After he runs away in a boat with Oedipa and Metzger they figure out that the person he is running from is actually his client and he is running from him because he wants to borrow some money. What is the point of this character? This same character, Manny di Presso is suing Inverarity because he didn’t pay some bones belonging to American soldiers of WWII and which bones were used to decorate scuba equipment. As Juan Mauricio said in is blog: Is this a Mock to the suing in the United States, where people sue each other or companies for the most absurd things?