THE CRYING OF LOT 49: The ‘Anarchist Miracle’

Abstract

This essay will explore the theme of anarchy in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Specifically, I will examine to what extent anarchy can be understood as a unifying principle in The Crying of Lot 49 as it pertains to the passage of the book in which the revolutionary anarchist, Jesus Arrabal, declares an ‘anarchist miracle’ as a moment defined by “another world’s intrusion into this one” (120). Focusing on this passage, I wish to examine how anarchy might be understood by Jesus Arrabal, and more importantly how this might serve well to help illuminate a thematic reading of the book along the lines of miraculous anarchic events, in which ‘collisions lead to consensus’. In addition, I will compare how this model fares alongside two other key models used by critics – the Rhizome analogy authored by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and Pynchon’s own central allusion of the Nefastis Machine. Grouped together, my aim is to see how all three reveal important distinctions and understanding of the text as a whole. Ultimately, all of these models work together in many ways, but their subtle differences evoke a pivotal concept in The Crying of Lot 49 – the law of ‘excluded middles’, which is defined by the narrative as a dialectic between the dominance of reason pitted against the muddled world of uncertainty and myth.