The force of Pynchon's attention to myriad cultural contexts and multiple perspectives does not seem to be that all of them are potentially self-invalidating, but rather that they are mutually validating. Again, words for Pynchon are most fascinating insofar as they are allusive along multiple vectors of signification. Many of his peripheral characters do fear a perceived degradation of language and a comcomitant epistemological instability, a fear similar in many ways to Pym's. (In fact, in The Crying of Lot 49, there is a sense in which the males even die from it.) But the source of Oedipa's own psychological distress is less clear.

   With an author like Pynchon, who's syntax is so precisely vague, and who's allusions are so carefully constructed, it is of utmost importance to scrutinize the text with as much precision. It is fascinating, then, to note that Oedipa never actively seeks out the Trystero (after leaving Driblette's dressing room, she says "I went in there to talk about bones, and instead we talked about the Trystero thing" (Pynchon, 80)). Throughout the entire book, Pynchon maintains a careful ambiguity around the true sources of her anxiety and her need. Her paranoia seems not to have the same source as Pym's mania, or Hilarius' psychosis, or Mucho's depression. Rather, Pynchon's language leaves open another quest for Oedipa. In all these men, she seeks one who can love her, without fear, without anxiety, without obsession for the legacy of who knows what, and most importantly, without dying. When she calls Arnold Farb, she begs for a vague "help". But what she wants to know is not whether the Trystero exists; she wants to know if Pierce set her up to be seduced and/or disappointed by a trail of men. Even at the last, as she awaits the crying of lot 49, she focuses on the man and not the symbol. The Trystero only manipulates Oedipa indirectly by determining the fate of every man in the book. In that final scene, Oedipa finds herself in a cult-like ceremony, surrounded by men in black with "pale, cruel faces" (Pynchon, 183). These are the fragile devotees of that flat symbol, the posthorn, who wait for it to be sold to them with unswerving obeisance. But Oedipa waits only for a man, a man who will take responsibility for the whole ridiculous charade.

   In this passage, Pynchon's narrator slips unnoticed between the perspectives of Herbert Stencil and the Muslim skipper so effortlessly that the reader barely notices. But what of the "rift in time's fabric"? Is this language from the mind of the skipper? It doesn't sound like it. Is it Stencil or the narrator? Who can tell? In these passages, it is as though no one ever thinks for themselves, and yet the narrator does not think for them either. All the thoughts and perspectives not placed solidly between quotations simply float together in an amorphous consciousness. Then there is the "xebec", the sailor "off Bizerte in 1324", the shifts between the Aegean, a Tuscan, Rhodes, the Mediterranean. These bits and pieces rarely provide a place to land, a single image to cling to. Pynchon does not show the Aegean. He simply refers to it. It is barely there and then it is gone. Nothing is allowed to sink in. The details are too numerous and too ephemeral. These are Pynchon's encodings - places, dates, nicknames, references to things that may never have existed, all collected in a single soupy consciousness. To what message do they reduce?. If they do not decrypt to a theme or a set of themes, then what?

Vectors from the Glyph: Johanna Drucker's Word and Flesh