Thomas Pynchon

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Well known author Thomas Pynchon, can often force readers to do more than just read his novels to understand the entirety of them. The reader will often have to go further, and think deeper to understand Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49 may be the most challenging of Pynchon’s novels for readers. As Phillip Gochenour states on page 41 of “Anarchist Miracles: Distributed Communities, Nodal Subjects and The Crying of Lot 49,” “Lot 49 is often taught to undergraduates as typical text of postmodernism, with attention to problems of narrative and reading. All the Pynchonian themes are there, from the preterite to paranoia, making it a good introduction to Pynchon; but rarely is Lot 49 seen as having the same political urgency as Pynchon’s other works.” …show more content…
A common word in all three passage examples, is the word “consensus.” “[Consensus] implies a complex system of individual parts that simultaneously function both separately and together” (Gochenour 42). One example can be found on page 120 of Pynchon’s novel, “Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul’s talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself.” He gives two additional examples from The Crying of Lot 49. The second example comes from the scene where Oedipa is drug to the party in her hotel by the drunk delegates. Couples at the dance, are not all dancing in the same way, which causes Oedipa to think about the possibility of collisions on the dance floor, but none ever occurred. “Jesús Arrabal would have called it an anarchist miracle” (Pynchon 132). The third and final example that Gochenour uses for consensus is “Mucho Maas’s miraculous ‘vision of consensus,’ arrived at through the sacrament of LSD” (Gochenour 42). According to Gochenour, “consensus can also be described as ‘phasing’… the anarchist miracle”
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