Towards the end of Thomas Pynchon's 1965 novel The Cry of Lot 49, the protagonist Oedipa finds herself at a crossroads after attempting to unravel the mystery of WASTE, a conspiratorial underground postal system, without finding many tangible results. “Now it was like walking among the matrices of a great digital computer,” Pynchon writes, “the zeros and ones twinned above…Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would be either transcendent meaning, or just earth” (Pynchon 181). At the beginning of the novel, however, this discrepancy is not represented as a simple binary. Only pages earlier, when she considers the validity of her suspicions, Oedipa thinks to herself: “Either you have stumbled upon… the secret wealth and hidden destiny of a dream… Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been hatched against you… Or you are fantasizing such a plot” (170-171). Oedipa equates the existence of WASTE with “transcendent meaning” and “secret wealth,” but given the subsequent binary description, does this mean she views the other three options as simply other worldly parts of “just the earth”? Even next to the possibility of a hallucination or an incredibly elaborate practical joke, is the only thing that can make the world more meaningful to Oedipa the existence of something so seemingly insignificant as a secret mail system? Pynchon combines the arcane imagery of computers with the banal imagery of much older and more transparent forms of technology to demonstrate the futility of the search for meaning in an increasingly technologized world, especially through technology itself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. Oedipa also evokes the imagery of modern arcane technology much earlier in the novel, as she drives towards San Narciso. Lost in thought, she thinks of the time she "opened up a transistor radio to replace a battery and saw her first circuit board," and finds that "the orderly swirl of houses and streets... jumped out at her now with the same unexpected, startling clarity as the circuit board had…there was in both outward models a hieroglyphic sense of hidden meaning, of an intent to communicate” (24) Here too the word “hieroglyphic” appears. , which represents this “intent to communicate” that he is unable to decipher, while in this section he compares the layout of the circuits to that of a neighborhood, at the end of the novel this comparison changes and the image of a complex technology is applied. to a conspiracy centered on the postal system, an ancient postal system. and a seemingly banal form of technology whose workings should be no mystery to anyone. Even in the 17th-century play The Courier's Tragedy that appears in the novel, a character "masquerades as a special courier for the Thurn und Taxis family who... held a postal monopoly throughout much of the Holy Roman Empire" so he can appear less suspicious, demonstrating that while in the 1600s the postal system was considered a normal part of life , should be considered even more banal in the novel's time, when electronic computers were relatively new inventions (66). However, Oedipa continues to base the existence of “transcendent meaning,” and even equates it, with the existence of a hidden system of postal couriers, even in the face of newer and more secret technologies. Service is not the first old technology to which Oedipa applies some form of “transcendent meaning” in the novel. The first, at the beginning of the novel, is even older, the weaving loom. Before going to San Narciso, Oedipa remembersa painting he had seen in Mexico City, “Bordando el Manto Terrestre” by Remedios Varo, in which there were “a number of fragile girls… prisoners in the highest room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry that it spilled over... into the void, desperately trying to fill the void” (21). This makes Oedipa realize that “what she was standing on had been woven together just a couple thousand miles away in her own tower… and so Pierce,” her former lover, “had taken her away from nowhere, there had been no escape. " Here, Pynchon sets a precedent for Oedipa's later obsession with mail, linking the ancient and relatively simple weaving technology not only to the idea of ​​hidden arcane meaning, but also to the idea of ​​aimlessness, represented by the "void." While the weavers in the painting attempt to fill it with their embroidery, Oedipa attempts to fill a void of meaning in her life by revealing a postal conspiracy, perhaps something she too has woven for herself without knowing it, but like the weavers' attempts, the goals can be equally “hopeless.” The imagery of weaving, in fact, returns later in the novel that "everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow be woven into the Tristero". The choice to bring back the imagery of weaving reinforces the idea that Oedipa is "weaving" this conspiracy herself, to parallel the women in the painting and fill the void in his own life (81). To say that these things “were woven” into the conspiracy implies that they were not part of it before Oedipa herself made the connection, that Oedipa herself created this conspiracy rather than unraveling one that already existed independently of its weaving. Despite the comparison From the mysterious nature of modern technology to the perceived transcendent nature of ancient technology at the end of the novel, Pynchon more often describes the ways in which modern technology makes life more meaningless instead of attributing some sort of “secret richness” to it. This further explains Oedipa's ongoing attempts to find the same kind of transcendent mystery present in modern technology in older, less mysterious technologies. It also allows Pynchon to demonstrate that Oedipa is not the only person negatively affected by the advancement of modern technology. For example, a man Oedipa meets at a club tells her an anecdote about a man who was "automated out of work," eventually leading to a suicide attempt (113). When his wife and her lover catch him about to burn himself alive, the lover says, "It takes him almost three weeks... Do you know how long the IBM 7094 would have taken?" Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced” (115). Clearly the machine that replaced the worker has taken meaning from his life by taking away his job and his wife, but the implications of the lover are more sinister than this. The machine was superior to man, he believed, because it would more quickly come to the conclusion that life is meaningless and not worth living, implying that the loss of meaning is not simply a consequence of modern technology. Rather, emptying meaning is one of its purposes. It is also important to note that, early on, in addition to the persistent references to "weaving," Pynchon diminishes the possibility that Oedipa's conspiracy is anything more than the illusion she fears it to be. establishing that he has mental health issues, particularly hallucinations which he mentions as one of the possibilities. While on the phone with his psychiatrist, he tells her "We want you," in reference to 49.