Postal Fraud

It is safe to say that a vast majority of my class’s blogs on this book, The Crying of Lot 49, will analyze the saturated satire within the novel. For this reason, I wish not to continue to burn the topic to over-analysis. No. This blog will be about something else: A play within a play/novel.

In chapter 3, most words describe a play that entices Oedipa’s curiosity through its possible connection with the hieroglyph she saw in the bathroom of that bar. In The Scope, her mystery-solving journey began with that WASTE symbol. She also had to solve the connection between the name ‘Trystero’, reluctantly mentioned in The Courier’s Tragedy directed by one Randolph Driblette, the inked bones, and the assassins, with the death of merchandized bones of not-fighting-any-more soldiers of WWII. Enough of that…

Why does everyone Oedipa inquire about the W.A.S.T.E. case close up, keeping more to themselves, as if the whole issue were something to fear? The person who fears the unknown is the philatelist Genhis Cohen, while people who know about the 800-year old conspiracy include director Driblette, who chooses to be courageously mysterious, the old man Mr Thoth who’s old age has erased any nature of fear, and the Yoyodine worker Stanley Koteks, who revealed to much. The “800-year old tradition of postal fraud” (79) can be compared to modern conspiracies that are to atrocious and powerful to even mention. Recently, I saw the last few episodes of the sci-fi series Heroes, where a group of people also attempt to solve a mystery of the past, only to be rejected by the locals by fear. Corral Springs was a place where inhumane treatment of people with abilities took place one generation ago. All those with abilities were brutally exterminated. Conspiracies often leave those implicated or those who witnessed in a traumatic state of denial.