A Baudrillardian Reading of Pynchon's 'Crying of Lot 49' and Gibson's 'Johnny Mn

The works of Pynchon and Gibson can be illuminated by Baudrillard’s theories on the post-modern. In particular, we shall be reading Johnny Mnemonic and The Crying of Lot 49 through 'Simulacra and Simulation', especially the concept of the hyperreal. Baudrillard’s work has a structuralist basis in its central concern with systems of signs. In brief, language can be seen as a binary system of signs (written, vocal or pictographic) which represent various ‘signified’ objects or concepts in the real world. For Baudrillard, the post-modern era is marked by an abundance of signs which point to each other, proliferating new signs without any grounding in reality. Rather than representing the real, signs come to be the real – hyper-reality. The hyperreal is not to be understood as the purely virtual however, it is the space occupied by real and virtual colliding. An example is the recent news story about a couple that end their marriage over virtual cheating:

"For a while there was this impression that as long as it's online, it doesn't matter. But research has shown it's not a separate world," she said, adding that infidelity was "just as painful, whether it's electronic or physical."

(CBS News, 2009).

We can see that post-modern people’s lives consist of a combination of their physical and virtual realities. This age then is identified by what Eco calls ‘authentic replicas’ but Perry, interpreting Baudrillard’s account of Disneyland, believes are more accurately described as ‘real fakes,’ original simulations of which no physical counterpart ever existed (1998, p.79). Baudrillard extends the application of this concept beyond mere linguistic application though, applying it to ideologies, places and lifestyles. Baudrillard’s definition of the post-modern turns the map allegories of Borges and Lewis Carol on their heads: the real no longer wins out over the simulation, because now there is only simulation (Cosgrove, 2002, p.221-222). The Gibson documentary ‘No Maps for These Territories’ responds to Baudrillard’s analogy, post-modernity is the map with no real, this region cannot have a map because it already is one (Neale, 2000). The tapestry painting found in The Crying of Lot 49 coincides with allegory of the map of the real as it destroys the distinction between imaginary and real, simulation and reality: in the painting, tapestry becomes the whole world, including the girls sewing it in a fashion similar to the self-drawing hands of Escher. (Pynchon, 2000, p.13).

The two texts chosen have a lot in common, not only because they are both keystone examples of post-modern literature, but because one directly influenced the other. Both Johnny Mnemonic and the Crying of Lot 49 are channelled through a single character’s consciousness; with the absence of a trustworthy, omniscient narrator this leads to paranoid narratives that can neither be validated nor denied. Gibson’s books set in the Sprawl, including three novels and a collection of short stories including Johnny Mnemonic, often pay homage to Pynchon’s works; Gibson admitted Pynchon being a major influence in an interview with McCaffery. Oedipa’s surname Maas appears as the name of the omniscient company Maas Biotek in Gibson’s Sprawl series. One could infer a shared timeline between the two pieces, that Gibson’s reading of The Crying of Lot 49 has a positive ending and that rather than being merely paranoid, Oedipa eventually learns the secrets of Tristero - becoming the person behind a powerful company whose business relies on knowing everything that is going on. Even the very name of the megalopolis ‘Sprawl’ I suggest derives from Pynchon’s description of urban America (p.14). Equally, Gibson’s descriptions of cluttered, shambled together cyberpunk living spaces echo the passage found in The Crying of Lot 49 outlining Mucho’s disgust at the random waste found in cars which summarise a person’s life.

[The cars] smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze…actual residue of these lives…simply (perhaps tragically) lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10c, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials…butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn…rags of old underwear or dresses that were already period costume…all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes.

(Pynchon, 2000, p.8)

Post-modernity itself takes the form of the eclectic collage, a veritable magpie’s nest, mixing high and low culture and different periods of history as Jameson explores. The Lowtek den then is a metaphor for the post-modern condition, their ‘overall aesthetic’ has people literally battle on ‘crazy metal sea’ built from a mad array of junk, ‘random…rusting machine fragments’ which ‘moved constantly’ (Gibson, 1995, p.31-34). There is nothing beneath the killing floor – no reality under the post-modern map of the hyperreal. We shall return to Gibson’s concept of ‘cyberspace,’ Pynchon’s conspiracy theory and the all-pervading sense of paranoia found in both as examples of hyper-reality.

Each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life…Endless, convoluted incest.

(Pynchon, 2000, p.8)

Pynchon describes here how in the post-modern age, even individual identity has become subject to distancing from the real, people expect their cars and brand choices to represent themselves. Baudrillard’s theories on the post-modern can help us interpret the unusual usage of the word ‘incest’ in this context of used cars. Incest can be understood here as the way there is a narcissistic, homogenous exchange between valueless signs in post-modernity versus the heterogeneous exchange between sign and reality found in traditional structuralism.

This stand-in for actual identity goes much further in Gibson, extending to the point where actual bodies can be customised easily, for example Johnny has hardware installed in his brain, Molly has blades and lenses imbedded in her body, the lowteks bare canine teeth, the Yakuza assassin has a monofilament hidden beneath his fake thumb and so on. Baudrillard’s description of the post-modern as a place of proliferation of signs with no concrete ties to the real world can be seen in Ralfi Face: the ‘unique’ signifier of the face no longer matches up with the ‘unique’ signified personality – Ralfi has the face of the celebrity Sony Mao / Christian White, a face also ‘worn’ by many others (p.14 and 16). Instead of customisation creating an array of identities, what actually happens is that the population is homogenised as they all seek to obtain what the ideology of global capitalism deems attractive and now they have the technology to conform even physically. (This can be seen today in online game worlds where people can create virtual characters from a vast array of appearance options but instead of a varied population emerging, the overall aesthetic is clone-like as everyone creates purple haired, winged Adonises). As a result, ‘meat’ is frequently used as an offensive, disparaging term – bodies are to be improved or ignored when possible as they are reminders of the real that can hold one back from their virtual existence (Gibson, 1995, p.16). However, elsewhere in the Sprawl stories, Gibson introduces another concept that blurs the individual’s identity further: living via simstim. Here the subject has direct access to the senses and thoughts of another human and their surroundings, the height of hyper-reality, witnessing the ‘real’ world through a virtual medium but without this second-hand experience being ‘worth’ any less than the original because they are identical.

Dougherty points out two occasions in Neuromancer, one in the real world and one in cyberspace, when the body itself becomes a code, ‘the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked…a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone’ (p.285) and ‘looked at the back of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code’ (p.286):

Gibson's point would seem to be that it is all about data even when it is not, and that while the body's ur-code may be unknowable due to its infinite complexity, it is nevertheless potentially decipherable and manipulable as code, and therefore potentially subject to a kind of deep structural decoding and recoding according to social exigencies.

(Dougherty, S. 2001, p.4).

The faith placed in brand names and their logos is another post-modern phenomenon Baudrillard commented on which is worth exploring as it plays a crucial part frequently occurring in Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy. For example, Adidas is mentioned within the very first sentence Johnny Mnemonic and Johnny later identifies the brand of cigarettes Dog is smoking by their trademark (Gibson, 1995, p.14 and p.29).

The Western world [Baudrillard] asserted…now sustains itself through circulation of image and text (information)…[A] commodity culture in which the code of marketing signs did not just take priority over or precede commodities, but subsumed the distinction between object and representation altogether…the quintessential self-referential sign…is the product brand name or corporate trademark…These signifiers serve as the locus…through the mass media, the sign increasingly replaces the product itself as the site of fetishism…The value of the product…lies in the exchange value of its brand name, advertising image, or status connotations.

(Coombe, 1998, p.55-56).

Coombe’s example of Coca-Cola and it’s slogan “always the real thing” is particularly ironic and post-modern in that the ‘real thing’, the carbonated drink has nothing to do with the structure of signs clustered around it promising success and a good Christmas (1998, p.55). The effect of signs exchanged for signs with no ‘real’ corresponding value creates a kind of perpetual motion similar to Maxwell’s demon of thermal dynamics. An exchange occurs but nothing has left the system of signs, it runs itself perpetually, ‘you wouldn’t have put any real work into the system’ or indeed had to leave the system at all, the demon exists as a prisoner in an enclosed system of exchange like the post-modern subject (Pynchon, 2000, p.59).

Pynchon’ text provides a particularly interesting passage in regards to Baudrillard with the compounded illusion of the actor / lawyer:

A lawyer in a courtroom, in front of any jury, becomes an actor right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of the jury becomes an actor. Me, I’m a former actor who became a lawyer. They’ve done the pilot film…based loosely on my career, starring…a one time lawyer who quit his firm to become an actor. Who in the pilot plays me, an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor. The film is in an air-conditioned vault at one of the Hollywood studios, light can’t fatigue it, it can be repeated endlessly’

(Pynchon, 2000, p.21).

This is interesting when compared with Baudrillard’s brief describes of the four orders of illusion in Simulacra and Simulation:

Such would be the successive phases of the image:

It is the reflection of a profound reality;

It masks and denatures a profound reality;

It masks the absence of a profound reality;

It has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

(Baudrillard, 2002, p.95).

Johnston explores the idea of the four-way possibility in his essay, noting in particular the four interpretations of her life at the outset and the four endings left available (1991, p.53). Her epiphany in front of the Spanish painting makes her wonder which path to take, ‘she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey’ (Pynchon, 2000, p.13). More important is Johnston’s observation that The Crying of Lot 49 culminates

in four symmetrical possibilities: [1] either she has indeed stumbled onto a secret organization having objective, historical existence…; [2] or she is hallucinating it by projecting a pattern onto various signs only randomly associated; [3] or she is victim of a hoax set up by Inverarity…[4] or she is hallucinating such a hoax, in a semiosis of the second possibility. The novel concludes with these four possibilities intact as Oedipa awaits the revelation of the auctioneer’s cry.

(1991, p.52).

He fails however to make the vital jump, which is hopefully valid rather than itself paranoid, of equating this set of outcomes to Baudrillard’s four stages of the image. Thwaites does however, parallelling the four stages of image with Pynchon’s plot. Each of these stages can be related to a particular historical period; the classical age of counterfeit, the industrial revolution with production and post-modernity with pure simulation, suggesting that if Pynchon’s novel is indeed post-modern, than the conclusion is the forth option, that Oedipa has ungrounded paranoid (Burkitt, 1999, p.133-134). Accepting what Twaites description of the fourth option, ‘there is a plot that there is a plot that there is a plot that there is a plot,’ adds up to a kind of metafictional joke that extends beyond the text itself because of course the very form of a fictional novel entails creating such an illusion (Thwaites, 1997, p.269). Paranoid frame breaking, Baudrillard and cyberpunk also go hand-in-hand: in the ‘fake’ film The Matrix, the fake character Neo owns a fake, hollowed out version of the Simulacra and Simulation book which contains illegal, fake computer discs (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999). This confusing strata of multiple fakes is further complicated in the viewer’s mind by the fact Reeves, who plays the Gibsonesque character Neo, has previously played another similar role in the film version of Johnny Mnemonic (Longo, 1995).

While The Crying of Lot 49 clearly takes the form of a quest, the object of this quest ‘becomes increasingly unclear as the novel progresses’ (Newman, 1986, p.68). While the exact nature of the object is unclear, it is clear that Oedipa has become caught up with a search for impossible, universal truth: the answer to what Adams calls the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.

‘Repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnameable act, the recognition, The Word.’

(Pynchon, 2000, p.125).

‘The Word’ represents some kind of truth beyond reality – which is quite a hyperreal idea. It harks back to Platonic and religious language of the power of the ‘logos’, the Form of the Good, the super sign, the map which masks the entire real. Signs are a source of power and knowledge in both narratives. Gibson often introduces characters without naming them – creating a sense of paranoia (for an example see p.19). The sign and the name become equated with power; hence Oedipa’s hunt for the ‘answer’ to the Tristero mystery is really a quest for power over the real object. In folklore tradition names give power, The A.I. character Neuromancer comments upon this, ‘to call up a demon you must learn its name…but now it is real in another way’ (Gibson, 1995, p.289). This motive is revealed through Pynchon’s choice of names, for example, Thoth after the ancient Egyptian God of writing and knowledge. Berkeley harks back to the philosopher bishop whose idea that ‘to be is to be perceived’ serves as a forerunner to Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment which places the outcome in the hands of the observer. However, both contradictory states of known and unknown can be preserved by refusing to observe. The Crying of Lot 49’s ending does just this, by stopping the narrative before Oedipa finds out the secret contents of lot 49, Pynchon ‘guarantees that neither of these readings will receive authorial sanction’ (Hite, 1983, p.69). Baudrillard talks about a similar effect in relation to preserving mummies or indigenous peoples so that intellectual fields can guarantee a little bit of ‘real’ anchorage so that their system of signs does not come completely a drift:

It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

(2002, p.95-97)

Lastly, and ‘not accidentally, Pierce’s name evokes the name of the American founder of semiotics, C. S. Peirce’ (Johnston, 1991, p.56). As well as his influence in semiotics and epistemological philosophy, Peirce invented an electrical computing circuit in 1886 – leading us in an encyclopaedic, post-modern manner back to the computer generated world of cyberpunk (Bloom, 2001).

Cyberspace is a concept analogous to the hyperreal and was actually coined by Gibson in the short story Burning Chrome, but defined in Neuromancer as ‘a consensual hallucination’ (Gibson, 1995, p.12). Gibson has said:

All I knew about the word "cyberspace" when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

(Neale, 2000).

In the afterword to the twentieth anniversary edition of Neuromancer, Womack asks whether Gibson is responsible for the internet, ‘what if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?’ (2004, p.269). This seems in many ways to be the case, giving us an example of the sign preceding the reality – what Baudrillard describes as the ‘map that precedes the territory’ (2002, p.91). In the same way Gibson’s visions of the Matrix have begun coming true, the intense paranoia of The Crying of Lot 49 leaks out and pollutes the real world. An obsessive cult has grown up around the novel; compounded by Pynchon keeping a secretive persona himself as an author, the inter-textual homage paid to it is far too profuse to go into each individually but many authors, films and bands have utilised Pynchon’s ideas and the Tristero muted horn often turns up as graffiti. This is because the ‘virtual’ world of literature and the ‘real’ world are just as viable in the post-modern era, both are as fake or real as each other and as such the boundaries break down and ideas can leak from one realm into another. This links with post-modern concepts of metafiction where the fictional and real worlds collide because both are revealed to be artificial constructs or even Derrida’s idea that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ because all things are the text, there is no border anymore in an age of encyclopaedic connections; the real and not real have been equalised in value. As such, an all pervading sense of paranoia is at work both in Pynchon and Gibson’s texts because of signs being more freely associated, all interlinked on the internet, crossing disciplines, high and low culture, all periods of history co-existing as at once as Jameson’s take on the post-modern argues. The feeling of aura Benjamin describes in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is expected by Oedipa in LA but instead of a magical quality she encounters a ‘sprawl of houses’ that resemble a ‘printed circuit’ (Pynchon, 2000, p.14). This displays quite a modernist sentiment in that there is a feeling of lost innocence, now LA cannot be special on its own terms because it is invaded by all the meanings of the things Oedipa associates with it. Further proving the interlinked nature of everything in post-modernism is the reoccurrence of the same motif in Neuromancer, where a fabric’s ‘pattern might have represented microcircuits or a city map’ (Gibson, 1995, p.17).

While Baudrillard sees hyperrealism and post-modernity in general as negative, we have also seen how he is also disapproving of merely preserving the real for the sake of it. Pynchon seems to have a more positive outlook on the hyperreal, even appearing twice himself in the post-modern animation The Simpsons. Johnny reaches a similar comfortable agreement with post-modernity, what Eco would call a knowing irony. Johnny ultimately exchanges information ‘in languages [he would] never understand’ for a higher streetwise form of knowledge, he can read the signs clearly on Jones’ new screen and be happy once he gains a position of control over the web of the hyperreal; of ‘the killing floor’ of post-modernity (p. 32 and p.36).

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