What Happens in San Narciso, Stays in San Narciso

It can be debated whether anything that Oedipa encounters within Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 really happens. LSD, alcohol, and boredom are all prevalent throughout the novel and all could be blamed for some of the unbelievable events that transpire throughout the story. However regardless of these factors, there is one section of the story that seems to surpass their influences. The city of San Narciso is a hazy dream completely unto itself. Throughout his description of this location, Pynchon endows it with a number of different qualities all of which heighten its ambiguity and ephemeral nature.

Pynchon first describes San Narciso as a location “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts,” and this description is certainly proven true. She later observes that the city seems in some way “unnatural,” and yet she can find nothing to distinguish “any vital difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was invisible at first glance.” Nothing in San Narciso, including the city itself, seems is a concrete or permanent image. Its nondescript appearance makes it invisible. Everything Oedipa encounters there is in some way either false or passing, as if the city or the events passing there are not even real, but imagined.

The most obvious example of illusion in San Narciso comes from the character Metzger. Obviously his loveless sex with Oedipa is ephemeral. The two get lost in a brief moment of passion, but by the end of the novel he has completely disappeared. It is as if he were a briefly imagined fascination, for whom Oedipa quickly looses interest. Pynchon heightens the ambiguity of Metzger’s character by making him a lawyer as well as a former actor. Metzger is conscious of the illusions that both these professions present. He comments that the “beauty [of these jobs] lies…in the extended capacity for convolution.” Both lawyers and actors make a living by convincing other people of things that aren’t true. And in the context of The Crying of Lot 49, there is no more fitting for a man who convinces people of things that aren’t true than in a place that may be an illusion unto itself.

Further lies and illusion in San Narciso can be seen in the Paranoids as well as the cheap motel in which Oedipa stays. The Paranoids are told by their manager to affect their voices with British accents in order to fit in better with the trends of the musical world, but really they’re just lying to the public. The hotel’s symbol is a nymph, a mythical creature that never really existed. Like The Paranoids’ British accents the nymph is imagined.

All these components combine to make Pynchon’s San Narciso a world of illusion, isolated from the rest of the world but very much in alignment with the novel’s overarching theme of illusion.