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The Nefastis Machine
Although mail might seem like an unremarkable feature of modern life, it represents the social interconnectedness that Oedipa is searching for, and it stands in contrast to the electronic, immaterial media technologies that were increasingly taking over Americans’ lives in the 1960s, when The Crying of Lot 49 was written and set. The complex web of signs that draws Oedipa into the Tristero conspiracy in this novel centers on letters and postal systems. Whereas these new media recycle absurd stories like Cashiered and form adults whose primary relationships are to a screen rather than another person, the mail systems in this novel are an essential infrastructure connecting many Americans who send letters or packages back and forth. This service is easy to forget only because it has taken an immense amount of work over generations to create a robust network of mail-carriers across an enormous country. But now, mail exists in the shadows because it is not as convenient as the telephone or as glamorous as the radio or television. Curiously, however, many of the letters sent in this novel—like the notes Mike Fallopian sends to his friends and the letter Mucho writes to Oedipa in the third chapter—do not say much of anything at all. In fact, these empty letters point out the dwindling importance of direct, tangible social connections, and Oedipa’s quest to unmask the Tristero system can be seen as a search for the authentic human connections are fading fast all around her.
Mail Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49
The The Crying of Lot 49 quotes below all refer to the symbol of Mail. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3
Quotes
“It’s the principle,” Fallopian agreed, sounding defensive. “To keep it up to some kind of a reasonable volume, each member has to send at least one letter a week through the Yoyodyne system. If you don’t, you get fined.” He opened his letter and showed Oedipa and Metzger.
Dear Mike, it said, how are you? Just thought I’d drop you a note. How’s your book coming? Guess that’s all for now. See you at The Scope.
“That’s how it is,” Fallopian confessed bitterly, “most of the time.”
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Chapter 4
Quotes
“Then the watermark you found,” she said, “is nearly the same thing, except for the extra little doojigger sort of coming out of the bell.”
“It sounds ridiculous,” Cohen said, “but my guess is it's a mute.”
She nodded. The black costumes, the silence, the secrecy. Whoever they were their aim was to mute the Thurn and Taxis post horn.
[…]
“Why put in a deliberate mistake?” he asked, ignoring—if he saw it—the look on her face. “I've come up so far with eight in all. Each one has an error like this, laboriously worked into the design, like a taunt. There's even a transposition—U. S. Potsage, of all things.”
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Chapter 6
Quotes
Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream […] Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you […] all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.
Those, now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the alternatives. Those symmetrical four. She didn’t like any of them, but hoped she was mentally ill; that that’s all it was. That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.
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Get the entire The Crying of Lot 49 LitChart as a printable PDF.
Mail Symbol Timeline in The Crying of Lot 49
The timeline below shows where the symbol Mail appears in The Crying of Lot 49. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...memories of her past and wonders how Inverarity might have died. Oedipa has received a letter from someone named Metzger at a Los Angeles law firm, who writes that Inverarity died...
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...get into arguments like this all the time. Changing the subject, Oedipa shows Mucho the letter she received. Mucho, who was always jealous of Oedipa’s relationship with Pierce Inverarity, tells Oedipa...
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Chapter 3
...pays attention to Inverarity’s stamps for two reasons. The first is that she receives a letter from Mucho. In her letters to him, she does not mention her affair with Metzger....
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Someone in the bar suddenly starts handing out mail. Oedipa goes to the bathroom, where she finds a suspicious message written neatly on the...
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Back in the bar, Fallopian explains that his group has been developing an alternative postal system, in part by sending letters through Yoyodyne. The problem is that they have nothing...
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...is working in disguise at Duke Angelo’s court in Squamuglia. Angelo refuses to use the postal company Thurn and Taxis, which is dominant throughout Europe, because he does not want to...
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...is really alive and that Gennaro is planning to attack Squamuglia. He sends a cryptic letter for Gennaro with the official courier from Thurn and Taxis—who happens to be Niccolò. When...
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...at the lake and share another moment of suspicious, uncharacteristic silence. They realize that Angelo’s letter has transformed into a confession. Among other things, Angelo admits to killing Faggio’s soldiers, dumping...
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Chapter 4
...work, and Oedipa could get in touch with Nefastis in San Francisco at a certain P.O. box if she wanted to try. To take down Nefastis’s address, Oedipa opens her journal to...
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...a fly, and an elderly man named Mr. Thoth tells Oedipa about his grandfather, a mail courier on the Pony Express who loved murdering Native Americans. In his dreams, Thoth mixes...
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Oedipa visits Mike Fallopian, since the history of 19th-century mail carriers is his specialty. Fallopian laments that there is no solid evidence about bandits attacking...
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...from Germany, says “Thurn und Taxis.” Cohen explains that Thurn and Taxis was Europe’s dominant mail carrier from 1300 to 1867, and he shows Oedipa the stamp’s watermark, which is a...
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...instead of “U.S. Postage.” Oedipa tells Cohen that she saw the same thing on her letter from Mucho.
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Chapter 5
...of the Trystero horn symbol. She asks him about Thurn and Taxis and the U.S. Mail service, but he asks her why she is named Arnold Snarb and promises that he...
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...laughed and then took his suit off. He saw that the stamps on the gasoline-doused letters in his pocket showed the horn watermark, and he decided that this was a sign...
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...that this paper has somehow made it to him 60 years after it was first mailed out.
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...on his hand crying inside a building. She approaches him, and he gives her a letter for his wife, whom he abandoned many years ago. He tells Oedipa to take it...
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...an hour to find the green can marked “W.A.S.T.E.” She sees someone else leave some letters inside, adds her own, and then waits. When a raggedy man picks the letters up,...
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Chapter 6
...Chapter Eight, in which Dr. Blobb is crossing the mountains in a Thurn and Taxis mail coach and gets attacked by black-clad horsemen on the shores of “the Lake of Piety.”...
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...government kicked the Baron of Taxis and the nobleman who ran the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly out of their official positions. They replaced the latter with a nobleman named Jan...
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...Mike Fallopian again at The Scope. She explains all her findings and asks why his mail club does not use W.A.S.T.E. Mike replies that maybe they just haven’t found the right...
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...in his scheme. In fact, she realizes, Tristero could be a dream, a real secret mail network, an insane hallucination, or an unbelievably elaborate conspiracy created by Inverarity. Given these “symmetrical...
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...tells Professor Bortz, who suggests that Tristero would have been crushed by the American government’s postal reform, and that maybe its members disguised themselves as Native Americans to deliver mail. This...
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...off, and some secretive party has signed up to bid on the collection remotely, by mail. The “super-secretive” bidder has hired C. Morris Schrift, a well-known agent. They want to examine...
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...many other ones throughout the country. The squatters living in the abandoned trains and delivering mail for Tristero probably don’t even know what Tristero was supposed to inherit. So many Americans...
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