Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: The Hegemony of Hyperreality

Abstract

In The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Pynchon depicts a society where the proliferation of signs is continuously increasing via simulators and simulations, and huge amounts of messages and meanings are constantly produced. Consequently the original aims of production gradually disappear. As the protagonist of the novel is bombarded by the excess of information, her life circumstances become more and more chaotic. Consequently the more she struggles to find the answer to the puzzling questions, the more she gets lost in the confusing world of unrelated data. Suffering from uncertainty and confusion, she becomes mentally disordered, and gradually reaches a state of indifference which is regarded as one of the main effects of the hegemony of hyperreality in the contemporary society in the present article. These points are discussed in this article with regard to Baudrillard’s theory of “Simulacra and Simulation” to verify the role of the mass media in The Crying of Lot 49.