Confronting The Other:Oedipa Maas’s Abiection In The Crying Of Lot49

This thesis aims to explore Oedipa Maas’s psychological transformation during her search for the meaning of Tristero in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot49in light of Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory, specifically the notion of abjection. Within the closed system of the narcissistic capitalist culture, Tristero stands for the repressed and silenced cultural Other. During the course of the search for the meaning of the Tristero, Oedipa Maas continuously gains new knowledge and experiences abjection. The notion of the abject, which Julia Kristeva developed in Powers of Horror, is a concept between the subject and the object, representing taboo and expatriated elements in the cultural realm. Abjection is the traumatic experience that the subject goes through when confronting the abject. The psychological reading of Oedipa Maas’s psychological transformation is indispensable since it provides an illuminating comprehension of both the psychic make-up and transformation of Oedipa Maas as an individual and the problem amid the parameters of a collective culture breeding her mental states, thereby deconstructing the totalitarian order of the capitalist system and its new forms of cultural control in the postmodern era.In each individual’s psychosexual development, the subject initially experiences a painful but indispensible break-away from the mother. This separation renders the self indentify with itself and defines the clear boundary between self and other. However, the maternal and the materiality related to the maternal are inherent in the subject’s existence. Repressed by culture and the subject, the materiality of the existence nonetheless emerges in culture and in self in various forms. Through abjection, Oedipa Maas gains a new perspective into the inevitability of death and the materiality of existence, contrary to the narcotic ideology that mainstream society inebriated in consumerism, information technology and media culture. She also discovers the fact that in the periphery of mainstream society, there lives a group of people devoted to a "deliberate withdrawal" from the cultural hegemony, and that their anonymous existence de-centers the subject, and turns indeterminacy against the certainty in the signification system and. Chapter One illustrates the precondition for Oedipa’s confrontation with the Tristero, which is the inertia both culturally and psychically felt by the subject. Borrowing from McLuhan, Chapter One gives a detailed analysis of why consumerism and media devices contribute importantly to a narcissistic culture. It also probes the relationship between narcissism and abjection from Kristeva’s notion abjection which serves as the impetus for Oedipa Maas’s meeting with the Tristero. Chapter Two presents a number of instances of the abject during Oedipa’s quest for the meaning of the Tristero:the embodiment of the maternal body, suggesting prohibited unification with (m)other; the San Narciso freeway’s involvement with death and corpse; images and naming of characters with correlations to reproduction and femininity, all of which point to the repressed Other at the underside of subjectivity and cultural norms. As a result of the confrontation with abjects, Oedipa experiences an abjection that calls for a radical displacement both in the literal geographical sense, and in the meaning system that determines the clear boundary between self and other. Chapter Three expounds Kristeva’s argument that abjection edges with the sublime and delves into the religious instants suggesting the possible existence of a transcendental meaning; and adopts Baudrillard’s argument for the revolution of graffiti in the urban space in order to extrapolate the positive connotations of the sign of the abject Tristero in postmodern America.