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Simulacra: and the Simulating Simulators Who Say It Isn’t

There is a conspiracy that controls everything we say or do. This conspiracy is so completely in enmeshed in our lives that we can no longer distinguish it from reality. While one could forgive this meddling if it were for some higher purpose, this conspiracy happens for no reason at all. The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon describes such a story about a wild nebulous world in which a number of characters act as agents of the absurd. Jean Baudrillard too describes a world of such nonsense, but it exists here and its agents are you and me. Thomas Pynchon is a contemporary fiction author who wrote The Crying of Lot 49 circa 1965. Baudrillard, on the other hand, is a French philosopher who is most notable for his work on very similar ideas in his book Simulacra and Simulation in 1985. What Thomas Pynchon’s book is originally concerned with is how reality had become entirely based on illusion and subjectivity rather than any sort of substance. This becomes more troubling as he continues saying that humanity has become completely controlled, not by reality, but by these baseless, intangible, and random concepts that does not even know why it is controlling. However, it would not be until twenty years later that Jean Baudrillard would be able to explain the how or why.

Unassumingly, this questioning of reality originally comes from a very simple concept of Jean Baudrillard’s concerning the relationship between subjects, objects, and signs (Best 113). He said that a subjective observer views an object and designates that object with a sign that conveys how the object should be interpreted. A simple example would be: I (the subject) want a car (the object) because it would make me look cool (the sign). The beginning of The Crying of Lot 49 presents the reader with a similarly innocuous setting. Pynchon gives us our protagonist, Oedipa, who is described as a young blonde wife to Wendell “Mucho” Mas and she is cooking lasagna (Pynchon 2). As subjects, we the readers may already begin to place sign values on the object Oedipa from this description. The image of a wife cooking conjures images of a docile woman who is obliged to do the housework, while the name Oedipa is reminiscent of the Greek tragic character Oedipus who killed his father and married his mother. However, Pynchon is actually playing with sign value and showing how the simple relationship between subjects, objects, and signs can be ultimately wrong. Oedipa’s story has nothing to do with parents, and she proves time and again to be anything but docile.

In his work Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard begins to comment on this discrepancy between what people expect from signs and what is actually real. The character Dr. Hilarius, Oedipa’s psychiatrist, is a prime representation of this (Pynchon 7). Once again Pynchon presents us with a character whose name calls to mind obvious signs, the word “hilarious” for instance, but who does not reflect these signs in the slightest. Pynchon then breaks away from the normal psychiatrist signs by making Hilarius show signs of utter insanity. Dr. Hilarius insists on giving Oedipa hallucinogenic drugs as treatment ( cool and believes that he can cure blindness by making odd faces (9). Most importantly, he claims to do all of this because he bases his work on Sigmund Freud’s (109). Though there seems to be no connection between Freud and what Hilarius rather odd interpretation of psychiatry, it must be noted that the subjective nature of signs deems that a sign can be different for different people. Baudrillard says, “…the objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation” (Baudrillard 16). Though it does not help to explain matters more, Hilarius insists that he tries to emulate Freud because he simply likes Freud’s belief that all minds are reasonable (Pynchon 110). It is because of this why sign value can lead a person astray. Hilarious holds up Freud’s work as a model of what is good. Baudrillard says about models, “The facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once” (Baudrillard 16). This means that Dr. Hilarius does not believe in Freud because of any evidence, but simply because he wants to believe in him. The danger that faces him, and everyone who uses sign value, is when a person’s existing facts do not match up to the model in his or her head. According to Baudrillard, a person will actively chose what they would like to believe rather than stop believing in it (Baudrillard 16). In this case the only option a person has left is reinterpret signs until they can make them fit with his or her model of the way things should be. Dr. Hilarious continues to do this to until he is convinced that he is shooting intangible Israelites coming to arrest him. Of course half his bullets are blanks, but Hilarious counts on the Israelites to interpret the sound of shoots as if they are real (Pynchon 109).

All of Baudrillard’s later work can be seen as an extrapolation from this initial problem with signs. He makes the claim that sign value has become so entwined with our present concept of the world that signs have usurped what we once thought of as “real” reality (Best 11 cool . The Crying of Lot 49 analogizes this shift when Oedipa leaves the life she knows in her hometown and goes into the enigmatic city of San Narsisso to execute the will of her old boyfriend Pierce (Pynchon 13). In investigating Pierce, Oedipa uncovers what could be a possible involvement with the vague power structure that Oedipa dubs “The Tristero” (Pynchon 31). “The Tristero” is what Oedipa interprets to be the active conspiracy that keeps her from the truth, and it is signified with the sign of a muted trumpet (Pynchon 3 cool . For the remainder of The Crying of Lot 49 the Tristero becomes the Pynchon’s representation for reality itself. Therefore, it parallel’s Baudrillard’s idea that signs both distort reality and are all encompassing in our world (Baudrillard 2). A near parody of this idea within The Crying of Lot 49 portrays Oedipa literally running up and down the city following a path of muted trumpet signs that eventually lead her nowhere (Pynchon 94).

An important aspect of signs, which Baudrillard frequently refers to, is simulation (Best 11 cool . Simulation is when an object imitates the sign value of another object. Common examples of simulation are television shows or themed amusement parks that try in some ways to simulate themes in real life. While similar to the concept of pretending, Baudrillard makes note that there is a distinct difference between the two. He sates, “…pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principles of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked…” True simulation, on the other hand, “…is to feign what to have what one doesn’t have” (Baudrillard 3). In other words, when a person is pretending that person makes the distinction between what is real and what he or she pretending to be real; simulation can be interpreted as reality. The Crying of Lot 49 has a character Metzger, for instance, who is a lawyer for the late Pierce, but was once an actor (Pynchon 1 cool . Both of Metzger occupations rely heavily on simulation.

While acting may at first seem to be similar to pretending, because its roles of reality seem properly defined, there are people who do not make the distinction. Roseman, another lawyer character in Pynchon’s book, for instance, has been trying to build a legal case against the television lawyer character of Perry Mason (Pynchon 9). He does not, however, necessarily extend this lawsuit to Raymond Burr the actor who plays Perry Mason. Baudrillard does mention how the media can skew people’s idea of reality by bombarding them with signs (Best 125). One would think that no matter what evidence Roseman gathers it will amount to nothing because Perry Mason does not exist, yet the question of Perry Mason’s reality is not automatically inherent. Perry Mason may be only a simulation of a lawyer, but what he simulates is a real lawyer. Roseman becomes just another person who cannot be sure if the television show he watches represents reality or simulation of reality.

Metzger points out to Oedipa that even his in current job as a lawyer he still has to be an actor for the jury because he performs for them (Pynchon 22). A lawyer who entertains and puts on a show for the jury is not the real person underneath, and is therefore also a simulation. The whole occupation of lawyer, in Pynchon’s terms, becomes just a simulation of how a lawyer is supposed to act. This can extend to everyone who puts on different persona for a different circumstance such as work. Is the person who goes partying with his friends the same person who asks his boss for a raise the next day? Baudrillard claims that simulation is yet more pervasive because any type of preparation in this way can be seen as simulation. His example uses how people react during a holdup, “This is how all the holdups, airplane hijackings, etc. are now in some sense simulation holdups in that they are already inscribed in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipation in their presentation and their possible consequences” (Baudrillard 21). By playing out scenarios in our heads first, we are not acting according to reality but merely simulating our prepared imagery.

If simulation, as Baudrillard puts it, “…masks the absence of a profound reality” then how does it affect reality (Baudrillard 6)? Baudrillard simply bypasses the question by saying that humanity no longer has a real reality, only signs and simulations (Best 11 cool . This however is not the whole truth. He also explains that reality and simulation has actually merged at some point in history; he calls this gestalt hyperreality (Best 119). There is a point in Pynchon’s book when Metzger, the actor who became a lawyer, mentions his friend Manny Di Presso who was a lawyer who became an actor. Di Presso then plays in a TV pilot about Meztger’s life. However the simulation of the Metzger television-show-character still acts on the side (Pynchon 22). This means that a lawyer turned actor acts as an actor turned lawyer who acts on the side, while he really does not. Where is the “real” lawyer located in this arrangement, or the “simulated” lawyer for that matter? It is especially complicated when one remembers that the inherent reality of actor or lawyer is already in question. As mentioned previously, a real lawyer in its own right is also a simulation of a lawyer. This describes hyperreality because it exists as both simulation and reality. In Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard doubted if true reality itself could be found distinctly underneath such convolution of simulation and hyperreality, “…it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum—not unreal, but as simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference” (Baudrillard 6). Simulation may hide that there is no reality, but hyperreality, “…has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard 6).

Reality and the Tristero are only simulations due to the fact that they have become so layered with hyperreality and further simulation. Oedipa, in our story, is convinced that she is either amidst a powerful conspiracy or she is insane and she is willing to go wherever her investigation leads her in order to find the truth either way (Pynchon 141). However, according to Simulacra and Simulation, “…it is always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum” (Baudrillard 27). This is because the simulations are based on other simulations, which in turn are based on other simulations, and so forth without necessarily any reality at the bottom. The Crying of Lot 49 depicts these layers of simulation through the “clues” Oedipa finds that are supposed to reveal the truth behind the Tristero. Her first introduction to the word Tristero comes from mangling the title of the painting “Bordando el Manto Terrestre” (Pynchon 11). This real life painting depicts women weaving a tapestry that becomes their landscape. Oedipa compares this to the way she is manipulated by the Tristero, although, the reader may ascribe the image to Oedipa herself. Next, Oedipa hears the word “Trystero” in a play called The Courier’s Tragedy (Pynchon 5 cool . By asking the director, Mr. Driblette, she finds that the play is based on the book anthology Jacobean Revenge Plays (Pynchon 61). The book, once found, mentions “This trystero” only in a footnote where it guesses the word is either a pun on the word tryst or possibly a translation on the “pseudo-Italianate” word triste which means wretched or depraved. The footnote, of course, then points to another book as its source (Pynchon 82). This continues and though each level of simulation Oedipa’s discoveries give the illusion that she is uncovering some truth while it is in fact only convoluting the reality of Tristero.

Institutions that are supposed to control people do not even connect to any real power structure anymore. The philosopher Michel Foucault popularly advocated the idea that institutions as mechanisms control every aspect of humanity. They are supposed to be the systems of rules that govern social behavior, for instance, government, marriage, and school that each have their own microcosm that dictates what should be done and what should not be done. However Baudrillard wondered, “What if Foucault spoke so well to us concerning power… only because power is dead?” (Best 122). The Crying of Lot 49, jokes with the idea by making Pierce, the object of power possibly controlling the Tristero, truly dead. Over the course of the book Pierce grows to represent any power structure without a head that constantly acts for no discernible reason. Oedipa, for example, feels lost in these signs and coincidences concerning the Tristero and she is told, “a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive, so elaborate… so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond a practical joke (Pynchon 141).” The notable detail to this is that Oedipa never finds what that meaning is. Though the Tristero appears to be keeping her from the truth, what that truth is or why it would want to keep Oedipa from it remains unclear. She suspects nevertheless that if the Tristero has been fabricated then it would likely is Pierce behind it if he is still alive (Pynchon 140).

Whether Pierce is dead or merely faked his death is avoided till the end of the novel. This correlates Baudrillard’s thoughts of the real world institutions, “The modern political imagery goes increasingly in the direction of delaying, of concealing for as long as possible, the death of the head of state” (Baudrillard 25). In Baudrillard’s terms, this means that the goal of an institution is to try and convince people it is not just simulation, however Pynchon takes this statement more literally. In fact, Baudrillard makes the claim that dead figurehead can actually gain more power than any actual person, he says, “No one could grant the least consent, the least devotion to a real person. It is to his double, be being always already dead” (Baudrillard 26). The strength of Pierce lays in the sign value of his position, not in Pierce the man. Though through that logic any one could be leading the Tristero with the same authority of power because they sit within that sign value of power. Baudrillard correlates this by when he says, “…even if they occupy the seat of power, they will never exercise it except by proxy; that in fact, power, genuine power no longer exists, and thus there is no risk whoever seizes power or seizes it again” (Baudrillard 17).

The idea that all the institutions in the world were nothing but simulation deeply disturbed Oedipa’s husband Wendell “Mucho” Mas. Baudrillard did explains this when he said, “Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation” (Baudrillard 20). Near the end of the book, Mucho relates his biggest fear to Oedipa of a swinging sign at his old used car dealership that spelled NADA. It stood for the National Automobile Dealer’s Association, but Mucho connected the sign to the word “nada” (Pynchon 11 cool . His fear stemmed from the fact that all the institutions in his world were connected to nothing based in reality and that maybe events just happen for no reason at all.

Even if one chooses not to believe that institutions have become simulations, one must also consider the possibility that a perfect simulation could not be distinguished from a real institution. Baudrillard questions, “But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith?” (Baudrillard 5). Oedipa’s “discoveries” seem to point the Tristero as having an origin connecting it to a sixteenth century postal service called The Trystero that supposedly rivaled the real world Thurn and Taxi service (Pynchon 5 cool . Whether or not there is any fact to this story, however, the act of repeated simulations has disconnected the current Tristero from that historical reality. Baudrillard comments how all institutions suffer from this problem:
“As long as the historical threat came at it from the real, power played at deterrence and simulation, disintegrating all the contradictions by dint of producing equivalent signs. Today when the danger comes at it from simulation (that of being dissolved in the play of signs), power plays at the real…” (Baudrillard 22)
If a government, for example, wants to go to war for few real reasons it can lie to its people about the reasons or shift the reason to a convenient sign that people could rally behind. In this way the government is intentionally pushing themselves away from reality and into simulation. However, Baudrillard claims that such power structures have done this and to such excess that the problem is no longer to hide reality, but to prove that it is real. According to Simulacra and Simulation, “The only weapon of power, its only strategy against defection, its to reinject the real and the referential everywhere” (Baudrillard 22). The Tristero does this to Oedipa by constantly leaving the clues for her to find that appear to confirm its existence.

The Thurn and Taxi itself also helps to further confirm the Tristero’s existence because it stands in opposition to it. Baudrillard describes the concept of “operational negativity” wherein the opposite of an idea confirms the idea itself (Baudrillard 1 cool . It does this in the same way that pretending confirms reality by making distinctions about what is real and what is pretending to be real. Using Disneyland as an example of this operational negativity, Baudrillard relates, “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real” (Baudrillard 12). When the Thurn and Taxi claims to stand against Tristero the assumption is automatically made that there is a real Tristero at all. The statement ignores the idea that there could be an in-between these two oppositions or that neither could be real. If, as Oedipa thinks, the Tristero is a conspiracy that controls everything, than the Thurn and Taxi acts as an agent that helps hold the reality of the Tristero together.

Since there is no stable foundation of reality in Baudrillard and Pynchon’s universe, what is it that people can do? Baudrillard provides several options for mankind to follow that Thomas Pynchon also sees as the ultimate fate for his characters. One choice that Baudrillard mentions is to completely give in to simulation. He notices how humans have already done this by reversing the subject, object, and sign roles (Best 129). In this new paradigm the subject now relies on object to designate how the subject should be interpreted, rather than the other way around. If one wants to look at an old example in a new way: I (the subject) want a car (the object) because it makes me look cool. The car in this illustration defines the person instead of the person defining the car. Oedipa observes her husband Wendell ("Mucho") Mass feeling as though the object of his job defines him. Mucho is a used car salesman and is also unfortunately hyper-aware of the signs of the stereotypical car salesman’s appearance. Mass dislikes the dishonest sign value surrounding car salesmen and therefore attempts to remove his connections from these signs. He fanatically shaves so that he does not have a mustache and he purposefully has his suits tailored to that they do not have high shoulders. Items such as sawdust and honey also make him uneasy because he feels they are both connected to his profession as means to dishonestly make used cars seem better (Pynchon 4). Though Mass does not want to be connected to these signs, he feels as though he has lost control over them. Baudrillard presents the idea that in this point, “…the new high society objects have taken over and dominate the hapless subject” (Best 130).

Baudrillard and Pynchon did leave one last recourse for humanity to actually use simulation in order to dismantle the power structures that try to control us. It is called “fatal strategy,” and though Baudrillard coined the term, Pynchon used most the idea most effectively in The Crying of Lot 49 (Best 131). Fatal strategy intentionally pushes institutions into hyperreality. As we have seen, institutions are already hyperreal, but the value of the fatal strategy is to expose institutions as such. The only character in Pynchon’s story who seems to have a grasp on this true nature of reality is Randolph Driblette who denies that there are any truths (Pynchon 62). In the book Driblette directs the play that Oedipa thought might hold the meaning to her the unexplained coincidences involving the Tristero. He is the one that tells Oedipa that his play is not the original and that he got the idea from a book. However, before Oedipa goes any further in her investigation, Driblette goes out of his way to insist that any further investigation would be a waste of time. Driblette says,
“The words, who cares? … the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also” (Pynchon 62).
What Oedipa never really understands through their dialogue is that there is reality no deeper meaning to these events. Driblette tries to tell her that Tristero System in its entirety has only has as much truth as she wants to give it. If power must inject the real in order to propagate, than accepting no reality makes power impotent (Baudrillard 20). As Baudrillard says, “Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and every objective, they turn against power the deterrent that it used so well for such a long time” (Baudrillard 22). There is no mechanism that makes these things any truer for anyone, but for how the individual subject perceives it. Driblette goes on to sum up, “[the author] supplied the words and a yarn. I gave them life. That’s it (63).” The irony is that the more evidence Oedipa tries to pile on to her own assumptions about Tristero, the further she gets from this actual humble truth. Whether the Tristero is real or not is irrelevant because every time Oedipa searches for the Tristero she adds reality, and therefore power, to it.

By the end of The Crying of Lot 49 we find that Oedipa learns nothing. She forgets the Randolph Driblette’s parting words and continues downward into a mess of signs, simulation, and hyperreality. In the same way that Dr. Hilarius gave himself over to the ideals of Freud, Oedipa gives herself over to the Tristero simply because she wants to believe in it. While it may appear ludicrous, Oedipa stands as an allegory for a humanity that attempts to ascribe meaning to a universe that has no real meaning. People who agree with Driblette’s perspective are a minority, as Baudrillard states, “[there is] a collective demand for sings of power” (Baudrillard 23). Whether or not we agree with these simulations of institutions that try to control us, doing anything that resembles Oedipa’s attempt to fight back only adds power to the system. In doing so, Pynchon sees her as just becoming another example of the Thurn and Taxi. Baudrillard says, “One must not resist this process by trying to confront the system and destroy it…that we give the system back its death, that we revive it through the negative” (Baudrillard 24).

The final image The Crying of Lot 49 gives the reader is Oedipa waiting at an auction to see who bids on the last of Pierce’s possessions that, incidentally, are also the last remaining clues of the Tristero: a collection of stamps with the Tristero muted horn on them and yet another simulation. She waits to see who will bid and then the book abruptly ends (Baudrillard 152). The reader is left thinking that this person bidding might be the last clue of Tristero that would give meaning to the whole piece such as possibly Pierce himself. If one only looks at the on going themes of this book a person can see that even if the story continued there would be no resolution but only an infinite number of layers of simulation. “A simulation that can last indefinitely, because as distinct from ‘true’ power… it is nothing but the object of social demand.” (Baudrillard 26)

Thomas Pynchon and Jean Baudrillard have seen that humanity as a whole has fallen in to the same conspiracy that Oedipa finds herself trapped in. To say that this happens for no reason at all may be an overstatement because each person manipulates himself or herself. Regardless of who appears to be manipulating each of our realities, this conspiracy is ultimately a conspiracy of one. People give power to sign values and simulations and become controlled by them only because they believe that these things actually have power to control them. While he could not explain why this was, Thomas Pynchon wrote The Crying of Lot 49 not to present a fictional world of an odd spinning of events, but to describe the real world he saw everyday. Fortunately for readers, Jean Baudrillard’s background in philosophy is able to break down our immaterial and mostly illusionary universe into simple concepts. In their own way, they were also both able to provide the tools humanity needs in order to tear down the conspiracy our minds have built around us our entire lives. This is what Pynchon tries to show us, and this is what Baudrillard tries to explain.


Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford Press, 1991.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1986.

Very scholarly... What I got from it is that there are beings within us, and it is irrelevant weather they are actuall beings or not. However, they still controll us in our daily lives. The only way to get them to stop, is not by ignoring them, but by learning to controll their actions, and thus altering our own.

I believe this is an excelant portrayal of personal demons.

I'd like however, for you to go back and indent your paragraphs, if you don't mind doing that.