AP Success - AP English Literature: The Crying of Lot 49

As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations. Hardly about Pierce Inverarity, or 

herself; but about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away. There had hung the 

sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, 

just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned 

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herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among 

the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair. When it 

turned out to be Pierce she'd happily pulled out the pins and curlers and down it tumbled in its 

whispering, dainty avalanche, only when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, 

through some sinister sorcery, into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell, on his ass. But 

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dauntless, perhaps using one of his many credit cards for a shim, he'd slipped the lock on her 

tower door and come up the conchlike stairs, which, had true guile come more naturally to him, 

he'd have done to begin with. But all that had then gone on between them had really never 

escaped the confinement of that tower. In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition 

of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, 

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titled 'Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge 

eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry 

which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the 

other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this 

tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and 

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cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if 

the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the 

entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way 

forever, see the world refracted thorugh those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet 

unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at the feet and known, 

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then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple 

thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had 

taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a 

captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, it's height and 

architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps here where she is is magic, 

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anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no 

apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how 

it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on 

superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the 

tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?