Loss in the Mail: Pynchon, Psychoanalysis and the Postal Work of Mourning

Like Antigone and Hamlet, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is concerned with the vicissitudes of mourning. Oedipa Maas struggles to assume the task of what Pynchon, with Freud, calls the “work” of mourning. Pynchon emphasizes the energy-efficient and non-productive qualities of this work, and takes Freud’s economic model of loss one step further by evoking a direct parallel between Oedipa’s mourning and the postal labor of sorting.