Branding Counterculture in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

Explicating Pynchon’s politics remains, for literary criticism, a difficult task. This is perhaps because Pynchon’s political views, like the subjects of his novels, are often tremendously synthetic, conveying what Edward Mendelson describes as grand “imaginative designs” rather than forthright political agendas.¹ And yet despite critical consensus that Pynchon’s social commitments lie, in deliberately oblique fashion, somewhere beyond partisan commentary or polemic, scholarship continues to glean overtly topical political lessons from Pynchon’s work.² This essay asks not whether Pynchon’s subjunctive Americas are analogous to sixties-era resistance movements (the sites of cultural revolution and failure Pynchon’s California novels are frequently understood to idealize and indict), but rather how and why Pynchon begins to register his novels’ demotic function in a self-critical evaluation of his own role in giving voice to these movements.³ Thus, while The Crying of Lot 49’s underground mail carrier, the Trystero, has almost uniformly been decoded as a figure for counterculture, I will argue here that Pynchon also deploys the Trystero as a figure for the countercultural novelist, at once a medium for and commodifier of counterculture’s political aspirations. Specifically, by merging the Trystero’s political motifs with the representational practices of brand management (indexed by the Trystero’s extensive cultivation of symbolic assets such as a logo, slogan, mascot, and chant), I will argue that Pynchon develops the Trystero as an image for political authorship within commercial culture, an image that simultaneously endorses and resists branding as both a compensatory vehicle for counterculture’s political organization, and as a new model for postmodern and contemporary authorial self-construction.

Reading The Crying of Lot 49 in this way may seem at first to rehearse the terms of Thomas Frank’s and, more recently, Alan Liu’s accounts of counterculture’s relation to commercial culture. Revising the myth of an authentic counterculture’s cooptation by the “monolithic bad guys” of postwar American capitalism, Frank proposes that counterculture and commercial culture were “symbolic allies,” working in tandem to generate the hip symbolism from which the “hip consumerism” of the mid-sixties emerged.⁴ Building on Frank’s trajectory of hip, Liu triangulates the mainstream-counterculture-subculture relation in an effort to posit counterculture not simply as commercial culture’s ethotic double and inspiration, but as a disaffiliated mediator between the respective positions of mainstream insiders and subcultural outsiders. Acting as “insiders outside” and “outsiders inside,” Liu contends, counterculture oriented itself to subculture and the mainstream by “interioriz[ing] in its identity the complex relation between [the two],” simultaneously borrowing “the pose of subculture to protest angrily in the streets” while miming techno- and military-industrial styles associated with mainstream culture’s “adult workaday world.”⁵ Designating subculture as “that part of culture excluded by definition from normal work,” Liu thus sees counterculture as a pivot between mainstream cultures of work and subcultures of leisure, a contradictory milieu he most succinctly names an “alternative lifestyle.”⁶

Rather than take Trystero’s evocation of a brand as evidence of Frank’s symbolic alliance or, perhaps less generously still, as Pynchon’s disaffected illustration of counter-culture’s assent to the traditional charge of selling out, my suggestion that The Crying of Lot 49 represents branding as vehicle for the articulation of counterculture’s politics as well as for the self-fashioning of the countercultural novelist pursues what I perceive to be Pynchon and Liu’s shared sense of counterculture as a position capable of registering profound ambivalence toward commercial culture and subculture alike. Depicting the Trystero as a community forged by investments in a logo, slogan, mascot, and chant—a community that, in Liu’s sense, mimics the techniques of mainstream commercial culture while repurposing them for Trystero’s alternative yet not overtly anti-commercial modes of relation—Pynchon seems to propose that brand communities, like counterculture, limn a position of “insiders outside” in potentially critical and repurposable ways. At the same time, Pynchon expresses ambivalence about how authors, like brand managers, might sympathize with counterculture’s political aspirations while transmuting these aspirations into...