ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the question of what kinds of space characterize the late-twentieth-century city, by reading Thomas Pynchon’s short novel The Crying of Lot 49. A “mislocation of the self” is the crux of the cityscape of Southern California in Lot 49: a vast urban sprawl in which protagonist Oedipa Maas cannot get her bearings. Via reading Fredric Jameson against the grain, the chapter proceeds to argue that the mislocation of the self should be understood through anthropologist Marc Augé’s concept of non-place. The reading focuses on the ways in which Lot 49 explores the dynamics of the city as a signifying environment and its consequences for the urban individual. Lot 49 shows how discursive non-places are precisely where the urban subject can find freedom in temporary anonymity. This chapter concludes by turning to an essay by Pynchon, “A Journey Into the Mind of Watts,” written in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots on Watts in Los Angeles, to emphasize that the exclusionary politics of non-places reinforce a generic subject as markedly white and middle class.
