Valley of Dry Bones: How ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ Sheds Light On Holocaust Denial

It has become commonplace, not to say cliched, to compare the day and age we live in to George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm and to Aldous Huxely’s Brave New World.  I have many times commented on social media some variation of the complaint that these dystopian novels were intended to be warnings, not blueprints. But an even more apt comparison to the current state of the world may be found in a novel that is not quite so well-known and widely quoted. 

Thomas Pynchon’s 1965 postmodern novel, The Crying of Lot 49, was my first introduction to postmodernism. Upon revisiting the novel recently, it struck me that we need to look no further than the yellowed pages of this old novel to find a narrative that sheds light upon the explosion of Holocaust denial engaged in by prominent right-wing figures of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. 

The Crying of Lot 49 takes postmodernism out of the realm of theory and academia and into the realm of the ordinary. Some academic definitions of the postmodern vocabulary can serve as a map and compass to help navigate the overgrown terrain of this puzzling novel, and which we can use, in turn, as a map for our present day. As befits an English major, I turn to my trusty Bennet and Royle volume, “Literature: Criticism and Theory,” (Pearson 2009) for the terms dissemination, the undecidable, and the unpresentable. Dissemination, also called fragmentation, “involves a scattering (as of seeds), a scattering of origins and ends, of identity, center, and presence (282).”

Undecidability “involves the impossibility of deciding between two or more competing interpretations. Undecidability splits the text, and disorders it. Undecidability dislodges the principle of a single final meaning in a literary text. It haunts” (280). The unpresentable, finally, “is an effect, not least, of a disturbance in temporality, of the linear progression of time (287).” These aspects of postmodern life describe the changes in culture and economics that have been brought about by WWII. By looking at what the bones tell us about the history and commodification in postmodern culture as described in Lot 49, we may come to a clearer understanding of the way those changes are still affecting our society today, some 70 years after that great conflict. 

Author and Founder of Wrong Speak Publishing’s 'Black Victim to Black Victor: Second Edition' is now available at Wrong Speak Publishing, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble! Pick up your copy today!

Thomas Pynchon’s 1965 postmodern novel, The Crying of Lot 49, may as well have been set in the prophet Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones as in fictional central California, where the action of the novel actually takes place. The plot of the novel is sown with the seeds of dry bones that, figuratively speaking, walked around haunting the living instead of resting in peace. 

The bones also provide a metaphor for the way each piece of the often obscure novel fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. In a novel that is all about silent communication, it is the scattered bones, in their silence, that tell the story of this culture of dissemination. This 20th century, post-WWII, postmodern consumer culture lacks all respect for the dead. It has no regard for the past that has turned the bones into commodities. And finally, it has turned the horrors of that past into something to ignore or transform into lurid entertainment. 

The bones of Lot 49 encompass far more than simple human skeletons of soldiers and sailors who fell in WWII or souls who perished in the concentration camps. In the novel, bones are also the remnants of human lives. They span from coupons in used cars to memories of the Holocaust. These remnants have been discarded, forgotten, or lost in the shuffle of consumerism.

The bones were apparently not permitted to rest in peace on the bottom of the sea for very long. After the war, salvage teams determined that bones could be a commodity. They could be in turn a tourist trap sale, a ‘cult of the dead’ attraction, or leverage with Senator McCarthy. They were sold to make fertilizer and cigarettes. The bones of the honorable dead had become a lucrative commodity in a world that sought only to forget its past.

Tucker Carlson’s recent conversation with ‘Martyr Made’ is an example of the unpresentable, that is, the history/fiction blur that is a defining characteristic of postmodernism. “The postmodern,” explains Bennet and Royle, “challenges the distinction between mimesis, or copy, and the real” (268). Postmodern thought is characterized by the uncertainty of where history leaves off and fiction begins. 

Perhaps this revealing conversation is the key to the post-WWII and postmodern world we ourselves live in. A world in which the atrocities of the Holocaust have been unleashed is a world that must forget, by any means necessary, that such horrors ever happened. In Lot 49, some of those means are hardness of heart, LSD, relentless consumerism, or a quest for meaning where there simply is none.

Perhaps our own means today are not so different. The world of Lot 49 is a world in which an entire generation of young men were wiped out in the trenches of WWII a mere twenty years prior. Our world today is one in which we seem bound and determined to wipe out all history and rush head-long, hell-bent for leather, into an even more devastating conflict than the past two World Wars put together. The world of Lot 49 is one which has become so desensitized to death that disrespectful acts like digging up a few cemeteries to build highways and selling a few bones to make cigarettes seem commonplace. Yet this world, like ours, is a world that cannot escape the bones that are haunting it. 

Perhaps we might listen to what those bones are trying silently to communicate to us before there is nothing left of us all but bones. 

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.