College English Association 2026

March 27, 2026

“‘I’ll Be a Fugitive’: Oedipa Maas’s Anti-Oedipal Declaration in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.” Presented on March 27, 2026.

“I’ll be a fugitive.” This is Oedipa Maas’s anti-Oedipal manifesto in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, marking a crucial moment when she decides to run away from her shrink, her family, and the police, and continues her quest for the Trystero, an underground mail system that seems to dominate the other side of the society – a quest that is, as she clearly knows, an impossible journey. Whether intentionally allusive or humorously parodical, Thomas Pynchon urges us to answer the question: “Is Oedipa Oedipal?” While criticism on the character has extensively examined the mythological and psychoanalytical associations, often framing her quest as a paranoid attempt to solve an Oedipal riddle, I propose to bring schizoanalysis into the discussion and argue that Oedipa Maas functions as an anti-Oedipal subject, one who demonstrates a schizophrenic, ever-becoming subjectivity elucidated in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

This bold claim marks her transformation from a housewife living a changeless life in the suburbs to a fugitive fleeing from the territorializing forces. Instead of succumbing to cynical numbness or insanity like her husband and her shrink, or becoming a representative of capitalism like her quondam lover, Oedipa symbolizes a line of flight from the postmodern dilemma between the desire for graspable totality and the uncertainty that is constantly generating possibilities. Becoming a fugitive means to embark on an Oedipal quest of knowledge but also to escape the Oedipus myth and the family drama, to seek the fulfillment of desire while accepting its impossibility, and also to embrace the ongoing flow of becoming. Ultimately, by alluding to the Greek myth and reversing it, resorting to psychoanalysis and subverting it, Pynchon renders Oedipa anti-Oedipal, and thus provides a possible solution for postmodern subjects: to be Oedipa Maas, to be something more than Oedipus.