Poor Oedipa, pobrecita! She has tried so hard throughout this novel to understand the meaning of the W.A.S.T.E. symbol and the Thurn and Taxis history with no avail. Oedipa and I forgot that this novel is a postmodern one, and therefore, the harder we both look for meaning behind relationships, the more disappointment we feel. Oedipa should have just enjoyed the ride along her adventure and I should have just treasured the story as a good one. Oedipa did scrape up some meaning for the muted post horn, though.
Oedipa understands everything about her investigations to be a metaphor of God with many parts. “She knew a few things about it: it had opposed the Thurn and Taxis postal system in Europe; its symbol was a muted post horn; sometime before 1853 it had appeared in America and fought the Pony Express and Wells, Fargo, either as outlaws in black, or disguised as Indians; and it survived today, in California, serving as a channel of communication for those of unorthodox sexual persuasion, inventors who believed in the reality of Maxwell’s Demon,…” (109) Even this explanation of the novel’s happenings carries hardly any meaning whatsoever. It is a compilation of everything Oedipa gathers, but there exists no logical connections as she interacts with each new postmodern character.
Maxwell's Demon
There is one solid connection, though, between the muted post horn, the mismarked stamps, the postal service, and W.A.S.T.E. Oedipa comes across a crying drunk man who tells her how to deliver a letter by pointing to the muted post horn tattoo on his hand and giving her directions to the underpinnings of the freeway. “But at last in the shadows she did come on a can with a swinging trapezoidal top, the kind you throw trash in: old and green, nearly four feet high. On the swinging part were hand-painted the initials W.A.S.T.E.” (129-130) People drop off their letters into this can and men carry the trash bags as the transport system for the letters. This trash can is the only material and real connection between the post conspiracy and the underground mail delivery, and at last, it is a tangible one.
Show your allegiance to the W.A.S.T.E.!
Oedipa will have to dig further to discover more, but I am afraid she will go insane during the process; and as the ending of the novel appeared, I realized that I will never find out. Damn postmodernism, where is my closure?
Where is the happy part?
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