“You know what a miracle is,” writes Thomas Pynchon in his short novel, The Crying of Lot 49, “….another world’s intrusion into this one” (97). On another page, in another character’s voice, he continues, “Cherish [fantasy]!…What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you” (113). And finally, in his narrator’s voice (one of his characters says elsewhere, “the human voice, you know, it’s a flipping miracle” [117])—Pynchon states the binary clearly: there’s either “another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none” (150).

That is the topic here. It is a crucial topic, this other mode of meaning that intrudes upon the world and that should be cherished as the miracle it is, for this is a topic that must interest all fiction writers, all who spend the hours of their lives in the throes of the miracle.

This topic spawns two extremes (“She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided;…” [150]). The first is extreme realism. The second is extreme fantasy. But in three dimensions, the extreme right and the extreme left fold together to share a common vision of reality. Perhaps they react differently to this vision. While sharing a common vision of what reality is, they perhaps differ in their explanation as to why it is. To put it in Pynchon’s terms, they have both made the same binary choice: to see the world as a binary choice.

In the sense of fiction writing, there are two extremes. The first, extreme realism, focuses on capturing life as it is. The fiction writer, in this sense, functions as a newspaper editor, selecting the elements of reality that cohere into a sensible and interesting story. As with the editor, so with the fiction writer: the story begins and ends in the world.

The second, extreme fantasy, begins by imagining another world. It doesn’t focus on life as it is, but (and specifically) as it isn’t. For extreme fantasy, the world isn’t quite rich enough on its own. It suffers from a lack of desired meaning. For extreme fantasy, the perfect fiction cannot take place, cannot occur, in our reality (the fantasists’ concept of “our” reality and the realists’ concept of “the” world are the same).

Back in the hotel she found the lobby full of deaf-mute delegates…. They were every one of them drunk, and a few of the men grabbed her, thinking to bring her along to a party in the [hotel’s] grand ballroom…where she was seized about the waist…and waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier. But how long, [she] thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music…[s]omething they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. …She was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus, everybody took a break, without having felt any touch… She curtsied and fled (107).

Where does that scene take place? What kind of writing is it? Is it extreme realism, or extreme fantasy? The realism: drunk delegates at a hotel grab an attractive young woman and bring her to a party in a ballroom, where under an unlit chandelier, she shuffles in a hushed and silent room, hushed and silent because all of the attendees are deaf-mutes, incapable of the chatter of crowds, incapable of hearing music. Like a silent scene in a talkie movie, it is a meaningful representation of the experience as it could have been. The fantasy: no one collides on the dance floor and the only explanation is a fantastic sixth sense, plus they all take a “mysterious” break at the same moment. In this scene, as in many of the others in The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon shows us both extreme reality and extreme fantasy occurring at the same time. His protagonist wants to know what is really going on.

With the arrival of a piece of mail, Pynchon separates his protagonist from the reality of attending Tupperware parties and begins to introduce her to the (possible) fantasy of a worldwide conspiracy that finds its roots in the Netherlands of the 16th century before it spreads across Europe, over the Atlantic, and onto American soil. By the middle of the 20th century, the conspiracy reaches all the way out to San Narcisco on the coast of California. It is a conspiracy that only shows its face in the existence of an underground postal system. The letter Pynchon’s protagonist receives on page one is a miracle. It is another world intruding into her own. It intrudes upon her world (and ours) and asks, “Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none?”

The answer?

“What else do any of you have?”