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Department of English and American Studies English Language And Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Marek Torčík Entropy in Three Early Works of Thomas Pynchon Bachelor's Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D. 2016 1 2 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature 3 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D., for his patience and valuable advice provided for this thesis. 5 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 8 2. Entropy ............................................................................................................................. 16 2.1 Omens of Apocalypse ................................................................................................ 17 2.2 Noise and entropy ...................................................................................................... 25 3. The Crying of Lot 49 ....................................................................................................... 29 3.1 The failure of Maxwell’s demon ................................................................................ 30 3.2 We Await Silently Trystero’s Empire ........................................................................ 35 4. Gravity’s Rainbow ........................................................................................................... 40 4.1 Beyond the Zero ......................................................................................................... 42 4.2 Sloth or entropy .......................................................................................................... 43 4.3 Interconnected systems .............................................................................................. 46 5. Conclusion: An Organized Disorder ................................................................................ 51 Bibliography......................................................................................................................... 54 Resumé (English) ................................................................................................................. 57 Resumé (Czech) ................................................................................................................... 58 6 7 1. Introduction This thesis provides an analysis of three early works by Thomas Pynchon and the way they use the notion of entropy, or the measure of disorder, as exemplified in the second law of thermodynamics1. In all three works — namely the short story Entropy, the novella Crying of Lot 49 and the epic Gravity’s Rainbow — Pynchon explicitly uses the concept of entropy and notions from information theory, as well as the related notions of Maxwell’s demon and so on, for his own purposes, creating, as I further argue, a narrative aesthetic that is subject to the second law of thermodynamics. Thus, entropy in Thomas Pynchon’s writing is not limited to a mere reference, a curiosity in the plot. Rather, it serves as a higher organizing element of the narrative and the overall conceptual frame of the author’s work. This aesthetic provides a narrative order in otherwise very “disordered” fiction. An analysis of the specific workings of entropy in Pynchon’s works will thus provide a better and more complex understanding. Pynchon’s work is subject to a lot of criticism. In his essay American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction, Gore Vidal discusses the state of the then contemporary American fiction in his sensational way, mentioning Pynchon amongst the likes of John Barth, Donald Bartheleme and others. He finds his writing to be “too academic” and a “perfect teacher’s novel” arguing that his writing is disorganized and that: “the energy expended in reading Gravity’s Rainbow is, for anyone, rather greater than that expended by Pynchon in the actual writing” (Vidal 98). He also criticizes the inconsistency of Pynchon’s characters. However, Pynchon’s work draws heavily on Herman Melville’s 1 Oxford English Dictionary, cited by Pynchon himself, defines entropy and the second law of thermodynamics as such: “The entropy of a system = the sum of the entropies of its parts, and is always increased by any transport of heat within the system: hence ‘the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum’ (Clausius). The term was first used in English by Prof. Tait” (Oxford English Dictionary). 8 final novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade2 both in structure and inner workings and thus similar to Melville’s masterpiece, it creates its own mode of organization. His narratives are organized and consistent precisely in their non-linear chaos and apparent inconsistency. In this way, Pynchon’s narrative forms a body of writing that correlates with Deleuze and Guattari’s later notion of a rhizome3, a non-hierarchical organization opposed to the traditional “arboretal” models of organization. Yet, Vidal fails to recognize this as well as the value of his own observations. In fact, many of the things he criticizes in Pynchon’s writing are intentional and form a crucial element in what I call the “entropic narrative,” a narrative that makes use of the second law of thermodynamics. This thesis explores and tries to describe the functioning of this specific narrative order. The thesis is divided into three main chapters. Each chapter subdivides into specific sections for easier orientation and deals with one book for each chapter. In the conclusion, the thesis connects the themes and notions discussed, to create a unified analysis of the influence of entropy on Pynchon’s narrative. The first chapter deals with the short story Entropy, which explicitly refers to the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is a short story about a variety of characters in Washington D.C., most notably Callisto, a paranoiac obsessed with the coming of an apocalypse in the form of heat death of the universe4. This paranoia and a sense of an apocalypse forms an important and widely acknowledged5 part of Pynchon’s creative canon, it is thus even more interesting to look at an early form of the author’s portrayal 2 Although the parallel is more often drawn between Pynchon and Melville’s Moby-Dick, as in: Levitsky, Zhana. 2015. The Rocket and the Whale: A Critical Study of Pynchon’s Use of Melville. Master's thesis, Harvard Extension School. 3 In his 1990 novel Vineland, Pynchon mentions Deleuze and Guattari in a joke, referring to their fictional Italian Wedding Fake Book. 4 Meriam Webster Dictionary defines heat death of the universe as “an ultimate state of thermal equilibrium implying conditions of maximum entropy and zero available energy that according to the laws of thermodynamics the material universe is apparently approaching.” 5 See for example Olehla, Richard. Perspektivy konce: Thomas Pynchon a americký román po 11. září. Vyd. 1. Praha: Karolinum, 2014. 9 of these notions. Framed by Pynchon’s introduction to Slow Learner, Entropy posits a manual of sorts for the reader. It reveals the principles later elaborated in both Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The narrative of the short story, I argue, is subjugated to the second law itself, with the characters unable to overcome the ever increasing entropic drive of their universe. Chapter two deals with Crying of Lot 49, a novella about Oedipa Maas and her journey of discovery, it provides an exploration of order and disorder, of paranoiac systems… It is here that Pynchon introduces many of the concepts that are inherently present throughout much of his writing. Crying of Lot 49’s length helps to enlighten Pynchon’s entropic narrative strategy that will later crystalize in his masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow. In this chapter I argue that the structure of the whole novel is subjugated to the second law of thermodynamics and the notion of Maxwell’s demon, an imagined entity capable of reversing the second law of thermodynamics, in other words, of overcoming the tendency of entropy to always increase. Maxwell’s demon is a recurring theme in Pynchon’s work, it certainly affects all the works analyzed in this thesis. The third chapter deals with perhaps the best known novel by Thomas Pynchon which is often compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses both in its length and complexity. Gravity’s Rainbow is, with more than 900 pages, a novel about information overload. The amount of information conveyed to the reader is so extensive that the entropic drive results in the main character’s dissolution. Slothrop simply ceases to be a unified entity and, much in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, confirms the similarity of entropic structure of the narrative to the rhizomatic structures they try to convey in A Thousand Plateaus. The name Slothrop itself is subject to interpretation, with Salman Rushdie 10 suggesting that the name is an abbreviation for “sloth or entropy”6. The dismantling of the main character until he ceases to be a unified persona as well as the overall direction of the novel towards an inevitable chaos and its ever-increasing linguistic and narrative entropy provide an almost transcendental exploration of the human condition. In Gravity’s Rainbow, everything is connected in a mesh of narrative voices. This interconnectedness forms a new form organization in a non-linear way that makes use of the apocalyptic heat-death the novel inevitably leads
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