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

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I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D., for his patience and valuable advice provided for this thesis.

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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

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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 to.

A note on the selection of the texts ought to be made. Considering the context of

Pynchon’s work up to his most recent novel Bleeding Edge (dealing with the dot-com bubble and subsequent 9/11 attacks), entropy in its apocalyptic sense can be pinpointed as the leitmotif of Pynchon’s body of work. The world of Benny Profane in Pynchon’s first novel V. is thus filled with information noise and seems to lean towards a more disordered universe in the same way as Inherent Vice7 does. The three works selected for this thesis are exemplary due to their nature, length and specific structure. On one side of the spectrum is Entropy, a short story from Pynchon’s younger years that was criticized by the author himself. The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1965, is a novella about Oedipa Maas and the mysterious group called Tristero. Exploring the notions of information theory and entropy perhaps in the most explicit way, The Crying of Lot 49 positions itself in the middle. In a linear and arguably straight forward way the book makes use of (but at the same time parodies) the Aristotelean unity of time and space.

Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s 1973 tour de force, is on the other side of the spectrum: in its length, it is an extensive study of war-time Germany and much more. Its inevitable

6 See Rushdie’s article “Still Crazy after All These Years” on Vineland published in New York Times, January 14, 1990 7 The term inherent vice itself is used in insurance business for “a natural characteristic that causes some goods to be spoiled or become damaged, which insurance companies will not accept as a risk” (Cambridge English Dictionary) and in the archival sciences as “the tendency of material to deteriorate due to the essential instability of the components or interaction among components” (Society of American Archivists)

11 heat death forms a new ambitious approach to narrative by Pynchon. These specific works function together and form an evolutionary outline of Pynchon’s body of work.

They all use the concept of entropy in a much more straightforward way than the others.

A very important study of Thomas Pynchon’s writing is provided in Molly Hite’s

1983 Ideas of Order in The Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Hite in her book explores the various notions of order and disorder, notions tightly connected to those of entropy, arguing that the idea of an ordered narrative is inherent to Pynchon’s writing in a very specific way — the structure of the order responds to notions of disorder much in the same way as entropic systems in thermodynamics are inherently ordered8. She argues that:

Pynchon’s narratives are […] about order: about its presence or absence;

about order as object of desire, dread, fantasy, or hallucination; about

what order means, how it is apprehended, and what it entails. […] His

characters look for the hidden structures of their experience that will

reveal how events are connected, how everything adds up, what it all

means; and these structures reduplicate, oppose, or stand in some other

relation to the overall structure of the narrative. (Hite 4)

Hite argues on the example of V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow, that characters’ “quest” and the interconnectedness of everything is trying to convey a hidden meaning, which is however outside the reader’s (and the characters’) reach. This is linked to the notion of continuity, the reader is left only with an unfinished sentence.

Consider the famous ending of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Now everybody —“ (Pynchon

2013, 1443). Hite’s observations are crucial to an “entropic” understanding of

Pynchon’s narrative in that they describe the various ways order can be looked at in the context of Pynchon’s work.

8 See further discussion of Arnheim.

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In his introduction to Slow Learner, a collection of early short stories, the otherwise “reclusive” Pynchon provides a unique inside into his idiosyncratic writing.

First published in 1984, Slow Learner is a retrospective of a much younger Pynchon.

The introduction is a key text for an analysis of Pynchon’s writing in several ways: it provides a frame of understanding of the broader context of his work; the introductory note reveals Pynchon’s perception of his own writing and also, regarding Entropy, it provides other materials, mentioned by the author and reveals its background:

I happened to read Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings

(a rewrite for the interested layman of his more technical Cybernetics) at

about the same time as The Education of Henry Adams, and the “theme”

of the story [Entropy] is mostly derivative of what these two men had to

say. (Pynchon 1984, 13)

It ought to be mentioned, and the author accuses himself of this, that the understanding of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics “got picked up on by some communication theorist and given the cosmic moral twist it continues to enjoy in current usage”

(Pynchon 1984, 13). He suggests that his portrayal of “the marital crisis described is once again,[…], unconvincingly simplified”(Pynchon 1984, 13). Pynchon further states that: “since I wrote this story, I have kept trying to understand entropy, but my grasp becomes less sure the more I read” (Pynchon 1984, 14). Indeed, Pynchon’s understanding of entropy permeates all three books in this thesis. It is my aim here to prove that the books not only deal with entropy as a part of its plot, but that they in fact are about entropy, in the sense that they adopt its workings and make use of its qualities to create a specific narrative.

Making use of the sources provided by Pynchon’s introduction to Slow Learner, this thesis considers Norbert Wiener’s Human Use of Human Beings as a technical reference for some of the scientific concept, since Pynchon explicitly mentions

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Wiener’s work (although there is an ongoing debate in both the field of information theory and thermodynamics on the factuality and accurateness of many of the concepts dealt with in this thesis).9 Wiener’s book deals with cybernetics, information theory but also with the human condition in an increasingly automatized world. Its philosophical and sometimes apocalyptic connotations mirror in Pynchon’s writing. Wiener, a mathematical prodigy, shows an extensive background in philosophy and literature and draws from this knowledge a vision of future. Being aware of the dangers the modern age posits to the humanity, he creates an apologetics of automatization. Substantial as it is, Wiener’s observations in the field of information theory are connected with narrative in that the aim of both is the conveying of message. In much the same way as Marshall

McLuhan acknowledges that the medium is the message10, Wiener writes in a chapter entitled “Organization as the Message” that: “A pattern is a message and may be transmitted as a message” (Wiener 96). This is especially important considering the context of Pynchon’s highly formalized narrative.

As noted both in Vidal’s critique and Pynchon’s introduction to Slow Learner,

Henry Adams was a major influence on Pynchon’s work. The famous american historian is known to become impressed by the notion of history subjected to the second law of thermodynamics and the time’s inevitable drive towards equilibrium

(however, his notion of history and entropy was almost immediately renounced by scientists as inaccurate). In the chapter “A Dynamic Theory of History” from the posthumously published The Education of Henry Adams he tries to convey an image of history as temptation to equilibrium in an economic sense. Even more substantial to the thesis is Adams’s 1909 Rule of Phase Applied to History which discusses in a more technical way the entropic drive of the universe towards equilibrium in connection with

9 For the purposes of this thesis it is sufficient to consider only those sources available at the time of the publication of Pynchon’s work. 10 See McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding media: the extensions of man. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

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August Comte’s Law of Three Phases of History and Maxwell’s notion of the “demon”.

Adams’ observation are often dismissed by others as Romantic notions that imply apocalypse. However it is crucial to mention Adams’ work for the understanding of

Pynchon’s entropic narrative and the overall tendency of his books— a tendency towards ultimate equilibrium.

Finally, it is important to mention Rudolf Arnheim’s 1971 Entropy and Art:

Essays on Disorder and Order, a collection of essays dealing with the influence of the second law of thermodynamics on arts. Arnheim argues that:

It follows that the entropy principle defines order simply as an

improbable arrangement of elements, regardless of whether the macro-

shape of this arrangement is beautifully structured or most arbitrarily

deformed; and it calls disorder the dissolution of such an improbable

arrangement. (Arnheim 13)

In this sense, Arnheim’s definition and perception of entropy implies an “order in disorder,” or else: according to him, order is an “improbable arrangement of elements” and entropy reorders this improbability into a more harmonic arrangement, creating a new order which is more natural than the old one. Thus maximum entropy cannot be, according to Arnheim, understood as a measure of disorder, since even chaos has its implicit organization. This understanding of a disordered system as a more natural

“order” is crucial to the understanding of Pynchon’s narrative.

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2. Entropy

Entropy, probably the most well known Pynchon’s short story, was originally published 1960 in the Kenyon Review. In 1984, it was included with other short stories in Pynchon’s only such collection, Slow Learner: Early Stories. The introduction to

Slow Learner is a unique insight into his creative processes, almost a “journey into the mind of Pynchon”, to paraphrase the author’s 1966 article about the Watts riots.11 The introduction frames the whole collection as “illustrative of typical problems in entry- level fiction, and cautionary about some practices which younger writers might prefer to avoid” (Pynchon 1984, 4). Entropy on its own is denounced by Pynchon as “a fine example of a procedural error beginning writers are always being cautioned against”

(Pynchon 1984, 12). However, the story offers an interesting look into the creative themes as well as into Pynchon’s narrative strategies and the context of much of his metaphors, that would later crystalize in a masterpiece like Gravity’s Rainbow.

Entropy is set in Washington, D.C. of 1957 during a single day of “false spring.”

It is preoccupied mainly with two characters: Callisto, a man dictating his memoirs to his girlfriend, and with Meatball Mulligan and his party that is “moving into its 40th hour” (Pynchon 1984, 81). Meatball Mulligan is throwing a “lease-breaking” party in his flat, which is more and more stacked with a variety of completely unrelated people: government officials mix with young girls, “weirdos,” and others from Pynchon’s typical sample of characters. The party is essentially a very disorganized system where girls sleep in bathtubs and people are entering through fire escapes. In contrast to this chaos is Callisto’s apartment. At least in thought, the apartment is sealed away from the outside influence. Here, Callisto and his girlfriend Aubade live in an enclave of isolated

11 See Pynchon, Thomas. "A Journey into the Mind of Watts." The New York Times. 1997. Web. 12 Mar. 2016.

16 system trying to keep everything organized and sustain the life of an injured bird.

Callisto is a paranoiac, obsessed with the coming of an apocalypse in the form of the heat death of the universe. Thus, the name of the story comes into play; it is dealing with various notions of entropy and its implications of order and disorder. The story crystalizes in the destruction of this isolated system by Aubade’s shattering of the window, an act that will ultimately lead towards a thermal equilibrium of the flat and the outside world.

In this chapter, I analyze the notion that Entropy serves as a metaphor for dealing with the concept of entropy and at the same time, it responds and in part parodies some understandings of entropy in the social sciences 12 and history, like that of Henry

Adams’ view of a universal decline. Entropy also serves as a frame for other themes to come on surface. The chapter will conclude in an analysis of “entropic” narrative ordering and the metaphorical entropy that is used in a specific way that foreshadows and gives context to Pynchon’s further exploration of narrative possibilities that crystalize in his masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow.

2.1 Omens of Apocalypse

The theme uniting the story, the overwhelming sense of disorder and apocalyptic mood of the entire narrative crystalizes in the last moment of the story, when the window of Callisto’s flat is broken. This ending however, is not surprising at all, on the contrary, it is the most logical conclusion. The concept of entropy is sometimes defined not as a measure of improbability, but as the ultimate drive of particles to achieve their

12 Luhmann in the introduction to Social Systems cites Thermodynamics and biology as the two key factors responsible for changes in the system theory.

17 most probable and simple patterns13. Entropy, the story, uses the notion of entropy as a metaphor to the supposed tendency of society to decline and fall apart. At the same time, Pynchon is trying to convey the nonsensical reality of “cultural” entropy14 and parodies it.

In his Introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon writes:

I happened to read Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings

(a rewrite for the interested layman of his more technical Cybernetics) at

about the same time as The Education of Henry Adams, and the “theme”

of the story [Entropy] is mostly derivative of what these two men had to

say. (Pynchon 1984, 13)

Henry Adams, one of the famous American educators and historians became in the later years of his life, obsessed with entropy. He was amongst the first to compare it to the social sphere and in his A Letter To American Teachers of History and in several chapters of his acclaimed 1918 The Education of Henry Adams, Adams created a vision of an entropic course of history. Even in his time, Adams’ views of “social entropy” were dismissed by his many of his contemporaries. Entropy in the work of Henry

Adams is best represented in his A Letter To American Teachers of History. There,

Adams argues for a “degradationist” view of history that David Seed unjustly compares to a romantically determinist notion:

13 See Gasser, R, and W Richards. An Introduction To Statistical Thermodynamics. Singapore: World Scientific, c1995. Print. Gasser and Richards provide a comprehensive analysis of the various tendencies in statistical thermodynamics and argue, that rather than a tendency towards disorder, entropy is represented by fluctuations between states of high and low organization. This is further explicated in Zeman, Jiří, and Libor Kubát. Entropy And Information In Science And Philosophy. Prague: Academia, 1975. Print. 14 Cf. De Zwaan, Victoria. “Pynchon's 'entropy.' (Thomas Pynchon)”. The Explicator 51.3 (1993): 194- 196. Print. De Zwaan argues that although many critics highlight entropy as the most important theme in author’s writing, they often misinterpret it and thus remove “it from its contextual and metaphoric use in Pynchon's earlier work and distracts us from the playful complexity” (De Zwaan 194). This thesis includes Pynchon’s early writing precisely for its contextual values.

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After a large part of the whole existent energy has gone to raise the dead

level of things, no difference of temperature, adequate to work between,

will be possible, and the inevitable death of all things will approach with

headlong rapidity. (Adams 19)

In much of his work, Pynchon is playing15 with this apocalyptic perception, at times even ridiculing Adams’ tendency to connect entropy to every possible aspect of human life. David Seed in his essay Order in Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Entropy’ argues amongst other things that the application of entropy on the social sphere is a very Romantic notion connected to the fin de siècle moods of that time and thus cannot be applied, not even on history. This is also visible in Norbert Wiener’s definition of cybernetics, when he describes the tendency in history as that of a “darwinian progress.” Wiener is also cited by Pynchon as one of his influences. His work permeates the whole body of

Pynchon’s writing, with themes ranging from communication theory, mechanics and thermodynamics. In his 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener, the founder of the field of cybernetics and an expert in communication theory, writes:

Sooner or later we shall die, and it is highly probable that the whole

universe around us will die the heat death, in which the world shall be

reduced to one vast temperature equilibrium in which nothing really new

ever happens. There will be nothing left but a drab uniformity out of

which we can expect only minor and insignificant local fluctuations.

(Wiener 31)

This is, in Wiener’s perspective, the only implication of entropy. Even though his is also an apocalyptic notion subject to Romantic sentiments, it does not imply Adams’ degradation of history. The end, in Wiener’s perspective, is postponed somewhere

15 I use the word play with positive connotations. Although Pynchon is a fundamentally serious writer, he uses satire, parody and “playfulness” to communicate serious issues more effectively.

19 beyond our imagination, in the time when no human will be alive, much in the sense of

Jacques Derrida’s 1984 essay No Apocalypse, Not Now16. The sense of a “postponed” apocalypse is very important when considering Pynchon’s writing and will be discussed in subsequent chapters. In the context of Entropy, the postponed apocalypse takes the form of a shattered window and the number 37, which will eventually take hold of the room until it reaches equilibrium and thus achieve its end.

In Entropy, Pynchon plays with both Adams’ and Wiener’s ideas. This “game” results in a parody of Adams’ view as argued in Seed’s essay Order in Thomas

Pynchon’s ‘Entropy’. Here, Seed suggests that Entropy essentially dismisses Adams’ understanding of entropy, which is too fantastical in its pessimistic tone, and that

Callisto is in fact Adams’ impersonator. Seed further writes about Meatball Mulligan’s party that: “Apart from social ironies the party dramatizes one strand of meaning in

‘entropy,’ namely that it measures the amount of energy unavailable for conversion to work in a system. […] As movement increases at Mulligan’s party, so does its randomness” (Seed 145). This is an important observation for the understanding of the whole story. Meatball’s party is in fact nothing more than entropy in practice. As

Pynchon writes in the introduction, criticizing his own writing: “It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it” (Pynchon 1984, 12). However disagreeable this is to the author, it is precisely what he has done. In Entropy, characters are subject to the second law of thermodynamics in the way that their actions respond to the universal tendency towards increased randomness.

Consider now Meatball Mulligan’s party on its own. In the beginning of the story, the narrator describes the party as “moving into its 40th hour” (Pynchon 1984, 81). The

16 Richard Olehla in his 2014 book Perspektivy konce: Thomas Pynchon a americký román po 11. září deals with Derrida’s essay in connection to Pynchon’s novels and their portrayal of apocalypse. See Olehla, Richard. Perspektivy konce: Thomas Pynchon a americký román po 11. září. Vyd. 1. Praha: Karolinum, 2014.

20 party is taking place in a building in Washington, D.C. and is filled with government officials, such as members of the State Department or NSA. The overall description is that of an ultimate chaos. Cigarettes containing “cannabis sativa,” rooms full of

“American expatriates” who like to “stage, for instance, polyglot parties where the newcomer was sort of ignored if he couldn’t carry on simultaneous conversations in three or four languages” (Pynchon 1984, 82). The reader very quickly senses the overall disorder of the party, but the most important description is that of the weather:

The day before, it had snowed and the day before that there had been

winds of gale force and before that the sun had made the city glitter

bright as April, though the calendar read early February. It is a curious

season in Washington, this false spring. (Pynchon 1984, 82)

The theme of weather is very important to the entire story. Firstly the introductory quote from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer frames the story’s “unchanging weather.”

Pynchon himself in the introduction stresses the importance of weather: “For a while all

I worried about was that I’d set things up in terms of temperature and not energy. As I read more about the subject later, I came to see that this had not been such a bad tactic”

(Pynchon 1984, 13). This is why the number 37 is constantly repeated: “‘It is 37. Still

37.’ Callisto frowned. ‘Since Tuesday, then,’ he said. ‘No change’” (Pynchon 1984, 85).

37 degrees Fahrenheit are not purely coincidental, the number 37 symbolizes the temperature of human beings in degrees of Celsius. This symbolism becomes crucial for later consideration of the other character, Callisto.

Mulligan’s party is in the lower floor of the building and is rather open for people to come in. As everybody is “slowly getting wasted on tequila” (Pynchon 1984, 91), the party is becoming increasingly disorganized. The reader witnesses girls sleeping in bathtubs, characters entering the party through fire-escapes and dialogues loosing their

21 meaning. When the level of disorder reaches unbearable levels, Meatball is forced to act. He has two possibilities:

(a) lock himself in the closet and maybe eventually they would all go

away, or (b) try to calm everybody down, one by one. […] It was dark

and stuffy and he would be alone. (Pynchon 1984, 96)

Meatball eventually decides to try and “keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos” (Pynchon 1984, 96). However this comes at an expense of energy and the narrator carefully describes all the work he does after this decision. The way

Meatball decided to act and his dilemma itself is very similar to some of Pynchon’s later work, Meatball’s ordering of the chaotic party puts him into a function of a kind of

“Maxwell’s demon,17”an implied metaphor, here at best shallow, but later elaborated on in The Crying of Lot 49 on the character of Oedipa Maas, as is discussed in the second chapter.

Considering the number 37 and notions of temperature in the story again, Callisto is obsessed with its symbolic value and with entropy itself. “Leery at the omens of apocalypse” (Pynchon 1984, 85), the character is dictating memoirs to his girlfriend

Aubade in an isolated apartment. Whats more, the apartment is:

Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity in the city’s

chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, of national politics, of any

civil disorder. Through trial-and-error Callisto had perfected its

ecological balance, … (Pynchon 1984, 84)

The apartment is so different from the party that is happening below. In fact, the two apartments are quite an antithesis of each other. By this, Pynchon opposes two various notions: that of disorder and order. Callisto in his flat commits three distinctive acts of

17 A thought experiment devised by Clerk Maxwell. An entity capable of decreasing the entropy of a closed system. For a detailed description see Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York, NY: Da Capo, 1988. Print.

22 ordering. First, his flat is an attempt to isolate the two from the ever increasing entropy.

Second, he is dictating his memoirs, or in other words, sorting his thoughts and life into an organized, chronological narrative. And last, together with Aubade, they are trying to bring back to life a dying bird that Callisto had been “holding […] like that for three days: it was the only way he knew to restore its health.” (Pynchon 1984, 83). The hermetically sealed flat stands in opposition to Meatball’s party, yet it is still influenced by it. The narrator stresses the connection between the two with the theme “of music which emerged at intervals from a howling darkness of discordancy” (Pynchon 1984,

84), of music which is working its way into Callisto’s enclave of order.

The dying bird in Callisto’s flat symbolizes perhaps the inevitability of death. At least for Callisto and Aubade, it is precisely this. In thermodynamic terms, the heat equals energy and thus when Callisto is holding the bird, warming him in his hands, he perhaps imagines that it is “almost as if I were communicating life to him, or a sense of life” (Pynchon 1984, 97). However later when the bird is clearly dying, Callisto has the feeling as if “the transfer of heat ceased to work” (Pynchon 1984, 98). When the bird dies in the end of the story, its death results in Aubade breaking the window, thus allowing for the temperature inside the room and of the world outside to mingle “until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, forever” (Pynchon 1984, 98). By this ending, Pynchon is putting the two main characters, Callisto and Meatball, into juxtaposition. While the later one decreases the disorder of his party, playing his part as a “Maxwell’s demon,” the other is, ironically, unable to overcome his apocalyptic feeling and thus witnesses the increase of entropy in his enclave, that will gradually head towards the much feared heat death. I provide an analysis of this ending in more detail in the next part of this chapter.

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The character of Callisto bears an uncanny resemblance to Henry Adams. As

David Seed notes:

Once Callisto starts dictating his memoirs it becomes clear that he is a

parody of Henry Adams, specifically the author of The Education. Like

Adams at the time of composing the book, Callisto is living in

Washington. Both describe themselves in the third person; both are

attempting to articulate the cultural implications of modern scientific

theory. (Seed 140)

The similarities between the two are strengthened by Callisto’s mentioning of Adams.

He is thus put into a position of an “imitator,” obsessed with the apocalyptic implications of the second law of thermodynamics, specifically that of culture and music. Thus, the noise from Meatball’s party gains an importance. The term noise is an important concept in the field of communication theory, drawing on it other terms, it is often dealt with in literary science18. The notion of noise is also very important to the frame of the story and I will deal with it in detail in the following part. However, in

Callisto’s flat, noise has a much more of a concrete manifestation in the form of music from Meatball’s party. It triggers Callisto into contemplation of various cultural notions of music, like Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat. Callisto thinks of this particular work by Stravinsky as supposedly lacking of order and thus, in Callisto’s perspective, value.

For Callisto L’Histoire du Soldat is indicative of the increase of entropy and prolliferation in art.

18 See Serres, Michel, and Lawrence R. Schehr. The Parasite. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print.

24

2.2 Noise and entropy

An analysis of the language and narrative of Pynchon’s story is needed for its better understanding. It is clear that the story is amongst other things about language and noise. From the very beginning, we are introduced to two very different characters in two opposed environments. This juxtaposition is crucial to Pynchon’s narrative, because it creates a tension between two states: one relatively disordered and the other relatively ordered. From this tension, the narrative derives its play with the concept of entropy. The first law of thermodynamics is that of the conservation of energy19 while the second law states that entropy of a closed system will always tend to its maximum20.

Considering two open systems that are part of a single closed system, the temperature

(in our sense temperature equals energy) will try to achieve equilibrium. The number 37 is thus a uniting element in the story. It is the final value, an apocalyptic number.

By creating these two “systems,” that of Callisto’s flat and that of Meatball’s party, Pynchon creates a metaphorical environment similar to that of Maxwell’s demon, a thought experiment supposedly able to break the second law of thermodynamics21.

The two systems, seemingly isolated from each other, are interconnected. Not only is

Meatball’s and Callisto’s flat in the same building, the noise from the party is piercing through the walls into Callisto’s rooms— the first hints of an exchange. While Meatball

Mulligan’s flat is open to newcomers and thus open for thermal exchange between the outside and the inside, Callisto is trying to isolate himself from the entropic universe, which he perceives as dangerous and degenerating: “outside the temperature remained constant at 37 degrees Fahrenheit” (Pynchon 1984, 92). However, at the end of the

19 Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. 20 As discussed in Grasser and Richards, since the late 20th century, there is much debate on whether the tendency of entropy is always to decrease or whether it is more a matter of ongoing fluctuations. Cf. Zeman, Jiří, and Libor Kubát. Entropy And Information In Science And Philosophy. Prague: Academia, 1975. Print. 21 Cf. discussion of Maxwell’s demon in the context of The Crying of Lot 49

25 story, Aubade breaks the window in a desperate move and thus destroys the isolation and allows the number 37 to mingle with the temperature of the room. This does not happen, until Meatball starts organizing his party. It is as if in order for one to become more organized, the other has to fall in chaos. One could argue that this is almost an exchange of energies, that will ultimately lead to the most natural state, equilibrium.

In the introduction, Pynchon writes that at the time of writing the story, he “was more concerned with committing on paper a variety of abuses, such as overwriting”

(Pynchon 1984, 15). Overwriting, in a positive sense, is one of Pynchon’s trademarks, his novels are stuffed with information, details, characters and strange dialogues.

Consider for example this seemingly unimportant information: “like Machiavelli, he allowed the forces of virtù and fortuna to be about 50/50” (Pynchon 1984, 88). It is also here that Pynchon first mentions the Pavlovian dog and conditioned reflexes, a notion later developed into one of Gravity’s Rainbow’s main themes; he jokes about mnemonic devices for remembering the laws of thermodynamics and so on. Already in this early work, Pynchon incorporates into the narrative his typical voice. For its small length,

Entropy introduces many characters and concepts, some of them only for a brief moment, not to be mentioned again. In this sense, Pynchon’s story, as it proceeds, is becoming increasingly overcrowded by names and concepts and information— it becomes more disorganized, chaotic as the overall entropy increases. In the end, it is hard to orient between the switches of dialogues and the shift of focus from Meatball to

Callisto.

Dialogues in Entropy are yet another instance of an increasing disorder. Consider the multilingual parties at the beginning of the story, or Meatballs mentioning of the

“language barrier.” In the beginning of the story, Callisto and Aubade are discussing the dying bird. Even though they communicate in short sentences, their conversation is brief and effective. However, this is not the case with Meatball’s party, where characters

26 are uttering nonsensical things out of context, sometimes only sounds like “Aarrgghh,”

“Oaf!” and “Wha.” As the story proceeds, the dialogues of both are becoming more and more distorted. In this sense, the reader has no choice than, in words of the character

Duke “‘Just listen,’[…]‘You’ll catch on’” (Pynchon 1984, 95). The characters are experiencing noise that conceals the meaning of individual utterances. “Ambiguity.

Redundance. Irrelevance, even. Leakage. All this is noise. Noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the circuit”(Pynchon 1984, 91), it is noise that functions as an entropic device, the dialogues become disordered and arbitrary. Taking this into account, when Michel Serres, a French philosopher, who in his book The Parasite writes that: “Noise is part of communication, part of the house. But is it the house itself?” (Serres 12); somewhere on Jakobson’s model of sender—message—receiver22, there is a parasite, a noise that becomes meaning on its own. In this sense, Pynchon is using noise and the disruption of dialogue in the narrative to convey messages. The author is also exploring the connection between noise and entropy. Both notions are major themes in communication theory (discussed both by Serres and more notably

Norbert Wiener). Thus, consider the following dialogue:

“I don’t know anything about communication theory.”

“Neither does my wife. Come right down to it, who does? That’s the

joke.” (Pynchon 1984, 89)

This devalued notion of communication theory that nobody knows about is put in work here. Wiener writes in The Human Use of Human Beings that: “Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise” (Wiener 95). In Entropy, the world is “constantly threatened by such hints of anarchy” (Pynchon 1984, 88), the narrative “organism” fights back, in Wiener’s sense, the disintegration of the story.

22 Cf. Shannon-Weaver’s communicational model.Shannon draws from Wiener’s theory and creates the concept of information entropy, an uncertainty measure in the message.

27

Because of the tendency of the story’s world to be always in equilibrium, Meatball’s efforts to organize and make sense of the people and utterances around him are connected to Callisto’s ongoing memoirs, both are balancing the level of organization of both systems. It is as if in order for Meatball’s world to become organized, Callisto’s bird must die and his apartment is left to the fatality of the number 37.

In Entropy, Thomas Pynchon uses the concept of entropy for the first time. Now one of the recurrent themes of his work, it was also here where Pynchon first applied the concept on the narrative, making his characters subject to the ever increasing entropy.

The short story and the introductory notes provide a unique inside into Pynchon’s creative techniques. The same approach towards entropy can be traced also in subsequent works, most notably The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow, which takes the metaphor of historical decay further into extremes and creates a narrative structured in accordance to the second law.

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3. The Crying of Lot 49

If Entropy is the first work by Thomas Pynchon to explicitly deal with the concept of entropy, a work that introduced it to the author’s thematic world, The Crying of Lot 49 takes this theme and transforms it into a more concrete and serious aesthetic order.

The Crying of Lot 49 is a novella and Thomas Pynchon’s second published book.

Compared to the previous V., the story of a search for a mysterious entity, it is a more focused and linear work. Set mainly in San Narciso, a fictional city that Pynchon towards the end of the novel describes as a city of “true continuity” and as “having no boundaries” (Pynchon 2006, 147), thus indicating its locus in a fictional world, the novella revolves around Oedipa Maas, an “executress” of one Pierce Inverarity’s estate.

While organizing the estate, she encounters the mysterious Trystero, a secret postal service, running parallel to the official one. The appearance of signs of Trystero’s existence marks a change in Oedipa’s life. From this point, she is increasingly more paranoid, shifting all of her focus on the decoding of the message left behind by

Trystero and its W.A.S.T.E. symbol (an abbreviation for We Await Silently Trystero’s

Empire, it appears a muted post horn). The Crying of Lot 49 is, as Molly Hite in her study Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon argues, essentially a quest narrative, Oedipa’s name thus soon looses its “association with Freudian trendiness,[…], and begins to recall her truth seeking Sophoclean predecessor” (Hite

74). In this chapter, I argue that Oedipa’s quest is connected to the concept of entropy in that it stresses the lack of a decisive ending. Her quest for meaning is destined to fail due to the second law of thermodynamics, meaning behind reality ceases to have value at the same time as she discovers it. Since both The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s

Rainbow (its analysis is provided in the following chapter) are openended, I devote a

29 special attention to the connection between the concept of entropy and the lack of ending.

There are several encounters with entropy in text of The Crying of Lot 49. Most notably, the notion of Maxwell’s Demon, a thought experiment created by James Clerk

Maxwell in the 19th century supposedly able to decrease the level of entropy of an isolated system. The Demon is manifested as an entity sorting out the differing particles in a system in order to make the system more organized.23 In The Crying of Lot 49,

Maxwell’s Demon plays a hugely important role, both in the plot and in the narrative form of the novella. The final part of this chapter explores the specific ways The Crying of Lot 49 incorporates the concept of entropy and Maxwell’s Demon into the narrative structure in the form of proliferation and multiplication of meaning.

3.1 The failure of Maxwell’s demon

When Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made an executress of her ex- lover’s testament, she just returned home from a party. Living a middle-class, organized and peaceful life with her husband Mucho Maas, the news of Pierce Inverarity’s death and of her new role cause a great disturbance in her peaceful life. Her role of an executress is that of organizing and a special attention is ought to be paid as the narrator enumerates what she is supposed to do:

learn intimately the books and the business, go through probate, collect

debts, inventory the assets, get an appraisal of the estate, decide what to

liquidate and what to hold on to, pay off claims, square away taxes,

distribute legacies[…] (Pynchon 2006, 10)

23 For a closer and more technical description, see Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York, NY: Da Capo, 1988. Print.

30

In other words, Oedipa is supposed to organize Inverarity’s estate into a coherent system. This is very similar to the narrator’s later description of Maxwell’s Demon. A person trying to stabilize and organize a system:

If it was Pierce’s attempt to leave an organized something behind after

his own annihilation, than it was part of her duty, wasn’t it to bestow life

in what had persisted, to try to be what Driblette was, the dark machine

in the center of the planetarium, to bring the estate into pulsing

stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her? (Pynchon 2006,

64)

Thus, Oedipa’s act of sorting out, her existence as “the dark machine” operating to decrease entropy of one system, to bring life and “pulsing stelliferous meaning” to it, puts her in the role of Maxwell’s Demon. Pynchon is exploring in The Crying of Lot 49 the plausibility of this notion.

The first mention of something resembling Maxwell’s Demon in The Crying of

Lot 49 is a metaphor: Oedipa is reminiscing on her time with Pierce Inverarity and relives her encounter with Bordando el Manto Terrestre, a painting by the Spanish-

Mexican artist Remedios Varo. The painting portrays women weaving in a tower, embroidering into their fabric the structure of the world, which then slips out of the tower (Pynchon 2006, 11). Metaphorical Maxwell’s Demons, the women in the tower organize the world into a coherent whole, it is thus possible to say that they reduce its entropy. Here, Oedipa is compared to the women in the painting; she is in her own tower, isolated from the world, set on to “sort out” Inverarity’s estate. Yet, she “soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental”

(Pynchon 2006, 11).

Stanley Koteks, a corporate scientist, is the first person to introduce Oedipa to the concept of Maxwell’s Demon. He describes the Demon as “sorting out” the disorder of

31 a closed system, organizing the particles and thus decreasing the level of entropy

(Pynchon 2006, 68). It ought to be mentioned that the current discourse involving the notion of Maxwell’s Demon is sceptic about whether or not the Demon is able to reverse the second law of thermodynamics, since his activity inevitably produces heat which increases the level of disorder24. Oedipa herself questions this assumption, when

Koteks describes the workings of the Demon to her: “Sorting isn’t work?” (Pynchon

2006, 68). The Demon is perhaps inherently unable to reduce the entropy of its system, as he gains information and increases his internal entropy.

Koteks then sends Oedipa to John Nefastis, a man who supposedly possesses a real Maxwell’s demon. Here, Oedipa tries to activate the Demon, an act that Nefastis argues, only “Sensitives” can do (Pynchon 2006, 85). She fails, although it is later revealed that the “Nefastis Machine” was only a plot to seduce her. Yet, the encounter is crucial for the understanding of the novel. Consider first the two separate “systems” or worlds present in the novel.

First, there is Pierce Inverarity’s legacy, a closed system of a relatively stable meaning, with high level of disorganization. This is the system subject to reduction in entropy. The second system is Oedipa’s own. The “real” world, that of the narrative inside which every action takes place. It is explained that: “As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained bout [sic] what molecules were where” (Pynchon 2006, 84). This is exactly what is happening as the novel evolves into a quest for meaning behind reality. Thanks to her role as an executress, Oedipa discovers the mysterious Trystero, an organization running as a secret post service, thus undermining the economy of the official one. This newly acquired “information”

24 See Norton, John D. "Maxwell's Demon, Landauer's Principle and the Thermodynamics of Computation." Maxwell's Demon. Web. 30 Apr. 2015. Norton argues that: “the present orthodoxy holds that Maxwell's demon must fail to reverse the second law of thermodynamics because of a hidden entropy cost in the erasure of information” (Norton).

32 completely changes her perception of the world around her. She begins to read hidden meanings into it. As the novel proceeds, she is dragged deeper and deeper into the mystery of Trystero and her world is becoming more disorganized. Trystero takes control over Oedipa and makes her unable to comprehend reality in its original sense.

Everything leads to Trystero in her new paranoid reasoning. Oedipa is set off into the

“descent” to entropy. Rudolf Arnheim in his essay Entropy and Art states:

[…] one discovers, first of all, that the processes measured by the

principle of entropy are perceived as the gradual or sudden destruction of

inviolate objects – a degradation involving the breaking up of shape, the

dissolution of functional contexts, the abolition of meaningful location.

(Arnheim 11)

This is visible from the very beginning of The Crying of Lot 49. First sign of the gradual disintegration of Oedipa’s “ego” 25 and of the abolition of meaning and context in

Oedipa’s world, occurs when she has sex with a lawyer that helps with Inverarity’s estate. When he forces Oedipa to watch movies he starred in as a child, the buzz of the

TV and outside noises (Pynchon 2006, 25) interfere with her perception of reality and destroy all chances of conveying a meaning. Thus:

Things grew less and less clear. At some point she went into the

bathroom, tried to find her image in the mirror and couldn’t. She had a

moment of nearly pure terror. Then remembered that the mirror had

broken and fallen in the sink. (Pynchon 2006, 29)

25 Much has been written about Oedipa’s name and its relation to Oedipus complex. See for example Grant, J. Kerry. A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49. Athens: U of Georgia, 1994. Print. Grant provides a summary of various analyses made by others. He suggests that among other things, the Freudian “Oedipa” is often agreed to be ridiculed by “Maas,” which some agreed phonetically implies “my ass.”

33

Unable to find her image in a shattered mirror, confused from all the noise and information around, Oedipa first experiences the dissolution of her self.26 Somewhat later, her problems continue as she fall yet deeper into the Trystero paranoia, her

“toothaches got worse, she dreamed of disembodied voices from whose malignance there was no appeal” (Pynchon 2006, 144). As the novel nears its end, Oedipa’s life is becoming more disorganized, the level of its entropy is increased enormously due to the information she gained during her work as an executress. Mucho, her husband, is now constantly high on LSD, her psychiatrist is revealed to have done experiments on jews in concentration camps and he’s been prescribing his patients LSD. But most importantly, Oedipa is now trapped forever in a paranoiac delusion of Trystero, unable to figure the truth. Joseph Tabbi in his study Cognitive Fictions, a work that outlines the

“new media ecology” and connects literary analysis with cognitive science, argues that:

The moment Oedipa reads pots instead of post, she ceases to be an

interpreter of messages and becomes, in Kittler’s terms, an observer of a

system, who will henceforth look to the American communications

infrastructure for meanings in excess of what its designers put there.

(Tabbi 12)

Not only that Oedipa reads more into the world than there really is, she also misses signs and revelations that are brought to her, due to her preoccupation with Trystero she has “no suspicion at all that it might have something to tell her” (Pynchon 2006, 31).

She looses her chance to deciphering the coherent meaning behind the reality and inevitably “falls” into her private entropic apocalypse.

Thus, The Crying of Lot 49 is essentially a metaphor of Maxwell’s Demon, exploring its inability to decrease the level of entropy since the overall level of disorder

26 The dissolution of the self and of the perception of oneself is a recurrent theme in Pynchon’s work, most notably, Slothrop’s disintegration in Gravity’s Rainbow.

34 will always increase due to information acquired from the act of sorting out. Oedipa

Maas is subject to this understanding of Maxwell’s Demon, she fails to decrease the entropy level of the entire fictional world of Saint Narciso.

3.2 We Await Silently Trystero’s Empire

Pynchon’s novels happen in the middle. In a certain way, there is no clear beginning nor a definitive ending. Rather, the narrative continues “away” even after it was supposed to end. Consider in this sense the ending of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Now everybody–” (Pynchon 2013,1443). The Crying of Lot 49 is no exception. The novel starts with Oedipa coming home from a party and ends with her waiting for the “crying” of lot 49. The sense of an impeding apocalypse that gains momentum throughout the novel leaves the reader wondering and unsure. The revelation is postponed. As Joseph

Tabbi writes in Cognitive Fictions the audience has to be aware of the form in

Pynchon’s writing, “accepting that Pynchon is a metafictional writer who is self- conscious about questions of narrative form[…]” (Tabbi 29). This open-ended narrative carries a specific meaning too: together with the notion of entropy, it conveys a message that no matter how long we wait, the end is postponed. The gradual degradation, the tendency towards maximum entropy, continues in much of Pynchon’s works to increase ad infinitum.

As Shawn Smith in his study on Pynchon and History notes, The Crying of Lot

49’s themes and tones are inherently religious (Shawn 17). In The Crying of Lot 49,

Trystero is represented by the W.A.S.T.E. symbol, a muted post horn, perhaps signifying that the mythical end will come unnoticed. The name W.A.S.T.E. is an abbreviation of “We Await Silently Trystero’s Empire,” a phrase with a strong religious undertone. The connotations of “Trystero’s Empire” evoke connection to the Christian

35 notion of Kingdom of God. Much in the same way, the “empire” is always out of reach.

Moreover, the act of “waiting” should be put in context of the running down of the universe. Pynchon’s fictional worlds are, as their incoherency increases, waiting in this sense for the ultimate rundown. Molly Hite in Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas

Pynchon argues that The Crying of Lot 49 is fundamentally a “quest narrative” (Hite 89) and that his novels do not provide the end as promised, but rather an image of it (Hite

90). According to her, the absence of a clear end in The Crying of Lot 49 creates a tension between meaning and its absence that “will be prolonged indefinitely” (Ibid.).

The reader is left in the process of waiting, as Oedipa herself, for a meaning that was promised but will and can never come because it proliferated due to entropic process in communication.

Although there is no definitive ending in The Crying of Lot 49, there are conclusions and closures everywhere. The truth in Pynchon’s novels is entropic too, it fluctuates between states of high and low order. Frank Kermode in his groundbreaking work The Sense of The Ending writes that: “[Already in St. Paul and St. John] there is a tendency to conceive of the End as happening at every moment when the modern concept of crisis was born[…]” (Kermode 25). This is precisely the case in much of

Pynchon’s writing. There are many closures and endings in The Crying of Lot 49 that serve transformative function, most notably in the metafictional Jacobin drama ‘The

Courier’s Tragedy.’ The play’s position in the novel serves as an intermezzo between the “old” Oedipa, ignorant of the bigger implications of the world and between the

“new” and “transcended” Oedipa that is aware of (but does not comprehend) the secret

“truths” behind the obvious ones. The play is highly structured, supposedly a Jacobin drama it catalyzes Oedipa’s “quest” for Trystero and its meaning. What the play also signifies is a start of the entropic drive of the narrative: “It is at about this point in the play, in fact, that things really get peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to

36 creep in among the word” (Pynchon 2006, 55). After this metafictional interlude, the meaning starts to proliferate. Due to noise 27 and the workings of entropy, the communication is more and more disorganized. When Oedipa dreams of “disembodied voices,” it is clear that she is loosing her battle with entropy. She, as the metaphorical

Maxwell’s Demon, sorts out the mess of Pierce Inverarity’s estate, for the price of her marriage and personal life. When she meets Mucho who is high on LSD, his words seem to convey no message at all. Their relationship deteriorates, since both of them are unable to understand each other again.

In addition to Shawn Smith’s argument, The Crying of Lot 49 is about meaning and the specific problems of communication. This is also Linda Hutcheon’s argument.

Hutcheon in The Poetics of Postmodernism suggests that Pynchon’s works are about communication, plot and narratives (Hutcheon 120). Contrary to its relatively short length and small sample of characters, The Crying of Lot 49 questions the traditional linear perspective of communication in the narrative. Thus, the play inside the novella carries more significance when it comes to meaning than many of the revelations

Oedipa makes. The play stresses the secret truth hiding behind the obvious one, the communication between Oedipa’s fictional world and the world of the play intertwines and one influences the other. What’s more, Pynchon is in The Crying of Lot 49 breaking the linearity of his narrative through proliferation of meaning, the reader is constantly tempted into reading more into the storyline than there is (this is connected to paranoia, one of Pynchon’s leitmotifs). Intertextual practical jokes, like mentions of Nabokov’s

Lolita 28 and songs (with possibly more meaning than some of the characters’ conversations) are all a part of a bigger message. The narrator at one point warns the

27 To draw a parallel to Michel Serres work The Parasite, the communication between Oedipa and the Meaning is disturbed by Trystero. Trystero represents, in Serres’s sense, the parasite, which is, according to him, a form of noise too. 28 Pynchon reportedly attended Nabokov’s lectures on Cornell’s University.

37 reader that: “The words, who cares? They’re the rote noises to hold line bashes with”

(Pynchon 2006, 62). Thus, in The Crying of Lot 49, the meaning proliferates. The narrative order fluctuates between it absence and presence. The meaning, however, evades Oedipa, the metaphorical Maxwell’s Demon; she is, after all, only “meant to remember” (Pynchon 2006, 95).

In her essay Construction of Identity in Post-1970 Experimental Fiction, Kathleen

M. Wheeler argues that in The Crying of Lot 49:

Characters struggle to find out the meaning of situations, to interpret the

actions and thoughts of the characters, to determine the action, to get to

the end of something. Reading is shown to be an allegory of perception,

too, an example of our processes of ordering and stabilizing experience.

(Wheeler 20)

Oedipa’s world is in this sense that of a search for truth, of “reading” the world and deciphering its meaning in the same way as the actual reader deciphers the meaning of the work. This is what ‘The Courier’s Tragedy’ draws attention to, among other things.

Oedipa, “bringing something of herself” (Pynchon 2006, 72), does precisely that. Her role of an organizer of the system leaves her, however, unable to comprehend its meaning, no matter how hard she tries. Her language and the language of the narrative gets increasingly clouded by noise and all the additional meanings. Consider her encounter with Inamorati Anonymous, the anonymous group of people disappointed of love. When she meets one man from the group and immediately assumes that he is one of the Trystero. This paranoia and inability to decipher signs is later explicated in her tour through San Narciso. Oedipa sees Trystero everywhere. The meaning of the

W.A.S.T.E. symbol thus proliferates for Oedipa and through her for the reader until it means everything and nothing at the same time. Randomness in the narrative increases

38 parallel to the increase of entropy. Thus, Oedipa could, to paraphrase Pynchon, waste her live and never be able to touch the truth (Pynchon 2006, 63).

A comparison with Wiener’s theory of communication and feedback is needed here29. Meaning in communication is subject to noise and entropy and as the time proceeds, it proliferates due to certain specific processes. Wiener suggests in The

Human Use of Human Beings that even history is subject to this proliferation, or at least our perception of it. Oedipa’s work as Maxwell’s Demon leaves her unable to comprehend the world at large due to these processes, although she decreased the

“entropy” of Pierce Inverarity’s estate. Due to information feedback and her “bringing in something of herself” (Pynchon 2006, 72) she is now left alone, waiting for a final revelation that can never come, or perhaps more likely, that came unnoticed.

29 Cf. Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York, NY: Da Capo, 1988. Print.

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4. Gravity’s Rainbow

Much has been written about Gravity’s Rainbow and its complexity. The novel’s thematic range was subject to numerous analysis, like that in Lynda Hutcheon’s work

The Poetics of Postmodernism. Pynchon’s surreal 1973 tour de force starts in London during V-2 bomb attacks. “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to no. It is too late” (Pynchon 2013, 2), those are the opening words of he more than 900 pages length novel. The sound of the V-bomb is transformative, metaphysical. The fact that the “scream” is heard only after the bomb has reached its end is used throughout the novel as a recurring theme. It is an apocalypse without warning, one that came before it was prophesied. It is a fatality, connected to the gravitational force, a phenomena that gave the novel its name. Similar to the gravity’s rainbow, the parabolic mark left on the sky by the ascending rocket, the novel follows its own parabola. It starts in the war-time London to introduce Tyrone

Slothrop, who is keeping a map tracking all his sexual adventures. It is this map that starts Gravity’s Rainbow’s exploration of the human condition, for the locations on

Slothrop’s map somehow match the locations where the bombs fall. This discovery propels Slothrop into the heart of Germany, or the Zone, where he tries to find the mysterious Rocket 00000.

The self-replicating themes and minor narratives of Gravity’s Rainbow that could be related to the concept of entropy are far too numerous to be dealt with in this thesis without a considerable oversimplification. Thus, I deal specifically with leitmotifs that, one could argue, form Pynchon’s typical narrative strategies. This thesis directs its

40 attention on the “centerlessness” and “disorganization30” of the novel. As Molly Hite argues, applying Frank Kermode’s notion of happening in the “middest,” Pynchon’s narratives are set between their mythical beginning and a prophesied apocalypse (Hite

132). An analysis of this centerlessness is provided in here, arguing that Gravity’s

Rainbow is a narrative that uses disorganization and the concept of entropy and noise as an aesthetic tool to portray the state of human society, history and that the “entropic narrative,” i.e. the disorganized text, filled with creative slippages, ultimately conveys a specific meaning.

Already in his first published novel V. or later novella The Crying of Lot 4931

Pynchon uses a specific kind of character/hero that throughout the work “re-invents” themselves. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop takes the task of “re-invention” further to extremes. Towards the end of the novel, Slothrop is dissolved, due to entropic processes he ceases to be a unified entity. Or rather, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, he becomes a set of multiplicities, individualized parts.

Contrary to Molly Hite’s argument in Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas

Pynchon that it is a parody and comedy of form, Gravity’s Rainbow is ultimately a serious novel. Its play is in fact a critique of the profanities of the past, present and the future, an exploration of power and a tragedy of the human condition. Similar to the

Rocket 00000 it posits itself as an exclamation mark over humanity, conveying that the inevitable end, the ultimate rundown, could come sooner than expected. It is here where the notion of entropy, one of Pynchon’s leitmotifs, crystalizes much like Henry Adams’ view into a narrative of universal decomposition. Through entropy, Pynchon conveys to the reader compassion for the marginalized and oppressed. Only through sadistic jokes

30 Contrary to Vidal’s criticism of Pynchon’s “disordered” writing (see Introduction), I use the term “disordered” with positive connotations, since its perceived disorganization is intentional and carries a meaning of its own. 31 Consider one of the possible deeper meanings behind Oedipa’s name: Oedipa could signify the Freudian Oedipus or Id of the subconscious, yet as Hite argues, as the novel proceeds, Oedipa re-invents herself into the Sophoclean hero.

41 and mass death, songs about penis and through the dissolution of the main characters can one understand the cruelty and fatality of the world.

4.1 Beyond the Zero

The plot of Gravity’s Rainbow revolves around the mysterious Rocket 00000 as well as around lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop. However, as Molly Hite notes, the novel has more than 300 fully developed characters (Hite 13). Its megalomanic scope covers an immense sample of themes ranging from thermodynamics to Gödel’s theorem, from music to a critique of corporate-based economy. It is filled with sub-narratives, like that of Byron, the lightbulb, that form intermezzos and narrative diversions and disturb the

“unity” of the narrative. Furthermore, compared to V. or The Crying of Lot 49, as both

Hite and Shawn Smith note, Gravity’s Rainbow makes use of syntactic slippage and ellipses to achieve a certain aesthetic incompleteness, a disordered, entropic plot.

Consider the following passage:

But here its possible to see the whole shape at once— not for me, I’m not

that far along—but many know it as a clear presence…‘shape’ isn’t

really the right word… Let me be honest with you. I’m finding it harder

to put myself in your shoes. (Pynchon 2013, 307)

The narrator thus uses ellipses and slippages to convey the impossibility of communication. It is difficult to pass on any meaning to the reader due to the novel’s all-inclusive nature and due to the very nature of its communication. In other words,

Pynchon is rephrasing here his earlier stances on information theory. Gravity’s Rainbow destroys any attempt on conveying meaning in its traditional, organized form. Rather, due to what Wiener calls feedback processes and through noise interference, the message is transmitted in mutated forms. The novel makes use of the extralinguistic

42 reality of the word. The language of Gravity’s Rainbow signifies outside the fictional, it communicates with the reader through absences and local entropies, through noise. In this sense, the name of the first part of the novel ‘Beyond the Zero’ signifies this leakage of the fictional into the real. As Shawn Smith notes in his study Pynchon and

History, the very end of the novel is witness to the transformation of the narrative

(Smith 71). The narrator now speaks directly to the reader. Smith further argues that:

“Slothrop’s fragmentation replicates the novel’s formal strategy in miniature[…] The exponential increase of formal fragmentation in this section establishes incompletion as metahistorical commentary on historical perception” (Ibid.). The novel is in the same way as Slothrop, dissolving itself and re-inventing the narrative into transcendental forms that build on ideas of disorder, or entropy, in a struggle to create meaning. The plot draws from Henry Adams’ idea of “universal decline,” puts it into historical perspective of World War II and concludes that rather than gradual universal decline, the fictional world faces an abrupt end, either in the form of rocket that is hear only after it reaches its end or in the form of the famous openended “Now everybody–” (Pynchon

2013, 1443).

Incompleteness is deeply rooted in the Gravity’s Rainbow’s structure. It is visible in the ending but also in much of the characters and minor plotlines. Characters appear only to disappear again in the next minute. Consider Slothrop’s adventures as

“Rocketman” or his love affairs that have no definitive ending (for example his love for

Katje is never fully realized). The need for closure is again, as in The Crying of Lot 49 postponed beyond.

4.2 Sloth or entropy

Like the nameless main character in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man,

Tyrone Slothrop is constantly changing his persona too. The reader witnesses

43 throughout the novel a change from Slothrop, the war-time Casanova, into a spy, the mythical Rocketman and many other personas that he adopts to get rid of the mysterious

They. However, due to these changes, one can witness a gradual disintegration of

“Slothrop qua Slothrop” (Pynchon 2013, 1401). From the point he boards Anubis, the boat crossing throughout the Zone, he starts dissolving until towards the end of the novel he looses his identity, as Molly Hite writes in Ideas of Order: “he is no longer a unified character” (Hite 113). He becomes a set of individualities. This final

“Slothropian” transformation is portrayed in the novel as mythization. Slothrop is now a myth, other characters refer to him as to a telltale, a rumor that is only partially factual:

There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the

Zone to be present at his own assembly—perhaps, heavily paranoid

voices have whispered, his time’s assembly— and there ought to be a

punch line to it, but there isn’t. The plan went wrong. He is being broken

down instead, and scattered. (Pynchon 2013, 1400)

The breaking down of Slothrop follows the same conceptual parabola as the whole novel. Through changes of appearance and personas, Slothrop loses control over his self. Due to gravitational forces, he is torn apart until he can no longer be comprehended even by his friend. Only a few people can see Slothrop anymore (Pynchon 2013, 1405).

The novel follows similar trajectory in its assimilation of various sub-narratives and narrative voices.

Both Molly Hite and Shawn Smith tackle Slothrop’s disintegration, they differ however in the outcomes of their observations. While Smith argues in Pynchon and

History that Gravity’s Rainbow disintegrates Slothrop into an effect in order to be able to manipulate with him (Smith 38), Hite suggests that the novel reflects the path of

Slothrop’s breakdown and fragmentation and repeats it. According to Hite, it is an

44 analogy of the entropic rundown, the universe is gaining entropy through it (Hite 104).

Another interpretation of Slothrop’s disintegration and simultaneously the novel’s lack of structure is provided in Richard A. House’s Order and Orderlessness in Gravity’s

Rainbow: A Dialectic, where he argues, drawing from Jacques Derrida’s essay

Structure, Sign and Play, that when the novel decentralizes its narrative and through that Slothrop’s persona, it looses any resemblance of structure (House 16).

Nevertheless, the significance of Slothrop’s disintegration lies somewhere else.

All three authors are oblivious to Arnheim’s definition of entropy in art as that of a search for more natural and easily communicating patterns. This notion of entropy as a form of organization of its own is present throughout the scientific discourse too (see

Kubát and Zeman’s Entropy and Information in Science and Philosophy). Rather than what Hite, Smith and House describe, the novel uses Slothrop’s disintegration to create from him, and the book itself, what Deleuze and Guattari, the two French philosophers, in their 1980 work A Thousand Plateaus call “body without organs:”

A body without organs is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a

body upon which that which serves as organs […] is distributed

according to crowd phenomena, in Brownian motion, in the form of

molecular multiplicities. The desert is populous. Thus the body without

organs is opposed less to organs as such than to the organization of the

organs insofar as it composes an organism. (Deleuze, Guattari 51)

Slothrop’s disintegration is an evolution into such body without organs. He is still present throughout the end of the novel and makes occasional appearances. The narrator describes that there are some who believe that the fragments of his former self transformed “into consistent personæ [sic] of their own” (Pynchon 2013, 1409). When one compares this to Deleuze’s explication of the concept of body without organs in his

A Letter to a Harsh Critic, where he argues that it means a becoming of a “set of

45 liberated singularities, words, names, fingernails, things, animals, little events” (Deleuze

7), it is clear that Slothrop is precisely that. Consider his final transformation in a pig costume and his adventures with a real female pig (Pynchon 2013, 1152). Slothrop, the body without organs, is non-linear and decentralized, he achieved his equilibrium through paranoia, the level of entropy of his self is on its maximum.

Gravity’s Rainbow follows identical path as Slothrop’s deconstruction. Towards its end, it becomes a body without organs of its own. The narrative is increasingly fragmented, there are “minor” stories that however have a significance of their own or gain it somewhat later when put in the context of acquired information. In the last part of Gravity’s Rainbow, the increase of ellipses reaches its maximum. Entropy of the narrative dissolves the structure into a more natural, decentralized one. A structure that interconnects every aspect of the novel into an immensely complex web of relations.

4.3 Interconnected systems

Intertextuality is one of Pynchon’s trademarks, it is present through all of his writing32. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the level of intertextuality reaches a whole new level, whether it is the historic headlines used in the novel or references to scientific concepts, used as an authentication function. As Molly Hite argues in Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, Pynchon’s novels are obsessed with connections (Hite 32) Hite further explains that the author’s novels “depend on the premise of centerlessness” (Hite

33). It is through this centerlessness, through the deconstructed narrative, that the novel connects and creates a meaning.

32 Vineland, which is not the subject of this thesis, for example makes a lot of references to the 1966 TV show Star Trek.

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Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus describe the concept of a rhizome, a complex structure of intertwined, non-linear relations, “a map and not a tracing”

(Deleuze, Guattari 12). The narrative of Gravity’s Rainbow forms a similar structure, as the body without organs it is rhizomatic in the absence of a definitive center and interconnected meanings, in its fluctuations between states of high and low order. As

Hite notes, Gravity’s Rainbow is a novel of interconnectedness. Minor narratives in the novel gain significance when put into context. Thus, the Hiroshima bombing is mentioned only in the form of an unintelligible newspaper headline. It gains significance when connected with Slothrop’s earlier encounter with the Japanese man

Mori-turi, who remembers his home city of Hiroshima:

I want to see the war over in the Pacific so that I can go home. Since you

ask. It’s the season of the plum rains now, the Bai-u, when all the plums

are ripening. I want only to be with Michiko and our girls, and once I’m

there, never to leave Hiroshima again. I think you’d like it there. It’s a

city on Honshu, on the Inland Sea, very pretty, a perfect size, big enough

for city excitement, small enough for the serenity a man needs. (Pynchon

2013, 905)

It is clear that Mori-turi will never return home, for his city along with his family and friends, its teeming life that triggers his nostalgia, is gone. The horror of war is thus fully exposed in the novel by non-linear foreshadowing or by stories from the past.

One of the novel’s leitmotifs are Pavlovian conditioned reflexes. Slothrop’s response to ascending V-2 bombs, the mysterious erections that start his whole journey towards self-annihilation, are revealed to be reflexes resulting from experiments conducted on baby Slothrop. He reacts to Impolex G, a mysterious plastic that plays a vital role in the construction of rocket 00000. In Molly Hite’s words: “in Gravity’s

Rainbow connection is always allied with the possibility that a ubiquitous They

47 manipulate all the people and events of the novel’s worlds” (Hite 26). The same

“ubiquitous They” that made Slothrop react to V-bombs are thus in his eyes the ones behind every possible meaning. Slothrop’s paranoia unifies and creates a moving center.

Hite further writes that in Gravity’s Rainbow, characters tend to imagine someone behind, directing the course of their lives (Hite 44). The novel is thus, among other things, a novel about power and control. Consider one of the main sub-plots, that of the sadomasochistic Blicero and his submissive lover Gottfried. In the end, Blicero’s and

Gottfried’s relationship is that of control and exploitation, yet mutual trust. Exploration of power in Gravity’s Rainbow goes even further than that. The all-permeating paranoia that unites each concept introduced, stems from fears that control is in the hand of the

Other. Gravity’s Rainbow becomes in this sense a critique of power relations, it criticizes the system, perhaps best depicted in the description of Kekulé’s discovery of benzene structure (Pynchon 2013, 776). There the narrator envisages the future of all controlling corporations. In the metaphor of a snake who eats his own tail, Pynchon sees environmental threat of oil industry, wars and economy. In the metaphor of the snake, the tendency of our society to increase the pace with which we head towards the ultimate heat death is mirrored.

These notions of paranoia and interconnectedness, of rhizome-like structures in

Gravity’s Rainbow, are closely tied to the notion of entropy. According to Rudolf

Arnheim, entropy is defined by a tendency of particles to achieve balance, or in other words, to organize themselves into a more natural structure: “The state of balance is the only one in which the system remains at rest, and balance makes for order because it represents the simplest possible configuration of the system’s components” (Arnheim

7). Arnheim thus suggests that entropy is in fact a mode of organization in itself, according to him, entropic systems communicate with all its parts equally. Pynchon’s narrative thus uses interconnection and information overload to achieve “this

48 transmarginal leap, this surrender […] Where ideas of the opposite have come together, and lost their oppositeness” (Pynchon 2013, 91). With such depolarization, Gravity’s

Rainbow challenges the traditional structuralist notions of binary oppositions and as

Molly Hite proposes: “The absence of a definitive synthetic unity is finally a condition for freedom and Pynchon plays on a further conclusion: such an absence is also enabling condition for language, and especially for the language of his novels” (Hite

21). In this way, the language of Gravity’s Rainbow is a heterogenous one 33 , it multiplies meaning and helps abolish any idea of a unified set of knowledge. This is after all, what Gödel’s theorem34, a notion discussed in length in Gravity’s Rainbow, is all about. The “proletarian restatement of Murphy’s Law” (Pynchon 2013, 519) that suggests that there is always a room for surprise, that after all, no system of knowledge is complete and one cannot now all its components is simultaneously hopeful and depressing. Slothrop, as well as the reader, in his quest for the universal truth behind the fabric of reality discovers that there are multiple interpretation of the truth. Thus, the narrator asks:

Is there a single root, deeper than anyone has probed, from which

Slothrop’s Black-words only appear to flower separately? Or has he by

way of the language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing

the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly

apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination,

tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely,

33 As Katrin Amian notes in Rethinking Postmodernism(s), where she applies pragmatist reading on the works of Pynchon, Toni Morrison and Jonathan Safran Foer: The privileged language of analysis,[…], has been the language of ‘multiplicity,’ ‘difference,’ ‘heterogenity,’ and ‘play,’ strategically devised to contest liberal-humanist notions of language, identity, authorship, and literature, and to expose the powerful ideologies and discursive regimes on which they rely” (Amian 13). Pynchon is in his novels providing a similar analysis of culture, language identity, etc. 34 Kurt Gödel was a mathematical prodigy from Brno, best known for his “Ontological proof of God’s existence” and his Incompleteness Theorem, which, in lay words, suggest that no given set of systems can be comprehended in its entirety.

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endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words…

(Pynchon 2013, 736)

The sole structure of language is incapable of conveying objective meaning, for is is overloaded with noise and secondary connotations. Names like Mori-turi35 suggesting deeper truths help overload the overall meaning of the narrative until it proliferates, ceases to have any value. It is often pointed out by critics of Gravity’s Rainbow, that the novel is cold and absent36, yet this criticism fails to notice that through this entropic cold, through the gradual heat death of his novel, Pynchon is conveying a message of its own. Gravity’s Rainbow thus forms through its narrative style a critique of society37.

35 The Latin phrase “Morituri te salutant” is often translated as: “Those about to die salute you.” 36 See Vidal, Gore, and Jay Parini. The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal. New York: Vintage International, 2009. Print. 37 Hite suggests that: “Gravity’s Rainbow offers itself as a symptom of the irreversible process, proclaiming that the unifying, redemptive Word is irrevocably lost and that there is no going back” (Hite, 113).

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5. Conclusion: An Organized Disorder

When considering the context of Thomas Pynchon’s writing, the concept of entropy stands out as one of the unifying themes of Pynchon’s corpus of writing. In much of his novels, entropy serves as a theme that helps to describe the relationship in our real world. The three provided works, namely Entropy, The Crying of Lot 49 and

Gravity’s Rainbow, stand out as examples of “entropic narratives.” That is, narratives using the notion of entropy (as discussed in Wiener’s and Arnheim’s work) as an aesthetic norm. Whats more, all three of them, chronologically develop this notion. The evolution of Pynchon’s incorporation of entropy into the narrative is visible from

Entropy to Gravity’s Rainbow.

Thomas Pynchon is a ultimately a historical writer,38 the concept of entropy in his writing thus takes on a form of a historical tendency towards disintegration, yet challenges negative perception of this phenomena. To paraphrase the title of Chinua

Achebe’s famous work “things fall apart.” Pynchon draws from Henry Adams’ work to tell apocalyptic narratives. In Entropy, Thomas Pynchon examines the notion on a group of people and parodies much of its apocalyptic connotations. In his later novella

The Crying of Lot 49, the author explicates on much of the themes portrayed in Entropy to create a metaphor of Maxwell’s Demon, an entity supposedly capable of decreasing levels of disorder. However, apart from the textual references to the Demon, the notion also functions as an organizing element of the narrative structure. The main character’s struggle to organize her ex-lover’s estate fails in the same way as the narrative fails to organize concepts and ideas.

38 Cf. Smith, Shawn. Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

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Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s magnum opus, takes all these notions and unites them into a single “entropic” structure. Entropy in Gravity’s Rainbow is portrayed as a mode of organization in itself. The novel uses the notion of entropy, in Arnheim’s understanding of the term, as a more natural structure, “a cosmic tendency toward order” (Arnheim 40) that is organized in non-linear, rhizome-like manner. Thus, as

Molly Hite argues in Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, the ultimately pessimistic tone of Gravity’s Rainbow must be observed as mirroring “a world characterized by uncontrollable proliferation, and if this world is fallen because it has no center, the Fall is less a primal tragedy than a cosmogonic myth for what is finally a comic state of affairs” (Hite 131). Furthermore, Gravity’s Rainbow in a way foreshadows a concept of non-linear organization that Deleuze and Guattari later called the rhizome. As Hite writes, the novel is preoccupied with “a shifting network of relations that are continually being created and destroyed” (Hite 150).

Entropy, a concept from the fields of thermodynamics and information theory is thus applied on Pynchon’s literary corpus to convey a specific message of its own. It serves as aesthetic norm and forces characters to subject to it but also, entropy conveys to the reader the fatality and pessimism of the world. In Pynchon’s works, entropy is used to undermine totalitarian concepts and regimes39 and works against the ubiquitous

They systems and the paranoia they sow in the characters.

39 In this context it is interesting to compare this application of entropy to Václav Havel’s A Letter to Gustav Husák. There, Havel applies entropy, which he understands as a homogenity of form and absence of originality, on the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

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Bibliography

Primary Sources

Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner: Early Stories. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. Print.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying Lot of 49. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Print.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. London: Vintage Classic, 2013. Epub.

Secondary Sources

Amian, Katrin. Rethinking Postmodernism(s): Charles S. Peirce and the Pragmatist

Negotiations of Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Print.

Arnheim, Rudolf. Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order. Berkeley: U of

California, 1971. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations, 1972-1990. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1987. Pdf.

"entropy, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 30 April 2015.

Gasser, R, and W Richards. An Introduction To Statistical Thermodynamics. Singapore:

World Scientific, c1995. Print.

Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Columbus: Ohio State

UP, 1983. Print.

House, Richard A. "Order and Orderlessness in Gravity's Rainbow: A Dialectic."

Digital Commons at IWU. Illinois Wesleyan University, Web. 15 Mar. 2016.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory Fiction. London:

Routledge, 1988. Pdf.

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Kermode, Frank. The Sense Of An Ending: Studies In The Theory Of Fiction. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1967. Print.

Olehla, Richard. Perspektivy konce: Thomas Pynchon a americký román po 11. září.

Vyd. 1. Praha: Karolinum, 2014

Seed, David. “Order in Thomas Pynchon's ‘entropy’”. The Journal of Narrative

Technique 11.2 (1981): 135–153. Web.

Serres, Michel, and Lawrence R. Schehr. The Parasite. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,

1982. Print.

Smith, Shawn. Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern

Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Print.

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Vidal, Gore, and Jay Parini. The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal. New York: Vintage

International, 2009. Print.

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Resumé (English)

The thesis provides an analysis of the second law of thermodynamics and the notion of entropy, or measure of disorder, in three early works of Thomas Pynchon. It is divided into three main chapters, each dealing with the specific portrayal of entropy in individual works. In the first chapter, an analysis of Pynchon’s short story Entropy is provided. Entropy is also important for the explanation provided in insightful introduction to the collection of short stories Slow Learner, here Pynchon explains his perception of the phenomena. The second chapter analyses The Crying of Lot 49, a novella that conceptualizes the notion of entropy and that of Maxwell’s Demon, a thought experiment supposedly able to decrease the level of entropy. In The Crying of

Lot 49, the author uses the second law of thermodynamics to create “entropic narrative,” narrative that is subject to disintegration and chaos. The third chapter deals with

Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s magnum opus. Here, entropy takes an organizing role in the narrative and creates an apocalyptic vision of universal decay. Gravity’s Rainbow conceptualizes the notion of entropy in its effort to disintegrate and destroy traditional conceptions of the novel.

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Resumé (Czech)

Tato práce je analýzou zobrazení druhého zákona termodynamiky a konceptu entropie jako míry neurčitosti a chaosu ve třech dílech amerického spisovatele Thomase

Pynchona. Práce je rozdělena do tří hlavních kapitol, každá z nich se zabývá zobrazením entropie v kontextu jednotlivých děl. První kapitola přináší analýzu povídky

Entropy, kde autor poprvé uvádí pojem entropie v kontext své tvorby. Entropy je také důležitá díky autorovu úvodu ke sbírce, v níž povídka vyšla, kde Pynchon vysvětluje své chápání druhého zákona termodynamiky. Druhá kapitola se věnuje novele The

Crying of Lot 49, kde Pynchon konceptualizuje entropii a Maxwellova démona, myšlenkový experiment, schopný údajně snížit úroveň entropie. The Crying of Lot 49 aplikuje entropii na vyprávění a vytváří tak “entropickou” estetiku díla, kde děj i postavy podléhají druhému zákonu termodynamiky. Třetí kapitola je rozborem

Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchonova mistrovského díla. Autor zde dotahuje myšlenku

“entropického vyprávění” k dokonalosti. Gravity’s Rainbow je tak knihou rozkládající sebe sama a narušující tak tradiční představy o románu jako takovém.

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