Bluffton University's Cara Echols writes about “Pynchon's Entropy and Conflicting Science”. Thomas Pynchon's short story 'Entropy' is rich with conflict in every.
› › Analysis of Thomas Pynchon’s NovelsAnalysis of Thomas Pynchon’s NovelsBy on. ( )The quest would seem to be the one indispensable element in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, for each of his novels proves to be a modern-dress version of the search for some grail to revive the wasteland. Pynchon’s characters seek knowledge that will make sense of their unanchored lives and their fragmented times; Pynchon hints that questing has a value irrespective of the authenticity of that for which one quests. The quest lends purpose to life, enabling one to function, to see life as worthwhile.
At the same time, however, Pynchon invites his more privileged reader to recognize that the ordering principle thus projected is factitious. What is real is the gathering dissolution, the passing of human beings and whole civilizations. All attempts to discover or create order and system are doomed.Even so, as Pynchon’s career developed, one notes what may be a tendency to define some grail of his own, an inclination to search for a way out of the cul-de-sac of a metaphysics perhaps unduly in thrall to the principle of entropy (broadly defined as the gradual deterioriation of the universe caused by irreversible thermodynamic equalization). Pynchon’s critics disagree sharply on this point. Some maintain that the intimation of counter-entropic orders in The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow is merely a hook by which to catch the unwary reader, a means of seducing him or her into system-making as delusive as that of any of Pynchon’s characters. Other critics, unwilling to believe that Pynchon’s frequently noted affinity with modern science has been frozen at a point attained some time during the 1950’s, suspect that Pynchon means to hint at transcendental alternatives implicit in the vast mysteries of contemporary astronomy and particle physics.Regardless of whether Pynchon is on a grail quest of his own (with all the propensity for mysticism that seems indispensable to such a quester), he continues to create intricate labyrinths in which readers experience the paranoia that also figures as a prominent theme in his work. V.In his first novel, V., Pynchon brilliantly interweaves two narratives, one in the present (mid-1950’s), the other in the period 1880 to 1943.
The historical narrative, presented obliquely, concerns an extraordinary woman who appears originally as Victoria Wren and subsequently under noms de guerre in which the letter V of the alphabet figures prominently: Veronica Manganese, Vera Meroving. This is V., who turns up whenever there is bloodshed in the course of the twentieth century. In 1898, for example, she appears at the periphery of the Fashoda crisis in Egypt, and the following year she gravitates to Florence, where the spies of several nations are jockeying for position, engaging in what Pynchon calls “premilitary” activity. In 1913, she is in Paris, involved in a bloody theater riot that, like the crises in Egypt and Florence earlier, proves an earnest of World War I—a kind of fulfillment for V. In her early phase.When World War I ends with Western civilization intact, though permanently altered, V. Begins to be involved with those elements that will figure in the more satisfying carnage of the century’s real climacteric,WorldWar II. In 1922, she is in German southwest Africa, where the massacre of the local Herero people reenacts the even greater massacre of two decades earlier and anticipates the really accomplished genocide in Europe between 1933 and 1945.
On and off after 1918, she is on Malta, consorting with a group sympathetic to Mussolini and his Fascists. Dies in an air raid on Malta in 1943—just as the tide turns against the Fascist cause with which she has become increasingly identified.V.’s affinity with Fascism complements a decadent religiosity, and she comes to personify the drift to extinction of Western culture and of life itself. She gradually loses parts of her body and becomes more and more the sum of inanimate parts: false eye, false hair, false foot, false navel. She is a brilliant metaphor for entropy and the decline of civilization, and her baleful influence is projected in the novel’s present in the decadence of the contemporary characters, most of whom are part of a group called the Whole Sick Crew. The Crew is exemplified by its newest member, the winsome schlemiel Benny Profane. Profane is incapable of love and emotional involvement; he is also perennially at war with inanimate objects.
His dread of the inanimate suggests that he intuits the cultural situation as the century wanes. Though he is no thinker, he realizes that he and his fellows are Eliot’s hollow men, on the way to their whimpering end.
His inability to love is presented in comic terms—though fat, he is doted on by various desirable women, including the Maltese Paola Maijstral and the beautiful Rachel Owlglass. The failure is that of his entire circle, for though there is much sex among the Whole Sick Crew, there is no commitment, no love, no hope. The one baby generated by all the sexual freedom is aborted.The Whole Sick Crew is what Western civilization has become as a result of entropic processes that are utterly random and mindless. The meaninglessness of entropy is something difficult for the human mind to accept, however, and in Herbert Stencil, a marginal member of the Crew, Pynchon presents what becomes his standard character, a person who must discover conspiracy to deal with the fragmentation of life and culture. It is Stencil who does the mythmaking, the elevating of VictoriaWren from mere perverted adventuress to something awesome and as multifaceted as Robert Graves’s White Goddess.
It is not Stencil alone, for the undeniable desire for connectedness is quintessentially human. It is also shared by the sophisticated reader, who flings himself or herself into the literary puzzle and becomes himself a Stencil, a quester for meaning in the convoluted plot of V. And in the identity of the mysterious personage who gives the novel its name. Pynchon’s genius manifests itself in his ability to keep his readers suspended between his two mutually exclusive alternatives: that the clues to V.’s identity are the key to meaning and that V. Is nothing more than a paranoid fantasy, the product of a mind that cannot deal with very much reality.The fascination with which readers have responded to V. Indicates that Pynchon is himself a brilliant mythmaker. Even after one has “solved” the mystery of V.
And arrived at an enlightenment that Stencil explicitly rejects as a threat to his emotional and mental stability, one still finds the myth trenchant, moving, even terrifying. The decline of theWest is a theme that one has encountered before, but never has one encountered it so cogently as in this woman who loves death and the inanimate. The real conspiracy, then, is an artistic one; the connectedness is that of the novel, the cabal between author and reader. The Crying of Lot 49Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, seems slight between V. And Gravity’s Rainbow, and Pynchon himself seems to consider it something of a potboiler. Some readers, however, believe it to be his most perfect work of art. It is the story of Oedipa Maas, who is named “executor, or she supposed executrix” of the estate of an ex-lover, the millionaire Pierce Inverarity.
In carrying out her duties, she stumbles upon evidence of a conspiracy to circumvent the United States Postal Service. She discovers Tristero, a sub rosa postal system at war for centuries with all officially sanctioned postal services, first in the old world, then in the new. Tristero subsumes an extraordinary number of revolutionary or simply alienated groups. In its new-world phase, it seems to bring together all those within the American system who are disfranchised, disaffected, or disinherited—all those defrauded of the American Dream.Oedipa, like Herbert Stencil, finds that the harder she looks, the more connections to Tristero she discovers, until the connections start revealing themselves in such number and variety that she begins to doubt her sanity. Oedipa’s mental condition, in fact, becomes the book’s central conundrum. She first confronts the question in a flashback early in the story.
She recalls visiting a Mexico City art gallery with Pierce Inverarity and seeing a disturbing painting by Remedios Varo. In the painting, a group of girls are imprisoned at the top of a circular tower and made to embroider el Manto Terrestre—the earth mantle. The tapestry they create, extruded through the tower’s windows, contains “all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth,” for “the tapestry was the world.” Oedipa recognizes in the painting a representation of the fact that she—like any other human being—is imprisoned mentally and perceptually in the tower of her individual consciousness.
External reality, in other words, may be nothing more than what one weaves or embroiders in one’s cranial tower. Oedipa weeps at human isolation. Later, tracking down the clues to Tristero (which seems coextensive with Inverarity’s estate and enterprises), she cannot free herself from the suspicion that the proliferating connections she is discovering all have their throbbing ganglion in her own mind. She realizes that she is becoming a classic paranoid.Though Pynchon does not resolve the question of Oedipa’s sanity, he hints that becoming sensitized to the problems of twentieth century American culture (and to the horrors of the spiritual void contingent on certain twentieth century habits of mind) involves a necessary sacrifice of sanity or at least serenity.
At the end, Oedipa is faced with a harrowing choice: Either she is insane, or Tristero—with its stupendous reticulation—really exists. Gravity’s RainbowAll of Pynchon’s books are filled with bizarre characters and incidents, but Gravity’s Rainbow is especially dense and demanding. The hero is Tyrone Slothrop, an American Army lieutenant attached to an Allied intelligence unit in World War II.
Slothrop’s superiors become aware that the map of his sexual conquests (or his sexual fantasies; this is kept ambiguous) coincides with the distribution of German V-2 rockets falling on London. Significantly, the erection precedes the arrival of the rocket. This fact, which calls into question the usual mechanism of cause and effect (it complements the fact that the rocket, traveling faster than the speed of sound, is heard falling after it has exploded) is of central importance to the novel, for Pynchon means to pit two scientific models against each other. The older model, still seldom questioned, posits a mechanistic universe that operates according to the laws of cause and effect.The character associated with this worldview is the sinister Dr. Pointsman, a diehard Pavlovian threatened by the new model, which posits a universe in which physical phenomena can be plotted and predicted only in terms of uncertainty and probability (Pynchon is on sound theoretical ground here; he is presenting the physics of Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck). The character who embraces the more upto- date worldview is the sympathetic Roger Mexico, a statistician.
Between these two, poor Slothrop—a kind of Everyman—tries to stay alive and, if possible, free. Pointsman and his minions concoct an experiment with Slothrop; they will provide him with the best information they have on the German rocket and then observe him closely for further revelations. Slothrop, aware that he is being used, goes AWOL to embark on a private quest to discover the truth of his personal destiny—and perhaps the destiny of his age as well.Pynchon picks his historical moment carefully, for World War II was the moment when the technological world came of age. Technology offers humanity complete control of its environment and its destiny; techology offers something very like transcendence— or it offers annihilation. Pynchon’s novel is a meditation on the choice, which is seen nowhere more clearly than in the new rocket technology. Will humanity use the rocket transcendentally, to go to the stars, or will people use it to destroy themselves?
The answer has been taking shape since the German rocket scientists were sent east and west after World War II, and Pynchon concludes his great narrative with the split second before the ultimate cataclysm: The apocalyptic rocket plunges toward the “theatre” in which the film Gravity’s Rainbow has unreeled before the reader. Critical opinion is split on the degree of bleakness in this ending. Figuratively, says Pynchon, the world is separated from its end only by “the last delta-t,” the last infinitesimal unit of time and space between the rocket and its target. The delta-t, however, is a relative unit of measure.
Modern human folly has indeed set in motion the process of his own destruction, but the process might still be arrested by a reordering of priorities, human and technological.As for Slothrop, he simply fades away. Pynchon says he becomes “scattered,” and the word reveals a characteristic aspect of Pynchon’s genius. Just as Joyce forced religious and liturgical language to serve his aesthetic ends, Pynchon forces technological language to serve humanistic and spiritual ends. “Scattering,” a trope from particle physics, refers to the dispersal of a beam of radiation, but it also evokes sparagmos, the ritual dismemberment and dispersal of the divine scapegoat. Slothrop has been associated all along with Orpheus, whose dismemberment became the basis of one of the many fertility cults in the Mediterranean and Near East. In a sense, Slothrop dies for the sins of the modern world, and his scattering coincides with the founding of the Counterforce, a group of enlightened, anarchic men and women devoted to reversing the technology of violence and death.
The Counterforce, which has affinities with various countercultural movements waxing at the moment of this novel’s composition, is not particularly powerful or effective, but it offers hope for a planet hurtling toward destruction.After Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon published no new fiction for seventeen years. During this period, the counterculture retreated as the forces of reaction, complacency, and materialism took over, and perhaps it was this frightening and disheartening development that was behind Pynchon’s long silence. He may have abandoned a book or books that came to seem unattuned to the post-1960’s zeitgeist. However, when the novelistic silence was at last broken, it was with a meditation on the historical polarization of the 1960’s and the 1980’s. VinelandIn his long-awaited fourth novel, Vineland, Pynchon returns to the California setting of The Crying of Lot 49. As in V., Pynchon sets up a dual historical focus.
He imagines characters in the present—the portentous year 1984—trying to come to terms with the period, twenty years earlier, when they and the whole country underwent a searing passage. Broadly, then, Pynchon here reflects on the direction the country’s history has taken—from anarchic but healthy self-indulgence to neo- Puritan repression. These poles are visible in the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll, with its ethic of freedom, pleasure, dope, music, and self-expression, and in the Nixonian and Reaganite reaction that put an end to the polymorphous perversity of the 1960’s and ushered in the return to materialism and political conservatism.The novel is structured—somewhat more loosely than is usual with Pynchon— around the quest of a girl named Prairie for the mother, Frenesi Gates, who abandoned her shortly after her birth. Prairie’s father, Zoyd Wheeler, still loves Frenesi, as does the man with whom she was involved before him—the sinister Brock Vond, a federal agent who had used her to infiltrate and subvert PR3 and other radical causes. Zoyd accepts his misery, but Vond will stop at nothing to get Frenesi back in his clutches—not even at kidnapping Prairie, who could be made into an instrument of renewed control.
Also involved in the action are female Ninja Darryl Louise— DL—Chastain, an old friend of Frenesi, and DL’s companion, the “karmic adjuster” Takeshi Fumimota, a kind of Zen private eye.The centrality of Prairie, Frenesi, and DL, not to mention the narrational attention to Frenesi’s mother and grandmother (Sasha Gates and Eula Traverse), make this essay Pynchon’s first in feminist fiction. (Though a woman, V., was central to his first novel, it was really a parody of the kind of matriarchal vision associated with Robert Graves and the White Goddess.) It is in terms of this feminism that he is able in Vineland to move beyond the apocalyptic obsession that characterizes all three of his previous novels, as well as the stories “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna” and “Entropy.” Vineland ends with a vision of familial harmony that is nothing less than mythic—an augury of what an America-wide family might be. Here the reader sees Prairie reunited with her mother and half brother, as Zoyd and others are also integrated.
Vond alone is excluded (his surname is an apocope of the Dutch word vondeling, a foundling—as if to hint at his inability to be integrated into family wholeness). The reunion of the Traverse-Becker clans, which seem to center in their women, is Pynchon’s Kurt Vonnegut-like imagining of the millennium, the era of peace and harmony that ironically succeeds the apocalyptic disruptions everywhere expected in the novel.Herein, too, is the meaning of Pynchon’s setting, the imaginary community of Vineland that provides the novel with its title. Vineland is the name given to the American continent by the Vikings, its first European visitors, at the end of the first millennium.
Pynchon’s novel reminds American readers that their land has been known to history for one thousand years.