The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Although short, this book is also dense, like a many layered cake.
One way to distill it is to pull all the tropes together into one stream. Let’s start with Maxwell’s Demon. Maxwell’s Demon is a thought experiment in which a closed system remains, on the macrolevel, static, but in terms of its inner space, becomes organized through random motion, using entropy to violate the first law of thermodynamics: entropy. Maxwell’s Demon grabs particulates and then keeps all the high energy particles on one side and shuffles all the low energy particles on the other side.
So literally, Ophelia Maas attempts to be Maxwell’s Demon by taking all the random bits of narrative particulate streaming around, and organize them into one coherent gradient. One can see the gradient as a reality when a piston moves. As in the narrative, she fails. Towards the end of chapter 6, Ophelia is depressed, confused and increasingly unable to figure out what to do or how to be. Thus, she is not Maxwell’s Demon.
But if you think the story is on the side of Ophelia, that as a protagonist, she must in fact be the subject, somehow special like Maxwell’s Demon, you’ll discover you’re wrong.
But instead of being Maxwell’s Demon, Ophelia is in fact the piston that proves that Maxwell’s Demon is making a gradient. Hence, Maxwell’s Demon is somewhere else, moving the narrative particles about: the muted trumpet, W.A.S.T.E., her x-lover’s will, Trystero, Thurn and Taxis, the Courier’s Tragedy and of course John Nefastis and his actual Maxwell Demon perpetual machine… all of these are spun madly about, showing up in the Vatican, showing up as a pornographic version, showing up on the Western frontier, showing up in the Netherlands, in theater, in the mouths of Grad students… Pynchon creates a closed box of narrative particles spinning about. All the while Ophelia pistons around Los Angeles, going up to San Francisco and back down again, trying to find the correct subject, to locate the novel’s antagonism… to find the displacement that is the gradient’s negative.
But the novel ends abruptly, and rightly so, because in this mystery, just when things look like that we (Ophelia) has run out of options, so we hang all the antagonisms in the novel, place all the narrative displacement onto one plot element: that lot 49 that will auctioned and Ophelia will find a missing person…
Even though it seems that there’s no guarantee that the missing person will in fact have any answers what so ever!
So what Pynchon’s done is build his novel as a Maxwell’s Demon. But doesn’t this only just point out that novels as a structure have a rising gradient, with all the tropes being “pushed to one side”, suspended impossibly, so all resolutions can only come together, at once toppling down and revealing their secret panties? That Maxwell’s Demons are antagonists, and protagonists are pistols that are somehow able to stop the antagonisms…
But wait! There’s another side to Maxwell’s Demon as well:
The two fields [of thermodynamics and information theory] were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell’s Demon. As the Demon sat and stored 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 about what molecules were there
.
This isn’t totally right, because in information theory, entropy is the lossiness in information transfer. The state of a totally neutral field of molecules, one has perfect information because we know its completely even… any one area will look like any one another area. Once we get a difference in the field, we now have the possibility of entropy (that is, information entropy) reoccurring in the transfer to the subject.
So in this sense, as Ophelia sorts information (or Thurn and Taxis sorts information in the form of postage for others), or as anyone sorts out information for the Courier’s Tragedy or any kind of history, and you start to get a loss of information. Entropy insures. In fact, it’s arguable that the system Pynchon set up loses entropy (as molecules are sorted into gradient) in order to potentially increase entropy (as information about the molecules are lost).
So to wrap this up: The gradient in the narrative may follow the narrative curve and become climactic right at the end, but that’s equaled by the confusion about the narrative as we become continually displaced by as the characters reveal more and more information to Ophelia. In order words, right before the climax, the narrative gradient (loss of entropy) is equal to the narrative entropy (confusion about what we are looking for…). Imbalance on both information and gradient which is offset when both are balanced: information about nothing is equal to a field of indistinguishable nothing.
All of these layers wrap themselves together to form one even shell. From beginning to end, Pynchon magically carves a space out of words on the page for us to fall deeper and deeper into, grounding an experience in us, of an end so conclusive that we can’t ever reach it.
He impresses us with inevitability.
(Really. Go read it for yourself. You’ll see exactly what I mean.)
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