Pynchon, Beckett, and Entropy: Uses of Metaphor

PYNCHON, BECKETT, AND ENTROPY: USES OF METAPHOR / John R Harrington THOMAS PYNCHON'S work is extraordinarily eclectic in its interests , but his use of entropy as a metaphor has emerged, over the past ten years or so, as the pre-eminent single concern of critics of his work. This is understandable, given the fact that entropy is consistently evoked in all of his novels, that one of his first publications was a short story called "Entropy," and that the concept and the physicist James Clerk Maxwell's contribution to it are discussed at length in The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon's use of entropy as a metaphor seems so definitive, and the relevance of the concept itself to contemporary American culture so great, that evocation of entropy is rapidly attaining the status of a distinctive characteristic of American fiction, an identifiable means of addressing a specifically national sort of disillusionment and sense of purpose turned paranoia and frontier turned wasteland.1 Entropy may well be especially relevant to the contemporary American condition, but it is not, as common sense might dictate, a concept over which American writers hold any special franchise, although the recent vogue for evocations of the second law of thermodynamics by American "entropologists" may obscure that fact. A useful case in point is the fiction of Samuel Beckett, which has just as persistently refined an individual use of entropy as a metaphor with radically different results. Entropy, James Clerk Maxwell and his theoretical "demon," the fate of closed systems, and other concepts often assumed to have been derived from thermodynamics with definitive originality by Pynchon, (whose scientific and technological knowledge is clearly impressive) have in fact been a consistent motif in Beckett's work since his first published story, in Transition in 1929, described the problematics of response to a clearly scientific perception of "cosmic discord." What is most striking about Pynchon's and Beckett's individual uses of entropy as a metaphor are the dramatic contrasts involved. These contrasts are superficially apparent even in the manner in which Pynchon's work continues to expand in scope, to subsume more and more eclectic material, and to expand in length, while Beckett's work has increasingly narrowed in scope, has become more restrictive in its references, and has decreased in length from trilogies of novels to prose fragments. These are fairly obvious hints of the consequences of their respective uses of entropy as a metaphor, and they do serve to indicate that it is not simply occurrence of the metaphor that is of primary interest. It is, rather, the manner in which the metaphor is deployed that is revealing, instructive, and of cultural significance. The Missouri Review · 229 THIS SORT OF dramatically different use of a single metaphor can be accounted for by both the nature of the concept of entropy and the nature of metaphor itself, and when considered on this common ground Pynchon's and Beckett's fiction offer special insights into each. Entropy is a term that resists casual definition, and writers who use the term in literary or critical contexts inevitably introduce revealing assumptions not present in a purely scientific context. The synonym now commonly used to describe entropy, "disorder," is a case in point. For the layman the word bears connotations of proliferating chaos and is suggestive of the sort of randomness apparent in Pynchon's many lists, series, and congeries, but insofar as thermodynamics is concerned the term is applicable to states of uniformity and homogeneity suggestive of Beckett's bleakest and most minimal fictions. Obviously, "disorder" is a relative term meaningful only in the context of a specific definition of order. A familiar analogy is that of a shuffled deck of cards: they may be disordered in relation to the specific rules of conventional card games, but rules could be formulated so that any arrangement of cards would represent a usable order. In thermodynamics an absolute definition of microscopic order exists: it is the probability of a single molecular state rather than a multiplicity of possible states. Put another way, microscopic order is an improbably uniform arrangement of elements in a single system operating independently of all others. Lacking that...