Thomas Pynchon's "Classic" Presentation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

CRITICISM THOMAS PYNCHON'S "CLASSIC PRESENTATION OF THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS Thomas R. Lyons and Allan D. Franklin There has been little interest shown in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying Of Lot 49 since its publication more than six years ago. The book was initially acknowledged in a series of reviews more noteworthy for their clever displays of vocabulary than for their insights.1 And there has been little of a critical nature to fill the gap.2 The book and its author deserve better of us than this. For, beneath the veneer of flashy, sometimes sophomoric, verbal humor, Mr. Pynchon presents us with a new and quite serious dimension of an age-old literary theme, a uniquely twentieth century definition of the element of fate. The Crying Of Lot 49 takes its place in a series of classic statements of the theme which begins in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden, and encompasses the efforts of such figures as Oedipus, Hamlet, and Faust who are all bedeviled by the inevitable nexus of knowledge and evil. Pynchon grounds his literary themes in certain laws, theories, and speculations in the physical sciences—in particular, those of thermodynamics, entropy, and information theory. These topics reputedly were of more than passing 1He reviews, for the most part suffer the inadequacies characteristic of the genre. They are heavy on plot summary and light on thematic statement. Perhaps the best of the lot is that by Richard Poirier in The New York Times Book Review for May 1, 1966. Mr. Poirier demonstrates the apocalyptic social and political themes in the novel, though never quite realizing the mechanism which effects them. Lest we seem too harsh on these readers, let us temper our criticism by saying that, in our opinion, the structural metaphor which unified the book is taken from the highly technical world of theoretical physics—not a familiar haunt of literary critics. 2The "corpus" of Pynchon criticism is contained in three articles. James Hall's "The New Pleasures of the Imagination," Virginia Quarterly Review, XLVI (Autumn, 1970), 596-612, is concerned exclusively with Pynchon's first novel, V. James Dean Young's "The Enigma Variations of Thomas Pynchon, Critique: Studies in Modem Fiction, X (Jan., 1968), 69-77, is largely a stylistic piece. He concludes that Pynchon, by the manipulation of certain traditional parameters of fiction, portrays life, not as meaningless, but rather as enigmatic; "... its significance is up to the highest bidder. . . ." Don HausdorfFs "Thomas Pynchon's Multiple Absurdities," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VTI (Autumn, 1966), 258-269, is mainly devoted, again, to V, but illustrates several points by references to The Crying Of Lot 49. Mr. Hausdorff finds Pynchon absorbed by the movement of contemporary civilization toward the "inert," a fate man can mitigate by pursuing "viable delusions" as "a survival tactic in a world running out of alternatives." Although Mr. Hausdorff sees clearly Pynchon's social theme as do many of the reviewers, like them he only dimly glimpses the play of natural forces which determine the shape of society. 195 196RMMLA BulletinDecember 1973 interest to him during his years at Cornell.8 They are to be found in an early short story, "Entropy."4 Their appearance in The Crying Of Lot 49 signals a maturation in the writer in that they are put to more significant use and appear less as spectacular bits and pieces of eccentric lore. Significant, influential work in thermodynamics really began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century with the work of such men as Sadi Camot, James Joule, Lord Kelvin, James Maxwell, Rudolph Clausius, and August Kronig. The second law of thermodynamics, which is of specific interest to us here, was enunciated as early as 1824 by Camot. In brief, Camot, despite a wrong view of heat and an incomplete view of energy, discovered that "heat cannot be transformed completely to work." The complete conversion of heat to work would represent a transformation of disordered energy, a replacement of random molecular motion by orderly bulk motion. Joule's experiments on the mechanical equivalent of heat in the 1840s laid the groundwork for the submicroscopic mechanics of the kinetic theory. The second law...