{"id":67,"date":"2009-02-01T21:21:30","date_gmt":"2009-02-02T02:21:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=67"},"modified":"2009-02-01T23:50:44","modified_gmt":"2009-02-02T04:50:44","slug":"pynchons-crying-of-lot-49-and-entropy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=67","title":{"rendered":"Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and Entropy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Crying of Lot 49 has a plethora of information that was just as confusing to me as it was to Oedpia. <\/span>But I think this was intentional on Pynchon\u2019s part. <\/span>Oedpia pursues clues and information that appear to be connected, but when looked at from an objective viewpoint, these connections are arbitrary and only bring up more questions with indefinite answers. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Entropy is symbolic and used in a broader sense than just the explanation of Maxwell\u2019s Demon. <\/span>Oedpia is constantly getting clues to the mystery of the Trystero. <\/span>There are loosely connected clues that Oedpia encounters throughout the story, but one that really grabbed me was what leads her to Nefastis\u2019s perpetual motion machine and its relevance to Trystero. <\/span>This is completely arbitrary. <\/span>Koteks is merely sketching the muted post horn on a piece of paper when she walks by and he tells her the story of Maxwell\u2019s Demon and Nefastis\u2019s machine. <\/span>Oedpia takes this to be some sort of clue and seeks Nefastis out. <\/span>When she meets him, Nefastis says, \u201cEntropy is a metaphor, It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow\u201d (85). <\/span>I vaguely know what entropy is from merely the text and Wikipedia, so I spoke with my roommate, who is majoring in physics, and he tried to explain it to me a little better. <\/span>He said that entropy is an actual measurable quantity in physics. <\/span>The idea is that in a closed system, things tend to degrade into chaos. <\/span>Without any force or loss in a system, that system cannot function (He gave an example of a boiling pot of water with the lid on and how the tendency is for the energy in the pot to push the lid off and escape). <\/span>I think this idea is a prevailing one in the text, and entropy is used in terms of information and culture. <\/span>All the information that Oedpia encounters during her journey in California does not fit together like she hopes. <\/span>One thing leads to another and so on, and Oedpia becomes obsessive in solving this apparent mystery. <\/span>While Oedpia is experiencing culture in 1960s California, she is trying to make sense of the world around her, or should I say, the world that seems to be hidden from her, but draws no logical conclusion. <\/span>When Oedpia tries to formulate a conclusion and, seeing that the further she goes the more confusing things become, she loses the aspects of her life that were orderly and she becomes detached and paranoid: <\/span>\u201cThey are stripping from me \u2013 she said subvocally \u2013 feeling like a fluttering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out over the abyss \u2013 they are stripping away, one by one, my men\u201d (126). <\/span>In chapter 6 we really see her lose it as she wonders back to The Scope and her hotel started and meets with Mike Fallopian and Genghis Cohen again. <\/span>The world that Pynchon created has caused Oedpia to descend into chaos. <\/span><\/p>\n

Crying of Lot 49 is obviously more than a commentary on the monopoly of the postal service. <\/span>It\u2019s clear that Pynchon is making a greater point. <\/span>Crying of Lot 49 is considered one of the definitive postmodern novels, and I think I\u2019ll take a stab at the reason why. <\/span>COL49 is reflective of the 60s culture of the time \u2013 music, drugs, promiscuity, and rebellion of authority \u2013 all these things are inherent in the plot (and rather cleverly mocked at). <\/span>Elements of mystery, pop culture, history, counterculture, and science are combined in COL49 to form a pastiche, which is a symptom of postmodernism. <\/span>Culture is mirrored and satirized in the text while realism is ignored in order to exaggerate culture. <\/span>That\u2019s the most I can make out of it for now.<\/span><\/p>\n

Overall I enjoyed the novel and thought it had some fantastic sentences, like this one: \u201cI am the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming from my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also\u201d (62). With such a dense novel in so few pages it is obvious that Pynchon is smart, but with outbursts like this he also has a sense of humor.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Crying of Lot 49 has a plethora of information that was just as confusing to me as it was to Oedpia. But I think this was intentional on Pynchon\u2019s part. Oedpia pursues clues and information that appear to be connected, but when looked at from an objective viewpoint, these connections are arbitrary and only … Continue reading Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and Entropy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[22,14,17,20,120],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pynchon","tag-humor","tag-music","tag-pastiche","tag-pop-culture","tag-pynchon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions\/82"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}