Thomas Pynchon’s Entropy

The concept of entropy has arisen periodically during the course of my PhD study, both as an analog to thermodynamics operationalised by Alan Wilson in his ‘family’ of spatial interaction models and to Shannon’s entropy as formalised spatially by several scholars including Mike Batty. Alan Wilson’s models of urban systems work because modelling an entropy function allows for the ‘most probable state of a system’ to be realised; as in thermodynamics’ if you start with an initial condition in which the state of the system is unbalanced, or disorganised, and iteratively maximise this state until an equilibrium is reached, that equilibrium state will represent the most probable state. Similarly, information entropy, pioneered by Claude Shannon, tells a similar story that we might think of as unpredictability, or uncertainty, in the transmission of information; practically information theory in geography has been used to characterise ‘evenness’ in the observed distribution of phenomena.

Entropy is generally regarded as something of a wily concept, frequently managing to avoid clear-cut explanations of what it represents, and acting at times as a mysterious quantification of uncertainty. It is with some delight then that it should crop up far outside of the scientific, or at least social-scientific arena, within the work of Thomas Pynchon, the famous American novelist and acknowledged recluse. Although I believe it is a reoccurring theme in his work, I encountered Pynchon’s entropy in the context of his 1966 work “The Crying of Lot 49″. This was a curious moment of coincidence as I had only recently discovered from Peter Baudains that some work on ‘complexity science’ he had been involved with was supported by English novelist Giles Foden, famous for his 1998 novel “the Last King of Scotland”. Such coincidences aside, the aim of this post is simply to consider how Pynchon invoke’s entropy, and what he means by it.

The Crying of Lot 49 is concerned with the story of Oedipa Maas as she struggles to come to terms with the practicalities of executing the estate of her deceased tycoon ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity. The task that Oedipa faces is complicated by the apparent realisation that she may be entwined in an historic, and ongoing, global conspiracy between two postal companies: Thurn and Taxis, and Tristero. Pynchon’s direction leads Oedipa through a set increasingly confusing circumstances, which seem to point towards society behaving in an increasingly unpredictable way; echoing the entropic state of a system as inherently disorganised. Oedipa begins to behave like the ordering, maximising, function in a Spatial Interaction Model, attempting to sort and seek out a most probable understanding of just what is happening as the novel unfolds. The core question pertains to the success of Oedipa’s efforts, and is largely unresolved at the books ending, simply put: can we ever overcome the uncertainty of life?

Tellingly, Pynchon makes reference to “Maxwell’s Demon”, a philosophical device that can supposedly overcome entropy, the idea behind Maxwell’s demon is that there exists some “finite being” (as Maxwell put it) to order the disparate elements of a distribution. In thermodynamics this would mean creating an artificial seperation between hot and cold particles, thus avoiding the thermodynamic equilibrium of the 2nd law. Currently it is unclear whether Maxwell’s demon could in fact violate the second law of thermodynamics.