User:Dandyozymandy/The Crying of Lot 49

References

Ferrero "Echoes of Narcissus: Classical Mythology and Postmodern Pessimism in The Crying of Lot 49"

Religious Connotation - The '49' in the Crying of Lot 49 could refer to the Pentecostal number which signifies the commemoration of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus's disciples

- The name of Loren Passerine, that of the auctioneer, could support this by referring to the Passerine ground-dove, as the dove is often the symbolic form of the holy spirit

Oedipus Rex

- The presence of the myths of Oedipus and Narcissus may serve in tandem to underscore the framework of the novel such as this; an inherently incestuous and narcissistic production

- Among scholars that believe that reference to Oedipus is significant of more than a joke, there tend to be two leanings of this interpretation: that of the Sophoclean tragedy and that of Sigmund Freud's interpretation of the story of Oedipus. While some scholars suggest that the riddle-solving quality Oedipus (The Sphinx's Riddle) and Oedipa share as protagonists points towards the original myth, others claim the content of their riddles share little symmetry.

- On the other side of the coin, Pynchon's use of Oedipus for his own literary work has been pointed to as a Greek borrowing that could be seen as incestuous, as an interpretation of a myth of times past and the cyclic nature of idea recycling in literature.

- Incest may also point to a melting homogeneity of society that results from the culture of mass consumption displayed within the novel.

- The Courier's Tragedy similarly has reference to the incestuous plot involving a relationship between Francesca and her brother, Angelo, as well as Angelo's plot to marry Francesca to Pasquale, her own son

- Oedipa finds many of the clues regarding Trystero through the plot of the Courier's Tragedy

- Oedipa's inability to make sense of the original version of the Courier's Tragedy furthers her inability to organize the content of the story, leading to indeterminacy, leading to her growing feelings of urgency

Narcissus

- Upon arrival in San Narciso, Oedipa checks into the Echo Courts Motel, which sported a painted sheet metal likeness of the nymph Echo from the myth of Narcissus, who Oedipa regards as having a strong resemblance to herself

- Oedipa is suggested to be akin to Echo in that she only reflects the story around her, becoming increasingly a personality borrowed as a vessel for the story of Trystero. Similarly, she acts akin to Narcissus, resulting in her eventual fear of paranoia

- Oedipa's stay at the Echo Courts Motel involves the motel's flat-surfaced swimming pool, and her early actions in the novel follow a recurring encounter with mirrors, both reminiscent of the myth of Narcissus; Ovid's pool

- Oedipa's fascination with looking in mirrors could point to her desire to return to order and may serve to ground her within a continually turning and indeterminate storyline

- In a moment of terror in front of a bathroom mirror in Echo Courts, Oedipa fails to find her image in the mirror. Similarly, a dream recounts her making love to her husband, though she awakes to staring into the mirror at her own face. This could suggest her propensity for making love to herself, not unlike Narcissus

- Has Oedipa opened the window to an alternative world in pursuing Trystero, or is she paranoid as a result of her own narcissism

- The city of San Narciso is often described as 'still' or 'silent', a place in which life has stagnated and where entropy has reached a standstill

- The interconnectedness of everything within the story is overwhelming, leading Oedipa to liken San Narciso to that of America as a whole; the promise of Trystero brings a break from the tepid world Oedipa knows

- Does a Maxwell's Demon exist to counteract the entropic decline of the cultural system?

- Despite Nefastis' attempt, the second law of thermodynamics cannot be broken

- Oedipa hopes to assume the role of Maxwell's Demon in order to break the monotony and fragmented state that America has become

- As San Narciso is Spanish for St. Narcissus, we musn't exclude the possibility that the town alludes to St. Narcissus himself

- In The Courier's Tragedy, the Duke of Faggio is murdered by a rival who poisoned the feet of an iamge of St. Narcissus which the Duke always kissed during Sunday Mass

- St. Narcissus imagery hopes to perform transformative miracle like that which he is known for, possibly the apocalyptic miracle Trystero is suggested to bring within the novel

Entropy

- Only the system exists, it is impossible to exist outside of the system; the trap of making sense of that which cannot make sense. The indeterminacy of the novel also hopes to challenge its explanations

- Maxwell hypothesized his demon to sort unpredictable, random molecules, to create order and certainty; indeterminacy denies this hope of renewal and invalidates the demon's existence

Palmeri "Neither Literally Nor As Metaphor: Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 And The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions"

- John Nefastis shows Oedipa a black box which he claims can refute entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, in the style of Maxwell's Demon

- It is impossible to get something for nothing; entropy always increases

- Nefastis claims to possess knowledge of a link between his machinery and the soul, requiring a 'sensitive' work his machine

- "signal our position between inaccessible fullness and profane emptiness of meaning"

- Suggests the flower the nymph is holding in Echo Courts is Narcissus poetica

- Is Narcissus an emblem of sterile self-love, as in the myth, or the potency of miracle, as in the Christian story

- Trystero suggests a plot containing sinister adventures (trysts) as well as one that elicits melancholic regret (tristia)

- Oedipa's night spent drifting in absolute meaningless triggered muted post horns and undergounf activity like no others

- Tristero points to the underside of the American Dream's legacy; the WASTEs of the American system, its unrelinquent shadow; the muted post horn signifies a dispossession of these people, and of a silent tepidity

Clarke "Allegories of Victorian Thermodynamics"

- The operator of the Nefastis Machine uses telepathy with a Maxwell's Demon to finesse the dissipation mandated by the second law of thermodynamics

- The demon possesses virtual existence as a trope

- Nefastis explains the drive of entropy by the demon as a literalization of a metaphor

Leland "Pynchon's Linguistic Demon: The Crying of Lot 49"

- Western civilization as endlessly regressing in the face of existence

- Oedipa searches for what should have meaning, or what should be significant, according to her own inventions

- A novel not only about entropy, but one that is entropic in nature

- Oedipa's anarchist miracle is Tristero

- Pynchon sets up possible relations, possible connections, all to allow them to be dropped and leave the reader lost

- Attempts to make order of disorder are impossible, fruitless; entropy is the inevitable increase of chaos. As the novel progresses, more strings arrive, but never an end

- While the Demon sorts molecules into hot and cold, the loss of entropy is offset by the information the Demon gained about each molecule

- Entropy is made real by a sensitive communicating with the demon; connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow, machine uses both

- Oedipa attempts to communicate with the demon, only to be met with silence; Oedipa cannot navigate beyond the system in which she is contained, resulting only in misunderstanding

- The futility of Oedipa's order interpretation is shared by the reader's futility in confronting the fiction of Pynchon; we are forced to become victims of Pynchon's entropic system

Grant "Not Quite so Crazy After all These Years: Pynchon's Creative Engineer"

- Nefastis' name may implicate an uncleanliness or abomination, specifically "nefarious"; inappropriate assumption that Oedipa is sexually willing does not indicate a highly evolved consciousness

- The Nefastis Machine represents creativity past the bounds of universal laws

- Increase in entropy that accompanies measurement counteracts the decrease in energy from ordering

- In thermodynamics, entropy is the measure of certainty of information about the system

- Entropy is the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity; in information is the measure of uncertainty in a system

- Link between information entropy and thermodynamic entropy mirroring the work of Szilard and Brillouin to establish congruence between information and entropy

- The increase in entropy associated with the demon's choice is exactly equal to the amount of information it has gained; hence the decrease in entropy by the demon is offset by the information it gains about what molecules were where

- Nefastis understands that mental work has a thermodynamic cost; aims to provide an external source of energy through a 'sensitive'

- The demon must collect data on each of the molecules, pushing the faster ones into one portion of the box, which heats up, causing that portion of the box to rise, while the other sinks as its temperature drops; the demon then reverses direction, heating up the opposing cylinder, resulting in perpetual motion

- Thermal fluctuation means the demon is part of the system and vulnerable to disturbances caused by gas molecule collisions and blackbody radiation

- Nefastis does not believe he as invented a perpetual motion machine; he acknowledges the energy cost of the machine cycling

- Analogy between Oedipa and the demon, both of which who attempt to sort; Oedipa clues and the demon molecules. As the demon must receive the input of a sensitive, Oedipa must receive information from the outside

Abernethy "Entropy in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49"

- Because of entropy, America has produced a intellectually and spiritually sterile society; this cyclic redundancy results in the inability to love, much like the nymph, Echo

- Irony is that the human ability to communicate is stymied by a greater capacity for communication; leads to apocalypse

- Use of allegory "flat" characters which bear suggestive names but little personality; sense of hopelessness which consumes this environment

- A state of chaos and sameness arrives at the end of entropy; things move from the least probable to the most probable; disorder and chaos reflect sameness rather than a lack of uniformity- Suggests Pynchon's American Society reflects when entropy has reached a "crisis state"

- Clerk Maxwell believed information processed by demons cost nothing; Maxwell's physics suggested that demons could furnish their own power source

- Suggestion to John Nefastis "nefarious" meaning evil or impious

- Either the system is closed, meaning no energy can enter inside, or Oedipa is not a sensitive; the novel is a closed system as we never reach the answer or conclusion

- Narcissus as narcosis; he reacted with numbness rather than love to Echo

- Yoyodyne is seen as a faceless government R & D laboratory, consisting of teams of engineers who sign over their patent rights within their employment contracts; 'yoyo' may be seen as a cyclic activity in which energy is expended within a closed system for an essentially meaningless repetition

- Inamorato Anonymous, a society dedicated to the prevention of love, utilizing impersonal communication media to thwart communication

- The Paranoids are a parody, another example of flat characters used as allegory and shells rather than having their own human emotions and desires

- This 'sensitive' does not exist to make sense of each plotline; one cannot put back together the chaos of American culture

Allusions in the book

Oedipus Rex

The connection between Oedipus and the protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, tends to align with one of two interpretations within literature: that of the Sophoclean tragedy Oedipus Rex, and that of the Oedipus Complex, a psychoanalytical theory pioneered by Sigmund Freud. Comparing the novel with Oedipus Rex, some scholars argue that both Oedipus and Oedipa serve as solvers of riddles—Oedipus in answering the Sphinx's riddle and Oedipa in attempting to uncover the mystery behind Trystero. However, critics of this interpretation claim that these riddles share little topical symmetry.

Supporters of the Freudian interpretation tend to point towards Pynchon's heavy borrowing of Greek literature and extensive use of allusions as part of the cyclic, incestuous nature of recycling within literature. Alternatively, the homogeneity of society around San Narciso as a result of the convergence of entropy has also been pointed to as having an incestuous nature.

Metamorphoses

The flower held by the nymph Echo, Narcissus poeticus

Upon arrival in San Narciso, Oedipa stops to check in at the Echo Courts Motel, which sports a painted sheet metal likeness of the nymph Echo from Ovid's Metamorphoses. This figure of Echo is holding a flower, suggested to be Narcissus poeticus, alike to the flower Narcissus turns into within the myth of Echo and Narcissus. Additionally, the pool at Echo Courts Motel is described as flat-surfaced, possibly symbolizing the pool in which Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection.

Scholars have drawn parallels between Oedipa and both Narcissus and Echo. Oedipa is initially suggested to bear a self-proclaimed resemblance to Echo, and it has been suggested the longing for answers regarding Trystero mirrors Echo's desire of Narcissus. Oedipa also recurringly encounters mirrors throughout the novel, initially failing to find herself in the bathroom mirror at Echo Courts, which could point to the beginning of her paranoia. She additionally recounts a dream in which she is making love to her husband at the motel, only to awake to herself staring back at her through a mirror, an act of self-love by way of a mirror, alluding to the fate of Narcissus within Metamorphoses.

Maxwell's Demon

After being prompted to by Stanley Koteks, Oedipa seeks out John Nefastis and his invention coined the 'Nefastis Machine'. This machine attempts to serve as a perpetual motion machine, utilizing the theory of Maxwell's Demon to sort molecules within a closed chamber. Nefastis explains that a telepathic operator or 'sensitive' is necessary to work the invention by looking into a photo of James Clerk Maxwell.

Despite Nefastis' attempt at invention, the second law of thermodynamics and its statement regarding entropy cannot be disproven, as the system gains entropy by way of measurement by the demon. This alludes to a famous retort of Maxwell's Demon by Szilard and Brillouin which sought to establish congruence between entropy in information theory and thermodynamics. Scholars have pointed to the entropic nature and indeterminacy of the novel as a symbol which invalidates the demon's existence.

Oedipa's role within The Crying of Lot 49 can be likened to Maxwell's Demon—a force which seeks to reverse the flow of entropy on the town of San Narciso. Just as the demon is hypothesized to sort unpredictable, random molecules to create order from disorder, Oedipa seeks to make sense of the mystery of Trystero. San Narciso as a city is often described as 'still' or 'silent'; a place where life has stagnated, one cultural microcosm of many within the United States. The concept of Trystero acts as a promise to reverse the entropic regress that America has fallen into, as an 'anarchist miracle'.