Irreversible Time and Entropy in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract

Keeping in mind that both science and literature bring complementary endeavors in the process of perception and creation as well as in the world through which those processes take part, this article deals with irreversible time and entropy as presented in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Even though Pynchon acknowledges the entropic pull and consequently the dissipation of energy, he also regards entropy in Claude Shannon's terms, as a proliferation of information. In this sense, the system gets activated toward increasing complexity rather than heat death, juxtaposing it to chaos theory so that its underlying principle encompasses both renewal and dissolution. In Pynchon's vision, just as closed mechanical systems gradually lose energy and dissipate, so do societies run down, tend toward disorder, and ultimately collapse if there is no input of external energy. Yet, despite the menacing, official notion of entropy as the irreversible movement toward the absolute end of time, Pynchon's novel shows systems' "correspondences" with their surroundings, which gives them new possibilities. Open systems are in a better position because they can evolve with the arrow of time facing forward. Consequently, as the paper argues, information (recognized as disorder) is growing so rapidly that the systems get overloaded, distorted, and buried in noise, augmenting the main character's (who acts as a "demon" and sorts out information) confusion and the systems' complexities.