706 The American Century: Literature since 1945series of arcane signs. The signs, however, require interpretation, decoding according
to the rules of structural paranoia. And one of those rules is that structural paranoia
is impossible to distinguish from clinical paranoia. So interpretation may be a
symptom rather than a diagnosis. Pynchon’s novels are extraordinarily intricate
webs, self-reflexive halls of mirrors, precisely because they replicate the world as
text – a system of signs that must but cannot be interpreted. Each of his books
creates a lexical space, a self-referential verbal system, that imitates the post-humanist
space, steadily running down and losing energy, that all of us now occupy.
Pynchon has been his own fiercest critic. In an introductory essay to his early
stories, Slow Learner (1984), he has said that his fundamental problem when he
began writing was an inclination “to begin with a theme, symbol, or other unifying
agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.” His books are
certainly packed with ideas and esoteric references; and, whether one agrees with
this self-criticism or not, it is clear that Pynchon laid down his intellectual cards
early. The title of his first important short story is “Entropy” (1960). It contains
specific references to Henry Adams; and it follows carefully the Adams formulation,
“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.” The use of entropy as
a figure for civilization running down was to become structurally formative in his
later fiction. So was his use of two kinds of characters, alternative central figures first
sketched out here. The situation in “Entropy” is simply and deliberately schematic.
There is a downstairs and upstairs apartment. Downstairs, a character called
Meatball Mulligan is holding a lease-breaking party, which moves gradually toward
chaos and consequent torpor. Upstairs, another character, an intellectual called
Callisto, is trying to warm a freezing bird back to life. In his room he maintains a
small hothouse jungle, referred to as a “Rousseau-like fantasy.” “Hermetically sealed,
it was a tiny enclave in the city’s chaos,” the reader is told, “alien to the vagaries of the
weather, national politics, or any civil disorder.” The room is a fantasy, a dream of
order, in which Callisto has “perfected its ecological balance.” But the room leaves
him in paralysis, the dream does not work; the bird dies, and Callisto’s girlfriend,
realizing that he is “helpless in the past,” smashes the window of their hermetically
sealed retreat, breaking the shell surrounding his fantasy life. Meatball Mulligan,
meanwhile, does what he can to stop his party “deteriorating into total chaos” by
tidying up, calming his guests, getting things mended.
“Entropy,” in this way, mediates between binary opposites: which are the opposites
of modern consciousness and culture. There is the pragmatist, active to the point of
excess, doing what he can with the particular scene, working inside the chaos to
mitigate it. And there is the theorist, passive to the point of paralysis, trying to shape
and figure the cosmic process, standing outside as much as he can, constructing
patterns for the chaos to explain it. Meatball is immersed, drowning in the riotous
present; Callisto is imprisoned in the hermetically sealed glasshouse of the past.
The text, which here and later is the dominant presence in Pynchon’s writing, is the
interface between these two figures, these two systems or levels of experience. As
such, it sketches out human alternatives in a multiverse where mind and matter are
steadily heading for extinction. Or, it may be, the alternatives of hyperactivityGGray_c05.indd 706ray_c 05 .indd 706 8 8/1/2011 7:31:40 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 40 PM