NPPF: Canto Three: The Worm and Entropy

[Vincent A. Maeder]

This was originally sent rich text but the Pynch Liserv seems to have
eaten it, so I will send it again via plain text.  V.

_Pale Fire: Canto Three: The Worm and Entropy_

_Table of Contents_

	_The Worm as Metaphor of Life and Death_
		_Comparison to Mr. Pynchon_
	_The Worm as Larva_
	_The Worm as Entropy_
		_Resources of Mr. Pynchon's Use of Entropy_
		_Comparing Mssr. Nabokov and Pynchon's Treatment_
		_Entropy in Vineland_

Both Mssr. Nabokov and Pynchon utilize the themes of death and entropy
in their work.  While Mr. Pynchon seems more obsessed and capable in
handling the subject, Mr. Nabokov uses these themes throughout Pale Fire
as woven through the Mr. Shade's struggle with the death of his
daughter, Mr. Shade's obsession with life after death, taking up Canto
Three in it's entirety with his "investigation", and even Kinbote's slow
slide into a psychotic state.  

Canto Three is particularly focused on life after death and entropy.
The following discusses the use of the worm metaphor and the opening
stanza of Canto Three's images of death, destruction and disintegration,
as well as comparisons with Mr. Pynchon ending with a brief discussion
of Vineland's use of entropy.

_The Worm as Metaphor of Life and Death_

V52.7 "to lecture on the worm" Canto Three is obsessed about life after
death and sets up a contrast between religious faith and scientific
inquiry.  In this context, President McAber may have used the "worm" as
a metaphor of the life and death process; the larva developing into the
butterfly or the moth wherein the larva spins its cocoon of life and, in
the end, metamorphoses into a spiritual being leaving behind the husk of
its former self.  This is echoed in Shade's use of the term "larvorium",
a portmanteau word similar to "larviform" (structure of larva) and
perhaps meaning something like a place associated with larva.

Smith's Bible Dictionary: Worm, [N] [E] the representative in the
Authorized Version of several Hebrew words. Sas , which occurs in
(Isaiah 51:18) probably denotes some particular species of moth, whose
larva is injurious to wool. Rimmah , (Exodus 16:20) points evidently to
various kinds of maggots and the larvae of insects which feed on
putrefying animal matter, rather than to earthworms. Toleah is applied
in ( 28:39) to some kinds of larvae destructive to the vines. In (Job
19:26; 21:26; 24:20) there is an allusion to worms (insect larvae)
feeding on the dead bodies of the buried. There is the same allusion in
(Isaiah 66:24) which words are applied by our Lord, (Mark 9:44,46,48)
metaphorically to the torments of the guilty in the world of departed
spirits. The valley of Hinnom near Jerusalem, where the filth of the
city was cast, was alive with worms. The death of Herod Agrippa I, was
caused by worms. (Acts 12:23).
(http://www.biblestudytools.net/Dictionaries/SmithsBibleDictionary/smt.c
gi?number=T4481)

_Comparison to Mr. Pynchon_

Cf. GR V.29, Episode 5 and the séance as well as the obsession
throughout the book between the corporeal versus spiritual and the
approaches of Pavlovian instinct, Roger Mexico's statistical analysis,
Slothrop's eventual transformation, etc.

_The Worm as Larva_

The worm also sets up a neat resonance with the overall text: Kinbote
feeding off Shade like a larva feeding on corrupting matter as Gradus
feeds off the intended death of Kinbote and Kinbote's "Commentary" feeds
off Pale Fire (indeed, as all modern commentary and scholarly work feeds
off the creative work of others).

Worm - (1.) Heb. sas (Isa. 51:8), denotes the caterpillar of the
clothes-moth. (2.) The manna bred worms (tola'im), but on the Sabbath
there was not any worm (rimmah) therein (Ex. 16:20, 24). Here these
words refer to caterpillars or larvae, which feed on corrupting matter.
These two Hebrew words appear to be interchangeable (Job 25:6; Isa.
14:11). Tola'im in some places denotes the caterpillar (Deut. 28:39;
Jonah 4:7), and rimmah, the larvae, as bred from putridity (Job 17:14;
21:26; 24:20). In Micah 7:17, where it is said, "They shall move out of
their holes like worms," perhaps serpents or "creeping things," or as in
the Revised Version, "crawling things," are meant.  The word is used
figuratively in Job 25:6; Ps. 22:6; Isa. 41:14; Mark 9:44, 46, 48; Isa.
66:24.
(http://www.ccel.org/e/easton/ebd/ebd/T0003800.html#T0003836)

_The Worm as Entropy_

The text resonates with this image at V52.20-26 where Mr. Shade lays out
a metaphor of death and entropy (disintegration): "For we die every day;
oblivion thrives/Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,/And our
best yesterdays are now foul piles/of crumpled names, phone numbers and
foxed files."

_Resources of Mr. Pynchon's Use of Entropy_

Cf. Mr. Pynchon's treatment of this same law in his short stories, V,
COL49, GR, VL and MD which engage his "entropic vision". Cooper, Signs
and Symptoms, Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World, University of
California Press, 1983, pp. 45-48, et seq.; Harris, Contemporary
American Novelists of the Absurd, College and University Press, 1971, p.
78; Clerc, Mason & Dixon & Pynchon, University Press of America, 2000,
p. 100; Safer, The Contemporary American Comic Epic, Wayne State
University press, 1989, pp. 48, 86, 90-94, 99, 108-09; Chambers, Thomas
Pynchon, Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 23-31, 184-185.

_Comparing Mssr. Nabokov and Pynchon's Treatment_

In comparison of Mssr. Nabokov and Pynchon's treatment of entropy, Mr.
Cooper wrote, "The spectre of universal decline haunts even the private
aesthetic patternings of Nabokov.  'Time's arrow' in Lolita points
mockingly toward degradation, but not so much in the external worlds of
social organization and cosmic heat death as in the world of one's own
conceptions.  Humbert recalls a misplaced photograph of Annabel Leigh
'amid the sunny blur into which her loveliness graded.'  Just before
losing Lolita, he finds himself overtaken by a 'slow awfulness,' a
purely personal analogue for the 'slow apocalypse' of Fausto Maijistral
in V.  In Pale Fire, the character Gradus embodies this process of
'graded' loss.  As an agent of the 'communal eye,' Gradus is the enemy
of any 'special reality' or unique structuring.  As his name suggests,
he signifies the gradual degeneration of order to chaos, concentration
to diffusion, surprise to probability, singularity and distinction to
repetition and sameness.  He is portayed as a foolish bungler, but he
arrives nonetheless.  The force he represents is everywhere and closely
parallels entropy as presented by Pynchon."  Cooper, pp. 6-7.

Cooper also compares the use of the image of cages and towers in
discussing the value of entropy as a theme in the works of both Mssr.
Pynchon and Nabokov.  Both authors create such images ("Herbert Stencil
(V.), agent in his hothouse, or Oedipa Mass (49), the maiden held
captive in the tower" versus Kinbote's imprisonment in his castle.
Cooper, pp. 46-47), but while Nabokov makes their cages "artistic,"
building "novels around the sport and value of such activity," Mr.
Pynchon's characters desire to break out of the self-imposed structure
of a solipsistic character.

_Entropy in Vineland_

Chambers discusses Mr. Pynchon's use of entropy in relation to Vineland
as an extension of the theme of disintegration set forth in Gravity's
Rainbow.  Vineland is, Ms. Chamber's reports, "America 1984, where
nearly everything seems irrefragably reduced to commodity and surface,
where warmth has been sacrificed to coldness and light has faded to
twilight, and where lovely Frenesi Gates's once innocent eyes have grown
cold and 'unbearable' (VL, 247).  Pynchon is still using the theme of
decline, but if he uses entropy in Vineland, it is not so much as his
early mentor, Norbert Weiner, had seen it, as an 'organic incompleteness
. . . an Augustinian devil', but rather as a 'done deal,' a situation of
reversal now so complete that the organic has been reconfigured into the
inorganic.  As the next step in the devolution begun in Gravity's
Rainbow, Vineland, 'another story of twilight reconfiguration" (VL, 44),
is a story of depletion, diminishment, and depredation.  By 1984 the
primal interplay of light and dark, which had given way to the rocket's
ultrawhite terror, has dimmed to the dull, cold twilight of 'quotidian
California' (VL, 94)."  Chambers, pp. 184-85.

Chambers elaborates, and states that Mr. Pynchon, "[r]ather than share
Weiner's vision of a negative entropy that neutralizes this decline with
'local enclaves of order,' he imagines the opposite: establishing local
enclaves of mystery that disperse the hardened systems of order and that
reassert the animate as a viable force in a world of twilight sameness."
Chambers, p. 185.

Which leads to the state of Mr. Pynchon's work in Vineland as a
description of the current state of cultural entropy as a
Californication of the U.S.; the Starbuckization of the world where all
coffee tastes the same from Yavapai, Arizona to Beijing, China -- the
slow, cold death of humanity's cultures and heritage.

V.