SLSL 'Entropy'

[jbor]

from Joseph Tabbi, 'Pynchon's ENTROPY', _The Explicator_ 43.1 1984, pp.
61-3:

With his 1957 _Kenyon Review_ essay on 'The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic
Metaphor', M.H. Abrams helped to initiate a modern revaluation of Romantic
literary practice. Having studied with Abrams at Cornell during the year
this essay first appeared, Thomas Pynchon was among the first students
Abrams influenced, and we retain the trace of this influence in the
underlying structure and choice of words in Pynchon's early writing.(1) For
Abrams the recurrent motifs of breath and the wind in the greater Romantic
lyric represent a predominant theme of continuity and interchange between
nature's outer emotions and the interior life and emotions:
    The wind is not only a property of the landscape, but also a vehicle
    for radical changes in the poet's mind. The rising wind . . . is
    correlated with a complex subjective process: the return to a sense
    of community after isolation, the renewal of life and emotional vigor
    after apathy and a deathlike torpor, and an outburst of creative
    power following a period of imaginative sterility. (Abrams, 'The
    Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor', _The Kenyon Review_ 19,
    1957, p. 113)

(1) I learned of Pynchon's acquaintance with M.H. Abrams in a personal
interview with Abrams, by telephone, August 1982.

[...]

In this very short essay Tabbi quotes the passage from 'Entropy' beginning
from "And as every good Romantic knows ... " to nail his case. (NB also that
'Entropy' was first published in _The Kenyon Review_.) Tabbi goes on to note
that "Pynchon treats this metaphor with irony" and comments on the "fugal
structure" of the story, citing Robert Redfield and Peter L. Hays, 'Fugue as
Structure in Pynchon's 'Entropy', _Pacific Coast Philology_ 12, 1977, 50-55.

***

Also see John Simons, 'Third Story Man: Biblical Irony in Thomas Pynchon's
"Entropy"', _Studies in Short Fiction_ 14.1, 1977, pp. 88-93.

[...] Our understanding of the Saul-Miriam sections of 'Entropy' can be
further illuminated through a discussion of the symbolic function of their
names. Clearly Pynchon is using the Hebrew names for the apostle Paul and
the Virgin Mary with some definite purpose in mind. [...]
Saul's behavior is, I believe, meant to be a parody of a Biblical text,
specifically _Acts_ 20. [...]
Saul is an ironic parody of Paul in Pynchon's story, and in that story he
appears not as an apostle of the new Christian religion, but rather as a
spokesman for the new science of decline and decay in the twentieth century.
(i.e. "entropy") [...]

Interesting essay, discusses Wiener's _The Human Use of Human Beings_,
Tanner's chapter on P. in _City of Words_, and Henry Adams' Virgin and the
Dynamo.

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