Entropology (3)

[Dave Monroe]

CONT'D

But what is it all about? One way to answer is to say
that it is about modernity; but since this is, after
all, Pynchon, we can answer the question another way
and say it is about entropy. Pynchon's use of the
concept of entropy is imperfectly understood. This is
partly his own fault, since the book in which he tries
to get the most out of it, The Crying of Lot 49, is
finally incoherent. In the story "Entropy," the
concept is taken from thermodynamics. It refers to the
tendency of all systems—and ultimately the universe—to
run down, something that happens, technically
speaking, through a loss of available energy as all
molecules reach the same temperature. The main
character in "Entropy" is obsessed with the idea that
the weather has stopped changing, and the story makes
an analogy between this approaching meteorological
stasis and the condition of modern civilization.
Pynchon was influenced by the historical vision in The
Education of Henry Adams, but the story has a
specifically late-Fifties, dead-end aura.

In The Crying of Lot 49, though, the concept of
entropy is taken from information theory, where it
refers to the tendency of communications systems to
get rid of excess meanings, and to approach certainty
and predictability. A nontechnical way to put it is to
say that the more people talk, the less ambiguous
their meaning becomes. Twenty college students read
The Crying of Lot 49 and come to class with twenty
different interpretations of the novel. After
discussing the book together for fifty minutes, they
leave with most of those interpretations discarded. A
gain in clarity and mutual understanding has been
purchased by a loss of diversity of opinion. The
Crying of Lot 49 is about a woman who discovers, or
imagines she discovers, an underground communications
system, a rival to the official government post
office, known as the Tristero. The question in the
book, left unresolved, seems to be whether such a
system, if it existed, would be any more desirable,
any freer, than the official system it seeks to
displace.
Mason & Dixon is not about physics or communication.
It is about culture. The vision behind the novel
arises, almost certainly, out of the last pages of
Claude Lévi-Strauss's great work of cultural
anthropology Tristes Tropiques (1955):

Thus it is that civilization, taken as a whole, can be
described as an extraordinarily complex mechanism,
which we might be tempted to see as offering an
opportunity of survival for the human world, if its
function were not to produce what physicists call
entropy, that is inertia. Every verbal exchange, every
line printed, establishes communication between
people, thus creating an evenness of level, where
before there was an information gap and consequently a
greater degree of organization. Anthropology could
with advantage be changed into "entropology," as the
name of the discipline concerned with the study of the
highest manifestations of this process of
disintegration. [4] 

Imagine the globe, a million years ago, randomly
sprinkled with spores. These spores give birth to
groups of more or less genetically identical human
beings. Each group takes root on some part of the
planet and, independently of the others, develops its
own distinctive language, customs, myths—its own
culture. Over the millennia, each cultureevolves as
the means by which its particular group of human
beings adapts to its particular environment, makes
sense of its particular history, fends off the
particular threats to survival it confronts.
Biologically, the members of these groups are all the
same, but culturally they are exotically diverse.
 
Modernity, in this vision, refers to the process of
homogenizing these differences by compelling cultures
to come into contact with one another. This is, in the
case of the indigenous peoples of Brazil, the subject
of Tristes Tropiques. In political terms, the name for
it is colonialism, and nearly everything Pynchon has
written is, essentially, a lament over
colonialism—-political, economic, cultural, sexual.
"Small numbers of people go on telling much larger
numbers what to do with their precious Lives," as
Cherrycoke puts it. The part of the phenomenon in
which Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon play their tiny
and unwitting role is the standardization and
universalization of time and space. Their job, as
scientists, is to reduce the measurement of these
things to certainties, to eliminate bad guesses,
fantastical interpretations, scientifically impossible
notions—to get everyone on the planet on the same
wavelength.

Their enterprise, like the enterprise of the Age of
Reason to which it belongs, is to gain certainty at
the expense of variety and possibility. "Once the
solar parallax is known," the inhabitants of the land
underneath the surface of the earth explain to Dixon,
"once the necessary Degrees are measur'd, and the size
and weight and shape of the Earth are calculated
inescapably at last, all this will vanish." Once it is
established that the density of the earth makes it
impossible for there to be a society of people living
under its surface, that possible world will disappear.
This example is fantastic. The examples of the
American Indians and the native South Africans are
not.

Dreams, which play a big role in Mason & Dixon, are
among the ways people can continue to imagine freely,
and Cherrycoke at one point describes America still
unmapped as Europe's dream of exotic possibility—but
only 

safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and
recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work
of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its
Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive
to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities
that serve the ends of Governments,—winning away from
the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one,
and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is
our home, and our Despair.

The settling of America is an allegory for the way
getting people to think alike depletes the world.
 
The ghosts, talking animals, experiences of flying,
Gothicism, and the irreal rest in Mason & Dixon are
thus symptoms of the resistance to modernization and
rationalization. Pynchon himself has, elsewhere, made
their meaning clear: "In ways more and less literal,"
he wrote in 1984,

folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a
time all kinds of things had been possible which were
no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of
nature had not been so strictly formulated back then.
What had once been true working magic had, by the Age
of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery
. [The
persistence of these beliefs showed] a profound
unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however
"irrational," to an emerging technopolitical order
that might or might not know what it was doing.[5] 

This way of putting it is much harsher than anything
in Mason & Dixon, and it is possible to wonder why, if
Pynchon's sense of modernity as "an emerging
technopolitical order that might or might not know
what it was doing" is this heated, the tone of his
novel is so relaxed and bemused. The idea most readers
have learned to associate with Pynchon is the idea of
paranoia—the conviction that our lives are controlled
by some hidden design, some deep conspiracy. Many
candidates for this role turn upin the course of Mason
& Dixon: the Jesuits, the East India Company, the Roy
alists, the Penns and the Calverts—more vaguely:
capitalism, corporatism, the ideology of reason. "Are
we being us'd, by Forces invisible?" Dixon asks.

The point seems to be that they are not, because
although some people will try to take advantage of
this process (and these in Pynchon are always evil),
nobody is in control of it. This is just the direction
in which human history happens to run, and the effort
to get it to run in a different direction, the effort
to construct a counterculture to the culture of
bureaucracy and rationality, only ends up producing
another regime of coercion and control, another iron
cage—just as people struggling against dictatorships
sometimes become terrorists. The underground Tristero,
in The Crying of Lot 49, seems to be as oppressive as
the "official" communications system it rivals—just as
the black freedom fighter Enzian becomes the double of
the sadistic fascist Weissmann in Gravity's Rainbow.
In 
Mason & Dixon, the point is made by twinning a Spanish
Jesuit obsessed with the political advantages of
controlling information about latitude and longitude
with the Chinese renegade, Captain Zhang, who is
obsessed with the belief that drawing lines of
latitude and longitude will bring evil into the world.
The Chinaman ends up dressing like the Spaniard.
Paranoia about fanatics is a kind of fanaticism.

Mason and Dixon are always in a fog about whose secret
interests they might be serving, but they are highly
articulate about their role in the disenchantment of
the world. For disenchanting the world is what, in the
end, human beings do. "This Visto
is a result of what
we have chosen, in our Lives, to work at," Dixon
explains at one point to the mechanical duck,

"—unlike some mechanickal water-fowl, we have to, what
on our planet is styl'd, 'work,'
?"

"Running Lines is what surveyors do," explains Mason.

"Thankee, Mason," says Dixon.

Or as the book's epic poet of Pennsylvania, Timothy
Tox, puts it: "For Skies grow thick with aviating
Swine,/Ere men pass up the chance to draw a Line."

Drawing lines, of a different kind, is what writers
do, too. They work to disambiguate the tragedy of
disambiguity, to make sense of the cost of making
sense. By appropriating the loose and baggy forms of
Sterne and Swift, Pynchon has found an ideal vehicle
for his meditation on the worlds that were lost, and
the suffering that was caused, just so people could
understand one another better. He has produced a work
of cultural anthropology, a Tristes Tropiques of North
American civilization, and an astonishing and
wonderful book.

TO BE CONT'D


 
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