Ironic Distance in Thomas Pynchon's "Entropy"

alice wellintown alicewellintown at gmail.com
Thu Jun 13 14:56:46 CDT 2013


So, after a quick swipe at the misreading critics, including the great Tony
Tanner, Heffernan smiles on David Seed. And this is the reason:

"Seed's unusual attention to narrative perspective and rhetorical textures
led him, first, to favor the metaphor over the notion of entropy and,
second, to foreground detachment and irony as central compositional devices
in the story" (301).

So, Pynchon ironizes all the theories which are proposed.

Imagine that.

Now, ironic readings are, like, real powerful, dude.

Pay attention now, keep your eye on the periodic tables and the parabolas,
dudes, cause your knowledge of science, or whatever, is needed, for the
irony to work. But don't run away to the MLA. Not yet. There's nothing here
you can't get. Well, you might get the science and miss the irony, of
course.


On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 5:21 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> I'll comment on this article and on "TSI", the shorts that matter most to
> the science in P.
>
> To my reading, "TSI" is far more important than "Entropy", for a bunch of
> reasons, but chiefly
> because it includes our very first doomed counterforce lead by the little
> man, Grover Snodd, a "scientist" who tries to use science/math to
> understand the world and ends up abandoning his better angel (the little
> black boy). Forget the satanic mills, for now, here is the idea from Blake
> we need to focus on. It's not that P alludes directly to Blake in the
> story, but the concept, of harm and duty, the responsibility the boys have
> to both the jazz man and their imaginary friend, is essentially the same
> theme Blake develops, of innocence and experience. Dark, yes, but far
> darker than the satanic mills, surely, Blake a big reader of Milton would
> agree,  is the heart, dear Conrad.
>
>
>
>
> http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_literature/summary/v052/52.2.heffernan.html
>
>
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