Ironic Distance in Thomas Pynchon's "Entropy"

[alice wellintown]

Next, Heffernan jumps to the 2nd law in AGTD, where it makes a cameo
appearance. He then looks at the stock characters that show up in fictions,
and reminds the dear readers that they needn't brush up on their chem, no
more than a reader of Moby-Dick need go study the whale.


Why not? And wouldn't it be, if not needed, at least helpful? Sure. Could
be. Provided one is not fooled by the irony, by the tone. Heffernan does a
fine job of describing the tone. Of course, he has a big advantage of his
critical predecessors: Pynchon on the Simpsons, and the prose P has
published. These help us read P. He's no scientist. He's a writer.


On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 3:56 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130613/ac57327d/attachment.html>