Emily S. Apter

[alice malice]

The time travel narrative often includes an attempt to fix things,
reverse things, prevent a disaster, death etc....change the
future...so no Prime Directive (Star Trek).

History, as Henry Adams explains, is a chaos of indeterminate,
discontinuous and singular events that can't be averted yet
irreversibly alter our lives.

All you touch and and all you see is all chaos and entropy.
Run Rabbit, Run?

wenty years ago the english critic Tony Tanner maintained, as the
central thesis of his book City of Words (1971), that the fictional
imagination of postwar America was as much troubled by the
postmodernist novel's dissolution of form as by the constrictive,
overdefinitive forms of conventional realism. Tanner linked the
erosion of formal distinctions with fears of an entropic universe in
which energy was always running down: the abiding anxiety of 1960s
writers who discussed entropy (Pynchon, Burroughs) was its
homogenizing effect on the universe where all things dwindled to
nothing, all things became alike. The waste-making process resulted in
a confusion and merging of identities and an eventual dissolving of
all things into a blank, formless waste, a perfect homogeneity of
nothingness.

John Updike was never of this experimental school of writers but, as
Tanner observed, the characters of his early novels discussed these
same processes, and the landscapes they inhabited were afflicted by
the same cosmic entropy or universal wasting. Conner, in The Poorhouse
Fair (1959), theorizes about "entropia," and George Caldwell, in The
Centaur (1963), sees Nature as "garbage and confusion." Harry
Angstrom, a tidy man who dislikes waste in his domestic affairs if not
in his sexual ones, moves in Rabbit, Run (1960) across a terrain of
junk heaps, treeless wastes, and derelict houses which become part of
a single integrated and indistinct mass (or mess). Even childbirth is
seen by Rabbit as an entropic reduction of the universe to the one
monochromatic filth: "Janice's babyish black nostrils [widen] to take
in the antiseptic smell he smells, the smell running everywhere along
the whitewashed walls, of being washed, washed, blood washed, retching
washed until every surface smells like the inside of a bucket but it
will never become clean because we will always fill it up again with
our filth" (159). According to Tanner, doubleness was in Updike's
early novels the ultimate defence against entropy and its wasting
homogenization of the world (290), and love was crucial in this
defence because love involves two in everything: "She was double
everywhere but in her mouths. All things double. Without duality,
entropy. The universe God's mirror," reflects Piet on Georgene in
Couples (1968), a novel depicting a complex "universe of twos" (63).
Coupledom has continued to be the dynamo of Updike's fictional
universe--the chopping and changing of his twosomes in their tireless
pursuit of novelty and their adoption of new mirror positions is what
keeps their world in motion--and the theoretic importance of love is
that it resists the assimilation, the entropic merging, of one
identity into another. The idea had some literary currency in the
Sixties on both sides of the Atlantic--"What will survive of us is
love," Philip Larkin concluded the last poem of The Whitsun Weddings
(46)--but in the form in which it has come down to contemporary writing
it is fraught with fears that love is itself but another feature of
the world's entropy, its every particle inscribed with the process of
decay. Here, for example, is Julian Barnes in the "Parenthesis" to his
recent A History of the World in Ten-and-a-Half Chapters (1989):

It will go wrong, this love; it probably will. . . . Our current model
for the universe is entropy, which at the daily level translates as:
things fuck up. But when love fails us, we must still go on believing
in it. Is it encoded in every molecule that things fuck up, that love
will fail? Perhaps it is. Still we must believe in love, just as we
must believe in free will and objective truth. And when love fails, we
should blame the history of the world.

(246)

Moreover, within the context of Updike's fiction, the whole theory of
love as an oppositional, antientropic force has always begged the
question of whether his female characters are ever allowed
sufficiently well-defined and distinct identities to resist being
merged into and annihilated by the wills of their dominant males
(feminist critics such as Mary Allen have expressed reservations about
the bland and bovine kind of femininity which Updike's women
represent). The young Harry Angstrom of the...

Mapless Motion: Form and Space in Updike's Rabbit, Run
Derek Wright

From: MFS Modern Fiction Studies
Volume 37, Number 1, Spring 1991
pp. 35-44 | 10.1353/mfs.0.0959







On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 5:38 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> What I don't get here is the move from how it is all so bad and why to the time travel jump to entropy forever forward.
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l