Entropy and Meaning in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
In modernity, the narrative of scientific progress operates under the assumption of order and linear progress. But with the rise of postmodern theory, these assumptions begin to be called into question to provoke new scientific discourses based on indeterminacies and discontinuities. The Crying of Lot 49 poses the same questions of the possibility of scientific knowledge and the search for intrinsic meaning. Pynchon follows the scientific model of question and answer, except that he subverts the formula to reveal the answer as question itself. What results is a bifurcation of knowledge, in which the answer becomes an indeterminacy. However, characteristic of Pynchon’s work is …show more content…
The book is a literary subversion of the scientific method. Oedipa Maas is given the seemingly simple assignment of serving as executor to the final will of Pierce Inverarity. In the process of untangling Inverarity’s affairs, a group of questions are stumbled upon, perhaps the most prevalent being the secret of the Trystero (around which the plot is centered), but, no less important, the search for meaning in Oedipa’s own life. She engages in a series of scientific inquiries into answering these uncertainties, only to find that they are unanswerable. Oedipa is surely participating in an exercise of accumulation of knowledge, to return to Lyotard, but instead of forming a congruous whole, this accumulation only yields apparently disparate …show more content…
Indeed, the acronym even stands for “We Await Silent Tristero’s Return” (139). But the exact nature of W.A.S.T.E. is somewhat confusing. It begins as a group of people who have nothing to say to one another, and continues as members are required to send messages to one another once a week which contain no real significance. As Oedipa continues to discover new information about this strange faction, she finds only an increasingly number of ambiguities and apparent coincidences. In the end, she is faced with four equally viable conclusions: That she actually has found a network working to subvert the American postal service, or that she is hallucinating, or that she is the victim of some huge and expensive practical joke, or she is insane. Her experimentations lead only to four unknowable
In modernity, the narrative of scientific progress operates under the assumption of order and linear progress. But with the rise of postmodern theory, these assumptions begin to be called into question to provoke new scientific discourses based on indeterminacies and discontinuities. The Crying of Lot 49 poses the same questions of the possibility of scientific knowledge and the search for intrinsic meaning. Pynchon follows the scientific model of question and answer, except that he subverts the formula to reveal the answer as question itself. What results is a bifurcation of knowledge, in which the answer becomes an indeterminacy. However, characteristic of Pynchon’s work is …show more content…
The book is a literary subversion of the scientific method. Oedipa Maas is given the seemingly simple assignment of serving as executor to the final will of Pierce Inverarity. In the process of untangling Inverarity’s affairs, a group of questions are stumbled upon, perhaps the most prevalent being the secret of the Trystero (around which the plot is centered), but, no less important, the search for meaning in Oedipa’s own life. She engages in a series of scientific inquiries into answering these uncertainties, only to find that they are unanswerable. Oedipa is surely participating in an exercise of accumulation of knowledge, to return to Lyotard, but instead of forming a congruous whole, this accumulation only yields apparently disparate …show more content…
Indeed, the acronym even stands for “We Await Silent Tristero’s Return” (139). But the exact nature of W.A.S.T.E. is somewhat confusing. It begins as a group of people who have nothing to say to one another, and continues as members are required to send messages to one another once a week which contain no real significance. As Oedipa continues to discover new information about this strange faction, she finds only an increasingly number of ambiguities and apparent coincidences. In the end, she is faced with four equally viable conclusions: That she actually has found a network working to subvert the American postal service, or that she is hallucinating, or that she is the victim of some huge and expensive practical joke, or she is insane. Her experimentations lead only to four unknowable