Completing the Picture:

What Do You Give a Theory

That Has Everything?

Jonah Bossewitch

ENG 363

Professor Michael Wood

May 14, 1996

"Shake any family tree hard enough, and at least one nut will fall."

The moment of birth represents the first distinction between inner and outer, and begins a process that reccurs througout our liftimes. Recognition of the duality of everything, and our subsequent attempts to reconcile, reharmonize, and reunify, characterize the pattern that we call learning. The minimum number of symbols needed to represent information is two, and it is no coincidence that the world seems to be fundamentally split in two, no matter how you slice it. Mind and body, particle and wave, energy and matter, mathematical and physical, fact and fiction, literal and metaphorical. Wherever we turn, we are confronted with the binary nature of reality, and one of the primary jobs of literature is to probe the relationships between between these parts.

One of the most effective methods for improving our understanding of these types of phenomena is by studying the boundary cases which define and delimit them. In the Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon liberaly employs this strategy to explore many dualities including duality itself. He explicitly informs us of this technique when Nefastis explains the principle behind his demonic machine. "Entropy is a figure of speech then, a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true."1(77) Taking Pynchon at his word, we ought to understand the Nefastis machine as a metaphor for other dualities explored in the book. One example of this is Pynchon's treatment of insanity. We can say that Pynchon uses 'insanity' as a figure of speech, or a metaphor. It connects the world of the body to the world of the mind, and more generally, the world of the physical to the world of ideas. Our organisms use both, and the demon of insanity makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.

For Pynchon, insanity is an abstraction which is closely associated with entropy. He veiws insanity as the breakdown of order, which can occur on many different levels. Any system that has degenerated into chaos can satisfy this criteria, and Pynchon does not restrict the concept of insanity to people. Books, relationships, and even societies can be insane, in Pynchon's sence of the word, and he flirts with various incarnations of insanity throughout the book.

It is crucial to recognize that Pynchon distinguishes between insane behavior and insane mentality in all of these instances. Remember that Pynchon was writing at a time when the behaviorist movement dominated the field of psychology. In its extreme form, behaviorism denies the scientific reality of subjective experience, and seeks to explain behavior without recourse to beliefs, desires, and intentions. Against this backdrop, Pynchon's novel can be understood as a refutation of the behaviorist's reduction, which equates insanity with insane behavior.

Many mistakenly believe that this issue has been resolved, and behaviorism has been resoundingly defeated. However, a quick glance at contemporary institutional psychiatry shows that this is far from true. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is the book that psychiatrists use to diagnose mental disorders, or in other words, the modern day definition of madness. The definition of a "manic episode"2 includes the following symptoms: (1) Elevated or expansive mood "characterized by unceasing and unselective enthusiasm for interacting with people", (2) Inflated self-esteem such as giving "advice on matters about which he or she has no special knowledge" or claiming a special relationship with God, (3) Speech that is loud, rapid, difficult to interrupt, and often "full of jokes, puns, plays on words, and amusing irrelevancies", (4) A flight of ideas "i.e., a nearly continuous flow of accelerated speech, with abrupt changes from topic to topic, usually based on understandable relations", (5) Increased involvement in goal directed activity including "excessive planning of, and participation in, multiple activities (e.g., sexual, occupational, political, religious). (6) "God's voice may be heard explaining that the person has a special mission." Notice that this brand of insanity is defined exclusively in terms of a subject's behavior, and makes no mention of the subject's internal mental state. Modern day psychiatry is still entrenched in turn of the century dogma, and Pynchon's objects of concern are alive, and actively oppressing, as we speak.

From the symtoms listed in the DSM, it is obvious that Pynchon uses manic depression as a model for what society considers to be insane. To insure that we do not overlook this important association, Pynchon hits us over the head with an "amusing, irrelevant, pun" and names one of his characters Manny Di Presso, (i.e. Mani[c] De Pressio[n]). It is also significant that LSD simulates manic psychosis so well that trained professionals can only distinguish between artificially induced trips and natural ones, by waiting to see if the patient's behavior returns to "normal".

Pynchon contrasts the conventional model of sanity based on behavior, with a model of sanity that based on information theory. This model is expressed in the circuit card metaphor that is revealed to Oedipa while driving into San Narcisco. "The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected , astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sence of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate." (13) Pynchon begs us to look beyond the outward patterns of an object's behavior, and question whether there is an underlying method to the madness. True insanity describes the processes that lack a coherent pattern, have no concealed meaning, and do not intend, never mind intend to communicate. In short, insanity describes a system that has reached maximum entropy, in which the particles engage in random, disordered motion, and which contains zero information.

This formulation of insanity is more generic than the clinical sence, and it is abstract enough to encompass a wide range of phenomena. Texts, characters, realationships, and societies are all systems that are subject to Pynchon's psychiatric evaluation. Pynchon playfully integrates psychotic symptoms into virtually all of his characters, but a careful reading of the text reveals a universal application of the insanity principle.

Pynchon artfully weaves these same symptoms into the text itself.

Is there a difference between acting insane and being insane?

This dichotomy exists on many levels