The Second Law of Psychomechanics:

Thomas Pynchon's Secular Spirituality.

Jonah Bossewitch

ENG 363

Professor Michael Wood

Preceptor Sarah Churchwell

May 14, 1996

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

Family saying.

The moment of birth represents the first distinction between inner and outer, and begins a process that recurs throughout our lifetimes. Recognition of the duality in 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 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 liberally 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(pg. 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 exist in both worlds, 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 views 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 sense 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 that 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." (7) Paranoid delusions, including the fear that others are conspiring against the subject. (8) Excessive spending sprees. 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 states. Modern day psychiatry is still entrenched in turn of the century dogma, and Pynchon's concerns are alive, and actively oppressing, as we speak.

From the symptoms 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 is 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 sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate." (pg. 13) Pynchon begs us to look beyond the outward patterns of an object's behavior, and recognize that "though this be madness, yet there is method in't."3 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 sense, and it is abstract enough to encompass a wide range of phenomena. Texts, characters, relationships, 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.

Although it is difficult to distinguish between the author and the characters in a free form narrative, Pynchon artfully weaves these manic symptoms into the text itself. He opposes his manic writing style with an overriding depressive theme of sadness, evident in the title (crying), the lonely subcultures who correspond using W.A.S.T.E., and the inescapable death force that haunts the book. This frenetic balance establishes a field of tension between euphoria and despair, and recreates the manic-depressive reality that afflicts over 1% of America's population. Pynchon writes as if he is manufacturing a mind altering drug, which has the power to induce hallucinations in the reader, and forces him imagine what it might be like to simulate a mental condition. Chemicals are the drugs for the body, words are the drugs for the mind.

The Crying of Lot 49 opens with DSM symptom (4), a nearly continuous, run-on flow of accelerated words, with abrupt changes from topic to topic:

"One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Mass came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsh in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible." (pg. 1)

The first sentence is also full of puns (Oedipa Mass), wordplay (executrix), and amusing irrelevancies (too much kirsh in the fondue), and sets the tone for the rest of the book by exhibiting symptom (3). By the end of the second sentence we have encountered a two million dollar shopping spree (symptom (8)), and a character who feels she has such a special relationship with God that she calls him by name (symptom (2)). Pynchon also parades Oedipa's extreme paranoia (symptom (7)) in the personification of the inanimate objects of her surroundings. Oedipa feels that she is "stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube", has shared her sickness with "the room, which knew," and is awakened by the screaming telephone at three a.m. (pg. 1, 2, 7)

Of course, like everything else in the book, we need to look at the role of inanimate objects on a number of levels. First, Pynchon uses the personification of inanimate objects to demonstrate the internal psychosis of the characters in the novel, and to infuse the entire work with a mood that makes you feel like you should double lock the door. The melancholy Mucho reveals a second reading of inanimate objects early on in the book. "Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as featureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life." (pg. 5). Thus, we must also view the objects and the words, which surround and describe the characters, as external projections of their inner lives.

Pynchon does not deny the link between the mind and the body, but he appreciates that the body is the physical projection in space-time of the internal shadow(s) who is doing the driving. The state of the driver certainly influences the motion of the automobile, but there are many possible motivations and explanations which might account for any given trajectory. Excessive speed and erratic swerving temps us to posit an impaired driver, but we can not logically cannot infer this with certainty. Perhaps the driver is a law enforcement agent in pursuit of the bad guys, or maybe a Tristero carrier who is hopelessly behind schedule. In any event, Pynchon is urgently reminding us not to forget the underlying principle that sits in the drivers seat.

"'In a guessing game in which the answer is chess, which word is the one prohibited?' I thought for a moment and then replied: 'The word is chess.'"4

The Crying of Lot 49 is a masterfully crafted guessing game, in which the reader accompanies Oedipa on a search for the true meaning of the Tristero. However, if Borges' characterization of intellectual literary puzzles is accurate, the Tristero can't be the true object of inquiry since the word occurs frequently throughout the text, and its symbol, the muted postal horn, is plastered all over Pynchon's world. After thinking for many moments, I believe that one of the words which Pynchon deliberately omitted in The Crying of Lot 49 is 'soul'. Our generation has lost its soul, and not only in James Brown's sense of the phrase. Scientific reductionism flatly rejects Cartesian dualism, denies the mystics, the sensitives, and the prophets, and deprives society of its hopes, dreams, and visions. The Crying of Lot 49 is a desperate search for a concept of soul that is relevant and meaningful to passengers of the Twentieth Century. Pynchon uses insanity as a springboard, to explore a secular spirituality which offers our nihilistic generation an intelligent account of 'soul' as the underlying principle of being.

"As things developed, [Oedipa] was to have all manner of revelations. Hardly about Pierce Inverarity, or herself; but about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away... as if watching a movie... magically, prisoner... [in] the confinement of that tower... In the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void; for all the waves, and ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world." (pg. 10)

Pynchon is not suggesting a Casper-the-Friendly-Ghost soul that many people attribute to Descartes. Rather he is proposing a soul that is the governing principle of relationships, composed of information, and which shares the same ontological status as mathematical objects. The soul is the single point of intersection between the ordered flow of consciousness and the thermodynamic system contained by our skin. The Nefastis machine can now be understood as a metaphorical person, who seemingly violates the laws of physics, influencing the external world by projecting its will through the motion of its hands/pistons. Soul 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 Ego makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.

Oedipa's revelation is intended to be universal, "hardly about Pierce Inverarity, or herself." It activates many of the familiar images associated with consciousness, including a homunculus located inside our heads, trapped inside our Freudian Ego, watching the movie of our life, on the screen within the Cartesian theater. Pynchon captures the infinite extension of our inner world in the tapestry of our experiences which simultaneously contains the (outer) world, and is our (inner) world. Maxwell's demon is the ghost in the machine, and Pynchon teaches us to take its existence very seriously. The mind/soul governs the actions of the body, just as Maxwell's equations govern the actions of all charged particles.

This model of the soul allows us to reformulate Pynchon's definition of insanity in terms of this new vocabulary. Pynchon equates insanity with the death of the soul, or in other words, with the disintegration of the order which governs/describes the system. We see this most vividly in the two characters who truly "lose it", as opposed to merely behaving as if they have lost it.

Dr. Hilarius enters the scene as a parody of sanity, a psychotherapist who is actively trying to drive his patients mad. He calls Oedipa in the middle of the night urging her to partake in an ludicrous "experiment" which can only end in psychosis and self-destruction. Pynchon foreshadows Hilarius' paranoia with his question "You feel threatened by them?" (pg. 7) As classical Freudians, we ought to interpret Hilarius' question as a projection of his own neurosis, and indeed this is realized in the climactic showdown in Dr. Hilarius' office. Hilarius feels threatened by them—the Israeli Nazi hunters, the police, TV, Oedipa, the pills, etc. Not only has Hilarius' behavior become erratic and unpredictable, but the his thought processes have also degenerated into chaos. In a sense, his soul has committed suicide, by trying to "cultivate a faith in the literal truth of everything... even the idiocies and contradictions." (pg. 100)

Pynchon reinforces the idea of 'insanity = soul death' with the tale of the "liberal" Nazis who "worked on experimental induced insanity. A Catatonic Jew was as good as a dead one." (pg. 102). Pynchon's tongue in cheek use of the terms "liberal" and "humane" betray his conviction that killing a person's soul is far more cruel than killing a person's body. The Nazi doctors were not happy with the quick deaths in the ovens and showers. They systematically investigated new methods of torture by using the scientific method. Pynchon amazingly manages to discuss these morbid atrocities in a way that makes us giggle, but this does not disguise the seriousness of his assertion. We can laugh at the faces of Hilarius, but we must be on the lookout for the many faces of Pynchon.

Immediately after Oedipa is confronted with the idea of experimentally induced insanity, she learns of her husband's plunge into the void:

"'Frankly', confided Funch, 'since you left, Wendall hasn't been himself... Behind his back,' Funch was whining, 'they're calling him the Brothers N. He's losing his identity, Edna, how else can I put it? day by day, Wendall is less himself and more generic...' [Mucho] hesitated before breaking into a radiant smile, 'you'll think I'm crazy Oed... Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You can pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each persons time line sideways till they all coincide.'"

(pg. 106)

Mucho has lost his distinct pattern, and lives in a world devoid of Pynchonian souls. In this world, Mucho is correct, and there is no personal identity. This reductio ad absurdum is one of the techniques that Pynchon employs to justify the necessary existence of a unique flow of information coupled with every physical system. If we don't posit a soul, then Mucho's trip becomes a reality, and we lose the ability to identify the individual patterns that define objects, relationships, sounds, and people. Without any individual information, "everybody who says the same words, is the same person", and identical people can be shuffled "till they all coincide... you dig?"

Which brings us full circle to the issue of how insanity can be artificially induced, and the relationship between acting insane, and being insane. In the Nefastis machine, information flowed both ways, from the thermodynamic system to the informational system, and back again. "The Demon collects data on each and every [molecule]. At some deep psychic level he must get through. The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information. To keep it all cycling." (pg. 77) The system operates on a two way causality, with the sensitive influencing the Demon, and the Demon influencing the sensitive. This same dynamic is present in our organisms.

Just as an insane state of mind will usually be mirrored in insane behavior, insane behavior will gradually be mirrored in an insane state of mind. Notice that this does not equate states of mind with patterns of behavior. Instead, this model is based on the idea that the two systems are intimately coupled, and that oscillations on one side of the equation will inevitably resonate, and spread to the other side, until the entire system as whole has reached equilibrium. This theory allows us to call Oedipa sane despite her insane behavior, however, it also predicts that if she continues to act in a manic, delusional, paranoid mode, it will eventually seep into her psyche and corrupt her internal data structure.

We can also use this idea to describe modern society, whose collective behavior can be personified and analyzed. Los Angeles is an addict, whose freeways are veins "nourishing the mainliner L. A.", and if the fast talking, hyper-confrontational, New York City was a person, he would be committed in no time.

Finally, this idea helps us understand The Crying of Lot 49 as a text with many of the behavioral symptoms of insanity, but which has not yet lost its mind. On the contrary, Pynchon's novel has a sharp and coherent soul, that is well ordered, and full of meaning. However, as is the case with all types of souls, "communication is the key". (pg. 77) Should Pynchon's book fail to communicate its underlying messages to its readers, it will be thrown into the soundproof rubber room of non-communication, and die the miserable soul death that it predicts for itself.

Oedipa's quest, is to "examine this formless magic, [and] to understand how it works," before she is swept away by the whirlwind of chaos that threatens to engulf us all. (pg. 11) After all, science has shown that "(i) you cannot win (matter and energy are conserved); (ii) you cannot break even (cannot return to same entropy state, since disorder always increases); (iii) you cannot get out of the game (absolute zero is unattainable)."5 In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon turns secular science against itself, in a last ditch effort to save the soul, and returns a wave of magic to a disenchanted generation. To find out if he succeeds, stare at the picture on the following page, and pray that we can all find the sensitive within, before stress and confusion tear our souls to shreds...

I pledge my honor that neither my thermodynamic system, nor my information system, have violated the honor code while writing this paper.

Jonah Bossewitch