Entropy And Faith In Oedipa Maas The Crying Of Lot 49

Communication, Entropy and Faith in The Crying of Lot 49 [1] In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas realizes that she is “a captive maiden [in the] tower” of her dull suburban life (Pynchon 11). The confines of her daily existence model the sort of closed system in which the effects of entropy are most visible, and that thermodynamic measure of disorder is a major theme throughout the novel. The theme is most thoroughly developed in the passage in which Oedipa attempts to discover if she is a “sensitive” who can psychically operate a perpetual motion device called the Nefastis Machine, which would defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Machine represents the efforts of the individual to impose order on the natural chaos of the world. Oedipa

Letters are a prominent motif; what should be a straightforward method of communication becomes a symbol of the complex Trystero mystery, and their very content is often misleading or useless. The San Narciso chapter of the Peter Pinguid Society, for instance, is required to send at least one letter a week through the underground system, resulting in a large traffic of generally useless information (Pynchon 39). This chaotic system of correspondence clearly links the themes of communication and entropy, illustrating the tendency, rampant throughout the novel, for an abundance of information to merely reinforce confusion. The events of the novel are set in motion when Oedipa receives the letter informing her of her ex-lover’s death, but, by the end, we have strong reason to doubt whether it was even true. Truth, like the entropy of information theory, irreversibly destroys the meaning of its own message, just as the Demon destroys the information that the sensitive passes on to it in order to generate energy. In this paradoxical state, Oedipa's quest for the truth about Trystero, and her related attempt to escape from her metaphorical tower of thermodynamic entropy are useless, because she is trapped in a cycle of wasting energy trying to find out information that loses its value over time, destined by the laws of probability to remain in a state of uncertainty over