The Negentropic Freeways of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

The Negentropic Freeways of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract

In this paper I posit that the freeways of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 decrease both information entropy and thermodynamic entropy in the novel’s high entropy world. I defend this argument through the lens of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a United States public works project which created the modern-day Interstate Highway System. The interstate freeways of the 1956 Highway Act connect people easier and faster than ever before, a phenomenon which procures greater communication and differentiation within America. Pynchon in Lot 49 thus articulates that the communication and differentiation that freeways allow decreases informatic and thermodynamic entropy by combatting America’s overwhelming technological noise and social/cultural inertia, respectively.

Main Text

Despite their central position in the novel, scholars have seldom discussed the role of freeways in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of Lot 49, drives through Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, all, as explicitly specified by Pynchon, by utilizing freeways. Pynchon is most likely highlighting freeways in Lot 49 because of the then-recently passed Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. A bill signed into law by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 1956 Highway Act authorized 25 billion dollars for the construction of 41,000 miles of the Interstate Highway System (Weingroff 48-50). Interstate 5 was moreover created as part of the 1956 Highway Act, a freeway that stretches the entire length of California parallel to the Pacific and was originally planned to connect the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland (“National System”).

Modern interstate freeways connect people more quickly and conveniently than ever before, thereby enabling greater communication and differentiation within the United States. That freeways enable greater communication and differentiation is imperative in Lot 49’s world, which is constantly increasing in information entropy and thermodynamic entropy.[1] In this world of increasing informatic and thermodynamic entropy, the freeways of Lot 49 provide a much-needed negentropic (anti-entropic/orderly) environment, decreasing both forms of entropy. Consequently, I will now proceed to delineate how the freeways of Lot 49 are negentropic, discussing first how they decrease information entropy before moving on to discuss how they decrease thermodynamic entropy.

When Oedipa first drives into San Narciso, she almost has a revelation:

…so in [Oedipa’s] first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. She suspected that much (14).

A revelation is, at its essence, a communication. Therefore, for a revelation to occur, there must be a proper channel (i.e., frequency) to transmit said revelation between sender and receiver: a channel that necessarily must be low in information entropy and immune to outside infiltrations of noise. Freeways, which decrease information entropy by facilitating concise communications between people, consequently support clear channels of communication, allowing Oedipa to briefly clear her mind from all the technological noise that constantly surrounds her and feel as if she is having a revelation.[2] Indeed, Pynchon in this passage suggests that the low information entropy environment of the freeway is what almost allows the answer to Oedipa’s entire Tristero quest to communicate itself to her before she even knows of the organization’s existence. At this early point in the novel, Oedipa is unaware (yet still innately appreciative) of the negentropic properties of freeways: an unconscious appreciation that later in the novel turns conscious, within the context of thermodynamic entropy.

When Oedipa races away from John Nefastis’ house after he attempts to coerce her into sexual intercourse, she drives directly into San Francisco rush hour traffic. Contrary to the typical reaction of being bumper to bumper, however, Oedipa is quite pleased with her situation: “amid the exhaust, sweat, glare, and ill-humor of a summer evening on an American freeway, Oedipa Maas pondered her [Tristero] problem. All the silence of San Narciso – the calm surface of the motel pool, the contemplative contours of residential streets like rakings in the sand of a Japanese garden – had not allowed her to think as leisurely as this freeway madness” (Pynchon 87). Oedipa is happy to be gridlocked because the “madness” of the freeway is thermodynamically negentropic. The silence, calmness, and contemplativeness of San Narciso illustrates how the town is static, homogenous, and banal: all attributes that pertain to a stagnant system with high thermodynamic entropy. In a system with high thermodynamic entropy, all energy has exhausted. When all energy has exhausted in a system (such as San Narciso, or, as Pynchon implies, much of America) it is impossible to think, as thinking is an action that requires energy. Indeed, exactly like high information entropy, high thermodynamic entropy makes meaningful communications and/or thoughts impossible, because there is no energy to support said communications/thoughts. The freeway, with its variety of dissimilar people all with their own unique ideas, dialects, customs, etc., and from all over the United States and world, promotes differentiation for Oedipa. Differentiation combats the homogeneity of thermodynamic entropy and thus generates negentropy/order. With negentropy comes energy, or, in other words, a decrease in thermodynamic entropy; therefore, Oedipa can contemplate her “Tristero problem” in San Francisco rush hour, because the bedlam of its traffic promotes a level of difference which injects energy into Oedipa’s previously entropic San Narciso surroundings.

In this essay I hope to have demonstrated that freeways are negentropic constructs within Lot 49 that decrease both information entropy and thermodynamic entropy. Consequently, following the two examples above, it should be no surprise that when Oedipa meets the drunken sailor after her all-night journey in San Francisco, he asks her to mail a letter to his wife using the W.A.S.T.E. mailbox that is “under the freeway” (Pynchon 102). W.A.S.T.E., the postal system utilized by the Tristero and other discontents, promotes and maintains a communications network. As discussed earlier in this essay, for a communication (thought, signal, message, etc.) to transmit smoothly, it necessarily must be in a low entropy environment, both informatically and thermodynamically. Thus, the W.A.S.T.E. mailbox in San Francisco (“always one [mailbox.] You’ll see it”) is fittingly under the freeway, a microenvironment of low entropy (Pynchon 102). The negentropic freeway supports W.A.S.T.E.’s postal network, allowing the Tristero to communicate with each other in a contemporary United States that is by and large overwhelmed with high and ever-increasing informatic and thermodynamic entropy.[3] Pynchon consequently conveys to the reader that the 1956 Interstate Highway System, signed into law ten years before Lot 49 was published in 1966, is an exciting public works project that has the potential to decrease America’s modern communicative noise and social/cultural stagnation. To Pynchon, the connections that interstate freeways support contain the great potential to facilitate more meaningful communications among distantly separated individuals and procure higher differentiations of thought/lifestyle in once-uniform areas, phenomena which decrease information entropy and thermodynamic entropy, respectively.

Notes

[1] Please see Anne Mangel’s essay “Maxwell's demon, entropy, information: The Crying of Lot 49” for a comprehensive reading of the themes of information entropy and thermodynamic entropy in Lot 49. In this paper, however, all that needs to be known are the simple definitions of information entropy and thermodynamic entropy. Information entropy is a measure of a communication’s information content, where information is equal to entropy. Therefore, a communication with more information contains more entropy, while a communication with less information contains less entropy (Shannon 392-393). Following this definition, noise is thus an entropic overload where there is so much information in the communication that the receiver cannot parse any significance. On the other hand, thermodynamic entropy is a measure of a system’s disorder, or lack of energy. The more disordered a system, the higher its thermodynamic entropy, and the less energy it contains (Drake). It is worth clarifying here concerning thermodynamic entropy that “disorder” in the context of thermodynamics is not used in the popular sense of chaos, turmoil, confusion, etc., but rather the scientific sense of dispersal, inertness, and homogeneity; in other words, disorder represents a dead system exhausted of its energy/order/difference, not a scene of pandemonium. Finally, as Anne Mangel points out in her essay, information entropy and thermodynamic entropy are mathematically connected and therefore influence each other (202).

[2] Mediums of technological communication are infested with noise throughout Lot 49, a part of “the novel’s preoccupation with messages, signals, noise, information, and transmission;” freeways therefore act as a communicatively negentropic alternative to technologies such as the telephone (Grant 18).

[3] It is no wonder that this moment with the sailor breaks Oedipa out of the entropic “prison of her own ego” that she was trapped in up to this point, as she recognizes the importance of negentropic, genuine, communications with others in an America increasingly subsumed by isolation, artificiality, and noise (Carter 52).

Works Cited

Carter, Steven. “Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.” The Explicator, vol. 59, no. 1, 2000, pp. 50-

52. doi:10.1080/00144940009597078.

Drake, Gordon W. F. “Entropy.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 7

Jun. 2018, https://www. britannica.com/science/entropy-physics.

Grant, J. Kerry. A Companion to the Crying of Lot 49 – Second Edition. University of Georgia

Press, 2008.

Mangel, Anne. “Maxwell’s Demon, Entropy, Information: The Crying of Lot 49.” TriQuarterly,

vol. 20, 1971, pp. 194-208.

“National system of interstate and defense highways: as of June, 1958.” American Automobile

Association, 1958, https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701p.ct003465/?r=-0.033,0.19,1.554,0.767,0.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

Shannon, Claude E. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical

Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, 1948, pp. 379–423. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.

Weingroff, Richard F. “Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956: Creating The Interstate System.”

Public Roads, vol. 60, no.1, 1996, pp. 10-51.