The Crying of Lot 49

EntropyInformation

DisintegrationThe Nation

2nd Law of Thermodynamics:

Entropy Must Increase • In a closed system, spontaneous

action will happen to minimize potential energy and maximize entropy (“disorder”).

• “Entropy” is a measurement of the loss of order: a change in a system will always be toward less order, less heat, and less potential energy.

• Closed systems move only (that’s the law) – from hot to cold– from order and potential energy to

disorder and minimal potential energy

• This has many applications (human and environmental biology, chemistry, evolution, etc.), and the science changed after Lot 49 was written.

Maxwell’s Demon

He proposed a thought experiment (1867) that he thought could challenge the second law of thermodynamics: a demon that can move fast/hot molecules to their own system.

He thought fast/hot could move to fast/hot, not to cold/slow as the law dictates.

Maxwell was Wrong

The “demon” needs and uses energy to observe the molecules and to sort them.

“’Sorting isn’t work?’ Oedipa said. ‘Tell them down at the post office, you’ll find yourself in a mailbag headed for Fairbanks, Alaska, without even a FRAGILE sticker going for you” (86).

Informational Entropy:A Mathematical Theory of

Information (1948)• Co-authored by Claude Shannon and

Warren Weaver• Shannon worked for Bell Labs,during

WWII working on information theory for military communications

• Weaver worked for US govt agencies during WWII in applied mathematics

Informational Entropy:Premises

• Information can be quantified: Weaver and Shannone define it as the number of possible states of a message (probability)

• Information ≠ Meaning• The similarity between information

theory and thermodynamic equations is more than coincidence.

Definition: Informational Entropy

Information entropy quantifies the information contained in a message.

It is the minimum message length or number of symbols necessary to communicate information.

The more uncertain a message is (because it is being selected from a larger probability set), the more information it contains.

Therefore, the greater the noise and uncertainty in a message, the greater its informational entropy.

Shannon’s equation measures the amount of information contained as separate from what’s predictable or pre-determined in the message (e.g. repeated words or phrases, statistical probabilities of word choice).

Shannon’s Information System

Literary Questions• These dual theories of entropy

equate molecules in a box with quantities of information. What is the significance of this parallel?

• Information theory emerged from WWII military research: how does Lot 49 represent the relationship between information/communication and the military-industrial complex?

Answering the Questions• Tristero as an underground postal

service conspiracy: a politicized communication system, the sources of terror, anxiety, occasional information.

• Oedipa as a molecule moving around the closed systems of San Narciso and California, trying to sort the meaning from the noise.

• Conspiracy imposes order and stable knowledge--reduces both kinds of entropy.

• Uncertainty, indeterminacy, random motion in the system, increase entropy.

• At which pole does Tristero operate?• Given this science comes from military

research, at which pole does the U.S. government and society operate?

• Can Oedipa turn information into meaning, “project a world”?

She tested it [her death wish], shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike ‘clues’ were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the first, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night. (118)

For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U.S. Mail. It was not an act of treason, not possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal from the life of the republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world. (124-5)

There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America. . . . If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other town, any other estate, then by that continuity she might have found The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she’d looked. (178-9)

[Why Mucho quit selling used cars]: 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 futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest. (14)

That America coded in Inverarity’s testament, whose was that? She thought of. . . the voices before and after the dead man’s that had phoned at random during the darkest, slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial’s ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word. (180)

And how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. (181)