Thomas Pynchon's "Classic" Presentation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

There has been little interest shown in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying Of Lot 49 since its publication more than six years ago. The book was initially acknowledged in a series of reviews more noteworthy for their clever displays of vocabulary than for their insights.1 And there has been little of a critical nature to fill the gap.2 The book and its author deserve better of us than this. For, beneath the veneer of flashy, sometimes sophomoric, verbal humor, Mr. Pynchon presents us with a new and quite serious dimension of an age-old literary theme, a uniquely twentieth century definition of the element of fate. The Crying Of Lot 49 takes its place in a series of classic statements of the theme which begins in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden, and encompasses the efforts of such figures as Oedipus, Hamlet, and Faust who are all bedeviled by the inevitable nexus of knowledge and evil. Pynchon grounds his literary themes in certain laws, theories, and speculations in the physical sciences—in particular, those of thermodynamics, entropy, and information theory. These topics reputedly were of more than passing