The role of science and technology in the novels of Thomas Pynchon

Abstract

Thomas Pynchon's novels--V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland--rely heavily on scientific metaphors and allusions from cybernetics and information theory, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Instead of working to provide a stable picture of reality (and thereby provide characters with an epistemological authority within any novel), these scientific systems create contrasting versions of reality which range from completely deterministic to non-deterministic. The tension between these antithetical scientific/philosophical systems and characters' understandings of them creates an epistemological and ontological crisis in the narrative structure of the novels. A readily identifiable strategy of Pynchon's is the establishment of antithetical scientific pictures of reality (either deterministic or non-deterministic) which then compete for conceptual control of the novel without providing the reader any form of internal authority to distinguish between the two systems. The result is a destabilization of textual meanings because primary terms in the novels must often support two or more (often incompatible) concepts. This approach is analogous to opening a closed, rational system suffering from entropic decay and allowing in outside energy to revitalize the system. In V., the "Hothouse of History" and the "Chaos of the Street" are shown to have origins in deterministic and probabilistic conceptions of reality, respectively. In The Crying of Lot 49, the figure of Maxwell's Demon creates a double-bind for the main character, Oedipa Maas. In Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop is mechanized by behavioral psychology and the V-2 rocket is paradoxically humanized by several complementary scientific descriptions, Godel's Theorem of Incompleteness is then used to overturn these two conceptual movements. In Vineland, a general lack of scientific allusions is used to illustrate the consequences of general scientific and technological illiteracy in society.