by Chris Alexion, Copyright January 06, 2007, all rights reserved. 487 views
[Another cheap attempt to pass off a class paper as a real blog post. But at least this one has some relevance to the philosophical vanity discussed in Ecclesiastes.]
The past several units have discussed minority voices and oppression, particularly in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender. Though Thomas Pynchon's short story "Entropy" doesn't deal specifically with these issues, it shares the same threads of alienation, marginalization, and assimilation. Pynchon uses these themes to cast his own pensive and absurdly comic light on human experience.
Pynchon goes about his task by creating the darkly humorous misfits who populate Meatball Mulligan's "lease-breaking party," in its 40th hour at the time the story begins (Baym 2357). Meatball's friends aren't victims of classist or racist oppression, but they are alienated from society and from each other. The gang at Meatball's apartment comprises would-be intellectuals with no one on whom to practice their perceived intellectual abilities. The jazz enthusiasts play air instruments or listen in doped silence around a "speaker bolted into a wastepaper basket," flicking marijuana ashes into the speaker cone (Baym 2357). Saul sits ridiculously on the stove, lecturing Meatball on communication theory, over which he is now alienated from his wife Miriam (Baym 2357). The party animals are disconnected from reality, content to revel for two days straight in a drunken stupor. Nor do they have any real connection to each other, making Meatball figure that the best way to cope is to "lock himself in the closet and maybe eventually they would all go away. . . . But then he started thinking about that closet. It was dark and stuffy and he would be alone. He did not feature being alone" (Baym 2366). The girl Aubade suffers the same alienation from the outside world: She crawls "into dreams each night with a sense of exhaustion, and a desperate resolve never to relax that vigilance" (Baym 2361).
Similarly, when Pynchon deals with threads of marginalization, he does not evoke images of one part of mankind dominating another. Rather, he hints at the marginalization of man himself. Pynchon does this through the intellectual musings of Callisto, who takes the law of entropy as a fit metaphor for what he sees occurring in society. Callisto sees "the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street"; in American consumerism Callisto sees a tendency toward chaos. Stating entropy in cultural terms, he envisions "a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred . . . and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease" (Baym 2361). In this societal entropy–this cultural heat-death–America herself is marginalized; her culture will be cast aside as an irrelevant footnote to the Cosmos.
Finally, the theme of assimilation, in Pynchon's hands, emerges, not as the adoption of one person into a new culture, but as a failure to become part of anything productive. Meatball and his friends, intellectually alienated and faced with the impending death of American culture, are unwilling or unable to do anything. Meatball rejects his first idea of locking himself in a closet and sets himself to calming down his noisy guests: "This is what he did until nightfall, when most of the revelers had passed out and the party trembled on the threshold of its third day" (Baym 2366).
But Pynchon also deals with assimilation in another sense: the absorption of human experience into meaningless oblivion. Pynchon illustrates this through Callisto and Aubade, who fail to keep their injured pet bird alive. Aubade checks the thermometer outside the window, only to learn that the temperature remains at an obstinate 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Suddenly she smashes the window, letting the cold air rush in. Pynchon's closing is instructive:
[Aubade] turned to face the man on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion. (Baym 2367)
Work Cited
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. E. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
1 • LHR • January 06, 2007 • 4:18 PM
Cheap or not, it's something new. ./chrisalexion_2008-10_wordpress_export_files/icon_smile.gif alt=:- class=wp-smiley It isn't every day that I get to read someone's class paper — I enjoyed reading yours!
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