Entropy, Maxwell's Demon and the Crying of Lot 49 Kevin Etten

When reading Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" one is flooded with a deluge of historical references (dates, places, events) and, unless a historical genius, probably feels confused as to the historical accuracy of such references. As critics have shown, Pynchon blends factual history with fiction and manages, as David Seed writes in "The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon," to "juxtapose(s) historical references with reminders of the novel's status as artefact so that the reader's sense of history and of fiction are brought into maximum confrontation" (128). Pynchon, for example, in "Lot 49" speaks at length about Maxwell's Demon, a machine proposed in 1871 by physicist James Clerk Maxwell which, theoretically, could defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics by producing energy in a system without putting any energy into that system. Although the basic idea of the machine provides a neat metaphor for Oedipa's own project, ironically it is the historical event that Pynchon chooses not to reference that truly illuminates Oedipa's quest. This "unnamed historical reference" is the fact that Maxwell's Demon, and the way it operated, was eventually shown to...