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Thanatos, Death-Instinct...& the Second Law of Thermodynamic (Entropy) in "Crying of Lot 49"In our last module we explored how a pre-modern concept and evil -- as mythical, theological, religious and "supernatural" -- merge with a modern and/or postmodern concept of evil -- as essentially natural..as something that contemporary natural scientists and also contemporary artists and intellectuals associate with the "law of entropy," the "axiom decay and dissolution"-- together known by scientists as the "second law of thermodynamics." In contrast to inner-evil, there’s the evil outside of us, civilizational and bio-evolutionary evil which we all equally share – thinkers these days understand it as "objective evil" (versus subjective evil) and comprehend it as evil in the external world and / or in nature as an empirical scientific fact —as when Terrence Malick’s opens his captivating war-film, The Thin Red Line, with the questions… What's this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? ls there an avenging [evil] power in nature? Malik’s film’s characterization of evil as an “avenging power in nature” correlates to the nineteenth-century scientific discovery of the “law of entropy,” also known as the second-law of thermodynamics.It's classic formulation comes from Lord Kelvin, who discovered entropy in the form of a energy -- a depleting energy unto annihilation -- in his work "On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy." His law of entropy – characterized by numberless imaginative writers as the very “incarnation” of a malignant evil “energy” set free in the world -- guaranteed that an urge towards dissolution and decay -- what the ancient Greek’s would have associated with “Thanatos,” or “death instinct” -- was the irreversible destiny of the universe itself…so much so that, according the literary critic and biographer Felicia Bonaparte, these dissolute forces seemed to certain writers of fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century “the natural image of the state of planetary life.” I invoked the above account of evil in our last module. But now for this module we'll apply it to Pynchon's renowned novel The Crying of Lot 49.For this module of our course and also moving forward, we will examine fictionalized characterizations of evil as synonymous with two negative -- and indeed self-destructive -- civilizational dynamisms: (1) evil as synonymous with Kelvin’s modern and indeed scientific formulation of decay and self-annihilation as an empirically verifiable fact of planetary life; and (2) evil as synonymous with the ancient and indeed pre-modern Greek idea of Thanatos, meaning an instinct in the human and in the natural world towards death, decay, annihilation. What I mean to highlight above is that the pre-moderns of ancient Greece had already anticipated the modern scientific formulation of something like "natural evil" of Kelvin--Kelvin had only formulated it in more empirically verifiable terms. Whatever the case, we're now at a phase of history in which it is the habit of artists, ordinary people and intellectuals alike to comprehend things -- specifically all human, botanical and animal nature, all animate and inanimate nature -- according to the optics of the natural scientists and / or "empiricism." One of the artists who chose to comprehend evil both according to the modern optics of the natural sciences and according the pre-modern optics of "thanatos" is Thomas Pynchon. His book’s central metaphor is the thermodynamic concept of entropy, which for the moment may be defined loosely in Kelvin's terms - -as "the slowing down of a system, the calcifying decay of life and available energy on a scale that may be minute or global."Entropy is the principle within irreversible processes, the principle that, in the famed psychologist Sigmund Freud’s words, "opposes the undoing of what has already occurred." By extending this principle one may speculate that the universe itself must eventually suffer a “heatdeath,” reduced and simplified to a luke-warm system in which no energy may be used for any purpose. In other words, Kelvin's law of entropy as it appears in Pynchon's work may be comprehended as types of energy like "lethargy" or "inertia" that seek to fulfill themselves in the annihilation of the persons or things in whom we find such energies. Pynchon, in fact, used “Entropy" as the title and theme of one of his first published stories, and the concept recurs, in a significantly different form, in The Crying of Lot 49... and indeed in Malick's The Thin Red Line. In Pynchon’s hands entropy serves as a metaphor of exceptional range and emotional power, and in this Pynchon is not alone. The concept of entropy, whether or not it is named as such, has informed much fiction and philosophy for centuries: it is a central motif in satire, and is the historical principle behind Plato’s account of four types of unjust society in the Republic. In Lot 49 a world of triviality and “exitlessness” and "inanition" (at once comprehended by Pynchon as "boredom," "passivity," "sluggishness" and a "law of decay" and "thanatos") becomes infused with the opposite energies of "choice," "vitality," "vigor," "excitability." In other words, Lot 49 represents both (1) entropy (evil understood, in Freud's terms, as "a luke-warm system in which no energy may be used for any purpose") and (2) a kind of reverse-entropy (a "good" energy, a life-force) that fosters "variety and surprise" and offers a potential access to “transcendent meaning" and “a reason that mattered to the world” (p. 181).Or in other words, in Lot 49, there is -- to use a natural-scientific optic -- "a decline of available energy, a hardening of living beings into artificial ones, a degradation from vitality to mechanism, a transfer of sympathy from human suffering to inanimate, objective existence" and with seemingly "few alternatives to a logic of decline and decadence." (I here quote Edward Mendelson, my teacher at Columbia U. on Lot 49). Eventually all the above "entropic forces" point in the direction of a kind tectonic planetary "stasis" -- inanition, an inability for motion in humans. But we must now again remember Malick's Thin Red Line, because in Lot 49, as in Thin Red Line, there indeed does exist an opposite "Eros" -- a life-force, an urge, a great thirst toward vital-life, vitalism, excitability, inspiration, Love, such that Pynchon's characters are found on a thin-red line between an "avenging power in nature" and a "beneficent, life-giving power in nature." In other words, in Crying Lot characters and animate and inanimate objects from any given environment alike are typically found on the "thin line" between the "energies" of (I) Thanatos (understood as a kind of vague / implicit baseline "death instinct"- entropy), on the one hand, and (II) Eros (understood as a kind of vague / implicit baseline "life instinct"-- reverse entropy), on the other hand. And so therefore, for this module's discussion forum, we will again -- as we did with Thin Red Line -- isolate, cite and comment on two instances of the "thin line" in Pynchon's novel. * * * A quick reminder: as you go forward into all of the module-discussions for this course, please always keep in the back of your head that the Evidence Subsections (ESSs) in all excellent scholarly writing consists of Three Language Elements -- 1. you language2. the language of the "primary source" - in this case, our imaginative text, Lot 493. the language of one or more "secondary sources" -- the language of authoratative scholars / criticsIn other words, try to understand each of your module responses to questions as a kind of ESS in and of itself, indeed -- and even though you are not required to involve Language Element #3 (authoritative secondary sources) in your module responses, always assume that the best of all scholarly essay writing is fulfilled when all three language elements are present and mobilized in the direction of proving the credibility of a "response to an important, socially relevant question." And the secondary source that I personally mobilized for my own module lecture question -- Does Entropy Play a Pivotal Role in Lot 49? - is the secondary source "Edward Mendelson," a renowned critic on Pynchon's imaginative writing who happens to have been one of my best teachers as an undergraduate at Columbia University. For this module, you will also look at "entropy" at work in the work / article of another "secondary source," Simon Critchley, a philosophy professor for The New School in NYC. Learning Goals: 1. To continue to comprehend evil in its two guises: (i) according to its guise as a pre-modern form as supernatural, i.e., as a force that transcends what the optics of the modern natural sciences can say about evil; and (ii) according to evil's guise as a modern form -- as natural, i.e., as a force that is reducible to what modern natural sciences can say about it, beginning with the scientist Kelvin (mentioned above), the originator of the "law of entropy," also known as the "second law of thermodynamics." 2. To comprehend the ways in which Pynchon in his novel and Critchley in his article "implicitly" (i.e., not always "explicitly") give expression / application to Kelvin's [natural and scientific Law of Energy]; and this is to comprehend the difference between "implicit and explicit meaning," and how look out for implicit meaning in our acts of literary reading.