SOURCE: “Entropy in the Poetry of Gary Soto: The Dialectics of Violence,” in Revista de Temas Hispánicos, Vol. 5, No. 1, Autumn, 1987, pp. 111-20.

[In the following essay, de la Fuentes examines Soto's focus on entropy and deterioration in his poetry.]

In discussing the relationship between entropy and art, Rudolf Arnheim (1971) points out that “when the Second Law of Thermodynamics began to enter the public consciousness a century or so ago, it suggested an apocalyptic vision of the course of events on earth” by stating “that the entropy of the world strives towards a maximum, which amounted to saying that the energy of the universe, although constant in amount, was subject to more and more dissipation and degradation” (p. 9). Arnheim qualifies this definition, however, by adding that “the popular use of the notion of entropy has changed. If during the last century it served to diagnose, explain, and deplore the degradation of culture, it now provides a positive rationale for ‘minimal’ art and the pleasures of chaos” (pp. 11-12). If Arnheim's “positive rationale” may be taken to mean a logical and therefore organized body of principles, his definition of the entropy theory as, among other things, “a first attempt to deal with global form” (p. 21), provides a critical basis from which to explore the philosophical framework, structural dynamics, and thematic configurations in all forms of art. Hence the title of this essay, which examines the presence of entropy in the poetry of the Californian poet Gary Soto and in particular its metaphorical function as a reflection of the structural theme.¹

Arnheim conceives of this structural theme dynamically, as “a pattern of forces” rather than “an arrangement of static shapes” (p. 33). Such forces include the anabolic, creative force, and the catabolic erosion which leads to the eventual destruction of all organized shape (p. 48). From a philosophical standpoint, Soto's choice of images in developing his seemingly antagonistic themes of corrosive social pressures and a subtle yet persistent search for a viable form of individual, social and universal order is indicative of a world view in which catabolic erosion predominates.

The catabolic destruction of shape, Arnheim speculates, is one of the two fundamentally different kinds of processes which result in the increase of entropy. The other is the principle of tension reduction or of decreasing potential energy. Arnheim describes the catabolic effect as “rather a broad, catch-all category, comprising all sorts of agents and events that act in an unpredictable, disorderly fashion and have in common the fact that they all grind things to pieces” (p. 28). Catabolism, he suggests, occurs because “we live in a sufficiently disorderly world, in which innumerable patterns of forces constantly interfere with each other” (p. 28).

If we accept Arnheim's premise that a work of art, among other things, “is intended as a portrayal of a significant type of order existing elsewhere,” then it seems reasonable to say that the structural theme of, in this case, a poem “derives its value—even much of its value as a stimulant—from the human condition whose particular form of order it makes visible or audible” (p. 55). In the poetry of Gary Soto this revelation of order is articulated through images of violence, desolation, and disintegration; i.e. through the catabolic effect.

For the purpose of this discussion, Soto's poems may be divided into two principal groups, those which portray a gradual, often painful process of disintegrating structure involving a deep personal sense of disorientation, loss and desolation, and those which depict a more violent approach to changing form through suddenly unleashed disaster or the threat of it, in particular that caused by the death of the father. Although by no means absolute, these general categories will allow the identification of a consistent philosophy in a series of poems in The Elements of San Joaquín, Soto's first collection, which deal essentially with the same theme: the search for form and significance in a world which is perceived as disintegrating, degenerating and generally in the throes of catabolic forces.

Since Soto's poetic vision reveals an environment of physical and spiritual decay, it is appropriate that his recurring images are of dust, dirt, and the corrosive wind which grinds down mountains and men with equal indifference, and erodes the emotional resources that make life both bearable and meaningful. One of the most impressive examples of gradual human disintegration occurs in “County Ward,” a cheerless half-way house for those who are in the final stages of mental and physical dissipation. Here the catabolic force intrudes as a concrete, creeping presence of pain and cold into the world of those who have come to die in the County Ward. A distinctly threatening air accompanies its progress: “It begins in a corridor … It continues … It comes to speak in the drugged voice / That ate its tongue” (Soto, p. 6). Catabolism, the breaking down of tissue material, in this case human tissue, into simpler and more stable substances, is evident in the adverse effects of pain and cold:

There is a pain that gets up and moves, like the night attendant,
Pointing to the cough
That rises like dust and is dust
A month later …

(“County Ward” p. 6)

And towards the end of the poem, the effects of this process are treated more explicitly as inmates of the Ward approach a state of entropy or equilibrium in death:

This cold slowly deepens
The old whose bones ring with the coming weather,
.....The stunned face that could be your father's—
Deepens the gray space between each word
That reaches to say you are alone.

It is not only the old who are relentlessly ground down by hostile forces. In “San Fernando Road,” a young factory worker, whose energy is drained faster than he can renew it, becomes another casualty in a mechanized system when he ceased to dream of drugs and sex and thinks instead of “his body, / His weakening body, / And dawn only hours away” (p. 3).

This gradual erosion of energy is most consistently revealed on the intimate, individual level, where the very essence of the human condition is undergoing a pervasive disintegration. The wind often appears as the principal agent in this process, and dust as the concrete image of the state of equilibrium or entropy towards which the catabolic tendency aspires:

The wind sprays pale dirt into my mouth
The small, almost invisible scars
On my hands.
.....The pores in my throat and elbows
Have taken in a seed of dirt of their own.
.....A fine silt, washed by sweat,
Has settled into the lines
On my wrists and palms.
.....Already I am becoming the valley
A soil that sprouts nothing
For any of us.

(“Field,” p. 15)

The gradual encroachment of dirt into the mouth and pores of the field worker, while certainly suggestive of death, may also be viewed in terms of the entropy theory as the decomposition of a complex system into a simpler form. The molecular structure of the man's body appears to be breaking down, through loss of energy, into a form which is physically and symbolically closer to his own perception of himself when he says: “Already I am becoming the valley.” Thus, a man who sees his existence as unproductive, assumes the metaphorically barren identity of the “soil that sprouts nothing,” a physical state which reflects his inner disorientation and sense of futility. This movement towards entropy expresses the thematic structure of the poem; it gives dramatic form and substance to the narrator's barely articulated sense of worthlessness.

This action of the wind is a central catabolic image in Soto's poetic vision and embodies the essential indifference of the environment, one of Arnheim's “innumerable patterns of forces which constantly interfere with each other.” Pitted against this cosmic force, Soto's narrator reveals a critical lack of energy, a physical lassitude which mirrors a pervasive spiritual weariness. His resistance has been whittled down to a minimum: he bows before the pressures of a harsh reality:

The wind pressing us close to the ground

(“Daybreak,” p. 22)).

The wind crossed my face, moving the dust
And a portion of my voice a step closer to a new year

(“Harvest,” p. 25).

Dirt lifted in the air
Entering my nostrils
And eyes
The yellow under my fingernails (“Hoeing,” p. 24).
The wind picks up the breath of my armpits
Like dust

(“Wind,” p. 16).

Other elements provide catabolic images of grinding down, peeling or flaking away, collapsing, falling, decaying, unraveling, drowning, and graying in Soto's poems and contribute to the overall impression of a world that is winding down. The narrator at one point somberly anticipates the coming of rain in autumn, a time of unemployment, when his

… two good slacks
Will smother under a growth of lint
And smell of old dust
That rises
When the closet door opens and closes

(“Rain,” p. 20).

This scene of gradual decay, of slow, seemingly inevitable disintegration of man and his environment is echoed repeatedly. The fog, another catabolic force which appears as “a mouth nibbling everything to its origins” (“Fog,” p. 21), contributes to the narrator's deterioration and eventual disappearance:

Graying my hair that falls
And goes unfound, my fingerprints
Slowly growing a fur of dust
.....One hundred years from now
There should be no reason to believe
I lived.

(“Fog,” p. 21).

The enervating effects of this general increase in entropy are also evident in the environment of Soto's narrator. His is a world of “smashed bus window(s)” (“Field Poem”, p. 23), where “nothing will heal / Under the rain's broken fingers” (“Daybreak,” p. 22). Here the unpicked figs become “wrinkled and flattened / Like the elbows / of an old woman” (“Summer,” p. 26), while “the fog squatted in the vineyard / Like a stray dog” (“Piedra,” p. 28). It is a disintegrating world of “smashed bottles flaking back to sand” (“Piedra,” p. 28), where an abandoned hotel hides “A jacket forever without a shadow / And cold as the darkness it lies in” (“Street,” p. 32). People here “no longer / Bothered to shrug off / The flies” (“Town,” p. 33), and “A cane refused / The weight of the hand that carved it” (“The Level at Which the Sky Began,” p. 34).

The degree of physical and spiritual deterioration in the narrator's world may be judged by a comparison with the past where the energy level was noticeably higher. The vitality in the narrator's past is particularly evident in the figure of the grandmother. It is she who kept things moving in a constructive way; she “lit the stove … sliced papas / Pounded chiles … hosed down / The walk her sons paved,” and later “Unearthed her / Secret cigar box / Of bright coins … counted them … And buried them elsewhere” (“History,” p. 40). She is putting up a fight to survive, is aggressively protective of her family and will even shoplift food from the market to feed them. Eventually, she, too, will succumb to the catabolic effect:

. … her insides
… washed of tapeworm,
Her arms swelled into knobs
Of small growths—
Her second son
Dropped from a ladder
And was dust.

(“History,” p. 41).

This sudden death of the father signals both an emotional crisis for the narrator and the growing intrusion of destructive forces into his life. The disintegration of home and family seem to date from this event:

. … the moment our father slipped
From the ladder …
. … It was the moment
I came down from the tree
And into our home
Where a leash of ants
Swarmed for the rice the cupboard the stove
Carrying off what there was to carry.

(“The Evening of Ants,” pp. 48-89)

Years later, the physical destruction of the family home is still associated with the father's death:

It's 16 years
Since our house
Was bulldozed and my father
Stunned into a coma …

(“Braly Street,” p. 54)

and the loss of energy is apparent in the images of encroaching catabolic forces that have reduced the past to rubble:

… the long caravan
Of my uncle's footprints
Has been paved
With dirt. Where my father
Cemented a pond
There is a cavern of red ants
… When I come
To where our house was,
And a sewer line tied off
Like an umbilical cord.

(“Braly Street,” pp. 55-56).

Although there is undoubtedly a prevalence of such images of destruction in Soto's poetry, a subtle, anabolic or constructive force also makes itself felt as a necessary counterbalance to establish, according to Arnheim, the “structural theme, which introduces and maintains tension” (p. 52). “The antagonistic play of forces (which) is the structural theme” (p. 32) established what Arnheim calls a “definitive order” when it comes to a standstill; i.e., “achieves the maximum of entropy attainable for the given system of constraints” (p. 33). In philosophical terms, this suggests that Soto's world view is not necessarily nihilistic, as the preponderance of negative images might indicate, but rather represents an uneven balance between an oppressively hostile environment and a personal credo of survival in such a world.

Admittedly this faint optimistic note is difficult to detect in the cacophony of a world falling to pieces around our ears. It may be heard, however, above the noise of the wind peeling “mountains, grain by grain, / To small slopes, loose dirt,” and stoking “The skulls and spines of cattle / To white dust, to nothing.” Caught up in this inevitable cycle of dissolution, the narrator seeks to reestablish intellectual order for himself out of physical chaos:

The wind picks up the breath of my armpits
Like dust, swirls it
Miles away
And drops it
On the ear of a rabid dog
And I take on another life.

(“Wind,” p. 16)

This same impulse to withstand the forces of destruction and establish an inner stronghold, a reservoir of strength and resistance, is apparent in the distinction between the unresisting creatures in the fields:

The thick caterpillars
That shriveled
Into rings
And went where the wind went

and the intellectual resistance of the narrator, who sees his sweat not as evidence of a physical drain on his energy but rather as a part of “the sea / That is still within me” (“Hoeing,” p. 24). This concept of the “sea” as a source of primitive energy enables the narrator to withstand, at least intellectually and momentarily, the fate of the shriveled caterpillars.

The idea of taking on another life, of establishing an anabolic force in the face of destructive catabolism, recurs in various subtle, often ambiguous images.² The dead body of the drowned friend in “Avocado Lake” (p. 30) “moves under the dark lake,” its hands are like “those of a child reaching for his mother,” its fingers need to be “rubbed and kissed” as if death were not an absolute, irreversible step towards physical dissolution but rather an alternative form of existence in which the drowned man can find a compatible environment:

His phlegm drifts beneath the surface,
As his life did.

Perhaps the most significant of these anabolic images, however, is one which is also connected to the death of the narrator's father and thus suggests a level of order that has withstood the disintegration associated with that event. Sixteen years after his father's death, the narrator returns to “Braly Street” to find the almond tree gone, the uncle's footprints “paved with dirt,” the pond invaded by ants, the house bulldozed. But one thing has survived intact. The narrator comes back

To the chinaberry
Not pulled down
And to its rings
My father and uncle
Would equal, if alive.

(“Braly Street,” pp. 54-55)

This is the same tree the narrator “came down from” the moment his father died to witness the ant “carrying off what there was to carry” from the house (“The Evening of Ants,” pp. 48-49). This earlier scene foreshadows the actual destruction of sixteen years later. But something has been salvaged from the past. The chinaberry has resisted demolition and the wind has momentarily ceased its catabolic effect. Violence is held at bay and a metaphorical state of truce has been achieved. To the extent that the anabolic, constructive force survives in Soto's poetic vision in the form of the narrator's personal stronghold of intellectual resistance, symbolic perhaps of the creative energy of the poet himself, total chaos is averted and, in Arnheim's words, an uneasy “state of final equilibrium, of accomplished order and maximum entropy” is reached.³

Notes

1. The presence of these thematic elements in Soto's poetry places him squarely within the tradition of poets like Yeats (“Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “A Vision”) and Neruda, (“Residencia en la tierra”), and the poetic prose of novelists like Gabriel García Marquez (One Hundred years of Solitude) who use images of apocalyptic disintegration to explore the chaotic fabric of life in our time. In The Sense of an Ending (1970, pp. 95-96), Frank Kermode sees this recurrence of apocalyptic imagery in literature as “a powerful eschatological element in modern thought … reflected in the arts … a pattern of anxiety [which] is a feature of our cultural tradition, if not ultimately of our physiology.”9

2. For an extensive analysis of this topic, see my essay “Ambiguity in the Poetry of Gary Soto,” delivered at the 1982 Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures, February 18-20, 1982, and subsequently published in Revista Chicano-Riqueña, XI, Summer, 1983, No. 2, 34-39.

3. This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the IXth Annual Southern Comparative Literature Association Conference, Lexington, Virginia, on February 24-26, 1983.