and Mercy in Vienna”

Pynchon’s first nationally published short story, “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna,” also illustrates many of these themes. The protagonist, a career diplomat named Cleanth Siegel, arrives at a party in Washington, D.C., only to find that the host, a look-alike named David Lupescu, is abandoning the apartment and appointing Siegel to take his place. In the course of the party, Siegel finds himself listening to the confusing details of his guests’ convoluted and pointless sexual and social lives. Although he takes on the role of a father-confessor and although he wants to be a healer—“a prophet actually”—he has no cure for these people’s problems. He does find a cure of sorts, however, in Irving Loon, an Ojibwa Indian who has been brought to the party. Siegel recalls that the Ojibwa are prone to a psychic disorder in which the Indian, driven by a cosmic paranoia, comes to identify with a legendary flesh-eating monster, the Windigo, and goes on a rampage of destruction, killing and eating his friends and family. Siegel speaks the word “Windigo” to Loon and watches as the Indian takes a rifle from the wall. As Loon begins shooting the members of the party, Siegel himself escapes. Like Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), with whom he explicitly compares himself, Siegel finds the only possible salvation to be extermination.

The presentation of the modern world as a spiritual wasteland and the theme of paranoia continue throughout these early short stories, as well as V., but none of Pynchon’s other characters is able to act as forcefully as Siegel, even though his action is a negative one. The later stories, however, also demonstrate Pynchon’s greater ability and growth as a writer. “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna,” relying as it does on references to Conrad and T. S. Eliot and on a narrative voice which generally tells rather than shows, presents itself too self-consciously as a story even as it strives for verisimilitude. Pynchon’s next story, “Low-Lands,” demonstrates his growth in a short period of time.

“Low-Lands”

Dennis Flange, a former sailor now unhappily married, is thrown out of the house by his wife because of a surprise visit by his old Navy friend, Pig Bodine (who also later appears in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow). He takes refuge with Pig in a shack in the local garbage dump, which is presided over by a black caretaker. This caretaker has barricaded his shack against gypsies who are living in the dump, but that night when Flange hears someone call him he goes outside. There he meets a young woman named Nerissa who leads him to her room in a tunnel beneath the dump. At the story’s end, Flange seems prepared to stay with her.

The title of “Low-lands” comes from an old sea chantey which causes Flange to think of the sea as “a gray or glaucous desert, a wasteland which stretches away to the horizon, an assurance of perfect, passionless uniformity.” This “perfect, passionless uniformity” might be an apt description of Pynchon’s view of modern life, his great fear of the ultimate end to surprise and adventure. Cleanth Siegel’s response to this same fear is to obliterate the problem; Dennis Flange’s response is to hide from it. Flange fears the uniformity suggested by his “low-lands,” but he also desires it, wishing not to be exposed and lonely on that wasteland surface, “so that he would be left sticking out like a projected radius, unsheltered and reeling across the empty lunes of his tiny sphere.”

In order not to be left “sticking out,” Flange has taken refuge in his marriage and his house but finds that they can no longer shelter him. He finds his surrogate for a hiding place in the gypsy girl, Nerissa. Within Nerissa’s underground room, he knows he can find at least a temporary sanctuary. Like the underground refuge of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, this room suggests a place of recuperation and preparation to reemerge into life. In Nerissa herself, the image of the sea is restored to life: “Whitecaps danced across her eyes; sea creatures, he knew, would be cruising about in the submarine green of her heart.” This ending, with its gypsies and secret tunnels, suggests the possible existence of alternatives to the wasteland of modern society, a possibility to which Pynchon was to return in The Crying of Lot Forty-nine; at the time, this ending made “Low-lands” one of the most positive of Pynchon’s short stories.

“Entropy”

A tone of hope, although somewhat more muted, can also be found in “Entropy,” the best-known and perhaps most successful of Pynchon’s short stories. Here Pynchon returns to the scene of “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna”—a party taking place in Washington, D.C.—but theme, characters, and plot are now handled with much more sophistication. The party itself is a lease-breaking party being hosted by one Meatball Mulligan, whose guests arrive and depart, engage in various kinds of strange behavior, and pass out at random. Upstairs, a man named Callisto lives in another apartment which he has converted into a hermetically sealed hothouse with the aid of a French-Annamese woman named Aubade. The story shifts back and forth between the two apartments although Meatball and Callisto are connected only by the fact of living in the same building and by the theme of entropy which concerns them both.

Although there is in “Low-lands” a brief reference to the Heisenberg principle of nuclear physics (that an event is affected by the fact of being observed), “Entropy” is the first of Pynchon’s works to make sustained use of information and metaphors drawn from science and mathematics—a use which has become one of his hallmarks as a writer. Entropy manifests itself in the story in two different forms: as physical entropy—the tendency toward randomness and disorder within a closed system—and as communications entropy—a measure of the lack of information within a message or signal. In both cases, the tendency is toward stasis and confusion—lack of motion or lack of information; in either case and in human terms, the result is death.

Physical entropy is especially frightening to Callisto, which is why he has barricaded himself within his apartment. Since he fears that the “heat death” of the universe is imminent, he has built a private enclave where he can control the environment and remain safe. The concept of physical entropy can also be applied to Meatball’s party as the behavior of the individual party guests becomes more and more random and disordered. Ironically, Meatball manages (at least temporarily) to avoid chaos and to reverse entropy, while Callisto fails. Realizing that he can either hide in a closet and add to the chaos and mad individualism of his party or work “to calm everybody down, one by one,” Meatball chooses the latter. Callisto, on the other hand, fails to stop entropy within his own apartment. An ailing bird which he had been holding, trying to warm, dies in his hands after all; he wonders, “Has the transfer of heat ceased to work? Is there no more. ”

Part of the reason for Callisto’s failure has to do with communications entropy. Order in communication is essential for the maintenance of order in Callisto’s hothouse. Aubade brings “artistic harmony” to the apartment through a process by which all sensations “came to her reduced inevitable to the terms of sound: of music which emerged at intervals from a howling darkness of discordancy.” Noise from Meatball’s party threatens to plunge that music back into discord, and with the death of Callisto’s bird, Aubade can no longer continue her effort. She smashes the window of the apartment with her fists and with Callisto awaits the triumph of physical entropy “and the final absence of all motion.”

The fact that Meatball can bring order to his party suggests that order must be consciously created, not merely maintained as Callisto has sought to do. Even with Meatball’s effort, his resolution of discord is not permanent and the final image of the party trembling “on the threshold of its third day” is not reassuring. Pynchon’s message seems to be that of the physicists: Entropy is an inevitable condition although it can be reversed for a while in some places. “Entropy” is notable for its organization and style as well as for its subject matter. The characters and the alternation of story lines are models for Pynchon’s first novel, V., but the story succeeds on its own as well. This “contrapuntal” structure combined with a number of references to music makes it evident that the story is structured like a musical fugue.

“Under the Rose”

“Under the Rose,” Pynchon’s last short story before V., is also especially interesting for its style and structure. Set in Cairo at the end of the nineteenth century during the Fashoda crisis—when Britain and France nearly came to war over the colonization of the Sudan—the story is Pynchon’s first re-creation of a historical setting and his first successful use of a narrative limited to the point of view of a single character. With very little authorial intrusion, Pynchon skillfully describes the activities of two spies, Porpentine and Goodfellow, in seeking to prevent the assassination of the British ambassador and the international war which would inevitably follow. The story was later reworked by Pynchon, broken up into eight vignettes seen through the eyes of outside spectators, and installed as chapter 3 of V.

These early stories are generally characterized by a pessimism concerning the possibilities of human action and change. They are also marked by a sense of social isolation; with the exception of “Under the Rose,” there is little or no suggestion of the political, economic, and social pressures that shape life, and even in that story, these pressures are subordinated to a suggested nameless, hostile, possibly nonhuman intelligence at work in history. Following the publication of V., however, Pynchon has steadily moved back into the world, combining his imaginative perception of the condition of modern life with a recognition of the forces which can play a part in shaping that condition. That recognition is first manifested in Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration.”

“The Secret Integration”

“The Secret Integration” centers on a group of children living in the Berkshire town of Mingeborough, Massachusetts, who act in league to subvert adult institutions and encourage anarchistic liberty. The adults are seen as constantly seeking to make the children conform to their way of life: for example, Grover Snodd, “a boy genius with flaws,” is certain that adults are planting Tom Swift books for him to read in order to foster a sense of competition and avarice as well as to promote racism.

Racism is, in fact, the key theme of the story. Carl Barrington, a central member of the children’s gang, is himself black, his parents having recently moved into Northumberland Estates, a new development in Mingeborough. These newcomers are resented by the white adults of the town, and the children are aware of the presence of racism in their families, even though they do not quite understand it. There is also a flashback to the night the children—one of them a nine-year-old reformed alcoholic—go to the town hotel to sit with a black jazz musician because the adults in Alcoholics Anonymous are unwilling to help a black. After a night-long vigil, the boys see the musician hauled away by the police and never learn what really happens to him. In retaliation and as an affirmation of color, the boys stage a raid on the local train at night wearing green-colored masks and costumes to scare the passengers.

Color is a threat to Mingeborough and to a white way of life which thrives on the competition, separateness, and blandness exemplified by Tom Swift. The Barringtons are a special annoyance because they live in Northumberland Estates, which seems to have been built purposely to suppress differences and encourage uniformity. This development is like the “low-lands” of Dennis Flange, but with an important difference: Rather than an abstract psychological condition, it is a real, physical place with more than enough correlatives in the nonfictional world to make it all too recognizable.

The children, however, are able to overcome this prejudice; even though Grover only understands the word “integration” as a mathematical term, they accept Carl as an equal. Yet in the end, the group capitulates. They find garbage dumped on the Barringtons’ front lawn and recognize it as having come from their own houses. Unable to cut themselves off from their parents and repudiated by the Barringtons themselves, they say good-bye to Carl, who, it turns out, is imaginary, “put together out of phrases, images, possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from, repudiated, left out at the edges of town. ” The children return to the safety and love of their parents “and dreams that could never again be entirely safe.”

“The Secret Integration” is concerned once again with the quest for possibilities and alternatives, which is the theme of The Crying of Lot Forty-nine, and with the prevalence of racism, which is one of the many concerns of Gravity’s Rainbow. Although the children admit defeat, one still feels the hope that life will be somewhat better once they have grown up, that they will retain some of the lessons they have learned.

Slow Learner

Pynchon’s own estimation of his short stories is ambivalent and has been the subject of much scholarly discussion, especially since the publication in 1984 of Slow Learner, an anthology of the author’s short stories. In the introduction to this book, Pynchon disparages his short stories to such an extent that it is remarkable that he permitted their republication in the first place. The first-person Thomas Pynchon of the 1984 introduction discussing the third-person Thomas Pynchon of the 1960’s, however, may be no more than a fictional creation of the present Thomas Pynchon, with the introduction to Slow Learner being no more than another of the author’s highly equivocal and extraordinarily convoluted short stories.

It is impossible to say whether Pynchon will ever return to the short-story form for its own sake, and certainly his stories are less important than his novels. Nevertheless, these works are helpful introductions to this writer’s sometimes complex and baffling fictional world, and some of them—especially “Entropy” and perhaps “The Secret Integration”—will stand on their own as minor classics.