Pynchon's verbal complexities astound and confound, amaze and bewilder, because his mixed modes concern the ultimate formlessness of a world that for a decade now he has urged as much as described. Everything bears, and bears on, everything else in Pynchon's coming world; everything discovers some grosser or more petite example of itself; everything leads simultaneously to hope and despair….

How can Pynchon be persuaded of entropy's irreversibility and simultaneously of a second coming? How can he claim a winding down of the world and its winding up to spirit?

He manages these, in fact, by slipping beyond simple apocalyptic themes to a reimagining for these days of Apocalyptic as a literary genre—which he also parodies, as he parodies everything. V. and the rest of Pynchon's novels "behave" as if the End were past and most of the world didn't even know it, so needed an exemplary convincing. The persuasion largely consists of approximating tongued speech—the voice of apocalypse—and of an anti-organization which may be named Pentecostal. V. represents a mode in which the sacred and the profane are so profoundly mixed that an account which aims to experience the novel's primary subversions must attempt to discuss them together. (p. 163)

Pentecost is like entropy in its frightfulness, in its total opposition to customary ways of being in and thinking about the world, and in its position of both finality and gradualness….

Dealing most natively with language, Pentecost is therefore a concept perhaps more suited for a novelist than is entropy. It might be for this reason that Pynchon never mentions the word "entropy" in V., though he repeatedly writes of Pentecost and tongues. Still, Pentecostal imagery serves him more widely than for fiction-making. (p. 164)

Just as the novel's entropic instances do not mean the world is yet wholly entropic, the bulk of V. is para-Pentecostal, slipping near tongues. Pynchon mentions or employs some twenty languages or argots, including the MG language Rachel speaks to her car, mock Eskimo, Maltese, and Tuareg. In fact, the novel often seems "a tourist's confusion of tongues"…. With all this attention to language, and specifically to the language of the Pentecost, the feeling through the bulk of the novel is of a longing for transcendence, and an imminence of the spirit, but of no chance for it to occur…. (pp. 166-67)

The pressure of tongues against "wrong words" is one of the novel's topics. Straight language, like Christmas, has deteriorated and Benny is left with no adequate speech. He moves in the direction of tongues, however, as he becomes more and more paranoid. Paranoia is another indication in Pynchon's work of an alternative world beyond the customary one, for paranoids read signs of mystery and force that philistines never suspect. (p. 167)

Partly because the ecstasy of tongues is elusive and nearly impossible to warrant, and partly because the dominant mode of edification is historically just at its breaking point, there is no mass conversion in V. (p. 168)

Although he is not the first to use the idea of entropy in fiction, Pynchon is famous for his bridge between science and literature because he is the first to use the idea so fruitfully and so relentlessly. Still, the traffic goes both ways on Pynchon's bridge because he also takes tongues to entropy. (p. 174)

Pynchon's world is more and more besieged by Pentecostal promiscuity. And it is simultaneously more skewed by discreteness and scoured by edification as the momentum of enthalpic organization marches on. The world to come is permeating this one; the world to come is waging silent war with this one for hegemony; the world to come will not be this one. There are warring modes of edification and tongues with V. They correspond to an ancient struggle coming to a head beyond the novel, between this world and the one to come.

Pynchon's vision is different from Modern ideas of apocalypse because his understanding of it is not contemptuous. He predicts—even urges—a second coming that is frightening and selfless, transforming and subversive, irreversible and natural. From one perspective the coming is entropic, but it is also Pentecostal: the apocalypse strikes awe but is not awful…. Pynchon places people solely on their own terms—vulnerable, costumed, but essentially themselves for whatever they are worth, as much damned as graced, as much nothing as something.

If there is no longer an edifying normalcy of belief, if Paul's bequest is incredible now, then what? What's left is "foul ditch" promiscuity: the spirit of impulsive persistence against scaffolding policy, politesse, and polity—the same persistence which has informed Pynchon's fiction from V. to Gravity's Rainbow. What's left is anti-form: impulsive tongues. Pynchon stands in relation to the world as folk always have at beginnings, when their experience is honest and not yet demystified, when it is promising terribly and also terribly promising. (p. 175)