The image of the artist alone in his room is a familiar one, almost mandatory for any contemporary writer suspected of self-conscious narration. Pynchon does not disappoint his readers. His first novel [V.] provides a stereotype so clearly drawn that no one can miss the point. Fausto Maijstral is a poet and he is alone in his room…. To occupy the room is to accept the closed system as the environment of fiction and entropy as the metaphor for memory. What is a story if it is not a digression? While Fausto is not the only storyteller in Pynchon's world, he is the only one who self-consciously talks about his craft. It would be a mistake to regard Fausto as a stand-in for Pynchon, but it would be a greater mistake not to recognize Pynchon's closed world in Fausto's room. The poet's confession may be as much Pynchon's playful apology for his earlier narrative voice as it is Fausto's…. (pp. 7-8)

If Pynchon's fictional world is a closed system, then it must be subject to entropy; and yet fiction is nothing more than language—a system of logic and order, even if the implicit order is not always obvious in its manifestations. How can order represent chaos?… In Pynchon reality lies hidden beneath the inherent logic of language. Fausto gives up the psychological self for eyes clear enough to see past logic and order. The reader, however, is in much the same position as the heroine of [The Crying of Lot 49]. (p. 10)

With his scientific background, Pynchon is particularly conscious of the role of the observer. Fausto claims eyes clear enough to see, for example, and Oedipa wonders about the central truth. Observation, whether visual or metaphorical, is a special problem for those within a closed system. The most distinguishing characteristic of Fausto's room is that it is "sealed against the present." Regardless of how much he may claim to see within memory, constancy of purpose will not permit him to see beyond it. (pp. 10-11)

Within Pynchon's fictional world there are two orders of observation: that of characters such as Fausto and Oedipa, whose world is limited to the fiction itself, and that of the reader, who looks at their world from outside it but who is also enclosed by his or her relationship with that world. The respective problems of observation are similar…. The act of observing, the manipulation of data, and participation in the world being described are as much the acts of a person who would live in the world as they are of a person who would write about it. The choice appears to be one of involvement or disengagement, and in Pynchon's stories we can see characters exercising their rights of choice. The gesture may be futile because there always lurks the question of what difference a choice makes, whether the truth even matters—screwed up or not. (pp. 12-13)

The only thing the reader can do with the facts of Pynchon's novels is try to impose some order on all the clicks and whistles, all the noise. That Pynchon intends to enclose his readers within his fiction is obvious. In V. and The Crying of Lot 49 he uses mystery-story plots, laid tantalizingly close to the surface, to involve his readers in the search for clues. In V., for example, Pynchon mocks the reader for becoming involved in the search for V.'s identity…. (p. 14)

Among the several strategies Pynchon employs for involving his readers in his fictional world, one of the most effective is his use of detail and fact. Not only do these facts bring the readers' act of observing to the level of consciousness, but they force the readers to sort out referents and referring fictions. (p. 15)

Clearly fascinated by the implications of cinema for the novel, Pynchon writes The Crying of Lot 49 almost as if it were a movie; it has a tightly controlled plot based on the highly successful mystery-movie formula, an economy of dialogue, plausible fantasy, and characters that are at least imaginable. (p. 16)

From his earliest stories to Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon explores the self that is all that is the case. Among his more fascinating exhibits are Herbert Stencil, V., Benny Profane, Fausto, and Pig Bodine of V.; Pierce Inverarity, Mucho and Oedipa Maas of The Crying of Lot 49; and Edward Pointsman, Blicero, and Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity's Rainbow. In the variety and complexity of their projections, these characters begin to suggest the limits of the world, and the isolation of the self. (p. 19)

Stencil, V., and Profane are Pynchon's first fully developed characters; they are, superficially, the prototypes of subsequent inhabitants of his world. As Pynchon's skill increases, the complexity and sublety of characterization reflect less a change in the author's view of the world than an awareness of his own cunning. These variations, however, are important because it is from them that we can infer our own reality. With The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon leaves, at least temporarily, the puppetry and plotfulness of V. for a media-induced realism familiar to all inhabitants of the late twentieth century. (pp. 25-6)

After seven years of silence, Pynchon offers still another, more complex, version of the self's closed system. The central characters in Gravity's Rainbow are forces like gravity and entropy; they are, for the most part, unseen and unnamed, but they control the novel and its human characters. With only token help from the likes of Tyrone Slothrop, the reader alone must sort out clues, impose a structure on the facts stated or implied. However, Pynchon develops a character trait only hinted at in V. and Inverarity: control. Both V. and Inverarity sought to order and structure events and things, and in the process they achieved their own disintegration—the despotism of an artificial order that nature abhorred, as Henry Adams would say. To the extent that Gravity's Rainbow is about anything, it is about the interaction of the forces of nature with the efforts of men to create their artificial orders and to impose them on nature. Identity, as a consequence, is usually only an extension of the despotism of order into the lives and thoughts of the more or less human agents of the meta-cartels and a global military-industrial complex. (p. 28)

In Pynchon's fiction, a clock is more than a metaphor. The face, arms, and hands of a clock may have lost their metaphorical qualities through familiarity. Pynchon, however, not only reminds us of the metaphor, but also suggests that the relationship of a clock with a body may be similar to that of time with identity. Both the clock and the body are the visible manifestations of more complex abstractions. As the clock-body metaphor becomes literal, time and identity become indistinguishable and merge onto the same axis. The greater the sense of time, the more definite the identity.

Nowhere is this principle more clear than in Herbert Stencil, whose life is pure movement, like a clock, directed toward the search for V. in a series of endless cycles and repetitions. (pp. 30-1)

Throughout time is seen in its decay toward timelessness and history is seen as the proof of sequence and order, assumptions made ridiculous by the buffoonery of a Herbert Stencil or almost plausible by the reflections of a Sidney Stencil. (p. 32)

Pynchon shows that history is all that is the experience of time. In Stencil, V., Inverarity, Pointsman, Blicero, and the others there is an obvious tendency toward determinism and control, manipulation rather than accident. In V. Pynchon explicitly draws upon Machiavelli to establish a basic dichotomy between virtù and fortune, which he continues to exploit throughout his novels. As a prototype, for example, V. represents an ultimate manifestation of human intervention and control dedicated to increasing the world's disorder and decadence; in subsequent novels, the model is perfected and enlarged. Yet V.'s own disintegration and disassembly are the result of an accident, the unfortunate fall of a beam during a bombing. By integrating the Machiavellian dichotomy with Henry Adams's view of a world of increasing entroypy, Pynchon generates a tension between control and order on one hand and accident and chaos on the other. History, of course, must plot events on the grid of these two axes and the reader is left to resolve Pynchon's ambiguities.

Although Pynchon uses Adams and Machiavelli to establish the tension between human control and accident, he certainly has Wittgenstein in mind as well, according to whom everything outside logic is accident. (pp. 41-2)

His system intact, drawing upon his sources as capriciously as is convenient, Pynchon takes energy for his machinery of time and history from the disintegrating tension between order and chaos, much as a time clock based on atomic decay. While most characters are revealed in their futile attempts to resist a universe running down by their own fictions of control and history, a few appear to have accommodated themselves to the inevitable….

Although his treatment of time and history grows more complex with each novel and he incorporates an increasing number of references, the system remains essentially constant; the direction of time is always related to entropy, and history is always an attempt to impose order on time. (p. 44)

[It] is obvious that Pynchon draws upon relativity theory and quantum physics to establish the relativity of the observer. Quantum physics, for example, does not specify how the world is, but instead gives the result of observation by an observer; thus two descriptions may be both valid and different. Change, or time lapse, as Gödel suggested in his article on the relationship of relativity theory with philosophy, is an appearance due to our special mode of perception as a result of the relativization of simultaneity. In short, time changes with motion relative to an observer and in accord with the assumptions the observer makes about his motion. This characteristic is vital to an understanding of Fausto, Oedipa, and Slothrop because they, unlike most characters, are self-conscious about their respective roles as observers and possess, perhaps intuitively, a sense of the relativity of their own motion through time.

The second scientific concept Pynchon incorporates is derived from relativity's impact on the present. The present moment was formerly spatialized at the zero point on an axis in which the past was represented by negative numbers and the future by positive numbers; the present was a cosmic now, universal, simultaneous and instantaneous. With the acceptance of relativity, the present moment became localized—an accidental and changing perspective within the timeless, four-dimensioned, relativistic universe. (p. 45)

Presented as a multiform metaphorical structure that defines the limits of Pynchon's fictional world, the closed system may be seen everywhere in his novels and stories. We feel entropy increasing as we are lured further into Pynchon's deliberate uncertainties. That the form of Pynchon's fiction may in fact be an example of the entropy of information theory—where equiprobability permits maximum choice in constructing a message—demonstrates the metaphor's pervasiveness at the level of the reader's own experience. However, the idea of the closed system is more than a frame for the way we read—and Pynchon writes—his fiction. His characters are aware of the closed system in their own world; thus we can see them involved with the very problems that occupy us. (pp. 53-4)

Pynchon has created a fiction that shows as well as speaks about the closed system, and he has created a philosophically complete world, one that is all that is the case. He has been deliberate, precise, relentless. The world he shows us is frightening; there can be no more fundamentally pessimistic view. Even his stories and novels seem to draw energy from readers as they struggle with a signal-to-noise ratio, study the verbal landscape as a map. If there is a return for energy lost, it most probably comes as information gained, perhaps as knowledge about a closed system as seen from outside it. (p. 61)

As they document the vicissitude of the closed system, Pynchon's stories and novels also define a loss—to us as well as to his characters. (p. 63)

If the closed system is the environment of Pynchon's fiction, then the ruined garden is its landscape. Space is evidence. It testifies to the fact of depletion and the work of entropy. (p. 64)

V., Profane, Fausto, the two Stencils, Inverarity, Oedipa Maas, Tyrone Slothrop, Blicero, and Enzian are all wanderers searching for information that will make their world a little less alien. The nature of their interaction with the land distinguishes Pynchon's fiction, elevates it from the intellectually curious to the artistically significant…. [The] earth itself has become the vehicle of metaphor, important more for its descriptive value than its actuality. (p. 65)

There are any number of reasons for Pynchon to select information as the new medium of quest and tour: it is sequential and cumulative; it must be searched out; it implies a conclusion or resolution; it may be preconceived and then redefined by observation; it may be imagined or real; it has consequences. It is also this century's most important commodity and exists as its own territory, free from geography and national boundaries. And yet information has no value apart from those who seek it and, potentially, use it….

Stencil is Pynchon's first fully developed tourist. Although the principal character of V., he is nonetheless conspicuously absent most of the time. Instead of Stencil, there is his track—a record of where he has been, clues he has pursued. Both Stencil and his name are maps of a landscape. (p. 72)

The tour is a form of ritualized observation. Pynchon borrows a metaphor from physics that helps explain the tourist's double vision. On several occasions in Gravity's Rainbow he refers to the "Heisenberg situation…. It appears we can't have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle's velocity—."… The same principle is expressed by Dennis Flange in "Lowlands," when he says that the act of observing changes the data being observed. Each of Pynchon's protagonists shows some variation of the principle in operation. In fact, Pynchon takes quantum mechanics as a model for representing the world in his fiction. (p. 101)

Although an analysis of Pynchon's fiction, particularly Gravity's Rainbow, in terms of quantum mechanics might reward the effort, even this partial suggestion of a metaphorical structure indicates the extremely complex relationship between illusion and reality. They represent a unity, but neither is more fundamental than the other. The parallels go beyond the coexistence of two orders of being, however. As Stencil, Oedipa, and Slothrop demonstrate, the more certain they become about illusion, the less certain they are about reality. (p. 102)

Nothing in all of Pynchon's fiction rivals his accomplishment in showing how technology and its secular allies have reshaped the world. From Inverarity's personal dream in The Crying of Lot 49 to the impersonal meta-cartel of Gravity's Rainbow, there is a shift of emphasis, a growing anxiety, that commands our attention; there appears to be a global conspiracy that will accept nothing less than its own image of reality. (p. 119)

The evidence of technology's landscape hardly needs documentation since it is omnipresent in Pynchon's novels, but two tangible results of technology—dope and film—recur with such frequency as to require special attention. Both are extended metaphors for alternate landscapes and both have an element of irreducible strangeness. They are alternate forms of the tour and, accordingly, media for the metacartel's controlling images of reality. In a world gone synthetic, with illusion accepted as reality everywhere, drugs offer no "real" escape. But by removing their users one step from the usual landscape, they do offer the possibility of an alternate perception of the world. (p. 120)

The landscapes of Disney, dope, film, and tourism depend on a conscious recognition of form, and therefore artificiality, for their effect in shaping experience. However, a sense of familiarity is also essential. Repetition, prior knowledge, and experience itself can make even the strangest landscapes familiar. Familiarity in turn makes a landscape appear real, allows it to function as land. Although Pynchon's novels offer some of the strangest landscape of contemporary fiction, they do nonetheless have a familiarity about them…. Through his use of facts and details carried over from the reader's own experience, Pynchon creates a sense of place and event that self-consciously calls attention to the coexistence of reality and fiction. (pp. 128-29)

In Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon's ability to recreate the sense of a place and time has increased although he is less interested in the physical than the mental landscape. His rendering of the bureaucratic idiocies of the White Visitation, for example, has an ambiance of truth to it that allows the fictional institution to represent any number of real counterparts…. (p. 131)

Details are discovered, selected, altered, combined, and with them a landscape is created. Perception, finally, is all that distinguishes illusion from reality, and illusion is always partial. Whether observed or represented, reality necessarily involves illusion because it has no form of its own and cannot make itself visible without an image being imposed. If one purpose of criticism is to invent such images, Pynchon has prevented definitive perceptions by forcing critics into uncertainty relations with his observable world and thus into distracting complexity. (p. 132)

Land and landscape are the poles of Pynchon's fictional world, related in the life of man's illusion. (p. 133)

If the final measure of life is death, then death must be implicit everywhere in life. It is a pervasive artistic theme that haunts all others. The two approaches to Pynchon's fiction already examined claim their separate metaphors, but it becomes obvious that they are only other ways of talking about the probabilities and uncertainties of death. Although entropy is a measure of probability, it implies the process of transformation…. Rebirth is an illusion; the only transformation is, as Walter Rathenau expressed so well, "from death to death-transfigured." Despite its other connotations, the tour conceals the same inherent truth: reality and illusion are continuous, functions of the same uncertainty relation. Both the isolated system and the tour take their shapes from the earth's change toward death, from the nature of things. Death in new appearances and death exalted are the ends of transfiguration, not rebirth. (pp. 135-36)

If Walter Rathenau, as an apparently disinterested party, speaks the truth about life's being a movement toward death transfigured, then the characters of Pynchon's novels and stories should reveal various degrees of the transfiguration, all of which confirm death. Amid the variety of human activities that validate Rathenau's conclusion, love is one aspect to which Pynchon repeatedly turns for evidence—even in spite of a certain sympathy for human compassion. Within the traditions of western civilization Pynchon has a complete love-death structure to draw upon, including Freud's compendium, which begins with the conclusion that the goal of all life is death. (p. 137)

The structure of death tends to pervert love to its own form—homosexuality, fetishism, narcissism, (p. 175)

Though overshadowed by the machination of system, a human tenderness persists throughout Pynchon's stories and novels: irrational love amid death, a caring.

Its occurrences are relatively scarce and often fragmentary. In Pynchon's stories, Nerissa, Aubade, and the children of Mingeborough show evidence of caring. Pynchon himself openly cares in his essay on Watts…. There are others who care quietly, secretly, afraid that admission might deprive them of feeling. (pp. 176-77)

Pynchon insists that the capacity to care is a fragile and rare emotion amid so many easy feelings mass produced and manipulated by the system that passes for life. The isolation of Mexico may be the most poignant moment in all Pynchon's fiction. It is a loneliness that hurts because it touches nerves of memory, childhood dreams of what life was supposed to be like. By comparison, other moments of passion appear fabricated, taken from movie-screen images. (p. 185)

Paranoia serves Pynchon well as a model, or extended metaphor, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its decontaminated, socially acceptable use as description of real, imagined, and unconfirmed conspiracies. Its logical structure—the process of relating evidence—implies a structure for his own fiction, not unlike a great scientific theory. Although the clinical paranoid would organize uncertainties out of existence, Pynchon bases his use of the paranoia metaphor precisely on uncertainties, because both ambiguity and the more specific implications of uncertainty relations nourish paranoia and make any psychosis difficult to establish clinically. The question of whether a conspiracy is real or not remains an open one, a matter of interpretation. Paranoia also offers the advantage of allowing him to work with a dialectic of good and evil, the persecuted victim and the enemy conspiracy, without obligation to substantiate, defend or even explain. (p. 189)

A conspiracy or plot is a defining characteristic of all Pynchon's novels. Although the uncovering of each conspiracy supplies the momentum for all the novels, and although the conspiracies each show all the characteristics of paranoia, the device is not simply repeated. In fact, the most paranoid among us might suspect that there is only one conspiracy and that the more we read the more evidence we uncover that points to some grand design we cannot quite see…. Any reader must be impressed with the fact that Pynchon not only returns to the idea of conspiracy for each novel, but he also increases the complexity of its function and of his own vision. It would be tempting merely to ascribe his preoccupation with paranoia to the disorder and suspicion of the decades since World War One, and the development of his vision to cynicism and experience. Surely these factors are involved, but more significant is the possibility that Pynchon views paranoia as a social and aesthetic form rather than as metaphor or psychosis—a form for relating the individual to community, to some external truth (or system of belief), for counteracting what appears as an increasingly entropic world. (pp. 189-90)

Pynchon is conscious—self-conscious—of the fact that his novels are local enclaves of organization taken from the chaos of infinite possibilities. It is perhaps surprising, then, that Pynchon would give his fantasy such definite and precise shapes when the dangers of entropy, routinization, analysis, and consumption are so great. Certainly one of paranoia's freedoms is precisely the capacity to create elaborately detailed structures from an irrational, even false, premise and then to abandon them. But we must assume that Pynchon's shapes are deliberate since the act of publishing his stories and novels is one that implies a response or reaction. He is providing information—a commodity of exchange—in what can only be viewed as an effort to increase organizaton, concentrate energy. Because it incorporates Pynchon's own act and because it is one of the most recurrent themes of his fiction, communication may provide the framework for discovering how various things come together. (p. 220)

In The Crying of Lot 49 communication becomes a subject as well as a theme. Oedipa Maas finds herself between two systems: one is the offical system—the hermetic tower like Fausto's room with the banal conversations of surburban routine and the redundant, exhausted forms of life as it appears to be, including "lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty"; the other is the secret, mysterious system for the alienated and unassimilated people of the streets…. (p. 228)

Oedipa's encounter with the old sailor reveals to her the secret of how the sensitive can communicate (p. 230)

The mattress is a metaphor for memory, that which structures all communications and gives them their originality and redundance. Memory is unique to each individual even if all memories include the same standardized histories, the same shared symbols, and the same limited forms for expression. The saint, the clairvoyant, the true paranoid, and the dreamer all depend on metaphor as the relational form that can hold the original, the true, the cry that might abolish the night in its intelligible redundancy…. (p. 231)

The Crying of Lot 49 contains an aesthetically dense and dynamic model of communication. The Tristero, Inverarity's will, the Nefastis machine, Mucho's spectrum analysis, and Oedipa's metaphor are all complex and overlapping manifestations of information theory and the social theory of communication. Though Pynchon differentiates among various possibilities, he wryly leaves his readers with a riddle. It is only Oedipa's central role in the novel that relates all the parts and holds them together in her paranoia. There is a clear implication that metaphor as a thrust at truth and a lie offers Oedipa, at least, a viable mode of endurance for her particular circumstances, for the symmetry of two systems of communication. However, it is an alternative based on faith and transcendence, both of which are ephemeral qualities. (p. 233)

Pynchon permits Blicero's Rocket to retain its mystery even as he transforms it into the abstraction of the last section of [Gravity's Rainbow]. Rocket ooooo loses its identity to the Rocket system, which can be interpreted in a variety of ways. As a metaphor for communication, the abstracted Rocket corresponds loosely to the sonic object of information theory since it is this concept that helps explain how aesthetic information exists simultaneously with redundancy and intelligibility. If sound, such as music, is regarded as a temporal phenomenon, having direction in time, time can be mapped into space by recording. (p. 238)

The Rocket as sonic object has properties of both space and time. It is a perceptual form that integrates the multiple messages of Gravity's Rainbow, messages about control, death, illusion, and the promise of escape. It is a message carried between two silences, carrying the aesthetic Word about the earth's own transfiguration of death and the gravity that will reclaim all those structures devised to consume its energy. (p. 240)

Gravity's Rainbow is itself like the metaphorical Rocket, with a fight through time and space, a continuity, and an intelligible form. The paradigm for author and reader is perhaps described by the relationship between Blicero and Enzian, in which Enzian is the scholar interpreting the text, following Blicero's creation, recreating a similar, but slightly different, Rocket of his own. The flight of Pynchon's Rocket takes its readers through an Aether sea, and at Brennschluss, for a moment, rests in a sound-shadow whose silence defines the screaming that comes after. The abstracted Rocket, like … Oedipa's metaphors, is both a thrust at truth and a lie. It is a symbol of all the dialectical polarities that characterize Pynchon's fiction and that arise out of the basic duality of order and disorder, the duality that structures thermodynamics, perception, the self, paranoia, information theory, and communication theory, even Pynchon's novels…. Pynchon's fiction is undivided, parallel, and not serial as Leni Pökler said. It encompasses more dualities than can be easily named and therein lies its achievement: it is a relational form, a process. The stories and novels may seem occasionally strange and frequently chaotic despite a growing sense that everything is somehow connected. The novels have passed through contemporary literature as if they were rockets…. (pp. 241-42)

[Thomas Pynchon] has sought to recreate the strangeness and mystery of literature by showing us the world men have wrought with their knowledge, their technologies, and the cleverness of their own designs. (p. 242)

William M. Plater, in his The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (copyright © 1978 by William M. Plater), Indiana University Press, 1978, 268 p.