NEIL SCHMITZ
117
and receiving of information , the postal franchise is clearly the most
important in human society . The Postmaster (like the Roman Catholic
Church imposing Latin on the Swabians, the Danes and the Franks) has the
ability to define and structure consciousness itself. But the mails are always
blackmailed. Following the advice of Burroughs to cut up and fold in, the
phone phreak insinuates himself into the Bell System and speaks to a puzzled
bonze in Cambodia. Pynchon knows the fate of Latin in southern California.
Yet there is no solace to be found in the proliferation of idioms or cults since
each idiom inevitably aspires to become Latin, to monopolize discourse. In
State and Revolution
Lenin declares: "To organize the
whole
national
economy on the lines of the postal service , so that the technicians, foremen ,
bookkeepers , as well as
all
officials, shall receive salaries no higher than a
'workman's wage ,' all under the control and leadership of the armed
proletariat-this is our immediate aim. " And
this,
Pynchon seems to suggest,
is what constitutes the unholy dialectic of history-a struggle for the post
office , the right to be the godlike Postmaster who impersonally operates in
society like Maxwell's Demon sorting molecules in its closed, two-chambered
box. Each would-be Postmaster dreams the death of history , the stasis of an
even temperature eternally balanced by a perfected social system intelligently
regulating its energies without losses , without decadence .
In
Lot
49 Oedipa is finally directed to John Nefastis , the inventor of an
experimental Maxwellian box. "Communication is the key ," he informs her.
"The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive , and the sensitive must reply
in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in that box. The Demon
collects data on each and everyone . . . the sensitive must receive that
staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of
information . To keep it all cycling. " Since the work of the Demon parallels
Oedipa's in the novel , it is often argued that the Demon metaphorically
describes the function of the imagination which strives to create order in the
world . Yet as Anne Mangel points out in her useful essay, "Maxwell's demon ,
entropy , information:
The Crying of Lot
49
(TriQuarterly,
20 , Winter,
1971), the Demon is a part of the problem, not its resolution . Maxwell had
imagined a vessel divided into two portions, the temperatures of which would
be raised and lowered without an entropic expenditure of energy by an
ingenious exchange of swift and slow molecules, a theory later challenged by
Leo Szilard and Leon Brillouin who argued that the Demon would require
visual illumination to make its selection of molecules and thus necessarily
increase the rate of entropy . And indeed the more Oedipa sorts and selects in
her attempt to bring Inverarity 's estate" into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, "
the more diffuse and disparate grows the evidence . In effect Nefastis has
created a microcosm of the world, an idea of history. Oedipa makes the
