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PARTISAN REVIEW
mistake of identifying with the Demon, she wants to be the ' 'dark machine in
the center of the planetarium" projecting the universe, whereas in fact she is
inside Nefastis' figurative box and a part of its flux , a sensitive Oedipa sorted
rather than sorting, sent rather than sending .
As all his critics have noted, Pynchon's application of the second law of
thermodynamics to the modern world generally follows the thesis advanced
by Henry Adams in
The Rule ofPhase Applied to History
(1909). History is
subject to the rule of entropy , Adams argues, and is therefore intensifying its
processes as it approaches its apocalyptic close, piling event upon event in the
last wild thrashing of human time . In Pynchon' s interpretation, however, this
thesis is subtly turned. As it appears in
V.
and
Lot
49, history is, if anything, a
vile invention specifically designed to interfere with the random exhaustion of
human energy. By constantly devising (through its lesser demons) totalitarian
systems of mediation , institutionalized versions of the Demon, it seeks to
keep the social world of men going . History is
not
natural, but an imposition
of human will, a rebellion . The Hegelian Idea of Freedom that ostensibly
answers our questioning gaze when we turn from the "slaughter-bench" of
history reveals itself in
V.
(and most powerfully in
Gravity 's Rainbow)
as the
perverse Adversary, the Idea that impels Europeans into Africa to hound the
ahistorical Hottentots up out of their holes into consciousness, into awareness
of the master
I
slave relationship. What obsesses Pynchon is not the entropic
end of history , but the spectacle of historical repetition . And in rendering this
vision he refers us to John Adams, not Henry Adams , the John Adams who
diligently studied the political science of Machiavelli . How does a state escape
the turning historical wheel that generates aristocracies out of monarchies and
democracies out of aristocracies, turning again and again , toppling
innumerable Romes? The constitution Adams envisioned stabilizes that
endless and bloody round , serves as a perpetual motion machine demonically
checking and balancing political exchanges of power.
It
is the essence of the
American Dream , the perfect social contract, an agreement based on
synchronic principles and yet open to diachrony. And through the operative
intelligence of that text, a constitution fashioned to sense political
disequilibrium, America brings history to its poised culmination-the wheel
turns no more . James Clerk Maxwell is not only an important physicist, but
also , in the contrivance of that theoretical box, an American poet .
Yet the constitution fails, yielding to the corporate bylaws of GM, the
governance of Yoyodyne, an aerospace firm whose original business was the
construction of gyroscopes for children . As Christianity hardens into
orthodoxy, it engenders heresies ; as the Taxis postal system begins to
monopolize discourse in the post-Renaissance , the Trystero System emerges as
its counterforce; so , too , does Pierce Inverarity 's technological, IBM-
