THE CRYING OF LOT 49: - The 'Anarchist Miracle', Exercises of Painting

Download THE CRYING OF LOT 49: - The 'Anarchist Miracle' and more Exercises Painting in PDF only on Docsity! i          DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES     THE CRYING OF LOT 49: The ‘Anarchist Miracle’ Author: Matthew Tanz Essay/Thesis: 15 hp Program and/or course: EN1311 Level: First Cycle Semester/year: St2015 Supervisor: Marcus Nordlund Examiner: Ron Paul     ii   Abstract Essay/Thesis: 15 hp Program and/or course: EN1311 Level: First Cycle Semester/year: St2015 Supervisor: Marcus Nordlund Examiner: Ron Paul Keywords: Thomas Pynchon, anarchy, miracles, excluded middle, Deleuze and Guattari, Maxwell’s Demon, postmodernism, A Thousand Plateaus Abstract: This essay will explore the theme of anarchy in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Specifically, I will examine to what extent anarchy can be understood as a unifying principle in The Crying of Lot 49 as it pertains to the passage of the book in which the revolutionary anarchist, Jesus Arrabal, declares an ‘anarchist miracle’ as a moment defined by “another world’s intrusion into this one” (120). Focusing on this passage, I wish to examine how anarchy might be understood by Jesus Arrabal, and more importantly how this might serve well to help illuminate a thematic reading of the book along the lines of miraculous anarchic events, in which ‘collisions lead to consensus’. In addition, I will compare how this model fares alongside two other key models used by critics – the Rhizome analogy authored by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and Pynchon’s own central allusion of the Nefastis Machine. Grouped together, my aim is to see how all three reveal important distinctions and understanding of the text as a whole. Ultimately, all of these models work together in many ways, but their subtle differences evoke a pivotal concept in The Crying of Lot 49 – the law of ‘excluded middles’, which is defined by the narrative as a dialectic between the dominance of reason pitted against the muddled world of uncertainty and myth.       2   other, others not. No matter how it is characterized, however, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon appears to be universally regarded as central to its canon” (97). At the same time, new scientific theories of quantum mechanics were gaining momentum and breaking down the old laws of classical physics. As Carmen Auría points out, “modern science acknowledges the idea that causality can actually be reduced to a statistical principle of probabilities and that, consequently, reality cannot be known with absolute precision” (2). In The Crying of Lot 49, we witness the interweaving of these great political and scientific instabilities into the narrative of Oedipa, a middle class American housewife lost in a crucible of existential anguish. As Edward Mendelson states, “Pynchon organizes his book according to historical and scientific theory – according, that is, to an order independent of literary imagination, an order derived more from the realms of politics and physics than from the self-conscious Modernist reflexivities of language and literature” (14). Again, in the same way that quantum physics shattered the comfort of classical physics and objectivity, postmodernism was born elusively out of the inability of modernism to describe our world through language. Pynchon’s narratives play and thrive in the muddled world of quantum uncertainty, revitalizing the obscure world of ‘the other’ into the ambiguities of language itself. The text thus opens up great contradictions and resistance towards central meaning, and as Kerry Grant sensibly asserts, “even after a number of readings, the novel resists interpretation to an extraordinary degree, especially if ‘interpretation’ is taken to mean the effort to tease out a unitary and more or less comprehensive account of the novel’s message from the tangled network of metaphor and allusion that is Pynchon’s trademark” (Grant x). Consequently, critical approaches range from those who take great heart in scrupulously piecing together each potential clue for every possible endeavour for every possible routing of meaning, possibly carrying meaning beyond the world of the text itself, and those who even question the potential for classic literary theory to maintain any relevance in relation to the work. As Mendelson quips, “[t]here is, of course, nothing that requires a critic to think as his author does – literary history would be in chaos if there were – but when an author questions the basis of a critic’s enterprise, then that critic ought at least to acknowledge that the question has been raised” (15). Mendelson challenges contemporary criticism to unmoor itself from the what he believes to be the trappings of self-reflexive modernism, and to instead appreciate how Pynchon is “always pointing towards the real conditions of a world more serious than the world in his imagination: pointing towards, not embodying, not displacing” (Mendelson 4). In short, he argues that we might consider encouraging the reader and critic alike to obsess     3   less over our own plight and look back, with a greater humility and appreciation, towards the ever-changing frontier of language and its relationship to the greater cosmos around us. In terms of the immense criticism surrounding the novel, two models stand out, and serve as an umbrella to the many competing concepts of interpretation. For one, Scott Drake refers to the theoretical work done by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, eloquently modeling the coherence of the text to that of a rhizome. As Drake puts it, “[t]he concept of the rhizome theorizes movement or growth from which there are only lines or flows that disrupt or escape the structure that codes them back towards the supposed unity imposed by a master sign” (224). This concept works well to encompass the open qualities of novel’s patterning and therefore much of the surrounding criticism in this area. Second, we have Pynchon’s own Nefastis Machine, which alters the real life thought experiment of Maxwell’s Demon proposed by the 19th-century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Under this presiding model, we can group a lot of the criticism that undertakes the relationship of the scientific world with the mystical, and ultimately, due to the machine’s failure – evidence that we are perhaps confronted with a closed system after all. Many, if not a majority of the essays written about the book, stake out a pointed interest in the passage of Jesus Arrabal and ‘the anarchist miracle’. The passage serves as a meeting place where a lot of criticism intersects, despite launching into wildly different viewpoints and theories. Few critics doubt that Pynchon has an intense appreciation for the fundamental force of politics, although to what extent remains debated. Some critics share the view, as Tony Tanner suggests, that “[t]he ‘anarchist miracle’ would not involve the intrusion of the ‘sacred’ world into our profane one; rather it would be a kind of ‘revolution’ leading to a whole new way of living together in this world” (187). Graham Benton, finally, who has devoted a great deal of work towards the notion of anarchy in Pynchon, states that “[w]hile Pynchon frequently invokes a concept of anarchism as a powerful mechanism for social engineering, as a utopic horizon, and as a valued political philosophy, he is also wary of fully endorsing an anarchist position because he recognizes such a position to be open to any number of violent corruptions and betrayals” (Unruly Narratives, iii). Anarchy is surely omnipresent, but to what extent or what purpose as it relates to the metaphysical or even religious aspect of ‘miracles’ as a unifying force, is debated and investigated in my essay. I find that the ‘anarchist miracle’ is a powerful motif worth exploring alongside these other abstract critical metaphors of the rhizome and even Pynchon’s own metaphor of the Nefastis Machine (Maxwell’s Demon). Pynchon weaves the possibility of the mystical and sacred emerging through the catalyst of anarchy, delivering an important layer of unification     4   despite the overarching context of destruction and dithering of any central structure. In this analysis, there will be a focus on how, through the coded message of anarchy, we can better understand the narrative thread in which certain objects or characters are unified by an anarchist principle and others appear to ‘fall from grace’. Essentially, are some of the anarchic organizations such as the Tristero vitally different from the dominant systems they aim to subvert, or are they shadow copies, wholly part of the same closed system of the Inverarity estate? With the ‘anarchist miracle’ in mind, this paper aims to explore how these series of rare moments, spread out like a vast network of neural dendrites, reserve the possibility to open or synaptically fuse brand new lines of thought. In the seemingly chaotic arrangement of Oedipa’s narrative, the notion of two worlds colliding through these collections of moments bring us along one pathway in the vast network of plots and ideas to a particular state of joy, and humanity, found in the WASTE and fallout of The Crying of Lot 49.     7   a real ‘anarchist miracle’ is leaderless and could not possibly accommodate the orthodoxy of a figurehead like Bakunin to the movement. When Jesus Arrabal states, “[l]ike the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world”, we encounter another key item central to the text and this analysis. It lays out the thematic exploration of various worlds operating, and, in particular, it questions what might be deemed a closed world or an open one. Interweaving between the scientific, political, and metaphysical, the central question is laid out – is Oedipa’s world closed and dictated by a master sign, or is it somehow open to a completely new plane of existence? Trying to determine a fruitful answer to this question is best approached by the meditation upon how the world(s) of the text interact, pattern, and see where the fault lines begin to emerge. Therefore, if we focus on the function of anarchy as it relates to ‘miracles’ in The Crying of Lot 49, we can more appropriately observe the aesthetic fracture lines that begin to emerge between the many worlds found in the text. It is precisely the interplay that exists between these modes of ‘anarchism’ and ‘miracles’ that Pynchon exploits in The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon compels the reader to venture towards the fantasy of interpretation, not for any definitive conclusion, but to augment the nature of the tension itself – the dissonance and possibly even harmony that lies between the more obvious strands of harmonic scales. So in terms of the ‘anarchist miracle’, we can interpret Oedipa and her narrative as a cognitive interloping between a closed world, (defined by limited choices) and an open one, offering a ‘sacred’ escape route, or as Oedipa contemplates at the end, “onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream [...] maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know” (170). Through the persistent pressure of anarchistic processes, The Crying of Lot 49 starts from a highly ordered ‘one world’ state to that of a panoply of dynamic worlds. Oedipa starts her journey observing the artwork of Remedios Varo, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre” and proclaims “such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all” (21). Her observation constitutes the first allusion to two worlds interacting, and at this stage, her captivation by one. Furthermore, the passage of the Varo painting presents the entropic curve of many worlds opening up out of the oppressive world of the Inverarity estate. The first chapter opens up in a straightforward, one-dimensional, and ordered manner. Coming home from a Tupperware party, and embodying the comfortable and monotonous lifestyle of middle class,     8   post war, American housewife, Oedipa “wondered, shuffling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn’t she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer’s deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye” (11). But very quickly, the order to Oedipa’s life is fundamentally challenged. She states, “as things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations” (20). Oedipa goes on to describe the moment in Mexico City, where they stumble into the artwork of Remedios Varo. She describes the painting as such: [...] in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void; for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried (21). Here we encounter a visible opening to her gradual breakdown. She relates the imagery of the painting to her world – one giant tapestry being manufactured to fill a void. Furthermore, as she observes the painting, she questions her existence and is emotionally disturbed enough to cry. Tears and crying in the book in the book are not only difficult to ignore, but in particular, can be interpreted in the context of an ‘anarchist miracle’. Tears represent a metaphor that stands out, as they are carefully interspersed throughout a book that rarely provides literal recognition of human emotions. Tears exist at this first juncture, as she stares into the painting, later, as she encounters the dying sailor with delirium tremens, and finally, as the title serves and resolves the final page of the book, to await “the crying of lot 49” (183). With the Varo artwork, her tears unintentionally fracture and dilute the one-dimensional aspect of a painting – welling up the abstractions that stem from her vision and interpretation of the work. Staring into the painting, she says, “[s]he could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry” (21). So to add to the weight of Oedipa’s own interpretation of the painting, her tears literally and figuratively refract her mode of vision in the same way anarchic forces simultaneously open up and confound her world. Dana Medoro, in her essay Menstruation and Melancholy, supports a similar interpretation of tears in the novel. She states that “[c]rying also appears to allude to a passionate response to the tear between signifier and signified” and when “Oedipa breaks down and cries [...] her tears prefigure or instigate a kind of epiphanic knowledge, or at least the desire for some experience of this knowledge” (73).     9   Oedipa’s melancholic interpretation of the Varo painting also suggests that, for the first moment, Oedipa is confronted with a new and frightening awareness of her entrapment of some kind of larger, pernicious system at work on her fate. Kerry Grant suggests, “By this stage we may be ready to see a degree of complementarity in the apparently conflicting notions of solipsism and magic” (31). Her position, like that of the maidens in the painting, is set towards work and motion, although left with the existential uncertainty and question of – by what purpose, and whose making? Debra Castillo suggests that, in respect to Oedipa and the Varo painting, “[c]aught up in a web of her own weaving, in an ecstasy of discovery and reordering, Oedipa passes almost imperceptibly from fabricator to fabrication; she is taken into her desiring machine and lost” (40). Oedipa is lost, but at the same time a map, or labyrinth is exposed in the frame of a picture. Although her coordinates are unclear, we see some emergence of a position opening up – of what Oedipa later calls “the excluded middle” (181). The ‘excluded middle’ is a central concept in my investigation as it, by one interpretation at least, signifies the existential anarchic space that Oedipa’s narrative represents. And in particular, this space illustrates her perpetual wavering between one binary and logic based system and another world that can be described as a highly unstable quantum like multiverse with infinite possibilities. Jumping to the final pages of the book, Oedipa, still ultimately confounded by her fate, states: The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most tender flesh without a reflex or a cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless (181). Castillo, on a discussion about the symmetry found in the book, points out that “Chaos, rather than ceding to order and reason, resists interpretation, not as an actively malevolent force, but as a kind of deadening inertia [...] leaving an uncanny trace trapped in an ‘excluded middle’ between meaninglessness and meaning” (30). From the Varo painting to this final section of the book, Oedipa contemplates escape from the ‘matrices of ones and zeros,’ questioning and flirting with the spaces that hide between the pixelated and perhaps digital nature of the universe. In this philosophical questioning of the limits to rational science, or at least where classical physics breaks down, she projects movement, even though she may after all remain locked in place, frozen in time, in the greater labyrinth of the cosmos, as articulated in the tapestry of the painting. Castillo rightly points out that “The purposeful movement of the detective fades into Oedipa’s     12   Here, we witness the duality of metaphor as it contains both ‘truth and a lie’ determined by the dichotomy of inside or outside. Furthermore, this passage represents a collision of two different worlds. Oedipa is the missing ingredient, the spontaneous link (or intrusion of one world to the other) to the truly separate world of the WASTE mail delivery system and its outcasts. According to Samuel Thomas in Pynchon and the Political, the scene with the sailor “is arguably Oedipa’s only moment of unmediated human contact in the whole novel” (130). Although Thomas argues that this instant does not qualify as a “revolution”, it does convey a sense of departure for Oedipa towards an undisclosed truth of suffering, hidden from the superficiality of the Inverarity estate. John Johnston supports the idea that the world of the alienated (represented by the WASTE mail system) could qualify as an ‘anarchist miracle’ in the sense that “those politically, socially, and sexually unrecognized in official American life” (67) are separate but somehow still communicating “the silent, almost unrecognizable intrusion of an alien world into the official one” (67). These instances of anarchic ‘calculated withdrawals’ in the book illuminate the melancholic sense of loss and destruction of ‘miracles’ due to industrial machinery. As Pynchon himself articulated in his 1984 essay “Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?”: The craze for Gothic fiction after ''The Castle of Otranto'' was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythical time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery (40). Here, Pynchon articulates one of the central issues of The Crying of Lot 49 – that the power of myth and miracles once served as a powerful mechanism for inspiration and meaning, and how the ‘Age of Reason’ has bulldozed this sense of wonder into a locked matrix of ‘ones and zeroes’, and ‘unvarying grey sickness’ that defines the dominant world in The Crying of Lot 49. In literal terms, the closest we get to an ‘anarchist miracle’ is when Oedipa stumbles upon a dance with deaf mutes in chapter 5, shortly after her confrontation with Jesus Arrabal. She describes the odd nature of the event as follows: But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before the collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined. Something they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. She followed her partner’s lead, limp in the young mute’s clasp, waiting for the collisions to begin. But none came. She was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus, everybody took a break, without having felt any touch but the touch of her partner. Jesus Arrabal would have called it an anarchist miracle. Oedipa, with no name for it, was only demoralized (131-132).     13   At this moment we are confronted with a chaotic situation where somehow, much to Oedipa’s surprise, a ‘mysterious consensus’ of harmony takes shape. This allusion to order emerging out of what she expects to be a mess is conjoined with another key idea when she imagines this ‘unthinkable order of music’ as somehow ‘predestined’. The passage presents an ‘anarchist miracle’ as the possible agent to bring about certain changes, and in the context of the novel as a whole, calls into question once again the nature of Oedipa’s quest – is the world preordained, closed, and limited, or is there the possibility of some greater plane of existence, a secular or religious ‘excluded middle’ that exists between the seemingly binary choices she appears to be stuck with.     14   3. The Rhizome Model With the great scientific themes looming as a backdrop in The Crying of Lot 49 it is not surprising that certain natural and biological models have been applied to the text. The model of a rhizome authored by Deleuze and Guattari has been applied to the text in a way that reveals important similarities with that of the ‘anarchist miracle’, and works wonderfully to describe much of the anarchic patterning of the book in many ways. The fundamental aspects of the philosophy of the rhizome, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is illustrated by the biological structure of a rhizome – an inherently free routing system, containing no center, multifarious, open, and designed by “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” (42). Their model also explicitly differentiates the patterning of a rhizome from that of the linear and binary nature of an arboreal diagram, which is built by reproduction, tracings, and is ‘innately hierarchical’ (Deleuze and Guattari). Essentially, their view attempts to model the postmodern syndrome of uncertainty and multiplicity through erratic ‘lines of flight’, mimicking the biological framework of a rhizome. Before moving on to what this model lacks in its application towards the text, let us first explore how this idea shares many of the congruences found in the concept of the ‘anarchist miracle’. For one, it incorporates an essential ‘nomadic’ freedom of movement, beyond a preordained structure, much the way anarchy is symbolized in The Crying of Lot 49. The inherent multiplicity of structure in the rhizome allows patterns to go off course, enabling the possibility of escape and the formation of new symbiotic forms of life; in Oedipa’s terms, something what we might call an ‘anarchist miracle.’ According to Deleuze and Guattari, with the rhizome, “there is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying” (31). This analogy applied to the text is well suited to explain the frenetic and unpredictable movement of anarchic organisations. For instance, the structure of the Inamorati Anonymous group mentioned in the previous section is what Samuel Thomas describes as “[a] world of loveless isolates, of empty prosthetic lives – circulating without direction, consuming and expending, all soundtracked by the continuous whirring of IBMs” (126). The rhizome would also account for brand new systems emerging that avoid any ‘imitation’ or ‘resemblance’ to any signifying order. The novel sets out with limited choices for Oedipa. At the conclusion of chapter one, while contemplating the implications of the     17   The words, who cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also (79). Here, as in many other parts of the book, Oedipa is challenged to preserve her own ordering of the information she receives, and at least to question her own vested interest and experience as it relates to the blossoming mystery of her fate. This passage also reveals another potential disparity between the shape of the novel’s themes and the rhizome theory. Fundamental to the rhizome, argued by Deleuze and Guattari, is the fact that the rhizome exhibits “a map, not a tracing” (33). More specifically, “the map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification” (Deleuze and Guattari 33). The key point here is that the rhizome expresses a fundamental open quality to the system it represents. The idea behind the ‘anarchist miracle’, and the text as a whole, is that Oedipa lives in the potential plane of both a closed and open system. It is closed in the sense that the ‘miracle’ is forever kept out of reach as what Graham Benton argues to be a ‘utopic horizon’. It is an event horizon, always alluded to, but arguably never achieved. Driblette further admonishes Oedipa’s pragmatic detective stance at the end of chapter 3: “[y]ou can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Trystero possibility the way they did [...] You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth” (80). The possibility remains that Oedipa is in fact trapped in a closed system with no more than binary choices available. Oedipa is still posed with the haunting notion that perhaps her choices are ultimately limited and preordained, and that the cosmos is either a disinterested digital vacuum of ‘ones and zeroes’, with no other motive except the laws of thermodynamics, or some mysterious god in charge of her fate. This brings us to another key aspect of the ‘anarchist miracle’ not covered by the rhizome – and that is the religious aspect of the novel. The steady allusion to ‘revelations’ and ‘miracles’ throughout the text always hints that one possible escape route to her closed system is the quasi-religious realm of the mystical. By definition, the very idea of a possible miracle occurring infuses the religious overtones of the novel, infecting the anarchic and muddled scientific issues prevalent in the text. As Auria astutely point out, “[e]ither myth or transcendence – understood as Revelation in religious terms – reify an arbitrarily constructed order that can be superimposed upon human existence and give meaning to that existence. If the history of modern culture, as Pynchon portrays it in the novel, is characterized by insecurity, instability, and absurdity, a mythical or religious alternative can also fill the gap     18   between the individual’s existential despair and a never-graspable external gnoseology” (12). Both, the self-reflexive nature of The Crying of Lot 49, and the religious symbolism are involved in tailoring this idea. John Johnston presents important ideas on how semiotics works in The Crying of Lot 49. He argues, “[i]n the interstices and cracks of a now increasingly entropic system, what had been invisible and repressed rises to the surface in the form of ‘signs’ heralding the possible emergence of an entirely different order of meaning” (Johnston 70). Johnston goes further to explore how Oedipa’s role is central to the dispersal and configuration of signifiers, which conflate some hidden central but obscured truth, or as Oedipa states, something “anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all” (21). The language of Pynchon, carried through the narrative of Oedipa, is in a perpetual state of signaling the mysterious and religious – without outright landing on it. The self-reflexive questioning and simultaneous use of metaphor work together to illustrate numerous discrete boundaries within The Crying of Lot 49. Although interpretation is left open to the reader with the answers carefully left out of reach, it is precisely the signaling that Pynchon draws out that provides at least a hint – an ambiguous silhouette of what might be the mysterious “other” or even possibility of a miracle. In the same manner, the mystical aspect of the novel, and even the possibility that the Tristero does in fact exist projects the argument that perhaps there is a central signifying order. The possibility of some master sign, God, or Tristero works against the nature of the rhizome, which evades the possibility of a central order. Deleuze and Guattari state “In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by the circulation of states” (42). We cannot ignore the distinct possibility that Oedipa is in fact living in a closed, despotic system, fully controlled by a central force.     19   4. Maxwell’s Demon as a Machine Model Maxwell’s Demon presents us with a powerful scientific metaphor of a machine, also central to the overriding structure of the book, and notably the crosshatching of anarchy, realism, and fantasy that we have explored through the rhizome and the ‘anarchist miracle’. Kerry Grant states, “with the introduction of Maxwell and his demon we begin our attempts to grasp the novel’s central and most elusive metaphor” (82). Maxwell’s Demon represents a real life thought experiment designed by the renowned 19th-century Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell. In the book, the idea is altered and presented as the Nefastis Machine. Put simply, the machine is designed to somehow overcome the second law of thermodynamics by situating a ‘demon’ (some conscious entity) in the middle of a heat engine capable of sorting warm and cold particles into separate parts of the box. If the correct information can be captured about the particles (velocity and position), then they can hypothetically be sorted, creating usable energy, and preventing the heat-death of the engine, subverting entropy. After looking at the ‘anarchist miracle’ as a central allusion, and observing how the rhizome incorporates many of the free and anarchistic qualities of Oedipa’s world, Maxwell’s Demon colours the other side of the ‘excluded middle’ in which Oedipa finds herself – namely the machinic and binary conditions that exist in the novel. On one level, the Nefastis Machine works against the rhizome analogy. Deleuze and Guattari point out, “[b]inary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as ‘advanced’ as linguistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains wedded to classical reflection” (26). And furthermore, “binary logic and biunivocal relationships still dominate psychoanalysis [...] linguistics, structuralism, and even information science” (Deleuze and Guattari 26). Information science, crucial to the metaphor of the Nefastis Machine, is bound to the laws of binary computing. Christopher McKenna builds upon the idea of the narrative as a system similar to that of a computer program, which fits well with the allusion to the machinery of the Nefastis Machine. He argues, like many others, that the characters are often objectified and reduced to parts and things, binding them to the greater machinery of the world around them. And in this regard, the story can be understood as a computer-like program, with almost infinite possibilities, although binary in command, in which the protagonist and reader can work the program to execute different states of being. McKenna points out the historical importance of computer programming during the 60’s in its relation to The Crying of Lot 49. He states, “Oedipa begins to think of the Tristero as ‘a metaphor of god knew how many parts.’ Modern systems engineers, in their     22   speculation, and within this realm of imagination there remains a distinct possibility for real creation, or in anarchic terms what Benton calls a ‘utopic horizon’. Simply put, the fiction of our life, like Oedipa’s, is worth reading. And in the case of Nefastis the nutty inventor, his desire to make the machine work is more important than the fact that the machine does not work in reality. As Friedman and Puetz illustrate on this point: While the general tendency of physical processes is towards increasing disorder, twentieth-century biophysics has realized that life violates the pattern. We grow from a few molecular cells, increasing in complexity and order, adding atoms from potato fields, the ocean depths, and the earth itself [...] Of course, entropy will take over eventually, individuals will decay, die, and return to a disorganized scattering of atoms” (24). Our desire to resist entropy is as much a part of our makeup as Oedipa’s fight against the humdrum of middle class housewife, as is the anarchist impulse to resist power in The Crying of Lot 49.     23   5. Conclusion In this analysis, there has been a principal focus on the passage of Jesus Arrabal’s ‘anarchist miracle’ and this has been compared and tested against the hypothesis of the rhizome and the Nefastis Machine. My hope is that the correlation of how these ideas intersect has helped provide a better picture of the fascinating concept of ‘excluded middles’ that Oedipa and her narrative open up. As originally stated, the excluded middle represents the intangible ‘anarchic’ space between seemingly contradictory forces present throughout the novel. The realm of the excluded middle is represented by Oedipa’s narrative and is portrayed as the timeless human desire for meaning in a world stuck between logic and myth. What makes The Crying of Lot 49 such a fascinating novel, and still highly relevant to our time almost fifty years since its creation, is that the excluded middle poses the great philosophical and scientific questions of our time in the form of fiction. By questioning the very limits to language and literature in the ‘Age of Reason’, Pynchon has at the same time defended the role of fiction and its implications in the postmodern age. He has, with great vitality, brought theoretical physics into the drama of our lives and consequently questions what it means to be human in an age where the gap between human consciousness and our machines is smaller by the day. The realm of quantum physics and its indeterminable structures continue to baffle scientists today as much as it did in the 60’s. We are perhaps closer to unlocking a unified theory of the universe and developing conscious machines, but the question of whether we will ever reach these singularities is still left open for debate. We also still live in incredibly unstable times. The Doomsday Clock is today almost as close at it has ever been to midnight, shy by only three minutes. The adventurous pursuit of the great scientific questions continue to either threaten our species with extinction, or will extend us, like a cosmological rhizome, off into the labyrinth of the universe. Ultimately, scientific exploration will either be our salvation or prove to be our undoing. My focus on the ‘anarchist miracle’ has hopefully demonstrated the mystical aspect of what is ultimately a scientific novel. I believe a focus on this aspect of The Crying of Lot 49 provides an additional appreciation for the deeply human ingrained desires for meaning, myth, and miracles in the ‘Age of Reason’. Pynchon, as he articulated in “Is it O.K. to be a Luddite” in 1984, has shown great empathy for the revolutionary spirit of the early Luddites. Perhaps Jesus Arrabal was a literary manifestation of the respect Pynchon has for the Luddite revolutionary spirit as they fought against the more insidious workings of the machine. It might also reveal a slightly modernist sensibility of the author. As Pynchon says himself, “TO     24   insist on the Miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly or otherwise, may on occasion become Big and Bad enough to take part in transcendent doings” (“Luddite” n.p.). Although my paper has provided a peripheral discussion of some of the profound scientific themes latent in the text, my aim has been more situated around the human desires and reactions that stem from the world of machinery in The Crying of Lot 49. In the future, it would be interesting to explore how new research and theoretical work in the areas of quantum computing and artificial intelligence can be examined in the relation to The Crying of Lot 49. However, as readers continue to search for answers in The Crying of Lot 49, we will always find ourselves in the twilight zone of the ‘excluded middle’ where art and science sometimes overlap with astonishing beauty. Richard Feynman, one of the great theoretical physicists of our time, once emphatically wrote in The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? (chapter 3) Feynman also reminded us that, after scientifically analysing a glass of wine, “[t]o let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!” With this in mind, let us occasionally forget theory and logic, and instead, like Oedipa, ‘project a world’ and ‘create constellations’ through our own innate feeling for the book and allow us to inhabit that place “[i]n a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine” (90).