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American
Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Samples 2015 2b. Short Essay: Romanticism in a Previously-Read Text |
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Jon Anderson
Incorrigible Romanticism in Thomas Pynchon’s “Entropy”
One can never be entirely sure how many sets of quotation marks belong around
the things Pynchon writes, but when, in his early story “Entropy,” he brings
together the words “incorrigibly” and “Romantic,” we might get the impression of
a certain indulgent disapproval operating within the text. Previous to Paul
Thomas Anderson’s screen adaptation of
Inherent Vice, Pynchon was known by those who knew him at all as the author
of complex, postmodern epics featuring revolving door casts of characters
(sometimes, altogether, hundreds in the longer novels), a sort of counterculture
ethos, long, detailed digressions on obscure subjects, and silly song and dance
scenes. Multiple plotlines are compulsory, with many of them drifting into
constellations of conspiracy theory territory. Throughout Pynchon’s exhaustive
(and exhausting) comprehensiveness, though, are recurring scenes of Romantic
vintage: lovers who repudiate the world, adventurers on quests for
transcendence, unrequited longing, hedonist rebellion, idealism and nostalgia.
Pynchon himself calls “Entropy,” first published in 1960, “as close to a Beat
story as anything I was writing then” (Pynchon 14). The first few sentences
immediately evoke the Beat sensibility of rebellious freedom and the pursuit of
sensory experience:
Downstairs, Meatball Mulligan’s lease-breaking party was moving into its 40th
hour. On the kitchen floor, amid a litter of empty champagne fifths, were Sandor
Rojas and three friends, playing spit in the ocean and staying awake on Heidseck
and Benzedrine pills. In the living room Duke, Vincent, Krinkles and Paco sat
crouched over a 15-inch speaker which had been bolted into the top of a
wastepaper basket, listening to 27 watts’ worth of
The Heroes’ Gate at Kiev. They all
wore hornrimmed sunglasses and rapt expressions, and smoked funny-looking
cigarettes which contained not, as you might expect, tobacco, but an
unadulterated form of cannabis sativa.
(81)
The main connections between Beat and Romantic aesthetic are, first, Whitman,
and second, Transcendentalism, with Whitman the stylistic model in poems like
“Song of Myself,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” and “Song of the Open Road,” and
accounts of transcendent communion like Emerson’s the spiritual model.
The text adds various other partygoers throughout the next couple of paragraphs,
including “government girls, who worked for people like the State Department and
NSA, [who] had passed out on couches, chairs and in one case the bathroom sink”
and the general presence of “American expatriates around Washington, D. C., who
would talk, every time they met you, about how someday they were going to go
over to Europe for real but right now it seemed they were working for the
government” (82). The larger Washington context provides a segue to the extended
aside that leads to the narrator’s description of this assorted group as
“inevitably and incorrigibly Romantic” (83). Julian Jimenez Heffernan sees in
Pynchon’s “overarching effect … a systematic deflation of the romantic”
(Heffernan 304). To this end he cites the next passage that continues the ironic
musings on the modern Romantics: “And as every good Romantic knows, the soul (spiritus,
ruach, pneuma) is nothing, substantially, but air; it is only natural that
warpings in the atmosphere should be recapitulated in those who breathe it.”
Pynchon is clearly up to something in this passage, since we have some sense of
the attitude of Romantics like Whitman or Emerson toward the concept of the soul
(not to mention their attitudes toward the sort of empirically scientific
perspective offered by the narrator). Heffernan argues that Pynchon is pulling a
trick of perspective by implying though the reference to different linguistic
symbols for the concept of the soul (i.e.
soul in different languages) that it is “the plurality of jargons” that empties
the concept of meaning (305). This heightens the cognitive dissonance between
our recognition of the characters as contemporary embodiments of a nostalgic
Romantic sentiment and our sense that the characters comprehend to some extent
their inability to be true Romantics.
While the guests at the lease-breaking party try their luck at transcendence,
the apartment upstairs from Meatball Mulligan’s houses Callisto and Aubade, a
couple whose story is both more somber and more recognizably Romantic. While the
free pursuit of happiness rules the lower apartment, Callisto’s and Aubade’s is
a “Rousseau-like fantasy” that has taken Callisto “seven years to weave
together” (Pynchon 83). It is “[h]ermetically sealed, … a tiny enclave of
regularity in the city’s chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, of
national politics, of any civil disorder” (84).
These are the two contrasting plots of “Entropy,” and the progression of the
story finds each group’s attempts at transcendence frustrated. While Mulligan’s
guests share the “sense of communion supplied by alcohol and music,” they seem
to gradually be absorbed back into their own preoccupations (Heffernan 305). A
group of Navy seamen crash the party thinking it is a sex pad. The Duke di
Angelis quartet marks this progression, from listening to the late Russian
Romanticism of Mussorgsky’s
The Heroes’ Gate at Kiev
(fully notated orchestral music bringing together the massive forces of the full
orchestra), to the
Earl Bostic
side (a jazz combo only using partially notated music in which there is more
freedom for individual expression), to their final scene of purely imaginary
musical performance. Upstairs, Callisto and Aubade don’t fare any better.
Callisto is hopelessly lost in nostalgia for his earlier life, while Aubade
clings to her own private thought world.
Pynchon assesses the story as a product of his adolescent “somber glee at any
idea of mass destruction or decline” processed through “second-hand science” and
the “cosmic moral twist” given to the concept of entropy by communication
theorists (Pynchon 13). However, the story works just as well in many ways if we
think of it as what pure Romantic individualism may look like from a modern,
socially-conscious, skeptical point of view.
Works Cited
Heffernan, Julian Jimenez. “Ironic Distance in Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Entropy’.”
Contemporary Literature 52.2 (2011):
298-329.
Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner. New
York: Little, Brown and Company, 1984. Print.
