Abstract

Throughout the pages of his literary universe, Thomas Pynchon has frequently shown a meticulous interest in the notion of entropy. Many papers have been written on the subject. Elsewhere, I have stressed the authorial play, pervasive and ironic, on the binary constituted by “energy” and “entropy” that exists in what I defend as Pynchon’s evolving literary project (Collado Rodríguez 2004). Binaries—and energy/entropy is probably the most important one, because it refers directly to our condition of mortality—are always categorical, and even if we are aware of them, we cannot escape from their rule. Language, in the postmodernist sense, is our trap, a trap that produces social hierarchies by means of its categorical implications. Such implications, as many critics now understand, cannot be avoided, precisely because language is a tool also exposed to the arrow of time, that is to say, to the rule of entropy. When we talk, we do it in time, and therefore we have to choose our words—excluding the use of many other words—and produce our selected words one after the other, following the temporal line.

How to Cite:

Collado-Rodríguez, F., (2011) “No Either/Or: The Stagnation of Forces in Pynchon’s Universe: Ethical and Gender Undecidability in Two Spanish Cases”, Pynchon Notes , 46-56. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/pn.4