Maxwell's Demon and the Cycle of Abjection in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49
All literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted . . . on the fragile border . . . where identities . . . do not exist or only barely so - double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
The system of WASTE is littered throughout Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. For Julia Kristeva, waste is that which is abjected from the body: "my body extricates itself. . . . Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit - cadere, cadaver" (Kristeva 3). By looking at the system of waste through the cycle of the word becoming flesh within The Crying of Lot 49 (hereafter Lot 49), we can see a process of abjection at work in the novel.
Much like the ghost in the machine of Maxwell's Demon that is discussed in the novel and in Evelyn Fox Keller's "Molecules, Messages, and Memory: Life and the Second Law," the cycle of abjection resists entropy. When the word (which, according to Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, is contained within the patriarchal order of language - "the murder of the father is that historical event constituting the social code as such . . . its equivalent on the level of the subjective history of each individual is therefore the advent of language" [61]) is made flesh (that is, the body is assumed into the symbolic system of language and the word is assumed into the system/s of the body), the body must make abject that which represents the maternal (or, that which is often "jettisoned from the 'symbolic system'" [Kristeva 65] through rituals of and around defilement)....
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