Entropy and Armageddon

The satirist effectively irks and disquiets his readers by teasing them with tedium, shocking them with scatology, nauseating them with cannibalism, and rattling them with a melee of machines. But doubtless the most unpleasant subject the satirist can broach entails the death of the universe. There is enough wallop in that scenario to catch anybody’s attention.

In his rather sensational Rede Lecture at Cambridge in 1959, C.P. Snow described a divided world, “the two cultures,” made up of isolated and hostile groups, scientists and humanists. In reproaching the smug liberal arts types, Sir Charles observed that he had often asked members of an ignorant audience “how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was . . . negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” John Hollander once commented that Snow indeed made an unfortunate lapse in choosing as an example of ignorance the principle of entropy or the concept of the universal dissipation of energy in irreversible time that is the second law of thermodynamics, since “it is the one bit of ‘science’ which every American schoolboy knows.”¹

The concept of entropy has been around for some time and has had every opportunity of filtering into the general public consciousness—and settling there. Originally deriving from Sadi Carnot’s studies of the behavior of gases and the efficiency of steam engines, the idea of the inability to obtain maximum work from a given fuel and the tendency in time for the dissipation of energy was articulated by Clausius in 1850 and generalized as the second law of thermodynamics by William Thomson (later to become Lord Kelvin) in 1852. Thomson applied the law to the universe as a closed system and foretold its “heat death” as forces finally reached equilibrium at a low temperature. Hermann von Helmholtz elaborated Thomson’s principle in 1854, and much stress was placed upon the randomness of mounting disorder. Clausius introduced the term entropy (analogous to energy) to describe such dissipation in 1865.² These ideas were articulated and repeated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by such men as Ludwig Boltzmann, J.W. Gibbs, Max Planck, Sir Arthur Eddington, and Sir James Jeans.³ Similarly, entropy has since that time become a primal concept in communications theory, that postulates in a system increased static and disorder until communications break down.⁴ With a vengeance, then, do Hamlet’s words assume new ominous meaning: “The rest is silence.” Such a concept has become a primal metaphor in modern literature, in which, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, the world is conceived as ending lamely with ridiculous and lumpish inertness—not with a “bang,” but a “whimper.” “The basic point needs no arguing. In art, in literature, in science, in our culture as a whole we are a void-haunted, void-fascinated age.”⁵

Actually, of course, the renown of the law of entropy was early overshadowed by the Darwinian theory of evolution, which it predated. For some time, evolution appeared to reinforce ideas of progress that had been rife in the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, but almost as a kind of deliberate reaction against progressivist attitudes, the later nineteenth century and subsequently the twentieth have increasingly favored pessimistic readings of human and galactic history. In such a climate entropy was destined to come strongly into its own.

In fact, so fully have entropic ideas been embraced among painters and writers that it has become too well known indeed. Since the dada movement following World War I, there have been recurrent movements that are overtly antiart, and a number of works in music, painting, and literature are deliberately (and even hopelessly) random and chaotic. Monroe Beardsley laments that too many specious artists appeal to the “indeterminacy” principle of Heisenberg to justify such creations; or else they fatuously argue that “because the second law of thermodynamics promises an inexorable downhill march to a statistical heat-death, what else can a conscientious artist do but play along with nature by maximizing the entropy of his works?” R.P. Blackmur argues that the serious artist resists “disorder” and “torpor,” but he is in our century in a fateful atmosphere in which society favors “uniform motion” and a lumpish proletariat, what Ortega y Gasset discerned as the result of the ascendancy of a new minimally cultured, minimally motivated mass man.⁶

Society takes on the aspect of uniform motion. The artist is the hero who struggles against uniform motion, a struggle in marmalade.

For the artist regards uniform motion as the last torpor in life. Torpor . . . we prefer to believe . . . is the running down of things. For three generations we have heroized the second law of thermodynamics, which is the law of the dissipation or gradual unavailability of energy within any system—which is the law of entropy or the incapacity for fresh idiom, time and perception going backwards. Entropy, from the point of view of the rational imagination, is disorder.⁷

Tony Tanner is particularly struck by “the frequency with which ‘entropy’ occurs, as a word or a tendency, in recent American fiction.” He believes it points to “a disposition of the imagination” in contemporary America. He notes that writers who use the word include Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, John Updike, John Barth, Walker Percy, Stanley Elkin, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon.⁸ To such a group we can add George P. Elliott’s David Knudsen, a hopeless, drifting, selfless man suffering radiation sickness from fallout in a hydrogen bomb explosion in the Pacific. His physicist father early “dispirited” him to talk of entropy and theories, maintaining that “something or other was likely to fail or prove itself to be no good.” David’s whole life consists of slowly discovering “what the void is like,” an icy equilibrium where “a = b = c = d = e.”⁹

Again, Susan Sontag’s Diddy (or Dalton Harron) is a man without spirit or drive, “not having . . . job or identity, not having a cause . . . lacking a . . . goal.” He wanders into a dream world of corpses multiplying, a world of what he had almost always inhabited—death. Such a Diddy is entropy personified: “Diddy . . . not really alive . . . Diddy making everything unpredictable. . . . Everything running down: suffusing the whole of Diddy’s well-tended life. Like a house powered by one large generator in the basement. Diddy has an almost palpable sense of the decline of the generator’s energy . . . sending forth a torrent of refuse that climbs up into Diddy’s life.”¹⁰

Similarly, William Burroughs’s fiction is chock-full of chaos—excessive speed and collage and yet frustrating overall inertia—what in Nova Express he calls “terminal stasis.” In Naked Lunch he portrays this chaos by his imagery of the whole of American society suffering from cancerous “un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue,” a “degenerate . . . lifeform,” “fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter.” Elsewhere in Naked Lunch, in a limply appended “Atrophied Preface,” the human race is considered over: “Thermodynamics has won at a crawl. . . . Time ran out.” Other novelists go further. In a sudden burst of speed in Cat’s Cradle (1963), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., hastens the deep-freezing of planet earth, destroying everything. And Alvin Greenberg’s novel of wounded, aimless wandering, Going Nowhere (1971), suggests even in its title the primary tendencies of entropic literature.¹¹

Tony Tanner’s argument appears to imply that “paranoid” views of onrushing and inevitable entropy are particularly contemporary visions of the last several decades, especially confined to a host of American writers. But this is not so; for the visions of a world-devouring running-down have been dominant as a theme for the last hundred and more years. Wyndham Lewis in his old age conceived of the entire modern movement as having gotten lost in violent extremes and avant-garde run amok, bringing heterogeneity and superficiality to all our creations: “We seem to be running down, everywhere in life, to a final end to all good things.” This decline to “triviality” in the fine arts is almost ludicrously portrayed by Lewis as he lamely laments modern manufactured products: “paper is not what it was, in our newspapers, our books, our writing materials and so on, steel products, such as scissors, etc., become less and less reliable; the gut used in surgical dressing is no longer graded; but it is not necessary to enumerate this decline in detail.”¹²

Surely the most remarkable visionary artist of the entropic is Samuel Beckett, whose fictions abound in lame, static, and maimed creatures fastened in cells and trash barrels. Murphy is forever deposited in his rocking chair; Malone is perennially torpid and immobile. We also recollect the endless posture of “waiting” of Beckett’s exhausted inhabitants of Waiting for Godot (1952). In like manner, the predominant motif of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) is the lethal randomness of events and the irrevocable decline of human affairs toward chaos and exhaustion; Miss Lonelyhearts displays “an almost insane sensitiveness to order,” an order always being deranged. “He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature. . . . Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed.”¹³

Moreover, the central image of Céline’s influential work Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) is a crazy journey toward death and silence. A key image, for instance, is Broadway in a “sickly twilight”: “Like running sore this unending street, with all of us at the bottom of it, filling it from side to side, from one sorrow to the next, moving towards an end no one has ever seen, the end of all the streets in all the world.” In like manner, as if taking his ideas from Trotsky, Yevgeny Zamyatin conceives of revolution as a perpetual “revolving.” Any fixity in the state, he demonstrates in his dystopian We (1921), tends to produce totalitarian entropy—against which his revolutionary characters oppose rebellion and energy.¹⁴

One should also reflect that the idea of a profligate dissipation had captured the entire sensibilities of the fin de siècle French decadents and the late Victorians.¹⁵ H.G. Wells, in The Time Machine (1895), and Camille Flammarion, in La Fin du monde (1894), suggested the death of our planet and dramatized the dying out in the future of our sun. Even in the 1870s Flaubert in his notes for the completion of his Bouvard and Pecuchet (1881) indicates that “Pecuchet sees the future of humanity in dark colours. The modern man is lessened, and has become a machine.” But, most of all, Pecuchet predicts the “final anarchy of the human race.”¹⁶

The promulgation of ideas of falling-off, decay, and inertia have particularly proliferated in literature, then, during the past century and a half. Moralists have complained that our major authors contributed to creating what Henry Miller called “the Universe of Death.” George P. Elliott, with some distaste, perceives most of modern literature, despite its celebration of energy, as suffering from decline and entropy. Saul Bellow likewise objects to “antipersonalists” writers who reduce man to an “anonymous force,” and he laments the recent acceptance in letters of ideas of indeterminacy and entropy. But one must wonder whether simple “affirmation” or happy world views would prove satisfying in our era. The great and penetrating visions of our world—devised by Dostoyevsky, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Gide, Musil, Faulkner, Grass—are significantly pessimistic and grimly lacking in riotous good cheer. In fact, Leslie Fiedler has argued, our literature—if it is to be honest—“must be negative . . . for the irony of art in the human situation lies in this . . . works of art are about love, family relations, politics, etc.; and to the degree that these radically imperfect human activities are represented in a perfectly articulated form, they are revealed in all their intolerable inadequacy. The image of man in art . . . is the image of a failure.”¹⁷

Perhaps most important, outside the confines of literature, such ideas of decline helped to fashion entire views of history, as in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–22). Similar ideas are represented, say, by Erich Auerbach, who perceives ours as the period of “crisis” in which “European civilization is approaching the term of its existence.”¹⁸ Doubtless the most pervasive influence upon a philosophy of history induced by the second law of thermodynamics can be found in The Education of Henry Adams (1906). In those great passages of terrible recognition, the “educations” of Henry Adams come to a climax: Adams finally witnesses the defeat of two thousand years of Christianity, represented by the archaic power of the Virgin, and the emergence of raw modern energy and force, represented at the Paris Exposition of 1900 by the dynamo. Furthermore, not only is this newer “dynamic” force machine-made, more aloof, more brutal, but it also provides “no unity,” but rather “Multiplicity”—a “Chaos” that defies any “synthesis.”¹⁹ If the nineteenth century witnessed an incredible acceleration in knowledge, Adams nonetheless conjectures that it will peak, “like meteoroids,” and “pass beyond, into new equilibrium,” “or suffer dissipation altogether.”²⁰ Here, fully dressed, according to Adams, is the vision of “a dynamic theory of history” based upon the concept of entropy in its irreversible process.

Furthermore, Adams elaborates his discussion of the effects of entropy upon America in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919). For him, entropy implied the slow failure of the American political experiment; in addition, “it meant only that the ash-heap was constantly increasing in size. . . . every reader of the French or German papers knows that not a day passes without producing some uneasy discussion of supposed social decrepitude;—falling off of the birth rate;—decline of rural population;—lowering of army standards;—multiplication of suicides;—increase of insanity or idiocy,—of cancer,—of tuberculosis;—signs of nervous exhaustion,—of enfeebled vitality,—’habits’ of alcoholism and drugs,—failure of eye-sight in the young,—and so on, without end.”²¹ Adam’s allusion to a constantly accumulating “ash-heap” brings to light another figurative image that Susan Sontag also employed, with Diddy’s picturing of his life as a large generator running haywire, “sending forth a torrent of refuse.” Here is a kindred image, of the increased proliferation of “junk” and detritus that accompanies many entropic visions in literature and art.

Characters in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967), we recall, busily manufactured “plastic buffalo humps,” adding necessary “stuffing” and “sludge” to a society committed to the steady promulgation of ever-rising quantities of trash and detritus—until such productivity in the future attains to “100 percent.”²² And indeed, the proliferation of garbage is an ominous theme: one thinks of the Cleveland Wrecking Yard in Richard Brautigan’s book Trout Fishing in America (1967), or of Ezra Pound’s “Portrait d’une Femme” (1913), that describes a Victorian matron who is a listless ocean awash with facts, opinions, and gewgaws—the dead letter office of a dying civilization. We recall also the insidious piles of ashes and dust mounting up in London and surrounding the home of the wealthy Harmons in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865).

All these instances image forth, to be sure, alarmist signs and symbols of a decaying society. Modern literature is full of such figures, and of “underground men” and outsiders (as in Dostoyevsky and Ralph Ellison and Camus) who take refuge in hiding from such a culture. Archibald Geikie, for example, delivered a paper in 1868 that conjectured that soil erosion was so severe that eventually there would be no land masses left upon the planet.²³ Since that time, we have had more and more theses predicting the demise of trees, air, natural resources, and food supply, together with gloomy prognostications about the multiplication of refuse, radioactivity, toxins, cosmic rays, and the like.

All these depressive and downward-oriented philosophies hardly result solely from the second law of thermodynamics. For most of two thousand years in the West, Greek ideas of a decline from a golden age in the pristine past and then a Christian eschatology based upon the book of Revelation that anticipated the imminent destruction of the universe were predominant world views.²⁴ It was all that Francis Bacon and other scientific hopefuls in the seventeenth century could do to stanch the prevalent moods of pessimism. Only briefly, during the Enlightenment and into the nineteenth century, did a new benevolence, meliorism, and attendant ideas of progress prevail. Then, as suddenly, by the middle of the nineteenth century the reaction to this new optimism vehemently set in. Ideas of human “degeneration” (built into the genes) began to proliferate by midcentury.²⁵ These were accompanied by a pessimistic naturalism and determinism and were aided and abetted by dark satanic visions of a corrupt or infected romanticism. The movement of French decadence in the arts and subsequent schools of nihilism have similarly prospered. Such trends helped to foster new interest in every extremity of response to crisis: mental illness, ennui, paranoia, suicide, absurdity, inertia, and silence.²⁶ Ever since, we have had to live with an essentially decline-structured conception of our world.

Faced with all these movements heralding decline and decay, one thing is certain. C.P. Snow was certainly wrong about the humanist’s ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics. For, in a climate of ideas that has been for some 150 years morbid, cynical, and despondent, ideas of entropy have played a powerful role. They have provided traditional structural and metahistorical readings of human history with the glamor of mathematical principle and scientific law.²⁷

Late in his life, the great poet William Butler Yeats took to dabbling furiously in the occult and even married a woman gifted in automatic writing; she took dictation from spirits of the supernatural world. For a time Yeats was so entranced and beguiled by this influx of otherworldly commerce that he even offered to the spirits to give up writing poetry entirely. “No,” was their written reply to him, “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.”²⁸ In a striking and similar way, science—so long mistrusted by the humanists—has brought to literature and the arts the latest myth, and entropy has indeed bestowed upon us in the modern world vital metaphors for our poetry.

In our own era, no greater or more ingenious species of metaphor can be found than that within our satire. Satire has ever dealt with depravity and decline as its central message and motif, tracing vigorously, dismayingly, and flamboyantly the downturn from good news to bad. Alvin Kernan notes that in formal verse satire, authors such as Juvenal, Horace, and Pope string together upon a thread a number of works that illustrate “the general corruption of society.” That is precisely the general pattern to be found everywhere in literary satire, in which, as in Murphy’s Law, things go wrong.²⁹ Here, with Murphy’s and similar pronouncements, modern pseudoscience has merely codified what in satire had always been omnipresent: the concept of perpetual corrosion, senility, and degradation. Thus, Juvenal affirms that all vice nowadays is at the apex. Alexander Pope concurs: “Nothing is Sacred now but Villany.” Senecan dramas rehearsed the same lesson: fata se vertunt retro, “fate inverts itself,” gets twisted up, turned upside down. In every case, the traditional satirist insistently cries that poetic justice has been banished, happy endings dispelled, and stupidity and evil triumphant.³⁰

For that reason, it is curious that a number of critics in the twentieth century have repeated the opinion that satire itself has declined and possibly died out. Matthew Hodgart suspects, for instance, that satire is “a somewhat archaic survival which is being abandoned by the avant-garde of literature.”³¹ On the contrary, it could well be argued that such gloomy notions of satire’s demise are the gossip and gleeful prognoses spread abroad by the satirist himself, lovingly depicting the evolution of misery and the progress of decline. Evelyn Waugh for one—a satirist if there ever was one—flatly denies that he is satiric at all. Satire, he testily explains, thrives in centuries with standards and morals, in ages presuming that the guilty can be made to feel shame. “All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue.” What Waugh perceives “today” is “the disintegrated society”; tomorrow brings “the dark age opening.”³² Here the satirist outrageously denies his occupation as part and parcel of his strategy of heralding doom and inducing discomfort in the reader. Yet Waugh notwithstanding, complacent assertions that ours is no noteworthy age of satire cannot be farther from the truth.

Indeed, the sure sign that satire is alive and well can readily be established by observing the sheer numbers of satiric authors who embrace decline and retail the advancement of entropy. It is no accident that the major authors referred to in these pages—Dickens and Flaubert; Mann, Musil, and Grass; Zamyatin, West, and Céline, Vonnegut, Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon—are themselves the major satirists of our century. If their voices are uniformly raised in angelic celebration of debauchery and inertia, then it is precisely because they are our most impressive satiric singers. And it ought to go without saying that entropy has provided them with but one additional and wonderful metaphor for their continuous haunting, and mellifluous song.