How the realities of Oedipa and Devlin are challenged by the Demon
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
In The Crying of Lot 49, the Demon first appears in Chapter 2 (Pynchon 68) and was described as a mental sorting mechanism. After she physically experimented with the machine and failed to connect with the Demon, she realized herself doing the same job as the Demon or John Nefastis’s machine, which only deals with two parties “thermodynamics and informational”, while she was “faced with a metaphor of God knew how many parts … with coincidences blossoming these days wherever she looked.”
(Pynchon 87) In a multi-dimensional correlated system like this, Oedipa tried to “hold [a sound, a word, Trystero] together”, integrating all pieces of knowledge she have to sort out the connections and meanings. To Oedipa or Pynchon, the Demon is for sorting out orders. In Kesey’s Demon Box, the Demon was described more anthropomorphically. With the same sorting job, the Demon becomes a demon-slave who would need food, light and education and more expenses (Kesey 331). The Demon’s job was complemented with “He must deliberate over everything.” (Kesey 332) which makes him hungry and eventually leads to doom for “the nonavailability of energy” (Kesey 323). To Kesey, the Demon is for eating up all the energy.
With different personas of Demon in the two works, the protagonists experience the “two sides of the box” on different levels. Dr. Woofer in Demon Box analogized the thermal box with the “cognitive process of Modern civilization” (Kesey 331) His conversation with Devlin after the therapy workshop concluded that the society is facing a fear of emptiness (Kesey 334), running out of energy because of the consumption of the Demon and irreversibly increasing entropy. The fear of emptiness is related to the search for temporary solutions, such as the use of drugs to achieve a sense of happiness — “high-powered tranquilizers! pain-killers! mood elevators! muscle relaxants! psycho delics!” (Kesey 362). Devlin peeked into these two sides of the box in the scene at Disney land. One side is this father of the poor family who cannot afford another ride for the kids. Despite that we only see him from the back, the body gestures — “sat without comment, not moving, … , gripping the back of the seat” — shows his uneasiness as a working-class dad. Devlin realized the situation of the father and pitied him with the knowledge of the Demon who as well tries hard to “keep a grip” and yet it’s “getting harder all the time”. Devlin had a topdown view in the scene and thought “something was wrong somewhere.” (Kesey 354) There’s the other side of the happy hippos and Disney World. The exhibition of an experiment on drugged hippos presented that the hippos were much “happier” and quelled the attempts to escape. The arguments among the kids on the car and the illusion of Disney as the happiest place in the world prove the appealing concept of happiness to people even though it’s a huge industrial scam, like what they did on the hippos. This, however, is argued as the temporary solution to fight against the entropy or fear of emptiness as condemned by Dr. Woofer at the conference, and Devlin subconsciously realized that he “joined the happy hippos” for his senses are not brought in the present (Kesey 362). We will see trails of his lack of presence later.
Oedipa experienced another two sides of the box. On her journey of searching the story that happened in 1853, she experienced this seizure that she might not be left with only “compiled memories of clues … but never the central truth itself” (Pynchon 76). This “central truth” would “destroy its own message irreversibly” and leave enigmatic piles of information like what Oedipa was gathering. She sensed the boundary of these preexisting two realities of “central truth” and pieces of information that would get her nowhere with the metaphor of a seizure: “she would never know how many time such a seizure may already have visited, to how to grasp it should it visit again.” (Pynchon 76) She is looming out of one space while being aware of the other. In this view, the solution to overcome entropy or the nonsense of information is to seek out truth.
While both characters are aware of the double-sided world and the operation of the Demon to overcome the growing entropy, they bore the knowledge on personal levels with distinct life philosophies. While Oedipa is relatively optimistic, collecting all the information and searching actively for the truth, she was hindered by the blurred edges between “real and dreamed” at the point she saw the post horn sign everywhere in the city. The summit amount of information she perceived challenged her ethics that “each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chance for permanence” (Pynchon 95). Even though she was pushing herself to catch everything as clues that lead to the central truth that is meant to be stable and permanent, her reality was challenged by the thought that it would be easier to submit to the dream-like fragments. Compared to her former under-control life as a housewife with a boring rudderless husband, she started to feel instability and irreversibility of decay in her life, yet she still told herself “she was meant to remember” (Pynchon 95) to stay grounded and collected.
In contrast, Devlin didn’t have any grip on his reality. As a fantasy novelist, he was constantly not present. The comments of the doctor on his fascination and the scene when he visited the hospital, the stares from the patients “gave [him] a very curious feeling”, which he could not decode and felt something was needed from him but don’t know what it is — “maybe it was just information” (Kesey 339)— all lead t0 his indeterministic reality. His method is to numb the feelings and “keep ahead of the thing” (Kesey 364) with the irresponsible reality of too much drinking and drugs.
In the end, the Demon will lose to the second law of thermodynamics. Both Oedipa and Devlin stopped trusting themselves and entered the other realm startled, awakening, and unhinged. For Oedipa, when she realized everything leads to nowhere but swirls back to Pierce Inverarity, she got stuck in a state of paranoia and could no longer tell if every piece of information she tried to track down to the core is a hallucination or truly communicating a message. She has this back-and-forth conversation with herself: “Either you have stumbled … onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network…; maybe even onto a real alternative to the existlessness, … or you are hallucinating it …” (Pynchon 141) This obscurity of what is reality and what is hallucination incites her self-doubt and all her former efforts look like running in an “existless” box — the closed thermodynamic system that everything has doomed fate. She became fractured, existing in multi-dimensional spaces of different correlations between realities, but she didn’t overcome the entropy, she was rushed over by the particles — all the mysteries and stories leading back to Pierce — and that broke down her own integrated reality — the life with “absence of surprise” (Pynchon 141). She was cornered to take the paranoia as the reality and the reality as a hallucination.
Devlin, too, was hit by the Demon’s conviction for breaking the rule of reversing entropy. He, on contrary, was dragged down to the ground and faced the reality that he was a terrible father, son, and friend (Kesey 369). A sense of guilt occupied him in the last scene when he realized he forgot to bring anything from Disney for his son as he promised and he didn’t call his mother: “It only clarified the fearful murk that had been nagging me into something far more haunting: guilt.” (Kesey 369) This nagging feeling corresponds to the previous “curious feeling” (Kesey 339). This conversion from paralysis to despair leads Devlin to explore the reason behind it, then he concluded that the thing that had been chaining him back is “ the bleak and bottomless rock of failure” (Kesey 369) which dated back to the hot tub’s “black water”, relating back to the notion of the second law of thermodynamics — the doomed using up of energy. He now has the epiphany that he has been numbing himself to not become Maxwell’s Demon to face the destined catastrophe of life. His numbness and fascination now became his attestations of the “morbid self-recrimination” for the belief of “I couldn’t do anything about anything.” (Kesey 369) His self-preservation of floating above reality was broken down, and thus he was finally able to be in the present.
In the two contexts, some avoided becoming the Demon and collided with the inevitability of calamity in life, some were pursuing the Demon’s obligation of sorting but were fractured by the multi-level facts. Both had their prior perception of realities challenged, and none escaped this irreversible process of death that dwelled in every single cell of everything. However, we should still appreciate the present and the people around us instead of getting too attached and enchanted to the two-sided closed box, as learned from Devlin’s guilt and Oedipa’s paranoia.