23 pages • 46 minutes read
Thomas PynchonEntropy
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Static Temperature
Callisto and Aubade keep a close watch on the temperature outside of their apartment, which has remained steady at 37 degrees Fahrenheit for the past few days, even while the weather itself has been erratic: “The day before, it had snowed and the day before that there had been winds of gale force and before that the sun had made the city glitter bright as April, though the calendar read early February” (82). This mixture of stasis and chaos—that is, steady temperatures and unpredictable weather—evokes the concept of entropy that is central to this story, and therefore helps to set the story’s mood. (The story is set in 1957, well before global warming was a widely known phenomenon and unpredictable weather like this was something more than metaphorical.)
In his introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon states that he chose the outside temperature of 37 degrees in this story because it is the same temperature as that of the human body: “Cute, huh?” (13). He is dramatizing a breakdown of boundaries between his characters and their surroundings—the same breakdown that preoccupies Callisto and Aubade, since 37 degrees is also the temperature in their apartment. While this stasis and sameness might seem stable at first, to Callisto it is an ultimate sign of “apocalypse”: “The cosmologists had predicted an eventual heat-death for the universe (something like Limbo: form and motion abolished, heat-energy identical at every point in it)” (85). Less fancily, it is also a sign of death, as Pynchon also notes in his introduction: “When I think about [the concept of entropy] nowadays, it is more and more in connection with time, that human one-way time we’re all stuck with locally here, and which terminates, it is said, in death” (14-15).
Dying Bird
Callisto is attempting to nurse a wounded bird back to life with the heat of his body, while also keeping a watch on the temperature outside of his apartment. Both of these actions seem equally futile and passive, founded in superstition more than in science, even though Callisto is presented as a character of some learning and culture. The suggestion is that his learning and culture only go so far in these circumstances, and that ultimately the refuge that he has concocted with Aubade—careful and cultivated though it is—is no more of a real refuge than is Meatball’s raucous party downstairs.
We never learn why the bird is dying, which seems an intentional omission on Pynchon’s part. Its sickness is inexplicable, and therefore alarming, in an environment as carefully constructed as Callisto’s greenhouse shelter: “Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity in the city’s chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, of national politics, of any civil disorder” (83-84). Try as he might, Callisto cannot sustain this regularity forever, not only because of external circumstances but because—as the bird’s unexplainable frailty suggests—of what is within. The precarious psychological state of Aubade, Callisto’s girlfriend, is also an imminent threat from within, and the following phrase (note especially “small tenuous skull”) suggests an intended parallel between Aubade and the bird: “That precious signal-to-noise ratio, whose delicate balance required every calorie of her strength, seesawed inside the small tenuous skull as she watched Callisto, sheltering the bird” (92). The ultimate suggestion is that the silence and decorum of Callisto’s apartment—especially relative to Meatball’s party downstairs—only make it more difficult for its inhabitants to escape the noise inside their own heads.
Music and Silence
At one point in this story, Callisto broods over the amount of musicians who were wiped out during World War I, resulting in incomplete musical ensembles. He reflects that these incomplete ensembles were nevertheless able to produce powerful music that reflected the devastation of the war:
And the tango. Any tango, but more than any perhaps the sad sick dance in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat […] There was hardly a full complement left in Europe. Yet with violin and tympani Stravinsky had managed to communicate in that tango the same exhaustion, the same airlessness (93).
For Callisto, the tango is a stark and ominous death-dance, its “stately coupled automatons” (93) evoking both the passage of time and the grimness of survival.
In the following paragraph, the Duke di Angeles quartet mimes playing a jazz song downstairs in Meatball’s apartment. While the musical ensemble is complete in this case, no sounds come out of it at all. Duke, the leader of the quartet, explains to Meatball that the song that they have mimed playing is “Love for Sale,” as originally sung by Chet Baker with a band that did not include a piano. Duke explains to Meatball that Baker learned to “thin[k] the roots” that a piano would have provided, and that he is merely taking this idea to—as Meatball puts it—“the next logical extension” (95).
It is this invasion of silence—more than any of the previous chaos and debauchery—that leads Meatball to conclude that his party has gone too far and sets him to restoring order. Silence is as much of an anomaly in his apartment as is noise in Callisto’s upstairs aerie, and it produces a stronger reaction in him than have any of his unruly guests: Hearing Duke’s explanation for his quartet’s entirely silent performance, Meatball experiences “[a] horrified awareness” (95). While there is certainly some irony and exaggeration in this phrase (in keeping with Meatball’s bemused and ironic persona), it is a pale echo of the horror that Callisto registers in his own music upstairs. It suggests that Meatball has inherited some of Callisto’s apocalyptic concerns, whether he realizes it or not.
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