چکیده:
Having its roots in science, „chaos theory‟ provides a new strategy to examine the disordered world of postmodern novels to find the hidden order underlying the apparent chaos. This study tries to clarify the ambiguous relation between Oedipa Maas, the „Tristero system‟ and the „Maxwell‟s Demon‟ in Thomas Pynchon‟s The Crying of Lot 49. Oedipa Maas, the main character of the novel is regarded as an „everyman‟ type character who tries desperately to make sense of the signs and mysteries proliferating around her, but she can never fulfill her quest because she is trapped in a chaotic world where there are no stable values, friends or meanings. She feels separated from the world around her and longs to regain the stability she used to have before she started her task as the „executrix‟ of her former lover‟s vast estate. She does not manage to find „order‟ in the surrounding chaos, but applying the major tenets of chaos theory and examining concepts such as „the butterfly effect‟, „bifurcations‟, „strange attractors‟, „recursive symmetry‟ and „entropy‟ , we can come to a better understanding of the order underlying the disordered world of the novel.
خلاصه ماشینی:
ir Abstract Having its roots in science, „chaos theory‟ provides a new strategy to examine the disordered world of postmodern novels to find the hidden order underlying the apparent chaos.
Key words: chaos theory - the butterfly effect - strange attractors –entropy - recursive symmetry - Maxwell‟s demon - Thomas Pynchon Chaos theory is the study of apparently disordered systems to find an underlying order.
In the late twentieth century, non-linear dynamics and chaos theory provided the writers with a new source of inspiration that can be seen in the works of Tom Stoppard, Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon, who employ concepts of thermodynamics and information theory to “portray societies saturated with technologies that can by turns become liberating or threatening” (Heise 2).
(Hawkins 16) In the Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa is leading a seemingly normal, stable and relatively predictable life until she receives a letter giving her new responsibilities as Inverarity‟s executrix, at which point she becomes subjected to emotional and spiritual flux.
Through the examples of recursive symmetries discussed above, Pynchon has created a collection of plots within a novel that is much like a labyrinth full of disordered paths that apparently end in “nowhere”, but as William Gleason discusses in his article “The Postmodern Labyrinth of The Crying of Lot 49”, the labyrinth may appear chaotic and terrifying to the explorer, but at the same time “ordered and even delightful to the designer” (2).