Entropy

The “entropy” of this story’s title is a difficult, slippery concept to understand. It is a term from thermodynamics—the study of the conversion of heat into energy—and refers to the parts of a system that do not work for this conversion. The term can also be used metaphorically, referring to a state of simultaneous chaos and stasis. In his introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon admits that he himself still does not fully grasp the concept of entropy:

Because the story has been anthologized a couple-three times, people think I know more about the subject of entropy than I really do […] But the qualities and quantities will not come together to form a unified notion in my head (12-14).

The characters in Pynchon’s story likewise struggle to comprehend the concept, while also in different ways embodying it. The two main settings in the story, Meatball Mulligan’s apartment party and Callisto’s greenhouse sanctuary, represent two different sides of the entropy equation. Mulligan’s party is chaotic and becomes more so as the story continues. Strangers and desperate friends crash his party, and his apartment is laid to waste, all of which causes Mulligan, an affable-seeming hipster, no more than mild concern. Callisto’s apartment, conversely, is designed to be a harmonious retreat from the chaos that Mulligan’s party represents. It is its own ecosystem, complete with birds and greenery, which Callisto and Aubade, his girlfriend, feel no need ever to leave. Even so, the couple is unable to shut out the world completely, as is manifested by the distant crashing sounds that they can hear from the party downstairs. That they have retreated so thoroughly from the outside world only ultimately makes this world loom larger for them, as a threat and a preoccupation. Callisto spends his days dictating his memoirs—which concern the subject of entropy and his dawning awareness of its larger implications for society—to Aubade, while Aubade herself obsessively checks the temperature outside the apartment.

The outside temperature—which has remained static for the past three days at 37 degrees Fahrenheit—is one of the story’s few hints at a larger outside setting. While we know that the story takes place in an “American expatriate” (82) community in Washington, DC, we are given few concrete details about this community, and we have no idea how Callisto or Mulligan fit into it. We do not know what jobs they might have—or might once have had, as seems more likely—or how they ended up in Washington, DC, in the first place. Such vagueness gives a sense of their two apartments floating in space, linked only by their common isolation and disorder. One way in which this linkage is given metaphorical form is in the motif of music. At one point in the story, Callisto—remembering Europe during World War I—recalls how many musicians were wiped out during the war, resulting in incomplete quartets and orchestras:

And how many musicians were left after Passchendaele, after the Marne? It came down in this case [a Stravinsky tango] to seven […] Almost as if any tiny troupe of saltimbanques [charlatans] had set about conveying the same information as a full-pit orchestra (93).

Callisto’s musings take parodic real-life form, downstairs in Mulligan’s apartment, by the Duke di Angelis jazz quartet. This quartet (whose one record is aptly titled Songs of Outer Space) mimes playing an entire song, feigning everything from vocals to instrumentation. Duke, the leader of the quartet, explains to Mulligan that jazz musicians such as Chet Baker used to “think” the “root chords” of a song when no such chords were provided by instrumentation, and that he is merely taking this idea to “the next logical extension” (95). 

Callisto, a cultured European expatriate, is a more conscious and articulate character than Mulligan. He is aware of the entropy that Mulligan—and the guests at his party—are helplessly acting out. Yet Callisto’s greenhouse sanctuary is shattered by a sudden act of self-mutilating violence, when his girlfriend Aubade breaks through the windows with her hands. Conversely, Mulligan—having entertained and rejected the idea of shutting himself up in his closet—decides to restore his out-of-control party to some semblance of peace: “This is what he did until nightfall, when most of the revellers had passed out and the party trembled on the threshold of its third day” (97). While the end of Callisto’s story initially seems the more disturbing one, it at least represents a climax or a confrontation of some sort, and therefore implies the possibility of change and action. This is not the case with Mulligan’s ending, which is not really an ending at all. It is implied that Mulligan has not so much eradicated the chaos of his party as momentarily muted it, and that his party will therefore hold steady—like the 37 degree temperature outside—for an indefinite number of days.