Maxwell's Demon: A Short Polemic on Literary Fabrication
by G. Tiao

The implications for the Second Law of Thermodynamics were apparent almost from the get-go: “The future is disorder,” Valentine, a mathematician in Tom Stoppard’s brilliant and criminally under-taught play, Arcadia, rhapsodizes in a typically sweeping Stoppard-ian monologue. In a quieter moment, over tea in the drawing room of an English country house, Valentine explains in more prosaic terms the Second Law to Hannah, who is an author, a skeptic, and the play’s resident caustic personality:

Arcadia, written more than 200 years after the Law was first formulated into words by Rudolph Clausius and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), brings up the rear in a long line of intellectual wrestlings with the reality of a world of increasing entropy, or chaos, and decay. James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish mathematical physicist, found its implications so philosophically and theologically disturbing that he made it a point in the midst of his distinguished scientific career (Einstein would later proclaim him the greatest physicist since Newton) to attempt to uncover (or, failing that, forge) a refutation of the Second Law. The result, a piece of pseudoscientifica dubbed “Maxwell’s Demon”, eventually led to solid advances in information theory but, curiously enough, relied on an almost fairy-tale-like figure, “a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every [air] molecule in its course” to perform the Law-defying action of reducing entropy in a closed system. Maxwell’s 1867 thought experiment held that this “demon” belonged to a closed system of air molecules separated into two compartments. The compartments were divided by a wall with a trap door at which the demon stood guard. The demon’s task was to sort the air molecules into compartments of higher- and lower-velocity molecules; his unique observational capacity allowed him to open the trap door whenever a molecule of higher-than-average velocity whizzed past. After a certain amount of time, the molecules would be sorted to such an extent that the overall entropy of the entire system was substantially decreased – thus violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

It took over 60 years for scientists to provide convincing refutations of Maxwell’s refutation: Leo Szilard in 1929 would insist that the necessity of acquiring information to perform the task (measuring the speed of the molecules, for example) would also require the expenditure of energy. This expense of energy, Szilard noted, would always be attended by an increase of entropy, resulting in a net increase for the entire system: no violation of the Second Law would occur. In 1960, Rolf Landauer provided a crucial addendum to the informational aspect of this response to Maxwell. Landauer noticed that the “finite capabilities” Maxwell had attributed to the demon meant that the creature had only a limited ability to store information about each molecule that passed through the trapdoor — information necessary to make judgments determining the placement of the molecule. At a certain point, Landaeur conjectured, the demon would simply run out of room to store all the information acquired in the sorting process, and it would be forced to erase previous information in order to make room for the new data. The erasure increased the entropy the system – again, upholding the Second Law.

This idea – that a critical mass of information could hinder its own processing and hasten the breakdown of its own internal coherence – would inform Thomas Pynchon’s landmark postmodern novel, The Crying of Lot 49, a sprawling, encyclopedic romp through the cultural landscape of 1960s America. The novel’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas, embarks on a madcap quest to uncover the coordinating principle behind a series of maddening coincidences, puns, secret messages, allusions, and other literary oddities that point to a conspiracy involving a secret communications organization, Tristero, and a medieval postal service (among other things). The novel’s text hemorrhages clues – signs that fairly scream for signification, for their proper placement in a larger explanatory apparatus, for resolution, a deus ex machina imposition of sense and order. Oedipa, like Maxwell’s Demon, must sort the seemingly infinite masses of information that emerge, and yet

That one’s own personal history could be lost even – or perhaps particularly – to oneself is something that has been forgotten in the recent fracas over James Frey, author of the now-infamous memoir, A Million Little Pieces. (Full disclosure: I have not read the book, for better or worse.) For those unfamiliar with the controversy, Frey was accused in late January of having fabricated substantial – and sensational – details of his personal history. A 13,000-word expose on theSmokingGun.com revealed the author’s exaggerations and embellishments of his “purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw ‘wanted in three states.’” Frey’s choice of title, it seems, was a highly ironic and prophetic one, describing to a T the manner in which his professional credibility was shattered. It, too, unwittingly points to the very truth that might have lessened the intense criticism he received for hijacking the (mostly) nonfiction genre of memoir: that all subjective experience, as embodied in literature, is susceptible to entropy, prone to breakdown into a million little pieces of scattered data, distorted recollections and impressions. For what is a memoir but a hedge against entropic forces, a tacit acknowledgement that one’s personal history is constantly escaping, decomposing, in need of preservation in whatever form it can get?

The problem seems to lie at a deeper level than mere genre, however: Stoppard’s play, which veers across two centuries in increasingly wild structural chaoses, arrives at its last act in such a state of meltdown that characters inhabiting separate centuries simultaneously race in and out of the same English drawing-room. Pynchon’s novel is itself a study of the problem of communication, an articulation of a reflexive human impulse to impose meaning on an open system of signals. Just as Oedipa struggles to make heads or tails of the constellation of clues she unearths, the reader inexorably attempts the same impossible role of interpretation for the novel itself and for the universe at large; Pynchon shines a flashlight into the black box of Maxwell’s thought experiment, and the ghostly face of the demon is our own. But it is poetry, Vicente Huidobro’s modern Spanish-language epic, Altazor, that offers the keenest insight into the literary implications of the Second Law. After six cantos devoted to the freewheeling energetics of flight and fall at the speed of light, the epic erupts into a fireworks show of pure sound. Canto VII’s entropic collapse into the most elementary particles of language, phonemes scattershot on the page, is postmodern literature’s most eloquent yet unarticulated swan song:

But is literary writing singularly prone to this sort of decomposition, as postmodern writers would have it? Scientific writing would seem immune to this sort of biodegradability by virtue of its grounding in objectivity. If subjective experience is the glue that holds literary language together, then surely science, with its unapologetic straightforwardness, its plain-folks “just-the-facts,-ma’am” sensibility, would produce texts of greater stability. And yet experience shows the opposite to be true: many of the scientists I know are religious about keeping laboratory notebooks; and indeed, the best of them are endlessly documenting their work. They write more often and more voluminously, perhaps, than students of literature or the humanities do — and yet, even given enough intervening time, the pages they have filled with a Pynchon-esque proliferation of detail – the exact times and dates of experimental trials, observations, background information, careful measurements, conjectures and hypotheses, mistakes, anomalous conditions, error analyses, makes and models of equipment – enough information to constitute a small compendium of extraneous arcana – do not yield a coherent narrative. In fact, quite the opposite. Some synthesis, some fabrication, some small expenditure of creative energy, is required to impose order on the noise of the data at hand. Sense, particularly as the hallmark of the scientific narrative, does not piece itself together. Telling stories, then, is like buying furniture on the cheap: some assembly is required. Economists refer to it as TANSTAAFL (“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”) – one never gets more out of a system than one puts in.

The term “fabrication” in its everyday use, of course, implies a certain malicious intent. Few would argue that a scientist returning to her notebooks from a decade past and who finds them pockmarked, riddled with hollow spaces where meaning had once resided, was fabricating when she initially set her words down on paper. But what about the scientist who, in attempting to reconstruct her methods and conclusions from those very notebooks, strays from the original truth, the full seminal reality of her thinking? What non-trivial distinction can we make between that scientist and a literary memoirist?

Both must supply the holes created by entropy – age and time and forgetfulness, the inevitable decomposition of our informational archives – from their current stores of knowledge; both wallow in anachronism, invention, and fabrication.

Fabrication is inevitable, built in, a consequence of the world we live in; any reconstruction effort – and we are constantly reconstructing: histories, the events of our day, interpretations of literary texts (yes, even here) – will involve an involuntary deviance from an original truth.

This essay is not meant in any way to fudge around fundamental ethical principles – falseness in advertising (embellishing facts deliberately to sell more books) – is a reprehensible thing to do. (On a purely selfish level, his example, along with those of his journalistic counterparts – Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Janet Cooke, step forward! – has made it more difficult for other writers, other authors (including myself), to do their jobs. No amount of footnoting or source citation can reassure a jaded audience if it’s already decided that an author’s intention is purely superficial – to make money, to show off, to mess with people – or worse, malicious – to deceive, to oppress, to destroy.)

But for those wondering just how difficult, really, is it, to get the facts straight, I want to point (not without a touch of irony) to the facts. Facts, unavoidably, have a material aspect about them. They, too, are mental phenomena, residing partly in the brain – a reality that we inherently acknowledge in the act of writing, of trying to preserve our information, our truth, on paper. As creatures of entropy, even our language fails us. Our childhood game of telephone confirms this: the message goes down the line only to emerge distorted beyond recognition. All this is merely to say that our own efforts to redeem texts – to impose sense on things – are misguided, incoherent, inevitably off. Blaming Frey for the inevitable entropic inaccuracies of memory places all the responsibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics squarely on his shoulders. And this is ridiculous, not to mention hypocritical.

Not that blaming Frey wouldn’t be delightful in its own way: to do so without hypocrisy, in the full self-satisfaction of righteousness, would mean that we existed in a world in which entropy could be tamped down, held in check. It would mean that we existed in a world in which Maxwell’s Demon could hold court at the trapdoor between Box A and Box B, forever granting and denying entrance like a secular St. Peter at heaven’s gate. Stoppard acknowledges this vision in Arcadia as the helplessly naïve, hopelessly romantic dream of the fool. Noakes, a landscape architect whose pet project is to create a free energy machine out of a heat engine, is at best a buffoon, a bleating and bullied individual; his stage directions read “(Baffled) — (Baffled again)”; he is carried along the tide of other people’s actions and wishes, blending into the very backgrounds that he designs for his betters. A tart sixteen-year-old English girl informs him of his folly: “It concerns your heat engine. Improve it as you will, you can never get out of it what you put in. It repays eleven pence in the shilling at most. The penny is for this author’s thoughts.”

This, then, is Stoppard’s redemption for a world hurtling toward Byron’s bleak vision of a bright sun “extinguished, and the stars / Did wander darkling in the eternal space, / Rayless and pathless, and the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.” The act of authoring, the creative salvaging of entropic debris, balances the accounts and makes the living worthwhile: Hannah insists, “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.” All artistic endeavor is the human response to a deep awareness of entropic decay.

But is this a satisfying ending, this literary equivalent of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps? Was Frey happy concocting whoppers out of the dross of his memory and his life? Were his readers bothered at all by the revelation that the book was a fabrication at best, an intentional lie at worst? Pynchon’s response – that a broken narrative can only “partially be recovered in the activities of the dreamer or the paranoid” – places both the author and the reader in an unflattering position. Eerily enough, Stoppard writes in Arcadia that literary genius is “only for lunatics and poets.” If all narrative, all literature, is decomposing or reconstructed fabrication, reading and writing are madness and folly, the ludicrous pastimes of a house of the unhinged.

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