John Nefastis’s mysterious, useless, hermetically sealed communication box is a metaphor for the feelings of alienation and entrapment that Pynchon believes are inherent to modern American society. In particular, Oedipa’s failure to communicate with the box symbolizes her inability to fight that society’s entropy, or gradual tendency toward social conformity and decline. The root cause of this decline is the same as the reason that Nefastis built his machine: a misplaced faith in the inherent power of rationality ends up perverting science and technology, ultimately directing these fields toward unnecessary goals.
According to Nefastis’s theory, the Maxwell’s demon separates the air inside his box into hot and cold, then communicates with the “sensitive” person nearby. Nefastis assumes that the box is a closed system which nothing can enter or exit. (Of course, if the “sensitive” really can communicate with it, then this assumption is false.) This is much like the novel’s own self-referential closed system, in which everything ultimately refers back to Tristero, San Narciso, and Pierce Inverarity. The hot air that spreads out inside the box is like the smog that spreads out over the Los Angeles of the novel: a cultural drift toward uniformity that’s caused by material consumption. Oedipa is distraught to see everyone increasingly becoming the same: consuming mass-produced consumer goods, watching mass media, living in suburban homes, having cookie-cutter jobs and families. She wants none of it, but she cannot find an alternative, just as she cannot break open the system of the Nefastis box by communicating with the demon inside. In fact, this demon is a thought experiment and does not exist. Nefastis’s misplaced, religious faith in it shows that he forgets that science is a tool to serve other human needs, not a need in itself. The same goes for America’s misplaced faith in production, which leads to the decadence that Oedipa wants to escape.
The Nefastis Machine Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49
“Patents,” Oedipa said. Koteks explained how every engineer, in signing the Yoyodyne contract, also signed away the patent rights to any inventions he might come up with.
“This stifles your really creative engineer,” Koteks said, adding bitterly, “wherever he may be.”
“I didn't think people invented any more,” said Oedipa, sensing this would goad him. “I mean, who's there been, really, since Thomas Edison? Isn't it all teamwork now?” Bloody Chiclitz, in his welcoming speech this morning, had stressed teamwork.
“Teamwork,” Koteks snarled, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.”
“Goodness,” said Oedipa, “are you allowed to talk like that?
“Communication is the key,” cried Nefastis. “The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in that box. The demon collects data on each and every one. At some deep psychic level he must get through. The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information. To keep it all cycling. On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving. One little movement, against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over and over with each power stroke.”
“Help,” said Oedipa, “you’re not reaching me.”
“Entropy is a figure of speech, then,” sighed Nefastis, “a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.”
“But what,” she felt like some kind of a heretic, “if the Demon exists only because the two equations look alike? Because of the metaphor?”
Nefastis smiled; impenetrable, calm, a believer. “He existed for Clerk Maxwell long before the days of the metaphor.”
Looking down at San Francisco a few minutes later from the high point of the bridge’s arc, she saw smog. Haze, she corrected herself, is what it is, haze. How can they have smog in San Francisco? Smog, according to the folklore, did not begin till farther south. It had to be the angle of the sun.
Amid the exhaust, sweat, glare and ill-humor of a summer evening on an American freeway, Oedipa Maas pondered her Trystero problem. All the silence of San Narciso—the calm surface of the motel pool, the contemplative contours of residential streets like rakings in the sand of a Japanese garden—had not allowed her to think as leisurely as this freeway madness.
For John Nefastis (to take a recent example) two kinds of entropy, thermodynamic and informational, happened, say by coincidence, to look alike, when you wrote them down as equations. Yet he had made his mere coincidence respectable, with the help of Maxwell’s Demon.
Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of God knew how many parts; more than two, anyway. With coincidences blossoming these days wherever she looked, she had nothing but a sound, a word, Trystero, to hold them together.
She remembered John Nefastis, talking about his Machine, and massive destructions of information. So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking’s funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned. She stared at it in wonder. It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of.