Organisms Organise: An Entropic Reading of Samuel Beckett.

This is an uncondensed draft of a paper that I submitted yesterday as part of my degree. The final paper ended up being about 1500 words shorter. I have made a few other changes here including the addition of illustrative footnotes to the main text, the restructuring of some formatting, and a few proofreading errors that were only rectified in the condensed piece. In the absence of footnotes, I’ve attached the bibliography from my final submission to account for referencing.

Organisms organize. […] We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, […] We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece.

James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.

0.1 The time-honoured clicheé-cum-custom among students in higher education is to go in search of a definition, a kitschy little soundbite, to articulate the single idea that their papers hinge on.

“The OED says…”

“According to the Collins English Dictionary…”

“The Macmillan… the Cambridge…”

“I have conveniently chosen the Webster’s definition because it is ever so slightly closer to what I’m trying to say…”

Try as I might, however, a dictionary definition of entropy solves nothing; certainly nothing abundantly helpful within the parameters of this essay anyway. Entropy, by nature, is slippery; it is perhaps extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of. The most common definition we use today is that entropy is the amount of energy in a system that is unavailable for useful work. This isn’t particularly helpful — especially for those without any knowledge of thermodynamics. We might even say S = Kn lb 𝛺 which is equally helpful for the uninitiated. Besides, the meaning of entropy is found in its implications. Following the first two laws of thermodynamics:

“energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system.”

“the entropy of any isolated system always increases.”

we can see that the entropy of the universe, being an isolated system, is always increasing. In short, this means the universe is rapidly approaching a state of structural decay; just as an ice cube melting is an example of entropy in action, we can understand the universe as ‘melting’ around us at all times. A definition of entropy, even one as simple as ‘the most common definition we use today’, shields us from its meaning. We see implications from the meaning of entropy that are far reaching and apocalyptic — not that a dictionary definition would let us know that.

A melodramatic introduction, perhaps, but illustrative of my belief that a move away from the ‘neatness of identifications’, that is to say dictionary definitions, opens up multiple possibilities for the reapplication of these principles of thermodynamics.

0.2 To what end though do we search for further implications and the following reapplications of entropy? The prescribed goal of this essay is threefold:

1. To articulate an idea of entropic reading methods; reflecting on the work already done by John Harrington and Laura Salisbury.
2. To apply them to them to my own readings of Samuel Beckett, with some closer focus given to Waiting for Godot and Endgame.
3. To build upon their analysis with something of a critique, acknowledging the novel as an open system, but the play as a closed system, to show a different side of the literary-entropy coin.

0.3 Returning to my opening paragraphs though, I feel I can make broad assertions as to entropy’s indefinitiude, and the inevitable generalisations that follow these assertions, because when we discuss entropy in literature, we are not talking about real-world entropy; thermodynamics do not practically apply themselves to ideas or plots. John Harrington, in his article ‘Pynchon, Beckett, and Entropy: Uses of Metaphor’, suggests that “in the case of entropy, […] it is precisely the lack of technical specifics and consequent metaphorical freedom that account for the special allure of the metaphor.” In his paper, he reads the use of entropy as a metaphor within the work of the two authors — but, in the process of reading the metaphor, Harrington quietly embraces an entropic dialectic. And this dialectic seems to have validity; after all, when we deal without a specific technical or scientific definition, we are only dealing with ideas of entropy; a philosophy of entropy as it were.

For Harrington and Salisbury, this philosophy involves:

• The text/reader as an open system:

“As systems that are more like organisms than machines, both literary texts and the readers who encounter them are capable of maintaining their self-organisation and increasing their complexity through their connections with other systems and their work.”

• Signs and actions as molecules:

“Language functions here as a rough equivalent of the molecules that the demon theorised by James Clerk Maxwell attempts to sort”.

• A dialectic that analyses structure, dynamism, language, and the reader’s relation to their changes — or lack thereof:

“there is a way in which Beckett’s persistent examination of the relationship between artwork and the production and transmission of meaning that compels and disturbs the artist can be seen to interact with the legacy of thermodynamics in information theory that offers some insights for how literary texts and those who read them might perceive of themselves as becoming, at least contingently and temporarily, meaningful.”

0.4 I would like to make it abundantly clear: I do not feel that extended metaphor is a valid way to read literature, I do not wish to construct a convenient narrative of correspondence between text and theory. Neither do I want to allegorise for the sake of novel allegory. I do not feel, however, that this is the case here: by articulating an entropic dialectic, we borrow the language, ideas, and an understanding of thermodynamics to analyse the dynamism of a text. Whilst Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon are two authors whose thematics lend themselves to this reading, these ideas should be applicable to all texts. We should be able to read a text’s entropy/‘thermodynamics’, regardless of its thematics — a goal, I hope, that takes us out of the realms of pure allegory.

1.1 So, as I said: I do not feel that I am undertaking any work here that the Harrington and Salisbury are not.

“Beckett renders visible the work required for meaningful orders to be forged.”

Laura Salisbury’s work unites both entropy and noise theory in such a way as to focus on the explicit work that Beckett generates for his readers. The author highlights Beckett’s work as a realtime confrontation with entropy for the consumer: where we normally go about our routine, unaware of our constant battle with entropy, ‘building sandcastles’ and ‘rearranging chess pieces’, the experience of reading Beckett, is to be confronted with entropic decline and to go to work — sorting language, sorting noise, creating new structure where the original declines. Further to this though, Salisbury’s decision to unite Beckett with noise theory produces some interesting conclusions about the nature of the poet’s writing:

“The entropic disorganisation of a message in one system can also open up meaning in another; […] adding new and unpredictable signal to a message and thus increasing the amount of information transmitted.”

“We have no sure way of distinguishing between message and noise, since the notion of noise contained in the text requires the postulation of a message existing prior to its being conveyed in language, and it is impossible in general to guarantee the existence of such as a message”.

As Salisbury goes on to acknowledge though, in order for these observations to be true, the text and the reader must both be open systems. Now I differ with Salisbury in as much as that I do not feel all texts can be seen as open, but that will be addressed later on. What Salisbury identifies here is that “for a reader who is an open system encountering a similarly open literary text, then, the ‘noisy’ elements of excessive redundancy, overabundant repetition, and the seemingly aleatory become meaningful because s/he is able to “consider the elements hitherto unencountered as part of a new level of signifying structure”. This is an important observation as we begin to unpack a theory of literary entropy; texts and readers are, most often, open systems acting in interplay with each other: there is an exchange between two separate systems, a transfer of energy as it were. Because the system is open, we can undertake work, fight off entropy, and create meaning and structure. Open the system and we create the literature-as-consumed; close the system and anarchy reigns.

In his concluding juxtaposition of Beckett and Pynchon’s uses of the entropic metaphor, Harrington also seems to acknowledge the existence of Beckett’s writing as an open system:

Reading Pynchon’s fiction requires special kinds of knowledge that Beckett’s work does not. […] To read Pynchon’s work competently one must assume a position “inside” the metaphor, “safe,” privileged, one of the elect. Beckett’s work, on the other hand, while presenting its own formidable difficulties, requires no hierarchical complicity based on familiarity with sophisticated lore.

Placed in opposition to a method of reading where one must operate “inside” the text, we are led by Harrington to see Beckett’s work as more open and accessible; not so contingent on specialist signs. Now of course, in physics, there is not so much room for ‘almosts’ — systems are open, closed, or isolated; it is not so conducive to discuss some systems being more open than others, but as Harrington notes: “science and technology are, of course, primarily used as sources of metaphor and their technical specifics are not really crucial”. Returning to our original Salisbury quote, though: “Beckett renders visible the work required for meaningful orders to be forged.” It seems that a more open literary system from Beckett creates more work. When the exchange of information is not fixed by definitions and specialist knowledge, the lines of semiotic enquiry can become less clear (it is far easier to resolve definitions, simply put: a=a). Yet at the same time, less specialist knowledge means that more information is readily able to be consumed; consequently, more work is able to be undertaken. As well necessitating far more work, Beckett’s supposed relative accessibility leads to more subjective semiotic resolutions, doubling down on the work that a reader must undertake (a=b is a much harder conclusion to come to than a=a). This is not an insight unique to entropic views of literature, but an important one nonetheless; and by illustrating reader-responses as systems with work and exchange we can reaffirm the necessary ‘decoding’ processes that a reader or audience must always undertake.

1.2 So once we begin to view the text and the reader as a system, we necessarily begin to view language as the molecules within this system. Supporting this reading, Harrington notes that language functions as some kind of structural currency:

Here, too, the decay of order is most manifest in the decay of language, and that is hastened by the jargon of the “microcosmopolitans” until, like the demon and true to thermodynamics, their attempts to maintain linguistic order become counterproductive: “each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next.”

Following a discussion of the necessary work undertaken by the reader, the entropic dialectic as articulated by Salisbury, begins to make note of the active process of semiotic consumption. The reader undertakes work to give signs meaning and order; the interpretant is an active process — for without anyone to read a word or hear a sound it cannot be communicative, it is simply noisy, unorderly. [F] A sign is something that means something to someone.[F] Like building the sandcastle we create structure and meaning as we interpret the signifier and spit out the signified.

[FOOTNOTE] Here I am directly referencing Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic theory of signs. A model I prefer to Ferdinand de Saussure’s. Given its proper inclusion of the interpretant it allows us to sidestep much of the problems as laid out by Poststructuralist theory. Unfortunately this will not be an observation explored in this essay, merely an explanation as to its selection.

[FOOTNOTE] Charles Sanders Peirce, “I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the later is thereby mediately determined by the former.”

What I feel Harrington ignores though when acknowledging language as a structural currency is that a reader or audience is subject to the same language as the characters within the text. For the microcosmopolitans, language begins to lose shape, cogency, coherency, and structure as their world begins to disintegrate — or rather ossify, as Murphy begins to slow and lose motion. For Harrington, “the conclusion of Murphy does suggest the inexorable prevalence of the entropic process” within the novel, but outside of the novel — if we are indeed to view it as an open system, how does the entropic decline of language affect the reader? Harrington is correct when he identifies that “as entropy increases, order as determined by available energy decreases, and so use of the metaphor in fiction lends itself to a narrative in which a central character attempts to resist encroaching entropy by ordering and structuring experience” — but not just the central characters, consumers as well. The reader needs a text to read, and in the face of the entropic decline of the text, they must go about constructing their own from the structural materials of disordered language. Indeed, this is the same conclusion that Salisbury comes to with her introduction and discussion of noise theory — as discussed in 1.1. I don’t believe however, that noise theory is critical to understanding this restructuring process, rather, the understanding of the text as an entropically-fallible system reveals all of the structural baggage that language takes on as the molecular constituent of the system.

Harrington goes on to suggest that this entropic metaphor is not always manifested in the language of the text, explaining that another point of divergence between Beckett and Pynchon’s entropic metaphors can be seen in the scale of confrontations that the characters must encounter: “throughout Beckett’s trilogy of novels, indications of encroaching entropy are much more personal and immediate than they are in Pynchon’s work, although, true to thermodynamics, all attempts to order these radically simpler materials and to solve these problems of comparatively very manageable proportions remain equally unsuccessful”. You might suggest then, that in those works where language itself does not seem ruptured by entropic decline — any discussion of readerly work is invalidated. But I don’t believe this to be true — Harrington’s article once again suffers from the omission of the reader here, but I would argue that the example he gives for a discussion of the perplexing mundane in Beckett’s novel is a great example to illustrate my point as well.

Molloy’s struggle to arrange sixteen “sucking stone’s” in his four pockets in a particular order and a fine balance is a humorous case in point: “It is true that a kind of equilibrium was reached, at a given moment, in the early stages of each cycle, namely after the third suck and before the fourth, but it did not last long, and the rest of the time I felt the weight of the stones dragging me now to one side, now to the other.”

Scenes such as this are often problematic for the reader: the signs are recognisable, as are the actions; the language is not overly dense, and we can construe a clear image of what is going on. But, there isn’t much sense to what is going on; the image is nonsensical. Made up of signs, the scene must be treated as a sign in of itself — as an assemblage of signs, but surely in an arrangement such as this where the sign-assemblage struggles to ‘mean something to someone’ linguistic order has been lost. So — it is up to the reader then to construct the meaning, to subsume, and reconstitute it — exactly like when dealing with individual units of language. The work done by the reader, is once again rendered visible by the unification of entropy with literary theory.

1.3 We see then that our emerging entropic dialectic, as construed from Salisbury and Harrington, is certainly a reader-response theory. It is one of textual consumption. I will demonstrate here, before challenging some of their semantics, that it is, to some degree anyway, an applicable and useful theory. What I articulate in this paper, is hardly all-encompassing, and hardly original; I know my limitations. What it is though, I believe, is a framework for something interesting and useful. A sketch, perhaps, of literary entropy.

1.4 Before progressing to any kind of critique, or adding a degree of problematic nuance to the debate, I would first simply like to undertake a brief close-reading of part of one of my primary texts as a means of exploring the ideas of entropy as we have already laid out.

So, we will start by looking at one of a Beckett-audience’s most real confrontations with entropy: “Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua […]” and so forth. Lucky’s speech, an impenetrable 682 sign monologue, indicates the point in Waiting for Godot where Samuel Beckett increases the entropy of his play to the highest level. And the work that must be undertaken by the reader to create meaningful structure is extraordinary.

1. “Quaquaquaqua”, “Essy-in-Possy”, “Anthropopopometry”. Empty nonsensical signifiers or bastardised classical languages?

2. “the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara”, “tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating [and so forth]”, “it is established […] it is established” […] “it is established”. Important listing or dense noise creation?

3. “Testew and Cunard”, “Fartov and Belcher” , “Puncher and Wattman”, “Steinweg and Peterman”. Important names or empty signifiers?

Furthermore the complete absence of punctuation leads to a syntactic desert, unifying both a collapse in structure as well as meaning. Lucky’s speech is in such a state of entropic decline that the entire frequency is noise. Despite all the necessary constituent elements, Lucky’s speech cannot be considered language; surely best understood as being in a state of high entropy, what we see is disordered structural elements of meaning. Of course, “noise is only random and chaotic in relation to one particular message that it muddles”, we have no right to characterise Lucky’s monologue as noise, “since the notion of noise contained in the text requires the postulation of a message existing prior to its being conveyed in language, and it is impossible in general to guarantee the existence of such as a message.” But we can surely identify the monologue in more relative terms; it is certainly ‘noisy’, certainly ‘noisier’ than the rest of the text.

Rearranging these structural elements to find meaning in Lucky’s speech is certainly possible for an organism capable of organising however. For a reader, this requires an exorbitant amount of work to solve, but meaning can indeed be found with research and methodical reading: Lucky’s Speech in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”: A Punctuated Sense-Line Arrangement, and Ordnung und Chaos in Lucky’s ‘Think’, and Lucky’s ‘Think’ and the Image of Mind do so artfully.

Indeed, through employing the entropic dialectic that we construe through Harrington and Salisbury’s work, we reach a useful understanding of the relation between signs, sign-assemblages, and the readers that consume them. To read is to create order from chaos — this is more true for a reader of Waiting for Godot, than many others.

2.1 However, a play must not be exclusively analysed as prose — it is performed for an audience of course. So, and this applies to Lucky’s ‘speak’, what is a dense mosaic for the reader, fast becomes an onslaught of disordered signs for the viewer (more accurately, listener), much like in Murphy where “each word [was] obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next”. Unable to resolve the bewildering list of signs, coming thick and fast without any apparent structure or meaning, the viewing party is almost beaten into semiotic submission by Lucky. Entropy runs wild both on stage and in the crowd as both character and audience grasp for ordered structure. According to Peirce, the “sign determines an interpretant”, this may seem like a rather trite observation, but it is an important one nonetheless. It is Beckett’s use of language which problematises the consumption of his play; the entropic chaos of Lucky’s monologue is obviously a stylistic choice, and it must not be ignored. If we are to follow Harrington briefly and read entropic themes into the fabric of the play, the pain that Pozzo feels when Lucky ‘thinks’ stems from his confrontation with entropic decline; unable to ‘sort the mail’, Pozzo bears witness then to real end of the universe: complete and all-encompassing entropic disorder. If Beckett has made it so for Pozzo, perhaps the rest of Lucky’s audience feels the same. There is no time to work through the more problematic signs, instead, the monologue must be taken as a single multiplicitous sound-image — and, in the absence of a clear object, meaning is found in the interpretant, in work. Here, in my mind at least, it is the troubling or frustrating feeling generated by a futile effort against entropic unstructure that generates meaning for the audience.

2.2 It is not so much a critique but rather an observation that neither Salisbury nor Harrington acknowledge Beckett’s theatre. They do not seek to apply entropy and noise theory to the stage; strange, it seems when the stage is rife for entropic examination (something I hope to demonstrate). Perhaps they omit the stage because it muddles the theory a little: it seems that for a viewer of a play, they are within the system rather than without it. Unlike when reading, they are not physically outside the text viewing one unchanging structure, rather they are subject to the text as becoming. They are subject to a constant construction and deconstruction of structure, as they work to resolve now-transient signs one after another. There is no real chance for close reading in theatre. Especially in the case of Beckett, the audience are sat within the system watching entropic chaos ensue.

2.3 I have found only one author who directly acknowledges the confrontation of Beckett’s audience with scenes of entropy: Liliana Sikorska, in her 1994 essay, ‘The language of entropy: A pragma-dramatic analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame’. Within the paper, she makes two critical observations regarding the play: that the dialogue’s “dramatic value is highly questionable”, and that the characters constantly interrupt each other, hampering any attempt at “an idea of magnitude”. What Sikorska identifies then, is the rupturing of linguistic structure within the play; a ‘language of entropy’.

Fundamentally, this creates a problem for the audience; drained of dramatic value, “particular conversations do not constitute action, and so they do not make up the story”. In the absence of effective narration then, Endgame can almost be seen as an extended version of Lucky’s ‘speak’. And the audience can only be expected to react similarly: resolving certain exchanges instead as a sign-assemblages, as multiplicitous sound-images. You would suggest then, that the work undertaken by an audience of the absurd is far less than that of a reader; I believe this to be a valid conclusion.

For an audience of Beckett’s Endgame, semiotic work is not undertaken necessarily in the restructuring of signs, rather it seems to be a sorting process. Dialogic exchanges are distinguished by changes in tonality, or deliberate almost caesuric pauses, rather than logical conclusions — isolated clusters of unstructure which must be separated from each other by an audience listening for paralinguistic cues.

HAMM: I had a great fondness for him.

(Pause. He puts on his toque again.)

He was a painter — and engraver.

CLOV: There are so many terrible things.

HAMM: No, no, there are not so many now.

(Pause.)

Clov!

CLOV: Yes.

HAMM: Do you not think this has gone on long enough?

CLOV: Yes!

(Pause.)

What?

HAMM: This… this… thing.

CLOV: I’ve always thought so.

(Pause.)

You not?

HAMM: (gloomily)Then it’s a day like any other day.

CLOV: As long as it lasts.

(Pause.)

All life long the same inanities.

HAMM: I can’t leave you.

Indeed, giving textual examples for conclusions based on performance are difficult. I must assume that my reader has a good imagination. For a viewer, what we see here is not two characters communicating effectively, rather it is two characters exchanging non-sequitur and gleaning semi-logical answers. This is fairly typical of the exchanges that take place in Endgame, and for the audience this conjures all the Beckettian buzzwords: ‘stasis’, ‘isolation’, ‘bewilderment’, ‘claustrophobia’. But how? It seems that unable to methodically work through jumbled signs, as a reader would, the viewer has no choice but to ascribe the dialogue an approximate meaning; perhaps a feeling or a mood. Once again, meaning for the viewer comes from the problematisation of the interpretant. The molecules of language are arranged in disarray, and this can only conjure up uncomfortable reactions from an audience unable to create structure in the face of linguistic entropy.

2.4 We should, of course, note once again that this is a stylistic choice from Beckett. His decision to remove structure and use-value from language and to create instead a language of entropy — see our early definition (energy in a system that is unavailable for useful work) — is certainly undertaken for dramatic effect. The entropic dialectic that we have figured in this essay is not necessarily useful for understanding why Beckett creates these tonalities and moods, but it is certainly useful for understanding how.

To return to Sikorska’s paper:

“The comic and the tragic impact is anchored in the situational context, which directs the [viewer’s] interpretation while the characters remain puzzled and partly unaware of what is happening. The crisis is recognised on the basis of the fact that language is no longer in opposition to the world, but to itself. Beckett discards corrupted language trying to recover [the] primary, almost bare idea in which entropy is so eminent.”

When language becomes entropic unstructure, it is indeed in opposition to itself; it makes meaning, the goal of language, become murkier and harder to construct. What I take Sikorska to mean by a ‘primary, almost bare idea’ is similar to Walter Benjamin’s idea of prehistory and oblivion. That is to say, an idea with the kind of meaning generated by absence of meaning; that is, the same kind of meaning as generated by the problematisation of the interpretant.

[FOOTNOTE] This is why I use Peirce’s triad. The inclusion of the interpretant allows us to describe this kind of meaning without resorting to paradox or allegories of meaninglessness. “Meaning generated by absence of meaning”.

2.5 ‘A Language of Entropy’ then, a tool of Beckettian theatre, is one that revels in this problematisation. If we look at Pozzo and Lucky’s departure in Waiting for Godot, we once again see this language being constructed and deployed to great effect.

VLADIMIR: Silence!

All listen, bent double.

ESTRAGON: I hear something.

POZZO: Where?

VLADIMIR: It’s the heart.

POZZO: (disappointed). Damnation!

VLADIMIR: Silence!

ESTRAGON: Perhaps it has stopped.

They straighten up.

POZZO: Which of you smells so bad?

ESTRAGON: He has stinking breath and I have stinking feet.

POZZO: I must go.

Whilst the nature of the scene — ‘departure’ — may be indicative of a world less bound-up in entropy than in Endgame (an event is actually happening). Entropic language still controls the stage. Pozzo’s “damnation” is ambiguous, and therefore hard to quickly resolve, with multiple possible referents; Vladimir’s imperative interjections both arrest the audience’s attention and fracture the possible flow of information; and Pozzo’s questions, whilst logically answered, provide no comfort to an audience struggling to find meaning in the play that they are fast approaching the end of. It seems that even within a functioning syntactic structure, the language of entropy is no easier for an audience to effectively resolve.

It gets worse though with the scene progressing into its own microcosm of entropic decline.

ESTRAGON: Then adieu.

POZZO: Adieu.

VLADIMIR: Adieu.

POZZO: Adieu.

Silence. No one moves.

VLADIMIR: Adieu.

POZZO: Adieu.

ESTRAGON: Adieu.

Silence.

POZZO: And thank you.

VLADIMIR: Thank you.

POZZO: Not at all.

ESTRAGON: Yes yes.

POZZO: No no.

VLADIMIR: Yes yes.

ESTRAGON: No no.

Silence.

For me, this is the most entropic language that this paper has encountered yet. Meaningless and protracted, the language is in opposition to itself: it bares the resemblance of a commonplace farewell, but (at least immediately) results in none of the assumed action — that is, the enactment and resolution of the signs. Furthermore, in such commonplace exchanges, semiotic consumption is either absent or so habitual and fast paced that it does not register — to prolong it, is simply to say nothing and to create noise, to quote Salisbury: “in Beckett’s language, restatement seems to add to the text in a way that produces and introduces opacity rather than clarifying the signal that it repeats.” This is not a farewell, it is an encounter with the void. Ultimately, and I have laboured this point enough, it seems that in Beckett’s theatre, signs become nothing but unstructured molecules rattling around in an empty chamber.

Well, shall we go? Yes, let’s go.

I hope that I have not fallen guilty of allegory in this essay, or if I have, I hope that it has been to some useful purpose. The goals of this essay were, let me remind you:

1. To articulate an idea of entropic reading methods; reflecting on the work already done by John Harrington and Laura Salisbury.
2. To apply them to them to my own readings of Samuel Beckett, with some closer focus given to Waiting for Godot and Endgame.
3. To build upon their analysis with something of a critique, acknowledging the novel as an open system, but the play as a closed system, to show a different side of the literary-entropy coin.

And I believe that I have satisfied these goals. The bold proves it. Whether these were worthwhile goals or not is perhaps a different question, I believe that they were. When we choose to read the process of textual consumption as one of construction and reconstruction, then I believe, we can come to some interesting and hopefully somewhat original insights into the consumption of Samuel Beckett’s work, and perhaps others’ too. An entropic dialectic, it seems, is an especially useful tool for the investigation of work post structuralism, for those works that seek to subvert language and plunge it into the realms of unstructure. I hope that I have demonstrated its utility as a readerly theory for both the postmodern, and the experimental text, whether performed or read. “Organisms organise”, is this not true for language as well?

Bibliography

Focus Texts

Atkin, Albert, “Peirce’s Theory of Signs”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/peirce-semiotics/ (accessed 17/12/20–7/1/20)

Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot, (Faber and Faber, 2010)

Harrington, John, ‘Pynchon, Beckett, and Entropy: Uses of Metaphor’, in The Missouri Review, Vol5, 3, Summer 1982. (University of Missouri, 1983)

Salisbury, Laura, ‘ART OF NOISE: Beckett’s Language in a Culture of Information’ in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui , Vol. 22, Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies, (Brill, 2010)

Sikorska, Liliana, ’The language of entropy: A pragma-dramatic analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame’, in Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 28, (Adam Mickiewicz University, 1994)

Supporting Texts

[author unknown], ‘The Three Laws of Thermodynamics’, in ‘Introduction to Chemistry’, Lumen.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/introchem/chapter/the-three-laws-of-thermodynamics/ accessed November 28, 2020

Beckett, Samuel, ‘Dante […] Bruno, Vico […] Joyce’ (1929), qtd. in Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Goldman, Jane & Taxidou, Olga (eds.), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. (University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Beckett, Samuel, Endgame, (Faber and Faber, 2009)

Beckett, Samuel, Molloy (1951), qtd. in John P. Harrington

Evershed, Sydney in The Electrician, (9th Jan, 1903)

Gleick, James, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. {MORE{

Gordon W. F. Drake, ‘Entropy’ in Encyclopaedia Brittanica, (Encyclopaedia Brittanica, June 07, 2018)

https://www.britannica.com/science/entropy-physics accessed November 28, 2020

Osborne, Peter, and Matthew, Charles, Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), ‘Walter Benjamin’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/benjamin/ (accessed, 4/1/21)

Paulson, William R, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) p. 88, qtd. in Salisbury

Peirce, Charles Sanders qtd. in ‘the Peirce Edition Project’ (eds.), The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, (Indiana University Press, 1998)

Other

Breuer, Horst, ‘Ordnung und Chaos in Lucky’s ‘Think’, in Dreysse, Ursula, (ed.) Materialen zu Samuel Becketts Warten Auf Godot (Suhrkamp, 1973)

Furlani, Andre, “Lucky’s “Think” and the Image of Mind.” In Beckett after Wittgenstein, (Northwestern University Press, 2015)