ThermoPoetics by Gold Barri J

Author:Gold, Barri J. [Gold, Barri J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262288279
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

III The Engine and the Demon: Transformations

5 Bleak House: The Novel as Engine

We may regard the Universe in the light of a vast physical machine.

—Balfour Stewart1

In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.

—Homer Simpson (on Lisa’s discovery of a perpetual motion machine)2

Engineering Entropy

If the first law of thermodynamics was born of religious conviction,3 the second was the discovery of frustrated engineers. Joule’s experiments, Kelvin’s articulations, Clausius’s nomenclature—all of these attempt to account for the heat loss driving engineers a little batty since before the time of Sadi Carnot. Engineers struggled to make more efficient engines; heat loss kept getting in the way. One could put fuel in and get work out, but always less than was hoped for or even expected and never reversibly. But not for lack of trying. And the trying, after all, turns out to be very important. Sydney Carton, as we have seen, quite effectively manages to produce more work than was expected. He is Dickens’s tool for producing novelistic order within the constraints of thermodynamics—for manufacturing what some like to call a happy ending. But Carton is not the production of a moment. By the time Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities, he had already done quite a bit of tinkering with producing order in spite of entropy. In Dickens’s Bleak House we find evidence of this tinkering. For while A Tale gestures back toward an earlier time and physical sensibility, mostly critically (as in the case of Monseigneur) but also with some nostalgia (as with Mr. Lorry’s watch), Bleak House was actually published about seven years earlier.4 And in spite of Dickens’s well-known, if qualified optimism, one might reasonably expect Bleak House to be bleak. Nor does the novel disappoint. It does, in fact, manifest a profound sense of entropic decay. Like so many of the decadent texts of the late century (more on these in the next chapter), it seems almost overwhelmed by entropy. How, we may reasonably ask, is this possible? After all, the term entropy was a decade away. But engineers were struggling to make better engines long before the scientific object entropy came into being. And like them, Bleak House struggles with the list of features that will become entropy—the tendency of all systems to decay, the difficulty of maintaining order or producing work.5 But at the moment of its emergence, the new scientific object has ‘‘no other shape than this list’’ of answers to laboratory trials, this list of what it does when you do stuff to it. As Bruno Latour says, ‘‘If you add an item to this list, you redefine the object, that is, you give it a new shape.’’6 Energy is precisely the list of things it can do: the things it turns into, the fact that it is always conserved. Something that could be suddenly created or destroyed by ‘‘man’s agency’’ alone would not be the scientific object we have come to know and love as energy. Similarly, if it decreases spontaneously (without, say, someone putting work into the system), I don’t know what it is, but it’s not entropy.

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