It is appropriate to discuss the memory of the past in an age that advances towards an unknown future and whose memories are increasingly relegated to the realm of the nostalgic or , worse yet, obsolete. Thomas Pynchon and William Faulkner, in extremely contrasting ways, explore the means by which we, as individuals and communities, remember, recycle, and renew the past. Retrospection is inevitable in their works, as the past is unavoidable and defines, if not dominates, the present. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Pynchon maintains an optimistic, Ovidian view of the past: we recycle our cultural memories into another, perhaps better, form. The resulting mess of culture, filled as much by the glut of contemporary television channels as by 17th-century revenge dramas, is organized by some supervising principle. Just as the postal system sorts geography into specific zip codes and zones, Maxwell's Demon in The Crying of Lot 49 "connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow" (106); applies a scientific and controlled objective to the extended aesthetic subjective. But Pynchon's culture is not haunted, except for the ghosts of Hamlet and Scooby-Doo. Faulkner's landscape is tortured by the tragedy of the South. In his view, the land is cursed because of two presumptions of the white man: that he can own other men and that he can own the land. Focusing on the microcosm of the Compson family's fall, Faulkner details the extent to which various family members are burdened by past losses and how they deal with their searing memories. In what he canonized The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner recreates the temporal confusion of the Compsons even in the narrative, through a non-sequential chronology and through sentences that combine past, present and future. Despite the professional differences between the two authors, they share a surprising wealth of concerns, particularly in the ordering of chaos. Pynchon's order, however, remains fruitful with universality and coherence, while Faulkner argues that there is no real possible way of ordering memory, that every event is singular (indeed, he wanted the different times of the novel to be printed in the corresponding colors ), and that loss permeates the present despite attempts to reevaluate or separate the past. The first sentence of The Crying of Lot 49 introduces "Mrs Oedipa Maas" (9). Her name immediately and forcefully evokes to the reader all the cultural baggage linked to the name Oedipa. This is, of course, the Latin feminine of Oedipus, the tragic Greek hero destined to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Yet the female version of Oedipus is not Oedipa, but Electra. The obvious Freudian associations challenge the reader to a (most likely useless) psychoanalytic reading. His name is not so much about psychological complexes as it is about language and how language can work for the character. Oedipa also contains "pa" in the name, but is directly followed by "Ma" in Maas. Furthermore, the initials of "Mrs Oedipa Mass" indicate "MOM". Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the nickname her husband gave her is "Oed," or Oxford English Dictionary abbreviations. This is Oedipa, a dictionary of various etymologies whose roots we discover. Postmodernism often eliminates traditional characterization at the expense of names, because of all that the name can offer us through its etymological past. There is nothing sinister about this recycling; it is simply a mode of cultural awareness, a way of recycling the chaotic past into some kind of organized present. The names in Faulknerthey carry with them the literal and figurative pronunciation of their ancestors. Consider the following exchange in Benjy's memoir: Your name is Benjy, Caddy said. Doyou heard. Benjy. Benjy. Don't tell him, Mom said. Bring it here. Caddy lifted me under my arms. Get up, Mau... I mean Benjy, he said. (39)Benjy was called Maury, after his uncle but, as Faulkner tells us in the index, "when his mother finally realized what he was and tearfully insisted that his name be changed, he was renamed Benjamin" ( 213). Rebaptizing is a euphemistic term for what many Compsons strive for in vain, the purging of their dark past in the hope of a second chance at baptism. But he's not even Benjamin anymore; it seems like too adult a name for its childish status. This isn't the only example of a disastrous name choice. Caddy names her daughter after her brother, Quentin. Jason, tormented both by his sister, for her elopement and promiscuity, and by his brother, for his escape to Harvard and the resulting financial damage to the family (and preventing Jason from attending college), treats the Caddy woman as the her mother's daughter, with cruelty and barbarism. To compensate for the losses suffered by her mother and Quentin, she creates a loss for her by robbing her of the money her mother sends her (a tangible inheritance) and forbidding any contact between the two (a more emotional inheritance). Unlike Pynchon, in Faulkner the name is burdened, unpolished, with commemorative associations. However, these associations are omnipresent in TCL49, with high and low cultural artifacts intertwined into one grand equation of cultural consciousness. For Pynchon, collective cultural memory recognizes little difference between a museum of abstract, intellectual art and the experience stored in a dirty, concrete mattress. Everything merges into one, as in one of the many catalogs of seemingly disparate items in the book:...cut-out coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 cents, commercial stamps, pink flyers advertising special offers at markets, cigarette butts, shy teeth combs, help wanted ads, yellow pages torn from the telephone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that were period costumes... all the pieces coated evenly, like a salad of desperation, in a gray dressing of ash, exhaust gas condensate, dust, body excrement... (14)What a clipped coupon and a piece of deteriorated underwear have in common is that they are both waste, that they are both "evenly coated" with signs of decay, that their shared heritage is one of waste. In fact, the acronym REFUSAL runs through the novel, and not just for the mystery effect. The acronym gives new meaning to a word (in this case, it stands for "We await the silent Tristero's Empire"), infusing its letters with rich language while simultaneously obscuring its past incarnations as a single word. Similar meanings are grafted onto Mucho's radio station, KCUF (an inverted curse), and the CIA (not for the Central Intelligence Agency, but for Conjuración de los Insurgents Anarquistas). Indeed, the term "anarchic miracle" refers to a chaotic dance that does not explode into collisions but that "some unthinkable order "pervades" music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each pair intertwines easily, predetermined" (131). Maxwell's Demon assigns order to the seemingly untamable, imparting random information to spatial organization, just as the postal system oversees the geographic expansion of society. This organization, which draws from the past to produce a new and orderly present, lends an optimistic air to cultural recycling, as exemplified by the tasty wine ofdandelion and its more serious roots: "'...You see, in the spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine undergoes a fermentation as if they remembered'" (98). Oedipa denies this meaning, but Pynchon implies that the world works this way, taking scraps of waste and reframing them as something useful, even consumable. The cultural residue in Faulkner is of a much more pessimistic nature. Taken in conjunction with "The Wasteland", T. S. Eliot's The Sound and the Fury criticizes the sterility of a non-ritualized modern society. Eliot's poem demonstrates the fear of rain, of a fertile land where "April is the cruelest month" and "winter keeps us warm." The arid landscape provides the individual with a refuge against the advance of time (since fertility and seasonal rituals are abolished) and has settled over the South: The day appeared dark and cold, a moving wall of gray light coming from the north -est which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute, poisonous particles, like dust which, when Dilsey opened the cabin door and emerged, stuck sideways into his flesh, precipitating not so much moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of subtle matter. , oil not completely congealed. (165) Only Dilsey's outsider status (from the Compson family, at least), the quality that will make her and other blacks "endure," as Faulkner writes in the Appendix, turns the dust of death into a somewhat liquid state . The novel's many losses - of family members, of innocence, of money, of land, of manhood (Benjy's castration) - become an overwhelming symptom of sterility, of a land stuck in the past and unwilling to commit to the future . The title also derives from a line of "Macbeth", which indicates not only the tragic structure of the novel but also its associations with the high culture of the past (ironically, ambition, the most future-oriented of the drives, is the main theme of Shakespeare's play). With this damaging past to work through, it's no wonder the Compson family has so much difficulty extracting anything good from its memory banks. Each of the three brothers' narratives negotiates in a different and equally destructive way with the past. Benjy's narrative blends all time together in a messy, fragmented style. Unable to distinguish times, Benjy is reduced, as much as his delayed development limits him, to a state of infantile perception. Which is the cause and which is the effect is negligible: seeing the world in a temporal blur is like seeing it as a child. Quentin, on the other hand, perceives the past more logically, but to an extreme. He is mired in the past, consumed by the loss of Caddy's virginity, the pasture that was sold to send him to Harvard, his indifferent father, and the minute ticking of the hands of his watch. This Hamlet-like absorption in the past leads him to suicide, through which he continually walks in his own mortal shadow. The losses of the past deny him any kind of future and prove to be as unsuccessful a strategy as Benjy's time distortion. Ultimately, Jason proceeds through life as if the past were non-existent. However, he too cannot escape the memory and must deal with Quentin and Caddy's legacy in seventeen-year-old Caddy. That he tries to shackle his promiscuity also suggests his aversion to a fertile future, and pushes Jason into the condensed middle of the present, an unbearable present that can't help but notice the past fading and the future deteriorating. . The Compson family ultimately represents a microcosm of the antebellum South, showing the various approaches used by Southerners to their tragic and enduring history. Even the individual.