Maxwell's Demon Machine

Oedipa sits, staring at the Maxwell's Demon Machine, trying to communicate and more importantly to understand. Like her, we the readers also sit, waiting for some sort of understanding or meaning to come out of the novel. When she thinks she sees a piston twitch, she can't get her mind off it, hoping to have actually communicated with the machine. In the same way, we look and try to find one small bit of meaning, we hope when we find it that means we've managed to communicate with the text.

She's told that if she is truly sensitive she will be able to accomplish this, and she wonders if a "true sensitive" would feel and understand more. We, as readers, wonder as well if we're missing a hidden meaning, a point which the "truly enlightened" reader would understand. We believe that the novel is trying to communicate with us and that we are trying to communicate with it, but that the messages aren't getting across except in those brief moments where we see a piston twitch.

When Oedipa can't find meaning or communication with the machine, she becomes frustrated, not only with the machine, but with herself, and with the man who introduced her to the machine, one might say the author of the machine in her mind. He consoles her, tells her that it's okay, she probably wasn't going to see anything anyways. She decides that the only "truly sensitive" people are those that shared in his delusions. Perhaps he was even the only one who got the piston to move at all. Likewise, the author Pynchon, is the only one who would truly understand the novel as it was meant. But even that isn't true, because he meant to eschew meaning and prove that search futile. Likewise perhaps the man behind the machine knew it would never work and used it to disillusion those coming to search for the Maxwell's Demon.