Pynchon, Thomas - Pöhlmann, Sascha - Against The Grain - Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives-Rodopi (2010)
Pynchon, Thomas - Pöhlmann, Sascha - Against The Grain - Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives-Rodopi (2010)
Pynchon, Thomas - Pöhlmann, Sascha - Against The Grain - Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives-Rodopi (2010)
DIALOGUE
8
Edited by
Michael J. Meyer
Against the Grain
Reading Pynchon’s
Counternarratives
Edited by
Sascha Pöhlmann
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3072-5
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3073-2
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Printed in the Netherlands
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editor would like to thank everyone who made International
Pynchon Week 2008 possible. Generous financial endorsement was
granted by the US Consulate General in Munich, the Bavarian
American Academy, Pynchon Notes, and the Amerika-Institut of
Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Many individuals also gave
their invaluable support in countless ways: Klaus Benesch, Thea
Diesner, Meike Zwingenberger, Jasmin Falk, Fabian Diesner, Bruno
Arich-Gerz, John Krafft, and Veronika Schmideder. The conference
itself could not have worked without the help of Fabian Diesner,
Markus Faltermeier, Helmut Fuchs, Nathalie Aghoro, Jola Feix,
Maximilian Heinrich, Sebastian Huber, Gabriella Nikitina, Thoren
Opitz, Almut Ringleben, and Julia Stamm. The editor is also indebted
to William Clarke, Andrew Estes, Taylor Hagood, Jessica Lawson,
Amy Mohr, Daniel Rees, Rodney Taveira and Celia Wallhead for
their help with the manuscript.
VL: Vineland
General Editor’s Preface
voices were unwelcome; it was the tried and true that were greeted
with open arms. Yet these experienced scholars had no need for
further publications and often offered few original insights into the
Steinbeck canon. Sadly, the originality of the lesser-known essayists
met with hostility; the doors were closed, perhaps even locked tight,
against their innovative approaches and readings that took issue with
scholars whose authority and expertise had long been unquestioned.
This is the first time that a volume in the series has arrived full-
blown and whose editor was unsolicited. Nevertheless, the resulting
book is clearly very well assembled and addresses a wide variety of
issues in Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day. As noted in the
acknowledgments, the essays offered here were first presented during
International Pynchon Week in 2008 at a conference held in Munich,
Germany. Attracting Pynchon scholars from all parts of the world,
this conference has produced a volume that varies somewhat from the
original Dialogue concept in that almost all of the contributors are
Pynchon experts. Still, all the contributors engage in significant
assessments of Pynchon’s style, imagery, and thematics while
interacting with each other to evaluate a very complex author indeed.
As you will see, many of the authors break fertile new ground in the
process and offer approaches which will help readers see the novel
General Editor’s Preface
My thanks to Rodopi and its editorial board for its support of this
“radical” concept. May you, the reader, discover much to value in
these new approaches to issues that have fascinated readers for
decades and to books that have long stimulated our imaginations and
our critical discourse.
Michael J. Meyer
2010
CONTENTS
The Underworld and Its Forces: Croatia, the Uskoks and Their
Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 263
Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
Contributors 369
Index 375
Introduction: The Complex Text
Sascha Pöhlmann
Abstract: This introduction takes Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against the Day as
an occasion to raise the question of whether it is still legitimate to classify Pynchon as
a postmodern author. The essay presents two major ways in which Against the Day
transcends the category of the postmodern and thereby invites readers to reevaluate
Pynchon’s whole oeuvre anew while emphasizing once again its political dimension.
Firstly, Against the Day is interpreted as a postnational novel that challenges the
metanarrative of nation-ness in a variety of ways and thereby continues a project
Pynchon has been pursuing at least since The Crying of Lot 49. Secondly, Against the
Day is conceived of as a complex text in the sense of combining real and imaginary
aspects, discussing the use of mathematics in the novel with special emphasis on
aspects of describing, imagining and changing this world as well as many other
worlds. Both these aspects illustrate how Against the Day exceeds the boundaries of
postmodernist fiction and imply that Pynchon’s novels in general are always so much
more than postmodern.
Period terms like postmodernism (and modernism, for that matter) are
strategically useful; they help us see connections among disparate phenomena,
but at the same time they also obscure other connections, and we must
constantly weigh the illumination they shed over here against the obscurity
they cast over there. From the moment when the obscurity outweighs the
illumination, and the category in question becomes more a hindrance than a
help, we are free to reconstruct or even abandon it. (“What was
Postmodernism?”)
The collection opens with Heinz Ickstadt’s “Setting Sail Against the
Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon.” As its title suggests,
the essay can be seen as a point of departure for the others that follow,
since it not only reviews many of the most important aspects of
Against the Day, but also places the novel in the context of Pynchon’s
other texts. Ickstadt offers an overarching analysis that connects
particular concerns of Against the Day, ranging from mathematics to
anarchism to light, with the more general issues that have haunted
Pynchon’s writing since V.—potential, subjectivity, history, a
counterworld to the one we know all too well.
The Complex Text 13
aspects in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day.
Pynchon’s use of non-Western spirituality has been of interest to early
critics already, but the more recent novels demand that even more
attention be paid to it. Harris offers a concise and varied interpretation
of Eastern religion in Pynchon’s texts, arguing that it is a significant
motif as well as a meaningful structuring device.
Jessica Lawson concentrates on the carnal side of Pynchon’s
writing in “‘The Real and Only Fucking is Done on Paper’:
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text.” She considers the
complex relation between Gravity’s Rainbow and its readers in the
light of theories of the erotics of language, writing, text, and
interpretation, and offers valuable insights into this profound set of
questions about the novel: “how we get inside it, how it gets inside us,
and who exactly comes out on top.”
Manlio Della Marca deals with quite another kind of fluid in his
essay “Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in Thomas Pynchon’s The
Crying of Lot 49.“ He takes his cue from Marx, Engels, and Zygmunt
Bauman, and places Pynchon’s novel at a point of transition between
the solidity of a modernity focused on hardware and the fluidity of a
postmodernity focused on software, thereby presenting a dialectic that
opens up new readings of that text.
Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša returns to Against the Day by looking
closely at one of its major settings: the Balkans. In “The Underworld
and Its Forces: Croatia, the Uskoks and Their Fight for Autonomy in
Against the Day,” she parallels a literary analysis of narratives of
underworlds and exile in the novel with a historical account of
Croatian struggles for national independence, showing how Pynchon
represents fictionalized human and supernatural forces of the
underworld as agents in a political process.
Celia Wallhead continues the discussion of imperialism by
drawing on an intertextual connection between Against the Day and
Kipling’s novel Kim, which was published during the time in which
the former is set. Her essay “Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the
Day” points out parallels between the texts and employs them in order
to show how Pynchon’s novel can be read as a postmodern reworking
of the spy-adventure story.
Leyla Haferkamp analyzes Against the Day with regard to some of
its major scientific aspects in “‘Particle or Wave?’: The ‘Function’ of
the Prairie in Against the Day.” She argues that the prairie works in
16 Sascha Pöhlmann
Let me now come back to the narrative of Against the Day and
postmodernism. How exactly does the novel overspill that concept?
What leads me to argue that a postmodern lens allows for many exact
readings but leaves other possibilities out of focus? In short, it is
Pynchon’s globality, or what I call elsewhere his postnational
imagination.2 While postmodernism has worked a great deal towards
the deconstruction of hierarchies in the contexts of gender, sexuality,
race, colonialism, class, and a few more, it has either insufficiently or
not at all paid attention to the nation as a governing principle of being,
knowledge, thought, identity, and politics. Nation-ness, the abstract
The Complex Text 17
In a sense, nothing so clearly marks out the modern era and defines our
attitudes and sentiments as national consciousness and nationalist ideology.
Not only in everyday political and social life, but also in our underlying
assumptions, the nation and its nationalism provide a stable framework for
good and ill and define the goals and values of most collective activity. The
modern world has become inconceivable and unintelligible without nations
and nationalism […]. (106)
reborn. One trembles at the pestilent forms that would rise up afterward, from
the swamp of the ruined Europe.” (AtD 938)
In the U.S.A., it was almost the Fourth of July, which meant that tonight, by
standing orders, there had to be a shipboard celebration out here, too, like it or
not.
“Lights and noise, just to keep us hoppin like trained baboons,” was Darby’s
opinion.
“Anyone at all educated,” protested Lindsay, “knows that Fourth of July
fireworks are the patriotic symbols of noteworthy episodes of military
explosion in our nation’s history, deemed necessary to maintain the integrity
of the American homeland against threats presented from all sides by a
benightedly hostile world.”
“Explosion without an objective,” declared Miles Blundell, “is politics in its
purest form.”
“If we don’t take care,” opined Scientific Officer Counterfly, “folks will
begin to confuse us with the Anarcho-syndicalists.”
“About time,” snarled Darby. “I say let’s set off our barrage tonight in
honor of the Haymarket bomb, bless it, a turning point in American history,
and the only way working people will ever get a fair shake under that
miserable economic system—through the wonders of chemistry!”
20 Sascha Pöhlmann
bin ein Berliner!” (AtD 626) is taken out of its context so that it is not
available for purposes of national identity construction; instead, it is
reinscribed so that it runs counter to any such serious purpose. These
parodies efficiently show how national identities are constructed
discursively, and how these identities need to be denied any essential
status no matter how much they may claim to have it. Against the Day
shows the absurdity of an alleged essential national group identity in
presenting national traits of character as completely unjustified
assumptions and as the clichés they are: this is how Englishman
Dwight Prance can be mistaken for a Japanese spy in the first place,
and his defense is a comic recursion to stereotype: “‘But I say look
here, I’m not Japanese. I mean am I walking about in sandals?
gesturing with fans, speaking in unsolvable riddles, any of that?’”
(AtD 783). National identity is unstable and at the same time the result
of ill-founded perceptions of group identities. Many of the instances in
Against the Day when characters revert to their national identity are
humorous ones, reminders of stereotypical constructions rather than of
actual essential traits, such as when Frank calls Wolfe Tone
O’Rooney’s bluff when he poses as Eusebio the Mexican:
“Got to say you speak some mighty fine English, there, Eusebio,” nodded
Frank.
“In Tampico everybody speaks northamerican, it’s why we call it
‘Gringolandia’ here.”
“I bet you see a lot of Irish around too, huh? those irlandeses?”
“Señor?”
“Oh they’re easy to spot—red-nose drunk all the time, jabbering, dirt-
ignorant, idiot politics–“
“And what the bloody fuckall would you know about it—este...perdón,
señor, what I meant to say, of course—”
“Ah-ah…?” Frank grinning and waving his finger. (AtD 641)
This passage does not assign O’Rooney a stable Irish identity that his
performance of a Mexican identity could not cover up. On the one
hand, O’Rooney is all too clichéd as an Irish character in the first
place: his name could not be more appropriate for an Irish
revolutionary, and he employs, of all things, a potato to forge the
documents that identify him as Eusebio Gómez (AtD 373). On the
other hand, he only really loses his temper when Frank mentions Irish
“idiot politics,” not after one of the earlier insults. He employs
nationalist politics as an anticolonial weapon, but he does not espouse
22 Sascha Pöhlmann
“Oboy, oboy.” Reef had that look on his face, the same look his own father
used to get just before heading off for some dynamite-related activities. “Let’s
see that pencil a minute.”
“Already done.” What Jesse had ended up writing was,
It means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don’t go on
strike or their soldiers will shoot you down.
“That’s what they call the ‘topic sentence’?”
“That’s the whole thing.”
“Oh.”
It came back with a big A+ on it. “Mr. Becker was at the Coeur d’Alene
back in the olden days. Guess I forgot to mention that.” (AtD 1076)
Against the Day, and it has implications for the earlier novels as well.
In the remaining pages of this introduction, I will try to illustrate that
point by analyzing one of the most crucial ways of imagining worlds
in Against the Day—mathematics—and by pointing out its
implications for a literary imagination that can be understood as
global and postnational, and which struggles with its own imaginative
practice. Just as Gravity’s Rainbow drew on chemistry and physics
and Mason & Dixon on (para)geography and astronomy, Against the
Day looks to mathematics and uses it as a leitmotif that offers a vast
variety of ideas, images and structures for the literary text, and it is
also used metaphorically itself. Literature and mathematics are
combined in order to comment on how both fields imagine the world;
this imagination is a well-known issue in all of Pynchon’s texts, as his
own blurb for Against the Day reminds us in what should go down in
literary history as one of the biggest understatements: “If it is not the
world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two.
According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.” As I
hope to show in the following, the novel uses concepts of the
mathematical imagination to pursue that purpose and to comment on
its own fictional strategies in the process.
Against the Day is a complex text. This statement should not be
understood as perpetuating the cliché that Pynchon’s novels are
difficult, but rather as saying that the novel is complex in the way
numbers can be complex. The text itself provides this metaphor in
passing when readers are told that the Irish mathematician William
Rowan Hamilton, when he “discovered” the Quaternions, carved “his
renowned formulae” into Brougham Bridge in Dublin “with a pocket-
knife part real and part imaginary, a ‘complex’ knife one might say”
(AtD 634). “Part real and part imaginary” is exactly what Against the
Day is, and the description provides a concise understanding of its
overall narrative project that ties in with Pynchon’s programmatic
blurb. Earlier, a panorama is described as “a zone of dual nature” that
contains a number of “‘real objects’ appropriate to the setting” that yet
“could not strictly be termed entirely real, rather part ‘real’ and part
‘pictorial,’ or let us say ‘fictional’” (AtD 633). It is remarkable that the
complementary term of “real” is “fictional” in this case, not
“imaginary”: while the fictional and the imaginary are clearly related
to each other, they are not equated, and it would lead to an
impoverished understanding of the imaginary in Against the Day to
26 Sascha Pöhlmann
view the terms as synonymous. The text emphasizes the power of the
imaginary by complicating a hierarchical binary opposition that would
construct it as the weaker supplement to the “real,” as happened in
some early reviews of Against the Day. Critics raised accusations
against the novel to the effect that it lacked realism, implying that its
worlds differed too much from the reality they recognized and sought
to understand through fiction that matched it closely; for example,
Adam Kirsch claimed that the “silliness of ‘Against the Day’ about
the very subjects where we are most urgently in quest of wisdom
proves that, whatever he once was, Thomas Pynchon is no longer the
novelist we need.” Against the Day comments on such simplistic
views of fiction, reality, and the imagination by drawing on
mathematics in order to show how foolish it is to dismiss the
imaginary as something “unreal” or fictional that is either opposed or
irrelevant to a consideration of reality. Apparently, the imaginary
world of a work of fiction must be defended against some literary
critics when it allegedly differs too much from the world in which
they read it, while at the same time no mathematician would consider
imaginary numbers silly or a waste of time even though, strictly
speaking, they do not exist. Here, the mathematician can teach the
critic about the benefits of thinking a world with new rules, and this
image of mobility, expansion, and resistance against the status quo
informs Against the Day as deeply as Pynchon’s other works. It draws
on imaginary numbers to show how it is possible to think even the
most fundamental ideas and experiences differently, which is exactly
what these numbers demand. They relate to an equation that is not
solvable in the realm of real numbers: x2 = –1, since every square of a
real number is necessarily a positive number. However, the equation
is solvable when introducing the imaginary unit i by defining i2 = –1.
Imaginary numbers are an expansion of the world that does not seek
to describe it, but to break with conventions of thought that constitute
our reality. Even though an imaginary number demands an
“impossible” operation, it can be related to real numbers and coexist
with them precisely in complex numbers—numbers of the form a+b·i
that have a real part and an imaginary part. Just as imaginary numbers
do not bring about a wholly different kind of mathematics, but rather
enrich mathematics by breaking with its established modes of thought,
Pynchon’s imaginary worlds are not separate from the “real” world of
their readers. Instead, they expand a “real” world that may never have
The Complex Text 27
been all that simple and homogeneous, a fact that only becomes
obvious when this world is overlaid with other worlds.
This process, which in Mason & Dixon has its representational
correspondence in the multi-layered cartographic practice of
“parageography” (MD 141), is exemplified best in Against the Day by
the material called Iceland spar and its double refraction of light. The
dust jacket of the novel’s first hardcover edition was designed to show
that effect of double refraction, which is commonly demonstrated by
placing a piece of Iceland spar over a written text. In the written world
of Against the Day, this multiplication occurs as a literal separation of
countless worlds, and it raises grave doubts about the original unity of
“the” world in the first place, or any “natural” system of ordering it
(such as nation-ness). After all, Iceland spar is said to be nothing less
than “‘the sub-structure of reality,’” and remarkably its “curious
advent into the world occurred within only a few years of the
discovery of Imaginary Numbers, which also provided a doubling of
the mathematical Creation” (AtD 133). The connection is strengthened
even more in the description of the capabilities of Iceland spar: it “‘is
what hides the Hidden People, makes it possible for them to move
through the world that thinks of itself as ‘real,’ provides that all-
important ninety-degree twist to their light, so they can exist alongside
our own world but not be seen’” (AtD 134). Ninety degrees is also the
angle by which the horizontal axis of real numbers in a geometrical
coordinate system is turned as a result of multiplication with i, thereby
creating the complex plane in which complex numbers can be
visualized. Both Iceland spar and imaginary numbers make possible a
“doubling of the Creation” (AtD 133) in separate yet closely related
ways, and both demand an imagination of worlds from the reader of
Against the Day while offering metaphors for this creative
multiplication; the text itself becomes a complex plane.
Yet the novel makes even further use of imaginary numbers than
that, especially with regard to Hamilton’s Quaternions, which offer a
space in which alternative worlds can be imagined. Quaternions add
three more numbers to real numbers, i, j, k, and their relation to each
other is: i2·j2·k2 = i·j·k = –1. Against the Day juxtaposes i, j, k with the
more familiar axes x, y, z of a Cartesian coordinate system and thereby
not only imagines alternative places, but also a whole alternative
space in which these places could exist. Yet this clash of coordinate
systems had devastating consequences for the Quaternioneers, since
28 Sascha Pöhlmann
This is not just a war of ideas that has no effect on reality, it is a war
of the imagination in which the potential to think differently is at
stake, and in which the victorious dominant system has confirmed its
hegemony of interpretation of reality by preventing anything that, as
Yashmeen has it, “would allow access to a different […] ‘set of
conditions’” (AtD 618). Therefore, “the Hamiltonian devotees had
now, fallen from grace, come to embody, for the established scientific
religion, a subversive, indeed heretical, faith for whom proscription
and exile were too good” (AtD 526). Their heresy is a counternarrative
to space itself, to our everyday concept of reality, and to our
understanding of time. Against the Day here manages to invest the
most abstract ideas of mathematics with political significance by
celebrating potential in the face of the most rigid ideas of order, and
by asking readers to imagine a change of world view that could hardly
be more fundamental.3 The play of worlds of Against the Day is part
of these imaginative changes, and its multiplications matter most
where they show how petty the limits of reality actually are, and how
they are curbed and determined by forces that are eventually always
political; it functions like those “‘paramorphoscopes of Iceland spar”
that “reveal the architecture of dream, all that escapes the network of
ordinary latitude and longitude…’” (AtD 250). No wonder that many
characters in Against the Day see mathematics for a time as “a
reflection of some less-accessible reality, through close study of
which one might perhaps learn to pass beyond the difficult given
world” (AtD 749). For a long time, Yashmeen considered math as a
way to satisfy “her old need for some kind of transcendence—the
The Complex Text 29
In this passage, the material world of life, death and money asserts
itself most forcefully, and all work of the imagination rather seems
like idle play, only reinterpreting the world instead of changing it, and
thus missing what actually matters. Yet even this harsh materialism is
in turn suspended only a few pages later in a description of Venetian
architecture in which the imagination reasserts its power through
another mathematical metaphor:
[Venice] was supposed to’ve been built on trade, but the Basilica San Marco
was too insanely everything that trade, in its strenuous irrelevance to dream,
could never admit. The numbers of commerce were rational, but among the
real numbers, those that remained in the spaces between—the irrationals—
outnumbered those simple quotients overwhelmingly. (AtD 732)
reigned more than ever on the ground” (AtD 19), especially as they
leave the safe and simple haven of the nationalist narrative provided
by their superiors. Right from the beginning of Against the Day,
readers are warned along with Chick Counterfly—by Lindsay
Noseworth, ever the voice of “reason”—not to imagine that “‘in
coming aboard Inconvenience you have escaped into any realm of the
counterfactual,’” but that even there one “must nonetheless live with
the constraints of the given world” (AtD 9). Yet even then, at least the
commander of the Chums seems to be aware of the possibility to
change worlds and enter a new set of constraints:
Towards the end of Against the Day, this is exactly the journey they
undertake, and by now Chick has figured out that “each star and
planet we can see in the Sky is but the reflection of our single Earth
along a different Minkowskian space-time track. Travel to other
worlds is therefore travel to alternate versions of the same Earth” (AtD
1020). In journeying to the “other Earth” (AtD 1021), they also travel
to a myriad of alternative worlds, and instead of reaching a single one
completely in time and space, they remain suspended and at least
doubled: “They were on the Counter-Earth, on it and of it, yet at the
same time also on the Earth they had never, it seemed, left” (AtD
1021). In their oscillation between worlds, the real of “this” world
asserts itself once more in that the Chums stumble upon the First
World War, and it is countered with the imaginary narrative of
transnational organizations like the Chums and their doubles, the
Tovarishchi Slutchainyi, doing their best to relieve the pain brought
about by a war waged in thoroughly nationalized terms. This
ontological complexity is also reinforced by the narrator, who reminds
readers of the fictional status of the Chums by quoting the title of an
earlier novel he wrote about them (AtD 1019), as if it were necessary
at this point to make sure the Chums are not mistaken for an entirely
“real” set of characters within Against the Day itself. Their ontological
status remains suspended; on the one hand, they really are characters
of a series of books of young adult fiction, on the other hand, it is
32 Sascha Pöhlmann
Lew Basnight seemed a sociable enough young man, though it soon became
obvious that he had not, until now, so much as heard of the Chums of Chance.
“But every boy knows the Chums of Chance,” declared Lindsay Noseworth
perplexedly. “What could you’ve been reading, as a youth?”
Lew obligingly tried to remember. “Wild West, African explorers, the usual
adventure stuff. But you boys—you’re not storybook characters.” He had a
thought. “Are you?”
“No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly,” Randolph supposed. “Although
the longer a fellow’s name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell
fiction from non-fiction.” (AtD 36-37)
Notes
1
This could be described in David Cowart’s words as “the paradoxical subversion of
the postmodern gospel” (4).
2
Obviously, others will be able to add more such possibilities, and I will offer only
the one I consider most important to Pynchon’s writing.
3
The postnational significance of this lies not merely in showing that everything
could be different no matter how natural it looks, including nation-ness; it also lies in
the fact that the Quaternioneers are a “band of varying ages and nationalities” that
speak only the “common language […] of the Quaternions” (AtD 525). Similarly, and
on a funnier note, Miles Blundell finds out that the “‘Italian number that looks like a
zero, is the same as our own American ‘zero.’ The one that looks like a one, is ‘one.’
The one that looks like a two—’” (AtD 243). Mathematics potentially creates a
transnational community whose mere existence proves that nation-ness is far from
being the only constituent of group identity in the world, and that its claims to
hegemony stand in the way of other forms of the common.
Bibliography
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Ed. J. Dover Wilson.
London: Cambridge UP, 1961.
Caesar, Terry, and Taskashi Aso. “Japan, Creative Masochism, and
Transnationality in Vineland.” Critique 44.4 (Summer 2003): 371-
86.
Cowart, David. “Pynchon and the Sixties.” Critique 41.1 (Fall 1999):
3-12.
Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature
across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.
Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Essays.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950. 3-11.
34 Sascha Pöhlmann
Heinz Ickstadt
Abstract: The essay discussses the dominant themes, figures, semantic oppositions as
well as the overall structural design of Pynchon's Against the Day comparing them
with those of his earlier work. It attempts to thus bring out the continuities in
Pynchon's narrative world but also the peculiarities of this particular novel which,
despite its playfulness, evokes, with post-revolutionary melancholy, an American and
European past whose future is no longer open. In accordance with the many
ambivalences of its title, the fantastic balloon of Pynchon's narrative gradually turns
into an ever-expanding world of its own, moving subversively against, yet also
joyfully within the light of common day.
We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present—your future—
a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty—the
end of capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simple
thermodynamic truth that Earth’s resources were limited, in fact soon to run
out, the whole capitalist illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this
truth aloud were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic
Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon 39
what, one may ask, makes for “self-value” and “reality’s spine” in the
multidimensional and relative world of space-time?
Early in the book, one of the minor figures becomes aware “that
there was some grave imbalance in the structure of the world, which
would have to be corrected” (AtD 170). Indeed, the question of justice
might well be the reality-constant (the “spine of reality”) marking the
path of human history as it unfolds in space-time. All the protagonists
relate to it in one way or another: as perpetrators, victims and
avengers, or as dreamers of change or of escape.
The first group makes for the scoundrels of the book—its arch-
villain Scarsdale Vibe, a banker and mine owner, and the very
embodiment of all Capitalist evils. Vibe’s antagonist among the
second group is Webb Traverse, a union worker in the Colorado
mines, an anarchist and expert handler of explosives during the strike
at Cripple Creek in 1894. He is murdered by two of Vibe’s stooges,
one of whom is later shot by Frank Traverse, the second of Webb’s
three sons, who are bent (with diminishing intensity) on avenging
their dead father. Reef, the oldest, first follows in his father’s footsteps
as anarchist defender of the cause of Labor in the San Juan
Mountains; then he becomes a man of many disguises, a gambler and
a drifter, who eventually drifts to Europe, where he uses his
underground expertise in the construction of Alpine tunnels.
Frank, the second son, is the most American-rooted of the Traverse
children, moving along a North-South axis between the mountain
ranges of southern Colorado and the Mexican Sierra Madre. He
continues the Traverse dynamiting tradition during the Mexican
Revolution and is the only one who fulfills the family’s revenge
project at least in part. Returning from Mexico to Colorado he joins
the strikers at Ludlow, where he also meets (and stays with) Estrella
(“Stray”) and her boy Jesse,—the family that Frank’s brother Reef had
left behind.
The youngest and most gifted of the Traverse sons is Kit, whose
interest in physics and passion for mathematics are brought to a boil
by meeting the famous Nicola Tesla, who is just then conducting his
pioneering experiments with high voltage and alternating current at
Colorado Springs. Vibe buys Kit’s scientific talent by sending him to
Yale, later to Göttingen. From there he begins a long journey East—a
“journey,” he hopes, “into a purer condition” (AtD 675)—which will
eventually take him to the Flaming Mountains of northeastern China.
Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon 41
with concern for others. She is in that sense a star (estrella) that shines
and shows the way, can stray (perhaps even go astray) and yet be
straight. She is thus vector as well as eigenvalue. Can the spine of
reality, the reality-constant in multidimensional space-time, also be
regarded as a moral constant that defines eigenvalue? The figures that
might be said to have eigenvalue (that is, who combine the steady
with the unsettled) are, on the one hand, the mystics, the seekers and
the dreamers of what might be and, on the other, the dissenters and
resisters to what is. While those in the second group are entirely
secular in their desires, those in the first are religious in their yearning
for a God that has either disappeared or appears only in “visions of the
unsuspected […]. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of
day […]” (AtD 853).
If there is a development in the personal history of these seekers, it
is a movement away from all substitutes of the Transcendent (be they
the abstract religions of science, mathematics, or technology) and
toward those luminous glimpses of, and “chance encounters” with, the
“unseen world” (AtD 853) that is revealed in and through the body
and its senses. This shift in the trajectory of personal histories is also
noticeable on the symbolic level. The central metaphor of light is, of
course, first connected with mystic illumination but also with the
revelations of divinity in the “breaches in the Creation” (AtD 853):
such as the awesome power of electricity, or of the mysterious
Tunguskan Explosion.6 Like all such revelations of the extraordinary,
however, these are fleeting moments that succumb to the steady pull
of the everyday.
The absorption of the extraordinary into the realm of ordinariness
is the very hallmark of modernization, which received an enormous
boost from the industrial production of electric energy. Electricity has
turned night into day and turned the once-miraculous into the very
sign of what is normal now: the illumination of the cities, the
everyday blessings of the alternating current, or wireless transmissions
from one continent to another. When the Chums of Chance cross the
continent westwards toward California, they notice “how much more
infected with light the night-time terrains passing below them had
become” (AtD 1032). The conquest of light over darkness is therefore
paradoxically associated with the Prince of Darkness, who is,
however, also called “‘Lucifer, son of morning, bearer of light’” (AtD
1033).
Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon 43
It is not difficult to guess that Orwell, in 1984, was imagining a future for his
son’s generation, a world he was not so much wishing upon them as warning
against. He was impatient with predictions of the inevitable, he remained
confident in the ability of ordinary people to change anything, if they would.
46 Heinz Ickstadt
It is the boy’s smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and radiant,
proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, is
good and that human decency, like parental love, can always be taken for
granted—a faith so honorable that we can almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps
even ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done
to keep it from ever being betrayed. (“The Road to 1984”)
Notes
1
An expanded version of this essay appeared in Pynchon Notes Spring-Fall 2008
(“History, Utopia, and Transcendence in the Spacetime of Pynchon’s Against the
Day”).
2
Accordingly, Pynchon makes ample use of the various novelistic styles and genres
of the period, such as the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the Western
after Zane Gray, detective novels from Poe to Chandler, and adventure and dime
novels of the fin-de-siècle.
3
See e.g. Kakutani.
4
They have their “mysterious Russian counterpart—and, far too often, nemesis” (AtD
123)—in the airship Bolshai’a Igra (“The Great Game”) under the command of
Captain Igor Padzhitnoff whose path they often cross in missions of cooperation or
conflict.
5
See Hanjo Berressem’s essay in this collection.
6
Scientists are still not sure whether that devastating “Event”—which occurred in the
Siberian Taiga on June 30, 1908—was caused by an exploding meteor, by the
eruption of a subterranean volcano or an explosion of subterranean gases, of a cosmic
bomb or by the impact of antimatter. The energy released is estimated to have been
over one thousand times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Eighty million trees were destroyed. The sound of the explosion was heard hundreds
of kilometers away, and strange light phenomena were seen all over the world.
Scientists cannot explain why there were apparently several explosions in the sky and
why they cannot find meteorite fragments in the ground. Contemporary rumors (also
mentioned in Against the Day) had it that the “Event” resulted from a failed effort of
Nicola Tesla to communicate via wireless transmitter with Perry’s expedition to the
Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon 47
North Pole. According to another legend, Tesla was trying to use wireless electric-
power transmission to create a high-energy military bomb.
7
Cf. Ickstadt.
Bibliography
Ickstadt, Heinz. “Plot, Conspiracy, and the Reign of Chance: The
Fantastic as History in Pynchon’s Novels.” Faces of Fiction:
Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian
Period to Postmodernity, by Heinz Ickstadt. Eds. Susanne Rohr
and Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. 393-424.
Kakutani, Michiko. “A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon.” The New
York Times, 20 Nov. 2006.
Menand, Louis. “Do the Math.“ The New Yorker, 27 Nov. 2006: 170-
02.
Levine, George. “V-2.” Rev. of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas
Pynchon. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Edward
Mendelson. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1978. 178-91.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: The Penguin Press,
2006.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking Press, 1973.
—. “The Road to 1984.” The Guardian 3 May 2003.
Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art
Keith O’Neill
Abstract: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day situates itself on several thresholds:
between the nineteenth and twentieth century, between gaslight and electric light,
between fantasy and rationalized “reality.” This essay proposes that another key
crossroads in the book is a literary one, between populist and “high” literary forms.
Specifically, I look at the novel’s references to two writers occupying very different
spaces at the fin de siècle: H. G. Wells and Henry James. James is commonly read as
a progenitor of the twentieth-century avant-garde; Wells, by contrast, is regarded as a
populist writer whose importance is qualified as being that of an early practitioner of
science fiction. The works of James became the embodiment of high culture—dense,
sophisticated, technically innovative—while those of Wells became synonymous with
familiar aspects of low culture—shallow, childish, and plot-driven. Wells and James
clearly saw a difference between their works in their own time; after a decade of
friendly correspondence, they had a famous falling out over their respective positions
on the novel: James declared his distaste for Wells’s “diversity” and politics, while
Wells satirized James’s “unity” and lack of politics. At its outset, Against the Day
announces itself as being part of the same disreputable literary territory as Wells’s
work: it incorporates elements of the ghettoized genres of western, pulp, serial and
science fictions, and, in that the book sympathizes with the anarchic Traverses,
Pynchon’s politics are clearly Wellsian as well. This paper proposes to see Against the
Day as a response to the James-Wells split, and as an announcement that perhaps the
art of the novel revered in the last hundred years was only one way the genre can go:
Pynchon’s return to a populist or “low” genre is in fact a radical political gesture.
After a century of the primacy of individual perception and consciousness, Pynchon’s
novel rejects James’s mastery and the High Modernism that technique helped
inaugurate.
“Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master,
but you can tickle his creatures.” (GR 237)
1
Henry James is commonly read as a progenitor of the twentieth-
century avant-garde, whose “mastery” of presenting the depths of
human consciousness is understood to be the beginning of modernist
literary fiction.1 Wells, by contrast, is regarded as a populist writer
whose importance is qualified as that of an early practitioner of
science fiction. The valorized works of James, in other words, became
the embodiment of high culture—dense, sophisticated, technically
innovative—while those of Wells became synonymous with familiar
aspects of low culture—simplistic, childish, and plot-driven. Wells
and James clearly saw a difference between their works in their own
time; after a decade of friendly correspondence, they had a famous
falling out over their respective positions on the novel: James declared
his distaste for Wells’s “diversity” and politics, while Wells in turn
satirized James’s “unity” and lack of politics. Indeed, this call for
politics on Wells’s part has cast a long shadow over his legacy: his
brand of socialism has marked him as too topical, too didactic for the
purview of lasting art.
By contrast, the reference to James in the opening scene of Against
the Day, in which the literate canine Pugnax reads The Princess
Casamissima, suggests playfully that James’s highbrow literature is
for the dogs. James’s novel is strongly critical of exactly the kind of
Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art 51
novels and novelists who invented them, we see the symbolic result of
the process of literary canonization: a trash heap of literary history
“scorched” by the fires of cultural guardians and proclaimed failures.
As Professor Heino Vanderjuice exclaims, “‘Walloping Wellesianism
[sic]’” (AtD 409) indeed.
The Chums effectively see what happens to the kind of populist
literature of which they suspect they are manifestations. As they begin
to doubt the motives of the mysterious authority they are working for,
Noseworth’s blanket dismissal of dime novels as trash becomes an
increasingly untenable position to hold. For Noseworth to continue to
dismiss “‘Mr. H.G. Wells’s speculative jeu d’esprit’” would mean the
relegation of the entire Chums of Chances series to the same “terrible
Flow” of critical neglect. Aesthetical decisions are always political
ones as well.
Pynchon proclaimed his allegiance to genre writing as early as
1984, in “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” In that essay, a response to and
a ridiculing of the supposedly ossified “Two Cultures” in academia,
Pynchon reserves special commentary for science fiction:
judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the
only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely
defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love
conquers all. In whodunits, murder, being a pretext for a logical puzzle, is
hardly ever an irrational act. (“Luddite” 40)
For a detailed account [...] readers are referred to The Chums of Chance in the
Bowels of the Earth—for some reason one of the less appealing of this series,
letters having come in from as far away as Tunbridge Wells, England,
expressing displeasure, often quite intense, with my harmless little
intraterrestrial scherzo. (AtD 117)
2
The friendship and famous rift between Henry James and H. G. Wells
spans almost precisely the period during which Against the Day takes
place. James and Wells met in 1898 and they corresponded until about
1914, after which they stopped speaking. At the turn the century,
Wells had moved to Sandgate near James’s home in Rye, and the two
Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art 55
touch one of the exposed nerves of our century: the distinction to be drawn
between literature as the voice of the individual and literature engaged in the
furtherance of social welfare […] In a sense it involved also two ways of life:
the way of the writer like Wells or Bernard Shaw who subordinates his art to
his social message, and the way of the dedicated artist like James or Proust for
whom art is the only valid means of encompassing and preserving human
experience. (11)
The James-Wells split becomes “a parable of the two great camps into
which artists have been divided in the twentieth century” (Edel and
Ray 12). For a critic like Edel, who would spend the next several
decades writing the definitive biography of James, Wells is clearly
misguided in his argument:
The novel was, for Wells, a convenience, something to be used for specific
ends; for James the novel was the most characteristic art-form of our time,
intricate and human, to be practiced with professional skill and all the
resources of the artist’s imagination. Wells’s mockery of James […] is more
than a failure in perception; it reveals that this remarkable man, whose
imagination could soar through space and time and create tales of wonderful
new worlds, was yet limited and earth-bound when it came to understanding
the true nature of art. (39)
56 Keith O’Neill
[…] if the novel is to follow life it must be various and discursive. Life is
diversity and entertainment, not completeness and satisfaction […] In all of
[James’s] novels you will find no people with defined political opinions, no
people with religious opinions, none with clear partisanship or with lusts or
whims, none definitely up to any specific impersonal thing. There are no poor
people dominated by the imperatives of Saturday night and Monday morning,
no dreaming types—and don’t we all more or less live dreaming? (Boon 107)
3
Just as Mason & Dixon is a celebration and recovery of sorts of what
was lost with the onset of the Age of Reason, Against the Day
explores what was lost to the twentieth century with the advent of
Modernism. Modernism, the books implies, is integral to the path the
world took in the twentieth century, a path that forgot “‘the inexorably
rising tide of World Anarchism’” (AtD 6) that Noseworth—just like
Henry James—dreads so much at the beginning of the novel. Granted,
European and American artists and writers positioned themselves as
the enemies of fascism—the Spanish Civil War against Franco was a
cause célèbre of intellectuals, and the Nazis famously castigated
Modernist art as “degenerate”—but Pynchon hints that the avant-
garde and the extreme right were not as different as they appeared.
Indeed, though literary critics have tried anxiously to account for and
contextualize Eliot’s and Pound’s anti-Semitism, for instance, or tried
to dismiss charges that so-called High Modernism is classist and
elitist, Modernism’s distinction from fascism is becoming increasingly
blurred. As Mark Antliff puts it in an important essay on this
connection: “The terms fascism and modern art used to seem
comfortably opposed to each other, but the last two decades of
scholarship in history, art history, and literature have radically revised
that postwar complacency” (148).3 Pynchon’s text reminds us that
neither the left nor the right, neither the artist nor the industrial state,
58 Keith O’Neill
“[…] who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum, the
frozen corpses whose names, false in any case, have gone forever unrecorded?
[...] Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, but money will
beget money, grow like the bluebells in the meadow, spread and brighten and
gather force, and bring low all before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has
begun.” (AtD 1001)
1910 human character changed” (“Mr. Bennett” 124). For Woolf, the
change was a positive one, a progress from the repression of the
Victorian Age. Late in Against the Day, Pynchon has a similar line:
“‘The World came to an end in 1914’” (AtD 1077). We should stress,
of course, that Pynchon is not bemoaning the end of mainstream
Victorian culture: Scarsdale Vibe is as much a portrait of the robber
barons of the nineteenth century as he is a capitalist of the early
twentieth century. For Pynchon, the shift to Modernism constitutes a
loss of possibilities, of forms of resistance: as humanity moves into
the new decade, he suggests, both the avant-garde and the fascists
share a kind of class blindness, a move away from the forms of
anarchism celebrated in the novel.
Against the Day, then, is a political novel much different than the
socialist calls-to-arms of Wells and others. It is significant that
Pynchon situates the novel in the years before the Great War, at the
brink of the decline of the twentieth century into total war,
totalitarianism, and genocide. Clearly, to him, the nineteenth-century
political tradition of anarchism is worth considering. Throughout the
novel, one sees a tug-of-war between this political tradition and
modernity. Even Kit and Reef Traverse, two of the main protagonists
of the novel, become seduced by the new technology of the twentieth
century, and in the process slip away from their anarchist moorings.
The narrator describes, at the outbreak of World War I, “[a]mong the
frantic popping of Mauser against Mauser, something new on Earth.
Machine guns, the future of warfare” (AtD 965). Within a few pages,
Reef gains possession of one of these weapons, and “entered the
domain of five hundred rounds per minute” (AtD 969). This entry is
followed by the even more dramatic transformation of Kit in the final
section of the novel. In the years right after their marriage, Kit and
Dally live in Turin, and Kit’s pilot friend Renzon teaches him the
seductive quality of the picciate, or dive-bomb:
They were soon going so fast that something happened to time, and maybe
they’d slipped for a short interval in the Future, the Future known to Italian
Futurists, with events superimposed on one another, and geometry straining
irrationally away in all directions, including a couple of extra dimensions as
they continued hellward, a Hell that could never contain Kit’s abducted young
wife, to which he could never go to rescue her, which was actually Hell-of-
the-future, taken on into it functional equations, stripped and fire-blasted of
everything emotional or accidental.... (AtD 1070)
60 Keith O’Neill
[Kit] saw that here, approaching the speed of sound, he was being
metamorphosed into something else […] Renzo’s picciata had been perhaps
the first and purest expression in northern Italy of a Certain Word that would
not quite exist for another year or two. But somehow, like a precognitive
murmur, a dreamed voice, it had already provisionally entered Time. (AtD
1071)
Notes
1
See, for a famous example, the opening pages of Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (3-
5). Though Kenner’s point is to contrast Pound and James as representatives of two
very different generations, his focus on this meeting effectively places James at the
beginnings of Modernism’s lineage.
2
In an essay titled “The Terrorist in Fiction,” Beli Melman argues, defensively, not to
confuse novels about terrorism with real terrorism: “it seems that a useful study of
terrorism in fiction should concentrate on the terrorist as he is perceived by the writer,
rather than on the terrorist as he was, or might have been in reality” (560).
3
See the January 2008 issue of Modernism/Modernity, which was dedicated to this
topic. In particular, the articles by Baackmann and Craven, Griffin, and Fogu offered
a varied interpretation of the implications Modernism/fascism connection. David
Antliff’s excellent “Fascism, Modernism, Modernity” is one of the first extended
arguments along these lines, and might be read as a kind of manifesto for this line of
critique. (My thanks to Professor Barbara Will of Dartmouth College for steering me
in the direction of Modernism/Modernity.)
4
Again, see Claudio Fogu’s article for a detailed analysis of the connection between
the supposedly progressively-orientated Futurism and regressive fascism.
5
One cannot help but note that the cover image on the U.S. paperback edition of
Against the Day—Nosedive on the City by Futurist artist Tullio Crali—draws
attention to not only the piccicate scene in the novel, but to that scene’s relationship
with Modernism as well. Though there’s no proof that Pynchon chose this image, he
has been known to be involved in all aspects of his publications in the past.
6
Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice, “a noir novel ... set in the world of 1960s
psychedelia” (Ulin), furthers his alliance with popular literary genres.
Bibliography
Antliff, Mark. “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity.” The Art
Bulletin 84.1 (March 2002): 148-69.
Baackmann, Susanne, and David Craven. “An Introduction to
Modernism—Fascism—Postmodernism.” Modernism/ Modernity
15. 1 (January 2008): 1-8.
Edel, Leon, and Gordon N. Ray. Henry James and H. G. Wells: A
Record of their Friendship, their Debate of the Art of Fiction, and
their Quarrel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1948.
Fogu, Claudio. “Futurist Mediterraneità between Emporium and
Imperium.” Modernism/Modernity 15. 1 (January 2008): 25-43.
Griffin, Roger. “Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism. A ‘Mazeway
Resynthesis.’” Modernism/Modernity 15.1 (January 2008): 9-24.
62 Keith O’Neill
Simon de Bourcier
Abstract: This essay looks at the theme of the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day.
Speculations about the existence of a Fourth Dimension proliferated in the period
during which the novel is set, and a four-dimensional space-time continuum became
part of the way mainstream science saw the world with the advent of Einstein’s
Theory of Relativity in the early years of the twentieth century. This essay looks at
texts from this period by H. G. Wells, Israel Zangwill, Charles Howard Hinton, P. D.
Ouspensky, Henri Bergson, and Herman Minkowski, as a way of approaching
Pynchon’s treatment of the Fourth Dimension.
Hinton proposed the existence of a Fourth Dimension of space; Wells, in The
Time Machine, called time the Fourth Dimension. The essay argues that these two
versions of the Fourth Dimension are equivalent in many ways, including the types of
narrative they enable, which tend to be variations on the ancient tale of the journey to
the land of the dead. Relativistic space-time, on the other hand, is something quite
different, as it denies the possibility of perceiving all of time as a static whole, which
is implicit in earlier accounts of the Fourth Dimension.
This essay argues that Pynchon explores the narrative possibilities presented by
both the pre-relativistic Fourth Dimension and relativistic space-time in Against the
Day, and that by doing so he situates historically the different models of time which
he has explored in his earlier writing.
During the years in which Against the Day is set, the Fourth
Dimension crossed the boundary separating esoteric speculation and
science fiction from orthodox science. Among the possibilities that
threatened to smuggle themselves across with it were time travel and
instantaneous travel across space. However, the version of four-
dimensionality that became scientific orthodoxy with the advent of
relativity is subtly but crucially different from the ideas about the
Fourth Dimension that were circulating in wider textual culture before
relativity. So, while relativity is sometimes taken to give credibility to
these speculations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it
in fact forces their abandonment in favor of something far stranger.
64 Simon de Bourcier
The Time Machine is an important source for Against the Day. I make
this claim for three reasons. First, it is the earliest text in which an
explicit definition of the Fourth Dimension as time is developed in
any detail. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller says, “any real body must
have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth,
Thickness and—Duration. […] There are really four dimensions, three
which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time” (Wells
2005, 4). Second, this is part of a fictional narrative, and creates a
template for narrative explorations of the Fourth Dimension. The third
and most compelling reason is Pynchon’s pastiche of Wells: a remark
about “d’ toime machine” by a “street-Arab” at first seems to the
Chums of Chance to be a reference to “Mr. H. G. Wells’s speculative
Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day 65
jeu d’esprit” (AtD 397-98), but soon leads Chick and Darby to Dr.
Zoot’s machine. It seems old-fashioned to them, as Wells’s machine
does today. The “Breguet-style openwork of the indicator arrows”
(AtD 402) recalls the fact that the Time Traveller’s model, which he
demonstrates before boarding the full-size machine, is compared to a
“clock” (Wells 2005, 8). Zoot’s machine and the Time Traveller’s
both employ quartz (Wells 2005, 11; AtD 403). Like the Time
Traveller, the Chums visit two future times. In the first they see a vast
mass of “spectral” beings (AtD 403). The second finds them in a chaos
of darkness, inhuman cries, “the smell of excrement and dead tissue”
(AtD 404)—a vision, perhaps, of death itself. After all, Zoot does tell
them that “It’s different for everybody” (AtD 404). His second-hand
machine fails to create the disconnection of temporalities on which
Wells’s story depends, whereby the Time Traveller’s subjective time
flows independently of time as it passes for the rest of the world.
Without this disconnection, the machine propels one rapidly into
one’s own future, and can only be, in Darby’s words, a “death trap”
(AtD 405). There is grim comedy to this re-working of the time-travel
narrative.
Both Wells’s novel and Pynchon’s brief burlesque have elements
that mark them out as versions of a myth which depends on an
implicit substitution of space for time, the journey into the world of
the dead and back. Zoot’s machine seems “fiendish” (AtD 404), and
Chick’s best hope is that Zoot himself is “not altogether diabolical”
(AtD 403). To reach his workshop the Chums pass through an arch
bearing the words which greet Dante as he enters the Inferno (AtD
401). Several elements of The Time Machine position its narrative as a
variant on the netherworld myth. The Morlocks inhabit a literal
“Underworld” (Wells 2005, 47, 53-54) into which the Time Traveller
descends. Like the seething masses seen by the Chums, they are
“spectral” (54).
Wells’s story is not primarily an exploration of the four-
dimensional universe. The Time Traveller’s explanation of how his
machine works is an example of what Wells calls “scientific patter”
(qtd. in Philmus 2). However, the Zoot episode is about the
implications of the pre-relativistic model of the Four-Dimensional
universe, in which time is understood as “a kind of space” (Wells
2005, 5). This is highlighted by Pynchon’s joke of having Zoot offer
the boys a ride “then and back” for half price (AtD 402).
66 Simon de Bourcier
It is generally said that the mind cannot perceive things in themselves, but can
only apprehend them subject to space conditions. And in this way the space
conditions are as it were considered somewhat in the light of hindrances,
whereby we are prevented from seeing what the objects in themselves truly
are. But if we take the statement simply as it is—that we apprehend by means
of space—then it is equally allowable to consider our space sense as a positive
means by which the mind grasps experience. (New Era 2)
If the properties of space are aspects not of outer reality but of our
perception, then the way to grasp things as they really are is by
transcending those aspects of “space sense” which are really “self
elements” (Hinton, New Era 21). Conversely, “[a]cquiring an intuitive
knowledge of four-dimensional space” can be thought of as “casting
out the self” (Hinton, Speculations 66). By learning the shapes of the
three-dimensional planes and sections of four-dimensional objects,
Hinton claims that he can “feel four-dimensional existence” (New Era
46). Note the role time plays in this process. Hinton grasps the “actual
appearances” of four-dimensional objects “not altogether, but as
models succeeding one another” (New Era 51). Employing the
“Flatland” analogy, he explains further:
Now, the two ways, in which a plane-being would apprehend a solid body,
would be by successive appearances to him of it as it passed through his
plane; and also by the different views of one and the same solid body which
he got by turning the body over, so that different parts of its surface come into
contact with his plane.
68 Simon de Bourcier
Each part of the ampler existence which passed through our space would seem
perfectly limited to us. We should have no indication of the permanence of its
existence. Were such a thought adopted, we should have to imagine some
stupendous whole, wherein all that has ever come into being or will come co-
exists. (Speculations 16)
Here Hinton finds that trying to imagine the Fourth Dimension leads
him inevitably to representing it as time, and, furthermore, to a vision
of past, present and future as, in the Time Traveller’s phrase, “fixed
and unalterable” (Wells 2005, 5).
Hinton’s work illustrates the impossibility of disentangling
speculation about a fourth dimension of space from the idea that time
is the Fourth Dimension. It is worth examining the emergence of
Wells’s use of this idea in detail, because it illustrates how this
interpretation is latent in Hinton’s work and crystallizes with a kind of
inevitability in Wells’s. Wells is the first to designate time the Fourth
Dimension in the period I am discussing. The Fourth Dimension was
Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day 69
When Wells’s Time Traveller returns from his journey into the
future, the narrator not only notes that he is “ghastly pale,” but also
repeatedly mentions his “limp” or “lameness” (Wells 2005, 13-14).
When Pynchon’s Dr. Rao twists himself through the Fourth
Dimension and returns transformed, the mathematical rationale is the
non-commutative transformations effected by Hamiltonian
Quaternions; but he also reappears “with his foot in a tub of
mayonnaise” (AtD 539), suggesting the one-footed lameness Ginzburg
notes in many of those who return from the other world, especially
since mayonnaise shortly afterwards nearly becomes the instrument of
Kit’s death (AtD 547). Like Plattner, Rao has undertaken a
transformative voyage into a world beyond the visible, and its
narration has a shape as much magical as mathematical.
Attempts have been made before to link the idea of the fourth dimension with
the idea of time. But in all the theories which attempted to link the idea of
time with the fourth dimension there was always the implication of some kind
of space in time and some sort of motion in that space. It is evident that those
72 Simon de Bourcier
who built these theories did not understand that, by retaining the possibility of
motion, they put forward demands for a new time, for no motion can take
place without time. As a result time moves in front of us, like our own
shadow, receding as we approach. (31)
From the point of view of eternity time in no way differs from the other lines
and extensions of space—length, breadth, and height. This means that just as
space contains things we do not see or, to put it differently, more things exist
than those we see, so in time ‘events’ exist before our consciousness comes
into contact with them, and they still exist after our consciousness has
withdrawn from them. Consequently, extension in time is extension into an
unknown space and, therefore, time is the fourth dimension of space. (33)
Yashmeen and Kit agree that to believe one can see “future, past, and
present […] all together,” as if from “outside,” is “to interpret the
fourth dimension as Time” (AtD 617). Ouspensky’s “point of view of
eternity” will be met again as Henri Bergson’s “position outside of
time which flows and endures” (Duration 112), but for Bergson such
a position means detachment from the real nature of time, rather than
a privileged point of view from which to apprehend it.
After everybody else had left the hall, Roswell and Merle sat looking at the
blackboard Minkowski had used.
“Three times ten to the fifth kilometers,” Roswell read, “equals the square
root of minus one seconds. That’s if you want that other expression over there
to be symmetrical in all four directions.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Merle protested, “that’s what he said, I’ve got
no idea what it means.”
“Well, it looks like we’ve got us a very large, say, astronomical distance
there, set equal to an imaginary unit of time. I think he called the equation
‘pregnant.’”
“Jake with me. He also said ‘mystic.’” (AtD 458)
“eternalism,” past and future exist just as surely as the present, and
only our limited consciousness prevents us from perceiving them
(Savitt 2.1). The idea that time is the Fourth Dimension is, I have
suggested, difficult to separate from the “block universe” model.
The block universe presents a number of difficulties: it seems to
exclude free will; it is difficult to describe in the tensed verbs of
natural language; and it requires an additional time dimension to
accommodate the movement of consciousness through the timeless
universe. In fact, attempts to banish time arguably reintroduce not just
one higher order of time, or hypertime, but an infinite regress of
hypertimes. This I have been calling “the hypertime argument.” Both
conduits through which time insinuates itself into the timeless block
universe—tensed language and hypertime—can be thought of as
issues of point of view. They arise if we try to describe or visualize
the universe and its extension in time from a point of view that is itself
timeless. The idea of an “Eternal Now” or “Eternal Present,” for
example, invokes both a point of view and time.
Minkowski’s four-dimensional space-time is for Ouspensky a
version of the block universe or “Eternal Now.” However, it is
precisely in relativity’s rejection of a single, absolute “Now” that the
Minkowski-Einstein model distinguishes itself from the static,
Parmenidean universe. Miliþ ýapek persuasively argues that the
“elimination of time” is—as Bergson claims—implicit in the classical
picture of space, time and causality (139), but that it is a wrong to
interpret the Minkowski-Einstein model as a spatialization of time
(164-68). Part of this tradition of spatializing time, and thereby
implicitly abolishing it (ýapek 161-62), is Pierre-Simon Laplace’s
classic statement of determinism:
An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and
the position of all things of which the world consists—supposing the said
intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis—would embrace
in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and
those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future,
like the past would be present to its eyes. (qtd. in ýapek 122)
Bibliography
Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity. Ed. Robin Durie. Trans.
Mark Lewis and Robin Durie. Manchester: Clinamen, 1999.
—. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness. 3rd ed. 1913. Trans. F. L. Pogson. Mineola, NY:
Dover, 2001.
ýapek, Miliþ. The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics.
Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961.
Ginzburg, Carlo. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. Trans.
Raymond Rosenthal. Ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Hutchinson
Radius, 1990.
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and Non-
Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1983.
Hinton, Charles H[oward]. Speculations on the Fourth Dimension. Ed.
Rudolf v. B. Rucker. New York: Dover, 1980.
—. A New Era of Thought. 1888. London: George Allen, 1910.
—. The Fourth Dimension. 1904. London: George Allen, 1912.
Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon.
Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp
Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Minkowski, Hermann. “Space and Time.” The Principle of Relativity.
H. A. Lorentz et al. Trans. W. Perrett and G.B. Jeffery. Mineola,
NY: Dover, 1952. 73-91.
Ouspensky, P. D. Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought; A
Key to the Enigmas of the World. Trans. E. Kadloubovsky and P.
D. Ouspensky. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Philmus, Robert M. Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science
Fiction from Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1970.
80 Simon de Bourcier
Inger H. Dalsgaard
Abstract: Like a number of his earlier novels and short stories, Thomas Pynchon's
Against the Day (2006) displays a concern for the ways in which mechanisms of
standardization, dominance and destruction appear woven into the very fabric of
existence, and it is sensitive towards the endurance and potentials of alternatives to
and exceptions from such machinery. Using as its point of departure Pynchon’s 1993
contribution (on sloth) to the New York Times Book Review series on the seven deadly
sins, this chapter explores some of the ways in which time in Against the Day
becomes a locus of control and resistance. Whereas sloth once constituted a sin
against God, within a United States modernizing to the tune of figures such as
Franklin and Hamilton it took on secular form as a sin against time—or at any rate
against the time that became ever more identified with clocks and equated to money:
an integral element of a mechanized industrial capitalist order. Against the Day takes
up tropes in which sloth is associated with imagination and creativity, with dreams,
death and ghosts, in the process adumbrating other states of existence that stand at
odds with or apart from dominant temporalities. Set in the very era during which the
commodification of standardized time was proceeding apace, the novel offsets this
process against the simultaneous elaboration—within literature, philosophy, mass
media, psychoanalysis and the natural sciences—of speculations concerning other
(dis)orders of time. Drawing on the musical figure of rubato, in which a standard
tempo is subject to expressive disregard, this chapter shows how Against the Day
explores these alternative ideas of time. By way of the suspension, distortion, reversal,
even neutralization of time, it argues, individuals and groups, fantastic contraptions
and anachronistic events in the novel articulate imaginative forms of resistance to life
lived by clockwork. In the process, they also enact Pynchon’s critique of an industrial
capitalism bent on colonizing and subordinating not simply the material world but
also the very fabric of space and time. Ultimately, however, the extent to which the
novel’s scoring for a rubato of the mind extends to its orchestration of a more public,
political counterpoint in time is left suspended in Against the Day’s chronometric air.
The very first word in the title of Against the Day is a preposition of
direction, one that allows for many of those ideas of resistance or
turning, even reversal, which we frequently detect in Thomas
82 Inger H. Dalsgaard
Pynchon’s texts. In this case, because against premodifies day the title
reads like a bold statement about time travel, especially the kind that
goes against the clock-wise, usually irreversible, forward movement
of days and takes us into the past. Against the Day does not, on the
surface of things, announce anything about going forward into that
good night, or moving towards the light of a new day; it has us facing
the other way from the very start. However, though the book is about
the direction of time, it is also, when you come to the end of the text
and look back towards its beginning, about spiritual direction—the
two very last words of the book being, after all, “toward grace” (AtD
1085).
This essay compares Pynchon’s discussion of time and its
changing association with different realms of mind and spirit as it
appears in Against the Day and in an earlier piece of writing, “Nearer,
My Couch, to Thee,” in which Pynchon associates the manipulation of
time with changing levels of spiritual distress or anesthetization in the
USA. Furthermore, this essay explains how the ideas of time travel
and dream-time present in Pynchon’s 2006 novel were already being
rehearsed in his 1993 article. In it, he initially identifies a medieval
loss of spiritual direction, acedia, which also opens up avenues of
what I would term creative or resistant “time travel.” This is found
either in the shape of ghosts, who travel against the direction of time
from the past to the present (be they the old King in Hamlet or Webb
Traverse in Against the Day) or in the form of daydreams (like those
of Melville’s life-denying Bartleby) which challenge the productive
but dispiriting use of time for which Benjamin Franklin—and the
USA which he helped found—came to stand according to Pynchon’s
article. This essay shows how Pynchon’s writing exposes and
challenges not only a dominant world view of time as linear and
always forward-moving but also bolsters earlier critiques of the
orthogonal and capitalist perception of time as a resource to be
controlled and exploited. Those characters who dream and loaf or seek
to get out of the cycle of life are in essence time-travelers accessing
different ways in which to resist the tyranny of time-management and
mind-control. Against the Day, as I shall go on to show, develops and
adds to the variety of forms and methods of time travel of earlier
Pynchon texts also in more traditionally recognizable ways. Examples
of both science fiction modes of mechanical time travel as well as
scientific concepts of temporal changes, which align themselves with
Clock Time and Creative Resistance in Against the Day 83
where we might feed, uncritically, committing the six other deadly sins in
parallel, eating too much, envying the celebrated, coveting merchandize,
lusting after images, angry at the news, perversely proud of whatever distance
we may enjoy between our couches and what appears on the screen. (“Nearer”
57)
Pynchon’s texts play with different types of direction (and the lack
or perversion thereof), be they temporal, spatial, existential or
spiritual. In “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” he argues that a particular
transformation of sloth took place when capitalism redirected man’s
focus from the spiritual towards the material. Sloth evolved in a
secular direction when encountering the United States of America at a
time when the early republic was “consolidating itself as a Christian
capitalist state” (Pynchon, “Nearer” 3). This meant that “Sloth was no
longer so much a sin against God or spiritual good as against a
particular sort of time, uniform, one-way, in general not reversible—
that is, against clock time” (“Nearer” 3). The pursuit of faith was
being replaced by the pursuit of happiness in the form of money, with
which time had an ever clearer exchange rate of which writers are
presumed to be particularly aware (“Nearer” 3). The early eighteenth-
century Hamiltonian idea of industry—the “American System” which
combined domestic manufacture and internal improvement—needed
“first-generation factory workers” to be regulated (Luxon 259;
Gutman 21). For the factory system to work, it was necessary to teach
potential workers of an industrializing nation to recognize and obey
the same time frame. Only thus could factory owners count on
workers getting up in the morning and reporting at the factory door at
the same time every day. Humans were being standardized along with
time itself. From the mid-nineteenth century on, the growing network
of railways and the need to run efficient supply lines for industrial
production and consumption also fuelled a movement towards
standardized time, which succeeded in systematizing the arbitrary or
subjective measures of time existing in the USA up to 1883
(Trachtenberg 59-60; Stephens 17-20).
Clock time was not docilely accepted by the intelligentsia.
Bergson’s durée, gravitational time dilation in Einstein’s general
theory of relativity, and temporal experiments in modernist literature
offered resistance to uniform concepts of time. Today we rarely
question the mechanical regulation of time, but the text of Gravity’s
Rainbow reminds us that time is “an artificial resource to begin with”
(GR 412), which can be constructed and manipulated by the System
demanding “that ‘productivity’ and ‘earnings’ keep on increasing with
time” (GR 412). The System lays waste to the rest of the world by
removing “vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate
fraction showing a profit,” due to which “sooner or later [the System]
Clock Time and Creative Resistance in Against the Day 87
must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more
than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls
all along the chain of life” (GR 412). These lines suggest that the
economic necessity installed in our consciousnesses along with clock
time will lead to a system crash, the one also described as having
happened in the future by Mr. Ace in Against the Day, and which has
Trespassers returning to the past looking for old new energy sources
to tap into and, presumably, suck dry (AtD 415-17).
In “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” Benjamin Franklin is an agent of
that all-devouring System, and “Poor Richard” is an early
spokesperson for this sense of time and the demand for productivity.
Sloth had been a capital sin in the spirituality of the Middle Ages, but
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became a capitalist sin.
Time is money, and time not used to create wealth therefore has to be
tithed back. Sloth—or work-shyness—simply piles up a budget deficit
which will have to be recouped eventually. Franklin, Pynchon claims,
saw non-fiction as the model for productive life implying that
American society could afford no time for “speculations, dreams,
fantasies, fiction” (“Nearer” 57). Nonetheless, some writers, of which
Melville’s Bartleby is one, steal time from the capitalist project in
order to daydream. In the passive sorrow of Melville’s scrivener we
see active resistance, a civil disobedience “right in the middle of
robberbaron capitalism” (Pynchon, “Nearer” 3) directed against the
logic of trading one’s time and energy for “a few miserable years of
broken gleanings” (AtD 1000). A more extreme mode of sloth as
resistance to “outrageous fortune” is death in the form of suicide.
Anarchist bombings actively intend to destroy the railroad or deprive
mine owners of their lives, or at least their property (AtD 84-85).
Some Hereros in Gravity’s Rainbow turn away from life, and their
deaths, intended to deprive colonizers in Südwest of “laborers for the
construction or the mining” (GR 317), turn their dying into civil
disobedience. Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” (Melville 80) and
Hamlet’s “not to be” (III.1 56) are literary expressions of the
relationship between existential sloth and the end of life. Hamlet
eventually chooses an activist strategy to end the rotten system around
him, leaving behind him a wake of death almost worthy of an
anarchist suicide bomber. Bartleby’s resistance to the systems he is in,
and to necessity itself, consists instead of his turning away from life.
88 Inger H. Dalsgaard
returning from the future (AtD 415). Niels Bohr is present at the
Conference in 1895, at which point in chronological clock time he
would have been about ten years of age, unless he travelled back in
time as an adult. Participants appear not just to travel across the river
of time but to bilocate to Candlebrow insofar as time travel is almost
always also space travel: after all, bilocation is also defined as a
“‘Translation of the body, sort of lateral resurrection, if you like’”
(AtD 431). The conference participants are both inside and outside the
linear progression of time in the sense that they may have died but are
never seen to age as the conferences converge “to a form of Eternal
Return” (AtD 409). This sounds much like the definition of a ghost—
such as Ryder Thorn whose Trespasser status is downgraded from
time traveller to eternally returning ghost (AtD 555)—but these “were
solid bodily returns, mind you, nothing figurative or plasmic about
them” (AtD 410). This is not a case of haunting but of resurrection
inside the “precinct of the enchanted campus” (AtD 410). However,
like the rubato, this time and space travel is also only a localized and
limited disruption of the laws of time and space. It is bounded by the
perimeter of Candlebrow University and by the time at which the
conferences take place.
The fourth dimension offers another, scientific option for time
travel.2 Vector and quaternion theories dominate the text, and
especially the latter seems to promise the possibility of reversing
directions along vectors and to open up the realm of the imaginary.
Mathematics and physics are not just scientific expressions of what is
often seen as a clockwork realm. They also seem to provide a space
for creativity and daydreaming. Ever since Edison’s clever media spin
on behalf of innovation, popular imagination often has it that
paradigm shifts can be brought on by dreams. Accordingly, Kit
receives “one of those mathematicians’ dreams that surface now and
then in the folklore” (AtD 566). Science also inspires practical ideas
for alternative modes of time travel. At Candlebrow, Merle Rideout
and Roswell Bounce pick up the idea of Minkowskian space-time and
think of ways to rearrange space to alter the “one-way vector ‘time’”
(AtD 457). They ponder the effect gravity has on time—as did
Einstein in 1916—but also the effect time has on gravity: ideas which
eventually lead them to develop their Integroscope. Theorists who
paved the way for general relativity, such as Riemann, appear along
with the fathers of quantum mechanics. The uncertainty principle is
90 Inger H. Dalsgaard
Chums have resisted sloth and made the effort to provide either a
salvage raft for the temporally displaced or an anarchist haven.
Earlier, Chick had a vision of the inside of a “giant airship of the
future, crowded with resurrected bodies of all ages [...] a throng of
visitors [...] who must somehow be fed, clothed, sheltered” (AtD 413),
and victims of a red scare thought that “there might exist a place of
refuge, up in the fresh air, out over the sea, some place all the
Anarchists could escape to” (AtD 372). In my reading, this chance to
do good, at some expense to one’s own leisure, comfort or sloth, is not
what the Inconvenience finally comes to stand for. The ship may have
“grown as large as a small city” with “neighborhoods,” “parks,” and
also “slum conditions” (AtD 1084), but none of these seem populated.
The airship is a closed family community which stays aloft, striking
outsiders with blindness and members of the crew who return to earth
with “mnemonic frostbite” (AtD 1084). In other words, the
engagement of the kind allegedly valued in “Nearer, My Couch, to
Thee” might be personal and spiritual but certainly not public and
political. And what is the state of spiritual direction on board? The
Inconvenience is no longer on a voyage of pilgrimage in the world
outside. Instead it is “its own destination” (AtD 1085). “Sure, but is it
Sloth” (“Nearer” 57)? The Chums may have turned their ship away
from the world, but not necessarily in sorrow or rejection of the gift of
life. The Inconvenience teems with living souls and is “clamorous as a
nonstop feast day,” and “good unsought and uncompensated” is
“approaching” and “invisible” (AtD 1085). Though it may be unclear
(except to the individual reader’s own mind) exactly who acts as
granting authority, grace is available in the future. However, it is
attained actively—by asking or by flying toward it—rather than by
waiting and hoping.
Notes
1
The couch to which Pynchon’s title refers is one on which day-dreaming can
channel spiritual energy into creative writing or the couch in front of the TV, whose
Clock Time and Creative Resistance in Against the Day 95
program channels threatens to reverse that process. It is not Freud’s therapeutic couch
where the day-dreams, which published creative writers are compelled to share with
us, are exposed as neurotic wish-fulfillment, childish regression or the result of a
“mental situation which once more undoes the contrast between play and reality”
(Freud 144).
2
Simon De Bourcier covers this extensively elsewhere in this collection.
3
See Clément Lévy and Rod Taveira in this collection.
4
In 1895, Louis Lumière’s Charcuterie Méchanique runs film backward: “a mass of
broken glass ascending through space and reforming on a table into a perfect original”
(Kerns 30), Cubism in reverse.
Bibliography
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data
of Consciousness. Trans. F.L. Pogson. 1889. London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1910.
Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special and General Theory. Trans.
Robert W. Lawson. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920.
Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud. Vol. IX. Eds. James Strachey and Anna Freud. 1908.
London: Hogarth Press, 1959.
Gribbin, John. In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and
Reality. 1984. London: Black Swan, 1993.
Gutman, Herbert G. Work, Culture & Society in Industrializing
America. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
Kerns, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962. 3. ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Luxon, Norval Neil. Niles’ Weekly Register: News Magazine of the
Nineteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1947.
Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street.”
Billy Budd, Sailor & Other Stories. Ed. Harold Beaver. 1967.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. 59-99.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. London: Picador, 1975.
96 Inger H. Dalsgaard
Toon Staes
and mindless hours of the day” (GR 177). Yet Slade goes on to claim
that “Marcuse’s warnings notwithstanding, Pynchon peoples his novel
with freaks who do manage small insights even as they imitate more
authoritarian power structures” (192). Of course the epithet “freaks”
already suggests that within the present dispensation, those who refuse
to conform to Things As They Are cannot be taken seriously.
Moreover, while this dismissal typifies the self-validating impetus of
contemporary society, the resulting one-dimensional worldview is
precisely what both Marcuse and Pynchon indict. Therefore it is
useful to argue that Marcuse’s concept of intellectual subversion does
inform a possible reading of both Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the
Day. This would mean that by sidestepping the closed white version
of reality without indulging in solipsistic utopianism, both novels
narrativize the gap between the actual and the potential dimensions of
reality in order “to demonstrate the liberating tendencies within the
established society” (Marcuse 254). Whereas in the wholly
rationalized scientific worldview the actual and the potential have
become subsumed to the single rational variant of the world as it is—a
grammatical ambiguity I will pick up later on—Marcuse argues that
only when this gap is made apparent, individual possibilities for
autonomy and qualitative change can be restored. As late capitalism
keeps itself in motion, it truly seems to herald the end of history. Yet
it will appear that Pynchon and Marcuse both appeal for a tentative
merger of “truth” and “fiction” in order to understand reality as part of
a broad historical process.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon links the convergence of science,
capital and technology in modern society to a specific social project:
the cooptation of the metaphysical, or the charismatic, in the realm of
quantification and therefore of exploitation. The newly emerging
corporate state symbolized in the “octopus IG” (GR 284) takes on the
guise of an all-encompassing sublime network that is in total control
of all facets of society, and in which individual responsibility is
infinitely deferred. All characters that are directly involved in the
novel’s action can only vaguely comprehend the system as “Them,”
and They control Us. This labyrinthine rational hierarchy even
stretches so far, as Inger Dalsgaard makes clear, that its actual
participants are wholly interchangeable and insignificant. The White
Visitation’s manipulative behaviorist Edward Pointsman is clearly one
more cog in Their all-encompassing structure, but even SS Captain
100 Toon Staes
Pynchon writes that being able “to believe two contradictory truths at
the same time” (xi)—as long as the center of meaning remains unfixed
and therefore the difference between actual and potential “truth”
remains apparent—might allow us to achieve a better awareness of
our own condition rather than to passively accept the given
organization of society as some larger plot beyond our understanding.
Hence, as Pynchon exemplifies with some famous examples, the
ability to “transcend opposites” and believe in something and in its
contradiction at the same time, or in other words the ability to include
middles, can also be liberating: “For Walt Whitman […] it was being
large and containing multitudes, for American aphorist Yogi Berra it
was coming to a fork in the road and taking it, for Schrödinger’s cat, it
was the quantum paradox of being alive and dead at the same time”
(Foreword x). All three examples can in some way be connected to
Against the Day. Moreover, this ability to “doublethink” is precisely
what determines the willingness of the characters in that novel to
accept their role in the rational hierarchy of the day. That is, as
Marcuse argues, “[a]ll liberation depends on the consciousness of
servitude” (7).
For one, this point is illustrated in Against the Day when the
detective Lew Basnight discovers that the professors Renfrew and
Werfner “were [in fact] one and the same person […] [who] somehow
had the paranormal power to be in at least two places at the same
time” (AtD 685) As Lew starts digging into the nature of bilocation,
he learns to transcend the binaries and understand that both “sides” of
the geopolitical sphere are really driven by the same will to power.
And “[o]nce he was willing to accept the two professors as a single
person, Lew felt curiously released, as if from a servitude he had
never fully understood the terms of anyway” (AtD 685). Initially Lew
feels “the desolate stomach-spasms of exile,” understanding that he
had “tumbled early” into some official version of History (AtD 688-
89). Yet apparently, he now also has the capacity to see beyond things
as they merely “are.” That much becomes clear once again when Lew
reappears later on in the novel, bumping into Dally Rideout at a party
in London. After finding out that Renfrew and Werfner are merely
separate manifestations of the same underlying principle, it appears
that Lew has discovered “a level of ‘reality’ at which nations, like
money in the bank, are merged and indistinguishable” (AtD 903). This
level of reality is precisely the insight that history is not necessarily
108 Toon Staes
that which merely “is” and that which “ought to be.” Once Colonel
Auberon Halfcourt reaches this insight in the novel, he is no longer
“the servant of greed and force [for whom] the only form of love […]
was indistinguishable from commerce” he once used to be (AtD 974).
In that sense, Halfcourt has not discovered Shambhala as a real place,
but as another type of departure: “the act of leaving the futureless
place where [he] was” (AtD 975).
Negative thought thus engenders some form of “mirror-symmetry
about departure,” not a single straight line of “possibilities […] being
progressively narrowed” but “a denial of inevitability, an opening out
from the point of embarkation, beginning the moment all lines are
singled up […] an expanding of possibility” (AtD 821) The ability to
see the whole range of possible meanings beyond the official
historical narrative is precisely the intellectual subversion required to
step outside teleological history and critically assess the given reality,
both from within and against the day. In a way, just as the “Yogi” in
the text with directions to Shambhala is as much a real as a fictional
character, this ability requires the necessary awareness that all
interpretations of history can be viewed as both real and fictional. And
as illustrated with reference to Marcuse’s philosophy of grammar and
the multiple worlds in Pynchon’s novels, such a willingly held fiction
does not need to attest to relativism or solipsism, but allows for
various approaches to the unattainable core of reality, a continuous
form of Holy-Center-Approaching.
The unfixed center of meaning allows for the ability to believe in
something that both is and is not “real,” which is precisely what it
means to contain multitudes. And when Lew remembers bilocation
toward the end of the novel, he remembers that “long ago he had even
found himself now and then going off on these forks in the road.
Detours from what he still thought of as his official, supposed-to-be
life” (AtD 1049-50). Nonetheless, since returning to the U.S.—
precisely the country which is typified in Gravity’s Rainbow as “a
nation of starers” (GR 374)—these detours from Lew’s official life
had tapered off and stopped “as if they had been no more than vivid
dreams” (AtD 1050).
It is no coincidence, then, that the final scene of Gravity’s Rainbow
is set in an American movie theatre, where the final rocket is already
reaching “its last immeasurable gap” (GR 760) above the heads of the
passive audience. And as the narrator is now addressing his readers
110 Toon Staes
Bibliography
Dalsgaard, Inger H. “Terrifying Technology: Pynchon’s Warning
Myth of Today.” Approach and Avoid: Essays on Gravity’s
Rainbow. Ed. Luc Herman. Pynchon Notes 42-43 (1998): 91-110.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder In
Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1990.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of
Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Vintage, 2000.
—. V. London: Vintage, 2000.
—. Foreword. 1984. By George Orwell. New York: Penguin Books,
2003. v-xxv.
Slade, Joseph W. “Religion, Psychology, Sex, and Love in Gravity’s
Rainbow.” Approaches To Gravity’s Rainbow. Ed. Charles Clerc.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983. 153-98.
Imperfect Circles: Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from
the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow
Ali Chetwynd
Abstract: This paper reconsiders the rarely uncontested consensus that the core
rocket-arc metaphor in Gravity’s Rainbow has to be read as a symbol of rigid
binarism, of fall latent in rise, death latent in birth, and thus that figures associated
with, or whose trajectories follow this arc are to be associated with entropy and the
novel’s more destructive forces. Instead, it proposes that the “Perfect Rocket Arc”
discussed by pessimistic figures in the novel is in fact only one way of reading the
flight path. Taking into account the distorting effects of resistance on the flight path of
non-spherical objects, as much of Gravity’s Rainbow does, gives us a different, less
perfect, more ‘ecologically valid’ asymmetrical rocket arc. This paper addresses the
many different thematic implications that arise from this shift in perspective, most
notably the importance that it gives to the gravitational power of centre. Most extant
readings of the novel see Gravity’s Rainbow as engaged in a standard postmodern
project of de-centering, and the “holy centres” it discusses as avatars of outdated
delusion. Instead, this paper proposes that the novel closely associates the rocket
centre with a zero-membrane between negative and positive realms, and with the
movements of electric current, and thus that rather than being an indefinitely
postponed and fallacious centre, the rocket is a crossable, operant centre that plays a
fundamental role in the outward-looking movements of the novel’s later pages. The
paper redraws previously mapped flight paths, interpreting the move from
symmetrical Rocket Arc to an asymmetrical rocket arc, to a spiral approach to centre,
to a vortical passage through centre. It posits, and begins to answer, the question of
just what it might mean to read a Pynchon for whom figurative centres do valid
political work.
seen the true profile of the Rocket warped and travestied, a rocket of wax,
humped like a dolphin at around caliber 2, necking down towards the tail
[…]—and seen how his own face might be plotted, not in light but in net
forces acting upon it from the flow of Reich and coercion and love it moved
through … and known that it must suffer the same degradation, as death will
warp face to skull…. (GR 422-23)
The two rocket arcs are similarly synthesized earlier in the Pökler
chapter, when we hear how “[t]he Serpent that announces ‘the World
is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally returning,’ is to be
delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking
and not giving back…” (GR 412). Here as for Pökler, there is the
implication that an idealized cycle will be the aegis under which a
practical system must become centripetal and “sooner or later must
crash to its death” (GR 412). This establishes that the distinction to be
made is not just between spiral descent from orbit to centre and an
ideal arc that launched from earth thus crashes to earth, but between
that spiral approach to a gravitational point and a full circle/cycle
around a gravitational point. In order to begin differentiating the
implications of the asymmetrical path, it is necessary to view these
images of the rocket subject to gravity as parallel with the imagery of
the Rocket itself as a centre of gravity—not only the object travelling
along its various launched parabolae, but also the gravitational force
by which these curves are dictated. While Rocket-determinism is
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 119
before the rocket becomes operational, he says “‘[w]e’ll all use it,
someday, to leave the earth. To transcend. […] Borders won’t mean
anything. We’ll have all outer space…’” (GR 400).3 Meanwhile, as
the specter of the rocket takes over his life, he finds refuge by taking
his alleged daughter’s rocket-dreams of space travel and regressing
into them himself—“[…] sometimes Ilse whispered to him bedtime
stories about the moon she would live on, till he had transferred
silently to a world that wasn’t this one […] in which flight was as
natural as breathing” (GR 410).4 Earlier on, pre-rocketwork, Pökler
had hoped that Leni might “carry him away to a place where Destiny
couldn’t reach. As if it were gravity” (GR 162). Here, the link between
final destination, struggle for volition and gravitational pull that
structures Pökler’s later rocketry chapter is introduced, but what is
most remarkable is that when this relationship to gravity is directly
recapitulated in the rocketry chapter, the operational rocket has fully
taken the place of abstract destiny at the gravitational centre. In an
earlier passage with Leni, Pökler ponders that “real flight and dreams
of flight go together” (GR 159). Harking back to the pun of the Herero
passage, it is clear that in his dreams that stay the specter of the
rocket, Pökler is in “real flight” from his own agency. Where the
symmetrical 360-degree rim arc represents passivity in determined
orbit, a spiral pull towards the centre demands volition, either a quest
towards the centre or a striving away from it.
drags him along on the Wheel and thus denies him agency. The latter
certainly endorses Mendelson’s view that the “centripetal” Modernist
concern with selfhood finds its Pynchonian analogy in the determinist
Perfect Arc (4, 11). However, such a reading cannot provide a positive
account of the subsequent diffusing of Slothrop’s personality into a
“scattered” (GR 712) spirit for the counterforce. I want to suggest that
this scattering comes neither from a happy abandonment of all pursuit
nor from entropic attachment to the arc, but is a consequence of his
approach to a gravitational rocket-centre. Those “purposive” choices
Mendelson correctly identifies as the final offering of the book are to
be found not “outside” the wheel, but somewhere along that line to
and through the centre.
The opposition between point and wheel persists throughout the
novel. While Slothrop is taken away on the Wheel, his self is
shrinking to a point; later, as he and Närrisch are “Holy-Centre-
Approaching” (GR 508), we are made aware for the first time that
Slothrop’s shape of self is widening—he “has begun to thin, to
scatter” (GR 509). In the Pökler section on the “rocket of wax,” we
have seen that a spiral approach to a centre has a distorting effect on
physical bodies, and here it seems to be distending Slothrop’s once
‘point’-like sense of self. Gilbert-Rolfe and Johnston point out,
regarding the form of the mandala, that a circle around a central cross
is “a juxtaposition of open and closed limits” (74). That central cross,
modeled by both Slothrop and the Herero (notably the two perceiving
subjects who approach rather than flee the zero rocket centre) on the
Rocket’s fins, posits the Rocket not only as a centre, but also as a
point facing isotropically outward, and hence as a possible opening
force.5
The relationship between central point and circumscribing wheel
opposes opening and closing, generation and limitation, throughout
the text. That well-quoted passage about cusps and cathedral spires
which leads into Pökler’s chapter offers a series of images on points
as meetings of arc. The last point described, however, is not on an arc
but “the infinitely dense point from which the present Universe
expanded” (GR 396). The list culminates in contrast, with a vision of
point as centre, and point as creative, expansive centre at that. “Do all
these points imply, like the Rocket’s, an annihilation?” we are asked
(GR 396). The ending of this passage, though, would allow us to
answer in the affirmative only if we imagined annihilation and primal
122 Ali Chetwynd
The Vortex11 is a shape that takes the spiral’s outline and allows it a
mirror version. Whereas a spiral has no symmetry, a vortex passes
through a central point and recapitulates the spiral on the other side in
the opposite direction. As such, it is one shape that allows us to
reconcile the ideas of zero as a central point, and zero as a boundary
on an interface between two states.12 In terms of Gravity’s Rainbow,
this allows the zero point of a vortex to be the point that offers
Mendelson’s “turn away” from “dead ends” and towards “purposive
choices” (13). As Daniel Albright says in his book Quantum Poetics:
“A vortex is a turning, and it is specifically the kind of turning in
which something turns into something else” (177). The last sections of
the novel, with their numerous recapitulated images of rebirth, of
return, of rising, of reversal, are turnings, and turnings into something
else. Moreover, they are “drawn” into this turn by the momentary
charisma of the Rocket’s launch.
At the end of Gravity’s Rainbow the Rocket is a site of integration
and of outward potential. As it becomes fully identified with gravity,
the Rocket’s significance as centre shifts from a terminality to be fled
to a crucible in which dead matter is revivified, drawing objects
inward to unite and re-mold them. Rocket launching day is “a
Collection Day, and the garbage trucks are all heading north toward
the Ventura Freeway, a catharsis of dumpsters all hues, shapes and
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 127
Notes
1
In terms of focus on the imagery of circle, wheel and rim, Thomas Moore’s The
Style of Connectedness is richer than Hite’s book, indeed truly comprehensive, but
does not deal in much depth with other circular metaphors.
2
It is a pleasingly elegant irony that what complicates the vision of the Perfect Rocket
Arc as a perfect analogue of entropic symmetry should itself be an entropic factor like
air-resistance.
3
The first section of the novel uses a great deal of gravitational rim imagery in its
distinctions between two spiritual worlds. This is particularly true of the passages on
“Outer Radiance” (e.g. GR 150). The idea of gravitational pull constituting a spherical
boundary layer that separates two states of existence is relevant to the latter part of
this paper.
4
In this section, the word ‘someday’ that characterized Pökler’s conversation with
Leni years earlier is repeated: “‘Someday,’ Pökler told her. ‘Perhaps someday to the
moon’” (GR 410). His dreams of escape constitute an indefinite target perpetually
postponed that correlates with the absent-centre structures of Gravity’s Rainbow
proposed by Hite, David Seed and others. However, as will be shown when I look at
labyrinth imagery, there are different centers for Pökler that are pressing and not
indefinitely postponable. Indeed, to be very literal, what is absent or perpetually
delayed for him is that escape which is outside the rim, and which a present
metaphorical gravitational centre denies him.
5
The text also contains mandala images that are associated with the forces of
determinism, such as Jamf’s fob (GR 413). In that instance the outer circle is bent into
straight lines, evoking the closing off of possibility, the delineation of rim-like
130 Ali Chetwynd
boundaries. It seems that there is a contrast between mandalas that establish new
boundaries and those that encourage movement towards the central ‘open limit.’
6
This negative tone to labyrinth imagery is one thing that makes it hard for me to
accede to the idea of Pynchon as a committed deconstructionist. As opposed to J.
Hillis Miller’s notions of labyrinth, especially his approving comment that each and
every text leads us to confront an “aporia […] that blind alley, vacant of any
minotaur” (112) at the heart of the text, Pynchon’s labyrinths certainly reflect a
different view; the centers of Pynchon’s labyrinths contain minotaurs referred to as
such. For Miller, text is labyrinth, authentic text performs labyrinth, and this is its
virtue. For Pynchon, it seems, labyrinth is some kind of inauthentic insertion between
experience and knowledge, self-awareness and agency, in other words between “text”
and the action it could prompt.
7
Although it is far too large an argument to engage with fully here, it is worth
considering what this labyrinth imagery might mean for the numerous readings of
Pynchon that see him endorse Derridean notions about the perpetual absence of
centre. David Seed for example writes, not specifically about the rocket, of “an absent
centre which paradoxically by virtue of its absence still attracts characters towards it”
(188). While it is certainly possible to think of absence attracting action as a vacuum
pump draws in water, it makes less physical sense to consider action motivated
outward by absence. Central force in Gravity’s Rainbow does not always attract, and
as with Pökler the action it induces is not always towards it. To exert a consistent
influence, as does the central pull of the rocket on Pökler, implies that even if the
centre cannot be touched or marked or notated, it is still present through its
measurable and unshifting influence. Pynchon makes it clear that mathematical
calculation of centre is not a guarantee of its objective existence (GR 700).
Nevertheless, this calculable centre remains practically useful in terms of its dictating
and our predicting action, just like the concept of centre in Gravity’s Rainbow as a
whole.
8
To hark back to the passage in which rocket arc and rocket centre are first linked,
Pökler’s thoughts here bind his own self-perception with earlier narratorial
speculation about the Rocket; the shape whose centre is a Brennschluss “is most
likely an interface between one order of things and another” (GR 302). Pökler’s wish
to establish a rest-point at interface-zero is in this respect a further rejection of an
already authorially hinted opportunity to change, a further subscription to the “order”
under which he suffers.
9
It could actually be argued that this last movement past Enzian is a change-enabling
crossing for Tchitcherine, and that to have “passed his brother by, at the edge of
evening […] without knowing it” (GR 735) is analogous to Slothrop’s unknowing
movement past/through the rocket launch site. This would be endorsed by the
similarity between our last reported action of Tchitcherine going “back to his young
girl beside the stream.” (GR 735) and the kind of outwardly directed compassion
(again, see Michael Harris’s paper in this collection) enacted by Slothrop after his
turn.
10
Hite’s consideration of Holy Center as a figure only of revelation (22) is interesting
for this topic. Again focusing on structure as innately teleological, she does not
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 131
consider that Holy Center may be a boundary between inward and outward
movement, essentially a point of change that is less important as revelation in itself
than the future its change makes possible.
11
There are numerous conceptions of vortex in different scientific fields where all
that is meant is a spiral with depth and motion. Toroidal vortices, on the other hand,
which are commonly studied in aerodynamics, operate on the lines I am describing
here. Certain quasi-mystical conceptions of energy and aether, of the sort that
Pynchon seems to have been interested in throughout his career, rely on the same
vortical model.
12
It is worth bearing in mind that electrons are often considered to be vortices. Given
the preponderance of electrical flow imagery in Gravity’s Rainbow, this notion of the
vortex as the vehicle of constant electrical flow between positive and negative
charge—the vehicle that makes electrical circuit possible—resonates with the ideas of
vortical structure I discuss here. I omit a full consideration of those resonances
because they are not directly contingent upon the circular geometries of the novel.
Bibliography
Albright, Daniel. Quantum Poetics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, and John Johnston. “Gravity’s Rainbow and
the Spiral Jetty, Part 1.” October 1 (Spring 1976): 65-85.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Walter Pater, a Partial Portrait.” Daedalus 105:1
(Winter 1976): 97-113.
Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983.
Mendelson, Edward. “Introduction.” Pynchon: A Collection of
Critical Essays. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1978. 1-15.
Moore, Thomas. The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and
Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987.
Schaub, Thomas. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1981.
Seed, David. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1988.
Slade, Joseph W. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Peter Lang Press,
1990.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Vintage,
2000.
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s
Graphic Impulse
Rodney Taveira
I take it that Proust’s great theme is not memory but rather our incapacity to
experience things ‘for the first time’; the possibility of genuine experience
(Erfahrung) only the second time round (by writing rather than memory). This
means that if we stare at our immediate experience (Erlebnis) head-on, with a
will towards assimilating it all at once, without mediation, we lose it, but the
real thing comes in, as it were, at the corner of the eye, and while we are
consciously intent on something else. (32n10)
At the corner of our eye is that point of contrast between the light and
the dark, that forever collapsible, unresolved limit where opposites
exist in apposition. The photographic technique of contre-jour
exploits this undecidability between two ostensibly opposite states:
the camera is pointed directly at a source of light, the intervening
figure is registered in sharp contrast that elides detail, and it
concentrates the image on the play of borders, focusing on shape and
line.1
Pynchon employs contre-jour on numerous occasions in Against
the Day; one example among many is the disappearance of Alonzo
Meatman:
Around the edges of his form, a strange magenta-and-green aura had begun to
flicker, as if from a source somewhere behind him, growing more intense as
he himself faded from view, until seconds later nothing was left but a kind of
stain in the air where he had been, a warping of the light as through ancient
window-glass. The bottle he had been holding, having remained behind, fell
to the floor with a crash that seemed curiously prolonged. (AtD 410-11)
“Of course it’s to do with Time,” Tancredi frowning and intense […],
“everything that we imagine is real, living and still, thought and hallucinated,
is all on the way from being one thing to being another, from past to Future,
the challenge to us is to show as much of the passage as we can, given the
damnable stillness of paint.” (AtD 586)
Serial killing has its place in a public culture in which addictive violence has
become not merely a collective spectacle but one of the crucial sites where
private desire and public fantasy cross. The convening of the public around
scenes of violence—the rushing to the scene of the accident, the milling
around the point of impact—has come to make up a wound culture: the public
fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a
collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound. (1)
This happens not only at the level of the human and the human body,
but also in the space in which this tearing open takes place. And so
readers witness the photos of limbless men in field hospitals,
“reproduced not in simple black and white but varying shades of
green” (AtD 968), the crowds at the execution of Blinky Morgan (AtD
66), the State-sanctioned serial murder of World War I, the
unthinkably flattened and recombined figures of movement in Futurist
paintings, and the curiously Cubist killer career of Deuce Kindred.
The serial killer as a definable category of person, or as Seltzer
puts it, as a “career option” (1), becomes possible toward the end of
the nineteenth century, with the solidification of industrial modernity
and the emergence of new technologies that triggered the movement
of people around urban centers, setting up a strangely crowded space
of anonymity in which Georg Simmel identified an “intensification of
emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and
internal stimuli” (325). This led to people’s need for new ways to
work out who they were and how they fitted in, which in turn led to
“ordinary” people performing extraordinary acts of violence to answer
these questions. Deuce Kindred is one of them:
140 Rodney Taveira
Deuce had been one of these Sickly Youths who […] had absorbed enough
early insult to make inevitable some later re-emission, at a different psychical
frequency—a fluorescence of vindictiveness. He thought of it usually as the
need to prevail over every challenge that arose regardless of scale, from
cutting a deck to working a rock face. (AtD 193)
What was it, exactly, that had started in to ringing so inside Lake, tolling,
bone deep, invisible in the night…was it the way his face that morning, even
with the smoke in the room, had slowly emerged into clarity? Like an old
memory, older than herself, something that’d happened before, that she knew
now she’d have to go through again…. (AtD 262)
part of the picture is what Boccioni has decided to do with the vertical
window frame that is situated behind the woman’s head. Instead of
stopping the vertical lines when they reach her hair, Boccioni
continues to draw the lines down into her face, where they intersect
with the horizontals, resulting in a new and singular density in the
picture, like that left by Alonzo’s disappearance, “a kind of stain in
the air where he had been, a warping of the light as through ancient
window-glass” (AtD 411). This plays out how the subject gives into
its environment, a disavowal of the eye’s ability to establish the
borderline, a mimetic representation of the milieu Boccioni had before
him, or the picture in his mind, when he made the drawing. When
faced with the apposition of different states of light—the frame of the
glass window that changes the outside light as it passes through—
Boccioni was met with, gave into, and then represented, to use a
single-sentence paragraph from Roger Caillois’s discussion of
mimesis, “a temptation by space” (28).
within the malodorous Grotto of the Selves… Something that knows, unarguably as it
knows Flesh is sooner or later Meat
—Mason & Dixon
“Some define Hell,” says Tancredi, “as the absence of God, and that is the
least we may expect of the infernal machine—that the bourgeoisie be deprived
of what most sustains them, their personal problem-solver sitting at his
celestial bureau, correcting defects in the everyday world below…. But the
finite space would rapidly expand. To reveal the Future, we must get around
the inertia of paint. Paint wishes to remain as it is. We desire transformation.”
(AtD 586)
now steer past chartered landmarks. The aimless event and its associated
reverie is spatialized, this preparing directionless duration for directional
temporalities like hiding and revealing, moving on, causality. (66)
In Cubitt’s theory, which draws on both art history and science, the
cinema is trilocational (and thus bilocational): pixel, cut, vector. The
single image in a filmstrip is defined as a pixel, a self-identical unit
that does not do much because it lacks the energizing force of
difference. Painting may only approach the Brownian movement of
film’s “atomic jostling […] the directionless flux of pure movement”
(Cubitt 66) since paint wishes to remain as it is, no matter how fine
the instrument that tries to control or motivate it. Tancredi can only
theoretically define the pixel and call it “the smallest picture element”
(AtD 587), a basic unit of reality. As a unit, self-identity precludes it
from identifying other things in which their “kinship of difference”
(de Man 91) allows them to enter into (symbolic, visual, chemical,
imaginary, kinetic) relations. The cut seen (or precisely not seen) in
cinema is the frameline. The Anarchist Tancredi rages against the cut
and its “grammatical tyranny” (AtD 587) as it acts as an entropic
organizing principle. He wants to deny this sorting mechanism and
bring his art and the world, in their constituent elements as pixels,
together in an anarchic assemblage.
Tancredi does not realize, or perhaps does not accept, that nothing
can happen in this state because difference is denied, and this is
precisely what the cut introduces. With only the pixel and the cut, we
have cinema as Tancredi’s hellish infernal machine, correcting defects
of the everyday world through the second sight of framing and
selection. Tancredi, like all the Futurists, is always caught in the lag of
mediation, and will be eternally and structurally frustrated in his
desire to effect change in the world. For all their looking to the future,
they are stuck in the present as they deny the cutting edge that reels
out along a vector, Cubitt’s third term in his theory of cinema. A
vector is anything that has direction and magnitude—a tendency, an
urge, a path, a becoming—formed by the cut, comprising pixels. The
Futurist obsession with speed, a value independent of direction, fails
to recognize the interdependence of velocity, a physical vector
quantity, speed with respect to its milieu. Tancredi’s frustration comes
from the directional temporality of his paintings that means they
cannot be finished—a section “seems to light up like a birthday cake”
(AtD 587), but Tancredi immediately goes past this as he uses a
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 145
Dally thought she could see emerging from the glowing field of particles, like
towers from the foschetta, a city, a contra-Venice, the almost previsual reality
behind what everyone else was agreeing to define as “Venice.” These are in a
stack of canvases in a corner she hadn’t noticed before. They were all
nocturnes, saturated with fog. (AtD 587)
Again: “‘In Venice space and time, being more dependent on hearing
than sight, are actually modulated by fog. So this is a related sequence
here. La Velocità del Suono [The Speed of Sound]. What are you
thinking?’” (AtD 587) If we return to Russolo’s Solidità, we have the
picture of what Tancredi wants, the tableau-object of his desire, but
again not the thing itself. Solidità figures the speed of sound by
depicting its modulation in its striated space, and so also describes
Tancredi’s La Velocità del Suono. It is a nocturne, saturated by fog, in
which Tancredi represents almost exactly the same relation of audition
to experience as olfaction to the thing being detected when the Chums
catch “the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality—like
the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction” (AtD 10) when they first fly
in to Chicago. The two elements that keep the processes from being
exactly the same are telling, but both come back to the same
phenomenon: light. Firstly, olfaction involves exterior bits entering
into a kind of indexical dialogue with the perceiving subject; the
molecules of the thing being perceived act directly on the olfactory
receptors whether the subject likes it or not. Solidità and La Velocità
work differently. Perception occurs through a symbolic dialogue that
is mediated by waves of sound being modulated by the density of
space, mimicking the hypothesized movement of light through the
luminiferous aether. Of course, it is light itself that makes hearing
visually sensible in the paintings, and so the perceiver is
simultaneously a listening and seeing subject. Secondly, the painted
“fiction” is a nocturne; it is not “daylit” but requires an illumination
by the light of a historicized subject—Tancredi’s sentimentality is a
posture of and to the past, an affective bilocation that exists in the
here that is also the now and the then. The two-state existence of light
as particle and wave separates the Chums’ olfactory dark conjugate of
146 Rodney Taveira
the slaughterhouses, which exists only as particle (or pixel), from that
of Tancredi’s and Russolo’s paintings, which invoke but cannot
partake of both states of light. For this, we need not just a “related
sequence” (AtD 587) of images, but a contiguous, vectorial, cinematic
technology.
Mason has seen in the Glass, unexpectedly, something beyond simple reflection,—
outside of the world,—
—Mason & Dixon
This “thing itself” is the “contra-Venice” (AtD 587) that Dally detects
but cannot see directly in Tancredi’s paintings, what Pynchon calls
“the almost previsual reality behind what everyone else was agreeing
to define as ‘Venice’” (AtD 587). Dally only “thought” she could see
it “emerging,” reflecting what Jameson sees as the motivating impulse
for Proust’s project, the “incapacity to experience things ‘for the first
time’” (32n10). Compare this with The Book of Iceland Spar in
Against the Day, which contains “family histories going back to the
first discovery and exploitation of the eponymic mineral up to the
present, including a record of each day of this very Expedition, even
of days not yet transpired” (AtD 133, original emphasis). It seems that
there is something significant about a play with temporality, an urge
to circumvent the onward march of the day, to enact new and
different(iating) vectors of possibility.8 “In a different relation to time
anyhow,” to quote the librarian on The Book of Iceland Spar, “perhaps
even to be read through, mediated by, a lens of the very sort of calcite
which according to rumor you people are up here seeking” (AtD 133).
From this moment during the Vormance Expedition, still quite early in
the text, we have the intimation of a very important event that is also a
technology—the final resting place (at the end of the novel at least)
for Iceland Spar in Merle Rideout’s and Roswell Bounce’s
Integroscope, a play with light that can realize the dreams of Tancredi.
Both are caught up in death, the ultimate previsual reality. Following
the Icelandic librarian, I will concentrate on Merle’s and Roswell’s
Integroscope, which, to ignore the pataphysical explanations they
give, is the animation of the still image, its vectorial becoming, that
which the Futurist paintings could only fail to achieve.
“So smoothly Chick missed the moment, the photo came to life”
(AtD 1037). Enabled by the Lorandite that also powers the terrible Q-
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 147
weapon that can annihilate the world (AtD 563-67), the Integroscope
animates photography. It is also the manifestation-as-apparatus of
Emilio the pot dealer’s ability to see the future and the past by looking
into a toilet bowl. After he is asked by Lew Basnight to help in his
investigation of the missing Jardine Maraca, Emilio, magically aware
of the subject’s assimilation to ground, arrives to the scene of the
probable crime and heads for the bathroom. He writes down the
address of Deuce and Lake on the back of a picture postcard, which,
now inscribed, becomes the dark conjugate of what he saw in the
toilet bowl—“‘[b]ad, big…many bodies’” (AtD 1044), a visual
encounter guaranteed by death. Again, we have the second time round
of writing that allows the initial experience to creep in at the corner of
the eye.9
Emilio’s abilities and the Integroscope are complemented by
Lew’s experience of bilocation, the phenomenon that Pynchon
helpfully brings up again as Merle and Roswell explain their invention
to him (AtD 1050). But once he has been in contact with this
cinematic rendering of simultaneously being in different times and
places—being there in front of the Integroscope, and also seeing the
paths back and forth that the machine can trace, Lew experiences the
death that underwrites all copies of a singular event:
Lew kept a close but sociable eye on Jardine Maraca, […] yet somehow more
than everyday déjà vu, the old two-places-at-once condition, kicking up again,
he couldn’t be sure if he was remembering this now or, worse, foreseeing her
in some way, so that he had to worry about the possibility that not only might
Jardine Maraca be dead but also that it had not happened yet…. Intensely,
abruptly, she reminded him of Troth, his ex-wife from so long ago. (AtD
1058)
happened, Lew thinks of his ex-wife, who had to leave him over
twenty years earlier because of his awful “sin” that Pynchon does not
divulge to the reader nor even Lew.
The qualitative movement from the studium to the punctum is that
from what is intellectually but transitively interesting in the
photograph to an incidental yet (once recognized) indispensable detail.
This is how wound culture operates in Against the Day, how the visual
and the wound—Barthes describes the punctum as something that
“pricks,” a “sting, speck, cut, little hole” (27)—figures an
apprehension of temporality with which the three exemplary readers
in the novel, Miles Blundell, Lew Basnight, and Kit Traverse, can be
overwhelmed. This occurs simply by the clear perception of seeing
how things are, the possibility of genuine experience the first time
around:
Spheres of Darkness, Darkness impure,— Plexities of Honor and Sin we may never
clearly sight, for when we venture near they fall silent, Murdering must be silent
—Mason & Dixon
machines that used electricity to create infinite timbre and pitch) and
ascribing the label of “music” to what had previously been called
“noise.”10 In his “Art of Noises,” a pamphlet of 1913 that was
presented as a letter to Francesco Balilla Pratella, the recognized
composer of the Futurist movement, Russolo conceives of the noise
that resulted from the invention of the machine as sound that broke the
silence of ancient life. Every noise has a note—sometimes even a
chord—that predominates in the ensemble of its irregular vibrations.
The predominant note makes it possible, Russolo claims, to fix the
pitch of a given note. This means not a single pitch, but a variety of
pitches without the note losing its characteristic quality—its
distinguishing timbre. The noise can be transformed without changing
its essence if you can, as it were, find its pixel. Particularly significant
are the incarnations of the intonarumori known as the “Howlers,”
which mimic the noise of a motor engine.
Moreover, Russolo devoted an entire chapter of his 1916 book
(also called The Art of Noises) to “The Noises of War.” The battlefield
serves as a model for modern listening and an art of noises, since in
combat the ear is much more privileged than in daily life: it can judge
with “greater certainty than the eye!” (27) But this is not a new
phenomenon—it has been happening in Venice for hundreds of years
because of the fog. We can see from Solidità that Russolo knew this.
The vectorial operations of this phenomenon reveal that the
transformations made possible by new technology, pushed too far,
metamorphose into fascism, that temptation to which the Futurists
famously folded.11
They were soon going so fast that something happened to time, and maybe
they’d slipped for a short interval into the Future, the Future known to Italian
Futurists, with events superimposed on one another, and geometry straining
irrationally away in all directions including a couple of extra dimensions as
they continued hellward […] which was actually Hell-of-the-future, taken on
into its functional equations, stripped and fire-blasted of everything emotional
or accidental…. (AtD 1070)
May we imagine for them a vector, passing through the invisible, the
‘imaginary,’ the unimaginable, carrying them safely […]. A vector through
the night into a morning of hosed pavements, birds heard everywhere but
unseen, bakery smells, filtered green light, a courtyard still in shade… (AtD
1082-83)
We may, mais oui, but the sky-born vehicle of this passage (which is
both Pynchon’s prose and the vector on which the Chums travel) has
negative potential, with its “slum conditions” and ability to strike
ground-dwellers with “hysterical blindness” that makes them “end up
not seeing it at all” (AtD 1084). The description of “the vector through
the night”—the passage—employs all the different sensory
152 Rodney Taveira
Notes
1
The French translator of Against the Day, Christophe Claro, blogged his formidable
project. Originally indicating he would translate the title as “Face à jour” in January
2008 (“Le style c’est l’ohm”), this changed in May 2008, apparently in line with “a
decision of the author himself [in English in the original]” (“Contre-jour”) who
wanted the French version of his book to be called Contre-jour. My thanks to
Clémént Levy for bringing this to my attention and translating the relevant entries into
English.
2
An online reproduction is available at the website of the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice: http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese/collections/artisti/
dettagli/pop_up_opera2.php?id_opera=404&page=
3
This “failure” of the experiment is generally considered to be the first strong
evidence against the theory of a luminiferous æther. It involved directing a beam of
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 153
white light onto a half-silvered mirror, which split it into two, reflected the beams
back and forth, extending their length. The Earth was supposed to be moving through
the æther, and so a kind of wind should have been detectable by variations in the
speed of light, depending on the different rates at which the Earth moved and spun.
No variations were observed. Of course, this does not stop Pynchon from utilizing the
rhetorical possibilities of the æther.
4
An online reproduction is available at the website of the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice: http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese/collections/artisti/
dettagli/pop_up_opera2.php?id_opera=404&page=
5
It may be a little slippery or presumptuous to take as given that we can talk about
Deuce as a serial killer—he is never named as such, and he does not conform to the
“classical” characterization: cold, calculated, charismatic. However, he fits in with the
standard definition of killing more than one person with a cool-off period in between
killings, and his difficulties in childhood also partake of the standard etiology (Seltzer
4-10).
6
“Thanatoid” means “‘like death, only different’” (VL 170). The Thanatoids are a
population of morose zombies who linger in the realm of the living because of karmic
injustice, and also because as “we are assured by the Bardo Thödol, or Tibetan Book
of the Dead, that the soul newly in transition often doesn’t like—indeed will deny
quite vehemently—that it’s really dead” (VL 218). Thanatoids are inveterate watchers
of television. If Takeshi Fumimota is correct, this demonstrates another instance of
the subject being assimilated to ground: “Takeshi’s opinion being television, which
with its history of picking away at the topic with doctor shows, war shows, cop
shows, murder shows, had trivialized the Big D itself. If mediated lives, he figured,
why not mediated deaths?” (VL 218)
7
We may recognize the urge, even if we do not see its realization—the gap between
what the Futurists said they wanted to do, or were doing, and what they actually
executed, was large. Even R. W. Flint, who in his swooning introduction to
Marinetti’s Selected Writings manages to pair the words “tame” and “Fascist” in
simple and congruent juxtaposition (4), admits the “bristling charm and bravura” of
Marinetti’s prose in the manifestos he signed “may often be a more than adequate
substitution for the works that followed” (4).
8
See Inger H. Dalsgaard’s essay in this collection.
9
To extend my reading of the cinematic here, it might be interesting to think about
how Slavoj Žižek describes the experience of cinematic spectatorship in his Pervert’s
Guide to Cinema, where looking at the cinema screen is the same as looking into a
toilet bowl, a perverse and traumatic experience, an Aristotelian scene of suffering:
“Desire is a wound of reality. The art of cinema consists in arousing desire to play
with desire, but at the same time keeping it at a safe distance—domesticating it,
rendering it palpable. When we spectators are sitting in a movie theatre looking at the
screen—remember at the very beginning before the picture is on it is a black, dark
screen and then there is light thrown on, are we basically not standing at a toilet bowl
and waiting for things to reappear from the toilet? And is the entire magic of spectacle
shown on the screen not a kind of deceptive lure to conceal the fact that we are
basically watching shit, as it were?” The comment is delivered in, and in the context
154 Rodney Taveira
of, the bathroom in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, a film that hinges on
sonic inflection and the asymmetry of sight and sound.
10
The best account of Russolo’s musical career and biography is to be found in
Barclay Brown’s introduction to his translation of Russolo’s The Art of Noises. That
Russolo ended up a penniless mystic whose last piece of writing was a book on
Theosophy seems entirely appropriate.
11
But not Russolo: it must be noted that he was the only Futurist not to join the
Fascist Party.
12
There are only two gramophone recordings of Russolo’s original machines. They
are titled “Corale” and “Serenata.” These are two compositions written by Russolo’s
brother Antonio, and scored for several intonarumori and a small orchestral ensemble.
The 3:58 track titled “Risveglio di una città” is a series of demonstrations of the
sounds of the intonarumori performed with reconstructions made at the Venice
Biennale. The reader is directed to approximately 1:15 into “Risveglio di una città”
for an approximation of this sound of the picchiata. My thanks to Luciano Chessa for
the detail of the recording history of the intonarumori, and for the sonic dimension he
opened up during a performance of Marinetti’s “Zang Tumb Tumb” in Sydney in
2009.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans.
Richard Howard. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theories of German Fascism.” Ed. by Ernst
Jünger. New German Critique 17 (1979): 120-28.
—. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility.” Selected Writings Vol. 4. 1938-1940. Ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2003.
Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” Trans. John
Shepley. October 30 (1984): 16-32.
Claro, Christophe. “Contre-jour.” [Weblog entry.] Le Clavier
Cannibale. 6 May 2008. 15 May 2010 <http://towardgrace.
blogspot.com/2008/05/contre-jour.html>.
—. “Le style c’est l’ohm.” [Weblog entry.] Le Clavier Cannibale. 24
Jan. 2008. 15 May 2010 <http://towardgrace.blogspot.com/2008/
01/le-style-cest-lohm.html>.
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 155
Clément Lévy
As years went along, the film got faster, the exposure times shorter, the
cameras lighter. Premo came out with a celluloid film pack allowing you to
shoot twelve at a time, which sure beat glass plates, and Kodak started selling
its “Brownie,” a little box camera that weighed practically nothing. Merle
could bring it anywhere as long as he held everything steady in the frame, and
by then—the old glass plate folding models having weighed in at three pounds
plus plates—he had learned to breathe, calm as a sharpshooter, and the images
showed it, steady, deep, sometimes, Dally and Merle agreed, more real,
though they never got into “real” that far. (AtD 72)
The much smaller and more accurate 24x36 LEICA camera is also
mentioned by its brand name in V. (the company has been producing
cameras from 1925 to the present day), as it is used by Teflon to steal
pictures of Paola Maijstral and Benny Profane making love:
For American soldiers, cameras are part of the spoils of war in the
Zone, “champagne, furs, cameras, cigarettes” (GR 302), and they were
used on the black market, as Säure Bummer recalls: “‘Remember how
the Wilhelmplatz used to be? Watches, wine, jewels, cameras, heroin,
fur coats, everything in the world’” (GR 370).
Cameras and photographs are mentioned so frequently in
Pynchon’s novels because they became part of everyday life in
Western cultures during the twentieth century. Photographic portraits
are everywhere, and everyone keeps pictures of their loved ones or of
people they admire. We can find “oversize photos of John Dillinger”
in the bar called Chicago in Gravity’s Rainbow’s Berlin (GR 374), and
when Mayva Traverse meets Stray Briggs near the end of Against the
Day, they exchange tintypes of their sons Jesse and Reef (AtD 980-
81). The sentimental mood of this encounter is made stronger by the
contemplation of pictures showing cherished but absent people.
This great uproar is all the more funny as it sounds anachronistic. Yet
the tourists taking pictures of a traditional scene of the West are also
performing a pyrotechnical display, photography being a
technological show in itself.
This use of the photographic medium and its practice as a way to
build photo albums and put souvenirs together is quite harmless, even
when it drives a whole assembly of gamblers and drinkers to descend
into such mayhem. However, as it is also used for political purposes, a
shadow of mistrust is cast on photography. Spying relied on
photography in the twentieth century, whereas for ages it had only
relied on traitors. In Gravity’s Rainbow, aerial photo reconnaissance is
so widely used by Allied intelligence that “these days, with so much
death hidden in the sky, out under the sea, among the blobs and
smears of recco photographs, most women’s eyes are only functional”
(GR 235). Later in the novel there is a direct mention of Constance
Babington-Smith, a WAAF2 officer whose mission was to decipher
reconnaissance photographs, and who first identified a V-1 on its
launching ramp (GR 740). Of course, we also remember how Teddy
Bloat used his “midget spy-camera” (GR 17) to take a picture of
Slothrop’s map, “click zippety click” (GR 19). Modern spying
techniques have rendered the photographer obsolete, however, as
automatic cameras take pictures of areas under surveillance, and these
photographs are taken by satellites which have been on orbital flight
since the 1960s. The camera thus became ubiquitous, and from then
on most of the photos taken are discarded after careful study because
they do not convey the information desired. Modern spying
techniques thus created a new space of control where the now
classical conception of a space-time continuum does not make sense
any more. This is what the French architect Paul Virilio, in The Lost
Dimension (originally published as L’Espace critique in 1984), calls
“speed-space” (96). According to the author, this concept has many
applications for modern warfare, geopolitics, and social control. As
satellites glide around the Earth, they automatically record and
transmit digital pictures that are used to control troops on the ground
162 Clément Lévy
As even the most powerful states can decline in a few years, we must
remember that every photograph is momentary and bears a strong
relationship to death. As a polaroid picture appears in a moment of
chemical revelation, older pictures in family albums tend to fade
away. In the process of its making, a silver print reveals itself to the
photographer when he plunges the sensitive paper into the developer
bath after projection of the negative film. It is not by accident that
Pynchon compares the Raketen-Stadt in Gravity’s Rainbow to a
photograph: “it resembles a Daguerreotype taken of the early Raketen-
Stadt by a forgotten photographer in 1856: this is the picture, in fact,
that killed him—he died a week later from mercury poisoning after
inhaling fumes of the heated metal in his studio” (GR 740). Here, as in
Against the Day, Pynchon displays an extended knowledge of the art
to his readers. The fluid metal also used in alchemy gives access to a
fatal understanding of the city through its photographic representation.
Of course, Raketen-Stadt “the ceremonial City, fourfold as expected,
an eerie precision to all lines and shadings architectural and human,
built in mandalic form like a Herero village” (GR 740) has a perfect
architectural and symbolic organization. But its form is always
changing: “there seems to be building, or demolition, under way in
various parts of the City, for nothing here remains the same, […]
As Far as Pynchon “Loves Cameras” 163
“So with Lamarck, who said that if you cut the tail off a mother mouse her
children will be tailless also. But this is not true, the weight of scientific
evidence is against him, just as every photograph from a rocket over White
Sands or Cape Canaveral is against the Flat Earth Society.” (V. 47)
Miles has not gone through the looking-glass, but he finds himself in a
bright and shiny world, silent, filled with scents, but bearing the
anachronistic stain of a future catastrophe that turns out to be World
War I. The photographic images bear the morbid aura that Roland
Barthes perceives in every photo. In his essay on memory and
photography, the semiologist writes:
in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a
superposition here: of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists
only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence,
the noeme of Photography. (Barthes 76-77)
The thing that will have been there (the ça-a-été: “that-has-been” as
Barthes puts it) may be found on this page of Against the Day, as the
peace of a summer that precedes the horrendous massacres and
trenches that are described in Brigadier Pudding’s story in Gravity’s
Rainbow (GR 78). Here, the comparison with a photo allows a pause
that fixes a landscape forever in a form that is bound to disappear.
Pynchon describes photographic images for the fatality they entail. In
Vineland, this darkness of death looming in every picture becomes a
reason to produces pictures and films, when young activists of the
24fps collective document the repression of junkies and left-wing
activists in the 1960s, claiming that “[a] camera is a gun. An image
taken is a death performed” (VL 197). This brief anarchist manifesto
sentences capitalists to death, and Frenesi as the camera-operator is
the executioner, as her daughter Prairie discovers later. But it is also
worth a remark that the People’s Republic of Rock ’n’ Roll movement
in which Frenesi is involved is also closely watched by her lover
Brock Vond (she even gives him her films). Vond is a federal
prosecutor, and at the College of the Surf, during the revolutionary
events,
No hour day or night was exempt from helicopter visits, though this was still
back in the infancy of overhead surveillance, with a 16mm Arri “M” on a
As Far as Pynchon “Loves Cameras” 165
Tyler Mini-Mount being about state of the art as far as Frenesi knew. (VL
209)
Aerial surveillance is also used much later in the novel, during the
War on Drugs in Vineland County led by Kommandant Bopp. The
“former Nazi Luftwaffe officer” leads “helicopter and plane crews” of
voluntary “antidrug activists” (VL 221). The reconnaissance
techniques even involve the use of airborne radar equipment:
“AWACS planes in the air round the clock” (VL 222).
Notes
1
I wish to thank my research center, the CELEC, and Jean Monnet University in
Saint-Etienne, from which I received the financial aid that made my participation in
International Pynchon Week 2008 possible.
2
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.
166 Clément Lévy
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans.
Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux), 1981.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1952.
Ketzan, Erik. “Literary Titan Thomas Pynchon Breaks 40-Year
Silence—on The Simpsons!” Spermatikos Logos. Ed. Allen B.
Ruch and Larry Daw. 20 Feb. 2004. 15 May 2010 <http://
www.themodernword.com/pynchon/ketzan_simpsons.htm>.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
—. Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
—. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. London: Vintage, 1996.
—. V. 1963. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
—. Vineland. 1990. London: Vintage, 1991.
Teresi, Dick. “Haul Out the Old Cliches, It’s Time to Shoot an Author
Photo.” The New York Times, 12 Dec. 1993.
Virilio, Paul. The Lost Dimension. Trans. Daniel Moshenberg. New
York: Semiotext(e), 1991.
A Medium No Longer:
How Communication and Information Become
Objectives in Thomas Pynchon’s Works
Georgios Maragos
I will try to show here how media, and the information they carry,
acquire such a central role in Thomas Pynchon’s works and for his
protagonists, so that they cease to be a means to an end but become
objectives in themselves. Not even wars in the world of the American
author happen for patriotic or territorial reasons, nor are they fought
for the (economic) welfare of the people:
Don’t forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and
the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The
mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as
diversion from the real movements of war. (GR 105)
the spectacle, as Guy Debord would have it, “everything that was
directly lived has moved away into a representation” (1),4 and that is
where a contaminated truth lies.
Even though there is a clear distinction between television and film
in Pynchon’s novels, especially in Vineland, where the 24fps group
works as a counterbalance to TV, one can say that cinema plays, to a
lesser degree, the same role as television in both Gravity’s Rainbow
and Against the Day. “Cinema is equated with or placed among the
other cultural and scientific-technological forces that have shaped
modern consciousness” (Marquez 167). In Gravity’s Rainbow, Jessica
Swanlake tries to make sense of the war and her situation by resorting
to cinematic metaphors and analogies (GR 628), while in Against the
Day, in a discussion between Merle Rideout and Roswell Bounce, the
fact that people “can’t have enough” movies is referred to as “another
disease of the mind” (AtD 456). Against the Day is set in an era where
moving pictures are starting to evolve out of still photographs, and
Pynchon is at his best when describing this transition and its effects on
human consciousness.
One such effect is brought about by the transformation of time
through media, an aspect I will address by juxtaposing the relation of
time to film in Against the Day and to television in Vineland, in order
to see how this relation evolves through the timeline of Pynchon’s
fiction. According to Roswell Bounce in Against the Day, the film and
the movie projectors, which are built like clocks, manage to trivialize
time, to impose a single course from beginning to end (AtD 456-57). It
is the same Bounce and Rideout who, by the end of the book, manage
to construct a projector-like machine (AtD 1036) that can show the
past, present and future of a person, based only on a photograph, thus
releasing time from the confines of film, or film from the confines of
time. In Vineland, however, Pynchon describes time as “cut into
pieces” (VL 38), mainly because of television. Vineland’s America has
an “ever-dwindling attention span of an ever more infantilized
population” (VL 52), exactly because television has fragmented and
destroyed time, signs of which can be found retrospectively in Against
the Day.
These effects indeed go far deeper than those already covered.
According to McLuhan, our technologies, especially our media
technologies, have the power to alter the state of a whole nation and
regulate its behavior (30). Vineland is based on exactly that
172 Georgios Maragos
computer,” she says, “[…] and the only thing we’re good for, to be
dead or to be living, is the only thing he sees” (VL 91). This image,
however, tells us more about computers and media technologies than
it does about an absent God, especially when the night manager of the
store explains to her how the computer works: “‘The computer […]
never has to sleep, or even go take a break. It’s like it’s open 24 hours
a day…’” (VL 91). The computer, for Frenesi and for Pynchon, has
turned into a sentient being without any human needs and defects. It
rises above humans and is given the ability to know and control, if not
all, then a considerable number of important aspects of their lives. It is
not a paradox that a machine can achieve more than a human. From a
cybernetic point of view, there should be no distinction between a
machine and an organism; what does matter is its competency in
handling and, subsequently, manipulating the flow of information. If
the traditional religions give man some of the qualities of God, then
today’s faith in technology and science can give the exact same
qualities to human accomplishments. Pynchon’s characters are often
awed by things that are man-made, yet outside their intellectual grasp.
The second approach is related to the first aspect of media
mentioned above, and it has to do with how knowledge and
information are produced through science and technology, and with
the people who control these processes. Lyotard writes in The
Postmodern Condition that “science and industry are no more free of
the suspicion which concerns reality than are art and writing” (76).
Lyotard’s arguments proclaim that within the capitalist system,
science is not really searching for truth but for power; this happens
because, in simple words, science is costly and the people who do the
funding decide what is being researched. To put it differently, the
knowledge produced is the knowledge demanded or determined by the
nameless commanders, who belong in the corporate world rather than
in the governments. This is exactly the case of Scarsdale Vibe in
Against the Day. His every action is dictated by his will to acquire
power, to eliminate his enemies and, in the end, to manipulate the
truth. This is most apparent in his stance regarding Kit Traverse.
The decision-makers, with their ability to circulate this knowledge-
on-demand by controlling the communication networks, acquire once
more, and from a different path, omnipotence and omniscience. In the
end, all this power comes from information, and at the same time it is
is directed toward information. Under the technological advancements
A Medium No Longer 179
of our era, as McLuhan would put it, “the entire business of man
becomes learning and knowing,” and “all forms of wealth result from
the movement of information” (64).
That was a different route that took us, once more, close to the
conspiracy theories that run through Pynchon’s works. In the end, as I
have already mentioned, it all comes down to the struggle of the
individual to make sense of all the connections that are around him or
her, but not quite within his or her grasp. Pynchon is not only trying to
offer a glimpse of the invisible, powerful system that encompasses the
world, but also to describe the possibilities of resistance to those
networks of communication that try to control the individuals.
Pynchon’s protagonists are the hunted or the excluded, and they have
found themselves unknowingly in the middle of a conspiracy they
cannot fully understand, which results in paranoia. John Johnston, one
of the most prominent experts on the matter of media and literature,
claims that in Gravity’s Rainbow “paranoia no longer designated a
mental disorder, but rather a critical method of information retrieval”
(62). In other words, paranoia itself is a method of resistance, because
it forms a new information system which counteracts the
communication networks of the upper echelons. Tyrone Slothrop does
not decide to resist and then go on a hunt across Europe to retrieve
information. There is never such a decision; he resists exactly because
he goes on a hopeless chase to find information that will help him
understand his condition. Some characters in Vineland are not so
brave and, like Frenesi, become part of the system, only to be betrayed
by it once more. On the other hand, Slothrop’s punishment for not
complying is his integration with the environment, his complete
disappearance from this world. They do not absorb him, but do not
give him the chance to live by his own free will either, and finally the
noise or nuisance that is Slothrop fades out completely; either that, or
disappearing was his ultimate act of non-compliance. In Pynchon’s
world, where the commentator’s despair takes a whole new meaning,
one can never be certain.
It seems that Pynchon’s version of a “They-system” not only
allows resistance, but in fact predicts it and desires it, because it has
the ability to increase the system’s performance. Norbert Wiener, in
his study of messages, says that the higher administration relies not
only on controlling the messages that it sends, but also on the
information that is coming upstream from the lower levels towards
180 Georgios Maragos
To conclude this paper, I would like to point out that I have only
referred to the content of Pynchon’s works whilst neglecting the form.
Pynchon plays with the information he provides to his readers as
much as he troubles his characters with the information they are
acquiring. His own novels are immense labyrinths of data, from which
one can hardly distinguish what is actual information and what is
noise, if indeed there is any noise. The question of noise in particular
can be very effective in the analysis of the form of Pynchon’s novels.
Which pieces of information are there to further the plot, and which
are there only to puzzle the reader? Some reviewers of Against the
A Medium No Longer 181
Notes
1
This is Shannon’s schema of the communication process, as proposed in The
Mathematical Theory of Communication (34):
It can be applied regardless of medium and it is useful here since it was very
influential in the period in which Pynchon started to write. We will see later about the
importance of noise in that system, always in relation to Pynchon.
2
See also Kittler, Literature 102-03.
A Medium No Longer 183
3
A reference to the popular culture of the 1980s, so dear to Pynchon, is in order here:
Garfield makes the same claims about TV in one of the episodes of Garfield and
Friends. For more see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Must_Be_True!
4
There is no pagination in this particular edition of The Society of the Spectacle. The
number refers to Debord’s own numbering of the paragraphs.
5
See Slade, Schachterle, and Porush.
6
In Against the Day, there is the exception of Scarsdale Vibe, but in his case, he is too
much of a stereotypical capitalist. His character escapes the boundaries of “person”
and moves on to the range of “type.”
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1996.
Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why. London: Fourth Estate, 2001.
Bersani, Leo. “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature.” Representations
25 (Winter 1989): 99-118.
Brod, Max. The Biography of Franz Kafka. London: Secker and
Warburg, 1947.
Clarke, Arthur C. Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of
the Possible. Madison: Harper & Row, 1973.
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. London: Verso, 1993.
Johnston, John. Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age
of Media Saturation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998.
Kittler, Friedrich. Literature, Media, Information Systems.
Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997.
—. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Kumar, Krishan. From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New
Theories of the Contemporary World. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1995.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
184 Georgios Maragos
William D. Clarke
Abstract: This paper takes as its frame the work of political historian Ellen Meiksins
Wood, who maintains that most attempts to understand the history of capitalism have
tended also to naturalize it, imputing a transhistorical, latent tendency (with Adam
Smith) to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ onto the whole of human history. This in turn
results in an often unintentional mis-comprehension of modern capitalism as the
liberation of a natural tendency towards free exchange from the unnatural constraints
that tradition or outworn political systems have placed upon it. Wood posits, against
such a vision of Capitalism as latent opportunity, a ‘Culture of Improvement’ that
arose from coercive medieval English property relations. This ‘pristine culture of
capitalism’ never managed to shake the inner contradictions of its uniquely English
theory of property (which impelled landlords and tenants alike to continually increase
the rate of profit), even as it was exported throughout Europe and the British Empire,
and subsequently defined the trajectory of our contemporary, ‘globalized’ capitalist
expansion. Today, as Wood’s book Empire of Capital (2003) shows, that coercive
Culture of Improvement is caught in a most peculiarly capitalist bind, as the purely
economic ‘sphere’ both struggles to liberate itself from the boundaries of the nation
state even as it is dependent upon the nation state to provide the extra-economic force
required to enforce and to reproduce the ‘laws’ (imperatives) of the market.
Vineland, I would maintain, easily lends itself to just such a reading of property
relations, for there is always such a coercive ‘Culture of Improvement’ which
underlies every seemingly free commercial opportunity in the novel. Vineland is
bookended by the threat of extra-economic ‘persuasion’—by Zoyd’s compulsory
transfenestration on the one hand and by the sudden cancellation of Brock Vond and
his C.A.M.P. anti-marijuana crusade on the other. The tentacles of the shadowy
‘They’ who control the ‘House’ that Vond can only dream of entering are cast across
the globe: they figure the ‘insurance’ scam that could have kept the cash-starved
Kahuna Airlines from having to endure mid-air paramilitary boardings, are obviously
connected to the ‘Chipco incident,’ and are also the key to the entire subplot involving
the FBI, the ‘YakMaf grapevine’ and DL’s tale of indentured servitude.
Against this larger story of international commerce and coercion, I examine the
specific moments of local anxiety that surface in various characters’ relations to
property: in each case, behind the veil of commercial opportunity lies the hidden
capitalist imperative.
186 William D. Clarke
Zoyd had gone down, climbed on, ridden out with other newcomers, all
cherry to the labor market up here, former artists or spiritual pilgrims now
becoming choker setters, waiters and waitresses, baggers and checkout clerks,
tree workers, truck drivers, and framers, or taking temporary swamping jobs
like this, all in the service of others, the ones who did the building, selling,
buying and speculating. First thing new hires all found out was that their hair
kept getting in the way of work. Some cut it short, some tied it back or slicked
it behind their ears in a kind of question-mark shape. Their once-ethereal
girlfriends were busing dishes or cocktail-waitressing or attending the muscles
of weary loggers over at the Shangri-La Sauna, Vineland County’s finest.
Some chose to take the noon southbound back home, others kept plugging on,
at night school or Vineland Community College or Humboldt State, or going
to work for the various federal, state, county, church, and private charitable
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 191
agencies that were the biggest employers up here next to the timber
companies. Many would be the former tripping partners and old flames who
came over the years to deal with each other this way across desktops or
through computer terminals, as if chosen in secret and sorted into opposing
teams…. (VL 321)
Here, the hippies find that haircuts are made near-compulsory by the
ever-present market imperative. This is a literal enactment of the
metaphor of “joining the squares,” or adapting oneself to life in a
world created by and run for “the Man,” i.e. “the ones who did the
building, selling, buying and speculating” (VL 321) from head offices
back in San Francisco and other financial centers. “Plugging on” in
the midst of a resurgent neo-liberalism (what Hector Zuñiga calls a
“groundswell” or “real revolution,” and which he juxtaposes to the
“little fantasy hand-job” that was the hippies’ pipe dream of change
(VL 27)) means the depressing reduction of human interaction to
reified exchanges mediated by “desktops” and “computer terminals”
(VL 321). The official economy forces labor competition onto those
who idealistically might otherwise prefer cooperative behavior, as
they find that they are soon “chosen in secret and sorted into opposing
teams” (VL 321). The “opposing teams” bit, of course, is a sober,
materialist twist on that old Pynchon Studies chestnut, the
Calvinist/Weberian6 (and therefore idealist) binary opposition between
the “Elect” (or saved) and “Preterite” (or damned): if you are lucky
enough to have been among the chosen few to have work up in
Vineland, you either toil for the logging companies7 or for the
agencies that administer the Preterite throng who lack any such good
fortune. For the most part, people are left to struggle against (even as
some of them feel opportunities in) the almighty Market.
One of those who is full of scheming “opportunity” is Prairie’s
boyfriend, Isaiah Two Four, who is even more obsessed with money
than he is with violence—the production, distribution and
consumption of violence—via his dream of a nationwide chain of
theme parks devoted to aggression. Isaiah would satisfy a latent
human need for violence with “standardized,” consumable
experiences, and reproduce these via “franchising” for a nationwide
“family clientele” (VL 19). Isaiah’s “dreams” have concocted a tale of
Opportunity that looms so large, and with such seeming-ineluctable
momentum, that even Zoyd feels as if he is about to be struck by a
naturalized wave of “white water” (VL 19), as he terms it—a wave of
192 William D. Clarke
the future that he almost cannot resist. This scene in the novel is
typically hyperbolic of Pynchon, yet despite the outrageousness of the
particulars, reducible to a remarkably simple concept: having
discovered a territory which has been hitherto uncolonized by the
processes of commodification, Isaiah wishes to enclose it within the
sphere of iterative rational “improvement.”
However entrepreneurial Isaiah’s dreams are, in his waking life he
is rather unheroically in sore need of a loan guarantor, and though the
Bank of Vineland and their ilk “love it when you owe money” (VL
20), Zoyd declines out of a real fear that “if the whole project went
belly-up, they’d take the house” (VL 20). Thus does property reveal
that behind every opportunity lies a hidden imperative, often
expressed to the would-be entrepreneur (or artiste) as “don’t quit your
day-job.”
Zoyd’s own day-job is “non-union oddjobbing” (VL 320), a
cobbled-together assembly of “sideline[s]” (VL 35), “jobs at the
margin” (VL 291), whose haphazard form is a fair correlative to the
baroque, ramshackle physical structure that he and his daughter
inhabit: from “gypsy roofer” (VL 20) to “gypsy construction” (VL 37)
work as well as landscaping for the “Marquis de Sod” (VL 46).8 He is
also engaged in a quintessentially 1980s/Californian form of arbitrage,
of buying cheap in one market and selling dear in another. He ferries
the abundant, essentially free crawfish or crayfish to where the market
commands a higher price for them, that is, “back down [that “golden”]
101 to a string of restaurants catering to depraved yuppie food
preferences […]” (VL 35). Zoyd and his business partners RC and
Moonpie (the ex-hippie back-to-the-landers who tellingly put their
children to work catching the critters) are thus only allowed to live
where they do to the extent that such traffic is ferried “down the two
sand grooves of the access road[s]” (VL 54), back over that “Golden”
bridge which connects them, ineluctably, to the exoteric economy.
As for Prairie and her boyfriend, although neither contributes to the
domestic income of their parents’ households, each is subject to some
of the same market pressures that beset the adults in Vineland. Prairie
works at the “Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple,” the managers of which,
while seemingly progressive in giving employees “meditation
break[s]” (VL 45), are always keeping them economically off balance
with unannounced shift changes. In fact, for all of their other-worldly
chanting, this crew is as intimately connected with real world
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 193
Back then they let anybody who showed up crash here for free. Early days,
more idealistic, not so much into money. […] “Yeah now it’s group
insurance, pension plans, financial consultant name of Vicki down in L.A.
who moves it all around for us, lawyer in Century City, though Amber the
194 William D. Clarke
paralegal has been taking over most of his work since the indictment.” (VL
28)
This search for cash flow also haunts Isaiah, whose band had “been
having trouble lately finding work” (VL 20). Desperation leads them
to accept a gig at Mafia boss Ralph Wayvone’s daughter’s wedding,
even though they quite obviously lack the chops. Their playing so
insults the family that the band is in serious danger of what Ellen
Wood calls “extra-economic coercion” (Wood, Pristine Culture 37,
my emphasis): the mafia family’s typical display of machismo in
economic terms harkens back to that “age-old manner of non-
capitalist extra-economic exploitation in the form of tax and tribute”
that pre-dates capitalism (Wood, Empire of Capital 111): either you
pay the Mafia to “protect” you from other “Families,” or else.
However, in Vineland the Mafia no longer operate as shadowy feudal
kingdoms whose own imperatives function alongside each other in the
supposedly as-yet-uncolonized interstices of the official market, or as
the text puts it, “in business areas where transactions are
overwhelmingly in the form of cash” (VL 10, my emphasis); instead,
they are wholly integrated into a thoroughly globalized capitalism. It
is an unavoidable lesson that Ralph Wayvone feels he must give his
son if Ralph Jr. is to take over the business some day: the family is
now, he admits, a “wholly owned [corporate] subsidiary,” and
“strictly speaking [...] own[s] nothing” itself (VL 93). When Ralph Jr.
compares their situation to that of the British royal family, the analogy
is inadvertently apt: Ralph Jr. and the Prince of Wales are both in fact
“trophy sons” or brand ambassadors for the very corporations that
now, during the age of the leveraged buy-out, own the families. These
corporations, as Marx says, resort to such realms of mysticism and
theology (43) to thereby cloak, under veils of so-called tradition and
civility, the nakedness of the imperatives that drive them, which
Pynchon reveals in how Ralph Sr. chooses to display his estate (a
house that seems as allegorically constructed as Wemmick’s in
Dickens’s Great Expectations) to the world. While it “present[s] to the
street a face of single-story modesty […] behind it and down the hill
for eight levels sprawled a giant villa of smooth white stucco” that is a
kind of ecosphere, a “world” (VL 92) unto itself. Ralph is thankful for
the “fragile and precious” (VL 92) “microvacations” (VL 92) that the
house gives him (veiling as it does the nearby freeway and its links to
the pressure-filled world of commerce), and this says as much about
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 195
The photo was clipped to some stapled pages, where she saw federal seals and
stampings. “It’s all from the FBI. Perfectly legit.” [...]
“Well,” she inquired, “what’s ol’ Brock up to these days?”
“[...] He figures he won his war against the lefties, now he sees his future in
the war against drugs. Some dear friends of mine are quite naturally upset.”
“And he’s too big for them? Please, you’ve got to be rilly desperate, comin’
to me.”
196 William D. Clarke
“No. You’ve got the motivation.” At her look, “We know your history, it’s
all on the computer.”
She thought of the white armored limo at Inoshiro Sensei’s house, long ago
[...] there it was — he had her number, and it looked like he’d gotten it from
the FBI. What was going on here? Did Ralph have a line into their NCIC
computer? If they knew Brock was a target of Ralph’s friends, why fail to
protect one of their own? (VL 130-31)
Godfather hat’]” (VL 126), and had asked the all-too-human sensei,
who himself was no stranger to capitalism’s coercive culture of
improvement and who “was clearly under some time pressure so
heavy she didn’t want to know” (VL 123, my emphasis): “‘Uh-huh, tell
me, sensei, if you’re that tight with the Mob, and I’m working for you,
does that mean—’” (VL 126). He had responded by way of sending
her out on what she considers fool’s errands, to places like “pachinko
parlor[s]” (VL 123) and other “rendezvous more felonious than illicit”
(VL 124). Of course, pachinko parlors are as well-known for being
money laundering vehicles as casinos used to be in Las Vegas, so
although Pynchon does not make it explicit, this is all part of the script
that has been written for DL, and Ralph is being at least partially
disingenuous when he describes their new relationship as “‘working
for us’” (VL 139, my emphasis): “‘You might even get to like working
for us. Our benefits package is the best in the field. You get to veto
any assignment, we don’t ask for weekly quotas, but we do run a cash-
flow assessment on each of you quarterly…’” (VL 139).
Wayvone Enterprises may well have the superlative “benefits”
common to monopolist firms, but in the context of having a
“‘quarterly […] cash-flow assessment’” (VL 139) run on whatever
assassinations she is assigned to complete (meaning that the culture of
improvement has reached truly hegemonic proportions, even inside
the “Family”), “working” for Ralph gives the term “wage slavery” a
whole new meaning, and we read something more into Ralph’s
“purchasing” of DL. Moreover, this coercive and yet “free” exchange
between employer and employee also involves a libidinal economy
which is neither separable from the exoteric one nor wholly reducible
to a vulgar “economism.” Earlier, when Ralph had first tracked DL
down, she could not help noticing his “ultrathin expensive
wristwatch” and had almost immediately “checked out the cut and
surface texture of Ralph’s suit” (VL 130). Now, newly “hired,” she
cannot help but be appreciative that “his suit fit like Cary Grant’s”
(VL 138), and muses:
Even putting champagne and orchids aside, here was the first human in her
lifetime of running away who’d ever taken the trouble to come after her, not
to mention publicly buy her, however much in play, for the sticker price of a
Lamborghini plus options. How could a girl not be impressed? (VL 139)
She is, in short, subject to the same seductive impulses as Frenesi, and
198 William D. Clarke
mall rat subculture, as having been “aboriginal” to “Fox Hills [...] and
the Sherman Oaks Galleria” (VL 325)—this is how fast capitalism
moves, where four, perhaps five years in the life of a teenager are
presented as a generation in the evolution of mall “culture.” The new
malls, such as the “Noir Center” with its themed recycling of
Hollywood genre flicks, represent yet another stage in capitalism’s
relentless colonization of the lifeworld. The Center’s saccharine name
dropping, e.g. “an upscale mineral-water boutique called Bubble
Indemnity” (VL 326), along with its ubiquitous plastic foliage and its
tech-savvy, panoptical and quasi-fascist security team, is enough to
make Prairie long for “the malls [she]’d grown up with, when security
was not so mean and lean” and where finding someone in the food
courts “willing to swap a cheeseburger for a pair of earrings” (VL 326)
represented the residual existence of cracks, however feint, in the
power structures that controlled American life.
Commentators on the period now refer to the general arc of 1980s
finance capitalism as its progressive “Ponzification” (a Ponzi scheme
is where investors and ultimately whole economies rely on borrowing
to finance growth). Pynchon’s own metaphor for this is “‘life is
Vegas’” (VL 360). Moreover, Pynchon does not just assert this
metaphor straightforwardly; he embeds it into an almost-dialectical
conversation between Zoyd and his lawyer Elmhurst (over the DEA’s
seizure of Zoyd’s house), thereby forcing the clichés to yield fresh
insight:
Setting aside Zoyd’s specific concern with the coercive aspects of the
state over this RICO-justified seizure of his property, “Vegas” can be
viewed in a wider sense as a metaphor for the economy as a whole. In
that context Zoyd is still right, of course, to express dismay at the
“advice” he is receiving from Elmhurst here. In a very real sense, life
is manifestly not Vegas: as Doug Henwood notes, “a world that tends
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 203
towards ever more immateriality” (Wall Street: How It Works 48) still
has, under the credit system, quite real, material consequences for
living and breathing people such as Zoyd. Elmhurst gets teary-eyed
because, from his point of view, if life is Vegas, as a lawyer and
therefore someone who services “the house,” he always wins because
“the house always wins.”
Thus, “life is Vegas” connotes far more than just the cliché “life is
a crap-shoot.” It is that, of course, but it is also dialectically wedded to
another cliché: the house always wins. This coincidence arises out of
the manner in which the house—that is, the ruling, coupon-clipping
class that, I would argue, corresponds to the shadowy “They” that
Pynchon alludes to throughout his novels—has staged a “rentier
rebellion” (Henwood, “Wall Street: Class Racket”) in the late 1970s in
order to preserve their concentration of economic power. Under a
regime of financialization, the rentier class always wins, because each
new crisis allows them to redefine the protocols for who is worthy of
credit (and, by extension, worthy of property) and under what terms
(Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works 297). It truly is like the
“House” in Vegas:
[…] In other embedded rooms the croupiers called, the winners shrieked and
the drunks cackled, plastic foliage the size and weight of motel curtains
rippled slowly, just below the human threshold for seeing it, arching high
against the room lights, throwing lobed and sawtoothed shadows, while a
thousand strangers were taken on into a continuing education in the ways of
the House, and in general what would be expected of them, along with the
usual statistics and psych courses, and Frenesi and Hector had somehow
danced out into all the deep pile and sparkle of it, like a ritzy parable of the
world, leaving the picture of Prairie face up on the table, she and Desmond,
both squinting upward at nothing, at high risk for hostile magic against the
image, the two most likely means in here being fire and ice, but there the
Polaroid lay, safe, till it was rescued by a Las Vegas showgirl with a hard
glaze but a liquid center whom Prairie reminded of a younger sister, and who
returned it to Frenesi when she came around the next day, her heart pounding,
her skin aching for it still to be there, to find it again and claim it. (VL 350-51)
Notes
1
For a full explanation of which, see Thoreen.
2
By necessity, this paper will also contain a fairly large number of substantive
footnotes. These attempt to provide a more complete contextual picture of the
economic world that Vineland portrays (the period bracketed on one end by the
beginning of the “long downturn” (Brenner, Boom xiv) of “persistent stagnation”
(Brenner, Boom 7) and on the other by Reagan’s increasing turn toward
financialization) while keeping the body of the text more or less squarely focused
upon Vineland itself.
3
See Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development.” For insight into the
economic context of Vineland’s present day of 1984, see Brenner, The Boom and the
Bubble and The Economics of Global Turbulence.
4
Vineland would “someday [...] be all part of a Eureka-Crescent City-Vineland
megalopolis,” but when Zoyd first arrives it is still “not much different from what
early visitors in Spanish and Russian ships had seen” (VL 317).
5
My contention that Pynchon sees capitalism as “natural-ised” rather than as
“natural” is bolstered, I think, by a scene at the beginning of Against The Day in
which the billionaire Scarsdale Vibe complains to Professor Vanderjuice about
Tesla’s plans for a “world system” of free electrical power: “‘To put up money for
research into a system of free power would be to throw it away, and violate—hell,
betray—the essence of everything modern history is supposed to be [...] It is a
weapon, Professor, surely you see that—the most terrible weapon that the world has
seen, designed to destroy not armies or matériel, but the very nature of exchange, our
Economy’s long struggle to evolve out of the fish-market anarchy of all battling all to
the rational systems of control whose blessings we enjoy at present’” (AtD 34-35).
6
It is, again, a cliché in Pynchon studies, but it is worth pausing here to view some of
Weber’s own words on election and the attitude toward the creation of wealth on the
one hand, and the attitude that the elect take towards the preterite on the other: “This
consciousness of divine grace of the elect and holy was accompanied by an attitude
toward the sin of one’s neighbour, not of sympathetic understanding based on
consciousness of one’s own weakness, but of hatred and contempt for him as an
enemy of God bearing the signs of eternal damnation. […] The most important
criterion [concerning the usefulness of a calling] is found in private profitableness.
For if that God, whose hand the Puritan sees in all the occurrences of life, shows one
of His elect a chance of profit, he must do it with a purpose. Hence the faithful
Christian must follow the call by taking advantage of the opportunity. If God show
you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to
your soul or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you
cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward, and to
accept His gifts and use them for Him, when He requireth it: you may labour to be
rich for God, though not for the flesh and sin” (Weber 122, 162).
7
The state of the logging industry in the pacific northwest is a good example of how
America’s attempts to solve the problem of its own productive post-war overcapacity
(by lending dollars for the reconstruction of Germany and Japan, who in turn
purchased American goods to help rebuild their economies) has come back to haunt
206 William D. Clarke
its economy: the “spatio-temporal fix”(Harvey 1990, 135-37 and McNally 1999) that
precipitated the long boom of 1945-66 means that increasingly, much of the lumber
produced in the region is being exported to pacific rim countries unprocessed, and this
lack of “added value” has a serious detrimental effect on employment in the region
around Vineland, as Pynchon notes: “Everybody knew it was high times for the stiffs
in the woods—though not for those in the mills, with the Japanese buying up
unprocessed logs as fast as the forests could be clear-cut” (VL 5).
8
Millard and his wife Blodwen had had their own encounter with the market
imperative (which is, again, framed as opportunity) on an acid-fuelled camp-out,
when they heard “gold-bearing cobblestones knocking together at night,” and returned
from “dreams about specializing in Brecht” to “come back to Earth” (VL 48).
9
As James Berger notes, “Karmic Adjustment, the Ninja Death Touch, DL’s whole
martial arts education, and Sister Rochelle’s Kunoichi sisterhood all are part of
Vineland’s comic treatment of the American interest in Eastern religion which took
off in the 60s and reached a commercialized apotheosis in the 80s” (36). For Dirk
Vanderbeke, the Sisterhood is an emblematic send-up of the New Left, which
ultimately “turned to a new irrationalism and the eclecticism of the so-called New-
Age-philosophy. The movement of the 60s, which never excelled in excessive
coherence, has [by 1984] further dissolved into a heterogeneous mass of solipsistic
and interchangeable ideologies.”
10
Marx is actually somewhat ambivalent about co-operatives, also seeing them as
potential harbingers of a transition away from capitalism; for a more thorough
grounding in the subtleties of Marx’s thinking on co-operatives, see Jossa.
11
Primogeniture, according to Alan Macfarlane “a great rarity in the world,” was a
peculiarly Western European phenomenon, yet, “even within Europe, England seems
to have been by far the most extreme in its application of this principle,” which is
“intimately interlinked” with the development of the institution of “complete
individual property in real estate” and thus “diametrically opposed” to the communal
links of the peasant family (Macfarlane 19-20). This fact, taken in isolation, at first
appears as though it might lend support to Wood’s thesis concerning the “pristine”
English culture of capitalism, but the thrust of Macfarlane’s greater argument, Wood
maintains, begs the question: such elements of English Common Law display an
unproven assumption that “capitalist property relations are simply the unfolding of
age-old principles embodied in the common law from the beginning,” and not a
historical victory of the common law (“the king’s law”) over other competing
“systems of law” and over custom (The Pristine Culture of Capitalism 153-54).
12
The OED defines the Italian belvedere as “a faire sight, a place of a faire prospect.”
13
See Paul Bové’s similar but quasi-Weberian observation on Gravity’s Rainbow:
“Pynchon dramatizes the intellectual’s difficulty in a time of interregnum but also
shows how alluring is the logic of the elect—alluring because it resonates with the
desires of the preterite seduced by the elect’s projection of a fetish-object that
apparently meets what seem to be universal desires” (671).
14
Who, it should be noted, responded to DL’s confession concerning the attempted
assassination of Takeshi in the following terms: “‘Just what I wanted today, just when
the cash flow’s starting to turn around, just as I’m finding my life’s true meaning as a
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 207
businessperson, I might’ve known it, in you waltz and suddenly I’ve got to be Father
Flanagan’” (VL 153-54).
15
There were, of course, parallels in the market as a whole as well. Consider how
contemporary I.F. Stone’s assessment of market volatility, circa 1971, feels even
today: “While President Nixon was celebrating Labor Day with a Billy Graham-style
sermon on the work-ethic, the really best way to make a fast buck was being
explained by a Congressional committee staff report [...] into the sharp rise in recent
years of conglomerate corporations. In the four years 1965-68 conglomerates
absorbed more assets in manufacturing and mining than in the preceding two decades.
This was one of the by-products of the Vietnam War, though the report does not
connect the two. The inflation and speculative fever the war engendered alone made it
possible for shrewd operators to buy up other business at inflated values and then
recoup with “growth stocks” on a booming stock market [...] The report [also] shows
how insurance companies are taken over so their surpluses can be used for speculation
[...]. One reason these conglomerates [other examples being G&W, ITT, Litton] ran
into trouble is because they grew [between 1964 and 1968] by paying far more for the
business they acquired than they were worth” (1-3).
16
Pynchon traces this to the arrival of George Lucas and his Star Wars Trilogy (VL
7), but its actual cause has far more to do with the underlying economy than with the
media.
17
The last two syllables of Takeshi’s previous employer, Professor Wawazume’s
name (“Tsume”) means “talon” in Japanese. It is not surprising, then, that he seems to
be “fading some of the action” (VL 146) from the Chipco extortion racket just as the
performance of Chipco shares has become “very—strange” (VL 170). Here Pynchon
seems to be metaphorically hinting at the coercive nature of the process of
financialization that economies periodically go through, and its intensity rising the
more credit is emphasized in an economy, as it was in the 1890s, 1920s, late 1960s,
and again in the period of 1974-87, after the U.S. dismantled the Bretton Woods
currency exchange system and left all traces of the “Gold Standard” behind. Though
1974 also marked the end of Nixon and of the Vietnam war (Diebold), it is tempting
to view Takeshi and DL’s attendance at the “Thanatoid Roast ‘84 [...] the tenth annual
get-together” (VL 219) as perhaps marking the tenth anniversary of the beginning of
the “long down-turn” and the turn to financialization by the U.S by way of attempting
to evade its consequences, as the resulting “dematerializing of money” led it to lead a
Thanatoid-like existence, “a ghostly electronic life” (Henwood, Wall Street: How It
Works 228).
18
According to Victor Goldberg, “haggling over net profits clauses has long been a
Hollywood sport, and the disputes often end up in litigation” (532). This is because,
says Henwood, “financial innovations are more than mere bankers’ fancy; hard issues
of power and risk are settled through them” (Wall Street: How It Works 52). The
object being, of course, to shift risk (and therefore the degree of market coercion)
from one’s own territory onto someone else’s. Hector here is ‘naturally’ employing
the “inequality of bargaining power” (Goldberg 534) that he temporarily enjoys over
Sid and Ernie, a power relationship that would normally flow the other way. Thus
Hector is shrewd in asking for a guaranteed profit of $1 million plus half of the gross
208 William D. Clarke
receipts after the gross reaches only a small multiple of the cost to actually shoot the
film. As Natural Born Killers producer Don Murphy says, “where you really get
fucked” if you are producer of or simple investor in a film “is if you have a gross
participant” like Hector skimming dollars off (from not only the gate but also “any
ancillary deal”) before the film even reaches its actual break-even point. This is part
of what “sounds real natural” to Ernie—power players such as stars and corporate
subsidiaries (such as video distributors) do this all the time, and so the actual “profit”
reported back to “net” participants can vanish into the aether of Hollywood’s
“Martian accounting” (Susman).
19 rt
e is the formula for interest earned at a particular rate of return [r] for a given
amount of time [t]. A casual perusal of the formula suggest that a simple rise of 1% in
the rate yields an exponential increase in profit over a given time, due to
compounding. It “sounds real natural” to Ernie for three reasons: first, because e is the
base for “natural logarithms,” which you would employ to figure out, say, how long
you would need to invest in order to double your money (i.e. if a film promised an
investor a high rate of return, this time would shrink radically); second, it sounds
“natural” because in this, as in any capitalist arena, such negotiations, and the
coercive nature of the financialization practices that go with them, are often the key to
making a profit, and Ernie knows an effective gambit (i.e. Hector’s) when he sees it;
third, because over time, realize that the emerging financial technology of junk or
“high yield” bonds could be employed great effect in the film industry as well as in
real estate and corporate takeovers financial innovations such as those employed in
Hollywood the ‘80s only give their “innovators” an edge for a short period of time,
after which they become “naturalized” and new “financial technologies” must be
invented to keep the rate of return acceptably high.
20
The trouble with high relative rates of return that “innovators” such as Milken were
seeking is that they always coincide with higher risk. As classical economist David
Ricardo says, “[t]o the question, ‘who would lend money to farmers, manufacturers,
and merchants, at 5 per cent. per annum, when another borrower, having little credit,
would give 7 or 8?’ I reply, that every prudent or reasonable man would. Because the
rate of interest is 7 or 8 per cent. there where the lender runs extraordinary risk, is this
any reason that it should be equally high in those places where they are secured from
such risks?” (cited in Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works 173)
But in the 1980s, Michael Milken turned this logic on its head with his “high
yield” [aka “Junk”] bonds, by “proving” that by spreading such “extraordinary risk”
out widely enough, investments that did pay off would far outstrip the losses of those
that did not. The key was to find enough money in order to spread the risk around,
and the answer to that was debt, or credit, which began with “the severance of paper
currencies from gold in the early 1970s, [and] waxed during the 1983-89 binge”
(Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works 224) that Pynchon is concerned with here. Film
companies called this “co-financing” but in reality it is much more than that, as by
bringing institutional investors such as hedge and pension funds on board, they were
able to off-load risk, maintain “creative” control, and have progressively larger
budgets (Vogel 113). If hedge and pension funds took on that risk, it was because the
technique of junk bond financing, being still new, almost guaranteed high returns.
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 209
Interestingly, Milken himself concocted a theory about how such novel financial
“technologies” have a “multiplier effect” on the wealth of society as a whole:
“Because these financial technologies create anonymous, efficient markets, borrowers
are less dependent on the old relationship-based system. [...] It also contributes to
social capital by helping finance home building and strengthening communities.
(Social capital also includes the underlying incentives to invest provided by the rule
of law and secure property rights.) The multiplier effect of financial technology
suggests a theory of prosperity that I developed in the 1960s. It can be stated as a
simple formula:
P =Fti * (HCi + SCi +RAi)
Prosperity equals the collective value of financial technologies multiplied by the total
of human capital, social capital, and real [...]. The multiplier effect of these financial
techniques produced an unprecedented economic boom over the past 20 years”
(Milken).
According to Henwood, however, these ‘technologies’ eventually drive all
economies into the third term of the sequence: ‘hedge-speculative-Ponzi’ (Henwood,
Wall Street: How It Works 222), ‘Ponzi’ referring a notorious scheme in which a
financier can only pay off debts to existing investors by finding new ones—which is
ultimately self-limiting in that eventually new creditors become scarce and the
scheme collapses under its own weight. In the Junk-bond 80s, says Henwood, “[...]
the U.S. economy unquestionably entered a Ponzi phase. Corporate takeovers were
frequently done with the open admission that the debt could never be comfortably
serviced, and that only with asset sales or divine intervention could bankruptcy be
avoided“ (Wall Street: How It Works 223).
Bibliography
Berger, James. “Cultural Trauma and The ‘Timeless Burst’:
Pynchon’s Revision of Nostalgia in Vineland.” Postmodern
Culture 5.3 (1995). 15 May 2010 <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/
postmodern_culture/v005/5.3berger.html>.
Bové, Paul. “History and Fiction: The Narrative Voices of Pynchon’s
Gravity's Rainbow.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (2004): 657-80.
Brenner, Robert. “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique
of Neo-Smithian Marxism.” New Left Review 104 (1977): 25-92.
—. The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy. London
and New York: Verso, 2003.
—. The Economics of Global Turbulence. London and New York:
Verso, 2006.
Butterfield, Fox. “Hoover's F.B.I. And the Mafia: Case of Bad
210 William D. Clarke
Michael Harris
Abstract: It is clear from numerous references in his novels that Pynchon has
considerable knowledge and interest in the subject of Eastern religion, yet so far
criticism has neglected to address this topic, with the exception of Robert Kohn’s
2003 essay “Seven Buddhist Themes in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.” Rather than
promoting a particular religious belief, Pynchon’s texts utilize Eastern religion as a
foil to contrast with the more familiar Western, Christian perspective. Referencing
Eastern religion thus serves as a defamiliarizing technique as well as a means of
suggesting an alternative mode of perceiving the world. Pynchon has at times
expressed an implicit desire to recover or return to a sacred past, once alive but now
eviscerated by state-run religion, capitalism, and technology. In this essay, I argue
that, given this general shift from the spiritual to the secular, Pynchon’s referencing of
Eastern religion is not only a signifier worth taking seriously, but also a meaningful
structuring device that he increasingly uses in his longer narratives: Gravity’s
Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day.
to being a spiritual medium than he’s been yet, and he doesn’t even
know it” (GR 622). By this point Slothrop has let go of his mission for
Bummer and Bodine:
He’s letting hair and beard grow, wearing a dungaree shirt and trousers
Bodine liberated for him […]. But he likes to spend whole days naked, ants
crawling up his leg, butterflies lighting on his shoulders, watching the life on
the mountain […]. Any number of places he might be moving, but he’d rather
stay right here for now. (GR 623)
“I hesitated to disturb you with the news, Latewood, for you seemed another
of these neurasthenic youths one finds everywhere lately. But you must be
told. You have come to Sarajevo on a dummy assignment. All to lure you out
here to Bosnia, where it is easier for the Austrians to take you. Your English
employers have shopped you to them as a ‘Serbian agent’ […]. It seems you
owe England nothing anymore. I advise you to go. Save your life.” (AtD 832)
unexpected deep ravines” (AtD 833). After Danilo falls and breaks his
leg and later contracts a fever, Cyprian has no choice but to carry him
to safety to his home in Salonica, relying on untapped physical and
spiritual reserves: “He was surprised to find emerging in his character
previously unsuspected gifts, notably […] an often-absurd willingness
to sacrifice all comfort until he was satisfied that Danilo would be
safe” (AtD 839). Here Cyprian exemplifies compassion—the ability to
feel with others—and according to Buddhist teaching, the highest
virtue, along with wisdom (Robinson 23). Their wayward journey to
eventual safety marks the beginning of a change in Latewood that is
not sought, but is nevertheless welcome.
Whereas Kit Traverse acknowledges that he is not like the
stranniki, the holy wanderers that Yashmeen recalls from her Russian
childhood, Cyprian now is. These stranniki, Yashmeen remembers,
had led everyday lives like other men, had their families and work […]. Then
one day they simply turned—walked out through the door and away from all
of it—whatever had held them there, history, love, betrayals forgiven or not,
property, nothing mattered now, they were no longer responsible to the world,
let alone the Tsar […]. (AtD 663)
But along with the mysteries of Desire, Cyprian was now feeling a shift in its
terms, an apprehension that something was coming to an end.... The sources
of Desire were as unknowable as those of the Styx. But no more accountable
was the absence of desire—why one might choose not to embrace what the
world judges, it often seemed unanimously, to lie clearly in one’s interest.
(AtD 890)
Bibliography
Armstrong, Karen. Buddha. New York: Penguin, 2001.
Cowart, David. “The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon.” Thomas
Pynchon (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. 261-81.
Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. New York: New Directions, 1951.
Hopkins, Thomas J. The Hindu Religious Tradition. Belmont, CA:
Dickenson, 1971.
Howard, Gerald. “Pynchon from A to V.” Bookforum 12.2
(June/July/August/September, 2005): 29-40.
Kohn, Robert. “Seven Buddhist Themes in Pynchon’s The Crying of
Lot 49.” Religion & Literature 35.1 (Spring 2003): 73-96.
Matthiessen, Peter. The Snow Leopard. New York: Viking Press,
1978.
The Tao of Thomas Pynchon 229
Jessica Lawson
Does the text have a human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body?
Yes, but of our erotic body.
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (17)
In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love one another
decently, without shame or make-believe, under the uneasy likelihoods of their
sudden deaths […]. But the life-cry of that love has long since hissed away into no
more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. […] Homosexuality in high places is just a
carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper. (GR 616)
232 Jessica Lawson
Could there be, somewhere, a dossier, could They (They?) somehow have
managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty…how else
would They know?
“Hush,” she whispers. Her fingers stroke lightly her long olive thighs,
bare breasts swell from the top of her garment. Her face is toward the ceiling,
but her eyes are looking into Pirate’s own. (GR 72)
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 235
Legibility and the lack thereof are central concerns for Tyrone
Slothrop. The map Slothrop has made of his sexual conquests encodes
in two ways, one legible to Slothrop, and one not. Unbeknownst to
him, the sites of sexual intercourse which he marks with stars on this
map perfectly encode and predict the bomb sites of London. Within
his realm of knowledge, but never quite decoded by the map’s other
readers, are the patterned colors of the stars themselves. The narrator
reveals Slothrop’s own motivations as he muses over two of the
236 Jessica Lawson
women he has slept with, each of whom is marked with a silver star,
“He must’ve been feeling silvery both times—shiny, jingling. The
stars he pastes up are colored only to go with how he feels that day,
blue on up to golden” (GR 22). In this case, the methodology
governing his writing is one that reflects not the subject denoted, but
his own emotional state at the time of authoring. He also writes in
response to the rockets, recording observations in an activity he calls
“work-therapy” (GR 24), similarly using the occasion of inscription to
dually create a text and address his emotional state. Within one code
system, Slothrop’s authorship is sexually destructive, dubiously
legible, and uncomfortably public. Within another, his inscriptions are
intimacies that grant him access to himself through their private
readability.
Slothrop’s authorial power fluctuates based on the context in which
that authorship is decoded and given meaning, and his status as an
erotic reader is similarly complicated. While he can enter his partners
sexually, he cannot penetrate their textual counterparts quite as easily.
Recalling a series of lovers, Slothrop remembers: “snuggling for
warmth, blackout curtains over all the windows, no light but the coal
of their last cigarette, an English firefly, bobbing at her whim in
cursive writing that trails a bit behind, words he can’t read…” (GR
23). The woman’s writing is triply embodied: in the words on her
page, in the bobbing light of her cigarette as she moves her inscribing
hand, and in the cryptic smoke trails that follow from the cigarette’s
movement. Slothrop cannot read her words, whether directly or
through these secondary and tertiary levels of mediation and removal.
Like the texts of Pirate and Barthes, the legible object is presented
through a series of re-articulations that unfix the moment of
writing/reading, making it as difficult to tell which text Slothrop
should engage as it is for him to fix an interpretation to the object. The
rocket to which Slothrop is so intimately connected encapsulates
illegibility, the signified object travelling faster than its own sound,
repositioning the signifier as an afterthought rather than a precursor.
Yet the rocket remains exceptional, and Slothrop imagines it not
dislocated within its code, but totally divorced from all sign systems,
“nothing he can see or lay hands on—sudden gases, a violence upon
the air and no trace afterward…a Word, spoken with no warning into
your ear, and then silence forever” (GR 25). Never fully cognizant of
the code he could crack by the careful study of his own penis,
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 237
The time Roger and Jessica have spent together, totaled up, still only comes to
hours. And all their spoken words to less than one average SHAEF
memorandum. And there is no way, first time in his career, that the statistician
can make these figures mean anything.
Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles
and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.
Apart is for all their flip film-dialogue, scenarios they make up to play
alone for themselves in the nights with the Bofors door-knocking against her
sky. (GR 121)
Their connection slips into the spaces between and beyond the coding
and scripting systems that could make their intimacy “mean
anything,” just as the paragraph describing their connection is slipped
between the bookends of memoranda and film dialogue. This
connection necessarily takes them out of their static subject positions.
Roger and Jessica’s intimacy dissolves identity through their
conjoined bodies, making them into a “long skin interface” that utters
“hardly a word beyond her name, or his” and refuses to fix either
name to any portion of their collective body. Beyond the codes and
238 Jessica Lawson
The very first touch: he’d been saying something mean, a bit of the usual
Mexico self-reproach—ah you don’t know me I’m really a bastard sort of
thing— “No,” she went to put her fingers to his lips, “don’t say that.…” As
she reached, without thinking he grabbed her wrist, moved her hand away,
pure defense—but kept holding her, by the wrist. They were eyes-to-eyes, and
neither would look away. Roger brought her hand to his lips and kissed it
then, still watching her eyes. A pause, his heart in sharp knocks against the
front of his chest… “Ohh...” the sound rushing out of her, and she came in to
hug him, completely let-go, open, shivering as they held each other. She told
him later that as soon as he took her wrist that night, she came. (GR 120)
“What did he tell you?” She moves a step closer. Slothrop watches her hands,
thinking of army judo instructors he’s seen. It occurs to him he’s naked and
also, hmm, seems to be getting a hardon here, look out, Slothrop. And nobody
here to note it, or speculate why....
“Sure didn’t tell me you knew any of that judo. Must of taught you it in
that Holland, huh? Sure—little things,” singing in descending childish thirds,
“give you away, you know....”
“Aahh—” exasperated she rushes in, aims a chop at his head which he’s
able to dodge—goes diving in under her arm, lifts her in a fireman’s carry,
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 241
throws her against the bed and comes after her. She kicks a sharp heel at his
cock, which is what she should’ve done in the first place. Her timing, in fact,
is drastically off all through this, else she would likely be handing Slothrop’s
ass to him…it may be that she wants her foot to miss, only scraping Slothrop
along the leg as he swerves now, grabs her by the hair and twists an arm
behind her, pushing her, face-down, on the bed. Her skirt is up over her ass,
her thighs squirming underneath him, his penis in terrific erection.
“Listen, cunt, don’t make me lose my temper with you, got no problems at
all hitting women, I’m the Cagney of the French Riviera, so look out.”
“I’ll kill you—”
“What—and sabotage the whole thing?” (GR 221-22)
The clear signs in this scene are few: a lost fight and the exchange of
harsh words, which lead to penetration and Katje “screaming into the
pillow” (GR 222). Depending on how motives are attributed to these
actions, this episode could feature either a sexual assault that is re-
imagined in the false or distorting guise of consensual play, or an
implicitly consensual act which draws pleasure for its participants by
masquerading as assault.6 The narrator offers tentative explanations
for Katje’s misplaced kick, and Slothrop’s language is
uncharacteristically rough (as if he is acting), yet the text withholds
any simplifying categorization of the event. It may be that the
explanations offered are Slothrop’s own, justifying an actual rape. It
may also be that the characters are good enough at reading one
another (through “little things”) that they have negotiated, in the
silences between described movements, a spontaneous and consensual
domination scenario that only role-plays literal violence. It is possible
that Slothrop’s response, “What—and sabotage the whole thing?” to
Katje’s threat to kill him refers to the sexual game in which they are
currently engaged. Yet, the evidence that would lean toward
consensual role-playing is conspicuously noncommittal, positioning
the reader in an uncomfortable place between codes. The reader’s
position is further unsettled few paragraphs later: “But here’s only her
old residual bitterness again, and they are not, after all, to be lovers in
parachutes of sunlit voile, lapsing gently, hand in hand, down to
anything meadowed or calm. Surprised?” (GR 222) The word
surprised gestures to the surprised audience that has, up until this
point, been expecting a love story. The unintelligibility within this
scene is echoed by ambivalences of the narrative voice. The scene
hovers between systems of meaning, committing to neither, breaking
its contract with the reader to provide intelligible access to the reality
242 Jessica Lawson
of the events described. As the only one here “to note it, or to
speculate why,” the reader’s narrative trust is explicitly challenged.
However one interprets the scene between Katje and Slothrop itself,
the only wholly intelligible violation occurs not in the bed, but on the
page.
You address yourself to me so that I may read you, but I am nothing to you
except this address; in your eyes, I am a substitute for nothing, for no figure
(hardly that of the mother); for you I am neither a body nor even an object
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 243
(and I couldn’t care less: I am not the one whose very soul demands
recognition), but merely a field, a vessel for expansion. (5)
Pointsman, like the prattling writer, conflates the text he creates with
that text’s audience, making the act of writing an end in itself via the
forced elision of the reader’s presence. This is an authorial desire
which collapses back in upon itself, returning to the writer “whose
very soul demands recognition” at the expense of the reader. This
conflation, elision, and collapse characterize a peculiar stylistic move
Pynchon makes in this passage. The move in question begins with
Pointsman’s observation of a young girl in the St. Veronica’s
Downtown Bus Station. Using her as the starting point, Pointsman
considers more broadly the thousands of children passing through the
city, and the section ends with a description of the occasional child
who actually follows Pointsman home. This entire passage is the
novel’s first extended piece of second-person narration, a stylistic
change which both Barthes and Pynchon employ at moments when
readers are flattened by the textual event in which they have no
agency. Concurrent with Pynchon’s discussion of sexual inscription
upon passive subjects is a narrative conscription of the reader to the
uncomfortable position of direct address, co-opting us into the story in
a new and forceful way, like the children Pointsman wishes to pull
into the realm of the sexual.
Yet the character position in which the reader is placed, the “you”
whose role we momentarily assume in the story, is not the “artlessly
erotic” child (GR 50), but rather Pointsman himself. This doubly
reinforces the solipsism of Pointsman’s sexual and textual practices.
Not only are the words he will write upon these children self-
reflexive, but so is the narrative method by which these meetings are
then described. The only access that either the reader or Pointsman
have to the sexual object is mediated, always passing first through the
filtering circuit of how it affects Pointsman. For example, when
describing the physical and emotional state of the girl he sees in the
bus station, the narrator does not tell us plainly that she is tired, but
rather that “[y]ou feel her exhaustion, feel the impossible vastness of
all the sleeping countryside at her back, and for the moment you really
are selfless, sexless” (GR 51). The selflessness referred to here is
undercut not only by its ephemerality, but more pointedly by the fact
that the girl’s fatigue is never described as existing in the girl herself,
244 Jessica Lawson
back in, describing now the speech of the white boys: “Eastern prep-
school voices, pronouncing asshole with a certain sphinctering of the
lips so it comes out ehisshehwle” (GR 62). The entrance and re-
entrance into this hallucination emphasize distinctive pronunciations
of words on both sides of the cultural divide. The tie between the
racial or sexual body and the physicality of linguistic expression is
emphasized as the white college boys transform their mouths into the
very assholes they describe, creating a strangely embodied
pronunciation of the word and forecasting the later prominence of one
particular white asshole.
The struggle for linguistic control reemerges along with the
aforementioned anus when a black shoeshine boy, referred to by
Slothrop only as “Red,” punctuates his attempt to penetrate Slothrop
by correcting his use of language, which Slothrop belatedly considers
on his way down the toilet, “the true name is Malcolm” (GR 64). To
anally enter Slothrop is to assert linguistic as well as bodily
occupation. The concern with language continues down the toilet
along with Slothrop. The walls of the pipe he moves through, also
anal, are encrusted with feces, “mixed with hardwater minerals into a
deliberate brown barnacling of his route, patterns thick with meaning,
Burma-Shave signs of the toilet world, icky and sticky, cryptic and
glyptic” (GR 65). The anal passage Slothrop penetrates is itself
readable. There is even a legible difference between the excrement
produced by black men versus white. In a text that often compares
words and shit, the anal passage already contains signs and meaning
produced by the owner of that passage, the author of their own fecal
signature. The potential for another person, another culture, to
sexually insert their own use of language into that passage is here
rendered in highly literal terms. Anal sex becomes, in this scene, the
possibility to culturally inscribe with an authorial finger or penis,
altering and revising the pre-extent language housed in the interior of
the body.
Slothrop’s feces are a recurring concern in his musings on the
textual product of his culture and others. Much later in the novel,
Slothrop is struggling with “[v]omiting, cramps, diarrhea” and “lies,
listening [to] the tramping and the voice out of earshot, the sound of
his country fading away” (GR 360). The “fading” of his historical
language manifests textually as “poor refuge pockets stuffed with
tracts nobody’d read” (GR 360). In the middle of these cultural
246 Jessica Lawson
Notes
1
There are elements of this analogy which do not map perfectly: notably the
“interpretive edge,” which in Pirate’s case is predetermined.
2
He is the one-man masturbatory proof of Wittgenstein’s argument against the
possibility of a private language.
3
What I have termed an extension of the authorial event, strung out over textual and
bodily stop-gaps which continually shift the moment of inscription, owes much to
Timothy Melley’s discussion of both bodily dispersal and Pirate’s inexact agency (82-
85). Where I have examined the changes in body and identity as markers of
fluctuation in authorship, Melley discusses communication technologies and power
structures that redistribute the body and identity-as-agency.
4
Melley also notes this stylistic shift (85).
5
Their story, like their bodies, eventually thins out and disappears from the events of
Gravity’s Rainbow. Their breakup is only reported after the fact, when the two
characters reappear hundreds of pages later, once Jessica has slipped back into the
comfortable system of her socially coded relationship with Jeremy.
6
I believe that to offer a firm interpretation in either direction deprives the scene of its
structural richness.
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 249
7
For other readings of the relationship between sexuality and race in Gravity’s
Rainbow, see Sears and Curtin.
8
Many thanks to Rob Latham for advising the early stages of this article, and for
directing me to this scene.
9
For a closer reading of the problem of sexual orientation in Pynchon’s work, see
Sears.
10
The metaphoric tie between the phallus and readerly penetration also creates a few
inconsistencies for readers with vaginas.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Curtin, Maureen F. Out of Touch: Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf,
Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker. New York and London: Routledge,
2003.
Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in
Postwar America. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
2000.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Penguin,
1994.
Sears, Julie Christine. “Black and White Rainbows and Blurry Lines:
Sexual Deviance/Diversity in Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason &
Dixon.” Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins. Ed. Niran
Abbas. London: Associated University Press, 2003. 109-21.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd Ed. Trans. G.
E. M. Anscombe. Malden, MA; Oxford; and Victoria, Australia:
Blackwell Publishing, 2001.
Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in Thomas Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49
Abstract: This essay reads Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel The Crying of Lot 49
“against the light” of Marx and Bauman’s “melting visions.” It seems to me a
stimulating perspective which might enable us to see The Crying of Lot 49 as only a
few frames of a much longer movie, a point on that line of Western thought which,
from Marx through Benjamin to Bauman, has tried to depict the collateral effects of
modern capitalism, the wounds inflicted by modernization, next to the positive
aspects of progress. It is within this larger framework that I want to show how
focusing on the solid/fluid dialectic might open up new ways of looking at The Crying
of Lot 49. On the one hand, I will try to chart how, throughout the book, the play of
memory is at the center of a force field shaped by the solid/fluid tension. On the other
hand, I will show how Pynchon’s story might be read as a semiotic reflection on the
value of the almost completely dissolved, fluctuating signs of postmodern America.
1
“All That Is Solid Melts into Air”
All That Is Solid Melts into Air is the title of a compelling book on
modernization by Marshall Berman; at the same time “[a]ll rusted
relations […] dissolve away […]. All that is solid melts into air” is a
quotation from the heart of the Communist Manifesto which in the
original German reads: “Alle festen eingerosteten Verhältnisse […]
werden aufgelöst […]. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft.”2
By using this image of evaporation, Marx and Engels not only
managed to grasp the spirit of modern capitalism, but they also
foreshadowed some of the features to come of the postmodern, late
capitalist societies we have been living in for the past few decades.3
No wonder sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in Liquid Modernity, after
reminding us that fluidity is a distinguishing quality of gases and
liquids, argues that the crucial feature of the present phase of
modernity is the transformation from solid societies into fluid—or
252 Manlio Della Marca
The struggle between fluidity and form in the construction of the self has been
one Richard Poirier, in several books including A World Elsewhere and The
Performing Self, has located within the specific historical progressions of
classical American and modern literature. Pynchon, according to Poirier, is
part of this tradition of progression, a descendent of Hawthorne, Emerson and
Melville in his projection of a vision of “cultural inundation, of being
swamped, swept up […].” (11)
is solid melts into air” and all that is rusted dissolves away. Indeed,
Mucho leaves the used car lot and all its automobiles with their “rusty
underneath” (CoL 8) and starts to work for a radio station. But the
change, as Marx had predicted, is a traumatic one: “He [Mucho] had
believed too much in the lot, he believed not at all in the station” (CoL
9). The shift from the hard world of the used car lot to the soft world
of media encompasses the trajectory from modernity to
postmodernity. But the price to pay is a world which has lost even its
residual aura of holiness. The void must be filled with something else:
paranoia or memory.5 Both can be seen as last, desperate, postmodern
attempts to “re-enchant” and “resacralize” the world.6
Memory
Early in the book we read that Oedipa has “to decide what to liquidate
and what to hold on to” (CoL 12) of Pierce Inverarity’s legacy. I think
this sentence encapsulates the central dilemma at the heart of The
Crying of Lot 49, which is also the central problem of our present-day
liquefied, flowing societies.
Deciding what to liquidate and what to hold on to is a wonderful
image of memory, shaped by the tension between what is solid and
what becomes fluid. Harald Weinrich has argued that metaphors of
memory in Western thought could be grouped into two types or
“metaphorical fields”: the storehouse metaphors and the wax tablet
metaphors (Sprache in Texten 291-94). We can draw on Weinrich’s
brilliant intuitions to imagine an alternative “field” that could be used
to explore not only metaphors, but all images of memory: the one
created by the solid/fluid dialectic. While solidity stresses the stability
of memory, fluidity draws attention to the transient nature of it and its
need for perpetual self-reorganization.
Applying this model to The Crying of Lot 49, we can see that
memory exposed to liquefaction and dematerialization imposed by
modernization generates two clusters of recurring images in the novel:
one of hard materiality (junk, waste),7 which seemingly appears to be
an attempt to stabilize memory, and another of fluid, liquefied realities
(media, spectral figures).8 The following passage shows how “rusty”
cars become a hard, though temporary, deposit of memory—or
memories—which will be inexorably swept away:
Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in The Crying of Lot 49 255
Yet at least he [Mucho] had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could
he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a
parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins:
motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their
whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like
himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath […] inside smelling
hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations
of cigarette smokers, or only of dust—and when the cars were swept out you
had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling
what things had been truly refused […] and what had simply (perhaps
tragically) been lost: […] all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad
of despair, in a grey dressing ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes […].
(CoL 8, my emphasis)
Once again, as in the car lot passage, there is almost an attempt to use
junk as a means of creating a storage device which can resist the
vaporization of memory. However, it is an attempt inevitably
condemned to failure.10
Besides the heavy, solid and only partially liquefied images of
memory discussed so far, throughout The Crying of Lot 49 we find
256 Manlio Della Marca
to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet
below, still resisting decay—any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself
for some last burst, […] just-glimmering, holding together with its final
strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host,
or dissipate forever into the dark. (CoL 111)
narrations:11 “Two very old men. All these fatigued brain cells
between herself [Oedipa] and the truth” (CoL 65). Thus Pynchon
deconstructs American history—or better, the myth of America—at its
roots. The supposed historical truth on which America was founded
seems to be melting away. But, as Benedict Anderson reminds us, it is
exactly in this fluid space generated by the dialectic between memory
and forgetting that nationalist discourse operates to create “a narrative
of ‘identity’” (201, 205), because what “can not be ‘remembered,’
must be narrated” (204). Looked at from this perspective, the
discourse of memory in The Crying of Lot 49 configures itself as a
subtle attempt to uncover the constructed nature of what, extending
Anderson, might be termed America’s imagined past. At the same
time, the text foregrounds the persistence of the past in the present.
Like the homemade wine Genghis Cohen offers Oedipa (CoL 65-
68)—a wine made from dandelions picked in a cemetery that has been
destroyed for a new freeway—America’s present is a liquid
containing the fluctuating signs picked from a land no longer
existing.12
Signs
According to John Johnston, one the novel’s central motifs is “that the
dead never really go away or disappear, but persist as ‘signs’” (56).
Focusing on the persistence of the past in the semiotic texture of the
present, his words take us from the discourse on memory to the last
part of this essay, which is devoted to the different signs, inscriptions
and symbols that crop up in the novel. From the very first paragraph
we already find Oedipa remembering “a whitewashed bust of Jay
Gould […] the only icon” (CoL 5) in Pierce Inverarity’s house. By
opening with an “icon” and the name “Pierce,” the text inevitably
“evokes the name of the American founder of semiotics C. S. Peirce”
(Johnston 56). My point is that not only could all of The Crying of Lot
49 be read as a semiotic reflection on the value of postmodern signs
(Johnston 47, 50). but also on how they are shaped by the tension
between solidity and fluidity. Oedipa’s search first for the (paper)back
and then for the (hard)cover edition of Wharfinger’s collected plays is
just one example of that tension. But there is much more than that; the
central sign of the novel is at the centre of this force field as well.
258 Manlio Della Marca
On this site […] in 1853, a dozen Wells Fargo men battled gallantly with a
band of masked marauders in mysterious black uniforms. We owe this
description to a post rider, the only witness to the massacre, who died shortly
after. The only other clue was a cross, traced by one of the victims in the dust.
To this day the identities of the slayers remain shrouded in mystery. (CoL 62)
Notes
1
I wish to thank Shelly Kittleson, Giogio Mariani, and Alessandro Portelli. Their
suggestions have been invaluable. They are of course in no way responsible for the
flaws of my work.
2
My quotations from the Manifesto are drawn from Moore’s classic translation
(1888), authorized and edited by Engels. Here, however, I have slightly deviated from
it. Moore’s original English translation reads: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with
their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-
formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,
260 Manlio Della Marca
all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real condition of life and his relations with his kind ” (Marx and Engels, The
Communist Manifesto 7). The passage differs significantly in German: “Alle festen
eingerosteten Verhältnisse mit ihrem Gefolge von altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und
Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern
können. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und
die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen
Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen” (Marx and Engels, Das
Kommunistische Manifest 465).
3
On the notion of “late capitalism,” see Jameson, Postmodernism 3.
4
I take the expression “melting vision” from Berman. According to him, Marx’s
melting vision “pulls like an undertow against the more ‘solid’ Marxian visions we
know so well” (89). Even though Bauman claims that the melting process described
by Marx is different from the one taking place in the contemporary phase of
modernity, it seems to me that Bauman’s analysis of modernization bear close
affinities with that of Marx. On this point, see Bauman, Liquid Modernity 3-4.
5
On paranoia and conspiracy theories, see Jameson, Postmodernism 83, and his The
Geopolitical Aesthetic 9-10. See also Portelli, Canoni Americani 291, and Simonetti
61-76.
6
On postmodernity “as a re-enchantment of the world that modernity tried hard to
dis-enchant,” see Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity x. On most postmodernist
fiction as “a post-secular project of resacralization,” see McClure 144.
7
On garbage and waste in Pynchon’s work, see Tanner, Thomas Pynchon 20, 31.
8
On ghosts in The Crying of Lot 49, see Portelli, The Text and the Voice 46. For a
more general study of ghosts in Pynchon’s fiction, see Punday.
9
For some stimulating reflections on the images of memory in our computer age, see
Weinrich, Lethe 5-6.
10
On the “sailor’s mattress” scene, see Tanner, “V. and V-2” 45. and Hinds 30. See
also Hayles 114-16.
11
For a discussion of the scenes of oral exchange in the novel, see Duyfhuizen 85.
12
Commenting on this passage, Mendelson speaks of “the sacramental content of
wine, the persistence of mythical time behind the profane world” (“The Sacred, the
Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49” 133-34).
13
On sandy areas as a metaphor for “oblivion,” see Weinrich, Lethe 4.
14
See Portelli, Canoni Americani 268. Steiner notes that “the reference to the Boston
Tea Party seems unavoidable here” (345).
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge,
1992.
Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in The Crying of Lot 49 261
Abstract: This essay tries to capture and explain the complex relationship of
underworld forces (both human and supernatural) represented in Against the Day with
the Croatian struggle for freedom in the context of Pynchon’s novel, drawing on a
historical and mythological framework. It addresses this question: how do
underground forces that are present in all of Pynchon’s novels function in this
particular context of narration, and how do they support a mythological structure tied
to the stereotypical beliefs that justify violence and unceasing struggles? The analysis
includes the investigation of Pynchon’s narrative framework that mostly hinges on
mythology and Western thought about more remote Eastern places, tolerating elisions
and imposed disfigurations, yet with a dose of criticism. Yet both the structure and his
arguments are more convincing because he interjects the re-writing of ideological
views and the demeaning stereotypes about the Balkans, as well as stressing Western,
external domination and control, while trying to illustrate the Easterners’ perception
of imperialist powers and their notion of self-determination.
“We are pirates, aren’t we, brutal and simple, too attached to the outsides of things,
always amazed when blood flows from the wound of our enemy. We cannot conceive
of any interior that might be its source, yet we obey its demands, arriving by surprise
from some Beyond we cannot imagine, as if from one of the underground rivers of the
Velebit, down in that labyrinth of streams, lakes, coves, and cataracts, each with its
narrative, sometimes even older than the Argonauts’ expedition—before history, or
even the possibility of connected chronology—before maps, for what is a map in that
lightless underworld, what pilgrimage can it mark out the stations of?” (AtD 819)
Other underworld forces that occupy the pages of Against the Day
are invisible supernatural powers that usually dwell in the regions
below the surface of the earth and lurk in the shadows for their
enemies. Pynchon’s tendency to write of the subterranean forces and
invisible underworld spirits that possess powers beyond the factual,
lurking for retribution in the margins of recorded history, has been
manifest in all of his work. Folklore, fables, legends, and all sorts of
tales that dwell someplace between myth and reality abound in his
texts. These restless creatures that roam in Pynchon’s novels belong to
“unknown purposes […] known only to the blood-scented deserts of
the Night” (MD 769).
In V., characters “yo-yo […] back and forth underneath 42nd
Street” (V. 31). They are the “king[s] of the subway” and sewer,
dreaming of their “own submarine country” (V. 217), crossing paths
with a whole “world downstairs” (V. 151) at “the other side of the
night” that “vanish[ed] again as if back behind some invisible curtain”
(V. 142).
The Crying of Lot 49 features “a calculated withdrawal” (CoL 124)
of who knows how many U.S. citizens. Thus, Oedipa feels “intrusions
into this world from another, […] the separate, silent, unsuspected
world” of “undergrounds” (CoL 124-25) that communicate by the
secretive subterranean mail system known as W.A.S.T.E. During her
ride she meets “drunks, bums, pedestrians, pederasts, hookers,
walking psychotic” (CoL 129), commuting with alternative,
underground, and marginalized representatives of American society.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, there is a doomed race of Herero exiles,
“known collectively as the Erdschweinhöhle”2 who are living in
“underground communities” (GR 315), opting “for sterility and death”
(GR 316). Their retribution to the whites is silent: “no more maids, no
field-hands” and “receptive darkness of limbs” (GR 317). The entire
tribe is “crawling away to die […] a whole people’s suicide” (GR
318). Another underground population is that of Dora “prison camp”
(GR 296), the “invisible kingdom” (GR 432) of “crematoria ghosts”
(Leonard 3) that “kept on, in the darkness” (GR 432), where “[t]he
walls did not dissolve—no prison wall ever did, not from tears” (GR
433).
In Vineland, “woge, creatures like humans but smaller” (VL 186),
felt “invaded” when Indians arrived so they withdrew “into the
features of the landscape, remaining conscious, remembering better
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 267
times” (VL 186). Yurok and Tolowa Indians were “exiled” when
Spanish and Russian settlers arrived, and “virtually erased from
memory” (Harris 204), but their spirits are still haunting new
generations. Thanatoids, a community of neither fully alive nor fully
dead people—“like death, only different” (VL 170)—grotesquely
underline our TV-based culture, a fantasy world welcomed from
comfortable armchairs and passively observed through the screen.
This last withdrawal seems particularly threatening, for it is a
consented withdrawal from the “real” world of not just a group but a
whole generation to “a comfortable masochism or diverting spectacle”
(Moore 138) that empowers yet another—in this case artificial—force,
the media.
Particularly imaginative, Mason & Dixon portrays a whole palette
of underworld figures, such as luminous phantoms, ghost-fish,
werewolves, black dogs, and “an Infestation of certain Beings
Invisible” (MD 560), for “[i]f an Actor or a painted Portrait may
represent a Personage no longer alive, might there not be other
Modalities of Appearance, as well?” (MD 165) These creatures are
“hiding, haunting, waiting” (MD 769); the only uncertainty seems to
be their idea of death, and “how are they going to deal with eternal
Rest? unless the World be already their Purgatory, and they no longer
classifiable as living” (MD 660).
Pynchon suggests in all of his novels that somewhere in the
landscape or below ground, buried, trapped, or willingly hiding from
daylight, or waiting in ambush on the other side of a screen or a glass
beyond simple reflection, there are invisible forces that camouflage
and prey upon us (even when their “outer shells” are visible as in V.
and Vineland). They seem to wait patiently, sometimes for centuries,
for some sort of vengeance. As John Leonard concludes: “invisible
forces mass to motion like an angry Wormwood, for payback time”
(3). Time is of no importance to them since their metaphysical
existence could be associated with that of “the unquiet dead” (AtD
1003). As noted by Ewball in Against the Day, they reappear
wherever there is some “unfinished business, it’s wherever there’s
accounts to be balanced” (AtD 1003). The hegumen of the convent in
Bulgaria, the head of a sect that “did not embrace the Roman Church
in 1650” but went “underground” (AtD 956), explains it: “And we go
back and forth, as Pythagoreans suspected, in and out of death as we
do dreams, but much more slowly” (AtD 961). Their spirits “dwell a
268 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
little over the Line between the Day and its annihilation” (MD 769),
accumulating strength, acquiring features and the spirit from secretive
underground forces, getting ready (even if subconsciously) for
payback time.
In Against the Day, geography and topology of the broader Balkan
region (and Europe in general) play one of the crucial roles in
elucidating mysterious underworld forces that haunt the area, and in
clarifying the spirituality of the inhabitants of the peninsula. The
Chums of Chance, a crew of protagonists that flies around the Earth
and below ground, and characters in their own series of adventure
books, conclude in one of their explorations under the sand: “As
above, so below” (AtD 439). This means that the underworld is
sometimes represented as a mirror image of the world above, as in
various African and Chinese myths. Pursuing their “dive into the
lightless world” past the boundaries of the visible, the Chums
encounter “darker shapes that kept pace with the ship’s progress”
(AtD 434).
Throughout the novel there is this idea of an ancient menace that
lurks from the insides of the Earth, enraged because humans treat it
disrespectfully, distorting its sacred territory (drilling tunnels below
ground, relocating its pieces—as the Iceland Spar figure—or
vandalizing it by mere human presence). This ancient force unleashes
“its pitiless gifts” (AtD 151), and the power “follow[s] its nature, in
exacting an appropriate vengeance” (AtD 151), at the same time
bequeathing its intensity to those that walk above ground so that it
incarnates within the inhabitants of the area.
In the Croatian territories of the novel these invisible forces are
said to “arriv[e] by surprise from some Beyond we cannot imagine, as
if from one of the underground rivers of the Velebit, down in that
labyrinth of streams, lakes, coves, and cataracts, each with its
narrative” (AtD 819). The mystical forces represent “that lightless
underworld” and are so powerful that the living folk cultures “obey its
demands” (AtD 819). In Croatian popular mythology one of the rulers
of the underworld is Dark, and during night all the underworld
apparitions (as Fear, Doom, and a variety of Passions) exit above
ground under Dark’s protection to “unfold their underworld
operations” (Suþiü 81-82, my translation). But in Against the Day,
these metaphysical powers also reflect the accumulated undying spirit
of the dead, deprived of freedom in life and in the afterlife, as chapter
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 269
headings of The Book of the Masked hint: “‘To Listen to the Voices of
the Dead.’ ‘To Pass Through the Impenetrable Earth’” (AtD 853).
Suþiü explains that heroic communities from Croatia refused to live in
subjugation and would rather choose courageous death: “Death gave
them to Earth as mortals. Glory returned them immortal to live a life
beyond this world” (109, my translation). This popular myth fits
perfectly with Pynchon’s tales of the Uskoks and their epic lives, but
also with his allusions, expressed through Ewball, to “Balkan ghosts”
or “the unquiet dead” who “surface wherever there’s a fight with the
same shape to it, same history of back-and-forth killing” (AtD 1003).
The otherworldly creatures of the Velebit, as well as humans, seem
to follow dreams as old as the world “before maps” (AtD 819), even
when they are masked as someone’s own ideas while the primal,
centuries-long objective urges for resurrection. Such a trans-
generational element is present in Clissan’s cherished The Book of the
Masked, which was
Although Vlado’s “living hand […] had made these marks across the
paper” (AtD 863), the readers are lead to believe that the ideas the
book embodies are not only his own but adhered to by generation after
generation, as old as the first settlers to the Velebit or even older if we
consider humans’ eternal pondering about life and death. Composed
in a hermetic mode that “could not be paraphrased even into the
strange holiness of Old Slavonic script” (AtD 853), with “the symbols,
vector and Quaternion notation” (AtD 863) that common folk were
definitely not familiar with, it is obvious that the majority of the
Croatian population cannot “conceive of” (AtD 819) the meaning of
the book. But the author implies they somehow follow its doctrine,
“obey its demands” (AtD 819). The substance of the text escapes
Yashmeen and those that are not natives of “those mountains, with
centuries of blood as security” (AtD 853), for when on the verge of
revelation, “when she felt herself about to grasp an intelligence so
grand and fatal […] she deliberately retreated” (AtD 863). Pynchon is
very secretive of the contents of the script, referring to it as “visions of
270 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
and superiority that the West demonstrates toward the Balkans has
found a fitting correlative in Pynchon’s novel. This is how professor
Renfrew from Cambridge, one of the western “leading specialist[s]”
(AtD 226) of the Eastern Question and the Balkans, simplifies
solutions to the problems in the area: “‘Best procedure when
considering the Balkans […] is not to look at components singly—one
begins to run about the room screaming after a while—but all
together, everything in a single timeless snapshot, the way master
chess players are said to regard the board’” (AtD 689). As is visible
from this quotation, the author is both playing along with the western
views of the Balkans, the novel testifying to the “otherness” of the
region, and at the same time he is being sarcastic and ridicules the
ideas of “balkanization” and “balkanism” (pejorative terms that
Todorova discusses in her work and that certainly draw on Said’s
“Orientalism”). It is important to keep in mind that “balkanization”
does not just designate fragmentation and division into small, often
hostile political units, but “had become a synonym for a reversion to
the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian” (Todorova 3).
By narrating semi-mythical constructs of ancient cultures and
myriad peoples that are ready to eat their enemies’ hearts (AtD 819-
20), Pynchon certainly emulates western views of the barbaric and
uncivilized behavior of the Balkans’ inhabitants. Yet it would be
wrong in the first place to claim that the term Balkans has ontological
stability. As Said claims, neither the concepts of the West nor Orient
retain firmness, “each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation,
partly identification of the Other” (xii), and as Todorova
acknowledges, it would be wrong to “create a counterstereotype of the
West, to commit the fallacy of ‘occidentalism’” (ix). That is why
Pynchon undermines Renfrew’s subscription to the homogeneity of
the Balkans and his ideas in general by introducing his doppelganger,
Professor Werfner of Göttingen, who “sure did look a hell of a lot like
Renfrew” (AtD 680). Werfner is equally eminent in his expertise on
the Balkans and sees the “‘long-range solution to the Macedonian
Question […] ‘to install all across the Peninsula […] das Interdikt’”
with “‘[p]oison gas’” (AtD 690). The resemblance of the two Western
professors and their “mutual loathing” (AtD 226) is in tune with their
views of the Balkan political units, which once again shows
Pynchon’s ingenuity. Since Pynchon’s novel is about power, cultures,
ideas and politics, both in the USA and in Europe, and is tied to the
274 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
(AtD 818-19). Indeed, large galleys could not anchor in the bay while
the Uskoks’ boats were light enough to navigate the smallest creeks
and inlets of the shore, and were easily sunk and recovered if a
temporary landing became necessary.
The first Uskoks appeared in the early sixteenth century. Close to
the end of the century the Venetian archbishop of Zara (today’s
Zadar), Minuccio Minucci, spoke of the early Uskoks as brave men
who fought for their county and were sick of Turkish tyranny (218-
19). They found their way to the coast from inlands, being forced to
move mostly from Bosnia and Herzegovina and continental Croatia by
the Turks who were progressing north. This is how Vlado Clissan
narrates this history: “‘Until the early sixteenth century, we lived on
the other side of the mountains. Then the Turks invaded, and forced us
off our land. We came over the Velebit range and down to the sea, and
kept fighting them all the way’” (AtD 818). Since Senj and Klis are
naturally located at excellent strategic positions and the inhabitants
built strong, almost invincible fortresses, the Uskoks were able to hold
their forts from there and “defended Christendom even when Venice
could not” (AtD 819). When Klis fell in 1537, the Uskoks from
southern Dalmatia joined their comrades in Senj, protecting “the
fortress city” and the surrounding territory known as the Military
Frontier for almost a century.
The term uskok comes from the Croatian word uskoþiti which
means “to jump in,” because Uskoks continued to move into the
Ottoman territory and fight against the infidels: their primary goal was
holy war against Muslim “unbelievers” who chased them off their
land and forcefully Islamized the population that remained. Ratty in
Against the Day interprets the consequences of the Ottoman
domination in Bosnia by calling it “‘a Mahommedan country, in fact a
Turkish province’” (AtD 809). It is not surprising that the Uskoks
wanted to banish the Turks from their territory. Daniel Goffman
explains the Uskoks were “a chaotic mix of uprooted people and
irregular soldiers, many possessed with a zeal for revenge and holy
war” (102). Clissan sees his ancestors in a more glorious light: “‘We
were guerrillas. The Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I gave us an annual
subsidy. […] We fought the Turks on land and kept them on the other
side of the Velebit […]. For generations we defended Christendom
even when Venice could not’” (AtD 818-19). Indeed, throughout the
sixteenth century, they served as antemurale Christianitatis (the shield
280 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
made a deal with the Turks, guaranteeing their safety in the Adriatic.
So we did what anybody would have done. We kept attacking ships,
only now Venetian ships as well as Turkish’” (AtD 819). The difficult
economic situation in which the Uskoks found themselves in the
inlands and at Senj, and grudges they started to bear against Venice
when it turned their back on the Uskoks, made them channel their
aggression to piracy on the Adriatic Sea, which is why the West
considered them as bandits.
Since the peace treaty of 1573 between Venice and the Ottoman
Empire, and since the loss of Cyprus, the Serenissima, as Venice was
known, tried not to endanger peaceful relations with the Turks.
Ottoman diplomats demanded that Venice suppress the Uskoks’
attacks and plundering of merchants sailing under the Ottoman flag
along the Croatian coast because the northern Adriatic was under
Venetian rule. In peril of plunging into an open conflict with the
Ottomans over the Uskok raids, Venice shielded Turkish ships with an
escort of galleys. This saddened and infuriated the Uskoks who, as
Clissan discloses, “‘love Venice, and […] continue to dream of her
[…]. Venice is the bride of the sea, whom we wish to abduct, to
worship, to hope in vain someday to be loved by’” (AtD 819). A
quotation with somewhat similar meaning can be found in the passage
where Kit arrives at Lake Baikal: “There are places we fear, places we
dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, too
late” (AtD 768). Venice was for Croatians such a charismatic place of
beauty and their role model to a point where sometimes they became
her exiles even when staying home. We see Venice’s influence when
Cyprian, Bevis and Jacintha, aboard the John of Asia, “pass among
island cities, variations on the theme of Venice, domes, villas, and
shrines arpeggiated along the irregular Croatian coastline” (AtD 822).
Clissan’s last name is a perfect example of how Venetian rule left its
mark, and he “kept an address in Venice, a couple of rooms in
Cannareggio” (AtD 817), demonstrating this unbreakable bond with
Venice.
At that time Croatia was split among Venetian, Austrian and
Turkish rulers. Tesla explains it in Against the Day by saying: “‘My
native land is not a country but an artifact of Habsburg foreign
policy’” (AtD 326). As is visible from abundant historical data, both
Austria and Venice reacted with diplomatic skill to the turbulences in
the area, determined by specific state interests. Venice was reserved to
282 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
every Habsburg and Papal plea for help during the Austrian-Turkish
War of 1593-1606, at the same time not negating the possibility of
another league against the Turks, and claiming loyalty to a Christian
confederation.
The Habsburg dynasty, on its part, made an agreement with
Venetian diplomats to control the Uskoks’ behavior at Senj. But they
did not really wish to enforce the agreement, for their military system
relied heavily on irregular Uskok troops as a defense system for their
Croatian territories (Simon 5). In addition to these reasons,
Habsburg’s political interests were to curb Venetian demands on land
and at sea. They used the Uskoks as indirect pressure against Venice,
which still represented a rival power in the Adriatic region during this
period. These power plays of great forces (and against the welfare of
smaller nations and communities) are depicted throughout Against the
Day, with Danilo’s analysis as one of the most striking: “‘The
Northern powers are more like administrators, who manipulate other
people’s history but produce none of their own. They are the stock-
jobbers of history, lives are their units of exchange’” (AtD 828).
Counting on “ancient tribal hatreds” (AtD 847) and religious
fanaticism, the great forces used smaller nations to secure their own
positions. The eminent Venetian scholar Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623)
explained that Habsburg’s arguments used for justifying the raids of
the Uskoks were simply that the Turks were enemies of the Christian
creed and, as such, were justly attacked (18).
On the other hand, the Uskoks were easily motivated to combat the
Turks. The Ottoman expansion into Christian Europe was reason
enough for them to fight back, since Christendom was to be protected.
Religious zeal was one of the best ways of inciting the people of
Dalmatia to cooperate, and the Habsburgs exploited this to a
maximum. The Uskoks’ creed guaranteed that they would fight
against the Ottomans and, from time to time, against the Venetians
(since friends of infidels are their enemies) without any, or at least
with minimal, regular payment. They provided an effective buffer
against Ottoman attacks and Venetian demands for domination of the
Adriatic. As Pynchon describes them, they were “a threat to Venice at
sea as to the Turks back in the mountains” (AtD 697).
But with the Treaty of Zsitvatörök in 1606, signed by the emperor
and the sultan, the relationship between the Habsburg and the
Ottoman Empires changed. Since the Turks could not penetrate
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 283
“the quite intolerable tyranny over people to whom the land really belongs,
land which, generation after generation, has been absorbing their labor,
accepting the corpses this labor produces, along the obscene profits, which it
is left to other and usually whiter men to gather.” (AtD 935)
Croatians have indeed lived on and off the same land, changing rulers
and borders, sometimes constrained to migration, while each authority
exploited them, plundered their riches and left a mark, whether
Turkish, Austro-Hungarian or Venetian.
Pynchon continues this tale of resistance through Clissan and a
group of young Croats from the early twentieth century that belonged
to “the increasingly energetic New Uskok movement” (AtD 697) that
would keep up struggle for independence by engaging in a variety of
“political errands” (AtD 819). While the Hungarian domination of
Croatia’s economic and political life during the last decades of the
nineteenth century tried to smother Croatian aspirations for autonomy,
the Croatian national movement was persistent in demanding
“freedom of the press, freedom of association, universal suffrage and,
above all else, the financial independence of Croatia and Slavonia
from Budapest” (Glenny 264). Their insistence on Croatian as the
official language as well as Hungarian is visible in the novel when
neo-Uskoks meet in Trieste and “[e]verybody was talking a dialect
part coastal ýakavština, part seventeenth-century maritime slang.
Opaque to Cyprian, but more important, to Vienna” (AtD 870).5 The
main task of the neo-Uskoks was to get rid of all the obstacles to
national progress and autonomy. The burning issue at the turn of the
century was, as Pynchon’s characters reveal, “the annexation” (AtD
808) of Bosnia and Herzegovina which Franz Joseph I proclaimed in
October 1908, and which poisoned European politics in general,
leading to a “general European war” (AtD 938). The shaky relations
between Croatians and Serbians deteriorated over Bosnian territory
again. This demonstrates that the turbulence in the Balkans has always
been more than the growing gap between the rulers and the oppressed,
for it comprises a very diverse ethno-linguistic region, an area where
Orthodox and Catholic Christianity collide, as well as a frontier
between Islam and Christianity.
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 285
The last sentence characterizes the archetypal force that was described
earlier, lurking in a community that is, as Yashmeen says,
“summoning memories older than her present incarnation” (AtD 958).
Throughout the novel Pynchon follows these underworld forces, and
in the Balkans specifically, crowded with angry ghosts, dead ones that
resurrect (AtD 1003), and alive ones, as Vatroslav’s “[i]ndustrial
ghosts” which Theign and the Western powers reject: “‘Your world
refuses them, so they haunt it, they walk, they chant, when needed
they wake it from its slumbers’” (AtD 873). They demand justice and
balance, as neo-Uskoks put it, for centuries of abiding in a murderous
landscape, hiding, relocating, and because they became “exiles […]
and never learned it until, too late” (AtD 768). Although the entire
Balkan populations took part in migrations, this paper focuses on
Croatia, its underground forces and their yearning for political
autonomy, which is why it should be said that after centuries of
subjugation, “flags threatened, the sacred soils of homelands defiled”
(AtD 938), Croatia finally became independent in 1991. But “the
unquiet dead” (AtD 1003) in the Balkans still walk, the underworld
remains, regardless of the national orientation, and even though the
stories and adventures retold are said to be “some exaggerated
accounts, already half folkloric” (AtD 870).
In Against the Day, parallel to the region’s human force—the
Uskoks of Senj—the Velebit’s mysterious underground and its diverse
outside appearance are the habitat of yet another force; or, perhaps it
286 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
is more natural to say that this unique “ruling component” (AtD 151)
has shaped the location and its inhabitants. After all, the area appears
haunted “by forces which had never seen reason to declare
themselves” (AtD 887). According to the myths, the underworld of the
Velebit is populated with spirits that, angry for not being granted
freedom in life, continue their struggle in death, and constitute a force
of history that is alive from generation to generation, and not just
among the living, “some primordial plasm of hate and punishment at
the center of the Earth which takes on different forms” (AtD 655). One
of the Croatian characters in Against the Day explains this by saying
that “‘there is nothing you can tell us. Nothing you can pay us. You
have stepped into a long history of blood and penance, and the coin of
these transactions is struck not from metal but from Time’” (AtD 874).
Thus, “the lower parts of the compass rose, the faceless, the despised,
the Mavrovlachi of Croatia. Vlado’s own” (AtD 870). Even if this
underlines Pynchon’s inclination to exploit and subscribe to the
stereotype of “balkanization,” these quotations also stress the
consequences of centuries of Croatian struggle for autonomy. At the
same time, this longing was invested with the characteristics of a
religious yearning, a wish that could not die with one’s death but
continued to persist in the afterlife, “arriving by surprise from some
Beyond we cannot imagine […] before maps” (AtD 819).
Thus, most of the natives of the Balkans region, including Croatia,
have for too long lived “against the day,” just so they can reach the
next morning alive, in the middle of tensions and fights of both great
powers and smaller nations or groups. The following quotation,
although pertaining to the aftermath of the Tunguska event, fits
perfectly with how the Balkan nations lived, tired of historical
travails: “most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the
sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking
only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the
night and prepare them against the day” (AtD 805). This is partly how
Croatians lived, worn down by centuries-long conflicts, yearning for
independence and better days to come. The other, idealistic
constituents, like the Uskoks, obeyed some invisible, yet palpable
force of menacing and dark underworld provenience, “tolling, bone
deep, invisible in the night” (AtD 262), enlightening the cloaked
layers of history “with centuries of blood as security” (AtD 853),
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 287
Notes
1
This proper name illustrates the linguistic complexities that abound in the text. Is
Pynchon mocking the readers by spelling the Croatian last name—Klisan, from the
town of Klis in Dalmatia—in the Italian way, or is he simply drawing attention to the
consequences of the Venetian rule and the flattening of cultural diversities?
2
In German, “Erde” is “earth,” “Schwein” is “pig,” “Höhle” is “cave.”
3
In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, he notes that dreaming of violets could be
associated with the words rape and violate and can symbolize violence and
defloration (247-49). It is also interesting to note that the name Ljubica is closely
related to Croatian word for love which is ljubav.
4
Suþiü explains that this fairy is one of the battle fairies that accompany their human
armies into battles (92-94).
5
Pynchon would have been more precise if he said “opaque to Vienna and Budapest”
since in the 1890s Budapest insisted on the sole use of the Hungarian language on the
state railway, which did not just mean they violated the nagodba which allowed for
the use of Croatian, but sabotaged Austrian interests. As Glenny explains: “The
Hungarian government blocked the construction of rail links between Zagreb and
Vienna so that all goods transported by rail would have to go either via Rijeka [the
port was under the direct administration of the authorities in Budapest] or via
Budapest” (260).
Bibliography
Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia. Torino: Paravia, 1941.
Begiü, Vanesa. “Istarskim kamenom graÿeni su Venecija, Ravenna,
dvorac Miramare…” Novi list 2 Mar. 2008: 9.
Bracewell, Catherine Wendy. Senjski uskoci: piratstvo, razbojništvo i
sveti rat na Jadranu u šesnaestom stoljeüu. Trans. N. Popoviü and
M. Rossini. 1992. Zagreb: Barbat, 1997.
Dawson, Andrew, and Mark Johnson. “Migration, Exile and
Landscapes of the Imagination.” Contested Landscapes:
288 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
Celia Wallhead
Abstract: In Against the Day, The Russian balloonists under Captain Igor Padzhitnoff
fly in a skyship called BOL’SHAIA IGRA, or “The Great Game.” This is a direct
reference to Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (1901). Kipling sets his story in India in
what was for him the present, hence the time period coincides with that of Against the
Day, which overtly spans from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to just after
the First World War, round about 1922. Kipling’s young protagonist is torn between
two tendencies in his identity: he is a Sahib, and as such gets involved in “The Great
Game”, but having been brought up in India, his spiritual side is attracted to a Tibetan
lama, and he becomes his follower. Pynchon’s narrator refers explicitly to espionage
as “styled by Mr. Kipling, in a simpler day, ‘The Great Game.’” It is as if the narrator
is speaking from the days of the Cold War (the concept of the Great Game having
been taken originally by the Russians from chess), or later, for example, the beginning
of the twenty-first century, and looking back to the beginning of the twentieth
century, and seeing it as “simpler” then. Against the Day, therefore, contains, amongst
its myriad subjects and styles, a postmodern reworking of the spy-adventure story
with specific reference to Kipling. While investigating this possibility, I have come
across many parallels between the two novels: (conflicting) quest stories involving the
material and the spiritual; their “plotlessness,” where unity is provided through
images and symbols; similarities between Kim and Kit; parallels between Kim and
some of the other spies in Against the Day; the treatment of light; and the foretelling
of the future, with the war looming ahead as a sort of apocalypse. Kim is the least
pessimistic of Kipling’s works, but of the two moral precepts underlying the novel,
one is negative but unavoidable: a recognition of man’s mortal insufficiency.
Pynchon’s postmodernism eschews any moralizing, but the threat of death is ever-
present in all his works. Furthermore, his rejection of any monolithic vision is not
dissimilar to Kipling’s other moral precept in Kim: the appeal for ecumenical
understanding.
The world, since the Chicago fair of 1893, had undergone a sudden craze for
vertical rotation on the grand scale. The cycle, Yashmeen, speculated, might
only seem reversible, for once to the top and down again, one would be
changed “forever.” Wouldn’t one. She drifted thence into issues of modular
arithmetic, and its relation to the Riemann problem, and eventually to the
beginnings of a roulette system which would someday see her past landlords
and sommeliers and other kinds of lupine liminality, and become the wonder
and despair of casino managers across the Continent. (AtD 503)
For the lama, the quest is a “search for the mystical River which
gushed out of the earth at the precise spot where the arrow launched
by Gautama Buddha in his youth had landed. The River is a
miraculously purifying one which will wash away sin and raise those
so redeemed above all earthly considerations” (Sandison xviii). Kim’s
river is the river of life, and his quest becomes a search for identity,
without his being aware of it: “‘Who is Kim—Kim—Kim? […] I am
Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’” (Kipling 282)
Similar searches for identities occur throughout Against the Day.
The principal searcher is Kit, but his older brother Reef also has an
identity crisis after a séance: “‘I don’t even know who I fuckin am
anymore’” (AtD 673). On the capitalist side, opposed to the anarchist
Traverse family, there is Scarsdale Vibe’s son Fleetwood, who,
rebelling against his father, is searching for a hidden place, “home,”
more spiritual than physical, and obviously not his father’s house (AtD
165). The uprooted Tesla speaks of a mystical river in his homeland of
“Granitza”: “In the Velebit, rivers disappear, flow underground for
miles, re-surface unexpectedly, descend to the sea. Underground,
therefore, lies an entire unmapped region, a carrying into the Invisible
of geography, and—one must ask—why not of other sciences as
well?” (AtD 327)
What are the reasons for these crises of identity both in Kim and
Against the Day? Kim’s crisis is caused by the fact that he is torn
between his white roots, his physical identity, and his spiritual side,
fostered by his upbringing in India, a sort of nature/nurture question.
But it is aggravated by the loneliness that is inevitable when he
becomes a spy. After his final “passing-out” as a member of the Great
Game, he thinks: “‘Now I am alone—all alone,’ he thought. ‘[…] In
296 Celia Wallhead
all India is no one so alone as I!’” (Kipling 282) There is also the
physical danger that is entailed by the Great Game. Once a spy, you
must always be a spy. As Grisha—or is it Misha?—says to Cyprian
Latewood: “‘even the silliest cretin on their list knows that if you turn,
you die’” (AtD 704). (The use of the word “turn” is reminiscent of
Frenesi Gates in Vineland.) Or, as Derrick Theign says to Latewood,
talking about death—with an Oriental reference: “‘Yet in our business
it’s everywhere. We must tithe a certain number of lives yearly to the
goddess Kali in return for a European history more or less free of
violence and safe for investment, and very few are the wiser’” (AtD
709).
Both Kim and Kit feel their lives under threat, though Kit’s
situation has the added irony that he is pursued by the very man who
sponsored him. Both young men are fatherless and have no home
(AtD 331). They both have someone interested in their future pay for
their schooling. Kimball O’Hara’s education at St Xavier’s School,
apparently promoted by the British army, is really financed by the
lama, while Scarsdale Vibe foots the bill for Kit to study mathematics
at Yale. A painted sepulcher of a Christian, ostensibly, he feels guilty
for having Kit’s father killed, but his real motive is to control Kit and,
through him, Tesla and his discoveries. The project Tesla is working
on which he particularly wants to obstruct or prevent, or preferably
take over, is the one aimed at producing “free universal power for
everybody” (AtD 158).
The lives and trajectories of both Kit and Kim seem plotless because
the characters are caught up in quests which they do not control. Their
routes move in circles or meander like rivers because they are
manipulated or because they flee from their spy masters. It is
interesting to compare the objectives and methods of the espionage in
the two novels. In Kim, one of the most important characters spying
for the British is Mahbub Ali, known as one of the best horse-dealers
in the Punjab. In Against the Day, Auberon Halfcourt disguises
himself as a Punjabi trader dealing in donkeys (AtD 759). Mahbub Ali
was registered as “C. 25. 1B” in one of the locked books of the Indian
Survey Department, which was a cover for spying, especially at a time
Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 297
The indulgence of chess players by the government had its roots in the
beginnings of the Soviet state, whose leaders saw in chess masters
exactly the qualities they saw as Bolshevik: self-discipline, analytical
strength and iron nerves. One could say that a spy needs these
qualities too. Kim keeps his nerve when he has to disguise and
transform the identity of his fellow spy E. 23 on the train in order to
save his life.
Intelligence, or knowledge, is the objective of espionage. At first,
Kim has sought it “for the sake of satisfying his curiosity about his
country and its people” (Sandison xxv). His love of maths at school,
and his sense of community—his nickname is “Little Friend of all the
World” as he is identified with communal life (Sandison xvi)—are the
motivating forces behind his accepting the idea of pursuing a career in
surveying. But the knowledge venerated by the Game’s players is
“British science at the service of empire” (Sandison xxiv); it has a
specifically utilitarian or political function. He points out the irony of
this intelligence-gathering in relation to the young Kim:
The sheet of “strangely-scented yellow Chinese paper” on which the lama has
drawn his picture-parable of the Wheel of Life is literally transformed into a
Survey map, and the Holy One’s rosary becomes a means of measuring
distance. Thus India is made to seem to depend for its unity not on a universal
élan vital, but on the skills of the Secret Service; and those in the forefront of
this secret war experience loneliness and isolation instead of universal
friendship. (Sandison xxv)
established’” (Kipling 20). Neither Kim nor Kit have direct contact
with the Higher Command. The seemingly innocuous message is not
taken literally by Kim, and he is also entrusted by Mahbub Ali with a
message in physical form: “Kim slunk away, his teeth in the bread,
and, as he expected, he found a small wad of folded tissue-paper
wrapped in oil-skin, with three silver rupees, enormous largesse”
(Kipling 21). When Kim examines the paper, he finds
The five holes indicate that these five different forces are all
collaborating and are coming together to make an imminent attack in
the north-west of the British-occupied area of the Indian subcontinent.
Two points interest us here, first of all the gun-maker in Belgium:
in Against the Day, Kit is afraid that the Q gun he left in Ostend with
Umeki might have been stolen and used, the Tunguska Event being a
probable side-effect.3 There are weapons sales representatives in
Ostend, who come “as to some international chess tournament” (AtD
558), and in one of the few more-or-less explicit references to the First
World War, war is seen as chess (AtD 594). In Kim, the gun is an
important symbol, alongside the wheel and the river, as it represents
conquest. In the opening scene, Kim is sitting astride the cannon
outside the Lahore museum. Over the years, the cannon had fallen into
the hands of different people, but, as Sandison points out: “The most
recent to have acquired the gun are the British, of whom Kim is one”
(xv). Thus it is a symbol of conquest of the Punjab.
The second point is the subject of dynamite, which plays such an
important role in Against the Day. The narrator of Kim comments on
the message Kim carried: “Dynamite was milky and innocuous beside
that report of C. 25” (Kipling 22). Indeed, for the British to find proof
not only that the Russians were plotting against them in the East, but
that the weapons came from Belgium, made the collaboration of
Muslims with Hindus sound routine in comparison. The two factors of
double-dealing arms-dealers and Russians can be found wherever
Pynchon is setting scenes in the Cold War period, as in The Crying of
Lot 49,4 or is writing about other time periods in the past (as here or in
Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 299
Mason & Dixon) that can be compared forward to the late twentieth
century.
To go back to the methods of transmission of messages, in Kim,
messages and instructions to spies are put in food—the bread that
Mahbub Ali gives to Kim. In Against the Day, a parody of this is seen
when the Chums of Chance receive instructions in the food, and
Lindsay Noseworth almost breaks a tooth:
The orders had arrived with the usual lack of ceremony or even common
courtesy, by way of the Oyster Stew traditionally prepared each Thursday as
the Plat du Jour by Miles Blundell, who, that morning, well before sunup, had
visited the shellfish market in the teeming narrow lanes of the old town in
Surabaya, East Java, where the boys were enjoying a few days of ground-
leave. There, Miles had been approached by a gentleman of Japanese origin
and unusual persuasiveness, who had sold him, at what did seem a remarkably
attractive price, two buckets full of what he repeatedly described as “Special
Japanese Oyster,” these being in fact the only English words Miles would
recall him having spoken. Miles had thought no more about it until the noon
mess was interrupted by an agonized scream from Lindsay Noseworth,
followed by a half minute of uncharacteristic profanity. On the mess-tray
before him, where he had just vigorously expelled it from his mouth, lay a
pearl of quite uncommon size and iridescence, seeming indeed to glow from
within, which the boys, gathered about, recognized immediately as a
communication from the Chums of Chance Upper Hierarchy. (AtD 113)
The parody or mocking of the boys’ spy story comes through use of
three devices or effects: exaggeration (Lindsay’s agonized scream);
over-elaborate language (vigorously expelled it from his mouth); and
swear-words (the profanity one would never find in Kipling).
Furthermore, in Against the Day, messages are delivered in a far wider
variety of ways:
In New York for a few weeks of ground-leave, the boys had set up camp in
Central Park. From time to time, messages arrived from Hierarchy via the
usual pigeons and spiritualists, rocks through windows, blindfolded couriers
reciting from memory, undersea cable, overland telegraph wire, lately the
syntonic wireless, and signed, when at all, only with a carefully cryptic
number—that being as nigh as any of them had ever approached, or ever
would, to whatever pyramid of offices might be towering in the mists above.
(AtD 397)
Time-travel
Kim is set within a great sweep of history, often looking deeply into
the past. As Sandison says:
Pynchon’s novel reflects far more the popular obsession with time-
travel that Wells’s story initiated: “‘Mr. H. G. Wells’s speculative jeu
d’esprit on the subject has been adulterated to profitable effect by the
‘dime novels’ […]’” (AtD 398). Of the Chums of Chance, Miles
Blundell is the one most in tune with the non-material world. He feels
Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 301
very close to “the holy City” (AtD 551). He is aware of the presence
of Trespassers or Time Travellers, and, indeed, from Ostend goes on a
bicycle excursion with one of them, Ryder Thorn, who takes him to
Ypres and tries to describe to him what is to happen there in ten years’
time (AtD 554). Thorn is angry that even sensitive Earthlings like
Miles will not believe him, least of all take steps to avoid the
apocalypse. Miles thinks he is a ghost and will not shake hands with
him for fear of putting his hand right through his “body” (AtD 555).
So the Travellers from the future are doing their best to try to prevent
the First World War. But since they are also constructed as opponents
to the Chums, their motives are unclear, unless they want to be
admitted to Earth and offer peace-making as an “entrance ticket.”
Time-travel is also involved in the under-sand travel episode. The
Chums of Chance are in the “subdesertine frigate Saksaul” (AtD 435),
in search of the holy City Shambhala. To travel underground, without
dynamite and tunneling, the sand has to be converted, through
manipulating time, into something transparent, like glass:
Randolph wondered, “how can you travel underneath the sand and even see
where you’re going?”
“By redeploying energy on the order of what it would take to change the
displaced sand into something transparent—quartz or glass, say. Obviously,”
the Professor explained, “one wouldn’t want to be in the middle of that much
heat, so one must arrange to translate oneself in Time, compensating for the
speed of light in the transparent medium. As long as the sand has only been
wind-deposited without local obstruction, we assume the familiar mechanics
of water-waves generally to apply, and if we wished to move deeper, say in an
under-sand vessel, new elements analogous to vortex-formation would enter
the wave-history—in any case, expressible by some set of wave-functions.”
“Which always include Time,” said Chick, “so if you were looking for
some way to reverse or invert those curves—wouldn’t that imply some form
of passage backward in Time?” (AtD 426)
Captain Toadflax, who is in charge of the vessel, says that the true
Shambhala will be found underground, and three things are needed:
the map that the Chums of Chance had in their possession, the
Sfinciuno Itinerary; the ship’s Paramorphoscope; “‘[a]nd as any
Tibetan lama will tell you, the right attitude’” (AtD 435).
The espionage of the Chums of Chance is related to these Time
Travellers. Alonzo Meatman introduces Chick Counterfly, the newest
member of the Chums of Chance, to some of the Trespassers (AtD
418). They are people like Mr. Ace, who has fled the future, back into
302 Celia Wallhead
the past, on account of poverty, famine and the end of the capitalist
system. Mr. Ace asks Chick: “‘You are not aware that each of your
mission assignments is intended to prevent some attempt of our own
to enter your time-regime?” (AtD 415) They offer seductive rewards
like eternal youth in what could become a Faustian situation.
Knowledge is power, especially foreknowledge. The British
apparently believe in foretelling the future, in reincarnation and ghosts
(AtD 132-33), whereas their American counterparts are more
skeptical. But this skepticism does not prevent Chick and Renata from
foretelling the fall of the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco in
Venice through reading the Tarot (AtD 255). Since there is also belief
in mineral consciousness, neither does it prevent Frank Traverse from
“seeing” Sloat Fresno and locating his whereabouts in a piece of
Iceland spar in Mexico and, four pages later, suddenly coming across
him in a cantina and killing him (AtD 395).
The mineral consciousness can take the form of the nunatak or the
strange Figure (AtD 141) or Time Traveller in the “meteor” in the
Arctic. But in Against the Day, the journey itself is “a kind of
conscious Being” (AtD 765). Perhaps Kim’s lama would have
understood this. The narrator lives in the future in relation to the
events of the narrative and has journeyed into the past, because at one
point, he or she writes “[w]e of the futurity know that […]” (AtD 706).
The Ending
Against the Day has a more closed ending than most of Pynchon’s
novels, except perhaps Mason & Dixon, though some may find it
contrived. The ending of Kim brings us full circle, for we begin with
the “picture” of Kim sitting astride the cannon, as the lama approaches
him, and we end with the lama sitting in a similar position but on the
ground, watching over Kim. In a way, Against the Day also comes full
circle. Kit is in Torino, which he finds just like Denver: “The
mountains were close, and there was hydro-electric power
everywhere. ‘Well full fuckin circle,’ is what he muttered to himself,
‘ain’t it’” (AtD 1068). He has joined up the circle, but a lama would
believe that he had gone up a level, as he has learnt so much. Even
Dally, alone in Paris until Kit is “transported” there (AtD 1080)
(through bilocation?), feels that she is living her life over and over
Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 303
Had Rudyard Kipling died of fever in 1899, as he very nearly did, he would
surely be revered today as one of our greatest writers. His contemporaries
certainly thought so. Henry James considered him “the most complete man of
genius” he had ever known. The Times rated his short stories as highly as Guy
De Maupassant’s. Among the thousands of fans who wrote to him on his
recovery were Kaiser Wilhelm, Theodore Roosevelt and Lord Curzon.
Unfortunately for his reputation, however, Kipling lived on for another 37
years: more than enough time for the backlash to develop. Leading the mob
was George Orwell, whose vicious caricature of him as a “morally insensitive,
aesthetically disgusting gutter patriot” still colours our assessment of him
today. (69)
Read in isolation, Kim should not earn this negative reputation for its
author. Patronizing, perhaps, but not full-blown racist. The love
between Kim and the lama—the text ends on the word “beloved”—
appears genuine, if idealized, and fits the plot. The lama returns from
Nirvana, which he has achieved, in order to tend to his “chela” Kim,
so he will not miss his way there when the time comes. Kim’s mentor
“dies” on earth but continues to guide him from “heaven,” while Kit’s
mentor dies on earth, full stop.
304 Celia Wallhead
Conclusions
Kim is the least pessimistic of Kipling’s works, but of the two moral
precepts underlying the novel, one is negative but unavoidable: a
recognition of man’s mortal insufficiency. Pynchon’s postmodernism
eschews any moralizing, but the threat of death is ever-present in all
his works. Furthermore, his rejection of any monolithic vision is not
dissimilar to Kipling’s other moral precept in Kim: the appeal for
ecumenical understanding. Pynchon, by contrast, is an anti-
imperialist. The Whitehall spy Dwight Prance gives Kit a strict lesson
on this covering the white man in America and African slavery,
beginning “‘Traverse, for God’s sake […] There is light and there is
darkness’” (AtD 777). The white man’s usurping Native Indian lands
is condemned as Lew Basnight, riding down the valley out of Denver,
surveys the land:
[T]he land held the forever unquiet spirits of generations of Utes, Apaches,
Anasazi, Navajo, Chirakawa, ignored, betrayed, raped, robbed, and murdered,
bearing witness at the speed of the wind, saturating the light, whispering over
the faces and in and out the lungs of the white trespassers in a music toneless
as cicadas, unforgiving as any grave marked or lost. (AtD 175)
Notes
1
See Vernon 4.
2
See Michael Harris’s essay in this collection for a discussion of eastern religion in
Against the Day.
3
For other theories for that devastating explosion, see Wallhead.
4
See Hollander.
Bibliography
Allen, Charles. Kipling Sahib. London: Little Brown, 2007.
Delingpole, James. “Was Kipling on Drugs?” Rev. of Kipling Sahib
by Charles Allen. The Mail on Sunday 2 Dec. 2007, 69.
Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “‘The Exact Degree of Fictitiousness’: Thomas
Pynchon’s Against the Day.” Rev. of Against the Day by Thomas
Pynchon. Postmodern Culture 17.2 (January 2007). 15 May 2010
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v017/ 17.2duyfhuizen.html>.
Hollander, Charles. “Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of
The Crying of Lot 49.” Pynchon Notes 40-41 (1997): 61-106.
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 1901. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
306 Celia Wallhead
Leyla Haferkamp
Abstract: In Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, the (meta)physics of light forms one
of the most significant theoretical as well as narrative contexts. In his treatment of the
issue, Pynchon makes use of the complementarity typical of the particle-wave duality
as a main reference. The concept of complementarity in the novel, however, is by no
means restricted to the metaphorics of light. In spatial terms, for instance, it also
informs Pynchon’s take on the reciprocal relations between the country and the city,
or, in more general terms, between nature and culture. Pynchon’s interest in the
complementarity of these two realms becomes particularly important in his
representation of the Midwest, which he envisions as a complex topological
plane/plain that aligns diverse oppositions based on the overall dichotomy of form and
flux; of ‘particle and wave.’ Against this background, the essay surveys the depiction
of the prairie in Against the Day as a complex spatial modality with both political and
poetological ramifications.
As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to
the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the
earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once
again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them
through the night and prepare them against the day. (AtD 805, my emphasis)
“Lord Salisbury said [aether] was only a noun for the verb ‘to undulate.’ Sir
Oliver Lodge defined it as ‘one continuous substance filling all space, which
can vibrate light […].’ It certainly depends on a belief in the waviness of
light—if light were particulate, it could just go blasting through empty space
with no need for any Aether to carry it. Indeed one finds in the devout
Aetherist a propensity of character ever towards the continuous as against the
discrete.” (AtD 58).
and flux, logos and nomos, order and chaos, territory and terrain,
discretum and continuum, or, in more general and problematic terms,
culture and nature. Along these lines, I will argue that the prairie in
Against the Day functions as a complementary spatial modality that
has both political and poetological ramifications.
Prior to Against the Day, Pynchon’s work already contained
allusions to the grasslands. In fact, once they are introduced to the
Traverse clan in the novel’s first section “The Light over the Ranges,”
the “faithful readers will remember” (AtD 3) Reef Traverse’s great-
granddaughter, Vineland’s teenage protagonist Prairie Wheeler. In the
context of Vineland, “Prairie” is obviously not any oddball name
reflecting the “back to nature” sentiments prevailing in the “Mellow
Sixties” (VL 38), not “Cloud,” “Rain” or “River,” but a name
connoting the novel’s long-term historical relations to a genuinely
American environment that served as the stage for the unfolding of
Westward Expansion.5
It is by virtue of Pynchon’s idiosyncratic nomenclature that the
prairie subsists, throughout Vineland, as an extended metaphor. Read
in this context, the novel becomes the account of a modern trans-
American quest, the trajectory of which consists of a series of
boundaries to be crossed. Alongside the telling name Prairie Wheeler,
other names in the protagonist’s family tree, especially those of the
left-wing activists on her maternal side, evoke similar associations
with the “frontier experience”: Gates and Traverse. This specific
choice of names suggests the process of traveling across the land, thus
implying transition and transgression, boundaries, gateways and
thresholds. In Pynchon’s doubly refracted universe, Prairie and her
family also have their direct counterparts in Against the Day: the
aspect of mobility is redolent in the name Merle Rideout, a character
who is in retrospect Zoyd Wheeler’s prototype. Merle’s daughter
Dahlia as well as her quest for her mother Erlys, who has run off with
Luca Zombini, resemble Prairie and her search for her mother Frenesi,
who has abandoned the family for Brock Vond. In fact, Pynchon
combines the two narratives by way of a single word: both Merle and
Zoyd, in the same lovingly consoling manner, call their “motherless”
daughters “Trooper” (AtD 71, VL 15). In Against the Day, the readers
are referred not only to Vineland but also to Mason & Dixon, once
again by way of the Traverse family tree: the Traverses are originally
“from southern Pennsylvania, close to the Mason-Dixon” (AtD 87).
“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day 311
conceptual edges, with urban space shifting around the outskirts from
the Cartesian grid into what Pynchon calls “the urban unmappable”
(AtD 131). When Lew Basnight is confronted with the randomness
and “unmapped wilderness” (AtD 131) residing within the confines of
urbanity (AtD 38), puzzled by this unexpected interpenetration of
“White City” and “Dark City,” he asks himself: “Was it still Chicago?
[…] the first thing he noticed was how few of the streets here
followed the familiar grid pattern of the rest of town […] increasing
chances for traffic collisions” (AtD 38). The same obscurity and
fuzziness around the edges is observed within the organization of the
Columbian Exposition: “how civilized […] and […] white exhibits
located closer to the center of the ‘White City’ seemed to be, whereas
the farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more
evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery” (AtD 22).
Chicago’s Columbian Exposition coincides, as Pynchon stresses,
with a significant turning point in American history, the end of the
frontier process as announced by Frederic Jackson Turner in his
famous thesis: “‘Back in July […] Freddie Turner came out here from
Harvard and gave a speech […] [t]o the effect that the Western
frontier we all thought we knew from song and story was no longer on
the map but gone. Absorbed—a dead duck’” (AtD 52). With the
frontier myth rendered “history,” what the Chums are viewing from
above is American smooth “wilderness” already turned into organized
State Space, within the bounds of which the “unshaped freedom” of
the grasslands is at the service of a teleological reasoning with deadly
instrumental ends. Meat industry is regarded here as one of the steps
of the “gridding” process, realized at the cost of abandoning the
prairie’s wandering and wavering nomos in favor of sedentary
schemes and “cultivating” strategies that display different shades of
the Western logos.7 What is reduced—within the image of the
industrialized slaughter—is also nature’s complexity, its cloudlike
patterns of diverse and dynamic processes, as well as the synergic
potential these processes might entail. As Pynchon notes in Mason &
Dixon, the schemes of “gridding” inherent in the process of
colonization were set forth as new territories were “seen and recorded,
measur’d and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known,
[…] reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of
Governments” (MD 345, my emphasis).
“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day 313
What they will call space will be the sphere on which they are confined, and
on which take place all the phenomena with which they’re acquainted. Their
space will therefore be unbounded, since on a sphere one may always walk
forward without ever being brought to a stop, and yet it will be finite; the end
will never be found, but the complete tour can be made. Well, Riemann’s
geometry is spherical geometry extended to three dimensions. (38)
Although the city contains its own “wilderness within,” its true
“other,” as Deleuze and Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus, is, in
terms of geography, the sea. Symptomatically, when Merle and Dahlia
travel across the Great Plains on a westward spree, the prairie
becomes literally aquatic and oceanic, with “morning fields that went
rolling all the way to every horizon” (AtD 71). The prairie is by now
“the Inner American Sea, where the chickens schooled like herring,
and the hogs and heifers foraged and browsed like groupers and
codfish, and the sharks tended to operate out of Chicago or Kansas
City—[…]” (AtD 71). In the image of the sharks, Pynchon shows
once again that the smooth and the gridded cannot be separated:
predatory capitalist forces that have their origin in the city already
move through the smooth wilderness, introducing a—even if
rudimentary—free market logic: “Waiting out there for them each
daybreak […] was always that map crisscrossed with pikes and
“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day 315
Holey Spaces
Imagine that inside this labyrinth you see is another one, but on a smaller
scale, reserved only, say, for cats, dogs, and mice—and then, inside that, one
for ants and flies, then microbes and the whole invisible world—down and
down the scale, for once the labyrinthine principle is allowed, don’t you see,
why stop in any scale in particular? It’s self-repeating. Exactly the spot where
we are now is a microcosm of all Venice. (AtD 575)
It is rather interesting to note that electrons looked like particles at first, and
their wavish character was later discovered. On the other hand […] light
looked like waves at first, and its characteristics as a particle were discovered
later. In fact both objects behave somewhat like waves, and somewhat like
particles. In order to save ourselves from inventing new words such as
“wavicles,” we have chosen to call these objects “particles” […]. (85)
Notes
1
In Mason & Dixon, the process of triangulation brings about the transformation of
the subjunctive “dream” into the declarative (MD 345); the subjunctive is “contrary to
fact” (MD 365), it corresponds to “the counterfactual.”
2
Traditionally a wave-phenomenon, light in quantum physics is ascribed two
incompatible modes as particles and waves, complementarized for the sake of
scientific functionality and “complete” description. See Plotnitsky 6-7.
3
In Vineland, the analog and the digital seem, at first sight, diametrically opposed as
the focus is set on transition from “the Mellow Sixties, […] predigital, not yet so cut
into pieces” (VL 38) to the digital eighties, where everything is chopped up into
computable units and people are nothing but “digits in God’s computer” (VL 91).
However, the discrete and the continuous are rendered complementary in the realm of
aesthetics when Van Meter, while removing the frets from his Fender Precision bass
for the sake of smooth transition, still feels the need to draw lines where they had
been, “just to help him through the transition” (VL 224).
4
See especially chapters 12 and 14.
5
See also my “Prairie: Pynchon’s Poetics of Immanence” in Pynchon Notes
[forthcoming].
“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day 321
6
The “lurid acropolis” is no less than the “reborn phoenix” (Cronon 348), whose epic
of metropolitan progress, while culminating in the fair, owes much to its worst
infernal disaster that put an end to its urban mediocrity.
7
Although the nomos has come to designate the law, it was originally associated with
the “nomadic trajectory” as “a very special kind of distribution, one without division
into shares, in a space without borders or enclosure” (Deleuze and Guattari 380).
While the nomadic trajectory suggests the distribution of people or animals in space,
“the function of the sedentary road […] is to parcel out a closed space to people,
assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares”
(Deleuze and Guattari 380).
8
“One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can be only more convenient.
Now, Euclidean geometry is, and will remain, the most convenient: 1st, because it is
the simplest […]; 2nd, because it sufficiently agrees with the properties of natural
solids, those bodies which we can measure and compare by means of our senses”
(Poincaré 50).
9
Deleuze and Guattari ascribe the property of smoothness to biomes as diverse as
“desert, steppe, sea, or ice” (484). In Against the Day, the Mexican desert also reflects
the smoothness of the prairie landscape: “They returned to the desert camp among
whirling colors […], affording glimpses now and then of some solitary band of
figures alone on the prairie toward sunset, the untouched depths of it windsweeping
away for hundreds of miles […]” (AtD 394).
10
http://www.mathgrapher.com/index.php?pagina=example_Lindenmayer&sub=input
/html/L_systems/lsysex02.inc
11
Mandelbrot’s article is also implicitly mentioned in Mason & Dixon: “[…] there
exists no ‘Maryland’ beyond an Abstraction, a Frame of right lines drawn to enclose
and square off the great Bay in its unimagin’d Fecundity, its shore line tending to
Infinite Length, ultimately unmappable [...]” (MD 354).
Bibliography
Clemens, Samuel Langhorne [Mark Twain]. Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Prairie. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1987.
Feynmann, Richard P. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.
Charlotte: Baker& Taylor, 1988.
322 Leyla Haferkamp
Francisco Collado-Rodríguez
Abstract: This contribution starts from the hypothesis that Pynchon’s organizing
principle of energy is mostly carried out by means of three strategies: 1) the
manipulation of scientific notions; 2) the use of intertextuality and metafiction; and 3)
the ironic exploitation of alphabetic letters, especially of “V,” as symbols of the
postmodern belief in the capacity of language to create reality. Accordingly, the main
aim in this essay is to evaluate Against the Day in relation to these three strategies and
to relate them to the persistent anti-categorical approach used by Pynchon in his
narrative. In light of his interpretations of energy and in his attack on categorical
interpretations of life, in Against the Day Pynchon aims at calling his readers’
attention to the present-day impact of terrorism and violence. The following pages,
then, focus on the importance of scientific discourse in the novel, especially on
interpretations given to the notion of energy as well as to the importance that light has
as a reiterative trope in the novel. Next, the essay evaluates Pynchon’s use of
metafictional and intertextual devices that aim at the blurring of physical and cultural
boundaries in a reality described within a modernist context. Finally, it addresses the
writer’s use of “V,” the letter that has increasingly represented Pynchon’s complex
quest for understanding the human manipulation of forces. In Against the Day “V”
establishes evident connections with early American terrorism and the beginning of
capitalist corporations, notions that finally stimulate an ethical reflection on the
collective posttraumatic condition of the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“Forty-five years of study had proved to be quite futile for the pursuit of power; one
controlled no more force in 1900 than in 1850, although the amount of force
controlled by society had enormously increased.”
(“The Dynamo and the Virgin,” The Education of Henry Adams XXV: 390)
324 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez
Since the publication of his first novel in 1963, Thomas Pynchon has
built an increasingly complex literary universe of which many critics
have suggested the existence of an underpinning order.2 In effect,
following Henry Adams’s well-known metaphor of Venus and the
Virgin as a source of spiritual power, Pynchon seems to organize his
literary world systematically around the encompassing theme that
obsessed the American historian: the analysis of the different
manifestations of energy and their impact on society. The novelist
repeatedly signals the representation of energy by using the capital
“V,” the letter that also functions as the title for his first novel, V., to
which he added a period as a suggestion of the ever-changing identity
of energy. The letter reappears on many occasions throughout
Pynchon’s fiction, but since the beginning, V. has been following a
process of moral degradation, which increases along the twentieth
century, as energy mutates into capitalist demands and devastating
weaponry that take us closer to an apocalyptic end. From the spiritual
grounds represented by Adams’s interpretation of Venus and the
Virgin, throughout the period that goes from V. to Mason & Dixon
(1963-1998), Pynchon takes his readers along a path of energy
manifestations that evolve from early mechanical devices into the
more dangerous expressions of energy as electricity or nuclear power
(see Mendelson and Kupsch). I have elsewhere contended that, as
regards his fiction until 1997, the novelist’s organizing principle of
energy is mostly carried out by means of three strategies: 1)
Pynchon’s manipulation of scientific notions; 2) his use of
intertextuality and metafiction; 3) his recurrent and ironic exploitation
of alphabetic letters, especially of V, as symbols of the postmodern
belief in the capacity of language to create reality (Collado-Rodríguez,
El orden del caos). I have further argued that Pynchon’s literary world
works systematically to erase the reader’s predisposition to analyze
and interpret reality in the one-sided, categorical terms that Aristotle
defined in his Law of the Excluded Middle, one of the strongest
philosophical bases that support traditional Western thinking. In
Pynchon’s fiction, uncertainty eventually displaces any clear
monolithic interpretation of life and reality.3
My aim in this paper is to study Against the Day in relation to the
three strategies mentioned above and to the persistent anti-categorical
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 325
take us as well as the mysterious quality of the event itself. Should we,
then, favor darkness, the absence of light? There are indications in the
novel that “the ancient darkness” that the author parodies from old
mythologies is also to be understood as a source of evil (AtD 964), but
indications may come shortly after light has been considered again to
be a destroyer of life (AtD 963). When facing Pynchon’s use of the
binary light/darkness, the answer seems to be again “karmic
adjustment” or “keep it bouncing”: neither stands permanently in the
ethical centre as both may produce chaos and order, evil and good. In
Against the Day, light as destructive energy, be it in the form of
nuclear power, as magnified waves, or as energy concentrated in
phosgene bombs, is also complemented by the color white, the other
typical Pynchonian term that symbolizes death since it acquired such
meaning in the figure of Weissmann, the perverse Nazi officer who
first appears in V. He represents the whiteness of the North from
which the invaders still come in Against the Day (AtD 928-29), which
opens at the White City of Chicago’s Exposition, the first textual
expression of a simulated reality in the book (AtD 1). The phrase also
appears in the name of the sinister White City Investigations (AtD
1041). It can be inferred from Gravity’s Rainbow that in the
Pynchonian Universe the term white symbolically represents not only
the claims to ethnic predominance of the white man but also the
alleged purity of light. Paradoxically, such purity also absorbs in it all
the colors in the rainbow, so impeding the colorful variations of life
(GR 759). Darkness, on the other hand, is the territory of the
dispossessed, of the margins of social discourse where, however, the
forces of evil are also ready to accost the passerby. The notions of
good and evil, filtered through the prism of post-Newtonian physics,
do not have clear limits in Pynchon’s fiction.
In addition, the writer uses light and its manifestations in an astute
metaphorical sense by playing with the levels of the story and the
narration. Terms like illumination, reflection, reverberation—even
double refraction or doubleness—appear reiteratively in Against the
Day also to suggest that they also refer metaphorically to notions of
thinking, understanding, and truth. The strategy allows Pynchon, in
his presentation of past events, to guide his readers into a reflection on
our present sociopolitical conditions. Accordingly, narrator and
characters unfold a chain of thoughts and coincidences that frequently
transgress the temporal frontiers existing between the story time at the
330 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez
therefore encapsulating the rest of the book: science fiction and the
detective novel. Furthermore, the first one already comes out as a
blend of genres that combines the motifs of adventure stories in the
tradition of Jules Verne and children’s narratives with a parodic
suggestion of contemporary steampunk fiction.9 It features the Chums
of Chance, a group of young balloonists who also clearly show traits
known from the Star Trek TV series. As happens to the voyagers of
the Enterprise, the Chums have their Prime Directive that forbids them
to interfere with the people who live on the planet’s surface, even if it
seems to contradict their only way to make a living (AtD 444, 1021).
Like the Klingons or the Romulans in Star Trek, the Chums can also
cloak their ship and avoid detection (AtD 549). The result is that
sometimes they do intervene, are seen, and talked to by some of the
characters that belong to the main realist story (mostly Lew and
Merle) but frequently they remain invisible to everybody but the
reader. For some other characters, the Chums’ peculiar nature belongs
to the territory of the sacred invisible, of the angels. They even end up
marrying female cyborgs who fly the skies with the help of steampunk
wings (AtD 1030).
Pynchon has abundantly used the second encapsulating genre in
the book, the detective story, since his early fiction. In one of his roles
Lewis Basnight, the detective in Against the Day, is the link between
the fantastic Chums of Chance and the other, more realist protagonists
in the book. Nevertheless, from a sociopolitical perspective Lew is
also a trespassing or bilocated detective, as he himself realizes. He
started in his profession by serving the owners’ interests against the
workers, but he ends up helping the latter as a hard-boiled private dick
in California at a moment in which the cinema, real estate speculation,
and violent crime already go hand in hand in the construction of the
new American Dream of simulation and glamour (AtD 689-90).
Pynchon’s view of the situation chronologically anticipates—but
intertextually refracts—his own reflections on 1960s California in The
Crying of Lot 49. A Western that sometimes becomes the
representation of porn cinema scenes, spies attracted by séances and
Tarot cards, political quests that take readers to polar regions with
reverberations of horror and sci-fi movies, modernist quests of self-
discovery that take some of the characters to the dangerous territory of
the Balkans: in Against the Day, narrative genres constantly blend as a
332 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez
other.10 Hence, there are many characters in the novel that seem to
believe that relativity theory can finally account for states of religious
revelation. Furthermore, the blending of genres and the reiterative act
of trespassing doors and arches also have their metaphorical
equivalence in two other elements of the text’s narrative architecture.
On the one hand, metafiction and the playful condition of the narrator,
and on the other the use of literary parody of specific authors,
especially of Eliot’s poetry, also become transgressing strategies that
in Against the Day contest any singular interpretation of life.
As happens so often in Pynchon’s fiction, the novel’s narrator is an
anti-categorical drifter. Overt metafiction plays its part on a number of
occasions in which the omniscient narrator mixes narrative levels by
addressing the reader directly (AtD 666, 979) or sharing with us his
ironic position with a “we of the futurity” (AtD 706). On other
occasions he teaches his readers a lesson (AtD 768), openly shows his
doubtful approach to the story he is narrating (AtD 839, 972), or
refrains from further describing some sexual scenes with a “let us
reluctantly leave them” (AtD 883). Pynchon’s narrators have always
followed similar traits, playing with the notion of omniscience but
frequently contradicting themselves—Whitman’s famous line being
quoted more than once in Pynchon’s fiction. However, the crossing of
different narrative levels does not stop in the figure of the narrator. As
done so often in the postmodernist fiction written in the 1960s and
1970s and also in his previous novels, Pynchon plays with ideas that
recursively validate a metafictional understanding of literature and, by
extension, of a reality whose meaning is always trapped in the web of
human languages and codes of representation. Lew Basnight feels
soon that he could be an actor in the theatre (AtD 242). By then Reef
has already read a novel by the Chums of Chance (AtD 215) and,
recalling Borges’s celebrated story “Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius,”
readers may already think that perhaps the young balloonists have
trespassed from their fictional world of fantasy into the territory of the
more realist story that concerns the Traverses’ Western, spy,
modernist, and sexual adventures. Later on, in a museum the
mathematicians Günther and Yashmeen listen to a secretive voice that
talks about Time, the implication being that it could be the voice of
the author himself, as deus ex machina (AtD 636). An exaggerated use
of narrative chance11 also becomes a relevant strategy to downgrade
the story’s credibility. Frequently, the narrator addresses the reader
334 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez
with a “who should appear but…” (AtD 849, 995, 1034), and
coincidentally the line of encounters among the multiplicity of places
and characters neatly allows for the progression of the plot. By the end
of the book, the balloonist Chick Counterfly unexpectedly meets his
father in California. Through him, Chick makes contact again with
Lew who then also meets the lost Traverse sister, Lake, thirty pages
before the novel ends, allowing for no loose threads for conventional
readers who expect to know what befalls every major character before
the story finishes. By then, Einstein’s dream of the possible existence
of parallel universes also accounts for Kit’s capability to contact the
Chums (AtD 1079) and eventually find what seems to be the
legendary mystic city of Shambhala. That happens, of course, once he
has crossed a space-time door and become, like Benny Profane in V., a
human yo-yo (AtD 1080). Three pages before the end, we find the
Chums looking down at a possible reconciliation between Kit and
Dally thanks to metafictional bilocation (AtD 1082), although perhaps
this is all nothing but another announcement of the apocalyptic times
to come; the novel’s end is anything but closed.
Apocalypse is one of Pynchon’s most well-known and reiterative
motifs. Since “The Small Rain” (1959), the writer has frequently
connected the religious notion to a mythic understanding of reality
and to T.S. Eliot’s poetry. In Against the Day, the story is often
presented in ways that evoke The Waste Land, especially in the
detective’s episodes in London. Not coincidentally, Eliot’s influential
poem is also an experiment at mixing memory and desire, past and
future, as its narrator soon asserts in the first part of the poem, “The
Burial of the Dead.” Explicit and implicit references to The Waste
Land abound in the novel. In Eliot’s work there is an accumulation of
séances, interpretations of the Tarot, and frequent allusions to the
twilight that insistently suggest the blurring of ontological frontiers,
while also connecting the poet’s modernist ethos to Pynchon’s
concern with the trope of light. The role of myth, being a well-known
topic in Eliot’s poetry, also offers an intertextual interpretation for the
novelist’s insistent use of Jungian archetypes, angels, centers of
power, gates to be crossed by the initiated, the role of Woman as
symbol of life, or conversations with the dead. Readers who know
Eliot’s poem in detail may notice the importance of certain motifs in it
related to the notion of social decadence and the end of the cycle of
life. In The Waste Land, the main narrative voice shows frequent
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 335
are not clear-cut. They will fight in a social war manifested in the
overt use of terror, a war that, as “we of the futurity” know, will not
lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat, at least in the United States,
but to the rule of the ones who in the novel are frequently referred to
as the “Plutocrats.” Such a term also stresses the use of another well-
known strategy in Pynchon’s previous fiction: the game of
“meaningful” names. This time, the word helps Pynchon to further his
ironic critique on categorical thinking and to stress the pervasive
importance of light and energy in his fiction. Plutocrat comes from
Pluto, the ruler of the underworld in Roman mythology but also the
god of wealth in Greek mythology. In the Christian tradition, Pluto as
ruler of the underworld was replaced by Satan, a devil of many names,
including among them Lucifer, literarily the carrier of Light.
However, we should not forget that Satan was known as Lucifer when
he was still an angel in heaven, before his fall. The Chums of Chance
also engage in an interesting terminological conversation about the
name that again brings echoes from Henry Adams’s symbolic
understanding of spiritual energy as well as from Pynchon’s earlier
fiction. Lindsay recalls Christ’s vision in Luke’s gospel “of Satan
falling like lightning from heaven. ‘Complicated further by the ancient
astronomers’ use of the name Lucifer for Venus when she appears as
the morning star—’” (AtD 1033). That is to say, the text progresses
from plutocratic riches to the trope of light as Lucifer, and from the
latter to Henry Adams’s primordial illustration of spiritual energy as
Venus.
Energy manifests itself in unnerving ways in Against the Day. As
shown so far in this paper, in Pynchon’s literary universe Einstein’s
concept of energy fluctuates, perspectives and interpretations
multiply, and human values are continuously exposed to different
contexts and even to the author’s linguistic games. When dealing with
terrorism in Against the Day, as an initial hypothesis we might start
considering that it is a force that increases the entropic level in any
human system, that is to say, its tendency towards destruction and
stillness. Even so, the issue also has to be tackled from the symbolic
angles provided by the text’s central motif of light, its metaphorical
power of reflection and reverberation for the reader, and from the
present American posttraumatic condition.
There are no direct references to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in this
U.S. novel published in 2006 despite the fact that one of its main
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 337
“So of course we use them, […] we harness and sodomize them, photograph
their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and
sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest
from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness
a few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They
338 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez
are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood,
become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take
what we can while we may. Look at them—they carry the mark of their
absurd fate in plain sight. […] We will buy it all up,” making the expected
arm gesture, “all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the
Anarchists skulked, where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of
Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-
proofed, ready to build on. Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping
after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will
come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrial, Christian, while we,
gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar
palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to
build for us.” (AtD 1000-01)
Was this the path [the Indian shaman] El Espinero had had in mind, this
specific half mile of track, where suddenly the day had become
extradimensional, the country shifted, was no longer the desert abstraction of
a map but was speed, air rushing, the smell of smoke and steam, time whose
substance grew more condensed as each tick came faster and faster, all
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 341
perfectly inseparable from Frank’s certainty that jumping or not jumping was
no longer the point, he belonged to what was happening […]. (AtD 985, my
emphasis)
The explosion was terrific, shrapnel and parts of men and animals flew
everywhere, superheated steam blasting through a million irregular flueways
among the moving fragments, a huge ragged hemisphere of gray dust, gone
pink with blood, rose and spread, and survivors staggered around in it blinded
and coughing miserably. (AtD 985)
following a more complex ethical path that takes him from his early
commitment to Vibe’s plans to his later agreement to participate in the
tycoon’s assassination. Despite the early pacifist views that kept him
away from anarchist terrorism, the time he serves with Vibe and his
own experiences as a parodic modernist quester eventually lead him to
take a job with the Italian Air Force to improve their airplanes. As a
pilot, he will also go gun-crazy like his brothers and fly as many
combat missions as he can, jeopardizing his wife’s love by doing so
(AtD 1068-74).
Thus, by the end of the novel the entropic attraction to war and
terror has totally engulfed all the male members in the Traverse
family. Webb, Reef, and Frank Traverse had always believed in the
efficiency of dynamite to solve their problems but Kit—short for
Christopher, “the one who carries Christ within”—also becomes
finally subdued by the entropic forces of martial violence. Even
Reef’s son Jesse—the would-be Traverse patriarch in Vineland—is
already an expert gunman when still a boy (AtD 1008). How can
contemporary readers consider the Traverses to be the goodies in the
story unless they are again trapped in a traditional and categorical
understanding of life that sees violence as the only valid answer to
violence? In this sense, I can only conclude that what also seems new
in Against the Day as opposed to Pynchon’s earlier perspective in V. is
that now he is ready to challenge some of the one-sided assumptions
in which his first novel itself was still trapped. More specifically, he
has revised the assumption that people can still be divided in distinct
terms of “good” or “bad” and be ruled by old conventional ways to
understand life. For young people in the 1960s it was love against
war. Despite their anti-categorical family name, the Traverses can be
always on the move or “bouncing,” but they are not ethically equal
either to Stencil or to Profane. The protagonists in V. never wanted to
use explicit violence on anybody even if each of them responded to
life in apparently very different terms. In their persistent violent
reaction to life, the Traverses are anchored in the pioneering and
jingoist American past: they prefer war to love. But the problem is
that, following Pynchon’s astute game with light, the Traverses
qualify as the realistic reflection of our own violent present and its
reevaluation of old pioneering and imperialistic myths. The hopes of
the 1960s for a better, more peaceful future have regrettably failed.
For Thomas Pynchon in 2006, V. also stands for Violence.
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 343
Notes
1
The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the
Spanish Ministry of Education and the European Commission/FEDER (Research
project HUM2007-61035/FILO).
2
See, for instance, Tanner, Hide, Conte, and Schroeder.
3
In Part V of his Categories, Aristotle stresses that “while remaining numerically one
and the same,” substance is the only principle “capable of admitting contrary
qualities.” Things other than substance, then, do not possess this mark, which leads
the philosopher to proclaim: “one and the same color cannot be white and black. Nor
can the same one action be good and bad: this law holds good with everything that is
not substance” (The Basic Works 13). For a more detailed analysis of the role of
contemporary science in questioning the validity of categorical thinking, see Nadeau.
For a study of Pynchon’s rejection of Aristotle’s Law in his earlier fiction, see
Collado-Rodríguez, “Trespassing Limits.”
4
This formula, incidentally, also backs up Henry Adams’s understanding of force or
energy as the main key in the formation of historical processes. See especially
chapters XXV, XXXIII, and XXXIV of his Education.
5
“Since mass and energy are, according to the theory of relativity, essentially the
same concepts, we may say that all elementary particles consist of energy” (Werner
Heisenberg, quoted in Nadeau 18).
6
The theories of Max Born and Werner Heisenberg led to the latter’s famous
Indeterminacy or Uncertainty Principle (1927), which “states that pairs of quantities
(e.g. the position and momentum of a particle) are incompatible, and cannot have
precise values simultaneously. The physicist can choose to measure either quantity,
and obtain a result to any desired degree of precision, but the more precisely one
quantity is measured, the less precise the other quantity becomes” (Davies 166).
7
The Principle of Complementarity states that both wave and particle should be held
in the scientist’s mind as complementary views of one and the same reality. Bohr’s
principle was an invitation to the scientific world to reject traditional either-or
dichotomies.
8
I must stress here that there are influential scientists who also defend a position
similar to that of some modernist and poststructuralist critics—from Jung to
Derrida—concerning human cognitive capacities. As Prigogine and Stengers put it:
“We have emphasized the importance of operators because they demonstrate that the
reality studied by physics is also a mental construct; it is not merely given [...]. One of
the reasons for the opposition between the ‘two cultures’ may have been the belief
that literature corresponds to a conceptualization of reality, to ‘fiction,’ while science
seems to express objective ‘reality.’ Quantum mechanics teaches us that the situation
is not so simple. On all levels reality implies an essential element of
conceptualization” (225-26). Compare Solomon’s contrasting opinion (75).
9
For a definition of the steampunk genre, see Girardot and Méreste.
10
The novel’s reiterative notion of bilocation, which affects both scientific and
religious beliefs, takes us back to Pynchon’s well-trodden territory of Christian
symbolism while also stressing his anti-categorical stance: “The question whether the
same finite being (especially a body) can be at once in two (bilocation) or more
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 345
(replication, multilocation) totally different places grew out of the Catholic doctrine
on the Eucharist. According to this Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in
every consecrated Host wheresoever located.” See the complete definition of
“Bilocation” provided by Francis Siegfried in The Catholic Encyclopedia.
11
That might be also interpreted as an ironic game on the cultural relevance that
chance had for non-scientific believers in chaos theory, especially in the 1980s and
1990s (see Hayles).
12
Not surprisingly, anarchism and the Chicago Fair are also dealt with by Henry
Adams in Chapter XXII of his Education, where he reports on his own visit to the
1893 Chicago Exposition: “The instability was greater than he calculated; the speed of
acceleration passed bounds. Among other general rules [his brother Brooks] laid
down the paradox that, in the social disequilibrium between capital and labor, the
logical outcome was not collectivism, but anarchism; and Henry made note of it for
study” (340, my emphasis).
Bibliography
Hanjo Berressem
Abstract: The essay traces one of Pynchon’s many mathematical references in Against
the Day. The mathematical contexts are linear algebra and vector geometry, the
specific reference is the term eigenvalue, an alloy of the German ‘eigen’ and the
English ‘value.’ Pynchon uses it in V. in reference to ‘psychodontist’ Dudley
Eigenvalue and his feeling of the loss of the continuity of history. In Against the Day,
the reference is much more extended. In fact, it incorporates a fictional conversation
about eigenvalues between Yashmeen Harcourt and David Hilbert, the German
mathematician who originally coined the term in 1904. In that conversation,
eigenvalues are said to function as the “spine of reality.” Along the term eigenvalue,
as well as a number of other ‘eigen’concepts, such as eigenvector, eigenfrequency and
eigenorganization, the essay delineates Pynchon’s notion of a subject that is defined
as a bundle of habits and frequencies—or, in Pynchon’s terms, of ‘vibes’—that moves
in a world defined as an infinitely complex and dynamic vector-space.
Introduction: Dudley
Eigenvalues
its eigenvalue (if there is a vector [object x] that has been preserved by
H apart from submitting it to a scalar multiplier k, x is called an
eigenvector of H with the eigenvalue k). Hilbert called a
transformation that does not affect the direction of a vector an
eigenvalue equation [Eigenwertgleichung].
The term could become more than a throwaway reference for
Pynchon because it is possible to generalize from vectorial
transformation|change to systemic transformation|change. As
eigenvalues and eigenvectors can define invariants not only within
mathematical, but also within physical and biological systems while
these undergo changes, they can be used to model these systems in
relation to the changes they undergo. Or, to stress the processual
rather than the systemic side, as eigenvalues|eigenvectors define
invariants within transformations, they can be used to isolate systems
within larger sets of continuous transformation|metamorphosis. If
eigenvectors define a system x, such as a plant, a river or a character
in a novel by Thomas Pynchon, as ‘the invariance x within the
transformational process y,’ a system is nothing but ‘the cluster of
invariant characteristics within a process of continuous
change|modulation’ and as such a modification; what Gregory
Bateson calls a “pattern through time” (Mind and Nature 14).
‘Eigenfaces,’ as instances of ‘eigenimages,’ for example, are sets of
facial eigenvectors. They are used, especially after 9/11, for
computerized face recognition. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon relates
such eigenfaciality to genetic invariants that can be traced across long
temporal intervals within evolution’s overall drift: Because of “[t]he
high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, […] living genetic
chains prove […] labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face
down ten or twenty generations” (GR 10, my emphasis). I will return
to the ‘molecular’ at a later point.
Sinuous Cycles
The shift from eigenvalues to sinuous cycles concerns the fact that in
physics, eigenvalues are used to model systems in terms of wave
functions, resonances, and their invariant ‘eigenfrequencies,’ which
were important fields of research for an important real-life character
in Against the Day, Nicola Tesla, who used them especially, it seems,
352 Hanjo Berressem
“Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the
same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary.
You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each
person’s time line sideways till they all coincide. Then you’d have this big,
God, maybe a couple of hundred million chorus […] and it would all be the
same voice.” (CoL 142)
Habits
We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air—not merely prior to the
recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being sensed. Every
organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a
sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations. […] [B]y combining with
the perceptual syntheses built upon them, these organic syntheses are
redeployed in the active syntheses of a psycho-organic memory and
intelligence. (Difference 73)
[w]e start with atomic parts, but these atomic parts have transitions, passages,
‘tendencies,’ which circulate from one to another. These tendencies give rise
to habits. Isn’t this the answer to the question ‘what are we?’ We are habits,
nothing but habits—the habit of saying ‘I.’ Perhaps there is no more striking
answer to the problem of the Self. (Empiricism x)
allows the system to escape, at every single instant, its current habitual
envelope.
In order to realize this potential, however, the system must operate
at a ‘far-from-equilibrium’ state, which allows it to change from one
habitual attractor to another one. In fact, the less habits have hardened
into strict routines and protocols (a process Deleuze|Guattari call
‘territorialization’), the more plasticity, potential for movement, and
‘speed’ there is in the system (‘deterritorialization’); a plasticity and
speed Pynchon addresses in his introduction to Slow Learner when he
notes that “[w]hat is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the
changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie,
the soul in flux” (SL 23). Unfortunately, however, in the ‘practice of
the subject’ habits tend to harden and decelerate precisely into
routines (these two processes are ‘in actual fact’ identical) according
to processes of a creeping routinization or ‘crystallization’; processes
of the deceleration of ‘becoming’ into ‘being,’ if one considers being
as a becoming that has been decelerated to zero. Although habits form
the genetic ground of systems and are necessary for any systemic
maintenance, habits can become addictive (too much of a habit, that
is) such as, in Against the Day, amongst others, the “Cyclomite habit”
(AtD 184). As Bateson notes,
in the ongoing life of the organism there is a process of sorting, which in some
of its forms is called ‘habit formation.’ In this process, certain items, which
have been learned at ‘soft’ levels, gradually become ‘hard’ […]. The converse
of ‘habit formation’ […] is a form of learning which is always likely to be
difficult and painful and which, when it fails, may be pathogenic. (Sacred
Unity 138)
From the beginning of his work, Pynchon has treated this creeping
routinization of habits as the shift from individual “virtù” (V. 461, AtD
529) to generalized processes of the “rationalization” (GR 81), and as
the bureaucratization of the “terrible disease […] charisma” (GR 81);
a—once more deeply ambiguous—“routinization of charisma” (GR
325) that spans from the Machiavelli and Max Weber references in V.
to what is called, in Gravity’s Rainbow, the “Führer-principle” (GR
81), to Brock Vond in Vineland, and further to Scarsdale Vibe in
Against the Day. Some habits, in fact, such as the habit of
colonization, the habitual desire for fascisms, masochisms, and
oedipalizations in general seem so deeply engrained into the system’s
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day 361
Against the Day, which is a novel about the fight between routinized
state operators and anarchists—a fight in which anarchism might, in
fact, be defined as a ‘state without habits’—is an extended meditation
on the nature of wavelike, communal vibes, whether electrical, optical
or historical, and ‘particular’ human beings and their eigenvectorial
movements through the medium we call ‘America.’ At this point, it
echoes Deleuze’s differentiation between physical and psychic
mechanisms; between matters-of-fact and fiction; the first of which
are always communal, while the second are ‘individual.’ In fact,
Deleuze’s description gains an even stronger political resonance in the
light of Pynchon’s prose:
“If you were a vector, mademoiselle, you would begin in the ‘real’ world,
change your length, enter an ‘imaginary’ reference system, rotate up to three
different ways, and return to ‘reality’ a new person. Or vector.”
“Fascinating. But…human beings aren’t vectors. Are they?”
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day 363
‘eigenspaces’ are invariably tied to and part of the larger milieu of the
vectorfield we call America; a milieu that is made up of a multiplicity
of singular ‘eigenspaces,’ but that is in constant danger of being
relentlessly territorialized and overcoded by forces that aim at
implementing an overall, hegemonic (or even fascist!) ‘eigenspace.’
Pynchon is such an important writer because he is one of the most
radical and politically incorrect chroniclers of these projects of
complete territorialization. Who else would publish, after 9/11, a
novel in which explosives are some of the most important
‘protagonists.’ At the same time, he is one of the both most poetic and
hilarious inventors of and advocates for strategies of
deterritorialization. Throughout his work, which by now shows a
panorama of almost all of American history, he refracts the matter-of-
fact vector of ‘real history’ (what is and what was) into fictional
vectors (what could be and what could have been) that function as
counternarratives to an official historical narrative that is, in actual
fact, equally fictional but that—much like ideology as theorized by
Althusser—presents itself as ‘natural.’
In What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari note that
[i]t seems to us that the theory of multiplicities does not support the
hypothesis of any multiplicity whatever [...]. There must be at least two
multiplicities, two types, from the outset. This is not because dualism is better
than unity but because the multiplicity is precisely what happens between the
two. (152)
Bibliography
Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Cresskill:
Hampton Press, 2002.
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day 367