Against the Day | Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press)
Against the Day’s view of the late 19th century and early 20th evokes the vision of historian Eric Hobsbawm–an irreversible slide from civilization into barbarism as capitalists duke it out with anarchists, culminating though hardly ending in the apocalypse of World War I. “All history after that will belong properly to the history of hell,” one character predicts–or remembers. One reason this book is so difficult is that we can’t always distinguish between memory and prediction, between history and science fiction.
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Pynchon depicts an era of technological advancement that encompasses light, air, water, sand, coal, dirt, electricity, photography, explosions, and even time travel–inhabitants of the future, including us readers, turn up in that earlier era, searching for refuge. The mix of science and pseudoscience can be bewildering, but it stopped seeming frivolous as soon as I conceded that all eras are stuck somewhere between these realms, even if it’s often hard to say exactly where. And though all the math and physics can be difficult, it’s edifying to track down Pynchon’s references–just as tracking down the sources of T.S. Eliot’s footnotes to The Waste Land once was. I’m happy, for example, that Pynchon led me to E.T. Bell’s classic Men of Mathematics.
Against the Day is easier to read as narrative than V., Gravity’s Rainbow, or Mason & Dixon, though the technical data are harder to process. It has less of a sense of urgency than The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland, and it’s more given to generic conventions, especially those of late westerns and early SF novels. And it’s the first Pynchon novel without a central figure or figures–apart from the well-named Traverses, who seem to spill randomly across the globe. The plot sprawls with a 19th-century roominess, directing us toward such apparently disconnected events as the collapse of Saint Mark’s campanile in Venice (1902), the Tunguska Event (or great Siberian explosion, 1908), and World War I–even if the war functions mainly as a structuring absence.
That sort of intensity is missing from most of Against the Day. Yet on my first trip through Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973 I was also often stumped and frustrated. Many insights were slow in coming–I still don’t quite grasp the novel’s enigmatic references to the Kenosha Kid. Today I can compare notes with a community of fellow explicators, though sometimes the surfeit of information they offer threatens clarity.
It’s characteristic of some of our greatest as well as most obsessive writers, from Melville to Faulkner to Ginsberg, that the lines separating self-indulgence from generosity and eloquence from delirium aren’t always clear-cut. Excess is part of vision, and for better and for worse, Pynchon is given to it. But reading him slowly and carefully, thoughtfully and respectfully, has usually paid rich dividends, and a careful read of his longest and busiest novel will surely be worth the trouble.
