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AGAINST THE DAY, by Thomas Pynchon. Penguin Press, 1,085 pp.
Writing in the early
1920s about a recent book by James Joyce called Ulysses, T.S. Eliot zeroed in on the structure beneath its sprawl:
the sustained parallel between an ancient myth (the wanderings of Odysseus) and a contemporary story (a day in the life of
an advertising salesman). This was a narrative experiment, certainly. But Eliot considered it a lot more than that.
"It
has," the poet wrote, "the importance of a scientific discovery." It was decisive for the future of literature, just as Einstein's
work was for physics. The world had changed, and so many established structures had collapsed that sophisticated readers now
felt, as Eliot put it, "the need for something stricter" than anything available from the old-fashioned novel. Returning to
myth, then, was "simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."
Against the Day, the new novel by Thomas Pynchon, opens
during the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 - and it closes, not so coincidentally, at just about the time Eliot was penning those
words. Few contemporary American authors are following up on the hint that myth provides an expressway to deep structure and
meaning. Pynchon's great and perplexing innovation as a novelist has been to go one step beyond that technique.
In
lieu of parallels between the daylit realms of everyday life and the timeless, invisible world of gods and heroes, Pynchon's
novels constantly point toward another kind of higher-order reality: the domains of information theory, mathematical physics,
cosmology. It isn't that his characters recite introductory lectures. (That, too, sometimes; but not very often.)
Instead,
his fiction is shaped at its deepest levels by the basic concepts of these fields, which are, for Pynchon, absolutely essential
to understanding the history and inner logic of the way we live now. All of this places considerable demands upon the attention
of a reader - but even more, perhaps, on the lives of his characters, who constantly threaten to turn into allegorical emblems
or algebraic cyphers.
To anyone familiar with Gravity's Rainbow or The Crying of Lot 49, the foregoing
may seem like a statement of the obvious. But a responsible reviewer needs to spell it out, on the odd chance that some reader
will make a first venture into the world of Pynchon via Against the Day - a novel as exhilarating, tiresome, unnerving
and exhausting as all the others put together.
It is brilliant. It is oblique, and in some ways obtuse. Very few people
will finish it. I read the whole thing in a few days, which is not an experience to be recommended. (Sometime around page
800, it felt as if my brain were trying to claw its way out of my skull.) You should expect to do some homework. It certainly
helps to keep E.T. Bell's classic Men of Mathematics close at hand, in case references to William Hamilton's quaternions
or Georg Riemann's zeta function do not produce an immediate glimmer of recognition.
Trying to summarize any Pynchon
plot is a fool's errand. It would be fair to describe Against the Day as a cross between (1) a revisionist Western
containing bomb-throwing anarchists and pre-Einsteinian physics; and (2) an Edwardian science-fiction novel involving Balkan
politics and bisexual romance.
At the simplest level, it is a family saga - a story about the killing of Webb Traverse,
a Colorado miner who engages in class struggle against Gilded Age capitalism by blowing up railroads with dynamite. The plutocracy
strikes back, sending out a pair of gunslingers to torture and execute him.
Webb's four children pursue various and
intersecting courses across the globe - following a complicated pattern that yields both revenge against their father's killers
and accommodation with the capitalist system he fought. Their itineraries place them within grids of communication and transportation
that are expanding throughout the final decade of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th. The networks enabling
connection and exchange among people also function as part of a system of domination that is moving steadily toward the First
World War.
Meanwhile (in a nod to H.G. Wells) there are signs that time-travelers are arriving as refugees from a
future in which all the resources have run out. And then there are the Chums of Chance: a crew orbiting the world as part
of an international movement of philanthropic balloonists. The Chums are sort of like the anarchists, except they don't blow
anything up.
All of this unfolds (or, more accurately, folds in upon itself) as part of a collage of shaggy-dog stories
involving British occult societies, the "God-building" faction of the Bolsheviks, and the Michelson-Morley experiment (which
disproved the idea that there is a cosmic "aether" in which light moves as a wave).
If this thumbnail sketch makes
Against the Day sound like an edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica undergoing a manic episode - well,
that is perhaps understandable. What drives a committed reader of Pynchon is the hope (frequently renewed, constantly frustrated)
that the parts must somehow lock, so as to form a whole.
But that yearning is also something his fiction tries to
question. It is a desire for control. And Pynchon is on the side of the anarchists. "Central governments," one of them says
in a scene occurring shortly before Europe plunges into hell in 1914, "were never designed for peace. Their structure is line
and staff, the same as an army. The national idea depends on war." And vice versa, of course.
What is the alternative?
In a way, there is none: "The world came to an end in 1914," as another character says in the final few pages. "Like the mindless
dead, who don't know they're dead, we are as little aware of having been in Hell ever since that terrible August." One of
the strangest things about "Against the Day" as a historical novel is that it scarcely tries to represent the First World
War itself. (It's as if that were a traumatic reality that the book is constantly approaching and avoiding - in part, through
its loquacity on a hundred other matters.) By the end, it feels as if we were doomed to repeat the experience ad infinitum.
But that is not the only possible reading. The "mythology" governing Pynchon's novel (enriching it, complicating it,
and giving the untutored reader a headache) involves the relationship between the nature of light and the structure of space-time.
It's an effort, perhaps, to imagine something beyond our familiar world, in which "progress" has meant a growing capacity
to dominate and to kill.
"Political space has its neutral ground," says another character in what may be the definitive
passage of the novel. "But does Time? is there such a thing as the neutral hour? one that goes neither forward nor back? is
that too much to hope?" (Or as Joyce has Stephen Dedalus say in Ulysses: "History is a nightmare from which I am
trying to awake.")
It is not at all clear whether Pynchon himself thinks such escape or transcendence is really possible.
Instead of an answer, we have the novel itself, serving as a kind of time machine - one covered with intricate circuits, emitting
peculiar noises and a vaguely hypnotic glow.
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