Into the Light of 'Day'
At the start of one century, Pynchon's latest novel illuminates the dawn of the last
With his mesmerizing intelligence, unrepentant shtick, and polymathic and panoramic synthesis of the historical, technological, and metaphysical, Thomas Pynchon resembles no other author. Gravity's Rainbow, his 1973 masterpiece, remains my idea of the Great American Novel and an incomparable source of inspiration and enlightenment. Against the Day (The Penguin Press, $35), the famously elusive author's sixth and longest (1,085 pages!) novel, finds him stretching out still further in time and space. Now, before you decide to "absquatulate" (one of Pynchon's impeccably chosen 19th-century synonyms for "skedaddle"), consider this: For all that he is venerated as an entropic, paranoiac, or apocalyptic writer, he also enjoys telling tales, spinning yarns, clustering stories together in a Scheherazadean concatenation.
That's just what Pynchon does in his first novel of the 21st century. Against the Day reflects on the start of the previous century, an era of rapacious capitalists, seditious anarchists, and ingenious mathematicians, scientists, and inventors. Beginning at the Industrialist pageant of the White City at Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exhibition and spanning three decades, the novel marshals a whole new sick crew of characters into locales throughout America, Europe, Asia, and, as in all Pynchon novels, numerous spaces both unmapped and unmappable: counter-historical forks-in-the-road, covert terrains, dreamlands. One of the many professors in Against the Day posits that "maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as maps again." The book maps a world of wonders, filled with zany adventures and excursions into a variety of ungovernable forces - electricity, spirituality, anarchy, history. With this novel, Pynchon continues one of 20th-century literature's most acute and necessary journeys into the meaning of our modern world.
Summarizing a Pynchon novel is a fool's errand, not only well nigh impossible, but also beside the point. Suffice it to say that one turning point comes when Webb Traverse, a.k.a. The Kieselguhr Kid, a Colorado silver miner turned anarchist bomber "intimate with the deepest arcana of dynamite," is murdered by two minions of the sinister plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. In their respective intellectual, spiritual, and sexual adventures, the Traverse children - Kit, Reef, Frank, and Lake - all find themselves at one point or another homing in on or extricating themselves from this "bad Vibe" and his cohorts. (One member of the Traverse family in this book, Reef's son, Jess, will become the grandfather of Vineland's Frenesi Gates.) After studying at Yale under Vibe's sponsorship (not unlike the ominous transaction that takes Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity's Rainbow to Harvard), Kit furthers his education in international citadels of higher mathematics from Cambridge to Göttingen. He becomes involved with Yashmeen Halfcourt, an entrancing English mathematician who will also become involved with another Traverse brother, but whose true infatuation is with the work of a famous mathematician named Riemann.
"This is our own age of exploration," she declared, "into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we've seen. What are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time-travel?"
Pynchon does not stint on his outrageously fantastical character names and signature songs. He also seems to be having more fun with his acronymic organizations, such as an English occult society that combines Pythagoras with the Tarot, the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys, known as T.W.I.T. Also, Nikola Tesla and Franz Ferdinand make appearances, and there are brief cameos (under their birth names) by Groucho Marx and Bela Lugosi. Pynchon aficionados will be pleased to see the fourth appearance in his novels by a character named Bodine, and Gravity's Rainbow devotees may recognize a figure named El Ñato. Against the Day draws upon all manner of fictional genres, and some sections summon up nothing so much as Pynchon's own earlier works. The accounts of explorer Fleetwood Vibe, for example, recall those of V.'s Hugh Godolphin.
Floating high above the action in the airship Inconvenience are the Chums of Chance, a youthful band of balloonists who simultaneously exist as characters in a series of boys' adventure stories. Pynchon has referenced Tom Swift before, but here the boy scientist, a colleague of the Chums, "spends more time these days in court than in the laboratory." Framing the novel's opening and closing acts, the Chums only sporadically interact with the other characters, but whenever they touch down they discover divergent and counter-factual worlds.
Against the Day explores, not the laws of gravity or cause and effect but of space and time, and their bearing on history, or what one character calls "Time's pathology." The Fourth Dimension may not loom quite as large as the V-2 rocket or the Mason-Dixon line from Pynchon's other novels, but how to define the nature of this dimension becomes the central preoccupation for many characters, from the mathematical factions of Vectorists and Quaternionists to the Ætherists, who cling to a recently debunked theory, and others who seek an even more unseen or invisible realm. Images of doubles abound, and movements through space are manipulated by characters through both a crystal, "Iceland spar" (which possesses the property of "double refraction"), and the power of "bilocation," the mystical ability to be in two places at once.
Light permeates all; it is the medium that transforms, provides the gateway and the wormhole. (Thelonious Monk supplies the novel's epigraph: "It's always night, or we wouldn't need light.") Luca Zombini, a magician, explains: "Remember, God didn't say, 'I'm gonna make light now,' he said, 'Let there be light.' His first act was to allow light in to what had been Nothing." Elsewhere, inventor Merle Rideout converses with a "ball lightning" named Skip and observes that both alchemy and photography are "redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals." Another character muses that light "might be a secret determinant of history." Of course, such acts of "illumination" have their costs; insomnia, not paranoia, is this book's most prevalent condition.
The novel's title may refer to the Second Epistle of Peter, but, for those keeping track of such things, the phrase appears after Kit bears witnesses to the Tunguska incident of 1908, when a comet or other force ("Tchernobyl, the star of Revelation" or a Tesla message gone awry?) leveled the Siberian forest and left its inhabitants searching the skies for signs while grappling with a potential day of judgment. The title also speaks to the myriad journeys beyond the zone of the daylit world - shamanic rituals, "subdesertine" voyages, hallucinations, séances, and expeditions seeking mythic cities like the Mexican homeland of Aztlán and the Tibetan sanctuary of Shambhala.
Against the Day is among the most all-encompassing but also the most accessible of Pynchon's novels. As characters crisscross the pages, not all the story arcs are equally engrossing, and the sense of grand design can be difficult to discern within the exuberant storytelling. Readers frustrated or even outraged by the lack of a central character should recall the multifarious narratives of such previous works as Gravity's Rainbow, in which Slothrop, the ostensible hero, vanishes well before its final page.
Yashmeen's above-quoted description of her project could, in a way, apply to Pynchon's, whose writing traverses time through his own redemptive dreams, transfiguring the past to help us better comprehend both the present and the potential future. Against the Day is a luminous novel that sets off an anarchic explosion of the imagination to demolish our simple myths of progress, which would only strand us in the dark, and carry careful and faithful readers further into the light.
Published: 12/14/2006
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