Against The Day

I haven’t written in a while so much of this comment pertains to parts of the book that I’m a little past at this point. And perhaps this observation is a little front door, but I can’t help being impressed, touched, and enchanted by a frequent comparison of the warm, fading natural light of the old world against the harsh, cold, electric light of the future. Approaching towns, as sunsets fade, the light becomes overtaken by a growing, pale luminences that is frequently described in terms both harsh and alien to the viewer. And though Pynchon never subcumbs to outright nostalgia, it’s fairly obvious that he holds the optimism of the future reperesented by the White City in lower regard than the belief expresed by those like Mayva Travers who have decided to simply hunker down in the face of onrushing history. But then he (and we) know exactly what horror lurks over the threshold of the next century.

To contineu on the nature and use of fading light, I’ve found this book to be the “softest” of any Pynchon work I’ve yet read. In particular V, GR, and the Crying of Lot 49 all have a sharp, alost cynical edge. I don’t have quotes to support this, it’s more a feeling than anything else. Wtith ATD, I find that he writes with a greater degree of sentiment and uses descriptions that are strikingly beautiful, pastoral and at times verging on nostalgic. I have found all of this to be quite hypnotic and have found myself exclaiming outloud on the subway in pure delight at some of the prose I’ve encountered in the book. Here’s a passage that I find captures all that I’m mentioning above: electric light over taking fading hues of natural light, an almost disney like rendering of an old mining town that is both beautiful and dripping with reverance for the mystery and naivete of the old west.

“After passengers for Telluride had changed at Ridgeway Junction, the little stub train climbed up over Dallas Divide and rolled down again to Placerville and the final haul up the valley of the San Miguel, through sunset and into the uncertainties of night. The high-country darkness, with little to break it but starlight off the flow of some creek or a fugitive lamp or hearth up in a miner’s cabin, soon gave way to an unholy radiance ahead , in theeast. I was the wrong color for a fire, and daybreak was out of the question, though the end of the world remained a possibility. It was in fact the famous electric street-lighting of Telluride, first city in the U.S. to be so lit…”

And this one from earlier in the book. It has less of the pastoral (being in London) but draws an even more stark contrast between the organic light of the old world as representd by autumnal light, sunset and shadows and the clinical, sharp-edged light of the future:

As autum deepend, Lew could be noticed hurring from place to place, as if increasingly claimed by a higher argument — tensely vertical, favoring narrow black overcoats, slouch hats, and serviceable boots, a trimmed black mustache settled in along his upper lip. Despite the gorwing presence of electric street illumination, London in resolute municipal creep out of the Realm of Gas, he had begun to discover a structure to the darkness, dating from quite ancient times, perhaps well before there was any city here at all — in place all along, and little more than ratified by the extreme and unmerciful whitenss replacing the glare-free tones and composite shadows of the old illumination, with its multiplied chances for error. Even ventureing out in the daylight, he found himself usually moving from one shadow to another, amonth quotidian frights which would only become unbearably visible with the passing of lamplighting-time into the lofty electric night.”

For me, despite Pynchon still being the wildman who shanghai’s us into depths of depravity that one can only dream of (or hope for?), I think he’s showing his age. This book has the feel of a reverie related on a screend-in porch told at the end of the day. Even when we are in locations as exotic as the under-sand oceans of inner asia and the hollow center of the earth there’s a wistfulness and poinant sense of loss that comes through quite strongly. And being members of an age entirely emulsified in photographic and film imagery, the strongest way to play this out is in the terms of visible light - sepia, autumnal, liminal and fading — that we have come to associate with those feelings; and further he never lets us forget that a mechanical horror, whispering to our fuzzy mammalian cortex, draws ever closer; lurking always over the horizon and in those spaces defined by wavelengths of energy forerver out of the grasp of our naturally given sensory apparatus.

“I want to know light,” Roswell was confessing. I want to reach inside light and find its heart, touch its soul, take some in my hands whatever it turns out to be, and bring it back, like the Gold Rush only more at stake, maybe, ’cause it’s easier to go crazy from…”

and further

“I’m heading for California,” replied Roswell.
“That out to help some,” said Merle.
“I’m serious. It’s where the future of light is, in particular the moving pictures.”

I for one find all of this to be wonderful and enchanting process. Pynchon, being…well…Pynchon manages to handle this elgaic tone with enough zany asides and lewed carrying on that I never feel the sentiment is unearned or sacchrine. He also continually counterbalances these moments with his own (and our) awe at realms of reality described by the purely mathmatical.

Such as:

“But out here in the four-dimensional space-and-time of Dr. Minkowski, inside the tiniest ‘interval’ as small as you care to make it, within each tiny hypervolume of Kontinuum–there likewise must be always hidden an infinite number of other points–and if we define a “world” as a ver large and finite set of points, then there must be worlds. Universes!

In fact, a mystical Cantorian cult of the very, indeed vanishingly, negligible, ever seeking escape into a boundless epsilonic world…’A sort of Geogrphical Society for the unlimited expolroation of regions neibhboring the Zero….”

I wish I had a nice bow to put on this rambling but I don’t. Just in awe of his ability to osscilate between beautifully pastoral moments, the mind-bendingly abstract, vaudvillian silliness, and the touchingly human.

-Colin

PS - who knows a good WWI book that gets into the geo-political causes of the war. I don’t know much about it and would find it helpful.

10 reasons to Read Against The Day

#1Learn more about science.
#2 Get more sex acts between one sets of covers than the last six books you’ve read put together.
#3 Learn about Central European political geography at a graduate-course level.
#4 Get high from vicarious indulgence in more drugs than you ever knew existed.
#5 Find correspondences from Pre-WWI history to everything that bothers one about the present age.
#6 Acquire a working theory of time travel.
#7 You can create musical settings in you head for a score of wonderful ditties, such as the one about the invention of dive-bombing.
#8 You can be secure in the knowledge that there are few fictional works in English (short of say Finnegans Wake and arguably that is not English) that someone can beat you with for sheer density. You are one bad-ass reader, and others must attention pay.
#9 Learn to take a journey with a growing knowledge that there is no destination in sight, nothing will be revealed, and any happiness found in any endings is not your own.
#10 Because you will find yourself hoping it won’t end.

I am back in. looks like the other posters here have been on break as well. I haven’t really been compelled to write, as i have not really had any open questions or unique experiences over the last 100 pages or so. I find i am inspired to post every time the Chums float back into the scene after some kind of absence, as they have around pg 400 or so. so here i am in the middle of the book, and i can “feel” the looming catastrophe. i have been introduced to some kind of mysterious trespassers in our dimension, and some other fascinating possibilities. and i guess that is just it, it is feeling like a set of multiple possibilities, as well as possibilities from other dimensions of time and space, which our fearless and well dressed lads are apparently about to explore. Also, the idea of their unknown hierarchy giving orders that must be blindly followed has definite implications with the terrible and unstoppable mechanism of the advent of “The Great War”. Mostly i am just enjoying the delicious off the tongue language. i love his little pynchonesque “lists” of describing the possibilities.
-Brian

One of the most exceeding rare postures in the surcaresque, hypermorphic fictions of Pynchon is the classic formal device of addressing the reader directly. Admittedly, this is a narrative stance that has been out of fashion oooh, maybe since Nabokov, but hey, it is a legitimate authorial choice. One, I might point out, that is almost completely missing from the corpus — note I say almost because such a regard does rarely occur amidst the forested plains and craggy peaks of the plentitudinous narrational terrain. In V it occurs, to my best recollection, exactly once, at the bottom of the ocean in a submarine. This would suggest a ratio of pages to an implied 1st person voicing of oh, about 1000:1. Again, this is not a big deal, unless your Hunter Thompson, but if you’re Peder Sjogren, say, this isn’t going to happen ever. Indeed, why [[[[you]]]] might ask, is this even worth wasting [[[our]]] time with? Is it because the author in this case has attained mythic dimensions for reclusiveness, thus making any presentation of a self even in the form of an implied I/Thou relation more noteworthy than say, a certain compulsive Irish fingernail-trimmer with poor vision and a scary-looking secretary? Nah, probably not. Is it because the underlying hallucinatory programme is such that attempting such a relation, even while it is technically feasible — after all, it is not unheard of to have the connection have a perfecly civil conversation with you the consumer as the walls start to pulsate and miniature heat lightning arcs across the ceiling, but then there is the messy business of having to talk you down as the trip progresses — and the programme here is too important to have to also hold [[[[your]]]] hand, innit? Truth be told, I don’t have the answer. All I know is it’s a damn shock when it occurs, and it does this time on page 666. The exact details I leave to your imagination, I will only say it involves a form of yes, trans-species relations (eyeball rolls from readers exposed to a previous post of mine on this topic). One more observation, germane to the discussion actually, is that the moment can best be described as slapstick (those animals do the darndest things) and as far away from the solemnity of the submarine in V as possible. So what’s with that? We get recognition for watching the cartoons? (Oh, the entire book is a cartoon?).

The real point of this post actually, is to ecourage fellow travellers to maintain vigilance on the point of the narrative regard, and with respect to same, cite any sightings.

- Mark Plakias

Like all recovering academics, I know how to write a thesis statement. Mercifully, I’ve forgotten why, or maybe when. So one month in, what is it I think I’m doing here? My New Year’s project: blogging my way through Against the Day, at a rate of about 3 pages a day, a blog every other day, or so (and today isn’t any other day, you know: a slightly possessed Chicago reminder).

Traversing the web to post irregular illuminations to Pynchon’s text.

webs that when the early daylight was right could cause you to stand there just stupefied. (p.76)

I like the image of the literary crow, that raucous, social, sharp-eyed creature of a certain subversive intelligence and particular tastes, drawn to shiny things.

I am especially keen on scientists caught in unguarded Pynchonian moments of camaraderie and geeky enthusiasm, the kind of passionate individualists Gary Larson drew and Errol Morris delights in drawing out. The web in all
its crosscurrents and blind corners is natural habitat for these rarae aves.

My growing collection of mysteries, curiosities, and odd conjunctions is housed here, for your consideration.

–SteelR

It being the time it is, Iceland Spar is commonly available on the good old
Internet. I bought a few “optical quality” specimens on Ebay.
Perhaps after the first read-through of the book i will go back and read it
again with my spar specks, and find wholly other pynchonian landscapes.
Perhaps i need a whole reading costume or two. a red and white striped
blazer and handlebar mustache. and then my mad scientist/magician top hat and cape with some red velvet and black -the brass hardware gleaming and thumb screws for adjustment lubed on my scientiffical headgear holding the pieces of Iceland spar the correct distance from my eyes…

-Brian

No grand vista (so much for my prediction), but we do get to Colorado, in “wind meaner than any he could remember since Chicago, full of ice crystals and hostile intent,” (p.75) and meet Webb Traverse.

In a moment of felicitous synchronicity Webb tells Merle of a job for a man who knows his way around quicksilver (p.78),

“Little Hellkite they’re lookin for an amalgamator, seein ‘s how with the altitude and breathin in those fumes, the current one’s got it into his head he’s the President.”

“Oh. Of. . . ?”

“Put it this way, he has this nipper with a harmonica foll’n him around everywhere playin Hail to the Chief. Out of tune. Goes off into long speeches nobody can understand, declared war on the state of Colorado last week.”

And to elaborate the theme, this isn’t Pynchon, but it should be: Randy Newman’s anthem for our times.

–SteelR

For a book that travels so far and wide, the traveling itself is strangely told. Places are not separated by the distances, at least not distances crossed. Vehicles, whose retinue includes airships, navy destroyers disguised as passenger ships, manned torpedoes that buzz Venetian canals like vespas sawing through water on two-stroke fashion engines (Ciao! Ciao!), camels, horses, eagles (is that Mordor down below, Frodo? What is it you carry and that weighs upon your heart, so, Frodo?), not to mention time machines, are too imaginary to provide reliable transportation. What is the reader to make of all this?

I have intentionally avoided reading any reviews of the book, so as to plough through it on whatever strange connections my own head is capable of (a Rube Goldberg design, useful for traveing far as long as getting anywhere is not of any real consequence). And though I still believe that our characters are playing cards (I believe each family has four members in its suit, but those of you earlier in the book, help me) I’ve not yet checked out the Tarot deck to see if our characters’ descriptions match those of Tarot cards.

But there’s another realization creeping up on me (and ain’t this the distinct pleasure of reading a Pynchon novel? Those sneaking moments when you’re not sure whose reading whom, when author and reader seem to suddenly occupy the same head-space? Pynchon has a gift for engaging the reader to such a degree that the space between the novel and reader collapses into some strange zone of indeterminibility, the reading and the thinking now being one and the same, reader propelled forward by the sheer proximity of his own thoughts to the author’s fantastic prose…), and it’s that we’re still at the Chicago World’s Fair… Never left it folks.

By means I’m not certain of, we are making our way from pavilion to pavilion, as if in some weird Toy Story-Lord of the Rings odyssey set in a theme park featuring carnival rides, shooting galleries, Tarot readings, ferris wheels, balloon rides, Venetian gondolas, a hall of mirrors, Western saloons, bucket rides along cables and powered scooters and bicycles? A fantastic cartoon-like pursuit whose narratives bubble and froth with mythic as well as mystic force, but are enacted by a hapless and hopeless cast of marionnette dolls whose personalities include Darth Vader, Bilbo Baggins, Alice in Wonderland, Little Nemo, Houdini, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, Willy Wonka, the Wizard of Oz, Gandalf, and lord only knows who else…

Against the Day is at times incredibly unstable and uncertain, as if the book itself is a heaving, shaking, wheezing, and sputtering compendium of yarns unravelling, a Gargantuan rip-roaring roller coaster of a ride through frollicking revelries and reveries hoist on a petard un-tethered to the taut matrix of paranoia that structures Pynchon’s earlier efforts, manic and modern, fantastically filled with illusion and trickery, and simply howling with the pleasures of children given over to games and gibberish.

People, what have we done to ourselves?!

–Adrian Chan

Technorati tags: books, book reviews, pynchon, thomas pynchon,

I recently lost my dog of 11.5 years to a savage cancer that bloomed in her heart just before Christmas and took her away from us by the first week of the new year. Thus the passages on Pugnax mid-novel (550-551) are especially resonant: “Their admiration for Pugnax’s martial skills was not unmixed these days with apprehension. The faithful canine carried about a strange gleam in his eye, and the only member of the crew who communicated with him much anymore was Miles Blundell. The two had been known to sit together side by side on the fantail, wordlessly deep into the hours of the midwatch, as if in some sort of telepathic contact. ” The passage goes on (pp 550-551) and rings the changes around the timeless trope of man’s best friend, as in: “Thus he sought out Pugnax, in whose eyes the light of understanding was a beacon in what had without warning become dangerous skies.” The point here is that what’s in Pugnax’s eyes is a comprehension of a impending ominence, which is referred to as “that immeasurable Approach,” and that this dog with a “highly developed taste for human blood” may be part (might one say warp and woof?) of a larger theme around trans-species communications? Note that in the same passage describing Pugnax’ ferocity, Randolph St. Cosmo refers to “the way he drove off that squadron of Uhlans at Temesvar, almost as if he were hypnotizing their horses into unseating their riders.” Recall the talking duck from M+D. So if you, kind reader, are willing to entertain trans-species communications (which actually, when we think about the communicating chemicals from GR, is not that big a stretch) then I’s gonna stick one little TOE in the water and submit that the imagination that connects all living entities across four dimensions (can we say “if it quacks like a Quaternion and walks ‘all-quadrants’, Wilber?) that the ATD is among other things, (such as a Gaian manifesto), a theory of everything.

- Mark Plakias

I was flipping through Deleuze’s books on cinema this morning, with cinema, not literature, on my mind. But this just leapt out at me. We know that there’s a connecting line between Thomas Pynchon and Gilles Deleuze. And Against The Day, like his previous novels, is at times incredibly cinematic (in a sort of impossible way). So check these passages out. They deal with the kinds of films that create worlds. Deleuze uses philosopher Henri Bergson, whose ideas on the relationship of Past and Present to Time map well to film (since each film creates a strip of its own time, and can create movements through time within itself: flashbacks, dreams, parallel times, etc.). Deleuze describes these cinematic worlds as crystals, each having a kind of genetic purity, or organizational structure. What grabbed my attention were the numerous similarities between the role Iceland Spar plays in the book and this description of the crystal image. The notion that the charactres have an actual and virtual image corresponds with the book’s constant population of ghosts, the doubling, the bilocations, deja vus, and so on. Even the references here to mirrors, and the Venetian mirror and multi-sided mirors is particularly weird. The Serpent is even mentioned! I’ll post the full section in one of the series pages when it’s all typed up.

Excerpt is in Series/Literature/Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books: Crystals of Time

–Adrian Chan