Pynchon's Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide

Pynchon’s Against the Day

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Pynchon’s Against the Day A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide Edited by Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

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CREDIT LINE: From AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pychon, copyright © 2006 by Thomas Pynchon. Used by permission of The Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2006 by Thomas Pynchon. From Against the Day (The Penguin Press). Reprinted with permission by Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC. Cover image: “Dirigible Taking Mail from Top of Moving Train with Grappling Hooks, Preparatory to Transferring the Pouch to a Ship at Sea.” Popular Mechanics 54, no. 2 (August 1930). Published by University of Delaware Press Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rlpgbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pynchon’s Against the day : a corrupted pilgrim’s guide / edited by Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-61149-064-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61149-065-7 (electronic) 1. Pynchon, Thomas. Against the day. I. Severs, Jeffrey, 1974- II. Leise, Christopher, 1978– PS3566.Y55A7337 2011 813'54—dc22 2010053749

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Notes on the Text

ix

Introduction: “Exceeding the Usual Three Dimensions”: Collective Visions of the Unsuspected

1

Christopher Leise

Part I: Narrative Strategies 1

Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching

15

Brian McHale

2 Plots, Pilgrimage, and the Politics of Genre in Against the Day

29

Amy J. Elias

3

Mapping, the Unmappable, and Pynchon’s Antitragic Vision

47

Krzysztof Piekarski, Martin Kevorkian, and Elisabeth McKetta

4

Binocular Disparity and Pynchon’s Panoramic Paradigm

67

Justin St. Clair

v

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vi

Contents

Part II: Science, Belief, and Faith 5

Bogomilism, Orphism, Shamanism: The Spiritual and Spatial Grounds of Pynchon’s Ecological Ethic

91

Christopher K. Coffman

6

Readers and Trespassers: Time Travel, Orthogonal Time, and Alternative Figurations of Time in Against the Day

115

Inger H. Dalsgaard

7

Narrating Tesla in Against the Day

139

Terry Reilly

Part III: Politics and Economics 8

The Religious and Political Vision of Against the Day

167

Kathryn Hume

9

Daydreams and Dynamite: Anarchist Strategies of Resistance and Paths for Transformation in Against the Day

191

Graham Benton

10

“The abstractions she was instructed to embody”: Women, Capitalism, and Artistic Representation in Against the Day

215

Jeffrey Severs

11

Europe’s “Eastern Question” and the United States’ “Western Question”: Representing Ethnic Wars in Against the Day

239

J. Paul Narkunas

Works Cited

265

Index

279

About the Editors

289

About the Contributors

291

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Acknowledgments

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ollaborations of this nature inevitably represent efforts and kindnesses from individuals beyond those listed as “contributors.” We would especially like to thank John Krafft and Peter Schmidt for their expert recommendations, Crystal Alberts for her publication savvy, and David C. Waddell for his commitment of time and energy at the close of a chaotic semester. Joseph Conte, Richard Hardack, Luc Herman, and Joseph Tabbi provided support and generated interest in this book; without them we would not have been nearly so encouraged to proceed to this final stage. Donald C. Mell and the members of the Editorial Board at the University of Delaware Press were uncommonly generous in their appraisal of our proposal and the subsequent manuscript; thanks also to Karen Druliner for responding to innumerable e-mails. And, of course, all our friends, family, and colleagues make our work possible and worth doing in the first place. Christopher Leise would like to thank Thomas J. Morrissey and the members of the Plattsburgh State University English Department for their undeserved faith and great good humor. Thanks also to Whitman College, particularly the Department of English, for helping him keep balanced, which is far from his natural state. Jeffrey Severs thanks the University of British Columbia for generous research assistance, as well as his colleagues at UBC, the University of Texas-Austin, and Wake Forest University for their support. vii

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Notes on the Text

T

he introduction and all essays refer to Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (New York: Penguin, 2006). Citations are given parenthetically with page numbers. In keeping with common practice among critics, for Against the Day and all other works by Pynchon, we surround with brackets ellipses that signify elisions; all other ellipses in quotations from Pynchon appear in the original texts. A version of Brian McHale’s essay appeared as “History as Genre: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching,” Genre 42, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2009): 5–20. A version of Kathryn Hume’s essay appeared as “The Religious and Political Vision of Pynchon’s Against the Day,” Philological Quarterly 86, no. 1–2 (Winter 2007): 163–87. We are grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to reprint.

ix

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Introduction

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“Exceeding the Usual Three Dimensions”: Collective Visions of the Unsuspected Christopher Leise

They return to Earth [. . .] retaining only awed impressions of a ship exceeding the usual three dimensions, docking, each time precariously, at a series of remote stations high in unmeasured outer space, which together form a road to a destination [. . .]. (1084)

R

eviews of Thomas Pynchon’s longest novel to date, Against the Day, were (to put it gently) mixed. The diversity of critical reactions was doubtlessly a product of the book’s own heterogeneity: the novel begins with a group of boy balloonists literally descending upon Chicago’s White City, at the 1893 World’s Fair. These “Chums of Chance” belong to that bygone order of propriety, hygiene, allegiance to duty and country, and unswerving fealty to grammar that marked the fin de siècle ideal of boys’ behavior. Oddly, the Chums are as fictional within the pages of Against the Day as such figures were in reality, and their adventures fly forward and spin off into typically arcane Pynchonian high jinks: historical personages (such as Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Nikola Tesla) cavort with fictional characters with whom we are equally familiar, in that we have seen their type before . . . well, in a certain sense.1 There’s Lew Basnight, your typical hard-boiled detective, excepting of course his apparent ability to become invisible; there are hard-ridden cowboy brothers 1

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seeking revenge for their father’s murder but who never seem to stay very committed to the decidedly cold trail of the killers; there’s a far-flung international conspiracy whose almost imperceptible machinations have something to do with obscure mathematics; there are monsters that live under the earth and lay waste to alternate versions of extant cities, shamans who can be in two places at once, and quasi-submarine adventures that explore the regions beneath the surface of the desert. And much more, of course: all in the service of a shaggy-dog story centered around the inexorable progression into modernity, with all its promise of doom and destruction and that faint glimmer of possibility that there might yet be another, better way. While critics celebrated Against the Day’s intelligence, they just as often derided its inaccessibility. Its range was lauded as much as its ranging was denounced, often within the same account. A few reviewers celebrated its return to the formal experimentation that solidified Gravity’s Rainbow as the postmodern masterpiece par excellence, while most found cause to decry the confusion and chaos that characterized so many of the nearly eleven hundred pages. The effect of Against the Day on the reading market was, as so many reported, “dizzying,” but not all enjoyed the buzz. The strongest rebukes of Against the Day saw in it a devolution of Pynchon’s practice: even the most well-rounded characters, the Traverse family, are far from the sympathetic eponymous subjects of Mason & Dixon. After the richness of personality presented in Mason & Dixon, many critics felt that Pynchon had fallen off his game. A characteristic slam, from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times: “Whereas Mr. Pynchon’s last novel, the stunning ‘Mason & Dixon,’ demonstrated a new psychological depth, depicting its two heroes as full-fledged human beings, not merely as pawns in the author’s philosophical chess game, the people in ‘Against the Day’ are little more than stick figure cartoons.”2 Other critics bypassed questions of character altogether, in dismissals of the book’s enormous plot. The “shapeless” story, “yards and yards of Pynchon wallpaper,” Louis Menand lamented, fails to provide the staples of narrative fiction (including obvious exposition, a predominant conflict, and a tidy denouement) dictated by a tradition so established—and entrenched—as that of Aristotle.3 Yvonne Zipp complained of an effort akin to “nailing Jell-O to a tree” in attempting to gloss the plot: Menand and Zipp were two of the several who reported dizziness as a side effect of the “often monumentally irritating prose.”4 Not all found cause to reject the novel outright. Notably, Christopher Sorrentino expressed a genial ambivalence, writing that “a book this long that amazes even 50% of the time is amazing . . .”; Liesl Shillinger even bucked the established wisdom (established, that is, earlier in the week by her New York Times compatriot Kakutani), citing Against the Day as

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Pynchon’s “funniest and arguably his most accessible novel.”5 Despite the small but enthusiastic crowd of supporters, though, the loudest voices in the critical establishment judged Against the Day to be a bad Pynchon novel. While it would be unfair to lambast personal reactions to a work of fiction (that is the nature of a review, after all), the scale and intensity of so much disappointment deserve consideration. It is safe to assume that Pynchon’s notoriety—since the consensus viewpoint is that so much of his prior output is centrally important to American fiction of the latter twentieth century—would necessarily color any reader’s expectations for a new novel nearly ten years after his name was last seen in a publisher’s catalog, and (excepting the collection of reprinted short stories, Slow Learner) for only the third time in three decades. In fact, such energetic reactions may ultimately reveal as much about the expectations of Pynchon’s development as they do about the novel itself. The response to Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s follow-up to Against the Day, confirms the critical tendency to burden readings of his newest output with the relatively narrow precedent set by his directly preceding fiction. That is to say that a brief turn to Inherent Vice is in order. As a collection of essays, A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide began its gestation well before there were even rumors of another novel, so shortly (just under three years) after Against the Day was released—shortly, that is, with respect to Pynchon Time, which previously seemed to work in basic units of decades, not months or years. The general tenor of critics’ reactions to Inherent Vice was more positive, but what the harshest detractors of the smaller, neonoir detective story reveal is a continuation of the pattern of an externally perceived teleology of Pynchon-the-auteur; and in this narrative, Mason & Dixon was a corner around which all serious (read: good) writers necessarily turn. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were real characters—not simply because they were historical personages but also because Pynchon rendered them as believable men with psychological depth to be plumbed. They felt and we felt along with them; their relationship grew more meaningful with each turned page, and our investment in it did too. As the reviews attest, Against the Day was not what many suspected should come next, nor was Inherent Vice.6 In the process of looking for the expected, it is apparent that many reviews missed what was actually there—that is, what makes Against the Day a novel worth the serious consideration and attention his earlier long novels generated. By expecting “full-fledged human beings,” the critics seem to have missed the political influence that “cartoons” can exercise; in looking for Aristotelian convention, they largely missed the productive qualities in experimenting within and around questions of genre. These reviewers’ vision was as a result blinded to the world as given by Pynchon, his portrayal of what is yet to come in the future—even (as the

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Chums may have witnessed in Dr. Zoot’s ersatz time machine) the End of it All. But rather than anticipating a normalization of Pynchon’s plots and characters, these reviewers might have looked at Mason & Dixon and all the Pynchon that preceded it for established consistencies. Other than that reviewers’ expectations seem to demand one vector of movement in Pynchon’s literary field, Inherent Vice’s take on the hard-boiled detective novel and Against the Day’s exploration of manifold forms reveal that the realism of Mason & Dixon might have been another one of Pynchon’s forays into genre. Indeed, Mason & Dixon is replete with genre play: it echoes the American tall tale (the Werebeaver); the captivity narrative (Eliza Fields); pulp fiction (The Ghastly Fop); the gothic (Mason and the wind of St. Helena); travel narrative (the exotic, spicy delight of ketjap—that is, catsup—in South Africa) . . . the list could go on, and still fail to mention the developing focus on the individual subject so prominent in late-eighteenth-century fiction that many critics seemed to see as a new stylistic weapon, rather than a relatively familiar arrow in Pynchon’s quiver. Seen this way, the characterization of Mason and Dixon as real people with families and complex emotions and heartfelt yearnings (and all that) is yet another display of a novelist’s ability to ape the conventions of the historical period he is lovingly parodying. As one star in a constellation of Revolution era American fictional conventions, this kind of psychological roundness is a requirement of any novel that would seek to represent the breadth of popular fiction in the literary landscape of the era. Nor is the artifice of psychological “depth” fully absent in Against the Day. Merle Rideout clearly suffers from the loss of his wife, Erlys—and then the absence of his daughter, Dally. Webb Traverse is existentially torn between his immediate duty to his family and his longer-term commitment to remedy the living (and working) conditions for families like his the world around. Cyprian Latewood suffers so deeply from anxiety due to his nonnormative sexuality that he is ultimately compelled to withdraw to a cloistered life. What makes Against the Day so interesting then—if unsuspected—is not its continuation along a presumed trajectory of more believable, even likable characters. Instead, it follows the track of generic exploration: in this case, its highest genius lies in the ability to occupy so many genres of American ideological indoctrination to dramatically repurposed effect. Ragged Dick becomes Kit Traverse, and his hand-up from Scarsdale Vibe leads to spiritual wealth, not an upper-middle-class lifestyle. The Chums of Chance eschew easy, unthinking loyalty to the red, white, and blue of their Employer and their Country in favor of a more ethically nuanced agency. The Lone Ranger is refigured as the Kieselguhr Kid, a sympathetic terrorist—perhaps multiple terrorists—bombing in the name

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of the worker in defense of his basic humanity. John Clute noted that all characters can be initially identified in terms of some genre or other of popular fiction as it was written before the end of World War I: the western, from Edward S. Ellis to Bret Harte to Jack London; boys’ adventure fiction, from the Airship Boys tale to Horatio Alger; the Dime Novel in general; the British school story in general; the Zuleika Dobson subgenre of the femme fatale tale in particular; the future war novel; the Lost Race novel; the Symmesian Hollow Earth tale; the Tibetan Llama or Shangri-La thriller; the Vernean Extraordinary Journey; the Wellsian scientific romance; the Invention tale and its close cousin the Edisonade; the European spy romance thriller à la E. Phillips Oppenheim; the World Island spy thriller à la John Buchan; the mildly sadomasochistic soft porn tale as published by the likes of Charles Carrington in Paris around the turn of the century.7

Against the Day’s raw materials, like those of other Pynchon novels, are thus not just the history but also the literature that composed the narrative of America in its crucial periods of rise onto the world stage; the novel’s finished product obliquely asks questions of that ascendant America in the present. Is America more Webb Traverse or Scarsdale Vibe? After 9/11, can we find violent protesters of entrenched interests sympathetic, and (after the near-collapse of global finance in 2008, a question so much easier to answer) ought we not see CEOs as villains? The essays in this collection move such questions to the fore: how must we read the forms of the past? What space is there for women and indigenous peoples and those with nonnormative sexualities? How small is this world, and what can we do to make it large enough for everyone? As usual for Pynchon, Against the Day’s dominant mood is the subjunctive—what these genres could have trumpeted as U.S. “national character”: the Good over the profitable; love of others over love of Self; the resilient Community over the rugged Individualist. In this way, it makes of the American Novel something new: often not even something specifically American. The ambition supporting the vastness of this construction, which left so many reviewers scrambling for purchase, leaves room for so much more exploration. The treasury of genres, discourses, ideas, and facts cannot be fully accounted for by any one mind, and none—save that of the septuagenarian Pynchon, which seems to wax with each decade—could possibly find familiarity in all the terms and concepts and events that populate a landscape so thoroughly global as to chart lands even under the sands—and inside the hollow heart of Earth itself. It may be for this reason that Tom LeClair, one of the greatest contributors to Pynchon scholarship, found the novel so deeply off-putting. “The only readers

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(besides responsible reviewers) I can imagine finishing Against the Day are the Pynchonists, the fetishizing collectors of P-trivia,” he opined. “I hope I’m wrong. I hope some future scholar will read the novel twenty times and either illustrate how it recapitulates the whole history of narrative or demonstrate how every piece fits together into a fourfold design that will replace four-base genetics as a model of all life. As the author himself says in his abstract, ‘visions of the unsuspected.’”8 Setting aside the hyperbole, we have attempted here the spirit of LeClair’s hope for a serious study of Against the Day as a novel that is much more than a ham-handed recapitulation of earlier Pynchon themes, and much greater than a great disappointment of a perceived trajectory toward a more sensitive psychological realism in Pynchon’s style. Leaving reviews for the reviewers, we have instead drawn inspiration from the Against the Day Wiki, which almost instantly began the scholarly annotation process, and which has produced dramatically more accurate and far-reaching research than any single scholar could turn out with years and years of rereading.9 One might say that it takes a village to read a Pynchon novel; his works are, after all, populated with enormous communities of characters and touch upon countless world communities as these characters traipse across the globe. This speaks to the relevance of Pynchon’s fiction in general, and of Against the Day in particular, in the early part of the twenty-first century. Pynchon’s fictions have a reach that equals that of the world, even if facets of the world given are not, as the book’s jacket copy reads, “strictly speaking on the map at all.” Though readers of Pynchon’s previous novels will be unsurprised by this plurality, more than ever Against the Day invites the expertise and experience of all the world’s readers to contribute to a conversation about his work, and thus all of literature thereby. In arranging our collective investigation of Pynchon’s longest novel, we have chosen to focus on three predominant dimensions of the book’s pursuits: narrative strategies, the intersection of scientific belief with faith, and, finally, politics and economics. By collecting together a wide array of established experts and a few new voices, we have augmented LeClair’s request for a single scholar, laboring through scores of rereadings, in favor of the model of our emergent literary world—one where the most complete understanding of a book, this book, develops from coordinating plural readings by multiple readers. These essays, we hope, follow Pynchon’s lead beyond “the daylit and obvious and taken-for-granted,” becoming “a set of directions, an itinerary, a map to a hidden space” (566). Pynchon is characteristically playful here, suggesting his map—Against the Day—constitutes a “corrupted pilgrim’s guide,” which acknowledges that maps are as often misleading as we “pilgrims” are innately misguided. Interpreting a novel whose major theme is doubling, our text aspires to be a guide to the guide—faithful that some goals are realizable,

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but also aware that, when it comes to the wide-ranging Pynchon, every authority is in a sense corrupted, partial, to be suspected, even when it provides a useful structure. Each essay naturally exceeds the taxonomic distinction we have ascribed to it: politics and faith bleed one into the other, science and narrative strategy become mutually informed belief systems. Through these resonances, this collection develops a collective vision of the unsuspected, at least unsuspected by the initial public response, one that takes us well beyond the measured space of reviews and extant criticism. This collection is the first major step across the divide between scholarship and popular opinion—the divide made so visible when Gravity’s Rainbow left Pulitzer Prize officials riven and led to no award for fiction in 1974; the rift seemingly an ocean wide once again in 1997, when Charles Frazier’s historical novel Cold Mountain won the National Book Award and the critically lauded Mason & Dixon failed to make the short list. Our first guide, Brian McHale, considers the systematic process whereby Against the Day “poaches” from the genres of the periods contemporaneous with the novel’s action. “Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching” makes clear not only that Pynchon borrows from turnof-the-century “entertainment-fiction” genres, but that he does so in order to modify their common ideological effects. This is a process that McHale calls Pynchon’s “mediated historiography,” a practice of using genres of a specific time to illustrate—and correct—the distortions made to our understanding of the times the genres ostensibly represent. By reoccupying these conventional narrative forms, Against the Day (as well as all of Pynchon’s post-1973 output) updates or revises the generic-historical record and writes into being a more perfect historical novel, one that sets a period’s entire range of popular genres into a single space. In this way, McHale contends, the warts and warps of each generic convention cancel the others’ out, to the effect of “approximating the historical ‘truth’ of the era that produced them.” Continuing along the path of genre, Amy J. Elias’s “Plots, Pilgrimage, and the Politics of Genre in Against the Day” contends that a sense of order in the novel does not issue from conventional sources like theme or explicit narratorial commentary, but rather from the associations made by and within narrative forms. Against the Day oscillates among hero quest, picaresque, and social realism by creating a new form, “postmodern pilgrimage,” which is uniquely appropriate to the present and “reveals the constructed nature of social and historical space and the possibility of alternate space-time.” For Elias (much as for Christopher K. Coffman in a later essay), Against the Day advocates an “ecological ethics” that recognizes the vulnerability of individuals and the resistance against repressive systems implicit in communal systems. Neither constrained by

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Aristotelian linearity nor fully possessed of picaresque’s lack of closure, Pynchon’s pilgrimages are at once realizable and yet readily repeatable: this open-endedness makes possible a reading of the novel, and thus the world, conducive to an “anarchic communitas,” contesting the related ideas of stable residence, capitalist individualism, and the repressive force of the nation-state. If the generic and political grounds of Against the Day are ever-shifting, as McHale and Elias show, Krzysztof Piekarski, Martin Kevorkian, and Elisabeth McKetta seek to identify an anarchic narrative strategy in Against the Day by positioning mapping as an analogue to the Tragic. “Mapping, the Unmappable, and Pynchon’s Antitragic Vision” argues for an anarchist poetics of the antitragic, an impulse that refuses the novel’s opening call to “single up all [narrative] lines.” While mapping seeks to circumscribe, and thus to contain—indeed, constrain—Pynchon confounds the map’s predatory power by refusing to confine his narrative to a single hero and the concomitant unity of place and time required by such singularity of attention. The authors contend that this resistance to the convention of tragedy results in not one protagonist but instead at least ten “decagonists,” the whole of whom compose a new benchmark in the development of Pynchon’s anarchics of form. More than simply an anarchic poetics, the mapping of disparate images one upon another mirrors the way in which Pynchon’s characters develop full dimensionality, according to Justin St. Clair, in our final guide to the terrain of narrative strategy. St. Clair exposes how Pynchon produces depth of character and meaning by using the technique of the panorama in the construction of his metafiction. In “Binocular Disparity and Pynchon’s Panoramic Paradigm,” St. Clair argues that the panorama Kit and Yashmeen visit near the center of the book serves as a governing model of the novel’s method: Pynchon maps pairs of two-dimensional characters—so often a prime target of reviewers’ negative critique—in a slightly “offset” fashion, creating extradiegetic depth in precisely the same way human eyes perceive three dimensions in the real world. In doing so, Pynchon appropriates the force of a dominant mode of nineteenth-century realism, “remediating” the panorama so as to underscore the artificially constructed nature of so-called realist fiction. This essay, as does McHale’s, demonstrates how Against the Day redeploys fin de siècle modes of representation to challenge and update the ways in which contemporary fiction renders historical reality for its readers. Having set out from questions of form, our itinerary takes us next to the sometimes parallel, sometimes parallax concerns of science and faith. In “Bogomilism, Orphism, Shamanism: The Spiritual and Spatial Grounds of Pynchon’s Ecological Ethic,” Christopher K. Coffman examines the spatial dimension of Pynchon’s spirituality. Expanding upon recent (and

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highly important) work exploring Pynchon’s commitment to environmental concerns, Coffman investigates Pynchon’s improvisations on the Bogomil heresy—an arcane Christian cult into which Cyprian ultimately enters—in order to argue that Against the Day advocates a deeply ecological spirituality. By linking Cyprian’s Bogomilism to Orphic beliefs, Pynchon turns a heavenward spiritual stare downward, linking depth, spirituality, and the earth as related terms in his most thoroughgoing proenvironment text yet. Interested in the spatial dynamics of time travel and bilocation, Inger H. Dalsgaard shows how these seemingly well-trodden tropes of (again, highly generic) science fiction actually figure as a unique attack on the capitalist misappropriation of modern temporality. Linking Against the Day to an earlier Pynchon notion of “Orthogonal Time,” Dalsgaard teases out connections between the science of time travel and the fictions upon which capitalism so often relies, while also leading readers through the complexities, played on in the novel, of the theoretical “possibility” of time travel. By suggesting that the Chums and the Trespassers offer alternate models of reading and being read—the former a passive and superpositioned group; the latter active and thereby underdetermined— Dalsgaard ultimately recovers the paradoxical within Pynchon as a necessary corrective to the reductive reading of time as a resource—and only a resource—within the modern American episteme. Dalsgaard looks at Pynchon’s resistance to a real time limited by capitalism. Terry Reilly demonstrates Pynchon’s related commitment to scientists who look past the limits of rationalism and pragmatism. “Narrating Tesla in Against the Day” shows how the presence of Nikola Tesla is far from tangential; by consulting definitive biographies, this essay demonstrates the accuracy, ingenuity, and even contentiousness with which Pynchon imbricates the historically unorthodox Tesla within his fictional universe—all while largely omitting the more conventional Edison. Unlike so many of the historical personages to whom Pynchon refers, Reilly concludes, Tesla is central to the novel, and scientists of his ilk are central to the Pynchon corpus as a whole. Reilly thus adds a new dimension to Pynchonian science studies, helping to redefine the way in which the corpus calls upon “Mad Scientists” to help ground the scientific exposition within its “visionary” exploration. Concerns of scientific and spiritual belief dovetail in Pynchon’s novels: so do the concerns of faith and politics. Kathryn Hume’s essay examines what she sees as a newly established clarity in Pynchon’s political and religious belief. Arguing for a via media wrought from a deep ambivalence, “The Religious and Political Vision of Against the Day” finds a consistent message of violent resistance balanced by atonement—that is, a political anarchism to which Pynchon seems to grant clemency through a Catholic

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vision of penance. In Hume’s provocative set of claims, Against the Day marks the clearest, most important statement of his faith and political position yet, distinct from the syncretism and limited, unrevolutionary “cool” so many readers have thought his work to endorse. Graham Benton finds Against the Day to be far less forthright about its religious or political stance. Beginning the book’s final section on politics and economics, “Daydreams and Dynamite: Anarchist Strategies of Resistance and Paths for Transformation in Against the Day” traces an invaluable narrative of anarchism within the body of Pynchon’s fictions. Benton also situates the novel with respect to the wildly diverse theories of anarchism of the past two centuries. Instead of combining violence with penance, Benton claims that Pynchon forges a unique position, both informed and interrogative, that seeks a positive anarchism against the extremes of statist and religious thought in the post-9/11 moment. Comparing in its conclusion the present political landscape to Pynchon’s subtle readings of historical uses and repressions of terror, Benton’s essay shows Against the Day to be a book that comments on contemporary problems from the distance of a hundred years. Benton sees a newfound frankness about anarchism in Against the Day, compelling a look back at its previous, more cryptic appearances in Pynchon’s oeuvre. Jeffrey Severs finds a similar retrospective urge in Pynchon with respect to a much-maligned aspect of his work: its portrayals of women. Focused on Dally Rideout, “‘The abstractions she was instructed to embody’: Women, Capitalism, and Artistic Representation in Against the Day” argues that one of the most fully formed women characters in Pynchon’s work to date is deeply connected to the novel’s devastating critique of Gilded Age capitalism and its tendency toward disembodiment. Against the Day in Severs’s account both revisits the degradation of earlier female characters and lights the way for furthering critics’ still nascent feminist consideration of Pynchon’s women. J. Paul Narkunas directs us to our final hidden space with another discussion of resistance, one that demonstrates how Against the Day forces us to consider Europe’s exploitation of Balkan civil unrest alongside the closing of the American West. “Europe’s ‘Eastern Question’ and the United States’ ‘Western Question’: Representing Ethnic Wars in Against the Day” draws on the ideas of Michel Foucault to underscore the parallel processes whereby an arbitrary “national character” emerged in both the United States and the Balkan states and became normalized by exclusion, intolerance, and extermination of Others. Like the Balkans, a “fictional construct” created to place a normative “European” identity in relief, Narkunas contends, the West becomes a site of capitalist and Christian exclusion of political and ethnic difference, focused on immigrant laborers. Against the Day uses this past to

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imagine the future as well—helping us rethink our policies and proclivities in the present. This entire collection of essays likewise takes Pynchon’s novel to the present—delivering it anew to both devoted readers and initial skeptics, helping them see and hear its fresh lines of Pynchonian wonder that disappeared amid the frayed nerves of its critical reception. Every Pynchon novel, to his longtime fans and critics, calls for worthy guides, lamps to light the way home. But this novel may need more lamps than most to illuminate its unsuspected importance. Eleven of them follow.

NOTES 1. On this point, see John Clute, “Aubade, Poor Dad,” passim. 2. Michiko Kakutani, “A Pynchonesque Turn,” n.p. 3. Louis Menand, “Do the Math,” n.p. 4. Yvonne Zipp, “All in One ‘Day,’” n.p. 5. Christopher Sorrentino, “Post-modern Pynchon,” n.p.; Liesl Schillinger, “Dream Maps,” n.p. 6. Kakutani wrote of Inherent Vice: “With the exception of Doc, who has a vague, poignant charm, [the characters] bear less of a resemblance to the fully human heroes of ‘Mason & Dixon’ than to the flimsy paper dolls who populated much of his earlier fiction: collections of funny Pynchonian names, bizarre tics, weird occupations and weirder sexual predilections. Many seem to exist for no reason other than that Mr. Pynchon dreamed them up and inserted them into the story, to fill up space or to act as vague red herrings in Doc’s quest to find Shasta and ensure her safety.” “Another Doorway,” n.p. Similarly, Laura Miller complained: “‘Inherent Vice’ almost succumbs to the flaws that scuttled ‘Against the Day’; in the middle, it certainly founders. The narrative, as is all too typical of Pynchon’s recent fiction, lumbers through a monotonous parade of indistinguishable characters, each with a silly name and one or perhaps two outlandish traits, as if selfhood were something to be ladled out in stingy portions like the gruel in ‘Oliver Twist.’” “Pynchon Lights Up,” n.p. 7. Clute, “Aubade,” 285. 8. Tom LeClair, “Lead Zeppelin,” n.p. 9. Mathijs den Besten and Ralph Schroeder, “Literary Sleuths Online.”

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NARRATIVE STRATEGIES

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S Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching Brian McHale

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screaming comes across the sky”—but not this time. Readers who opened to the first page of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, expecting something like the apocalyptic sublime of Gravity’s Rainbow, were no doubt disappointed, if not appalled, to find this instead:1 “Now single up all lines!” “Cheerly now . . . handsomely . . . very well! Prepare to cast her off!” “Windy City, here we come!” “Hurrah! Up we go!” It was amid such exclamations that the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, its gondola draped with patriotic bunting, carrying a five-lad crew belonging to that celebrated aeronautics club known as the Chums of Chance, ascended briskly into the morning, and soon caught the southerly wind. When the ship reached cruising altitude, those features left behind on the ground having now dwindled to all but microscopic size, Randolph St. Cosmo, the ship commander, announced, “Now secure the Special Sky Detail,” and the boys, each dressed neatly in the summer uniform of red-andwhite-striped blazer and trousers of sky blue, spiritedly complied. They were bound for the city of Chicago, and the World’s Columbian Exposition recently opened there. Since their orders had come through, the 15

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Brian McHale “scuttlebutt” among the excited and curious crew had been of little besides the fabled “White City,” its great Ferris wheel, alabaster temples of commerce and industry, sparkling lagoons, and the thousand more such wonders, of both a scientific and an artistic nature, which awaited them there. “Oh boy!” cried Darby Suckling, as he leaned over the lifelines to watch the national heartland deeply swung in a whirling blur of green far below, his tow-colored locks streaming in the wind past the gondola like a banner to leeward. (Darby, as my faithful readers will remember, was the “baby” of the crew, and served as both factotum and mascotte, singing as well the difficult treble parts whenever these adolescents found it impossible to contain song of some kind.) “I can’t hardly wait!” he exclaimed. (3–4)

This is parody. An abundance of markers point to that conclusion—the corny idioms, the conspicuous clichés (“ascended briskly,” “alabaster temples,” “sparkling lagoons,” “tow-colored locks,” etc.), the patriotic bunting and uniforms, the intrusive and patronizing narrator, the overfastidious scare quotes. It is as if Ulysses opened, not with Mulligan and Stephen on the tower, but with the sentimental women’s-magazine discourse of the “Nausicaa” chapter. Parody of what, exactly? The Chums, as their narrator makes clear, are heroes of a series of boys’-adventure novels, with titles such as The Chums of Chance at Krakatoa, The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis (6), The Chums of Chance in Old Mexico (7), The Chums of Chance and the Curse of the Great Kahuna (15), . . . in the Bowels of the Earth (117), . . . and the Ice Pirates (123), . . . and the Caged Women of Yokohama (411), . . . and the Wrath of the Yellow Fang (1019), and even The Chums of Chance Nearly Crash into the Kremlin (123). In the course of Against the Day itself, the Chums undertake airship missions to such far-flung locales as Venice, Flanders, Siberia, and both Poles; they seek the lost city of Shambhala in Central Asia and travel from one Pole to the other subterraneously, by way of the Hollow Earth. The Chums series is Pynchon’s invention, but it is modeled on actual mass-market juvenile adventures series of the early twentieth century.2 The most familiar of these is the series devoted to the inventions and adventures of Tom Swift—“our colleague, Brother Tom Swift,” as one of the Chums calls him much later in Pynchon’s novel (704). The Chums inhabit the same generic universe as Tom Swift and his precursors and imitators.3 While the Chums’ adventures, and the genre-world in which they unfold, recur throughout Against the Day, they do not continuously dominate the novel (no doubt to many readers’ relief). Instead, by the middle of part 2 of this gargantuan five-part work, its genre undergoes a modulation. Anticipations of this new genre can already be glimpsed at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, toward which the Chums are flying when we first encounter them. Their mentor, Professor Vanderjuice, prompted by a lecture on the closing of the frontier by his colleague “Freddie Turner”—that

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is, Frederick Jackson Turner, who really did present his “frontier thesis” at the 1893 Exposition—reflects on the end of the Old West. Gazing down from above on the Chicago stockyards, he muses, “here’s where the Trail comes to its end, along with the American Cowboy who used to live on it and by it. No matter how virtuous he’s kept his name, how many evildoers he’s managed to get by undamaged, how he’s done by his horses, what girls he has chastely kissed, serenaded by guitar, or gone out and raised hallelujah with, it’s all back there in the traildust now and none of it matters [. . .].” (53) If in one sense the professor’s analysis is correct, and the Old West does indeed end with the closure of the frontier and the triumph of industrial production, as represented by the stockyards, in another sense he is contradicted by the presence at the same Columbian Exposition of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.4 For the Wild West Show testifies to the continuing vitality of the fictional West, the West of the “yellowback” or “dime novels” that made Buffalo Bill Cody a household name in the first place.5 The professor’s pocket eulogy of the Old West conveniently enumerates some of the genre conventions of the dime-novel western. By the end of part 2 we will have encountered more of them, as the novel pursues story lines that carry it to the mountain West and the world of the Traverse family: Webb Traverse, outlaw dynamiter of Colorado, murdered by hired gunmen; his sons Reef, Frank, and Kit, who seek revenge for their father’s death; and his daughter Lake, who runs off with one of Webb’s killers. Reef recovers his father’s body and takes it home for a proper funeral (209–17); Frank, finding himself in “a dime novel of Old Mexico, featuring gringo evildoers in exile [and] sudden deaths” (374), ends up killing one of his father’s murderers in a shootout (395). Badmen and outlaw towns, showdowns and gunfights, chases on horseback, stoic heroes, thrilling rescues, violent revenge: the novel’s motif repertoire here is that of the dime-novel western. By part 3 of Against the Day, however, the Traverse brothers have dispersed, Frank to Mexico, where a number of the Wild West motifs persist, but Reef and Kit to Europe, where the novel’s dominant genre modulates again. New motifs begin to appear: first Kit, then later Reef, become involved with radical groups, terrorist cells, and secret missions; rival undercover operatives struggle for the possession of a secret “weapon able to annihilate the world” (559); one operative turns double agent and betrays another, who returns to exact vengeance on the turncoat; and all of this is played out against the background of great-power conflicts over control of the Balkans and Inner Asia (the “Great Game” of Kipling’s Kim; see Pynchon’s reference to it on 227). In other words, the world of Against the Day converges with that of the “shocker” or spy novel, a subgenre of so-called imperial romance. Typical of this genre, from Stevenson’s

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Treasure Island through Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands (1903), John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), and beyond, is the moment when characters contemplate a map of desired or disputed territory. A kind of primal scene of imperial romance, this moment is conspicuously enacted several times in parts 3 and 4 of Against the Day (e.g., 689–90, 806, 935–38).6 There is even a rescue onboard the Orient Express, a topos of the spy-novel genre from at least Graham Greene’s Stamboul Express (1932) to Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love (1957). These are the genres that dominate Against the Day: juvenile adventure of the “Tom Swift” type, the dime-novel western, and the “shocker” or spy novel. Among them these three compose the bulk of this novel’s generic repertoire, but they do not exhaust it—far from it. The attentive reader will recognize, dispersed throughout the novel, material derived from a whole range of other popular genres: Edwardian detective fiction, on the model of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes;7 scientific romance, on the model of H. G. Wells;8 other subgenres of imperial romance, including African adventure and polar adventure; collegiate novels, both the American dime-novel type associated with the generic college-boy hero, Frank Merriwell (see 100), and the comic Oxbridge type; and, more fleetingly, various theatrical genres, including melodrama and operetta. Against the Day is, among other things, a massive anthology of popular genres—a virtual library of entertainment fiction. II From the outset, Against the Day schools us in the identification and discrimination of its popular-genre materials. By the midpoint of this immensely long novel, we may feel confident of having mastered its technique of genre-poaching. But Pynchon has a surprise in store for us. As late as the last chapter of part 4—the novel’s penultimate chapter, just before the brief coda of part 5—Pynchon suddenly introduces a new genre, never glimpsed before in the novel’s preceding 1,040-odd pages: It was late afternoon by the time Lew [Basnight] motored over to the address Emilio had given him. He parked a few doors down from a chalet-style bungalow with a pepper tree in the yard, went up and knocked politely at the front door. And was shocked, or as much as he could be anymore, by the malevolent glamour of the face that so abruptly appeared. Shady side of forty, presentable, but also what he had long come, regretfully, to recognize as haunted. Maybe he ought to’ve turned and ankled it, but instead he took his hat off all the way and inquired, “This the house that’s for rent?” “Not so far. Should it be, do you think?” Lew pretended to look at his daybook. “You’d be . . .”

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“Mrs. Deuce Kindred.” The door screen cast over her face a strange rectilinear mist, which somehow extended to her voice and which for no reason he could figure, thinking about it later, he took as a sexual signal, proceeding to get an erection out on the front porch here and everything—“Did I come to the wrong place?” He watched her eyes flicker down and up. “Easy to find out.” “The husband home?” “Come on in.” She took a step back and turned, with the beginning of a smile she almost contemptuously would not allow him to see any further stages of, and led him through the olive light of the little front room toward the kitchen. Oh this was going to be sordid as all hell, he knew the feeling by now. At first he thought it must be him, and some tough-guy sex appeal, but after a while he understood that out on this coast it was nothing personal, it only happened a lot. (1051)

The slightly seedy Southern California milieu, the generic character roles (tough guy, femme fatale),9 the wisecracking repartee, the slangy colloquialisms (“Shady side of forty,” “ankled it”), and above all the cynical, world-weary tone—all these features unmistakably signal hard-boiled detective fiction. The interesting question is not “Why introduce this genre?”, but “Why do so just now, so late in the novel?” The surprise of encountering this genre for the first time here, a mere forty pages from the end, instructively illuminates something crucial about Pynchon’s genrepoaching technique that might otherwise have escaped our attention. Lew Basnight, the tough-guy detective in this passage, has already passed through two other detective genres to reach this one. He begins his career as an operative for a detective agency battling strike breakers and anarchists, on the model of the Pinkerton detectives who figured as heroes in turn-of-the-century dime novels; after a detour into the London of Edwardian detectives of the Sherlock Holmes type, he finally finds himself on the West Coast, enacting the role of hard-boiled detective.10 Minus the Edwardian detour, Basnight’s itinerary retraces that of Dashiell Hammett’s detectives, from agency operative (the Continental Op) to private investigator (Sam Spade, Nick Charles), or, for that matter, Hammett’s own career, from Pinkerton detective to one of the founders of the hard-boiled genre.11 Hard-boiled detective fiction emerges around 1920 in the pages of the Black Mask pulp magazine, where Hammett’s own first stories began appearing in 1922 and 1923.12 This is precisely the era that Pynchon’s storyworld has reached by this point in part 4: post–Great War, the early twenties. This insight has in its wake a broader appreciation of the logic of Pynchon’s genre-poaching throughout Against the Day: Pynchon appropriates the conventions and materials of genres that flourished at the historical moments during which the events of his story occur. His genre-poaching

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is synchronized with the unfolding chronology of his storyworld. Only in the closing chapters does the chronology of Against the Day reach the post–Great War period, so only here does hard-boiled detective fiction become available for appropriation. Most of the novel transpires during the two-decade run-up to the Great War, from 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition, to 1914, so its dominant genres are the popular genres of that era. For instance, the “Tom Swift” series of juvenile novels, on which the Chums of Chance narrative is modeled, was launched in 1910, near the middle of Against the Day’s chronological span.13 The best known of the boy engineers in popular juvenile literature, Tom Swift is hardly the first of them, the boy-inventor genre having been a staple of American dime novels since the 1870s, yielding a number of commercially successful series predating “Tom Swift.”14 Westerns, too, had been a staple of “yellow-back” dime novels since at least the 1860s, undergoing a number of mutations over the decades.15 By the 1890s, when the chronology of Against the Day’s storyworld begins, typical dime-novel westerns often featured sympathetic outlaw heroes who engaged in forms of “social banditry,” seeking redress and retribution for wrongs done to them by powerful landowners and corrupt politicians.16 Even the historical Frank and Jesse James—in real life, unreconstructed secessionist insurgents—were recast as dime-novel heroes in this mold.17 This, of course, is exactly the situation of the Traverse boys in Pynchon’s Wild West narrative. The Traverses, like the James Boys of the dime novels, are good-guy outlaws bent on justifiable revenge; the middle brother, Frank, even shares a first name with one of the James brothers. Finally, the period from 1893 through the Great War—the period of Against the Day—also coincides with the heyday of what contemporaries called “shockers”—British spy novels.18 The amateur spies of Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) or John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) or Greenmantle (1916) foil foreign conspiracies at home or offshore and even travel undercover to the enemy heartland (as Richard Hannay and his companions do in Greenmantle)—missions that anticipate those undertaken by Pynchon’s secret agents in Against the Day. Parallel cases could be made for nearly all of the popular genres that Pynchon appropriates throughout Against the Day. Stories of Edwardian era detection, scientific romances, “imperial romances” set in Africa or the Arctic, college novels, operettas: these are all popular genres that flourished during the decades covered by the events of Against the Day. If Against the Day is a virtual library of entertainment fiction, it is more specifically a library of early-twentieth-century entertainment fiction. This is not the first time Pynchon has applied the technique of synchronizing the popular genres being pastiched or appropriated with the era of the novel’s storyworld. Indeed, it could be argued that all of his

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novels since at least 1973 manifest this same logic. The tendency is less discernible in the earlier, pre-1973 novels, where, though popular genres are certainly evoked, recycled, and remediated—for example, spy novels in V. (1963), Hollywood war movies in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)—they seem not to be systematically coordinated with the eras of the respective storyworlds.19 Beginning with Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), however, such coordination becomes the norm. Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel about the 1940s, is cast in the form of a movie from the forties—or rather, it mingles several different genres of forties movies, including the war movie, the musical comedy, the romance, the horror movie, even the animated cartoon. Genre-poaching in Gravity’s Rainbow does not stop there, for the novel also appropriates a number of other popular genres of its period, in various media, including superhero comics and various radio-show genres.20 If Against the Day is a library of early-twentieth-century entertainment fiction, then Gravity’s Rainbow is a media library of the 1940s. Following Gravity’s Rainbow after an interval of seventeen years, Vineland (1990) has been seen by some as complicit with ephemeral television culture and the televisual medium. Certainly, it is saturated with television: TV jingles and catch phrases, the names of TV shows and celebrities, and above all, TV genres, including cop shows, game shows, soap operas, sitcoms, movies of the week, and even commercials.21 From another perspective, however, the televisuality of Vineland appears less a matter of supine complicity with mass culture than of a kind of historicity, or even a method of historiography: another instance of Pynchon’s appropriation of popular genres keyed to the historical moment of his novel, here the year 1984. Inherent Vice (2009), a companion to Vineland and Pynchon’s most recent novel to date, is set in 1970 and models itself on hard-boiled detective fiction and film of the late sixties and early seventies, such as Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels and the director Robert Altman’s 1973 updating of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1953). Finally, Mason & Dixon (1997), the novel that immediately precedes Against the Day, systematically pastiches eighteenth-century comic or picaresque narrative. Written wall-to-wall in a mock-eighteenth-century style, it simulates the style and conventions of popular novels contemporary with the events it narrates, as well as poaching other popular narrative forms of its era, including the “gothick” novel and the seventeenth-century New England captivity narrative.

III If a logic of synchronization consistently determines Pynchon’s selection of genres for poaching throughout Against the Day—indeed, right across

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the whole corpus of his fiction since at least 1973—this by no means entails consistency or uniformity in his handling of these genres. Rather, the mode of appropriation varies from genre to genre. That Pynchon subjects the boy-inventor genre to somewhat campy parody, for instance, does not mean that he will necessarily handle the dime-novel western genre or the spy-novel “shocker” the same way; manifestly, he does not. In fact, the Chums of Chance receive special treatment. While there are moments of parody in the handling of all these genres, in the case of the Chums the parody is broader and more consistent, and the serious or “straight” moments rare (and accordingly more conspicuous). Moreover, the Chums are subjected to a kind of “quarantine,” as though parody were contagious and Pynchon did not want to risk contaminating the other genres. Their narrative alone features an intrusive narrator (the one who alludes to “my faithful readers” on the novel’s first page (3)), who appears not to narrate any of the other story lines. The Chums almost never interact directly with protagonists of the other genres—for instance, the Traverses—but generally do so only indirectly, at one or more removes, through minor intermediary characters.22 From the perspective of the other characters, they are fictitious, heroes of a series of novels—Reef Traverse actually reads one of them, The Chums of Chance at the Ends of the Earth (214–15)23—and that makes them, from our own perspective as readers, doubly fictitious, fictions within a fiction. The Chums receive special treatment because they have been reserved for a special destiny. In a novel so invested in tracing the buildup to the Great War, and so relentless in foreshadowing it, it is only from the perspective of the Chums that we witness the war in present time. Whereas other characters (including Kit and Reef Traverse) flash back to their Great War experiences after the fact, in retrospective, only the Chums are permitted to reflect the war experience as it happens—albeit from high above (and perhaps in an alternative universe): “[Randolph St. Cosmo] gestured out the window, where long-range artillery shells, till quite recently objects of mystery, glittering with the colors of late afternoon, could be seen just reaching the tops of their trajectories and pausing in the air for an instance before the deadly plunge back to Earth.24 Among distant sounds of repeated explosion could also be heard the strident massed buzzing of military aircraft. Below, across the embattled countryside, the first searchlights of evening were coming on” (1025). The paradox is powerful: Pynchon reserves for the most lightweight of all the genres he poaches—literally as well as figuratively lightweight, airborne, lighterthan-air—the mission of bearing witness to the weightiest, the gravest, of historical catastrophes.25 Pynchon could easily have subjected the western genre to the same sort of parodic transformation that he applied to the boy-inventor genre, as

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many others already had—Ishmael Reed in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969),26 Gilbert Sorrentino in Gold Fools (2001), even Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles (1974). Instead, he adopts a strategy of demystification and debunking, subjecting the western to a revisionist transformation in the spirit of E. L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times (1960), Michael Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970),27 or revisionist western films like Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), or HBO’s Deadwood series (2004–06). The aspiration of these revisionist novels and films, as of Against the Day, is to close the gap between the genre conventions of the western and what one imagines the historical experience of the American West must have been like, by restoring (among other things) the hardships, the class conflict, the profanity, the sexuality, and the unglamorous violence that the genre conventionally edits out. Animated by this revisionist spirit is Frank Traverse’s experience of “Old Mexico” as “a dime novel [. . .] featuring gringo evildoers in exile [and] sudden deaths” (374). The catalog of motifs does not actually end there but continues: “gringo evildoers in exile, sudden deaths, a government that had already fallen but did not yet know it, a revolution that would never begin though thousands were already dying and suffering in its name” (my italics) (374). While this catalog begins with the familiar repertoire of the dime-novel western, it soon swerves into real-world politics and the painful paradoxes of history, which the dime novel sought systematically to evade and suppress.28 To put it another way, Frank’s dime-novel experience swerves into a different, revisionist subgenre, that of “Mexico Westerns” such as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) or Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy (1993, 1994, 1998).29 Similarly revealing of Pynchon’s revisionist strategy is his treatment of the three “classic” gunfights in which Frank Traverse is involved. In the first (395), Frank stumbles upon his adversary unexpectedly in a cantina and manages to shoot him before the other man even recognizes him; in the second (646–48), a tense standoff that seems on the brink of erupting into a gunfight is defused by the farcical intrusion of an outsider; in the third (1005–06), Frank’s revenge on the man who ordered his father’s murder is preempted when a bodyguard guns the culprit down before Frank gets a chance to do so. Messy and unsatisfactory, each episode ends in an anticlimax of one kind or another. These are hardly the sorts of stories that the dime novels conventionally tell about Wild West violence. Pynchon’s approach to the spy novel is similarly revisionist, but here he seeks, not so much to close the gap between the genre’s conventions and historical reality, as to bring to light the repressed content of the genre itself—to read its subtext. Pynchon highlights the element of earlytwentieth-century “shockers” that strikes twenty-first-century readers of the genre most forcibly, namely, the intense homosocial bonding among

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these novels’ male protagonists, verging on homoeroticism. More even than their patriotism, what motivates these men—for example, the two English amateur sailors of Childers’s Riddle of the Sands or the international companions of Greenmantle (an Englishman, a Scot, an American, a Boer)—is the intensity of their devotion to each other, rooted in all-male public-school culture and reinforced by the homosocial model of the Boy Scouts.30 Women disturb the intimacy among male friends, except when they pose an outright threat, as the German femme fatale Hilda von Einem does in Greenmantle.31 More typically, however, they simply fall outside the circle of these men’s experience: “Women had never much come my way,” frankly confesses Buchan’s Richard Hannay, “and I knew about as much of their ways as I knew about the Chinese language. All my life I had lived with men only.”32 If homosociality is the norm, however, homoeroticism itself is repressed and dissimulated. The possibility of homosexuality, when acknowledged at all, tends to be coded and displaced onto enemy aliens, such as the German secret-service chief Stumm in Greenmantle, whose room, with its effeminate décor—literally, his closet!—gives him away: “It was the room of a man who had a passion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft delicate things. . . . I began to see the queer other side to my host, that evil side which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army.”33 Pynchon takes the “shocker” out of the closet in his version of the spy novel. He seizes on the genre’s intense homosociality and amplifies it into outright homosexuality in the person of his principal spy, the British secret agent Cyprian Latewood, a flaming queen who uses his sexuality as a tool of the espionage trade. Already notorious at Cambridge as a “sod,” or sodomite (489), Latewood is recruited into the British secret service in Vienna, has a homosexual affair with his immediate superior and handler (who is later exposed as a traitor), and goes on to form a threesome with Reef Traverse and Yashmeen Halfcourt between and during missions to the Balkans. He is the frankly queer version of Childers’s closeted, overgrown boy scouts and Buchan’s dapper and misogynistic “clubland heroes.”34 Through the figure of Cyprian Latewood, Pynchon queers the British spy novel.35

IV Against the Day is a library of entertainment fiction, but entertainment fiction passed through the looking glass, rendered differently, altered: parodied, revised and demystified, queered. To what end? Perhaps to the end of perfecting a new method of writing historical fiction. Over the course of several substantial novels, since at least Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, and nowhere more extensively or more successfully

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than in Against the Day, Pynchon has been refining his practice of what we might call mediated historiography—the writing of an era’s history through the medium of its popular genres. There is precedent in postmodernist fiction for a novel that “poaches” multiple genres—William Burroughs’s Cities of the Red Night (1981), for example. There is also precedent for historical novels that mimic the style of novels written in the era of their storyworlds—John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) and A Maggot (1985), for instance. But there is little or no precedent for Pynchon’s method of sampling from the whole range of a particular era’s popular genres and piecing them together in a single text to produce, if not genuinely exhaustive coverage, then at least a compelling illusion of exhaustiveness. It is as though Pynchon were aiming to map the era’s entire system of popular genres within the covers of a single novel (albeit a huge one). To map an era’s genre system is to map its popular self-representations. Every popular genre, for all its obvious limitations, distortions, and suppressions, captures the way a historical epoch represented itself to itself. Juvenile-inventor fiction, for all its puerilities, shows us something about Americans’ imaginary relationship to technology around the turn of the century, and perhaps something, too, about their relationship to categories of time and space.36 The dime-novel western, however unfaithful to the historical experience of the West, nevertheless shows us how Americans of that era imagined their relationship to that historical experience. In the same way, the British “shocker” shows us how contemporary readers imagined their relationship to empire, the hard-boiled detective novel shows how its readers imagined their relationship to urban modernity, and so on. Each genre holds a distorting mirror up to historical reality. Multiply the genre mirrors, set them at different angles to each other, and one might stand some chance of approximating the historical “truth” of the era that produced them. This appears to be Pynchon’s wager: that, multiplied and juxtaposed, an era’s genres might compensate for each others’ distortions and, taken all together, might jointly yield a complete and faithful—if also complex and elusive—representation of the historical whole. The map of the era’s genre system can also serve as a cognitive mapping of the era itself (in Jameson’s sense)—or so Pynchon hopes.37 It is a measure of Pynchon’s sophistication as a cognitive cartographer that he also takes into account his own historical position—which is to say, our historical position as latter-day readers of these early-twentieth-century popular genres, looking back from the distance of a century at the world on the eve of the Great War. Pynchon introduces his, and our, historical perspective into the picture through his parodic and revisionist handling of the popular genres in Against the Day. His parody of juvenile-inventor fiction reflects our distance from the Chums’ “boys’-book innocence” (418) about

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technology and history—an innocence that also qualifies them to serve as estranged witnesses of the horrors of the Great War. His restoration of the unspoken realities of the West to the dime-novel western reflects our skepticism, our iconoclasm, our impatience with the western’s generic pieties. His queering of the British “shocker” reflects our own inability to see that genre’s intense homosociality as anything but deeply closeted homosexuality. And so on, for the rest of the genres that compose the fabric of Against the Day. Pynchon historicizes doubly, on the one hand, by refracting the era’s historical realities through the genres of its own self-representation; on the other, by indicating where we stand with respect to this distant era and its characteristic genres. The cognitive map includes us, the readers of Against the Day: “You are here.”

NOTES A version of this article appeared as “Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching,” Genre 42, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2009): 5–20. 1. This is not to say that the apocalyptic sublime is absent from Against the Day, only that it is deferred. See, e.g., the opening of the sixth chapter of part 4: “A heavenwide blast of light” (79). 2. Juvenile adventurers in the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s Great Marvels series actually anticipate the Chums’ expeditions to the North Pole and the Hollow Earth, in novels from 1906 and 1908, respectively; see John T. Dizer Jr., Swift and Company, 100–07; see also E. F. Bleiler, “Newark Steam Man to Tom Swift,” 109–12. 3. See Dizer, Swift and Company and Tom Swift and Bobbsey Twins, passim; see also Francis J. Molson, “Tom Swift Books.” 4. In chapter 6 of part 1 of Against the Day, Pynchon has the Archduke Franz Ferdinand attend Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (45). On the almost-too-good-tobe-true conjunction of the Turner thesis and Buffalo Bill at the Columbian Exposition, see Bill Brown, “Reading the West,” esp. 30. 5. The journalist Ned Buntline “discovered” Buffalo Bill in 1869 and launched him as a hero of dime novels that appeared between 1879 and 1904; see Daryl Jones, Dime Novel Western, 56–75. On the Wild West Show at the Columbian Exposition, see Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 63–87. 6. On turn-of-the-century imperial romance generally, and its map motif in particular, see Susan Jones, “Into the Twentieth Century,” esp. 420. 7. Lew Basnight, hitherto a detective of a different type, ironically enumerates some of the genre’s motifs: “anxious husbands and missing necklaces and exotic poisons” (693). On Edwardian detective fiction, see Joseph A. Kestner, The Edwardian Detective. 8. Two of the Chums of Chance take a trip on a substandard time machine, evidence of the way that “Mr. H. G. Wells’s speculative jeu d’esprit on the subject has been adulterated to profitable effect by the ‘dime novels’” (398).

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9. The femme fatale in this passage, who identifies herself as Mrs. Deuce Kindred, is none other than Lake Traverse, strayed from her origins in a different genre. 10. To describe Basnight as having “passed” from one genre to another is putting it mildly. His transformation from Pinkerton operative to Holmes-style Edwardian detective is literally explosive: blown up by anarchists somewhere in Colorado, he is rescued by a pair of effete English travelers and taken to London, to be recruited there to do detective work on behalf of a mystical order. The head of this order explains that the world he inhabited before the blast was different from the one he now inhabits, and that the explosion was one of the “crossover points or gates of transfer” between “lateral world-sets, other parts of the Creation”: “You found passage between the Worlds” (221)—or at any rate, between genres. 11. See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 139–43; 224–28. 12. Sinda Gregory, Private Investigations, passim. 13. The Chums’ mention of “Brother Tom Swift” actually occurs during an episode datable to the year of the Tunguska Event, 1908, two years before Tom Swift’s first appearance in print—a trivial anachronism, and probably an unintentional one. 14. See Bleiler, “Newark Steam Man to Tom Swift,” passim. 15. See Daryl Jones, The Dime Novel Western, passim; also Brown, “Reading the West,” passim. 16. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 128. 17. Ibid., 125–55; Daryl Jones, The Dime Novel Western, 75–99. 18. See Susan Jones, “Into the Twentieth Century,” passim. 19. Pynchon’s first spy-novel pastiche occurs in the short story “Under the Rose” (1961), which he later incorporated as chapter 3 of V., though in radically revised form, refracted through eight distinct points of view. By reworking the story as an exercise in perspectivism, he somewhat obscures and dilutes its genre identity, reflecting, perhaps, a lack of commitment, at this point in his career, to the technique of genre-poaching that he would develop later. 20. There are also traces of the western genre in Gravity’s Rainbow, though on nothing like the scale of Against the Day—in the hallucinatory episode of Crouchfield the westwardman, a sort of distillation of all the frontiersman figures of popular fiction and film, and in the episodes set in Soviet Central Asia, which are whimsically reconfigured in terms of Wild West clichés and stereotypes. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 67–70, 338–43. 21. See Brian McHale, “Zapping, the Art of Switching Channels: On Vineland” in Constructing Postmodernism, 115–41. 22. The most significant exception here is Lew Basnight, who actually ventures aboard the Chums’ dirigible, the Inconvenience, in chapter 5 of part 1. 23. Reef, evidently attuned to their existence by his reading, actually intuits the Chums’ presence—a rare moment of “leakage” between the Chums’ sphere and the Traverses’: “At odd moments, now, [Reef] found himself looking at the sky, as if trying to locate somewhere in it the great airship [. . .] sometimes in the sky, when the light was funny enough, he thought he saw something familiar. Never lasting more than a couple of watch ticks, but persistent” (215). 24. What the Chums are witnessing here, of course, are the upper reaches of these projectiles’ ballistic parabola: gravity’s rainbow.

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25. There is precedent in the juvenile-adventure literature for the Chums’ involvement in the Great War. Clair Hayes produced, between 1915 and 1919, two series of “Boy Allies” adventures: ten volumes of “The Boy Allies with the Navy” and thirteen of “The Boy Allies with the Army.” See Dizer, Tom Swift and Company, 63–67. The Boy Scout hero, Tom Slade, also went to war, in five novels published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1918 and 1919. Dizer, Tom Swift and The Bobbsey Twins, 400–04. Pynchon had already parodied the boys-at-war topos in Cashiered, the war movie screened (out of order) in The Crying of Lot 49, and Pynchon’s handling of the Chums’ wartime experience could be seen as a dialogical riposte to this particular juvenile-adventure fantasy: “‘Those poor innocents,’ says the most thoughtful of the Chums. ‘Back at the beginning of this . . . they must have been boys, so much like us. . . . They knew they were standing before a great chasm none could see to the bottom of. But they launched themselves into it anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was their own grand “Adventure.” They were juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative—unreflective and free, they went on hurling themselves into those depths by tens of thousands until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and instead of finding themselves posed nobly against some dramatic moral geography, they were down cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats and smelling of shit and death’” (1023–24). 26. The name of the eponymous outlaw town in Reed’s title, Yellow Back Radio, refers explicitly to the yellow-back dime novels that were the main medium of the Wild West genre before the rise of the movie western. 27. Among the other materials in this mixed-medium, dossier text—photographs, poetry, documents, testimony—Ondaatje inserts excerpts from a turn-ofthe-century dime novel, Billy the Kid and the Princess. On postmodern appropriations of the western more generally, see Theo D’Haen, “The Western.” 28. Brown, “Reading the West,” 5. 29. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 591–613. 30. Robert Baden-Powell’s widely read Scouting for Boys appeared in 1908, in the middle of the “shocker” era, too late to have influenced Childers (1903), but undoubtedly a model for Buchan (1916) (see Kestner, The Edwardian Detective, 4, 73, 356). 31. Jones, “Into the Twentieth Century,” 209. 32. John Buchan, Greenmantle, 191. 33. Ibid., 84. 34. See Richard Usborne, Clubland Heroes. The characteristics of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, a loner and womanizer, can be seen as compensation (or overcompensation) for the homosociality and repressed homosexuality of his precursors, the earlier generation of clubland heroes. 35. Compare Pynchon’s rehandling of the “shocker” genre with John Ashbery’s in a cut-up collage-poem called “Europe,” from The Tennis-Court Oath (1962). Ashbery’s source is a Great War era juvenile spy novel by William LeQueux, Beryl of the Biplane (1917), which the poet literally fragments and rearranges. Where Pynchon exposes the homoerotic subtext of the spy novel, Ashbery’s juxtapositions expose its complementary homophobic subtext: see John Shoptaw, On the Outside, 57–63. 36. Stephen Kern, Culture of Time and Space, passim. 37. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, 51–54.

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S Plots, Pilgrimage, and the Politics of Genre in Against the Day Amy J. Elias

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homas Pynchon’s Against the Day is a novel thematically obsessed with the symbolism of travel and the politics of space. At its center is a family whose very name—Traverse—indicates this. As it traces characters’ peripatetic global wanderings, the novel quotes numerous genres (detective story, romance, science fiction, bildungsroman, gothic, erotica, the western), and many reviewers have complained about both its confusing episodic structure and its generic promiscuity. Yet as Molly Hite noted some time ago, Pynchon’s novels always inscribe ideas of order: there is always a paranoid logic that renders order logically, politically, and metaphysically mysterious, but not absent.1 This holds true in Against the Day. One way to account for the novel’s hints of order in a way that does not impose upon its story is to look to the generic macrostructures it references. Even if, as Gerald Prince has argued, genres should be understood as flexible sets of narrative classes, in this novel they provide a kind of order through their association with specific narrative structures and thematic values.2 In fact, a battle between genres is central to this novel’s political sympathies and thematic questions. As do Pynchon’s earlier novels, Against the Day straddles two dominant generic models, the hero quest and the picaresque, yet a third genre option, what I will call “postmodern 29

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pilgrimage,” uniquely accounts for the novel’s dominant motifs and symbols and accommodates Pynchon’s anarchic politics. The quest pattern invoked by Against the Day is complex but structurally predictable: it features protagonists who seek some boon, travel from their homes in order to get it, are aided in some way by odd and quasimystical people or forces, have a test or trial, and usually return from their journeys changed, with revelatory knowledge of various sorts.3 Usually in such stories, the hero’s triumph and initiation into society serve to reinforce the power as well as the cultural logic of existing social or religious norms. None of Pynchon’s novels, however, is a typical quest narrative. Hite has noted, in fact, that “failure to attain revelation is a hallmark of Pynchon’s questing heroes.”4 What his protagonists usually find at the end of the trail or the heart of the adventure is aporetic mystery of one sort or another. By the end of Against the Day, the Traverse family members have not significantly changed as people or taken back to America any information that will force change in society and history. They do take back a renewed sense of the mystery of life, and they have a deeper sense of their father’s own bitter struggle against industrial capitalism, but they have found no solution to this social conflict. At best, Pynchon’s questing characters here and elsewhere gain the freeing knowledge of the limitations of logic and law, often understood by others to be hegemonic social discourses. The object of the question dissolves into the process of the quest, which becomes its own perverse revelation. Realizing that “quest” seems inadequate to define genre in many of Pynchon’s novels, scholars have searched for alternatives, including picaresque, a genre that seems particularly appropriate to Pynchon’s oeuvre.5 The picaresque is a chronicle presenting the life story of a socially isolated, internally divided vagabond/rascal/rogue of low degree, little self-control, and no sentimental memory, who seemingly is born under a “negative determinism,” is assaulted by events, and is at the mercy of fortune. The picaro is a liminal figure, a bricoleur who lives by his wits in a state of borderline criminality. The picaresque plot is usually anti-Aristotelian and episodic, characterized by a “dance pattern” of shifting milieux and characters.6 It eschews depth of characterization, has a paratactic structure, and includes a plurality of worlds.7 It also is characterized by a split allegiance to both realism and romance. Aligned with realism, the picaresque critiques the stabilizing social values and class hierarchies of romance: through the pranks and predicaments of the picaro, orphaned early in life or the child of vagrants, the author is able to satirize social classes.8 Ellen Turner Gutiérrez writes that the early Spanish picaresque “became characterized by a bankruptcy of traditional values and a desertion of the medieval universalist ethical system”; thus the picaresque

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novel expresses “the crisis of a culture in which the material standard is supreme.”9 Carmen Benito-Vessels and Michael Zappala concur: the classic picaresque is a “social document of an exhausted society.”10 Against the Day also often reads as social realism about a bankrupt society, particularly in sections that align the views of the covert narrator with those of anarchists, soldiers, and disenfranchised worker populations in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. History and geography are painstakingly rendered in this novel, which often mourns and satirizes a society in crisis, a society in which the potential to reimagine social processes and ethical values is being replaced by a myopic, antiutopian, and soulless materialism. Facing this, Pynchon’s main characters exhibit the typical liminality and moderate criminality of the picaro within maddeningly episodic storylines. Particularly in the multigenerational saga of the Traverse family (the children of vagrants), but also in Lew Basnight and even in the Chums of Chance (boys who, for the most part, seem to have no biological families), readers see characters apparently born under a “negative determinism” and at the mercy of fortune (or controlling multinational corporations, governments, or evil geniuses). For all of their affiliations with realism, though, both picaresque and Against the Day share much with older forms of romance, including a comedic thrust, shallow treatment of character psychology (in contrast to, for example, the bildungsroman), inclusion of hyperbolic events or characters, and self-consciousness of form. Marina S. Brownlee understands picaresque as “a pervasive longing for romance wish fulfillment,” and Ulrich Wicks asks, “Is not the essential pattern [of the picaresque] a quest for ‘home’—home in the sense of social and material success . . . or the spiritual sense of union with God . . . , or even in the mythic sense of return to Paradise?”11 In Against the Day, scenes with Thorvald the sentient tornado, talking ball lightning, mind-reading Tatzelwurms, journeys through the omphalos of the earth, and sand-submarine rides under the desert floor introduce fantasy elements common to epic romance. Other romance elements enter through the many mythological references and nods toward archetypes in American and European literature (such as the American cowboy and gold-hearted frontier whore, the mad scientist, and the types of European gothic such as the Balkan ghost and Transylvanian vampire), as well as, perhaps, the longing for “home” that permeates the novel’s plot. As in picaresque understood as romance, Pynchon’s novel doubles and mirrors characters and scenes as if to construct an allegorical landscape. The novel is replete with metaphors of duality: light refraction, bilocation, mirroring, multiple time and space dimensions, and metaphysical duality. The central symbol of this is Iceland Spar, a rock crystal that splits light to reveal multidimensionality. But readers also see twinned characters

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throughout the text (such as Neville and Nigel, Professors Renfrew and Werfner, Fatou and Eugénie, Pino and Rocco, Misha and Grisha); parallel scenes (as when Deuce Kindred, Lake Traverse, and Sloat Fresno’s ménage à trois escapade at Four Corners directly parallels the one involving Yashmeen Halfcourt, Reef Traverse, and Cyprian Latewood later in the novel); tripled actions of characters (such as the tripled Chums of Chance journeys through, under, and above the earth); and reverse parallelism or mirroring of scenes (such as Kit Traverse’s escape through the mountains of East Asia from Scarsdale Vibe mirroring Cyprian Latewood’s escape through the Balkans from the death threats of Derrick Theign—both scenes involving triads of characters). Like picaresque, Against the Day seems always to be squinting between realism and romance. It is packed with historical references, and some scenes are aligned with social commentary typical of historical realism, such as Miles Blundell’s commentary on his vision of World War I (1023–24), which portends the death of a certain mythic America and the beginning of an age of crisis. Yet the novel also turns repeatedly to the strategies and tropes of romance. It gives the Chums a magically happy ending (they meet flying, immachinated women, the Ætheronauts, who become their wives and bear their children); reconciles Kit Traverse and Dally Rideout; lets Frank Traverse, his wife, Stray, and their children meet up fortuitously with Reef Traverse, his common-law wife Yashmeen, and their child; and shows the brothers reconciling and then moving their families ever farther into the American and then Canadian frontiers. The novel ends with comic domesticity and a wistfulness for a redemptive ending. In fact, ballooning with the Chums of Chance, it ends with a vision of Elysian Grace. Its generic characteristics and contradictions thus seem to place Against the Day closer to picaresque than quest, yet neither genre adequately contains the novel. Furthermore, picaresque is such a split and contradictory category that it is only marginally useful to a critical analysis. In this light, I propose that Pynchon constructs a form of journey narrative with a chronotope appropriate for our own time, one that distrusts social realism and offers alternatives both to the conventional normativity of quest and the confusion of picaresque: namely, pilgrimage. Like the existentialist Situations that, Thomas Schaub argues, define Pynchon’s plots,12 the pilgrimage journey might be understood as an interface or liminal zone (a switching point in local time) traversed by morally alert seekers pursuing metaphysical meaning. Typically, all pilgrimages are directed to a shrine site, where pilgrims believe sacred qualities are concentrated. James J. Preston (using a science metaphor in which Pynchon would delight) writes that pilgrimage sites might be characterized by “spiritual magnetism” that derives from association with highly

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prized human values coalescing at a sacred center and manifested in the “sacred trace,” which is that center’s “powerhouse, so to speak.”13 Pilgrims must be Augustinian semioticians, reading the signs of the world without confirmation, and in this sense they share affinities with what Schaub defines as the existential seekers of Pynchon’s novels. The pilgrimage at its core is, as Preston notes, the “phenomenon of an invisible reality made visible in the world,” a kind of differend or trace but also, in the archaic sense, “a path or trail through a wilderness.”14 Anthropological definitions of pilgrimage as a transcultural practice support the idea that semiotic reading is central to spiritual quest. In Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, the linkage is clear: “All the way back to the Visto, Mason is seiz’d by Monology. ‘Text,—’ he cries, and more than once, ‘it is Text,— and we are its readers, and its Pages are the Days turning. Unscrolling, as a Pilgrim’s Itinerary map in ancient Days.’”15 As destination points do on a pilgrim’s map, “shrines” appear at key points in Against the Day. All the characters are traveling, and the shrines at which they worship become indexes of their relation to the gods of capital. The novel opens at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the shrine of nineteenth-century American laissez-faire capitalism and ideologies of white racial superiority. Reversing the iconography and class values of the Chicago World’s Fair, labor camps in this novel assume the holy aura of sites of martyrdom and shrine sites, particularly in showdown scenes between owners and workers, and after Webb Traverse’s murder. The book ends with allusions to saints’ shrines that show how the fair’s narrative of Progress has been realized in the archetypal postmodern city of Los Angeles: the Chums of Chance, after meeting the Ætheronauts, fly to California; one night they “looked down and beheld an incalculable expanse of lights, which according to their charts was known as the City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels” (1032). Lew Basnight and Lake Traverse live in Los Angeles, though Basnight lives in Santa Barbara around the time of the war (1051). Merle Rideout meets Luca in Santa Monica, another town named after a saint. By defamiliarizing these city names, Pynchon draws our attention to the already sacralized geography in which his postmodern pilgrims travel. Frank Traverse travels throughout the United States on a quest to avenge his father, and at one point, after ingesting peyote cactus, he dreams of “folks on pilgrimage” and himself carrying “sacred scrolls” (924). Reef, Cyprian, and Yashmeen travel from one secular tourist “shrine” city to another—Venice, the Riviera—until they arrive at the militaryindustrial complex’s true shrine of death in the Balkans. One actual Tibetan pilgrimage site in Siberia, near sites in the novel important to Kit Traverse’s awakening, is called Pure Crystal Mountain, recalling Iceland Spar’s refraction.16

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As a traveler, the pilgrim is the mystical brother to the secular picaro as well as to the chivalric hero. The meaning of pilgrimage in the Christian tradition is linked to homo viator, or “man as a wayfarer and stranger in this world.”17 Yet while the picaro is alienated from his fellows, and the chivalric hero exceptional in relation to them, pilgrims find themselves in groups working at least nominally toward a common goal. Victor Turner defines pilgrimage in terms of communitas and has argued that, by their very nature as journeys to distant and powerful sites, pilgrimages tend to suspend social hierarchies temporarily.18 The pilgrimage structure is predicated on a paradox: in it, both group identity and personal identity are intensely felt, and pilgrimages thus are always to some extent internally dialogical. The pilgrimage, as Chaucer knew well, is a microcosm of society, social diversity in unity, in a way that the quest typically is not. Metaphorically, in relation to Pynchon’s work, this aspect of pilgrimage implies that a collective may be broken down into subsystems that have their own logics but must somehow integrate with the larger whole. The pilgrimage, in other words, is also an example of a fluid but directed system—an idea congenial to the systems metaphors that proliferate in Pynchon’s fiction. Moreover, the system of pilgrimage complexly reconfigures time and space. Not only do borders become central and marginal space (such as country barns and grottoes) beatified; Ronald Williamson notes also that medieval pilgrimage involved “a journey, as it were, into the future. . . . Pilgrims were practitioners of the art of realising [sic] eschatology, men and women who sought, and found, the Not-Yet in the Now.”19 In this sense, pilgrims superimpose one historical time (future) onto another (present) and introduce the time-space of possible worlds. As the interestingly named anarchist Jésus Arrabal states in The Crying of Lot 49, a miracle is “another world’s intrusion into this one.”20 Pilgrimage reveals the constructed nature of social and historical space and the possibility of alternative space-time. Against the Day likewise is saturated with examples of alternative futures, intersecting time dimensions, multiple spatial domains, and fractured and mirrored pasts and presents. The central symbols in the book are Iceland Spar and Shambhala, both of which refract light to reveal or to hide the multidimensionality of space. Likewise, in religious journeys, penetrating the apparent truth of threedimensionality requires special sight—and in Pynchon’s novel this is translated into use of special glasses, periscopes, special mathematics, or spiritual visions. While a student at Ostend, Kit intuits that “deep among the equations describing the behavior of light, field equations, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an itinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in many places,

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has become too frail, too permeable, for safety” (566). Within that view lies “the corrupted pilgrim’s guide” (566).21 This worldly novel embeds pilgrimage’s multidimensional metaphysics, often figured through flight, ascension, and aerial views, in its focus on double refraction. Most of Against the Day’s characters travel in groups, and the lessons they learn are ambiguous or deferred, in keeping with the deferred outcomes of pilgrimage. For unlike quest, pilgrimage asserts that whether or not one receives the boon, one’s prayers have been answered. This may be why we can talk about failed quests and antiheroes but almost never think in terms of failed pilgrimages or “antipilgrims.” There is actually a type of pilgrimage epitomizing this open-endedness, one that E. Alan Morinis calls “Wandering.”22 In Pynchon’s work, a similar lack of closure is figured in grammatical terms, as “the subjunctive” (versus the “indicative,” the realm of Being constructed by empirical thinking and closed physical and philosophical systems). Even when characters form new families and communities, these are provisional, open, unconstrained by mainstream mores, and characterized by movement through space and time. When the Chums “fly toward grace” at the end, they seem to enter a territory of pure subjunctive openness, an alternate reality or mode of potentiality or Becoming (1085). Mason & Dixon specifically linked this realm of the subjunctive to spiritual questing through the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke’s negative theology, which posited Christ as Doubt and Uncertainty, and Against the Day similarly links absence and truth, or subjunctive possibility and spiritual vision. In one significant textual moment, for example, Miles Blundell has a waking dream of a winged lion (a vision of St. Mark) and then notes to Darby Suckling, the youngest member of the Chums: It wanted us to know that we, too, are here on a pilgrimage. [. . .] When all the masks have been removed, it is really an inquiry into our own duty, our fate. Which is not to penetrate Asia in hopes of profit. Which is not to perish in the deserts of the world without reaching our objective. Which is not to rise in the hierarchies of power. Not to discover fragments of any True Cross however imagined. As the Franciscans developed the Stations of the Cross to allow any parishioner to journey to Jerusalem without leaving his church-grounds, so have we been brought up and down the paths and aisles of what we take to be the all-but-boundless world, but which in reality are only a circuit of humble images reflecting a glory greater than we can imagine [. . .]. (251)

In the text, Miles’s vision is not ironic. It syncretically merges Buddhist ideas (duty, life journeying, the falseness of material reality, and Shambhala), idealist sentiments, negative theology (not discovering the True Cross), and clear references to real pilgrimage traditions. (Many religions

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replicate faraway, sanctified shrines in local shrine sites, such as the Stations of the Cross in Catholicism.) Though an eschatological vision is implied, the speech illustrates the necessity of open-endedness to a sacred vision of the world. Here, only closed systems (of energy, of reasoning) end on final notes of certainty, and in Pynchon’s works, this is always a bad thing. Operating in the realm of the mystical subjunctive allows for prophetic dreams and communications with the dead: Reef and Kit communicate with their dead father through séances (670) and dreams (673); Miles practices divination; mystic scientists such as the Theosophoids communicate with the Fourth Dimension (602); T.W.I.T., a group of mystical Pythagoreans, merge Orphic knowledge with the pure geometry of higher math (219). Lew Basnight experiences a chemical explosion that throws him into alternative dimensions. When they have these revelatory moments of other-worldly communion, the characters seem transformed from global tourists into pilgrims in a multidimensional cosmos—the opposite of Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin’s gang of neurasthenics, “traveling hot spring to spring in search of eternal youth or fleeing the deadweight of time” (368). Once aware of the subjunctive nature of time and space, characters can avoid ethical (or political) stagnation and start purposeful movement. Reef is traveling with the dissolute aristocrat Ruperta when he channels his anarchist father, Webb, in a séance and suddenly realizes, “I don’t even know who I fuckin am anymore” (673). Later he sees that “this was the precise intelligence he needed to get him back to where he had wandered off the trail, so long ago” (888). After this he becomes part of an anarchist family with Yashmeen Halfcourt, their child Ljubica, and Cyprian and engages in political activity in the Balkans: “Reef was delighted at how easily this baby took to being out on the road” (954). Called “religious” by Yashmeen (668), Kit, under the patronage of his father’s murderer Scarsdale Vibe, dreams of Webb and is “sick and hollow with shame” that he has not killed Vibe, then is spurred on to do so. When the Chums of Chance glimpse Shambhala below the desert sands, they begin for the first time to question their professional roles as agents of the technoplex. Contrary to living a life of individual self-determination, however, Pynchon’s characters, as wandering pilgrims, must learn submission and the importance of communal bonds. Characters are lost when they pursue the ends of pilgrimage egoistically—as does Fleetwood Vibe, the collector who acquires sacred objects for personal gratification, or T.W.I.T., a secret society that desires to know the mysteries of the universe in order to increase its own power (224). As Thomas Moore notes, Pynchon as moralist “condemns the paranoid cop-out, which is passivity, mere mindless pleasures, and that includes merely escapist indulgence in mysticism.”23 Characters who lose themselves in escapism or egoism lose the capacity for action and moral connection with others. The Chums of Chance, for

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instance, are almost overcome when they forget their mission and become passive at Candlebrow University. Endowed by a land baron who invented artificial lard, the university hosts an annual conference on time travel that investigates Eternal Return as a practical means to a fountain of youth (453). There the Chums find “exactly the mixture of nostalgia and amnesia to provide them a reasonable counterfeit of the Timeless” (406). Characters are also lost, however, when they cannot distinguish freely chosen submission and ritual liminality from structural inferiority imposed by political, legal, and economic systems: Pynchon, as does Victor Turner, stresses that pilgrimage can resemble forced exile but has a radically different political valence.24 In Against the Day, Lake Traverse is understood as lost as long as she abjectly submits to her father’s murderers, and the forced submission of labor to capital in the novel is understood as radical exploitation. Paradoxically, however, when submission is willed and directed to Eros (creative or life forces), then it can connect one to others and to life-affirming action in the world. Pynchon seems to construct a double paradox of pilgrim submission, in that it is an almost Levinasian willed abjection of the self to a self-transforming Other.25 The character who perhaps best exemplifies self-willed abjection in Against the Day is Cyprian Latewood. Masochistic admirer of Yashmeen Halfcourt at Cambridge and symbolically associated with Pynchon’s Orpheus figures,26 he is early identified with both submission and spirituality. But both are self-directed and free from false and constraining social hierarchies, and he sounds like Mason & Dixon’s Wicks Cherrycoke when he thinks that “it was possible to hope, not so much despite but paradoxically because of this very snarled web of human flaw, for the emergence of the incommensurable mystery, the dense, unknowable Christ, bearing the secret of how on a hilltop that was not Zion, he had conquered death” (497, italics mine). His sexual submission and his spiritual submission are linked: after Yashmeen becomes his dominatrix, she notes that his willingness to transgress limits and surrender to her “was almost an indifference to self, in which desire was directed at passing beyond the conditions of the self” (877). This indifference to self includes Cyprian’s sexual preferences, which are polymorphous, and his movement between gender categories. After forming a ménage à trois, he, Reef, and Yashmeen, with new child Ljubica, travel to Bulgaria, where they must cross the Halkata Ring, a stone rock formation gateway that legend says grants love to couples who walk through it but changes the sex of a single human who enters it (955). (In a textual parallel again linking sexuality and spirituality, the stone gateway maps onto the mystical “Shipton’s Arch,” or Tushuk Tash, in Xianjiang, which Kit passes through on his way to Lake Baikal (771).) When Reef and Yashmeen pass through the gateway, their love is confirmed; when Cyprian passes through it, he does so to

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emerge on the path to a Bogomil-inspired convent, where he performatively switches genders. Reef and Yashmeen leave him at the convent to live the rest of his life silently in the order as a transvestite nun. The Bogomils understand their gnostic beliefs in terms of anarchistic politics, so when Cyprian ends his wandering pilgrimage with Reef and Yashmeen to enter the convent, he does not necessarily abandon a commitment to thwarting forces of ideological unity and normativity. “It may be,” he says, “that God doesn’t always require us to wander about. It may be that sometimes there is a—would you say a ‘convergence’ to a kind of stillness, not merely in space but in Time as well?” (958). His self-willed, doubled renunciation of self as a transvestite nun is the mirror of Reef’s dream of his dead father, in which exploited miners walk in a procession “like postulants in habits” (887): self-fulfillment as an anarchic religious seems to be the end point of Cyprian’s life pilgrimage. While Cyprian seems to have reached some state of spiritual fulfillment, however, it is not clear from the text whether he has chosen wisely or been duped by another false ideology and death-inspired spiritual system. He is, after all, finally “disappeared,” not even as orphically as Tyrone Slothrop at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, and consequently alienated from family love. Reef and Yashmeen mourn him as if he were dead. In addition, as Dwight Eddins has convincingly argued, gnosticisms are usually presented negatively in Pynchon’s work, and this convent is predicated on both gnostic and Orphic theologies.27 Finally, the text makes clear that the forces of war will annihilate this convent: Cyprian soon may become a martyred saint for his new spiritual calling. Even here, Pynchon refuses to give readers signposts. It is unclear whether Reef and Yashmeen, opting for movement and permanent pilgrimage rather than stasis and organized religion, have made a better choice, or whether Cyprian’s convent is symbolic of their pilgrim journey. This is because, at least in theory, the pilgrim who crosses geographical, psychological, and spiritual borders occupies the suspended space of utopian possibility. To live permanently as a spiritual pilgrim might in fact be a kind of anarchism in relation to capitalist and republican values. When the Grand Cohen of T.W.I.T. maintains that the agents responsible for a chemical explosion were shamans and “agencies of the angelic,” Lew Basnight calls them “Anarchistic terrorists” (221). This is in keeping with Turner’s view that “sustained manifestations of communitas must appear as dangerous and anarchical, and have to be hedged around with prescriptions, prohibitions, and conditions.”28 Pynchon’s refusal to separate spiritual questing from anarchistic politics in this way would surprise the political theorists and utopianists who formulated anarchism as a social project: Paul Goodman thought “religious superstition” was akin to the madness of crowds; Gustav Landauer understood religion and its

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rituals, like the abstracted notion of the state, to be a fracturing of the unifying spirit of primitive communities and forms of coercion; and Mikhail Bakunin traced the origins of the state to religious illusion, a primordial alienation leading to the reification of abstractions into fetishes.29 Yet in Pynchon’s work, anarchistic communitas overturns the aggressive individualism that is central to capitalism, just as a life of movement and migration upsets the political stability of nation-states. Scarsdale Vibe, the multinational robber baron in the novel, in fact sums up the new materialism of the twentieth century precisely as egoism and stasis: “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, industrious, 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. [. . .] Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, but money will [. . .] bring low all before it” (1001). In contrast to Vibe’s vision of a fake community of vacation bungalows, Pynchon’s anarchism is aligned with an ethics of mutuality and is thus similar to Goodman’s thoroughly constructivist social anarchism affirming “that the only sort of freedom that is really worth having, or even really free, is a social freedom, freedom lived in community with others.”30 In Pynchon’s novel, both the anarchist and the pilgrim distrust earthly hierarchy, advocate popular movements outside parliamentary politics, and understand life as transition and movement. Articulating the anarchist view, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon writes that “the true . . . is what changes, or at least what is capable of progression, reconciliation and transformation, while what is false, fictitious, impossible and abstract appears as fixed, complete, whole, unchangeable, indefectible.”31 In this evolutionary logic, human development toward a just society is dependent not on the unfolding of material necessity (as it is for Marx) but on “a series of largely contingent events, possibilities opened for a time but then closed again, roads not taken, and avoidable catastrophes.”32 Such a society is in fact formed through the lives of the pilgrim anarchists in Pynchon’s text. Yashmeen notes that “the only rule is that there are no rules” (943). Unlike the quest, which privileges noble birth or natural right, pilgrimage fits with Pynchon’s consistent underclass sympathies and links pilgrims to “underground men.”33 Standing at Riemann’s grave in Switzerland, Yashmeen tells a story heard in her Russian girlhood about the stranniki, or pilgrims who left jobs, family, and property to search for God. They are wanderers, “wild-looking men” on a “holy mission.” The townspeople sheltered them in basements: “Floors that had once been solid and simple became veils over another world” (663). Yashmeen asserts that the “Government feared them more than it feared Social Democrats, more than bomb-throwers, ‘Very dangerous,’ Papa assured

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us. [. . .] They had to keep wandering the world. [. . .] People called them podpol’niki, underground men.” Having left the sterile safety of Göttingen, Yashmeen declares, “I find that now I am also strannik” (663). Pynchon’s anarchic move in Against the Day (if not in all of his novels) may be to combine advocacy of social anarchism with support for a syncretic spiritualism that demands recognition of wonder and transcendental realities. Critics generally recognize that Pynchon consistently sides with the underclass and uses a Calvinist shorthand to designate them as “preterite,” but scholars such as Moore also have linked the worldview of the latter more generally to those who refuse to disenchant the world. He distinguishes between two populations in Pynchon’s fiction: the “grailquesting elect,” Pilgrims-with-a-Capital-P who practice “an absolutely unreal dichotomization between Their own world and the ‘magical’ one,” and the “preterites’ song,” which is “a signature of the deep connection of preterition with an invisible flux, with the One.”34 If the Elect quest, the Preterite pilgrimage. One might assume that this terminology would imply a Christian palimpsest for Pynchon’s work, but while Christian motifs figure heavily in all of Pynchon’s novels (Gravity’s Rainbow is organized according to the Christian liturgical calendar, for example) and appear again in Against the Day, such motifs do not align easily with Christian dogma or institutionalized religious practice.35 “Christers,” as Christians are called in this novel, are in fact usually portrayed negatively: Protestant Christianity, capitalism, and a Weberian rationalization of nature are linked and denounced, and characters search for a “someplace, some deep penultimate town the capitalist/Christer gridwork hadn’t got to quite yet” (1075). Lieutenant Dwight Prance is probably a mouthpiece for Pynchon when he excoriates organized religion (777–78). The evil Scarsdale Vibe rhetorically presents himself as an Old Testament prophet (333) and/or a Christ figure (1001), and his sidekick Foley Walker is described by Ewball Oust as “a born-again Christer, so he can act as bad as he wants because Jesus is coming and nothin a human can do so bad Jesus won’t forgive it” (1004). Ironically, however, it is Foley who finally shoots and kills Vibe, doing the best deed in the novel and beating the “heroes” Oust and Frank Traverse to the punch. Yet there are two central crucifixion images that appear in the text, and importantly, both are linked to anarchists: Webb is killed by Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno by being hung upside-down (as St. Paul was) on an adobe tower (210), and much later in the text Yashmeen gives birth in a crucifixion pose, with her two male partners, Reef and Cyprian, on either side of her bed, holding her outstretched hands (949). Webb and Yashmeen are “christlike” in that they are aligned with justice, mercy, preterite freedom, revelation, and wandering. References to other spiritual practices—including pantheism, animism, tarot and Blavatsky-like channeling, Orphism, kabbalah, various scientific

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mysticisms, metempsychosis, gnosticisms, Native American dream-vision, and intelligent design—indicate that Christian pilgrimage is only part of a syncretic panoply of spiritual journeying in this novel. David Cowart and others have noted how the earth and a kind of natural theology become important in Pynchon’s writing, and this certainly also is true in Against the Day, with its centralization of romantic sublimity, Pythagoreanism, and Orphism.36 Not only are many of the characters named for natural images or properties, but scenes constantly emphasize the holiness and power of nature and the earth (against the artificial death power of war technology).37 Of particular importance are Hinduism and Buddhism. The firstedition book jacket featured a mandalalike customs stamp that also may be a pilgrim badge showing Shambhala, a central textual symbol. The Chums fly over the mythical city in the desert (793); the Capitalists are searching for it as a source of infinite energy; Kit Traverse takes a shaman-guided journey through “Inner Asia” to find it (and at the end of the novel is told that he has been there all along). Light, flame, metempsychosis, and duty, key ideas within Buddhism, are central leitmotifs. One powerful image of the novel is Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, which has actual religious significance and to which Kit and Prance journey “disguised as Buriat pilgrims” (764). Yashmeen also dreams of ascending in the wind above Lake Baikal and Tian Shan (891); Prance has a revelation about “a Tibetan Buddhist enclave in the middle of a prevailing Islamism” (787), before encountering and being taken aloft by the Chums of Chance. The lake reminds Kit of pilgrimage sites: “Mount Kailash, or Tengri Khann, parts of a superterrestrial order included provisionally in this lower, broken one” (769). Mount Kailash is located in the Chinese Himalayas and is understood by religious pilgrims as the residence of Shiva. What is consistent through all the religious and spiritual leitmotifs is the notion of journeying, wandering, seeking—or pilgrimage. In Against the Day, the Doosra (a political and religious leader) tells Kit Traverse as the latter heads toward Siberia, “The journey itself is a kind of conscious Being, a living deity who does not wish to engage with the foolish or the weak, and hence will try to dissuade you. It insists on the furthest degree of respect” (765). The journey in this book is almost always made in company and as a collaborative questing. Mining the familiar symbolism of established faiths, Against the Day combines a search for social values with pilgrimage toward the sacred; social and mystical pilgrimage become Escher-like inverses of one another. As a ritual pattern, pilgrimage, like quest, tends to move in a circle rather than an Aristotelian line. But this circular time of pilgrimage is, oddly, both closed like quest (because one performance of the ritual has a defined beginning, middle, and end, and because the ritual is often linked to eschatological history) and open-ended like picaresque (because

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the ritual is reversible and recoverable; it can be replayed; it periodically returns). Pilgrimage thus operates in the space between one and zero, as both closed and open circle. While registering its seeming open-endedness, readers might easily overlook the circularity of Against the Day’s plot, which moves from America to Europe to Mexico to America. Estrella Briggs, Frank, and Reef end up back in the American West, where they meet many of the characters who appeared earlier in the novel in Chicago and in mining camps. Even when characters do not return to the States, they feel this circularity. When Kit and Dally go to Torino, for example, Kit thinks, “Might as well be Denver. The mountains were close, and there was hydroelectric power everywhere. ‘Well full fuckin circle,’ is what he muttered to himself, ‘ain’t it’” (1068). The circularity of the novel’s plot seems to align it with a sacred centering, a kind of religious ritual, as well as an antiheroic sense of political futility: for all the characters’ journeys and dangerous adventures, they have made no progress stemming the power of the military-industrial complex. This “lack of progress” is in keeping with the structural logic of pilgrimage. The political, thematic implication of this circularity in Against the Day is that any anarchist project will likewise need to be repeated, as bourgeoisie and proletariat join almost ritualistically throughout history to enact their dialectical struggle. In Against the Day, the secular realism of picaresque and the romance of quest are transformed by syncretic mysticism, leading to the formation of a kind of postmodern pilgrimage in motion somewhere between the secular and the sacred, between history and romance, between nature and culture.38 Yet Pynchon, hardly sympathetic to an easy, postmodern pastiche of religious thought, constructs a syncretism that demands that something (lived) be at stake. In this novel, Pynchon does not exclude the possibility that a secular pilgrimage may be meaningful or even in its way sacred (or vice versa).39 Importantly, this project has an ethical as well as a political dimension and is linked to ecological understandings of the social world—the moral ethic of postmodernism, according to James Richard Mensch: “[Postmodern ethics are] not some set of ethical rules . . . [but an] emphasis on the vulnerability of the self. . . . The best way to put this is in terms of the shift it implies in the epistemological paradigm of modernity. This is a shift from observation to incarnation as the fundamental mode of knowing. Modernity positions the subject as a disembodied, Cartesian (or Kantian) spectator. Our reversal gives it the ontological sense of ‘flesh.’ The term signifies that what we are open to incarnates itself through us.”40 Mensch’s discussion is in accord with the turns toward “incarnation” in recent theoretical writings by Žižek, Badiou, and others.41 “System,” as it appears positively in Pynchon’s novels, is a figure for what Mensch here calls an ecology: an enfleshed, dialogical

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environment dependent upon interrelationship rather than an ideal state predicated upon transcendental values. This idea is key to Pynchon’s ethics. It helps explain his simultaneous commitments to sociality, the body, materialism, syncretism, anarchism, Orphism. His many protagonists—Oedipa Maas, Tyrone Slothrop, Charles Mason, and Jeremiah Dixon—become enlightened or whole precisely when they recognize the vulnerability of the self and their connections to a larger material ecology. “Control” over nature and others, the desire for total control of self and others, is consistently presented in his novels as the disease of modernity. In contrast, fleshing out a life of social justice without relinquishing the incarnated sacred is the task of the anarchistic postmodern pilgrim, whose actions reanimate a world disenchanted by rationalization. Relinquishing an abstractly defined “humankind,” “country,” or “law” in favor of lived mutuality is the key to a different, materialist way of being. Also key to this kind of ecological ethics is Against the Day’s peripatetic narrative structure, situated somewhere outside both quest and picaresque and linked to anarchist political values. To understand this novel one must accept genre as a cognitive schemata with ontological implications: according to John Frow, a genre is “a key component of the construction of knowledges: far from being merely stylistic devices, genres create effects of reality and truth that are central to the ways the world is understood.”42 Differing from the categorial, systematizing approach legitimized by Aristotle, Pynchon’s approach to genre rebels against rules. In this sense Against the Day recalls Derrida’s definition in “The Law of Genre” of genre as both the marker of the Law (“order’s principle”) and the register of Law’s inevitable failure, a kind of “madness.”43 Extending this position further, Thomas O. Beebee maintains that genre is an example of cultural “noise,” a “cusp between different use-values of texts” that both reflects and performs ideological work. In terms apropos to Against the Day, a book obsessed with magnetism, he writes, “Ideology is . . . something like the magnetic field that arranges a chaotic mass of iron filings into intriguing, ordered curves on a piece of paper. . . . It is only in the deformations and contradictions of writing and thinking that we can recognize ideology; genre is one of those observable deformations. . . . Jameson locates literature outside the constraints of genre; I locate it in those texts where the battle [against genre] is most intense.”44 In Against the Day, the battle against genre is intense indeed. Pynchon’s text frustrates readers’ generic expectations, but its generic instability—like the political instability of anarchism—may be understood as precisely the grounds of its critique. While the Traverse family embodies Western patriarchal values (e.g., hypermasculinized phallic power in Reef, science and technology in Kit, frontier individualism in Frank), the text makes

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visible the instability of the Symbolic as the Law of the Father, thereby implying the unstable grounding of (generic) Law. But in a postmodern world, where change is ironically the norm and goal of capitalism, the novel also refuses to reify instability. Instead, it posits a territory of journeying and of communitas that allows for a reintegration of metaphysical, ethical, and political discourse. In the journeys of all of its characters, Against the Day raises the possibility that even a failed quest may be a successful pilgrimage if understood in ecological terms. Like picaresque, Against the Day is mired in the social world, but Pynchon’s novel will not abandon ethics or metaphysics for politics: it enfleshes and politicizes values, replacing the autonomous subject with community and stasis with motion within an organized, nonteleological, global ecosystem. Here is an assertion not of indeterminacy but of value. Just as pilgrims wandering in multidimensional realities must have double vision as they engage in semiotic reading, so too Against the Day demands of a reader the double vision of allegory, in which the phenomenal is always read against the noumenal, the epistemological against the ethical, and the journey through symbolic discourse is always supplemented and redefined by the (mystical or political) unspoken/ Other within that discourse. If the meaning of a text is indeed located in the play of the differences of its embedded genres,45 the meaning of Pynchon’s novel may finally reside in the play between picaresque and quest—between secular and sacred, line and circle—embodied in the unhomeliness of both pilgrimage and political life within global capital. For Pynchon, this unhomeliness is predicated upon movement and action in the world. It is an exilic position that paradoxically is directed toward a sacred center of embodiment. Neither a religious morality nor transcendental philosophy, it can include the violence and rhizomatic logic of evolution. In postmodern pilgrimage, Pynchon has found a narrative structure that accommodates his anarchic aesthetic, ethical, and political ends, implying that living a life of spiritual pilgrimage—or anarchistic mysticism, or evolutionary ecological spiritualism—means living a life of generic instability.46 NOTES 1. See, for example, Molly Hite, Ideas of Order; David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon; and Thomas Moore, Style of Connectedness. Fabienne Collignon has written a wonderful analysis of space in Against the Day, titled “A Glimpse of Light.” 2. Gerald Prince, “On Narrative Studies,” 280. 3. On Pynchon’s use of quest and hero monomyth, see Kathryn Hume, “Romance,” and Pynchon’s Mythography, esp. chapter 4. David K. Kirby, Anne Osterrieth, and Mary Lee Nolan and Sidney Nolan correlate quest with Christian

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pilgrimage. See Kirby, “Two Modern Versions”; Osterrieth, “Pilgrimage”; and Nolan and Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage. 4. Hite, Ideas of Order, 22. 5. On picaresque, see Frank Wadleigh Chandler, Literature of Roguery, vols. 1 and 2; Ulrich Wicks, Picaresque Narrative; and Howard Mancing, “Protean Picaresque.” Barbara A. Babcock argues that picaresque inverts the pattern of chivalric romance and pastoral in “‘Liberty’s a Whore,’” 101. 6. Stuart Miller, The Picaresque Novel, 13–20. 7. For readings aligning contemporary literature with picaresque, see R. W. B. Lewis, The Picaresque Saint; Robert Alter, Rogue’s Progress; Francisco J. Sánchez and Nicholas Spadaccini, “Revisiting the Picaresque,” 304–5; and Alexander Blackburn, Myth of the Picaro, 207. Regine Rosenthal discusses picaresque and Gravity’s Rainbow in “Postmodern Picaro.” 8. Babcock, “Liberty’s a Whore,” 100. 9. Ellen Turner Gutiérrez, Reception of the Picaresque, 5. 10. Carmen Benito-Vessels and Michael Zappala, “Preface,” 12. 11. Marina S. Brownlee, “Discursive Parameters,” 28; Wicks, Picaresque Narrative, 28. 12. Thomas H. Schaub, Pynchon, 16. 13. James J. Preston, “Spiritual Magnetism,” 33, 41. 14. Ibid., 41. See Augustine of Hippo’s theory of signs in On Christian Doctrine. 15. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 497–8. See Deborah Madsen’s Postmodernist Allegories on the difference among patristic, Protestant, and postmodernist allegory, and Lewis’s correlation of picaresque with sainthood. 16. See Toni Huber, Pure Crystal Mountain. 17. Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck, Ruth Kriss-Rettenbeck, and Ivan Illich, “Homo Viator,” 22. 18. Victor Turner, Ritual Process, 94–165; and Huber, Pure Crystal Mountain, 8. See Alan Morinis (“Introduction”) on secular pilgrimages; and Pierre André Sigal (“Les différents types de pèlerinage,” 86) on devotional pilgrimage. Nikolaus Egender (“Jerusalem,” 315) contends that there are three characteristic aspects of the state of pilgrimage: alienation, hospitality (Xeniteia), and renewal. Arnold van Gennep notes that all rites de passage are “marked by three phases: separation, limen or margin, and aggregation” (quoted in Victor W. Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 2). Kriss-Rettenbeck, Kriss-Rettenbeck, and Illich understand Christian pilgrimage as a slightly different tripartite structure (22). 19. Ronald Williamson, “Medieval English Pilgrims,” 114. 20. Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49, 115. 21. See the Pynchon Wiki, “Against the Day 557–587,” http://against-the-day. pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_557-587 (accessed May 23, 2010). 22. Morinis, “Introduction,” 13. Morinis defines the wandering pilgrimage against other types: instrumental, normative, obligatory, and initiatory. 23. Moore, Style of Connectedness, 231. 24. Turner, Ritual Process, 98–99. 25. For another reading of submission in the novel, see Kathryn Hume’s essay in this volume.

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26. See the Pynchon Wiki, “Against the Day 489–524,” http://against-the-day. pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_489524, and “Cyprian Latewood,” http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Cyprian_Late wood (both accessed May 23, 2010). 27. Dwight Eddins, Gnostic Pynchon. 28. Turner, Ritual Process, 109. 29. Paul Goodman, Gustav Landauer, and Mikhail Bakunin are quoted in Jesse S. Cohn, Anarchism, 63. 30. George Levine, “Risking the Moment,” 61. Goodman is quoted in Cohn, Anarchism, 62. 31. Quoted in Cohn, Anarchism, 76. 32. Ibid., 75. For differing readings of anarchism’s importance to narration, politics, and ethnicity in Against the Day, see the essays in this volume by Krzysztof Piekarski, Martin Kevorkian, and Elisabeth McKetta; Graham Benton; and J. Paul Narkunas. See Benton in particular for evidence that Pynchon may be critical of certain anarchist practices. 33. Paul Fussell and E. P. Thompson have noted how John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) was a central text to both the nineteenth-century English workingclass movement and British soldiers in World War I; thus centralizing the notion of pilgrimage may also be thematically appropriate for Pynchon’s story of union strikes and World War I. See W. R. Owens, “Introduction,” which cites Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory and Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. 34. Moore, Style of Connectedness, 223. 35. See Kathryn Hume’s essay in this volume. For discussions of Pynchon’s canon and Christianity, Christian heresy, or biblical tradition, see Victoria H. Price, Christian Allusions; James Nohrnberg, “Pynchon’s Paraclete”; John M. Krafft, “‘And How Far-Fallen.’” 36. Cowart, Thomas Pynchon, 265ff. 37. See Eddins, Gnostic Pynchon, and Hume, Pynchon’s Mythography, for discussions of gnosticism and Orphism in Pynchon’s work. See also Christopher K. Coffman’s essay in this volume. 38. For discussion of the fraught term syncretism, see Andre Droogers, “Syncretism,” 20; and Hendrik M. Vroom, “Syncretism and Dialogue.” 39. See Morinis, “Introduction,” 4–5. “Pilgrims” may describe, among others, Russians who take their newborns for blessing at Lenin’s tomb, travelers to Disneyland, or tourists. See Ian Reader and Tony Walter, Pilgrimage in Popular Culture, passim. 40. James Richard Mensch, Knowing and Being, 214–15. 41. For one example, see Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, 103–11. 42. John Frow, “‘Reproducibles,’” 1632. 43. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” 80. 44. Thomas O. Beebee, Ideology of Genre, 18–19. 45. Ibid., 250. 46. My thanks for Thomas Schaub’s invitation to speak with other panelists (Molly Hite, Brian McHale, Alan Nadel, Bernard Duyfhuizen) at the 2007 Narrative Conference (Washington, D.C.) on this topic, and to Misty Anderson for article revision comments.

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S Mapping, the Unmappable, and Pynchon’s Antitragic Vision Krzysztof Piekarski, Martin Kevorkian, and Elisabeth McKetta

They took her down to the Four Corners and put her so one of her knees was in Utah, one in Colorado, one elbow in Arizona and the other in New Mexico––with the point of insertion exactly above the mythical crosshairs itself. Then rotated her all four different ways. Her small features pressed into the dirt, the blood-red dirt. —Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (269)

M

apping is an act of abstraction, a fictive construction that can nevertheless impose its order on real bodies. Maps can serve the brutal games of power and desire that take place on all scales, from the global to the interpersonal, at every vantage point from which a “They” enjoys the privilege of subjugating another. One example of cartographic violence in Against the Day occurs when the characters involved in the bloody desert orgy described in the epigraph try to be “exact” about a sexual conquest, one with a “mythical” target that determines the position of the real body needed for the conquest’s consummation. Through this sexual act of mapping, Lake Traverse—whose name implies a fluid expanse at odds with abstract rectilinear crosshairs—is forced into the object position as the passive, acted-upon “her” (never “she”). This conquest—through which Lake takes part in a perverse charade of cartographic seduction with the men who killed her father—represents a violation of both her family and 47

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the Traverse commitment to anarchism. She becomes a brutalized object at the intersection of lines whose power anarchists would refuse to recognize, lines laid down by the system of states and nations that an internationalist anarchism would unmap.1 As an act of colonization, mapping takes things out of the realm of life and ongoing present tense and into a state that Pynchon has termed “preterition,” reducing them to the taxidermy world of repetition and death. In one of his strongest statements on the damnable power of mapping, Mason and Dixon, while pursuing their survey of the land, “understand as well that the Line is exactly what [. . .] a number of others have been styling it all along–– a conduit for Evil.”2 Against the Day revisits the dangers of divisive cartographic mastery and gives this problem teeth. In a world marked and ruled by what Against the Day calls “the terrible American divide, between hunter and prey” (186), the mapper readily becomes the hunter, with the mapped reduced to the plight of prey, devoured physically or figuratively. Characterizing the cartographic appetite, Angus Fletcher has proposed that “the map seduces the reader into an expectant state of unfulfilled desire. . . . One wants to say that in its magically seductive power the map is the most dangerous symbol in the world.”3 In a recent survey of scholarship on maps as cultural objects and operators, Robert Karrow recognizes the “need to acknowledge the simple power of maps,” that “maps have an undeniable . . . way of expressing knowledge of, mastery of, and control over the environments they depict. . . . This power of maps rather subtly commands respect, deference, and subordination. Maps charm, intimidate, beguile, and browbeat.”4 And as Pynchon makes especially clear, maps exert control not just over environments but also over bodies, and the shapes of lives.5 Against the Day attends to the powers and perils of mapping, not just by describing maps throughout the text but by invoking mapping as a metaphor for charting the trajectories of individuals, for determining their narrative fates. For example, Pynchon’s portrait of the “alarming” Professor Renfrew invites, with a suitably cautionary note, a connection between maps and characters. This “envenomed” academician, ambitious yet ineffectual, keeps files on “everyone who had ever crossed his path”: “The data by now filled several rooms he was obliged to rent for the purpose, as well as odd cabinets, closets, and steamer trunks, and in private he called it his ‘Map of the World’” (495). The reader of this novel, as does the mapmaking professor, also faces the prospect of keeping track of an overwhelming number of characters, geographical locations, time lines, and narratives. We offer here a reading of Against the Day as a meditation upon what it means for lives to be mapped, for stories to be considered as maps, for narratives to worry about the problem of mappability. We begin with a discussion of the Chums of Chance, to introduce the connection between

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mappability and narrative fate; we next consider the possibilities for characters to loosen that narrative fate by making uncoerced use of survivalist mappings and evading mappability altogether—a loosening, exemplified in the character of Cyprian Latewood, that increases over the course of the novel; finally, we synthesize these concerns with a consideration of the novel’s anarchic form as delivering, in its movement between mapping and the unmappable, the experience of a nontragic aesthetics.

ON THE MAP: “NO SURPRISES THERE” “Now single up all lines!” is the command that opens the narrative and calls the Chums of Chance to order (3). In a novel that cherishes dreams of anarchism, this organizational imperative reads as a threat. Along such singled lines, the Chicago Stockyards present a menacing mapping, the operation of systematized violence: “unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor” (10). As this deterministic diagram suggests, mappable beings are easy to find, hunt, and kill; their freedom has yielded to a charted fate. It echoes, too, the unchecked repercussions of that originary Pynchonian straight line, the Mason-Dixon. If mapping leads to the reduction of choices and to the killing floor, then we could say that being mapped equates with being in the preterite—done, complete, and incapable of present or future action. This realm of preterition, in Pynchon’s grammar of salvation, is the space of the past tense, inhabited by those who have been passed over, whose stories have already been written, whose books are irretrievably closed. Preterition is the state that the Chums escape by moving toward unregulated possibility as “they fly toward grace” at the end of the novel (1085). In this leap into the present tense, they abandon their highly mapped, fully narrated, and recorded-into-children’s-books past. Looking retrospectively at a dossier of voyages, Chick comments on the extreme mappability of the Chums, as their movements have always been tracked by those of their archrival: “‘The travels of Captain Padzhitnoff,’ tapping a pointer across the map that covered the entire forward bulkhead of Inconvenience’s wardroom, ‘over the years, have pretty closely matched our own. No surprises there’” (1023). Chick’s comment points to the irony of the Chums’ full name: there is no “chance” in a book (or book series on The Chums of Chance and . . .) that has already been written and mapped out. The will to render the world as a map, with everything taken in at a glance, leaves no room for silence, faith, or the invisible or unpredictable. The capitalist mogul Scarsdale Vibe, his name a suggestion of violently

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marked terrain (not to mention American suburbanization), embodies the drive for ultimate control through total mapping: “He carried an ebony stick whose handle was a gold and silver sphere chased so as to represent an accurate and detailed globe of the world” (31, emphasis ours). The verb used to describe the craft with which the features of the world have been traced also bespeaks an action of pursuit: the map is the record of a hunt.6 The Vormance Expedition, funded by Vibe, extends the colonization of the world into a hunt for God, an ultimate power grab that would leave no space for grace. Dr. Vormance speculates: “Now we have taken the first few wingbeats of what will allow us to begin colonizing the Sky. Somewhere in it, God dwells in His Heavenly City. How far into that unmapped wilderness shall we journey before we find Him?” (131). The finite earthly realm, as Professor Vanderjuice notes, has already yielded its unknowns to the process of mapping: “The Western frontier we all thought we knew from song and story was no longer on the map but gone, absorbed—a dead duck” (52).7 On Vanderjuice’s map from the 1890s, the boundary separating known from unknown has disappeared into a completely inscribed system of states and nations. Because the freedom of the West has been hunted down, air colonization will be next. As Vanderjuice explains, “The Era of Sail had depended upon the mapping of seas and seacoasts of the globe [. . .]. Here at the high edge of the atmosphere was the next untamed frontier, pioneers arriving in airships instead of wagons” (121). The idea of the sky as the final unmapped frontier resonates with a general observation that “the predators tended to be skyborne” (752). The quasi-heroic Chums, too, are sky-borne, but they are at the mercy of their author and do not have the agency that other predators do, barely escaping their Russian counterparts most of the time—a fact that underscores their preterition. As do many Pynchon characters, though, the Chums exist on a kind of cusp between hunter and hunted, Elect and Preterite, fascist and antifascist. They are not predators, but they do not understand the larger colonizing mission of which they may be a part. The airborne (whether predators or not) enjoy a map view from above that yields, as Theign notes to Cyprian, “a different perspective . . . almost godlike” (807). Throughout the novel, those who would cultivate “the arts of being intelligent prey” must understand the intimate connection between the aerial view and power (971).

INTO AND OFF THE MAP: “AN UNLOOSENING OF FATE” The book’s prime example of prey thus educated is Cyprian Latewood. Recruited and deployed as a vulnerable pawn in the games of power,

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Cyprian learns “the advantages of being the hunted” (709): “It is in the nature of prey, Cyprian was later to reflect, that at times, instead of submitting to the demands of some predator, they will insist upon being difficult. Running for their lives. [. . .] Disappearing into clouds of ink, [. . .] holes in the earth” (840). Those “clouds of ink,” abundant with the material necessary to print not only a map but also the novel itself, may suggest a degree of collusion between characters on the run and a sympathetic novelist whose words immerse them in what Pynchon elsewhere calls “an all but unmappable flow of letters and numbers” (853). Even for the field agent, the means of disappearance can be curiously verbal: “Cyprian’s field skills, held to the whetstone of European crisis, had sharpened [. . .]. Cyprian recited the appropriate formulæ and became invisible” (871). To survive, then, prey must avoid being mappable. Cyprian notes that “life, however reduced now and then to the arts of being intelligent prey, was preferable to the plague of eagles beginning to take over the land” (971). And yet eluding the charts of airborne predators may not suffice for prey to thrive. Pynchon, so often preferring inversion, reversibility, and unstable binarisms, here suggests that the perspective of those eagles may be entwined with deliverance. It may be worth noting the ambivalent connections between these eagles and the aquiline images of Catholic iconography: Isaiah 40 tells us the faithful will “soar on wings like eagles,” and the eagle is often a symbol of Christ’s ascension, though Pynchon may just as often have in mind Satan as the “prince of the power of the air” from Ephesians 2. Indeed, the perspective of the airborne, be it the eagles or the Chums of Chance, can allow for salvation of a certain sort—or at the very least a deferral, a purgatory of being the damned, the preterite, or the easily located prey. In an image that seems to combine salvation with attack from above, the night Yashmeen becomes pregnant, “She dreamed [. . .] of a hunter arrived at last, a trainer of desert eagles” whose “predatory descent [. . .] would seize her [. . .] up off the defective Riemann sphere she had been taking for everything that was, [. . .] to hover at an altitude that made the Eurasian continent a map of itself” (891). Although Yashmeen’s revelation emphasizes limits—the fact that mapping’s will to totalization is illusory and does not describe everything that is—the map nevertheless contains information worth obtaining. Cyprian has internalized this lesson on the value of maps, although he has acquired his perspective by rather less visionary means: at a crucial juncture, “Cyprian, who had been inhabiting a one-to-one-scale map of the Peninsula since arriving, immediately grew alert” (947). The intelligent prey, the rat in the maze, can spend so much time on the run, concentrating on survival, as to develop a map of the territory purely from below, from direct experience of the terrain; this kind of mapping depends on the imagination and memory and suggests a version of cartography that works

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not just with facts but with possibilities.8 Cyprian thereby virtually inhabits the airborne perspective, but without ascending, and without preying. Might one say that he disrupts the hierarchy without taking up an elevated (and elect) position in it, thereby creating a new category, the unmapped and free preterite? He becomes, finally, “a bride of Night” (973). In a novel that speaks against the terrors of “daylit America, its practical affairs, its steadfast denial of night” (732), this loosened ascension, too, this embrace of silence, faith, and night, is a flight toward grace. If the Chicago Stockyards—a microcosm of “daylit America, its practical affairs”—model the cartographic fatality of lines singled up, Chicago itself, in its vast complexity, suggests a resistance to such singling: the “urban unmappable” (38). The metaphor likewise describes the vast sprawl of the novel. About eight hundred pages in, with Cyprian as our guide once again, the narrative revisits the initial command to single up all lines, this time to imagine its inversion: “If there is an inevitability to arrival by water, [Cyprian] reflected, as we watch the possibilities on shore being progressively narrowed at last to the destined quay or slip, there is no doubt a mirror-symmetry about departure, a denial of inevitability, an opening out from the point of embarkation, beginning the moment all lines are singled up, an unloosening of fate as the unknown and perhaps the uncreated begins to make its appearance ahead and astern, port and starboard, everywhere an expanding of possibility” (821). Cyprian’s reverie on the denial of inevitability, of an opening out that succeeds the imposed singling up of lines (like the divergence of a V), recapitulates the trajectory of the Chums of Chance: from a starting point of fully mapped determinism, their fate has been unloosening, and the Chums have been moving toward possibility. The first and most fully characterized of narrative voices within Against the Day belongs to the Chums’ narrator, whose voice explicitly identifies itself as that of an author, specifically, an author of a series of boys’ adventure books. In a comically proprietary tone, this narrator addresses “my faithful readers” (3) and “my young readers” (6). The narrator refers, with defensive whimsy, to unfavorable reader reactions to The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth, “my harmless little intraterrestrial scherzo” (117). Mason & Dixon is likewise framed as a story being told (mainly) to children, but the framing has an effect on the narrative that is antipodal to the one in Against the Day. Whereas the Chums are restricted by their storyteller and in some ways yearn to be released from their binding narratives, the Reverend Cherrycoke’s power as a storyteller is what enlivens and creates the many strands of Mason and Dixon’s adventures and keeps Cherrycoke gainfully employed. Mason & Dixon gains autonomy from historical fact through the assertion of the storyteller’s imagination, but because our perspective often follows the Chums themselves, Against

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the Day, conversely, dramatizes its freedom through the withering of authorial control. The chirpy, imperious asides in the authorial first-person singular dwindle and then vanish after about the first hundred pages; the Chums’ author makes a silent exit.9 Early in Part Two, Lindsay reacts to the mention of the “authorities” by repeating the word as a question: “‘Authorities?’ Lindsay inquired, keenly, as if he had recognized the name of an intimate acquaintance” (124). The Chums, as characters, have thus far acted only under orders of superiors who have mapped out their journey entirely. Over the course of Against the Day, the Chums become progressively less answerable to authorial dictates, as in the attenuation of relations with the “National Office” (1018). And the characters’ increasing assertions of free will are punctuated by discontinuities in the narrative structure. The receding of the fully characterized author-narrator who has controlled their fate provides one telling shift; a final narrative and metaphysical break occurs in the last movement of the novel, as the Chums go off the narrative map entirely. Having passed into a state where “all maps and charts had suddenly become unreadable” (1021), the Chums find themselves “lost” and yet “rescued” “just at that moment of spiritual perplexity” (1030). Their salvation, in the form of the Sodality of Ætheronauts, is a surprise, unaccountable by any chart: “How could they have ever crossed trajectories? Afterward none of the boys could remember where it happened” (1030). This movement from mapped to undetermined space registers on the level of narrative grammar: “Chick acted sometimes as if his heart were still back at the scenes of previous adventures, and Viridian’s day was itself not without lapses into the sentimental pluperfect” (1031). Pluperfect, the tense that gives ordering to multiple events in staggered pasts by designating actions that are complete or “perfect,” grammatically allows Chick and Viridian to define their newly achieved freedom in opposition to what they have left behind. They look back to their romantic existence as adventure-book characters whose stories had been written and completed—“perfect”—but seem, in light of their current, more complex state, imperfect. By escaping the narrative past tense, its determined mappability, and shedding the trappings of grammatical sentimentality, the Chums move toward an unmapped future. And though they have thus escaped the state of preterition, their flight includes rather than transcends the existence of the outcast and passed over, the nonelect. The process of inclusion, a process that transforms the Chums over the course of the novel, began early in the novel, with their decision to violate the “Charter” (8) and welcome aboard a poor hunted one—Chick Counterfly, on the run from the Ku Klux Klan—“for mercy’s sake”: the preterite of idealized fiction give shelter to the preterite of the earth and thus venture toward an uncharted status. In joining with the

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Ætheronauts, the Chums embrace a complex “domesticity of escape and rejection” (1030). Building upon this new complexity, the last fifty pages of the novel move toward a final narrative discontinuity. Thus it is that on the penultimate page of Against the Day, after more than a thousand pages in the past tense, the narration suddenly breaks into the present tense: “One day Heartsease discovers that she’s expecting a baby” (1084). The shift into present tense corresponds to the decisive conclusion of the Chums’ careers as ageless and unchanging characters.10 Now beyond the static idealizations of their maps, they have entered into a dynamic flux: “And on they fly. The ship by now has grown as large as a small city. There are neighborhoods, there are parks. There are slum conditions” (1084).11 Here, as with Chicago, urban scale provides an index of possibility for characters no longer singled up. They have become the urban unmappable. In this new dispensation, the Chums are no longer lines consigned to pages of impossible and predetermined adventures. Fiction becomes present, and open to the future. In Against the Day, urban unmappability repeatedly figures as a condition for visionary experience and the sacred. Reef Traverse dreams of “a city, not Venice but noplace American either, with an unmappable operational endlessness to its streets”; in this disorienting setting, he paradoxically receives “the precise intelligence that he needed to get him back to where he had wandered off the trail, so long ago” (887–88). His younger brother, Kit, always more sure of his own unmapped trail, “proceeded through the dark forests as if there were no doubt as to his way.” In this manner, Kit stumbles across an old acquaintance and fellow pilgrim; they have spoken before, and now speak again, of “cities, unmapped, sacramental places” (789–90).12 These cities are sacramental because they are unmapped. For this itinerary, “unmapped, sacramental” may be two ways of saying the same thing. And Pynchon consistently imagines a particular form of citizenship for these sacred, unmapped cities, set in “noplace American” and no place national at all. He sanctifies a political way of belonging in unmappable space: an anarchism that he presents as both a social and an aesthetic alternative to tragedy.13

THE MAP OF TRAGEDY AND THE MUSIC OF ANARCHY: “YOU COULDN’T EVEN TELL WHAT THE SONG WAS” Thus far we have emphasized the problem of mapping in Against the Day; in what follows, we amplify the question of how that problem plays out in the form of the novel, with particular attention to Pynchon’s treatment of narrative perspective and plot. As a thematics within the novel, one name for a resistant disregard for mapping is anarchy. To what extent, we

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could ask, does Against the Day itself offer up an aesthetic experience of anarchy? We propose that a tension between mapping and the unmappable reveals itself, on a formal level, through a contrast between a tragic and an anarchic poetics. In a text that contains repeated warnings against the tragedy of mapping, it may follow that its aesthetics would offer a formal challenge to the map of tragedy. Through an all but unmappable treatment of character and plot, the novel delivers an anarchic performance that seeks to escape tragedy—a form that Pynchon has undermined throughout his career. In Rome: The Book of Foundations, Michel Serres notes that dramatists were once “scrupulous about respecting the rule of the so-called unities in tragedy. It has been called superfluous”; but, writes Serres, the “rule is not supplementary; it is essential. What is more, tragedy is made for it, and only for it.”14 By contrast, Pynchon’s text, with its meandering plots and dispersed attention to character, is not made for tragedy; through its resistance to mapping the shapes of lives, Against the Day evades what tragedy imposes: “The tragic brings the spatial, temporal, and nominal capture of the multiple. . . . Let the multiple graze in peace; tragedy disappears.”15 Unified attention to a hero—a form of attention abetted by the classical unities of place, time, and action (and thus, by extension, of maps)—constitutes a precondition for a tragic narrative arc. Against the Day faces out toward the multiple and away from the singling up of all lines. Consequently, it eludes the unity of tragedy. Pynchon announces this project in his opening pages by inviting a comparison to Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886), published not long before the Chums’ 1893 arrival in Chicago and read onboard by the Chums’ dog, Pugnax. “Its subject,” Lindsay Noseworth reports, “is the inexorably rising tide of World Anarchism, to be found particularly rampant, in fact, at our current destination—a sinister affliction to which I pray we shall suffer no occasion for exposure more immediate than that to be experienced [. . .] safely within the fictional leaves of some book” (6). James’s book indeed takes anarchism as its “subject,” but its form is hardly anarchic. Pynchon’s readers are about to experience not only a book whose subject is anarchism but a book whose form also enacts it—a book that does not “safely” confine it from the real. One would expect Pynchon the playful postmodernist and James the psychological realist to differ in narrative form (James, for instance, would never have created a literate dog). But the point here is to notice how both novels conceive of themselves in relation to dramatic genres. James places his protagonist Hyacinth—an idealist crushed in the pursuit of anarchist dreams—in the role of a tragic hero who suffers a fated reversal of fortune.16 Comparing his creation to Hamlet and King Lear, in his New York preface James writes of his desire to construct a central consciousness to “enable us, as

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readers” to feel ourselves “as participators” in the protagonist’s tragic drama.17 Pynchon, by contrast, writes in a form that is both anarchic and nontragic; it decidedly lacks a single hero, tragic or otherwise. We are not implying that to write in a nontragic mode necessarily produces a celebration of anarchy. We do argue, however, that Pynchon’s anarchic poetics of character prevents the kind of identification and catharsis that are the hallmarks of experiencing a tragic text. But even if a nontragic aesthetics does not necessarily generate anarchy, an evasion of tragic unity may create a space for otherwise unthinkable political formations. Examining “foundations,” Serres catalogs the acts of unifying violence that establish empire. But he concludes his final chapter with a single exception, when “a great multitude together poured wheat into [a river] to found the city”: “No, this is not history. . . . It is what gushes, like a geyser, through a fissure when the king is no longer there, nor the consul, nor the hero, nor the concept, nor any unity—pure multiplicity.”18 In Against the Day, the distribution of narrative attention to a wide cast of characters allows us to read with particular emphasis Serres’s insistence on the absence of a hero and of tragic unity. Pynchon’s novel, as does Serres’s legend of fluid foundation, models a flow that is “all but” unmappable, neither violently unified nor purely chaotic: an outpouring that just manages to cohere into the shape of a habitable space—pluralistic island, cosmopolitan airship, or commodious text—that emerges from a confluence of multiplicities. We contend that an anarchic treatment of characters forms a primary means by which Pynchon’s textual topography resists tragic cartography—resists, in other words, the sentencing of a single character to lead us through a single tragic arc. Over the course of nearly eleven hundred pages, about ten fully developed characters emerge, each of whom holds the narrative point of view for between 50 and 150 pages. The remaining 100 pages are given over to the points of view of about fifty other characters. One way to think about the unusual texture of the book is via Alex Woloch’s study of the nineteenth-century novel, The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Woloch lays out a useful account of the democratic premises of the realist novel and its nevertheless unequal practices: “The realist novel is infused with the sense that any character is a potential hero. . . . Any character can be a protagonist, but only one character is.”19 Pynchon’s text realizes in practice the democratic and potentially anarchic premises of the realist novel, because Against the Day does not winnow its pool of potential heroes down to one. In Pynchon’s novel, any character can indeed become a protagonist, a foregrounded consciousness through whom the narrative is focalized and who is not ultimately subordinated with respect to the centrality of another character. In Against the Day, there is no clear quan-

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titative criterion by which one of the ten “largest” perspectives could be deemed more central than all the rest. There is also no way of telling, on the basis of a character’s first appearance, whether or not he or she will achieve that level of parity with the book’s multiple protagonists (or perhaps “decagonists,” given the singularity protagonist usually implies). In Pynchon’s book, no matter how or when we meet a character, that character can become as major as any other. Cyprian Latewood stands as an exemplary guarantor of Pynchon’s fidelity to this radically democratic poetics of character. “And now there was this Latewood person” (490), the text says nearly halfway through, in one of Pynchon’s most distinctive examples of the unloosening of narrative fate. The novel, as we have seen, commences with an imperative “Now”: “Now single up all lines!” (3). Here, the “And now” that heralds Cyprian’s entry adds a new line, one not present at the initial moment of singling. Cyprian’s subsequent “now” gives the lie to the idea that “all” narrative lines could have been arranged in orderly view since the outset. Though introduced near the midpoint of the novel, in terms that would seem to befit a minor character, Cyprian goes on to occupy about as much space on the narrative map as any of the other ten most “major” characters, none of whom can lay exclusive claim to the title of (elect) protagonist. By narrative law of the traditional realist novel, Cyprian, entering this novel around page 500, ought not have the chance to gain protagonist status. As a character who does, he incarnates the novel’s democratic potential and anarchic possibilities. Cyprian’s rise to prominence is joined by many other reminders that in this novel, apparently minor characters not only potentially merit, but in fact may receive, the kinds of narrative attention that tend to confer major status. We first meet Yashmeen Halfcourt 222 pages into the book “as if she had not been standing a foot away” (222), and Yashmeen does not acquire her own narrative perspective until nearly 250 pages later, with a rise to prominence that coincides with Cyprian’s: she becomes “major” with a high frequency of appearances in the second half of the book. She even ascends, briefly, to a kind of authorial status, as the novel dips briefly into epistolary form with Yashmeen as first-person narrator (748–51).20 But the most relevant corollary here is that even characters who never rack up high page counts may receive richly imagined histories that most authors would lavish only on figures expected to occupy significant spans of narrative space; Pynchon’s anarchist poetics obeys no such hierarchical mapping of authorial care as a function of a character’s ownership of written real estate.21 Vlado Clissan, a “neo-Uskok chap” (810) and one of Yashmeen’s sexual courters, looms large as a briefly experienced perspective; for only a two-page span (860–62), we perceive the world through his

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senses: “Vlado Clissan, aware of a region of silence behind him, risked a glance back” (860). We look back with him, with a sense of his past and of his deep significance to other characters. He may have entered the novel merely via Yashmeen’s orbit, as a minor personage who matters to a major character: “You have eaten my heart” (820), Yashmeen cries. But, with Vlado’s tales of the Uskok hinterlands, “that labyrinth of streams, lakes, coves, and cataracts, each with its narrative,” Pynchon seems to have inserted into Vlado’s character background a landscape whose turbulent plurality of features suggests precisely the kind of attention to small details and multiplicity he expects of his own readers—and does so in terms allied with unmappability. Vlado gives us a world of things and flows, each demanding narrative attention, “arriving,” like Pynchon’s major minor characters, “by surprise from some Beyond we cannot imagine, [. . .] 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?” (819). In essence, Vlado slips into the text and immediately out, leaving neither tracks nor trackable plans; his tales allude to the untold narratives of natural things, to their history beyond what humans could create or mechanize, to their function outside any map of his homeland. A further example of this sort of narrative rupture, where characters dart suddenly into the text, announcing their affiliations, and then just as suddenly out, is that of Ray Ipsow,22 the first minor character to acquire point of view. He reveals himself as a socialist anarchist (32) and vanishes. The narration from Ray’s perspective intrudes as the first subjective interruption of the Chums’ narrative. Up until this point, we may have thought that we were commencing to read a book more or less about the Chums of Chance.23 With this early intrusion of Ray’s subjectivity, we may momentarily wonder whether the book will become Ray’s, or whether he will be sharing the spotlight with the Chums. As it turns out, neither of these possible books will eventuate. Against the Day is not the kind of book in which the reader is introduced to the principals in an early chapter, after which, by mutual implied contract, the author and reader must follow their story until the novel’s close; in Against the Day, there is no way to know where to place your bets on who will become (relatively) major or importantly minor, no sure way to invest your identification. Rather, the text invites a distribution of care to a number of characters, characters like Ray Ipsow and Vlado Clissan, who, notably, on the level of signifying content, fly the banners of anarchism and unmappability while also enacting these principles at the level of form. The early reviews supply a valuable diagnosis of how this book works upon a reader with perhaps just enough time to get through the text once—as well as a suggestion about Pynchon’s evasion of tragic form.

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Louis Menand testifies to the overwhelming experience of reading Against the Day: “The text exceeds our ability to keep everything in our heads, to take it all in at once. There is too much going on among too many characters in too many places. . . . This was all surely part of the intention, a simulation of the disorienting overload of modern culture.”24 But what if the text, in its flow of spatially dispersed characters, is modeling something more particular: an anarchist alternative—one that might be discerned through a provisional kind of map, one that would account for textual features that we might not be able to keep in our heads? Complementing Menand’s account of how the excessive number of characters defies our cognitive capacity, Laura Miller’s review indicates how the book’s treatment of characters disappoints a very particular generic expectation: “This is the stuff of tragedy, but since the people it sort of happens to are flimsy constructions, we don’t experience it as tragic.”25 One can understand such objections, but we nevertheless assert what is more true of Against the Day: there is no single main character, flimsy or otherwise, and that central absence interferes with the reader’s identification and catharsis. There is no tragic hero with whom to identify, so we do not “experience it as tragic.” Menand offers this plot summary with summary judgment: “This is the plot: An anarchist named Webb Traverse, who employs dynamite as a weapon against the mining and railroad interests out West, is killed by two gunmen. . . . Traverse’s sons . . . set out to avenge their father’s murder. . . . Of course, there are a zillion other things going on in Against the Day, but the Traverse-family revenge drama is the only one that resembles a plot—that is, in Aristotle’s helpful definition, an action that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The rest of the novel is shapeless.”26 Even that revenge plot fizzles, frustrating audiences who have expectations founded on dramatic form. Around page 400 Frank Traverse stumbles across and reflexively shoots one of the gunmen in a bar. In a three-sentence paragraph that concludes the chapter, Frank reflects on the value of the payback: “This had been so quick, even, you could say, easy. You could. He would soon begin to understand how it all might turn, was already, well before he had the godforsaken little town at his back, turning, to regret” (396). Instead of seeking revenge in an organized way, the Traverse brothers simply drift all over the map, further loosening what— in a more conventional novel—would have been their fate of vengeance. In the remaining seven hundred pages, none of the Traverse brothers finds and kills the primary gunman; in fact, they stop seeking him. The action of the revenge drama essentially ends on that note of anticlimax and “regret.” But still, regret remains distinct from tragedy. Pynchon’s fascination with the genre of revenge tragedy—and its durable continuity from The Spanish Tragedy to westerns and films noir—pervades The Crying

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of Lot 49, in which he playfully lumps together Jacobean playwrights, film directors, and the author of The Courier’s Tragedy: “Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger.”27 Against the Day revisits these overlaid genres, as the problem of the Traverse family replays the revenge tragedy premise of Hamlet (with the variations that their sister, rather than their mother, is sleeping with their father’s killer, and that three potential Hamlet Jr.’s are loosed upon the world). Here, Pynchon gives us Hamlet as a western gunslinger tale that fails to deliver as a revenger’s tragedy. Against the Day is a High Plains Drifter more true to that title than the film itself is: for the Traverses, no final payback, only drift. Pynchon offers a further meditation on the nature of tragedy in such an unwieldy plot by introducing Melpómene, a woman who shares the name of the muse of tragedy. Frank encounters her near the end of the book. She introduces Frank to a tree of luminous beetles, “flashing brightly and then going dark, over and over, all in perfect unison” (991). Gazing at this spectacle, which appears to him as a “vast city” at night, Frank ponders the question “How is it that they all go off and on at once?” Melpómene offers, as an analogous demonstration, that she knows, at this instant, of a “disturbance” about to transpire in a town fifteen miles distant. Though this knowledge appears as a kind of mysterious telepathy, we also learn, contextually, of “resentments expressed regularly” in the region (992). Frank himself gains access to this kind of knowledge, as he experiences a vision of the basis for this regularity: “He found himself in a part of the City where savagery prevailed and mercy was unknown” (993). In the absence of mercy, the cycles of vengeance determine a uniform tempo. This is the music of tragedy. Anarchism gives us a different music: this music is not submitted to the order of Melpómene, “the one who is melodious,” the Muse of singing who became the muse of tragedy. Rather, as does the music of the book, it escapes the fatal order of “catastrophic payback” (782) in favor of the improvisational coherence of anarchic “Jass” (370). Pynchon’s art reverses the terms of Nietzsche’s title The Birth of Tragedy From the Spirit of Music: in Against the Day, tragic mapping is replaced by anarchic harmony: When Reef brought the drinks back, the table was deep in a discussion of Anarchist theory. “Your own Benjamin Tucker wrote of the Land League [. . .] in such glowing terms—the closest the world has ever come to perfect Anarchist organization.” “Were the phrase not self-contradictory,” commented “Dope” Breedlove. “Yet I’ve noticed the same thing when your band plays—the most amazing social coherence, as if you all shared the same brain.” “Sure,” agreed “Dope,” “but you can’t call that organization.” “What do you call it?” “Jass.” (370)

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Here, Pynchon’s fiction turns to art—specifically jazz—for a model of anarchic order: intimations of an anarchist miracle are sensed through aesthetic experience. In an earlier intimation of anarchist redemption, one revisited and revised in Against the Day, the Deaf-Mute Ball in Lot 49 offers the image of bodies dancing, mysteriously without collisions, to “some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once [. . .] Jesús Arrabal would have called it an anarchist miracle.”28 Against the Day presents revised models for anarchist possibility, similarly peaceful, but less silent, less smooth, and hence less mysterious. The anarchist alternative, without mystification, simply changes the rules of the game, as in “Anarchists’ Golf, a craze currently sweeping the civilized world, in which there was no fixed sequence—in fact, no fixed number—of holes, with distances flexible as well [. . .]. Parties were likely to [. . .] just go and whack balls at any time and in any direction they liked. Folks were constantly being beaned by approach shots barreling in from unexpected quarters. ‘This is kind of fun,’ Reef said, as an ancient brambled guttie went whizzing by, centimeters from his ear” (934). Unlike the anarchist miracle of the Deaf-Mute Ball, this unmapped terrain of flexible distances, a golf course without fixed fairways, is not a world mysteriously without collisions. Rather, it is a world in which the rule of reciprocal violence has been suspended: collisions do not lead inevitably to reprisals.29 The realization of harmonious anarchy, epitomized in Reef’s experience of this unmapped game of golf, requires suspension of the principle that drives the unity of tragic revenge action. Perhaps what is called for is a kind of conversion, a reversal—though not the fate-governed “reversal” spoken of in tragic dramaturgy—that Against the Day does not hesitate to term “a step toward salvation” (778). On a large scale, such steps might lead away from the ultimate escalation of reciprocal violence, the hell of war between nations. In Against the Day, Pynchon chronicles a moment in history when the harmonious cataclysm of anarchism seemed just on the verge of pouring out to work its blurring way across the map of nations—but when, tragically, world war was mobilized against it. Responding to Yashmeen’s query as to why anarchists should care about the “miserable incestuous stew of kings and Cæsars”—“why not let them have their war?”—Ratty McHugh explains why “Anarchists would be the biggest losers”: “Anarchism now is the idea that has seized hearts everywhere, some form of it will come to envelop every centrally governed society [. . .]. If a nation wants to preserve itself, what other steps can it take, but mobilize and go to war? [. . .] The national idea depends on war. A general European war, with every striking worker a traitor, flags threatened, the sacred soils of homelands defiled, would be just the ticket to wipe Anarchism off the political map” (938). What would it mean to wipe anarchism off the map?

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The formulation appears paradoxical. Here, anarchism figures as a threat to the national idea. As such, the image of an anarchism that would, like a rolling cloud or seeping fluid, “envelop” society corresponds to a map in which national borders have begun to fade from view, just as the concept of nation-state that underwrites them loses credibility. To wipe out anarchism would thus be to halt an impending erasure, to stem a tide that could cause the ink to run. The war would wipe the map clean of internationalist anarchism’s obscuring specter, restoring national boundary lines to a state of sharp relief. In this scenario, the scapegoating of anarchists serves as both a means for and an end to this violence, to drive anarchism from the hearts of the people and from the map of the world. This, in no uncertain terms, would be the ultimate state of preterition. At the end of the novel, the Chums have flown away from the preterition of their overmapped, overnarrated mission. In a late illustration of the Chums’ association with the novel’s loosening of fate, a pilgrim seeking the city of Compassion encounters an airship piloted by the Chums of Chance: he is “taken aloft and on to an uncertain fate” (787). To be taken aloft is therefore to escape the closed fate implied by mapping; to escape fate is to escape preterition; to escape preterition is to fly toward grace. The novel’s final paragraph returns to this airship’s trajectory, its hopeful escape from the certainty of tragic fate: “For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard Inconvenience has yet observed any sign of this. They know—Miles is certain—it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace” (1085). The language of this paragraph is, like Miles and like anarchism, paradoxically certain of its uncertainty. This uncertainty is partly composed of a simile that figures bad weather that is invisible (and therefore unmappable) with “good [. . .] uncompensated,” a phrase that invokes the miraculous. The word soon is a temporal term that can be acknowledged but remains inexact. This uncertain temporality is in stark contrast to the book’s opening word, Now, and its connotations of a definite, preterite, time; this is why the vision of a falling pressure gauge is metaphorically apt: one cannot move toward the uncertain terrain of grace with maps and mechanical meters. The wind will “turn.” The Chums of Chance have been playing by the rules of a mappable fiction for the length of their existence and have finally found the awareness to deconstruct the boys’ narratives to which they were sentenced and move toward the miraculous freedom of textual possibility. To begin flight, they had to realize that their own fiction was a fiction.30 Likewise,

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a reader looking for a map of Against the Day will be fooled, whereas a reader attempting to make one may be rewarded.31 The Chums of Chance have, in other words, gone off the map, but they have done so only by becoming merciful themselves, and mercy is a “good unsought and uncompensated.” Like Against the Day, it cannot be mapped or anticipated. The vision through the Chums’ smoked goggles will never be clear, but at least they will be flying in the right direction. NOTES 1. Against the Day quickly establishes a link between anarchism and a disrespect for state mapping. The anarchist Veikko, a veteran of the strike in Cripple Creek who has been exiled from Colorado, muses, along with some Apache friends, on the absurd delineations of states: “Somebody brought out an old geography schoolbook with a map of the state in it, including their own reservation boundaries, which showed Colorado as a rectangle, seven degrees of longitude wide by four degrees of latitude high—four straight lines on paper made up the borders Veikko had been forbidden to cross—not like there were rivers or ridgelines where the militia might lie in wait to shoot at him the minute he stepped over—from which he reasoned that, if exile from Colorado was that abstract, then as long as he stayed off the roads, he could come back into the state anytime and just keep soldiering on same as before” (83). 2. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 701. 3. Quoted in Ricardo Padrón, “Mapping Imaginary Worlds,” 267. 4. Robert Karrow, “Introduction,” 7. 5. In “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” J. B. Harley argues that maps structure the world in a manner that is “biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social relations” (53). Harley further articulates the consensus position that “as much as guns and warships, maps have been the weapons of imperialism” (57). 6. The idea of writing or mapmaking as a record of pursuit is related to the idea of history’s being written by its victors and conquerors: in other words, prey are hardly able to write the map that becomes record. See Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked for its elegant descriptions of the binary between “marked” and “unmarked” in identity and visibility politics. Phelan writes of the “unmarked” as that which “shows itself through the negative and through disappearance” (19). In terms of our argument, the hunters are the ones who mark the territory, while the unmarked prey internalize the map and strategically disappear. 7. In Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity, Peta Mitchell notes (with acknowledgment of Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900) that “the linearity of the Western geographical imagination was matched only by the narratives of colonial romances” (60); as we will be suggesting, Against the Day arrays its narrative multiplicities against such projects of pursuit and capture. 8. In “On and Off the Map,” Lucy Lippard comments upon several recent instances of such on-the-ground mappings (75–82).

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9. Brian McHale, in his essay in this volume, also highlights the uniqueness of the intrusive Chums narrator who greets us in the opening pages. In terms of McHale’s compelling insight, that Pynchon serially adopts the mannerisms of genres whose moments of popular prominence correspond to the eras of the novel’s storyworld, we might say that the Chums gain increasing autonomy as they survive into eras no longer synchronized with their places in literary history; these characters live more freely in periods when their genre of origin is being supplanted by conventions whose authority they do not recognize. 10. The shift to present tense is punctuated by a birth, the prospect of a new generation and an acknowledgment of a change in life status for the Chums, if not an intimation of mortality itself. For further discussion of the Chums’ dilemmas over their agelessness, see Inger H. Dalsgaard’s essay in this volume. 11. In the Chums’ ship-as-city, Cyprian’s real-time, on-the-ground mapping goes fully mobile. The ground itself goes airborne, as the Chums in a sense carry their land around with them—their “land” is always on the move, and so it would not stay fixed on any hypothetical map. 12. See Amy J. Elias’s essay in this volume for an account of pilgrimage as fluid but directed, potentially nonhierarchical, and oriented spiritually toward the future. 13. Our formal attention to the question of anarchism in Against the Day does not mean to suggest that Pynchon treats this concept ahistorically; Graham Benton’s ethically judicious contribution to this volume offers a full treatment of anarchism’s historical and political dimensions in the text. Amy J. Elias’s contribution highlights Pynchon’s refusal to separate spiritual questing from anarchistic politics. And both Elias and Benton attend to corresponding formal properties of the novel, with Benton identifying an anarchist aesthetic, and Elias felicitously pointing to a non-Aristotelian plot pattern. Prior engagements with the question of the Pynchonian unmappable include David Cruz Acevedo’s “Images of the Uncertainty” and José Liste Noya’s “Mapping the ‘Unmappable.’” Prior considerations of the tragic mode in Pynchon’s work include Thomas Schaub’s “Nietzsche and Gravity’s Rainbow” and Bruce Janoff’s “Black Humor: Beyond Satire.” We argue that Against the Day perspicuously synthesizes these concerns, aligning the unmappable with anarchy, and against tragedy. And whereas Janoff groups Pynchon with Kurt Vonnegut as fusing the Aristotelian polarities of comedy and tragedy, with a vision predicated on overwhelming despair, we find that Against the Day forms an antitragic articulation of hope. 14. Michel Serres, Rome, 280. 15. Ibid. 16. Critics of varying ideological persuasions have consistently reckoned with James’s novel via the category of tragedy. For a recent synthesis, see Julian Markels, “‘Socialism Anxiety.’” 17. Henry James, Literary Criticism, 1088. For James, moreover, the identification with the tragic hero occurs within an economy that subordinates attention to minor characters, who are created as inferior and thus less worthy of “our sympathy.” “We care,” James theorizes, “comparatively little for what happens to the stupid,” and “Hamlet and Lear are surrounded, amid their complications, by the stupid and the blind” (1088–89). From this perspective, the fact that a tragic hero

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fails to emerge in Against the Day depends upon a failure to subordinate care for characters that a tragedian would create and treat as minor. Dramaturgically, the problem does not result from the absence of a sympathetic character but rather from the excess of candidates for sympathy. 18. Serres, Rome, 280–81. 19. Alex Woloch, The One vs. The Many, 31. 20. Another inclusion of a character’s written first-person narration appears through the journal of Fleetwood Vibe, 138–46. 21. Here, as Louis Menand observes, “Elaborately imagined characters” may “pop up and disappear after a few pages.” See “Do the Math,” n.p. 22. The Pynchon Wiki makes the connection between Ray Ipsow and the Latin re ipso, “the thing itself.” See “Page 29,” http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki. com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_26-56#Page_29 (accessed September 1, 2009). 23. The Chums portion of the narrative itself differs in texture from the other relatively “major” perspectives, in that it is more characterized by passages of objective third person, much less frequently inhabiting the internal lives of its principal actors. 24. See Menand, “Do the Math,” n.p. 25. Laura Miller, “Fall of the House of Pynchon,” n.p. 26. See Menand, “Do the Math,” n.p. 27. Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49, 84. McHale’s essay in this volume similarly notes the conspicuously anticlimactic terminations of Against the Day’s gunfighter episodes, reading this gesture as a revisionist handling of the dime-novel western. Without disputing the historical specificity of that generic intervention, we would note that the revisionism is simultaneously legible as an ethical critique of the tragic revenger’s plot that typically underlies the western genre. 28. Ibid., 131–32. Though mysterious, the realization of this miracle is not, perhaps, entirely inexplicable. One could underscore the recurrence of the word consensus and especially the phrase “the soul’s latent talent for consensus,” from Arrabal’s Lot 49 discourse on the anarchist miracle (131–32). 29. Against the Day also portrays an incomplete version of such a world in the vignette of the “community founded on vengeance suspended” (970). But the vengeance, in this case, is suspended simply because the ostensible “targets of blood-feud revenge” remove themselves to a compound beyond the reach of the would-be avengers. The practical effect is undeniable, halting the cyclical operations of violent reprisal, but one might still view this solution as the unconverted version. In Vineland, another anticipation of the revenge problem appears in the form of the Thanatoids, fully embodied “ghosts”: “They were victims [. . .] of karmic imbalances—unanswered blows, unredeemed suffering, escapes by the guilty—anything that frustrated their daily expeditions on into the interior of Death, with Shade Creek, a psychic jumping-off town—behind it, unrolling, regions unmapped dwelt in by these transient souls in constant turnover, not living but persisting, on the skimpiest of hopes.” See Pynchon, Vineland, 173. Here “unmapped” space corresponds to a state of suspended vengeance. Of their emotions Pynchon writes, “Among these the most common by far was resentment, constrained as Thanatoids were by history and by rules of imbalance and restoration to feel little else beyond their needs for revenge” (171). One might think of them

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as prequels (as Vineland is to Against the Day) of Kit, Frank, and Reef, needing diversion from the path of revengeful thinking. 30. For a discussion of this reflexive awareness in Pynchon’s fiction, theorized with respect to the Lacanian principle that language is forever beside the referent, see Hanjo Berressem, Pynchon’s Poetics, 24. 31. McHale’s essay in this volume models the richness of such rewards, ultimately reading Pynchon as a cognitive cartographer whose keen historicity calls upon us to become mappers of genre.

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4

S Binocular Disparity and Pynchon’s Panoramic Paradigm Justin St. Clair

According to the design philosophy of the day, between the observer at the center of the panorama and the cylindrical wall on which the scene was projected lay a zone of dual nature, wherein must be correctly arranged a number of “real objects” appropriate to the setting—chairs and desks, Doric columns whole and damaged—though these could not be termed entirely real, rather part “real” and part “pictorial,” or let us say “fictional,” this assortment of hybrid objects being designed to “gradually blend in” with distance until the curving wall and a final condition of pure image. —Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (633–34)

REMEDIATION

W

hatever dissimilarities one finds in comparing Against the Day to Pynchon’s other books, there is no denying that, at the very least, this novel is another adventure in encyclopedic erudition. It should provoke little surprise, then, that tucked in amid the thousand-odd pages, several hundred characters, and countless fictional, factual, and factitious particulars, a bygone artistic medium makes a cameo appearance. Some six hundred pages in, Kit Traverse finds himself in Germany and pays a 67

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visit to the Museum der Monstrositäten, a sort of dumping ground for obsolete mathematical curiosities. Among the museum’s offerings are several panoramas, realistically rendered 360-degree paintings augmented (as the epigraph suggests) by carefully placed three-dimensional props. In a novel overflowing with historical detritus, a reader could certainly be forgiven for overlooking the entire episode. To do so, however, would be shortsighted, for there is more at stake in this fleeting vignette than a cursory glance might suggest. In fact, reading the novel “panoramically” offers us a new, wide-ranging model for understanding Pynchon’s method of characterization throughout his oeuvre while also neatly synthesizing his interests in immersive technologies, in drug-induced hallucinations, and in the remediation of outdated media forms. In their groundbreaking theorization of new media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that so-called new media are not altogether new—rather, in keeping with centuries of technological tradition, emergent digital technologies merely “remediate” older media forms. For Bolter and Grusin, remediation is simply “the representation of one medium in another,”1 and thus, under their definition, the appearance of a panorama within a novel, for example, would qualify as an act of “remediation.” Such recycling, they theorize, has twin, seemingly contradictory logics: the logic of immediacy and the logic of hypermediacy. The logic of immediacy, they note, reflects our demand for transparency. In other words, media forms borrow techniques of presentation from other media when those techniques succeed in making the audience feel that the experience is unmediated, that the apparatus of presentation has melted away, leaving the audience “right there” or “part of the action.” The logic of hypermediacy, meanwhile, slakes our appetite for artifice. In order to address this impulse, media forms borrow techniques of presentation from other media when those techniques explicitly call attention to the act of mediation.2 Hypermediacy, therefore, allows the audience to delight in the recognition that their experience is in fact mediated, while it reminds them of their desire for immediacy. In many respects, this is the same contradictory duality upon which magicians depend: we demand to be astonished by a trick, even as we attempt to understand how it functions (and this despite the fact that our astonishment lasts only so long as we remain in ignorance of the trick’s design). While Bolter and Grusin are mainly interested in the applicability of remediation to computer graphic design, the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and so forth, their formulations offer literary critics a particularly incisive approach to contemporary fiction, for in an effort to remain relevant in our increasingly media-saturated world, the novel remediates furiously.3 This essay argues that Against the Day has remediated the panorama, not merely representationally (that is, through the inclusion of a fictional

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panorama) but in the very logic of its presentation. That this particular novel would employ the twin logics of remediation should not be surprising: Against the Day is incessantly twinning, copying, replicating, doubling, and redoubling. From the recurring references to the optical properties of Iceland Spar to the inclusion of a paramorphoscope, a fictional device that “reveals worlds [. . .] set to the side of the one we have” (249) accepted, Against the Day insists upon double vision. Even the cover of the first edition emphasizes the novel’s obsession with doubling: if one peers behind the foregrounded typeface, another pair of fonts, doubly refracted, lurks in the background. While a comprehensive study of this replicating impulse is beyond the scope of this essay, the argument that follows will place explicit focus on the proliferation of paired characters within the novel. Against the Day does not merely refuse to present psychologically complex characters in the realist tradition; instead, it offers an alternative mode of characterization, and one that is best understood as a function of the novel’s panoramic paradigm. However, before endeavoring to characterize this presentational logic or discuss its larger implications, we must first consider the panorama as an artistic medium, particularly given that the once-popular form has all but disappeared from our collective consciousness.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PANORAMA In the popular imagination, the word panorama exists as little more than a dead metaphor. Contemporary usage—that is, “[a] complete and comprehensive survey or presentation of a subject” or “an unbroken view of the whole region surrounding an observer,” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it—did not predate the arrival of panoramic painting but rather arose in the wake of the medium’s success.4 Panorama, in fact, entered the English language as a neologism in the later decades of the 1700s—“an artificial, technical term,” in the words of Stephan Oettermann, “created for a specific form of landscape painting which reproduced a 360-degree view.”5 That the metaphoric usage of the word panorama persists is not surprising; that it is all but dead, however, is a bit strange, for the panorama, as Oettermann argues in his definitive cultural history, “represents the first true visual ‘mass medium.’”6 The Irishman Robert Barker is usually credited with being the so-called inventor of the panorama, for which he received a patent in 1787. His initial efforts met with some difficulties, but by 1793 Barker had built the first permanent panorama rotunda just off Leicester Square in London.7 Barker’s first exhibition in the new rotunda, Grand Fleet at Spithead in 1791, was a roaring success among all echelons of society and even numbered the royal family among its many visitors.8

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Early panoramas were singular events, popular for their novelty as much as anything else. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, an entire artistic industry emerged, and the circulating exhibitions drew from all segments of society.9 It took a team of artists around one year, on average, to produce a panorama, from the beginnings of preparation to completion.10 While one panorama was exhibited, its successor was readied off-site. On average, a panoramic exhibition lasted a few months, Oettermann notes: “Then it was dismantled and— like today’s successful musicals—sent to tour the provinces.”11 By the end of the nineteenth century, the panorama was arguably one of the dominant mass media—both in the United States and in Europe—as millions made their way to specially designed rotundas to partake in the spectacle.12 The twentieth century, however, ushered in the era of film, and long before video killed the radio star, film did away with the panorama. How did this now defunct medium work? Figure 4.1 depicts a typical panoramic exhibition. The streetside entryway (A) usually contained a box office, much in the same fashion as the theaters of the period or the cinemas of today. Entering the rotunda, patrons were ushered into a darkened subterranean corridor (B), which led to the center of the edifice. Their entire sensory experience carefully controlled, visitors were then “turned in circles like . . . blind-folded child[ren] about to play a game at a birthday party,” as they ascended a spiral staircase to the viewing platform (C).13 These disorienting funhouse techniques helped to intensify the illusion, and when patrons emerged onto the viewing platform, the sensation was unsettling, to say the least.14 While the canvas (E) stretched a full 360 degrees around the rotunda, the observer’s angle of vision (D) was limited in part by an umbrella-shaped canopy suspended overhead. This well-placed blind obscured not only the top of the canvas but also the rotunda’s skylights, which provided uniform, natural lighting over the entire surface of the painting. Between the viewer and the canvas, meanwhile, was an elaborate “false terrain” (F and G)—a collection of “three-dimensional objects, figures, and cutouts” carefully arranged in order to hide the bottom of the canvas and “to disguise the transition from the three-dimensional world to the two-dimensional painting.”15 The false terrain (which Pynchon refers to as the zone of dual nature in the epigraph) may well be the panoramic medium’s key element, for as the celebrated panoramist Anton von Werner notes, “the natural, sculptural foreground of grass, earth, rocks, weapons and the like, imperceptibly blending into the painted foreground, achieved a pretense of reality in a fashion unattainable for paintings in exhibits and other environments.”16

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Figure 4.1. Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone, 1997), 50.

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THE CHARACTER OF REALISM If the panorama was the nineteenth century’s dominant visual mass medium, then certainly realism was its dominant literary mode. The two share more than one might expect, particularly when we consider that both seek to immerse their audience in verisimilar environments. While the panorama, however, has faded from the popular consciousness, realism maintains its hold on our popular fictions, prompting Søren Pold to open his essay “Panoramic Realism” with a simple question: “Is realism up-to-date?”17 The answer, of course, depends on one’s perspective. For his part, Pold attempts to demonstrate that realism, “reconsidered in our contemporary media saturated age,” can “help us formulate literary answers to the challenges by new media.”18 In a consideration of two Balzac novels—Ferragus (1833) and Le Père Goriot (1835)—Pold deftly argues that the French realist remediates the panorama (apparently unfamiliar with Bolter and Grusin, Pold employs different terminology). Nevertheless, Pold’s construction coincides seamlessly with Bolter and Grusin’s: he even goes so far as to note the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy operating within Balzac’s fiction: At the same time as he depicts this new panoramic city, Balzac uses panoramic techniques to build his literary “Paris.” In the same gesture of turning the city space into a novel, he outlines a novelistic space; he constructs a multi-topical spatial work with an inherent poly-dimensionality. A work which, just as the panorama, oscillates between representation and simulation, but where the panorama aims to hide its artificiality and construction, Balzac is at the same time showing and reflecting this new mediated mode of representation, even to the point of being satirical and ironic. . . . And as a reader one becomes just as absorbed in this literary panorama as contemporary spectators did in the Parisian panoramas.19

Just as Bolter and Grusin do, Pold shows that remediation simultaneously entails both a retrofitting of successful immersive techniques (that is, Balzac’s literary panoramas absorb the audience by making use of proven representational devices on loan from the visual medium) and a repurposing of recognizable extraneous elements (that is, Balzac’s literary panoramas reward a media-savvy audience by obviously including and reflecting upon the panoramic form itself). Balzac’s assimilation of cutting-edge media technology (which the panorama was in the early nineteenth century) allows Pold to conclude that “realism is not a naïve mode of writing belonging to pre-modern society, as has often been maintained by shifting avant-garde movements,” but “on the contrary, it presents an up-to-date, critical mode in literature’s engagement in our increasingly complex media society.”20 “Furthermore,” he continues, “such a rereading of realism in the light of the development of modern visual media suggests that new media should not [simply] be

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considered as a threat to or a replacement of literature.”21 Despite the fact that an ironic reflection on a “mediated mode of representation” seems a bit afield of conventional constructions of realism, Pold’s apologia is convincing. Perhaps champions of various “experimental” modes of fiction do, on occasion, fail to acknowledge the breadth and potential of realist conventions. Still, while Pold compellingly investigates the spatial implication of Balzac’s remediation, he gives short shrift to the most—pardon the pun—characteristic component of realist fiction. The character of realism is the development of character, and as realism’s detractors would be quick to note, an overemphasis on conventions of characterization can occur at the expense and to the detriment of many other fictional endeavors. Whatever Pynchon may owe to Balzac, he certainly belongs to the “shifting avant-garde,” as Pold puts it, and when his fiction is under formal attack, “character” is usually one of the first categories trotted out. Some readers and critics, it seems, continue to demand “round” characters and reject “flat” characters as inherently flawed, even while many postmodern practitioners evince little interest in realist conventions of character development.22 Against the Day is no exception. Upon its publication, the novel met with mixed reviews, and several of the most critical directed dissatisfaction at Pynchon’s peculiar dramatis personae. Laura Miller, for example, writing in Salon, complains that Pynchon’s characters are “flimsy constructions” and that Against the Day is not “populate[d] . . . with believable people.” “It’s not quite enough,” she complains, “to sketch . . . characters without trying to make them breathe.”23 In the New Republic, James Wood describes the novel as “situational rather than characterological” and decries “the boredom that always attends upon cartoonish, inauthentic novelistic activity.”24 These sentiments are echoed by the New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, who dismisses Pynchon’s characters as “little more than stick figure cartoons.”25 Those who complain of the flatness of the characterization in Against the Day, however, fail to acknowledge that Pynchon’s fiction rejects fundamental notions of psychological realism outright.26 After all, this is a novel in which—on the fifth page—we find a dog reading Henry James. Despite a lack of interest in constructing psychologically complex characters in the realist tradition, however, Pynchon does not dismiss the notion of characterization altogether. While few, if any, of the characters in Against the Day are complete with rich interior lives, the care with which they have been constructed becomes apparent when they are approached as a feature of Pynchon’s remediation of the panorama.27

BINOCULAR DISPARITY In Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, Oliver Grau argues that the golden age of the panorama was informed—and even occasioned—by advances in

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the field of physiological psychology.28 In particular, he cites the pioneering work of Hermann von Helmholtz, whose oft-reprinted 1871 lecture “On the Relation of Optics to Painting” offers scientific insight into the world of artistic reception. Helmholtz notes that humans “see the world with two eyes, which occupy somewhat different positions in space, and which therefore show two different perspective views of objects before us. This difference of the images of the two eyes forms one of the most important means of estimating the distance of objects from our eye, and of estimating depth.”29 Helmholtz is quick to point out that this phenomenon—known as binocular disparity—presents something of a problem for artists working with two-dimensional media. “This is what is wanting to the painter, or even turns against him,” he offers, “since in binocular vision the picture distinctly forces itself on our perception as a plane surface.”30 A panoramic exhibition, however, surrounds the viewer in three dimensions. Not only does it make use of binocular disparity, but the very functioning of the illusion depends upon the phenomenon. As we assess a three-dimensional space, our brain processes the disparity between the image our left eye delivers and the image our right delivers; our brain then renders a unified, three-dimensional composite. At close range, this is an extremely effective method for assessing depth; as the distance between the observer and the object observed increases, however, binocular disparity quickly becomes irrelevant. Our eyes are too close set for binocular disparity to be of any use at distances in excess of approximately twelve meters.31 The panoramic illusion exploits this physiological phenomenon, in part by restricting the viewers’ ability to approach the painted canvas. The false terrain, meanwhile, which occupies the space between the viewing platform and the canvas, is populated with bona fide three-dimensional items. Given, however, that the false terrain extends beyond the distance at which binocular disparity proves useful, we are unable to ascertain where the three-dimensional false terrain ends and where the two-dimensional painting begins.32 This, in short, is the scientific basis for the efficacy of the panoramic illusion: the objects within the zone of dual nature appear to “gradually blend in” (to borrow Pynchon’s phrase) at the distance where binocular disparity ceases to provide meaningful depth data. To return for a brief moment to Bolter and Grusin’s idea of remediation, it is the hypermediacy half of their immediacy/hypermediacy pairing that emphasizes the surface. In all its various forms, the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a “real” space that lies beyond mediation. . . . What characterizes modern art is an insistence that the viewer keep coming back to the surface or, in extreme cases, an attempt to hold the viewer at the surface indefinitely. In the logic of hypermediacy,

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the artist (or multimedia programmer or web designer) strives to make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in that acknowledgement. She does so by multiplying spaces and media and by repeatedly redefining the visual and conceptual relationships among mediated spaces—relationships that may range from simple juxtaposition to complete absorption.33

This, I would argue, is Pynchon’s technique in Against the Day. Rather than generating depth by creating so-called round characters, as, say, Henry James did, through intricate investigations into the fictional psyches of individual characters, Pynchon generates depth by juxtaposing “flat” characters in pairs, relying on the reader to process the disparity between the two images. Thus, when Miller and Kakutani complain that Pynchon’s characters are “flimsy constructions” and “stick figure cartoons,” they are technically correct, but confused all the same. Clues to this alternate character paradigm are sprinkled throughout the novel. One of the novel’s early pairs is Professor Edward Morley and Charles “Blinky” Morgan—two ultimately minor figures who are, by conventional standards, entirely unrelated. A third character, however, gets “the idea in his head” that Morley and Morgan are “connected”—that they are “different utterances of the same principle” (61). This unconventional reading receives a derisive response within the world of the novel. “This is primitive hoodoo,” another character exclaims. “You might as well head for the deep jungle and talk this over with the trees, for in this town that kind of thinking won’t go, nosir not at all” (61). The narrator, however, is not so dismissive and goes so far as to reference binocular disparity directly, noting how “each of Blinky’s eyes [. . .] saw the world differently” (61). Ultimately, the Morley/Morgan episode, coupled with the narrator’s explicit attention to binocular disparity, serves as something of an embedded reading guide, a model for readers to follow as they assess Pynchon’s binary ciphers. Readers who heed the suggested approach have a multitude of characters upon which to practice their craft. Sloat and Deuce, Frank and Reef, Tesla and Vanderjuice, the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly and the Kieselguhr Kid, the two Estrellas, Nigel and Neville, Misha and Grisha—a list of explicitly paired characters in Against the Day, some significant, others obscure, would fill the better part of a page. While a number of these pairings become apparent only after careful consideration, others, such as the palindromically linked Werfner and Renfrew, allow space for metacommentary on the novel’s binocular technique. At one point Renfrew advises, “Best procedure [. . .] 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” (689). Indeed. A reader who does try to consider

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these characters singly will either begin to run around the room screaming or quickly capitulate. Perhaps the single most significant pairing in the novel is that of Scarsdale Vibe, the novel’s central “evil capitalist” caricature, and his double, Foley Walker. During the U.S. Civil War, Scarsdale Vibe hires Foley Walker as his paid substitute, and Walker takes a nonfatal bullet to the temple. Years later, Walker starts hearing voices telling him to buy Standard Oil stock, and he tracks down Vibe to pass along the “communications” (101). The two soon become inseparable—indistinguishable even—and their partnership lasts the majority of the novel, until, that is, Walker becomes a “born-again Christer,” accosts Vibe, and guns him down in the street (1004). Separately, Scarsdale Vibe and Foley Walker are flat, cartoonish figures. Taken together, however, they are a complicated, three-dimensional construct situated at the intersection of politics, economics, and religion. And that, precisely, is the payoff of remediating the panorama: by borrowing the physiologic of a bygone artistic trick, Pynchon offers an alternative to realist characterization and simultaneously reframes the novel’s developmental logic, from that of individual interiority to something organically corporate. “Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what’s the next step—human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood—a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is” (147–48). Thus, readers who triangulate characters to plumb the novel’s depths quickly fathom that the compound organism of Vibe and Walker is indeed a prototypical corporation—a rudimentary rendering of the capitalist construct destined to supplant even the myth of the individual industrialist. The Vibe/Walker corporation, moreover, exposes the political reality of corporate citizenship: as two-dimensional doppelgängers acting jointly, they have the rights (or agency) of an individual, but not individual responsibility. A corporation is incorporeal, and blame is diffuse. As the nameless lackey famously puts it in The Grapes of Wrath, “there’s nobody to shoot.”34 As any reader of Against the Day can attest, however, the novel’s obsession with doubles extends far beyond issues of characterization and corporate citizenship. Spaces, places, and even history itself seem to double back and reduplicate. Venice is, perhaps, the site most mirrored in the text—from “Venice of the Arctic” (136) to “Venice of the Low Countries” (531)—but a multitude of other locales have corresponding doppelgängers: Asia has its “Inner Asia” (717), Germany its “Deep Germany” (661), and even New York its own ghostly double, seemingly laid to waste by the “visitor” from the Arctic (149). Moreover, the political themes within

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the novel—from issues of terrorism to anticorporate anarchism—resonate in dual temporalities, as the historical events and their contemporary corollaries offer readers yet another binocular opportunity. Readers who ignore the abundant doublings do so at their own peril, and they may, as does Frank Traverse, find themselves assailed by a parrot: “Ever wonder why they call it Zacatecas, Zacatecas? Or why it’s Guanajuato, Guanajuato?” Frank, fallen by now into the doubtful habit of Conversation with a Parrot, shrugged in irritation. “One’s a city, one’s a state.” “¡Pendejo!” screamed the parrot. “Think! Double refraction! Your favorite optical property! Silver mines, full of espato double-refracting all the time, and not only light rays, naw, uh-uh! Cities, too! People! Parrots! You just keep floating along in the gringo smoke cloud thinking there’s only one of everything, huevón, you don’t see those strange lights all around you. Ay, Chihuahua. In fact, Ay, Chihuahua, Chihuahua. (387)

While this exchange, on the one hand, is little more than a comedic aside (as a bird famed for its powers of repetition attempts to transcend mere repetition by presenting a case for the omnipresence of repetition), it is, on the other hand, yet another example of the novel’s insistence that its constituent elements be evaluated in tandem with one another. In short, I can best summarize Pynchon’s panoramic technique in Against the Day by slightly misappropriating the words of the novel’s mysterious painter, Hunter Penhallow: the book is “like a canvas that gives the illusion of an extra dimension, yet each layer taken by itself is almost transparently shallow” (731).35 To plumb the novel’s depths and escape being subsumed within its panoramic scope, its constituent layers must be recognized as two-dimensional and simultaneously juxtaposed with complementary elements of the larger composition.

HIGH AS A KITE If “hypermediacy expresses itself as multiplicity,”36 as Bolter and Grusin would have it, and if “the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible,”37 then it stands to reason that Pynchon’s remediation of the panorama—as considered here—operates largely according to such logic. As an artistic medium, however, the panorama had as its predominant accomplishment not the remediation of earlier art forms (such as the fresco or the tapestry, although cases could be made for both) but rather the “totality of the image.”38 “The picture and the three-dimensional scenery are focused on and adjusted to the observer with the precision of illusionism,” Grau writes, and as

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the panoramic illusion “also addresses the human subjects on the physiological level, they find themselves both physically and emotionally in the picture.”39 The panorama’s immersive power, then, exemplifies “the logic of immediacy, [which] dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented.”40 Bolter and Grusin, in fact, recognize the panorama as a precursor to the immersive media experience of virtual reality: For enthusiasts, the perfect interface is one in which the user, wearing a head-mounted display, feels as if she has fallen through Alberti’s window41 and into a world of computer graphics. For them the immediacy of virtual reality comes from the illusion of three-dimensional immersion and from the capacity for interaction. In the case of a traditional painting, photograph, or film, the viewer is located beyond the frame, looking in. In the case of such nineteenth-century technologies as the panorama and the stereoscope, the viewer did get some sense of immersion.42

While Bolter and Grusin offer the comparison to highlight the interactivity of virtual reality (a quality that is not an appreciable part of the panoramic experience), their passing observations on the immersive qualities of the panorama both echo work of other media scholars and provide another avenue into Pynchon’s panoramic remediation.43 I would argue that on occasion, rather than exploiting the physiological psychology that occasioned the panoramic illusion, Pynchon remediates the panorama in an effort to represent the immersive effects of pharmacologically altered states. One such episode involves Lew Basnight. In the novel’s second section, we find the detective engaged in counteranarchist activities, investigating the manufacture of explosives. While “in the pleasant little desert oasis of Los Fatzos, handling explosives most of the day,” Lew “must have had his gloves off,” and the chemicals to which he is exposed have a psychotropic effect (182). Somehow the afternoon just drifted on into the dinner hour, and Lew must’ve forgot to wash his hands, because the next thing he knew, he was experiencing the hotel dining room in a range of colors, not to mention cultural references, which had not been there when he came in. The wallpaper in particular presented not a repeating pattern at all but a single view, in the French “panoramic” style, of a land very far away indeed, perhaps not even on our planet as currently understood, in which beings who resembled— though not compellingly—humans went about their lives—in motion, understand—beneath the gigantic looming of a nocturnal city full of towers, domes, and spidery catwalks, themselves edged by an eerie illumination proceeding not entirely from municipal sources. (182)

Clearly, the drug-induced virtual reality in which Basnight finds himself immersed is figured panoramically: the vignette contains a sly allusion to

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the dining room’s newfound “cultural references” followed by unnecessarily placed quotation marks around the word “panoramic”—not to mention the fact that the “eerie illumination” of the otherworldly panorama eerily recreates the otherworldly lighting of terrestrial panoramas, which employed hidden skylights rather than municipal power sources to illuminate their canvases. However, unlike Kit Traverse’s trip to the Museum der Monstrositäten, the reference to the panoramic medium here is much more allusive, and the employment of the device does not call attention to itself in a hypermediating fashion but rather borrows the immersive qualities of the panoramic medium to render immediate Lew’s altered state. A similar episode occurs a bit later in the novel, when Frank Traverse learns the secret of the hikuli cactus from the Tarahumare in Mexico. After parting ways with the tribesmen, Frank rides on alone, cactus “stashed [. . .] in his saddlebag” (394). From time to time, he “would take it out for a nibble,” and, high on the hallucinogenic hikuli, “he became aware that the mountains had become geometrical impersonations of themselves, impossibly pointed and forbidding, no easier to accept than this out-ofscale plain he’d been riding through” (394–95). Again we find a drugaddled character immersed in a panoramic landscape: Frank is situated on a foreshortened viewing plain, virtually immobile, and surrounded by an unapproachable mountainous backdrop. There is a touch of Eco’s “hyperreal” here—the landscape in which Frank is immersed is so gloriously panoramic, so hyperbolically natural, that it almost strikes Frank as unreal.44 While this art-imitating-life-by-imitating-art-imitating-life moment serves to recreate Frank’s immersion within, and the defamiliarizing effects of, his altered consciousness, it also functions as the immediate preamble to the panoramic cantina where he finds—and kills—Sloat Fresno. A Pynchonian parenthetical describes the pulquería as having adobe walls, perpetual 4:00 A.M. gloom, abiding fumes of pulque in the room, no Budweiser Little Big Horn panoramas here, no, instead some crumbling mural of the ancient Aztec foundation story of the eagle and the serpent, here perversely showing the snake coiled around the eagle and about to dispatch it, and posed presentably among that old-time scenery, a number of attractive señoritas with nineteenth-century hairdos and the painter’s idea of Aztec outfits—the walls otherwise undecorated, missing paint in chips and scars from long-ago gunplay or thrown furniture [. . .]. (395)

The crumbling cantina is noteworthy for its pulque and its panorama, and the association between intoxication and panoramic immersion is once again placed at the fore. The cantina’s conspicuously absent Little Big Horn panorama, meanwhile, is an allusion to a late nineteenth-century lithograph titled Custer’s Last Fight. Originally a 9 ½ by 6 ½ foot oil by Cassilly Adams, the painting of the infamous general’s ill-advised final stand

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was copied by F. Otto Becker in 1895 for an Anheuser-Busch advertising campaign. Hundreds of thousands of the resultant lithographs were then distributed to bars, pubs, and saloons, and over the ensuing half-century “millions of parched Americans . . . slaked their thirst and gazed, with diminished sobriety, at [the] harrowing scene.”45 Pynchon’s cantina, however, is not only outside the law but beyond the long arm of AnheuserBusch as well, and while the lithograph and the mural both glorify the unlikely victories of underdogs, they differ significantly. Not only does the mural better approximate the nineteenth-century panoramic form by extending across the walls of the cantina (whereas the Budweiser lithograph was a framed, poster-sized print), but like nineteenth-century panoramas, the cantina’s mural is a singular work of art, in contrast to the mass-produced (and widely distributed) Little Big Horn lithograph. Pynchon’s linking of national mythology—be it Custer’s Last Stand or the Aztec foundation story—and the panoramic art form is, of course, not coincidental. Not only did many panoramic exhibitions glorify key mythohistorical events, but like the panoramic form, a national mythology is immersive. For those trapped within, finding a point of reference outside the official construction can be nearly impossible. History, to revise the cliché, is painted by the victors, and by representing an “official” version of an imperial setback (i.e., Custer’s defeat), Pynchon calls attention to the vacuity of the authorized account. The Anheuser-Busch lithograph, in fact, actually makes a second appearance in Against the Day. Later in the novel, Scarsdale Vibe and Foley Walker go diving in northern Italy, to inspect an underwater mural “known informally as The Sack of Rome” (726). The immersion, this time, is quite literal: Scarsdale is “underwater,” “rigged out in rubber hoses and brass helmet” (726). Scarsdale’s head-mounted display is Victorian virtual reality as its finest, and as do today’s virtual reality interfaces, it allows Scarsdale to navigate an otherworldly three-dimensional space. The painting into which he descends, meanwhile, is rendered in (historically appropriate) panoramic terms. As with nineteenth-century panoramas, this painting is lit “from beyond the scene’s upper edge” (726). “Seen through the brilliant noontide illumination,” Pynchon writes, “approached with the dreamy smoothness of a marine predator, the depiction seemed almost three-dimensional” (726). Moreover, just as the Aztec mural in the cantina and the Little Big Horn lithograph offer scenes of traditional hierarchies inverted, so too does the Roman mural: horses biting their riders, “peasants [. . .] urinating on their superiors” (726). Again Pynchon juxtaposes the legitimately panoramic with the panorama in name only: while “Scarsdale was no aesthete,” and while “the Cassily [sic] Adam [sic] rendition of Little Big Horn was fine enough art for him,” he could nonetheless “see right away without the help of hired expertise that this was what you’d call a true masterpiece,

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and he’d be very surprised indeed if somebody hadn’t already sold reproductions of it to some Italian beer company to use in local saloons over here” (726). While the preceding episodes offer a glimpse into the ways in which the panorama can be novelistically repurposed as an immersive technical device, Against the Day is not Pynchon’s first crack at remediating the panorama. His fascination with the medium is longstanding, and even in his debut novel, V. (1963), Pynchon playfully renders a “real” battle scene as though it transpires inside a rotunda. In the novel’s ninth chapter, Kurt Mondaugen finds himself in Südwestafrika (present-day Namibia), where he has been sent as part of a program to study atmospheric radio disturbances. Civil unrest causes the young Mondaugen to seek refuge in the fortresslike compound of an affluent farmer named Foppl. Shortly after Mondaugen’s arrival, the stronghold is sealed off from the outside world, and he spends the next two and a half months immersed in a Rabelaisian carnival that becomes known as “Foppl’s Siege Party.”46 One afternoon, toward the end of the ten revelous weeks, Mondaugen stumbles out the window of his turret and finds “that everyone had rushed to the roof. A battle, a real one, was in progress across the ravine. Such was their elevation that they could see everything spread out in panorama, as if for their amusement. A small group of Bondels huddled among some rocks: men, women, children and a few starved-looking goats. [. . .] Declining sunlight stained the bodies of the Bondels to a certain orange. Thin wisps of cirrus floated diaphanous in the late afternoon sky.”47 The scene, in short, replicates the panoramic experience in a “live” setting—right down to the rooftop “viewing platform” on which the audience gathers. As he does on several occasions in Against the Day, in V. Pynchon also associates the experience of the panorama with intoxicative immersion. The bedraggled audience “leaned toward the battle: cords of the neck drawn tense, eyes sleep-puffed, hair in disarray and dotted with dandruff, fingers with dirty nails clutching like talons the sun-reddened stems of their wine goblets; lips blackened with yesterday’s wine, nicotine, blood and drawn back from the tartared teeth so that the original hue only showed in the cracks.”48 At one point Foppl is so absorbed in the surrounding panorama “that he slop[s] wine on the roof.”49 The ever-punning Pynchon sends a bird to slurp up the spillage: “[a] kite lit lower down on the roof and began to peck at the wine. Soon it took wing again.”50

A FICTIONAL VANTAGE All joking aside, it was the ability to get “high as a kite” that occasioned the panoramic medium. While the panoramic episode in V. includes “two

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biplanes, flying low and lazy, like birds wandered away from a flock,”51 it is the Chums’ dirigible in Against the Day that more closely resembles the aeronautic technology associated with the rise of the panorama. The panorama offers a continuous, 360-degree horizon, and it was the “discovery” of the horizon—and the resulting public appetite for horizontal experience—that both permitted and helped popularize the panorama. As Oettermann notes, “it is no accident that the discovery of the horizon and the first successful balloon flights occurred at about the same time.”52 Air balloon fever, or aeropetomania,53 was a significant mass phenomenon in the waning decades of the eighteenth century and was, as Oettermann suggests, “fueled by people’s craving to experience the horizon.”54 Panoramic exhibitions, meanwhile, which emerged contemporaneously, remediated the accounts and perspectives of balloonists and thereby served as a sort of virtual balloon ride for millions unable to afford the real experience. By the time the Chicago World’s Fair opened in 1893, both the panorama and the hot air balloon were established cultural technologies. Not only was the era in which Against the Day opens, moreover, the heyday of the panorama, but the Columbian Exposition—Pynchon’s initial backdrop—was famously home to several panoramic exhibits, including a Swiss entry, The Panorama of the Bernese Alps, and a Hawaiian entry, The Panorama of the Volcano of Kilauea, both of which augmented the standard illusion with cutting-edge special effects.55 It is, though, Pynchon’s aeronauts who provide us with one last vantage from which to appreciate Pynchon’s remediation of the panorama. The intermingling of historical characters, events, and plotlines within the world of a fictional novel is a longstanding literary technique. Postmodern practitioners, moreover, with their interest in counterfactual accounts and the fictionality of history, often engage in such playful conflation of “fact” and “fiction.” One relatively well-known example is E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel Ragtime, which incorporates historical figures (Sigmund Freud, Evelyn Nesbit, Harry Houdini) alongside purely fictional ones (some are “new” fictional characters of Doctorow’s own invention; others are on loan from extant fictions). Doctorow’s playing field, however, is level: all fictions, whether traditionally the domain of history departments or of English departments, are created equal.56 In contrast, Against the Day offers a “panoramic” approach to fictive multiplicities. Rather than presenting a panoply of fictive strands on a flat, two-dimensional plane, Pynchon’s “false terrain”—to borrow the panoramic term—is three-dimensional. In short, all fictional registers within the novel are not created equal—some are more fictional than others. In some respects, this is a palindromic remediation of the nineteenthcentury panorama, for rather than erecting an “unreal” painted backdrop

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behind a collection of “real” three-dimensional props, Pynchon arranges a collection of fictive props in front of a historical backdrop. This method of construction, however, has an equally vertiginous effect on the reader, unable, as with a panorama, to look “outside the frame” and unable definitively to distinguish among the various fictive registers. The most “fictional” of the novel’s fictional characters are indubitably the Chums of Chance, floating above most of the action in their giant dirigible, the Inconvenience. The Chums’ fictiveness is constantly underscored—they refer to Tom Swift as their “colleague” (794), and the narrator enumerates no fewer than eleven of their fictional fictions, titles such as The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit (5) and The Chums of Chance and the Wrath of the Yellow Fang (1019). As “extrafictional” fictions (so to speak), they need special dispensation to interact with their less fictional counterparts. One of these special “ground-leaves”—the novel repeatedly plays with this figure/ground pun—occurs during the opening World’s Fair scene: “The Chums of Chance could have been granted no more appropriate form of ‘ground-leave’ than the Chicago Fair, as the great national celebration possessed the exact degree of fictitiousness to permit the boys access and agency. The harsh nonfictional world waited outside the White City’s limits, held off for this brief summer, making the entire commemorative season beside Lake Michigan at once dream-like and real” (36). On this particular excursion, the Chums meet the dime-novel detective Lew Basnight, who, despite having similar generic origins, is figured as a less-fictional character than the Chums: 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.” (36–37)

Here, mediation, remediation, and bifurcated levels of fictionality all merge in one tidy exchange: a character within a novel suggests that historical figures are “mythified” through popular media (and in the process, remediates both official, historical accounts and magazine stories). At the same time, Lew, himself a fictional character within a novel, asks the Chums whether they are fictional characters within a novel within a novel, thereby foregrounding the dimensions of fictionality

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that ought (in a realist’s terms) to have remained in this novelistic panorama’s background. Pynchon’s narrative, however, a literary panorama if ever there was one, repeatedly jolts us with passages (like the preceding one) that highlight the constructedness of the panoramic illusion, twinning flat characters and overtly layering the levels of fictionality in order to draw our attention to the tricks that panoramas, binocular disparity, and “realistically” round characters in realist novels play. Moreover, in the most overtly political novel of his career, Pynchon whacks us over the head with figures that call attention to their own two-dimensional nature, a technique that highlights not only the process by which our brains synthesize visual images but also the techniques through which those processes can be manipulated in service of an illusion—and the way that postmodern metafictional strategies expose this manipulation. That readers as adept as Kakutani and Miller were unable to extricate themselves from the panoramic illusion—unable to look outside the frame, so to speak, even while Pynchon calls attention to the staging of the illusion— only underscores the power “realist” narrative wields in contemporary culture and further emphasizes the constructive potential of artistic remediation. With some distance, however, readers gain a vantage on the novel’s formal innovations, and from the “yards and yards of Pynchonian wallpaper”57 (to repurpose Louis Menand’s disparagement), figures materialize like so many shimmering stereograms.58

NOTES 1. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation, 45. 2. Consider, for example, the proclivity of contemporary television news programming to borrow “interactive” design elements from the Web, including banners, sidebars, scrolling tickers, and Twitter feeds. Rather than giving viewers the sense that they are “part of the action,” such hypermediacy calls explicit attention to the fact that viewers’ experience is mediated. This, in turn, amplifies the audience’s desire for “immediacy,” which the networks partially gratify by way of a rolling series of phony “breaking news” interruptions. And so the dialectic cycles. 3. See, for example, N. Katherine Hayles, “Remediation in House of Leaves.” In this essay, she discusses how Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel, “in a frenzy of remediation, attempts to eat all the other media”—an act of bingeing that “result[s] in a transformed physical and narrative corpus” (781). “It is an open question,” Hayles writes, “whether this transformation represents the rebirth of the novel or the beginning of the novel’s displacement by a hybrid discourse that as yet has no name” (781). 4. “panorama, n,” OED Online, December 2008, Oxford University Press, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50170445 (accessed May 10, 2010).

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5. Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama, 6. 6. Ibid., 7. Allow me briefly to defend my characterization of the panorama as an “all-but-dead metaphor.” First, most people simply do not know that the panorama was arguably the dominant visual mass medium of the nineteenth century. In fact, many contemporary media buffs would be hard pressed even to describe the form. And while it may be argued that contemporary visual media aspire toward the panoramic, I would offer that they do so in ignorance of the medium that engendered the terminology. There is little disputing that the denizens of the twenty-first century have a predilection for big screens. From sixtyseven-inch TVs to ever-widening aspect ratios, we seek out ever more impressive visual displays. Nevertheless, few contemporary media are truly panoramic (that is, a visual surround encompassing a full 360-degree perspective). Most “panoramic” photography, for example, is panoramic in name only and merely presents a wide-angled vista in a nonstandard aspect ratio. IMAX theaters—and IMAX Dome presentations in particular—may be the closest contemporary mass media equivalent to panoramic exhibitions, but even they fail to provide a true visual surround. Unlike nineteenth-century panorama goers, IMAX viewers are able to orient themselves by looking outside the frame of presentation. Moreover, unlike true panoramas, which encourage viewers to direct their attention where they may, IMAX films, despite their impressively wide angle of presentation, offer viewers but a single field of focus. Perhaps the advancement and widespread dissemination of virtual reality interfaces will, at some point in the future, not only offer the masses a new media equivalent of the panoramic experience but also reacquaint the public with this nearly forgotten form. 7. Ibid., 103. 8. Ibid., 105. 9. See Oliver Grau, Virtual Art. As the nineteenth century progressed, this artistic industry became big business as “the stock exchanges . . . caught panoramafever” (103). “In Belgium alone,” Grau notes, “more than twenty panorama jointstock companies were formed” (103). 10. Oettermann, The Panorama, 57. 11. Ibid. 12. See Bernard Comment, The Panorama. Comment provides data regarding the popularity of the panorama as an entertainment medium, noting that by the later decades of the nineteenth century, upward of 200,000 people visited panorama exhibitions annually—in France alone (116). If we extrapolate those figures to include Germany, Belgium, the United States, and Great Britain (four other countries where the panorama enjoyed widespread popularity), the numbers are staggering indeed. Oettermann concludes that “a total of one hundred million visitors to panorama exhibitions worldwide between 1870 and 1900 is probably a conservative estimate” (240). 13. Oettermann, The Panorama, 51. 14. While touring Barker’s Grand Fleet at Spithead in 1794, Oettermann reports, Queen Charlotte reportedly “felt seasick at the sight of so much water” (105). “A visit to one of the few surviving panoramas,” Oettermann writes, “shows that the effect can be overwhelming” (51). To this I can personally attest. In 2007 I was fortunate enough to visit Jan Styka and Wojcieck Kossak’s Panorama Racławicka

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(1894), a magnificently restored panorama on permanent exhibit in Wrocław, Poland. As Oettermann notes, one of the most destabilizing aspects of the illusion is the fact that “nowhere is it possible for the eye to shift ‘outside the frame’ and compare the artistic illusion with the real surroundings” (51); even the viewing platforms were often constructed so as to appear a “natural” part of the scenery. 15. Oettermann, The Panorama, 49. 16. Quoted in Dolf Sternberger and Joachim Neugroschel, “Panorama,” 7. 17. Søren Pold, “Panoramic Realism,” 47. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 58. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. See E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel. In this 1927 study, Forster defines “flat” characters as “types” or “caricatures” (67). “In their purest form,” he writes, flat characters “are constructed round a single idea or quality” (67). A round character, meanwhile, “waxes and wanes and has facets like a human being” (69). Literary studies, broadly writ, has so thoroughly internalized this classic distinction that, in some quarters, the terminology no longer evokes Forster’s treatise. Even worse, however, is the fact that Forster’s schema has been popularly reduced to a simplistic equation: flat = poorly wrought / round = well wrought. This gross oversimplification is miles away from Forster’s original observations. In Aspects of the Novel, Forster not only takes those who decry flat characterization to task; he also emphasizes the utility of two dimensionality: “A novel that is at all complex,” he notes, “often requires flat people” (71). 23. Laura Miller, “Fall of the House of Pynchon,” n.p. 24. James Wood, “All Rainbow, No Gravity,” n.p. 25. Michiko Kakutani, “A Pynchonesque Turn,” n.p. 26. Wood’s denunciation deserves a few more sentences of consideration here. Much as Miller and Kakutani do, Wood fails to acknowledge that Pynchon rejects the tenets of psychological realism outright; unlike Miller and Kakutani, however, Wood faults Pynchon for using the “grammar of realism,” by which he apparently means that the “stylistic syntax” of Against the Day “is relatively undaring” and that Pynchon has eschewed “an avant-gardism of form.” “Beyond his false surfaces,” Wood writes, “are only more false surfaces. . . . This novel systematically denies the reader any purchase.” Certainly Wood is an adept and accomplished reader (as are Miller and Kakutani). However, Pynchon’s fiction is notoriously layered and complex, and its intricacy allows critics, on occasion, to uncover material that the initial reviewers overlook. The balance of this essay describes in detail not only how Pynchon demonstrates an avant-gardism of form in Against the Day but also how the novel systematically facilitates purchase. 27. For another take on how Pynchon’s characterization rejects the dictates of psychological realism, see Kathryn Hume, “Character in Gravity’s Rainbow.” 28. According to Grau, Virtual Art, “Anton von Werner’s The Battle of Sedan [1883] represents the sum total of contemporary knowledge in the field of the physiology of sense perception and of technical skill in the art of illusion. It is state-of-the-art illusionism and based on the findings of the great Berlin scientist Hermann von Helmholtz” (105).

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29. Hermann von Helmholtz, Popular Lectures, 80. 30. Ibid. Compare Helmholtz’s assessment of the difficulty facing painters to the following selection from Against the Day: “The problem lies with the projection. The author of the Itinerary imagined the Earth not only as a three-dimensional sphere but, beyond that, as an imaginary surface, the optical arrangements for whose eventual projection onto the two-dimensional page proved to be very queer indeed” (249). Professor Svegli’s assessment of the Sfinciuno Itinerary, which requires a paramorphoscope to be properly read, is, in equal parts, a paraphrase of Helmholtz and a metafictional reflection on the novel itself. 31. Grau, Virtual Art, 106. 32. As Grau emphasizes, “The boundary between picture and faux terrain was indistinguishable to the naked eye” (106). It is this single effect that astonished countless nineteenth-century reviewers and continues to amaze first-time panorama patrons today—including me. 33. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 41–42. 34. John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 38. 35. This is, I would emphasize, but a slight misappropriation, for while Penhallow is not assessing Pynchon’s panoramic technique directly, he is analyzing one of his flat fellow characters. 36. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 33. 37. Ibid., 33–34. 38. Grau, Virtual Art, 107. 39. Ibid. 40. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 5–6. 41. The reference here is to Leon Battista Alberti, the father of modern artistic perspective, whose treatise De Pictura (On Painting) in 1435 laid the groundwork for the art of the Renaissance. Alberti famously considered the canvas an aperta finestra (open window), and Bolter and Grusin have appropriated the metaphor here as a way to evoke the difference between art as a two-dimensional projection and art as a three-dimensional, immersive experience. For more on Alberti’s window, see Ann Friedberg, The Virtual Window. 42. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 162. 43. See, for example, Grau, Virtual Art; Oettermann, Panorama; and Comment, Panorama, for more on the immersive qualities of the panoramic medium. 44. See Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality. In the title essay, Eco discusses American hyperreality, or what might be termed the “authentic fake.” In the realm of the hyperreal, Eco observes, it is not enough for a copy to replicate the original; it must improve upon it: the copy must seem “more convincing than the model” (19). Moreover, the hyperreal often confesses its illusionism as one method of appearing “more real than real.” In a section titled “The City of Robots,” Eco famously compares Disneyland to a traditional wax museum: “Disneyland is more hyperrealistic than the wax museum, precisely because the latter still tries to make us believe that what we are seeing reproduces reality absolutely, whereas Disneyland makes it clear that within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced” (43). 45. Eric von Schmidt, “Custer, Dying Again,” 60. 46. Pynchon, V., 248.

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47. Ibid., 299. 48. Ibid., 299-300. 49. Ibid., 300. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Oettermann, The Panorama, 13. 53. Oettermann, in The Panorama, credits the coinage to the German author Christoph Martin Wieland (14). 54. Oettermann, The Panorama, 13. 55. See Rand, McNally and Company, Handy Guide. Apparently there were at least three other panoramic exhibitions in the city of Chicago during the World’s Fair, including The Battle of Gettysburg Panorama, The Panorama of Niagara Falls, and The Chicago Fire Panorama (62). The two panoramas on display inside the White City, meanwhile, received special dispensation to appear on the Midway, on the grounds that “a panorama of the scenery of the countries from which they come is equivalent to an exhibition of the manufactured products of the average European country” (197). 56. E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime, passim. 57. Louis Menand, “Do the Math,” n.p. 58. I would like to thank Rob Latham, Pat Cesarini, Cris Hollingsworth, and Heidi LaVine, as well as Christopher Leise and Jeffrey Severs, all of whom provided thoughtful advice and invaluable suggestions.

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II

SCIENCE, BELIEF, AND FAITH

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S Bogomilism, Orphism, Shamanism: The Spiritual and Spatial Grounds of Pynchon’s Ecological Ethic Christopher K. Coffman

I

n what sense is Against the Day an ecological novel and its author an environmental writer? Some context is necessary to answer these questions. Much of the ecocritical attention paid to Pynchon’s work is, like criticism on Pynchon in general, devoted to Gravity’s Rainbow. Thomas Schaub provides an overview of this work in his “The Environmental Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow and the Ecological Context,” usefully situating both Pynchon’s fiction and the burgeoning ecocritical consideration of it within the historical rise of ecoconsciousness in general.1 Schaub agrees with most ecocritics that the first indispensable and intentionally ecoconscious text, and one to which contemporary literary ecology in general may be traced, was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, first published one year before V.2 Perhaps the most influential and useful ecocriticism of Pynchon has grown out of applications of ecological systems theory to his texts. Derived from models in the biological sciences, such approaches regard the worlds of fiction as accumulations of distinct but connected lived and discursive orders. These orders indicate an unknowable and complex whole greater than the sum of the constituent systems. Thus inherent in systems theory is a hermeneutic humility that is attractive to ecocriticism, which advocates a similar rethinking of humanity’s place within larger frameworks of biological understanding. Gabriele Schwab calls Gravity’s Rainbow an 91

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“ecological” novel, by which she means that the cultural and historical aspects of the text depend on its “unification and interrelation of commonly isolated areas of experience.”3 Even more notably, Tom LeClair asserts the “conceptual priority” of systems ecology to any interpretation of Gravity’s Rainbow.4 Particularly prominent in his argument are concepts derived from J. E. Lovelock’s Gaia, which argues for a conception of our planet as “an intricately mindful being.”5 For LeClair, “the fundamental model of relations in Gravity’s Rainbow” is that of the living planet expressed in the Gaia thesis.6 This position allows critics to understand the many discursive worlds of Pynchon’s works without demanding that any one be regarded as structurally dominant or that narrative ambiguities resulting from seeming incompatibilities between those discourses be resolved fully. While Gravity’s Rainbow, then, clearly has an ecological dimension, the subsequent books, Vineland and Mason & Dixon, have each expanded the range of environmental concerns.7 Against the Day is no exception to this trend. Furthermore, the ecological dimension of Against the Day makes evident the relation of ecology to mysticoreligious moral imperative and another prominent Pynchonian interest: the values and associative qualities of space. The conjunction of these three concerns—ecology, morality, and space—results in a text in which spiritual and spatial dimensions are mutually supportive and, together, buttress the text’s development of a normative environmentalism. As an introductory example of the connections among these three elements, consider the boys’-adventure-story balloonists, the Chums of Chance, reacting to the nightly artificial illumination of Southern California. Their response to the light8 pollution recalls several moments in Against the Day in which it is apparent that, as Robert L. McLaughlin remarks, “For Pynchon, . . . control and manipulation of the natural is a perversion and a distortion of the almost spiritual energy of nature.”9 Miles Blundell, for instance, sees in the artificial illumination “Lucifer, son of the morning, bearer of light.” The unholy comparison is, however, immediately complicated by Lindsay Noseworth’s observation that “ancient astronomers [used] the name Lucifer for Venus when she appears as the morning star” (1033). Thus even if the attitude toward light suggested by the title of the book, the obvious melancholy of the Chums in the face of the artificial illumination, and the declining possibilities for their type of adventure at this point in the text support a reading of the light as a negative symbol (by which I mean that it is both associated with destructive values and defined by that which proves to be absent), Against the Day offers Noseworth’s counterreading and suggests others. The conflation of evil, hubris, beauty, dawn, night, artificial light, science, and the quotidian life of Southern California results in a symbol that resists easy evaluation. Furthermore, the fall of Lucifer and the text’s repeated distinctions

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between the airborne Chums and the earth-bound masses complicate the issue by introducing elements of vertical spatial relations to the already complex scene. This brief episode thus clearly suggests that the interaction of the natural and the artificial is complexly connected, in Against the Day, with questions of a spatial and spiritual nature. Against the Day’s numerous physicists, mystics, explorers, anarchists, and capitalists are all concerned with the properties and values of space, making space and place a bridge between its spiritual and ecological dimensions. As a result, territories, dimensions, and movement are tested from a variety of perspectives, each of which offers its own advantages and dangers. Often human interactions with natural space awaken a planetary consciousness, one rarely interested in preserving those who disturb it. Likewise, as the book progresses, characters discover or explore a number of places that offer refuge to those who work against Earth’s enemies. The novel’s treatments of space suggest, broadly speaking, two avenues for exploring the ecological relationship between space and spirituality. One, reminiscent of LeClair’s work on Gravity’s Rainbow, inquires into the nature of the consciousness lurking in the earth, a consciousness ready to retaliate against those who encroach upon its sacred spaces and to embrace its allies. Another is embodied in the novel’s hidden realms, alternate Earths, and sacred and magical territories. Taken together, these concerns offer a description of a living earth that responds actively to the movement of human characters through its space, suggesting that this Earth can provide at least temporary relief to those aligned with it against its enemies. Both elements of the ecological theme are foregrounded, and their interdependence suggested, during the episode describing the Vormance Expedition. For these explorers, the landscape is ice, and “the voices of the ice entered their dreams, dictated what they would see, what would happen to each dreaming eye as, helpless, it gazed. Just to the north loomed a far-spreading glacier, the only one in this entire domain of ice that had never been named, as if in fearful acknowledgment of its ancient nobility, its seemingly conscious pursuit of a project” (129). Nature, here, has intention and voice; the landscape is alive. What it consciously pursues, however, is unclear. Despite this uncertainty, the unnamed glacier’s proximity to the fabled Ginnungagap causes trepidation in the explorers, for that “gap” is the “chasm” of “ice-chaos from which arose [. . .] the Earth,” and, given the Northmen’s more generic “Gap,” it is “also a wideopen human mouth, mortal, crying, screaming, calling out, calling back” (128). The intentional consciousness hidden in the folds of the glacier is interwoven with our telling of our own mythic origins, which call to us just as “duties to history and blood” do (127). The gap is dangerous in

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that it represents the “possible darkening of some day’s water-sky to the reflection of a mythical Interior, the chance, in this day and age, of sailing off the surface of the World, drawn into another, toroidal dispensation” (128). This mythic figure of the known world’s end is linked to a myth of the world’s beginnings, and both myths are tied to our own end and beginning. The gap thus provides a mythic, geometric, and spatial figuration of the alternate theories of time and space discussed by the Transnoctial Discussion Group in the expedition’s headquarters at the Hotel Borealis, theories that introduce readers to the basic terms of the book’s competing physicists. The glacier’s complexity and potential consciousness are reflected, and refracted, by Iceland Spar, the object of the Vormance Expedition’s pursuit. Certain characters believe that, like the glacier, the crystal is sentient and its caves are home to a “Hidden People” and other beings who travel paths “among the worlds” (134). The glacier and the crystals suggest that the landscape of the novel is alive, it has motive, and it provides unanticipated spatial openings to those who can discern them. Different characters are aware of the living landscape to varying degrees. The more aware enjoy a certain degree of liberation from spatial and temporal restrictions, as do the visitors to the nexus of the Spar caves. Most characters are limited to an eminently teleological and linear “Christian” experience of time and space, in which passing moments on Earth serve primarily to advance their collective spiritual state to the end of the created world and the final judgment; shamans, however, are capable of “bilocation” in space and aware of “time [. . .] spread out not in a single dimension but over many, which all exist in a single, timeless instant” (143). When Kit and Dwight Prance are seeking the shaman Magyakan, for example, he is compared to “the taiga, [. . .] everywhere, [. . .] a heroic being with unearthly gifts” (776). Westerners, because they do not understand the nature of the land, encounter the paradox that the gifts of the Siberian shaman, including his apparent omnipresence, appear “unearthly” at the same time that they appear like “the taiga,” or the very face of the earth. The space represented by different landscapes is transformed into place as characters pause in their movement across it, and certain places offer themselves as sacred or condemned, depending, partly, upon what has happened in them. Cyprian notes that “if the Earth were alive, with a planet-shaped consciousness, then the ‘Balkan Peninsula’ might easily map on to whatever in this consciousness most darkly wishes for its own destruction” (939). A similar realization occurs to Frank Traverse at Casas Grandes. He grasps not only that the planet lives but that its sacrality is linked to human history: “He understood for a moment, as if in the breeze from an undefined wing passing his face, that the history of all this ter-

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rible continent, clear to the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic ice, was this same history of exile and migration, the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern corporations moving in on the white man, and their incursions with drills and dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains, the sacred land” (928–29). Unlike Cyprian’s psychological view of Earth as having some thanotic urge, Frank’s epiphany is mythic and, perhaps spurred by his experiments with the drug hikuli, acknowledges a shamanic theology in which characters like Cyprian may only unknowingly participate (392ff, 924ff). Such awareness is not inherently salvific. The shamanic prophet of northern Eurasia, “the Doosra,” has been united with the landscape and is “a living fragment of the desert” (756). This connection allows him to participate in space unavailable to Europeans. Like Frank’s, the Doosra’s tools are often narcotic or psychedelic—opium, ganja, wild mushrooms— but they allow him to see that “what is to come will not occur in ordinary space. The Europeans will find great difficulty in drawing maps of this” (756–57). At the same time, the mechanism of his project—the elimination of Islam, Social-Democracy, Christianity, and Buddhism from Inner Asia, from Manchuria to Hungary—is not proselytization or magic but “the Mark IV Maxim Gun” (756). That a prophet united with sacred land turns to destructive means in pursuing his goals is unsurprising when one sees them adopted by even inanimate objects that are interwoven with the besieged planet. For example, the Interdikt, with its fortifications and “tunnels [that] led off into stone darkness,” appears to take on some of the earth’s knowledge and become violently self-aware: “It behaves as if it’s alive. Knows when someone’s coming and takes steps to protect itself” (952–53). Given over to the planet, the potentially active barrier of “fear in lethal form” produces a virtual no-man’s-land, a space corrupted by the Balkan Peninsula’s destructive psyche (953). Just as it turns readers’ attention skyward to soar through the aether with the Chums of Chance, Against the Day clearly also underscores the other aspect of the vertical—the descent below the surface of the earth— as an important motif. This downward turn emphasizes the novel’s physical, social, psychological, and theological underworlds, and it also shows the heart of Pynchon’s living Earth. The underworld comes to life not only in the scenes just mentioned but also in tales of fantastic intraplanetary voyages and—less dramatically—mining. Indeed, the history of the Traverse family and the frequent return of the narrative action to corrupt mining operations highlight the importance of the underground to the life of the earth. The parts of the novel devoted to the Tunguska Event make evident the profound consequences of physical changes in the earth. The occurrence produces results in the natural world that seem a combination of

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the apocalyptic revelation of John of Patmos and a comic cartoon, including glowing reindeer and mosquitoes with a taste for vodka rather than blood (784). As strange as such occurrences are, perhaps more unusual is the reorientation of space and place that follows the event: “Aspects of the landscape of Tierra del Fuego, directly opposite the Stony Tunguska on the globe, began to show up in Siberia [. . .]. Entire villages came to the conclusion that they were not where they ought to be, and [. . .] headed off together into the brush, where presently they set up villages no one else could see” (784–85). Even more exotic are the transformations that affect Kit, who “noticed that the angle of his vision was wider and the narrow track of his life branching now and then into unsuspected side trails,” trails down which he is led by Ssagan, a talking reindeer who is consulted by the local shamans (785–86). These occurrences display the disorientation that has resulted from interference with the planet’s ecological balance and suggest that nature will take extreme measures of defense. As some of these examples indicate, subsurface elements of the planet are often associated in Against the Day with greater preternatural environmental effects than those bound to the surface. As Fabienne Collignon has argued, Pynchon’s underground spaces often evoke the truth-speaking voice of grottoes of classical mythology, yet they also harbor “divergences and trajectories that digress, become fault lines and dead ends.”10 Likewise, those who tamper with the underground remain open to more significant threats than do the surface-bound. The Vormance Expedition’s Lovecraftian encounter with the monster buried in ice, despite its many ambiguities, is one of the clearer demonstrations of this. The Chums of Chance reveal that what members of the expedition first believe to be a nunatak is instead something like “the site of some sacred burial,” and, as do many of the pyramidal tombs of ancient Egypt, it promises its own curse (141). The Vormance Expedition sees potential profit, not potential threat, in the figure beneath the surface of the frozen waste, and despite their “common terror” that “it might become aware of our interest,” it is soon stowed in the ship’s hold (141). The “explorers” are really exploiters, groups whose “interest” is that of both curiosity and finance. As do the shamans and other characters and creatures who have links to the earth, the “object” undermines simple understandings of space: though “measured, and remeasured [. . .] each time the dimensions kept coming out different—not just slightly so but drastically” (144). After its transportation and thawing, the Figure wreaks destruction on the port city to which it has been taken. Fleetwood Vibe traces its opportunity to do so to the “original sin” of the “failure [. . .] to determine the distribution of weight in ordinary space, which should have offered a strong hint [. . .] that some fraction of the total must necessarily have escaped confinement” (145). This conclusion, connecting “sin” with the chthonic Figure that “the

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scientists of the Vormance Expedition had continued to believe [. . .] was a meteorite,” occupies the same semantic field as the Chums’ discussion of the artificial illumination of Southern California (149). Like Lucifer, the Figure seems to have fallen, is deep in the earth, and is awakened by man’s original sin, or violation of the natural order. Its fiery revenge is reminiscent of conventional representations of the Christian hell, and, as a Dantean allusion and the Figure’s Arctic origin suggest, the Commedia’s ice-bound Satan is not an unreasonable intertextual inference (154).11 The Figure may have fallen from outer space; it may be, as Magyakan claims, a manifestation of the icy North’s discontent at having been explored (143).12 Whatever its origins, it stands as a dramatic instance of nature’s self-defense mechanisms. As a member of the besieged city’s ruling body explains, “The Eskimo believe that every object in their surroundings has its invisible ruler—in general not friendly—an enforcer of ancient, indeed prehuman, laws” (150–51). Accompanying the punishment attendant upon violation of those prehuman laws is a manipulation of human space. In a passage that presages Kit’s experience after the Tunguska Event, Hunter Penhallow observes that the human world seems to have shifted, in accord with the immeasurable dimensions of the Figure: “The grid of numbered streets Hunter thought he’d understood made no sense anymore. The grid in fact had been distorted [. . . , its] streets [. . .] intersecting now at unexpected angles, narrowing into long, featureless alleyways to nowhere, running steeply up and down hills which had not been noticed before” (154). The ecological violation has multiple and generally harmful consequences for humanity, including profound disorientation of subjective space. Reef’s mining in Simplon, though less exotic than polar exploration, also demonstrates the immediate relationship between human action and natural reaction. Here, the underground defense emerges in the shape of Tatzelwurms, snakes with “four legs and three toes on each paw, and a big mouth full of very sharp teeth.” Like the Figure uncovered by the Vormance Expedition, the Tatzelwurms are protectors of a space that move into action when it is violated, and they have had time to prepare: “In Europe [. . .] the mountains are much older than in America. Whatever lives in them has had more time to evolve toward a more lethal, perhaps less amiable, sort of creature” (655). Some of the workers believe that the Tatzelwurms’ attacks on the miners indicate some larger consciousness foiling construction of the railroad, and the details of this popular understanding of the creatures again connect underground space to the transcendent. Gerhardt sees the Tatzelwurm as a sign primarily of vengeance, as “a good argument for Hell [. . . ,] for some primordial plasm of hate and punishment at the center of the Earth which takes on different forms, the closer it can be projected

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to the surface” (655). Philippe, who “had gained an early appreciation of institutional spaces,” views the underground space as sacred: “In a cathedral what looks solid never is. Walls are hollow inside. Columns contain winding staircases. This apparently solid mountain is really a collection of hot springs, caves, fissures, passageways, one hiding-place within another—and the Tatzelwurms know it all intimately. They are the priesthood of their own dark religion [. . .]” (658). Certainly the Tatzelwurms are not welcoming to man, but their aggression and the “darkness” of their religion are so only, as is the case with some of the other underground spaces, when viewed in opposition to those who take light from the surface into their cathedral. Here we have yet one more resonance of the disdain for “daylit America” in Pynchon’s title (732). The intersection of the spatial and spiritual implicit in these examples becomes more evident when Cyprian leaves Reef and Yashmeen Halfcourt to join a convent, the nature of which suggests the ongoing relationship of spatial positions with spiritual constructs in the novel. Its sect believes in the Shekhinah. This term and the principles associated with it have a long and complex history, but for both Father Ponko and Yashmeen it signifies a dark female principle that reflects the glory of God’s face in such a way that the divine becomes accessible to worshippers, just as the Moon reflects the light of the Sun (960).13 Furthermore, under the influence of an “Orphic” cosmology, the convent’s faithful place particular emphasis on the divine equation’s nocturnal elements and thus regard “Night [as] one’s betrothed.” Consequently, while at the convent, “one seeks to become [. . .] a kind of sacrifice, an offering, to Night” (959). This movement toward the dark situates the convent’s postulants within the tension between two heavenly forces and explains why they must remain acutely aware of binary divisions, of any “cosmic struggle between darkness and light” within the world and themselves (957). The historical background of the convent illuminates the nature of its theology. Pynchon explains that it “belonged to a sect descended from ancient Bogomils” (956). Bogomilism, a heresy that developed in the tenth century, spread over the next few centuries throughout the southeastern part of the Balkans and even reached the center of Orthodoxy in Byzantium before its decline and disappearance by the end of the fifteenth century. Although the Bogomils derived much of their theology from certain Manichaean doctrines, any suggestion of historical Bogomil dualism must be qualified, as Dmitri Obolensky explains, by the fact that believers advocated only a “mitigated dualism” that acknowledged a demiurge “dependent on and ultimately subordinate to God.”14 From the point of view of the Bogomils, Satan was not a fallen angel but the first son of God, elder brother of Christ, and demiurge (Obolensky 207). The doctrine of Cyprian’s convent, which seemingly ascribes the role of the demiurge

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to a reflective female counterpart of God, obviously differs slightly from the historical Bogomil perspective.15 Nevertheless, Cyprian’s conversion is a declaration of allegiance to a female transcendent, and the historical Bogomils’ doctrine ascribed the creation of the physical world to just such a counterpart of God. That “the Cyprian” was an epithet of Venus, whose planetary incarnation shares its existence with the Luciferian morning star, suggests that Cyprian’s devotion to female beauty, formerly expressed in his dedication to Yashmeen, is likewise devotion to the creator of our world, as that creator is delineated by Bogomil doctrine. In this sense, the exchange of Yashmeen for the Shekhinah acknowledges a dogmatic compatibility between a religion that accepts a female demiurge and Cyprian’s personal attachment to Yashmeen, a compatibility that allows one to recognize of Yashmeen, as does Kit Traverse, that she “is the world” in a more literal sense than Cyprian may have earlier argued (596). Cyprian’s typical role as an intermediary makes him even better suited to the convent’s theological grounding than these observations suggest. In his sexually preoccupied personal life a cross-dressing homosexual who finds fulfillment serving as a fellatial-cunnilingual medium for Reef’s immaculate impregnation of Yashmeen, Cyprian in his political work likewise depends on his ability to cross borders and sacrifice his well-being for others’ causes. As Kathryn Hume argues, Cyprian’s masochism predisposes him toward interest in the pseudo-Manichean convent.16 The religious training it can offer will teach him more of that division he knows but does not fully understand in his sexual nature, will help him grasp more of the relation between desire and its abolishment, between “his appetite for sexual debasement—its specific carnality [. . . and] religious surrender of the self” (876). By the time he leaves Yashmeen and Reef, Cyprian has begun to understand that his appetites define him and that what he most valued in his surrender to them was the surrender of them, by means of a paradoxically indulgent asceticism that permitted an escape from need and the ego at the very moment need and the ego were offered an opportunity for satisfaction. Heinz Ickstadt asserts that Pynchon’s figures are typically “torn between a yearning for the . . . Transcendent . . . and a longing for pure immanence.”17 Cyprian seems to have discovered a means to achieve both, as has Lake Traverse, who, “at the moment of surrendering, [. . .] found herself wishing only to become the wind. To feel herself refined to an edge, an invisible edge of unknown length, to enter the realm of air forever in motion over the broken land” (267). Lake desires to relinquish her body and its passions, to reduce the physical to a one-dimensional and moving form. The echo of the first verses of Genesis offers stylistic reinforcement to the sanctity of these efforts.

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Wishes to mortify the flesh in favor of the immaterial body are essentially compatible with conventional (and Bogomil) dualism, in which ascetics seek “gradual liberation of the particles . . . consubstantial with God, which are the souls of men, from the prison of Matter, of the body” (Obolensky 5). In addition, Cyprian’s transvestitism and self-destructive and nonprocreative tendencies find their counterparts in Bogomil doctrine, for through them he already overcomes two of the essential divisions perceived by dualists: “the duality of the sexes and . . . instinct of self-propagation inherited from the demons . . . intended to perpetuate . . . imprisonment . . . in his own body” (Obolensky 6). Cyprian’s (and Lake’s) desire to work through the body to an annulment of the physical is likewise in line with the Docetism of the Bogomils.18 This desire elevates his sexual predispositions to the level of theological advantages. Indeed, Cyprian’s recognition that descent into materialism paradoxically permits a transcendence of the material more closely aligns his efforts with Orphism, for that tradition indicates that the transcendent end, when striven for, obviates the dualist mechanism of that striving. In addition, that Bogomil doctrine rejected the dogma of the Last Judgment suggests one explanation for Cyprian’s indifference to Reef’s and Yashmeen’s warnings that the convent offers no strong defensible position or escape route in the event of military conflict (Obolensky 181). Cyprian’s obsolescence in the ménage à trois cements the importance of the convent for him, for Ljubica stands as an unmistakable representative of her parental union in a way that he never could, just as, in Bogomil mythology, Christ’s rise to prominence supplanted Lucifer from his role in the divine Trinity. In the face of this supercession, Cyprian’s decision to remain at the convent is a decision to negotiate the divisions in his nature in terms that reflect the paradoxical unity of his dual self. The final glimpse we are offered of him reads, “Cyprian was taken behind a great echoless door” (962). The “taking” of Cyprian is presented as his absorption into the convent’s cloaca; the echoless door encloses a space that figuratively resounds with the teachings of the order he is joining, particularly its interest in Orpheus and faith in the Shekhinah. That dark, feminine aspect of the divine not only stands, for the sect’s members, as a cosmological aspect of the Manichean duality present in any apparent unity; it also serves as a symbol of much of the sect’s history from the moment they “chose [. . .] to go underground” (956). Importantly, the order’s originary “underground” descent from the public eye is also a literal movement out of sight and into the darkness of the mountain on which the convent is located, and thus it is a movement in which Cyprian is involved both figuratively (as he disappears into the background of the novel) and literally (as he is absorbed into the mountain convent’s interiority). This conjunction of figurative and literal motion in the “taking”

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of Cyprian, together with the underground turn of his sect, reinforces a reading of the text that accepts theological underpinnings for spatial relations and spiritual (even salvific or damning) value for space and place. The sacred nature of the convent and such interior spaces as the tunnel in the Simplon highlights the fact that, in Against the Day, underground spaces are spiritually as well as topographically different. This idea becomes more significant when one notes that Pynchon’s pseudo-Bogomils have adopted to their faith “more nocturnal elements, going back [. . .] to the Thracian demigod Orpheus, and his dismemberment not far from” the convent (956). W. K. C. Guthrie notes something of the classical figure that at once resonates with Cyprian’s nature: “His outstanding quality is a gentleness amounting at times to softness.”19 The magic powers traditionally associated with Orpheus’s song extend this impression, for his art “excises and renders harmless” the “animal passions in our hearts,” a procedure that Cyprian seeks to undergo by not only membership in the convent but also abasement in sexual life (Guthrie 41). The Bogomil convent’s adaptation of some tenets of Orphism is entirely appropriate to both the novel’s spatial themes and the historical development of the sect and its descendants. In the first place, Thrace, the home of both the convent and Orpheus, was, as Obolensky explains, “the earliest centre of dualistic heresy in the Balkans” (161). In addition, the region’s role as a center of antiorthodox practices and dogma was cemented when, in the late tenth century, waves of immigrants from the East strengthened Thrace’s resident heretical communities, including the Bogomils (147). Finally, “the success of the Bogomil literature . . . is shown by its intimate connection with south Slavonic folk-lore” (Obolensky 154–55, n. 2). Given that Bogomilism was notable for its openness to local tradition and that Thrace was already linked to Orpheus and free from orthodoxy, Pynchon’s ascribing of Orphic influence to the convent is hardly historically problematic. Indeed, Bogomilism not only comfortably incorporated folk belief but also ably disguised itself in the outward forms of its major sources of persecution—primarily the Orthodox Church centered in Byzantium. The Orphic influences on Pynchon’s Bogomilistic convent’s belief are also important. Because of its historical connection to even earlier Thracian cults, Orphism is well suited to the aspects of the convent that appeal to Cyprian. Extant fragments of the early history of Orpheus and Orphism suggest that his is the story of a demigod, hero, or prophet transformed from association with Apollo and the Olympian to association with Dionysus and the chthonian, to “cults of the earth and the regions beneath it, often marked by a darkness” (Guthrie 6, 47, 56). For Cyprian, whose former experience predisposed him to turn to the female principle as an object of veneration and imitation, the convent’s focus on the Magna

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Mater–Shekhinah offers him the intermediate step between worship of the feminine and devotion to a chthonic cult, a human version of a Tatzelwurm’s “own dark religion.” This turn aligns Cyprian with not only the theology of the place but also the doctrinal descent “underground” taken when the convent refused to join an established church in favor of maintaining its own version of the Bogomil heresy.20 This underground spatial element shared by Orphism and the convent further supports a reading of Against the Day that sees a connection between my introductory example concerning Lucifer and other spatiotheological episodes. Here, the Orphic tradition provides yet more support. Guthrie relates the events of an ancient Orphic fragment in which Night is asked a question that places our attention on dualism: “How may I have all things one and each one separate?” and her response returns us to the Chums of Chance: “Surround all things with the ineffable aither” (Guthrie 81). From this perspective, the aetherial realm of the Chums is one that unites, and it, like the underground realm of the convent, thus sits in contrast to the mundane and increasingly entropic world of the earth’s surface dwellers. A handful of other correspondences between Bogomilism and Orphism are notable, particularly as they elucidate and strengthen the connections Pynchon’s text implies between the faiths. From the perspective of the Orphic tradition, the creator of the world was Phanes, a hermaphroditic god who handed over his scepter to his daughter and partner, Night (Guthrie 80). This cosmological understanding is obviously compatible with the historical Bogomil doctrine of the demiurge and with Cyprian’s convent’s faith in the dark, female counterpart of the divine. Moreover, to the Orphics, “Our nature is . . . twofold. We are born from the Titans, wicked sons of Earth, but there is in us something of a heavenly nature too” (Guthrie 83). This dualism is remarkably close to that understood by the Bogomils, and it resulted, for the Orphics as for the Bogomils, in a similar “doctrine of the degradation of the body.” This doctrine was “first and foremost . . . a way of life, imposing an ascetic regime which had to be carried into one’s daily actions” (Guthrie 154). In consequence, Orphics shared with the Bogomils celebration of an asceticism designed to eliminate “the source of evil[:] . . . the body with its appetites and passions” (Guthrie 156). The Orphic belief in dualism and asceticism is therefore ultimately compatible with Cyprian’s renunciation of bodily desire for the same reasons that the similar Bogomil beliefs were. Perhaps the most essential connections—both historically and in terms of Pynchon’s fiction—between Bogomil thought and Orphism are the more apparent areas of congruity between Orphism and Christianity. Bogomil doctrine deviates on many points from those propounded by the larger, more established Roman and Greek churches, but it is certainly far

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from unadulterated paganism, despite its adoption of folk tradition. Indeed, Bogomilism’s general attitude is similar to that of many early Christians, who identified Christian prophets, and even Christ, with Orpheus. The bases for this identification vary. Like David, for example, Orpheus is a “magical musician.” Like Christ’s, his storied power over nature, specifically animals, suggests that he was a Good Shepherd (Guthrie 264–65). Furthermore, both Orpheus (who is often viewed as a counterpart or type of Dionysius) and Jesus were the sons of gods who were sacrificed for salvific ends and ultimately resurrected (Guthrie 267). Such coincidences of character between one or another biblical figure and Orpheus, and the cosmological correspondences between Christianity and Orphism, are ultimately less significant than doctrinal and dogmatic connections. As Guthrie explains, “It is in the realm of eschatology . . . that we find Christian . . . dogmas which have their ultimate origin in the Orphic.” The concept of Christian purgatory, in particular, derives from the Orphic conception of an “intermediate stage” between an earthly incarnation and a next life. Although the Orphics would have usually regarded this stage as nothing more than a pause between earthly lives, the notion of rebirth persists as one moves from Orphism proper to Orphic-influenced Christianity. Furthermore, the concept that the nature of one’s future birth is informed by one’s actions in this world was, in the West, first an Orphic one, and the Orphic faith therefore was the first to have advocated “a positive ethic” for the same reasons and in the same manner that Christianity does (Guthrie 269). On a superficial level, the Bogomil rejection of judgment would appear to contradict the common Christian and Orphic view that one’s actions in this life influence one’s later fate. However, a more careful reading informed by these observations suggests that Pynchon’s convent provides readers with a glimpse of a sect whose Christianity is influenced by Orphism on a few points because of local conditions. Moreover, the sect unites Bogomilism and Orphism in a more profound way, one encouraging a realization of the common ground shared by the two rather different faiths. More specifically, Pynchon’s characterization of the sect reveals a point of essential compatibility, one in which Cyprian’s Bogomilist suspension of belief in the doctrine of a final judgment can be viewed as complementary to Orphism’s rejection of an ultimate eschatological scene. The movement of Cyprian into this sacred space is motion into the earth’s interior space, and into a space liberated, via Orphic mythology, from those historical and biological processes in which we are typically implicated. In keeping with this understanding, when Reef and Yashmeen find Cyprian prostrate before a statue of Zalmoxis (another god arguably connected to Orpheus), it seems as if he is watching a movie screen with “a kind of second sight, a knowledge beyond light of what

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lay within the wood itself” (957). Moving beyond light is, in this novel, undoubtedly a remarkable achievement. If Noseworth’s suggestion that light exists in a causal relation to history is a valid approach to the novel’s central thematic concerns, faith in the Shekhinah offers a means to escape the exigencies of history and the entropic procession of human fallibility. Furthermore, the “knowledge [. . .] of what lay within the wood itself” recalls the reader to a slightly earlier passage: “pine branches with dark streaks of shadow between reached trembling [. . .] like the arms of the numberless dead” (955). The numberless dead populating the forests of this Thracian landscape attest to the unavoidable implication of the Balkan states within history. At the same time, they are a darkly ironic reminder of the one avenue that removes one from historical involvement. From this perspective, Cyprian’s rejection of a coming earthly apocalypse is entirely in keeping with his turn to the convent’s Orphic underworld. One of the central elements of the myth of Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to reclaim Eurydice is, of course, his failure to resist the temptation to look back during their departure from the land of the dead, a turn that causes the second loss of his wife. Lest readers overlook the relevance of Orphism to Cyprian’s convent, Yashmeen’s final comments before their separation cement the connection, as she implores him, “Please—don’t look back,” and he replies, “Or he’ll take you below, you mean. Down to America” (962). The exchange both underscores the Orphic dynamic of Cyprian’s final episode and greatly magnifies its value in several ways. In the first place, that Yashmeen may be reclaimed by some sort of hell as a result of any hesitancy or succumbing to temptation on the part of Cyprian indicates that his decision is not only useful to his own spiritual well-being but—ultimately, and in keeping with her similarity to the Shekhinah—a salvific sacrifice of the self designed to preserve “the world.” In addition, that “none of them looked back” promises at least temporary success for Reef, Ljubica, and Yashmeen in avoiding all of the dangers presented by the surface world outside the convent (962). Eurydice is therefore associated, through the medium of Cyprian, with a female principle worthy of veneration and demanding self-sacrifice. She is a component of not just Yashmeen but many women in the book. Kit, practicing dive-bombing runs with Renzo over Torino, sees that the deathinflected future indicated by his flying machine has launched them toward “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 its functional equations, stripped and fire-blasted of everything emotional or accidental” (1070). Kit’s surreal journey near the end of the novel takes him not only through what appears to be Shambhala but also back to Dally Rideout. After his experience, they may indeed succeed in leaving behind the “Hell-of-the-future,” for the narrator asks that “we

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imagine for them a vector [. . .] carrying them safely [. . .], no longer to be broken into by light displaced from Hell,” the final words recalling the “knowledge beyond light” to which Cyprian has access after devoting himself to the convent (1082–83). In this sense, Kit’s experience of another world is more successful than Orpheus’s; it reclaims Dally-Eurydice from condemnation to the future of the declarative world, just as Cyprian’s selfsacrifice opened salvific possibility for Yashmeen-Eurydice. Thus, introducing the Orphic tradition to the Bogomil convent promotes an understanding of underground places as usually of positive spiritual value. In addition, it reinforces what the Interdikt, the Figure uncovered by the Vormance Expedition, and the Tatzelwurms suggest: the spirit of the earth is a living one opposed to principles represented by such entities as “the eastern corporations,” who assault the earth “with drills and dynamite” (929). The magnitude of the earth’s interior space emphasizes the degree of power touched on by Orphism. Readers learn, for instance, that the earth of the Chums of Chance is, in fact, hollow, in keeping with certain theories of “Kepler, Halley, and Euler” (115). While such an earth at first seems far removed from the declarative proceedings of the surface world, such as the Traverses’ tribulations or even the trials of the Vormance Expedition, the Chums themselves occasionally cross diegetic lines, suggesting that other facts of their storyworld, including not just a “Telluric Interior” but also that interior’s populations and civilizations, can likewise make the transition under appropriate conditions (114). Therefore, just as Orpheus crossed between the world of the living and the world of the dead, the Orphic tradition in Against the Day illustrates the possibility of movement between the real and the fictive, or the predetermined and the still-possible, the declarative and the subjunctive. Besides the association of Orpheus with the underworld, other characteristics make Orphism an important element of the connective tissues of Against the Day. The figure of Orpheus unites the Balkan episodes concerning Cyprian, Reef, Yashmeen, and Ljubica with those of the Doosra, Magyakan, Kit, and others in Siberia. More specifically, the many similarities between Orpheus and the shamans of northern and central Asia cement the importance of both Bogomilism and Orphism to Pynchon’s environmental ethics. The superficial connections between shamanism and Thracian spiritual traditions, including Orphism, are numerous. Just as Orpheus descends into Hades to recover Eurydice, so a descent into the underworld to reclaim a loved one is related to the pseudoshamanisms of many cultures, including those of the Tatars, Manchu, Polynesians, Maori, and American Indians.21 Furthermore, the ancient Mycian precursors to the early Thracian Getae are described by Strabo as kapnobatai, a term Mircea Eliade

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argues should be translated as “those who walk in smoke,” with an understanding that the smoke was from hemp used in service of shamanic ecstasy, a process we see employed by Pynchon’s Doosra (390).22 The common shamanic ritual symbolic ascent to the heavens by means of a real set of stairs finds its echo not only in Cyprian’s climb to his convent but also in ancient Thracian religious practice (Eliade 390). In addition, Orpheus’s “healing art, . . . love for music and animals, . . . his power of divination,” and role as a psychopomp (a figure who can guide others between the world of the living and that of the dead) are all characteristic of shamans as well (Eliade 391–92). Each of these similarities between Orphism and shamanism has the additional effect of bridging, through the connections between Orphism and Bogomilism, the divide between shamanism and that heresy. The particular attitude toward nature suggested by shamanism is what makes the connection between shamanism and Bogomilism important to the intersection of Against the Day’s spatial, spiritual, and environmental aspects. The figure of the shaman is aligned historically and popularly with sensitivity to nature. In Against the Day, a number of points suggest that characters who display shamanic powers are so aligned. Kit’s interaction with reindeer such as Ssagan and the Chums’ dealings with Pugnax both resemble the use of an “animal language” by shamans. This ritual convention, part of many shamanic cultures in diverse geographic locations, has several features. Learning the languages of animals allows the shaman to communicate with spirits and consequently “is equivalent to knowing the secrets of nature and hence . . . being able to prophesy”; such learning is also, as is the ritual use of animal costumes, “equivalent to ability to communicate with the beyond and the heavens” (Eliade 98). In addition, speaking animal languages is for shamans, as it was for Orpheus, “yet another sign that the shaman can move freely through . . . cosmic zones: underworld, earth, sky”; moreover, “in numerous traditions friendship with animals and understanding their language represent paradisal syndromes” (Eliade 99). Indeed, the mythic fall of man included his loss of ability to speak with beasts, a beginning of our enmity with them and each other. Conversely, the regaining of such a talent represents the start of a movement back to an Edenic world, or the speaker’s attainment of a state of grace. Because the Orphic elements of shamanic ritual indicate a sympathetic stance regarding nature, characters who speak with animals, including Kit, the Chums, and the several shamans of Against the Day, are associated with positive, and even transcendent, values. The ability to communicate with animals is a sympathetic exercise also related to another, more far-reaching magicoreligious notion: the recognition that “any natural phenomenon” has its own spirit (Eliade 104). North American shamans in particular hold this belief; in Pynchon it takes the

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form of such creatures as the Figure, the Tatzelwurms, and so forth. The Orphic and shamanistic ability to communicate with and even direct natural forces is exactly what the members of the Vormance Expedition, the operators of Against the Day’s corrupt mines, and the novel’s other capitalist entrepreneurs and militants lack, a lack that leads, ultimately, to the awakening of the destructive mechanisms of the earth’s revenge. There are several additional ways in which historical shamanism grounds the relations among spatiality, spirituality, and environmentalism in the novel. As in Pynchon’s text, the various extraworldly forces to which historical shamans are connected are rarely simple. The difficult ambiguities facing the Yakutsk shaman are particularly relevant, for their gods are not exclusively good or evil, and it is sometimes difficult to determine whether a particular spirit is a vengeful, telluric one or a more well-disposed, uranian one (Eliade 186–89). The divide suggested by this shamanistic understanding finds its echo not only in the sometimes ambiguous relation of Pynchon’s natural and underground creatures to man but also in Bogomil theology, in which the blending of Nature as the object of sacrifice (asceticism) and sacrament depends on the merging of Christianity into the oppositional position of dualism (Obolensky 24). This concern again pushes our understanding of the connections between shamanism and the rest of Pynchon’s text beyond Orphism to Bogomilism and Cyprian. Some other aspects of shamanism reinforce its relation to Cyprian’s dualism. Just as he serves as the medium of impregnation in his tryst with Yashmeen and Reef, the Yukagir shaman is often called upon to transport a soul “into a woman’s womb” (Eliade 246). Likewise, Cyprian’s cross-dressing and bisexuality resonate with the ritual transvestitism, frequent hermaphroditism, and changing of sexual behavior found in the shamanic traditions of a number of cultures (Eliade 257–58). Eliade argues that these practices are often ritual efforts to establish shamans as asexual, impotent androgynes, efforts important to the shaman’s role as an intermediary between two worlds that are themselves emblematic of the divine “coincidentia oppositorum” of many cosmological dualisms (Eliade 352, 285). In this regard, Cyprian’s sexual ambiguities not only prepare him for Bogomilism but attest to the connection between that faith and shamanism. In addition, the fact that the faith of the Bogomils “was frequently associated in the popular conception with superstition and even magic” similar to that of shamanism is particularly striking (Obolensky 164). The aggressive environmentalism and political exceptionalism of some of Pynchon’s shamans, such as the Doosra, are echoed by the strong political independence of the Bogomils, who suffered state persecution as early as the tenth century and were accused by Cosmas of “preaching civil disobedience” (Obolensky 136–37). This accusation derived from

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the fact that Bogmilism’s strength arose from its “essentially popular . . . character”: “Throughout its entire history of four centuries in Bulgaria, Bogomilism was linked with the religious and social aspirations of a large dissatisfied section of the people” (Obolensky 142). Furthermore, shamanism is intimately related to another aspect of Against the Day, the Tunguska Event. As noted previously, Magyakan is rumored to be wandering (appropriately, given shamanic history) in some giant form through the post-Event landscape. Despite their universality, shamans are, in one way, a specifically Tungusic phenomenon; Eliade explains that the word shaman derives from the Tungusic šaman (Eliade 4). Furthermore, the theory that the Tunguska Event was the collision of a meteorite with the earth is in keeping with many Asian shamanic traditions. In southern Siberia, in particular, a “thunder-stone” fallen from the sky can indicate the gods’ election of a future shaman, and such a stone has magical “virtue that can be used, communicated, [and] disseminated,” with the result that it offers “a new center of uranian sacrality on earth” (Eliade 19, n. 40; 139).23 The dissemination of magical power to those visiting the sacred site of a fallen thunder-stone or meteorite is thus one explanation for the many advantages, and disorientations, that surround characters who travel near the site of the Tunguska Event in Against the Day. Furthermore, the typical assumption that such a space indicates the manifestation of “a transhuman presence . . . from above (or from below)” in the human plane reminds one of the fall of Lucifer discussed by the Chums and the hypothetical supralunary origins of the Vormance Expedition’s Figure (Eliade 260). In every case, the environmentally sensitive shamans are blessed with an otherworldly confirmation, one that derives, in part, from that confirmation’s spatial exceptionality. These connections among shamanism, Orphism, Bogomilism, and other spiritual concerns are perhaps less significant than the manner in which shamans establish the importance of a mystical geography, a geography that houses a variety of alternative spaces that offer comment on humanity’s relation to nature. Unlike the hidden but more recognizable spaces of the novel, such as that of the Tatzelwurms, these mystical spaces generally depend on a change of vision. In part because of his role as a psychopomp, the shaman is the premier figure in the translation from the natural to preternatural and mystical realms. Indeed, “the pre-eminently shamanic technique is the passage from one cosmic region to another— from earth to the sky or from earth to the underworld” (Eliade 259). Insofar as this is the case, the characteristics that predispose Pynchon’s shamans to a superior relation with nature also align them with spaces that partake of not only natural but also supernatural virtues. Some such spaces are earthly paradises that offer respite to the marginalized and dispossessed, while others are more infernal and serve as illustrations of our

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fallen world. Still others are ambiguously related to the dominant world of the novel yet are clearly genuine alternate worlds. Pynchon often describes the earthly spaces as either sacred or indicative (as with the awakening of the Vormance Expedition’s Figure) of some sort of “original sin” against the planet (145, 393). When passages suggesting such an originary crime are not devoted to scenes of retribution, they provide instead a picture of a recoverable Eden, like the cave Frank discovers while wandering through a shamanic, hikuli-inspired underworld with a doubled Estrella: They came to a cave in which it was raining, calmly but steadily. Inside this one cave, she explained, falling steadily for thousands of years, was all the rain that should have been falling on the southwestern desert [. . .] as a result of the original sin, crime, or mistake that had produced the desert [. . .]. [. . .] She went on to tell Frank how the desert was made, to serve as their penance. (393)

The rain cave is not just tied to a punitive desert; it is itself a paradisal spot that remains available to those willing to try to find it. When Frank undertakes his psychedelic journey to Casas Grandes, he again finds himself in an alternate place, “a strange yet familiar City” under control of a shamanic priesthood called the Hallucinati (924). In addition to evincing a planetary self-awareness, this passage elaborates the significance of the novel’s mystical geographies. Frank’s encounter with an alternate space is, this time, a condensed experience of the Aztecs’ fall and hopeful redemption, an experience he eventually realizes “he had to begin to see, and remember he saw, if he was to have even an outside chance of saving his soul” (928). The rain cave and the Hallucinati’s city are both the embodiment of the knowledge of exceptional geographies available to those undertaking shamanic wanderings and visionary earthly spaces related to questions of redemption. Other earthly spaces are equally important in terms of the novel’s balancing of the redeeming possible against the damning declarative. One example is the hidden anarchist community at Yz-les-Bains (931ff.). As was the case with Frank’s more authentically shamanistic experiences, the existence of the novel’s more prosaic alternate spaces depends, in part, on seeing differently, as is the case with Venice’s Isola degli Specchi (570). Likewise, just as the Doosra predicted Europeans would have a difficult time mapping his revolutionary Asia, so these alternative earthly spaces offer the opportunity to rethink both space and representations of space. In Yz-les-Bains, Ratty McHugh shares with Reef and Cyprian a map that was obtained in Tangier, the interpretation of which is “like reading ancient Tibetan or something.” It is purported to be of the Belgian Congo, but, at the same time, it is recognized by Reef as a map of South Texas and

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by Cyprian as one of Bosnia (935). The confusion of place is due to certain ambiguities in the document, certainly, but they are ambiguities that arise from the nature of the place mapped in its connection to its inhabitants.24 The difficulty of mapping is also the result, in some cases, of the physical land’s resistance to man’s understanding. In this sense, the novel’s mystical geography is connected to its living Earth. When Kit travels to Lake Baikal, the beginning and end of his journey occur in such a territory. The Tushuk Tash, the archway through which Kit must take the first steps of his voyage, “was considered impossible actually to get to even by the local folks. [. . .] All maps were useless. Cartographers of different empires, notably the Russian, had been driven to nervous collapse trying to record the country” (769). Among the information relevant to this remarkable landmark is the title by which it is known to some: “the Prophet’s Gate,” the Prophet being not just Mahommed but also “another [. . .] for whom [. . .] the Doosra was the forerunner” (769). Behind the rock formation that marks the start of Kit’s pilgrimage into a seemingly preternatural space, then, rests a central Asian power whose interests are served by shamans. Furthermore, looking at the goal of Kit’s journey, Lake Baikal, is to him “like looking into the heart of the Earth itself. [. . .] It was another of those locations like Mount Kailash, or Tengri Khan, parts of a superterrestrial order included provisionally in this lower, broken one” (769). As is the case with the shaman Magyakan, who appears to be not of this world by virtue of his intimate connection to it, Lake Baikal provides a glimpse into an unearthliness that paradoxically lies at “the heart of the Earth.” Kit’s new understanding of the degree to which our world has fallen from some sort of paradisal model again directs our attention in opposite directions—heavenward and into the earth’s interior. As discussed previously, the interior of the planet holds a number of threats for those who disturb it as well as providing its own alternative worlds, but Kit’s new perspective encourages us to question the effectiveness of the barriers that protect such spaces from incursion by hostile forces. A striking instance is that of the subarenaceous world to which the Chums have access courtesy of Captain Toadflax and his sand frigate. In some ways, with its taverns, cities, wildlife, and competing capitalists, this space is reminiscent of the Hollow Earth through which they have traveled, and it appears as little more than a denser version of the surface world. On the other hand, the alleged destination of Toadflax and his crew, Shambhala, stands as a mystical motivating force for many of the novel’s most sympathetic characters. When it is discovered that this goal is actually secondary to the frigate’s various economic enterprises, it becomes apparent that Toadflax’s journey is just as motivated by greed as the Vormance Expedition, and the references to Shambhala are revealed as nothing more than a pre-

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text. This realization is particularly unsettling because it makes clear that even the planet’s interior is becoming corrupted by capitalist enterprise. This corruption of what is often a sacred space suggests an ecological tipping point has been approached, beyond which recovery is perhaps impossible. In spite of such suggestions regarding the corruption of our world’s spiritual and environmental natures, the novel’s mystical geography continues to offer zones from which efforts at recovery may be launched, and shamanistic ritual and Orphic knowledge persist as central to comprehending them. The ultimate example of these spaces is Shambhala. Lew Basnight, in conversation with Dr. Otto Ghloix, learns of “secret geographies of the beyul, or hidden lands” through which one journeys on the way to “far Shambhala, [. . .] the Pure Land” (686). Lew begins to understand that the secret lands and a journey through them rely on the technique of “bilocation” discovered by Dr. Werfner/Renfrew, a technique practiced more naturally, as mentioned earlier, by “North Asian shamans,” and one that had also “become a feature of Orphic [. . .] religions” (686). Werfner explains the underlying concept as “a giant railway-depot, with thousands of gates disposed radially in all dimensions, leading to tracks of departure to all manner of alternate Histories” (682). Shambhala is essential to the novel not just because it is an archetypal paradisal place, but also because it unifies the efforts of so many of the text’s central characters. An alternate space like Shambhala is exactly what is offered, from Yashmeen’s perspective, by the relatively prosaic commune of Yz-les-Bains, insofar as it provides “some late reprieve, some hope of passing [. . .] ‘into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time’” (942). Shambhala also serves to unify further the diegetically secondary narrative world(s) of the Chums with the primary narrative world of the novel. The Tunguska Event turns a grimy desert city over which the Chums hover into Shambhala—a vibrant and beautiful mirror of the former metropolis, a mirror in the face of which “the desert was renounced” (793). This latter phrase suggests that Shambhala is a place accessible only when the originary sin of which Frank became aware in a visionary experience has been forgiven, a forgiveness allowing “human eyes to see the City” (793). Once the Tunguska Event is seen in the light of shamanistic understandings of space, it is clear that the various re-visions experienced in the text (Frank at the rain cave, the Chums in the wake of the Tunguska Event, Kit after that same occurrence, Hunter Penhallow fleeing the Figure, Cyprian before Zalmoxis, and so forth) are all steps into similar, or even the same, hidden lands. Movement into this territory unites the concerns of the novel’s many characters, and the association of alternate spaces with the shamanistic power to cross into magicoreligious lands offers a promise of redemption from the

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sin that threatens both the souls of the characters and the earthly spaces that offer doors to redemption. By interweaving popular religions such as Bogomilism, Orphism, and shamanism with particular spatial relations that, in turn, draw readers’ attentions to planetary ecology, Against the Day illuminates the responsibilities of environmental stewardship. The novel’s alternate geographies—mystical and otherwise—contrast with the dominant world of the text in a dynamic relation that repeatedly unveils the limitations of human experience of that world. In some cases, these spaces are visions of a paradise regained, while others appear as figurative or literal deserts resulting from the planet’s attempts to defend itself. These worlds often highlight the reliance of people upon habits of sight, thus promoting a change of view that will open new possibilities of spiritual and biological survival. Pynchon, of course, maintains some ambiguity about the sanity of those who are too devoted to pursuit of such a place, as when Reef’s “old faith in the westward vector, in finding someplace [. . .] the capitalist/ Christer gridwork hadn’t got to” nearly gets him labeled an “Idiot” (1074–75). Nevertheless, the undeniable advantages presented to characters working for the preservation or recovery of natural space defend such possibly insane devotions as those of saints. Ultimately, the novel demonstrates that such efforts offer our one chance to discover a place “no longer to be broken into by light displaced from Hell,” to travel a vector “toward grace” (1083, 1085). NOTES 1. Thomas Schaub, “The Environmental Pynchon.” Schaub’s essay refers to numerous ecocritical readings of Pynchon, including Michael Vannoy Adams, “The Benzene Uroboros”; Douglas Keesey, “Nature and the Supernatural”; Robert L. McLaughlin, “I. G. Farben”; and Lawrence C. Wolfley, “Repression’s Rainbow.” 2. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. 3. Gabriele Schwab, “Creative Paranoia,” 99. See also Gregory Bateson, Ecology of Mind. 4. Tom LeClair, Art of Excess, 40. 5. Ibid., 42. See also J. E. Lovelock, Gaia. 6. LeClair, Art of Excess, 43. 7. Notable work in this strain includes Daniel R. White’s “Literary Ecology and Postmodernity.” 8. This light resonates with the biblical allusions of the book’s title (Job 38:23, Proverbs 21:31, John 12:7, Romans 2:5, 2 Peter 3:7) and Lindsay Noseworth’s suspicion that “light might be a secret determinant of history” (431). The consideration of light in relation to the novel’s historiographic dimensions is most fully dealt with in Andrew Yerkes’s generally outstanding essay “Prospects of Historiographic Metafiction.” 9. McLaughlin, “I. G. Farben,” 321. 10. Fabienne Collignon, “A Glimpse of Light,” 557–58.

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11. For a much different reading of the meaning of punishment in this episode, see Graham Benton’s essay in this volume. 12. Magyakan serves as a sort of counterpart to the Figure uncovered by the Vormance Expedition. Just as the expedition’s violation of the natural order precipitates their giant creature’s awakening and vengeful movement across human space, so Magyakan will be rumored to be roaming in giant form through the wastes created by the Tunguska Event. 13. Yashmeen’s definition of the Shekhinah, which is the view that appears to dominate Against the Day, is hardly the full picture of this entity as it is presented in other Pynchon texts or in the kabbalistic tradition. The ambiguities that surround this feminine figuration of the divine hardly reserve her for the side of good; somewhat like the Archangel Gabriel, she is alternately either nurturing and salvific or retributive and damning. As such, the Shekhinah is a brilliant figuration of Yashmeen, who offers carnal temptation while remaining a key element in the world’s salvation. Kathryn Hume offers an engaging and thoughtful reading of Against the Day in relation to religious, particularly Christian, doctrine in “Religious and Political Vision.” Of special interest here is the section entitled “Sacred Geography” (175–76). 14. Dmitri Obolensky, The Bogomils, 162. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically. 15. This and other departures from strict Bogomilism align Pynchon’s pseudoBogomils more closely with a general gnosticism. I here refrain from pursuit of the gnostic thread in order to concentrate on Pynchon’s Bogomils in relation to questions of spatiality. Curious readers will find that Dwight Eddins, in The Gnostic Pynchon, has written an excellent study of gnostic concerns in Pynchon’s short fiction and first three novels. Charles Hohmann, in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, treats gnosticism in Pynchon’s third novel. The tension Eddins rightly identifies between gnosticism and Orphism is much reduced by Against the Day’s turn to the Bogomils, who mediate between the different camps by offering a paradoxically Orphic gnosis, a faith that bridges, in the terms Eddins adopts from Eric Voegelin, the metaxic range of human experience that stretches from the apeiron to (or at least toward) the nous of an Orphic naturalism (15, 20–22). 16. Hume, “Religious and Political Vision,” 177. 17. Heinz Ickstadt, “History, Utopia and Transcendence,” 217. 18. Obolensky, in The Bogomils, explains that Docetic Christology was a general Bogomil doctrine. This heresy “claimed that the body of Christ was of a non-material nature” (211). Still, as with all statements regarding Bogomilism, one must recall that the Byzantine and Bulgarian (the leading non-Byzantine realization of Bogomilism) varieties of the sect differed slightly on several doctrinal issues, and local variations may well have existed. Nevertheless, such a claim importantly situates Bogomilism against the doctrine of “Word made flesh” that justifies what Eddins, Gnostic Pynchon, calls the “malevolent inversion” of “Christianized naturalism” (124). 19. W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus, 40. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically. 20. The vertical elements of Orphism are also reminiscent of the Ginnungagap faced by the Vormance Expedition. As do the myths of the Northmen, Orphic

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fragments and later writings by Orphic Neoplatonists such as Proklos describe an originary bottomless pit, Tartaros. See Guthrie, Orpheus, 168. 21. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, 214 n. 86, 367–68. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically. 22. The Doosra’s employment of other psychotropic chemicals is also historically accurate. Eliade, Shamanism, explains that shamanic “ecstasy through intoxication by mushrooms is known throughout Siberia” (221). 23. A variation on the notion is to be found in the shamanic culture of the Turko-Tatars. See Eliade, Shamanism, 260. 24. Collignon, “A Glimpse of Light,” gives a fuller treatment of the ambiguities of maps in Against the Day, usefully situating Pynchon’s treatment of them in relation to Lefebvre and de Certeau (547ff). See also, in this volume, the treatment of this scene by J. Paul Narkunas and the analysis of maps in general by Krzysztof Piekarski, Martin Kevorkian, and Elisabeth McKetta.

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S Readers and Trespassers: Time Travel, Orthogonal Time, and Alternative Figurations of Time in Against the Day Inger H. Dalsgaard

Yes and who says there can’t be time travel, or that places with realworld addresses can’t be haunted, not only by the dead but by the living as well? —Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (273)

INTRODUCTION

T

ime travel is a new—and yet eerily familiar—idea developed in Against the Day. Amusing or disturbing, passages that unambiguously describe the vehicles or acts of time travel frame questions about the nature of time itself, questions that permeate the text. Initially, Pynchon seems to define time travel in a traditional sense. For instance, in New York and at Candlebrow University, the Chums of Chance encounter H. G. Wells–style contraptions for moving into the future, during a concentrated time travel section (as I will refer to it) at the end of “Iceland Spar,” the novel’s second part (397–428). However, Pynchon soon problematizes the straightforwardness of time travel (that is, moving straight forward into the future or directly backward into the past), as well as the pace and direction of time itself. Against the Day can be said to expand, diffuse, or broaden definitions of time and temporal transport to involve theoretical, 115

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mental, spiritual, and existential senses of those concepts. Insofar as the text seems designed to subvert conceptions of time and time travel, an earlier Pynchon text offers an idea of why he would seek to undermine standardized ideas of time through his fiction. The text in question is a short article on sloth Pynchon wrote for the New York Times Book Review in 1993 as part of a series on the seven deadly sins. In “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee,” Pynchon views the United States as the cradle of a particularly dispiriting perception of time linked to capitalist productivity, of which Benjamin Franklin becomes the first representative. When “time is money” and cityscapes are organized in ruler-straight grids to become “a kind of high-output machine, materials and labor going in, goods and services coming out,” Pynchon writes, a shift from “a spiritual to a secular condition” occurs in which lack of productivity is a sin against “a particular sort of time, uniform, oneway, in general not reversible—that is, against clock time.”1 This “orthogonal time,” which for a capitalist state becomes a dominant tool for regularizing mind-sets and behavior, stands in opposition to alternative kinds of time perception and productivity. These can be found, Pynchon writes, in daydreaming, spiritual encounters, or even technology, such as the videocassette recorder, which allows creative editing of temporal sequences. Thus fast forward, rewind, and slow motion enable viewers, and writers, to revise a narrative freely and fly in the face of orthogonal time constraints.2 Similar ideas arise in Against the Day. Set near the turn of the twentieth century, the novel describes a nation in the throes of a rapid capitalist industrialization that required workers to be acculturated and transportation and production systems harnessed to the disciplines of the clock. In the process this society also began to conceive of time itself as a mechanized, standardized commodity subject to marketplace laws and commercial exploitation.3 Not coincidentally, the novel also draws into its field a complex of cultural innovations—from the natural sciences to the creative arts—that during these same years questioned and tested the fabric of time, both theoretically and imaginatively. This essay examines the subversions of the forward, sequential, linear, or orthogonal flow of time brought about by both the novel’s narrative strategies and those of its figures—time travelers, scientists, shamans, or magicians. These characters’ spirit of free inquiry and loose handling of the commodity of time also counter the relentless quest for productivity and earnings found in the rampant late nineteenth-century capitalist predators represented in the novel by the Vibe Corporation. This essay also refers to three recurrent figures of alternative time perception. Orthogonal time has been figured as a unidirectional, linear “arrow” on which the passage of time is measured and predictable—every second

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“of equal length and irrevocable” since Poor Richard’s day.4 Though traditionally conceived time travel does reverse passage along this time line 180o to voyage into the past, it still respects those basic rules: a conventional time traveler does not change the concept of the arrow of time itself. In Pynchon’s text, though, three novel models of time travel break with this idea. One recurrent image is that of time and space travel departing at a 90o angle, offering journeys at “right angles to the flow of time” (132). A second is that of a curved, rotating, or circular time line, which allows (eternal) return—a perception discussed by scientists on the Vormance Expedition (132), at time travel conferences at Candlebrow University (409, 452), and by returning Trespassers (555). A third image exemplifies ideas of coexistent (multiple, parallel, or radiating) time lines, which can take the form of “alternate Histories” (said to be like tracks of departure “disposed radially in all dimensions,” as from a giant railway depot (682)) or of multiple, coexisting identities (such as those the Chums adopt during the interlude at the Harmonica Marching Band Academy (418–24)). These ideas of multiple branches or forks in the (rail)road of time are explored in detail later. Both science and fiction, I argue, provide opportunities to imagine and interpret worlds and time lines that diverge from, without excluding, each other. Finally, this essay reflects on what the idea of time travel and alternatives to orthogonal time perception might mean for the way we read, interpret, or “trespass” on Against the Day. Just as we readers on prior occasions have imitated the behavior or adopted the stance of many a Pynchon character, so as we read Against the Day we might reflect (on) the behavior and interpretive opportunities of the Trespassers. We first hear of these Trespassers as “Hidden People” whose light Iceland Spar gives an “all-important ninety-degree twist” (134), allowing them to exist alongside the world we think of as real. However, it is suggested that they have been crossing over to our world “either fleeing retribution for offenses committed back where they came from or seeking new coastlines to pillage” (134). The Chums of Chance meet two named Trespassers, the businesslike Mr. Ace and the ghostlike Ryder Thorn, who represent both of these reasons for crossing—exploitation and guilt—though they have traveled back from the future, not the past. Our approach to and interaction with the text’s potentials may resemble those the Trespassers experience within the text. Like them, we become textual time travelers or ghosts h(a)unting narrative meaning, either within the framework of this novel or through alternative texts—including Pynchon’s other novels. To what extent may readers of the novel, as readers of the Trespassers, be able to imagine, if not take, other historical and textual roads—both those less and more well traveled, of ages past and hence?

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NARRATIVE AS TIME MACHINE Time travel is not overtly mentioned for the first few hundred pages of Against the Day, but we meet the first “time travelers,” in a different sense, when we are introduced to the Chums of Chance on its first page. They hover over the novel from beginning to end, virtually unaged, suspended in both time and space, and they seem to travel along time lines at an unconventional tempo. Born of a genre of juvenilia in which diegetic aging is inappropriate, they nonetheless trespass on and interact with a plot in which real time does pass for other characters, who grow up and age at a natural pace. This is one of many examples of the subtle ways in which concepts of time and time travel appear in Against the Day’s narrative structures. Ideas of suspended and alternative times—hypothesized for Icelanders and certain texts such as The Book of Iceland Spar (132–33), or found in passages on shamanic time (143), Queen Victoria (231), and four-space (256)—suddenly and quite rapidly find a clear focus when the Chums encounter an H. G. Wells–style time machine, or rather a “toime machine” (397), as a New York street-Arab calls it. The Chums react very strongly to this mere mention of a time machine, and within five pages of the concept’s being introduced in passing, an actual machine also materializes. In quick succession, two central elements in time travel are introduced: the vehicles and the travelers. Chick Counterfly and Darby Suckling try Dr. Zoot’s preowned time machine in his New York City laboratory; the Chums travel to the Midwest and find a wealth of “failed time machines—Chronoclipses, Asimov Transeculars, Tempomorph Q-98s” deposited at the municipal junkyard outside Candlebrow, all destroyed by “misrouted energy” and the terrible “Flow” in the “River of Time” (409–10); and, inside the perimeter of Candlebrow, the subject of time and time travel is hotly debated at a yearly International Conference on Time-Travel, which attracts both scientists and philosophers—or “cranks, double-domes, and bugbrains,” as Dr. Zoot describes them (405)—who arrive from across time and space. While time has surfaced as a topic in previous passages, in this time travel section it becomes both a concerted theme and a narrative device. Just as they believe in the reality of Tom Swift (794), the Chums take Wells’s invention for reality: Wells’s literary time machine, to which they imagine the street-Arab is referring, is the first expression (both inside this novel and in literary history) of a mechanical means to achieve alternative passages through time. Fictional examples of time travel precede Wells, but the basis of such journeys was spiritual, cognitive, or magical rather than technological or scientific.5 Subverting the normal passage of time, Against the Day’s narrative itself also acts in many ways as a time machine; indeed, the quickening and stagnation of narrative pace in the time travel

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section are explicit examples. Plot development suddenly speeds up within the first few pages, only to go into a repetitive loop toward the end as the Chums, or some left-behind version of them, become stuck as part of a Marching Academy Harmonica Band for an indeterminable amount of (plot) time. The text itself is thus a kind of time machine, apparently set in motion by a reference to the first time machine known in literature. The year in which The Time Machine first appeared (1895) is also stipulated by some participants at the First International Conference on Time Travel (F.I.C.O.T.T.) as the starting point for their own, circular time travel—that is, “once time-travel is invented” (407). The F.I.C.O.T.T. is an example of a narrative strand that, while present in the plot, might not, in strictly orthogonal terms, logically exist yet. Other fictional, existential ambiguities in the time travel section include the Chums’ interpretation of the “toime machine” quip as an order from the mysterious Hierarchy to gather information for a “highly secretive programme, related in some way to time-travel” (398). Once the Chums form this somewhat paranoid idea, supporting evidence promptly produces itself, and the street Arab gains an identity as “Plug” Loafsley. Conspiracy theory is itself a device rendering creative imagination as assumed reality through a narrative mechanism. The Marching Academy Harmonica Band interlude, described in detail later, also shows how fiddling with time, reality, or straightforward narrative progression can destabilize narratives of identity. The Chums seem to be in control of, or perhaps simply oblivious to, their unusual passage through time—that is, their lack of aging—right up to the point where they encounter a time machine. Their confrontation with the nature and direction of time inside Dr. Zoot’s machine and their subsequent meetings with the Trespassers end up unsettling the “unquestioning faith that none of them, barring misadventure, would ever simply grow old and die” (418)—a “boys’-book innocence” with which the conventions of their literary genre have provided them but of which “some invisible narrative” (418) is now depriving them. Their descent into “knowing”—their fear of aging and, in effect, acquiring a consciousness of Time as an absolute factor—spreads to the whole Chums of Chance organization. Some units react to the threat by making treacherous deals with the Trespassers, working for them in exchange for “eternal youth” (555); others opt for “lateral solutions, sidestepping the crisis by passing into metaphorical identities” (418)—a kind of bilocation or 90o departure from the flow of history. In the case of the crew of the Inconvenience, this means that some versions of the five balloon boys become members of a Marching Academy Harmonica Band rather than remain visitors at the Conference on Time Travel. The presence of multiple but different versions of the Chums is thus not a case of future and past ghost units produced by flawed time travel techniques. Rather, it is an example of

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spatial bilocation, of (as explained later) superpositioned eigenstates, or, put more simply by Yogi Berra (and echoed in Against the Day (766)), a case of “coming to a fork in the road and taking it.”6 It is not just the Chums whose identities are stuck in a loop at this point; so too is the surrounding narrative, as signified by the constantly changing identity of the band or academy to which their new identities are tied. The Marching Academy Harmonica Band (MAHB) is also part of the Harmonica Band Marching Academy (HBMA), the Marching Harmonica Band Academy (MHBA), and the Harmonica Marching Band Academy (HMBA) (418–19); six pages later the Harmonica Academy Marching Band (HAMB) appears, further illustrating how tenuous the idea of stable identities is at this point (425). The Chums themselves are not sure whether they have gone “through some mutation into imperfect replicas of who they once were? meant to revisit the scenes of unresolved conflicts, the way ghosts are said to revisit places where destinies took a wrong turn [. . .]?” (422–23). If indeed they are these “ghosts,” they are much like the Trespasser Ryder Thorn. They might also be surrogates for the “real” Chums, allowing those “real” selves to escape to the sky; or (in Pynchon’s signal to compare reading to time travel) they “may only have once been readers of the Chums of Chance Series of boys’ books” (423). In this difficult passage, their identities grow more past-tense and tenuous as the Chums are reduced to their ontological status as literary subjects. Some drift off into new lives, while others are doomed to revisit old sites and wait, “unsure whether their own youth was behind them or yet to come” (423). Eventually this time loop comes to an end as the various narrative strands of the boys recover direction and the plot forward focus. Near the end of the “Iceland Spar” section, the Chums reemerge “more closely tuned to [the Trespassers’] presence” and ready to join a forward-moving plot again (424). It may be no novelty for Pynchon narratives to go off on a tangent. In this text, however, the 90o turn to the side of linear plot development, or the alternatives that exist parallel to it, is not simply literary gamesmanship. Such a move is also recognizable in emerging scientific philosophies cited in the text.

NEW SCIENCE AND ALTERNATIVE TIME The fact that the Chums are permitted alternative histories that go off on multiple, radial time lines for some time may seem unproblematic to postmodern narratology, but during the twentieth century science also considered the possibility that many worlds might coexist. Theories of time travel could provide a “scientific” explanation as to why versions

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of the Chums suddenly coexist alongside one another and even intersect. In Wells, the time machine “glides into the future” on the stream of time; because it does not include travel in space, however, this theory of time travel is now considered flawed by scientists: to avoid colliding with versions of itself, a machine needs to jump in time and not pass through it, as the basically immobile Wellsian machine does.7 If the Chums are subject to a Wellsian mode of time travel, this could explain why earlier and later versions of themselves reconverge at the Marching Academy Harmonica Band at the end of the time travel section. Perhaps this possibility is what subsequently leads Lindsay Noseworth to suspect that his fellow crew members are really a ghost-unit masquerading as the Chums of Chance (433). Since only Darby Suckling and Chick Counterfly are inside Dr. Zoot’s stationary time machine, however, a wider principle of temporal transport would have to be at play. Discussions of time in terms of vector space, quaternions, and other contemporary mathematical and physical theories point to another scientific explanation for the fact that multiple realities can be found to radiate from one point of origin. Because these discussions share space with multiple examples of bilocation, Against the Day seems open to emergent fields in physics—relativity theory and quantum mechanics—according to which time travel (or communication across space-time) is conceptually possible. While theories of space and time that follow the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics ostensibly emerged chronologically after Against the Day’s narrative time frame, Pynchon carefully notes that both “young Einstein” and Niels Bohr attend the F.I.C.O.T.T. (412), thereby enabling him (as if any rationale were needed in historiographic metafiction) to include twentieth-century scientific developments that allow for time travel. This historical fudging also introduces notions of alternative reality perception in terms more easily associated with other ideas in Against the Day than classical explanations afford. For instance, many-worlds theory, an interpretation of quantum mechanics first conceptualized by Hugh Everett in 1957 and elaborated by Bryce S. DeWitt and Neill Graham in 1973, speaks the language of Against the Day especially well. According to quantum physics and mathematics, time travel of the sort the Chums experience is perfectly possible at the subatomic level, and “ghost worlds” of probabilities coexist happily when not observed. Erwin Schrödinger made this point in relation to Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg’s Copenhagen interpretation when he put his eponymous cat in a box to live and die until observing it collapses the wave function and “decides” which of the two eigenstates—dead or alive—applies.8 In this interpretation, a quantum event yields two or more possible outcomes, whence observation (measuring or recording) makes only one of these outcomes the “real” one. Many-worlds theory, however,

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stipulates a universe in which multiple ghost realities continue to coexist because they diverge, branch, or simply “bilocate” into different worlds, where each possible outcome is equally real: a consciousness observing or measuring does not, that is, collapse a wave function into only one of the possible eigenstates, as early twentieth-century quantum physicists believed; that consciousness simply chooses or locks on to one possible eigenstate, reality, or world, while the others continue along other time or world lines. This complex scientific ontology does not change the classical way we actually perceive our place in time, space, and reality.9 We are prevented from observing the quantum reality in which bilocation and multiple superpositions of different realities are possible, either because our consciousness is limited to a classical perception of the world (rather than the very different physical realities theorized by Heisenberg and Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of subatomic physics) or because our consciousness is tied to only one of many coexisting worlds (according to the many-worlds theory).10 We cannot see, but only theorize, the ghosts of alternative time lines in which we and our world developed differently. After the Marching Academy Harmonica Band loop, though, Lindsay does seem to have a residual consciousness that some kind of quantum jump has taken place, a branching of realities that has placed him in a different state from that of his ghost unit. Observers are usually only aware of inhabiting one of the superpositioned worlds freely allowed by quantum reality. When reading fictions, however, we may be in a better position to maintain a conscious awareness of alternative narrative realities coexisting with equal validity than we are in our everyday experience, where by necessity we usually privilege one reality and read others as “ghosts,” dreams, or fantasies. In such everyday reality, the many worlds splitting off at a subatomic level lie beyond our conscious grasp.

TECHNOLOGIES OF BILOCATION AND TIME TRAVEL In Against the Day time travel can be rooted in science, in an alternative reality or a “spirit” realm, or in an innovative technology—without any one of these modes necessarily excluding the others. After talking to Ryder Thorn, Miles becomes convinced that Trespassers who travel in time do not do so through a “brilliant technical coup” but via a “singularity in the smooth flow of time” (555). Thus the Chums’ faith in technological solutions, typical of the end of the nineteenth century, has to give way to the twentieth-century revolution in physics, or even to spiritual explanations, in order to account for aberrations in normal or classical time and space relations, such as those posed by the Trespassers. Perhaps this proves that

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the “truth” of time travel is bound to the Chums’ own conscious interpretation at a given time: as Dr. Zoot suggests, the experience of time travel is “different for everybody” (404). Accordingly, the text maintains many modes of time travel or bilocation in uncontested parallel. The scientific and philosophical discussion of time in relation to space begins during the Vormance Expedition, continues between Vectorists and Quaternionists throughout the book, and finds practical, technological applications or supernatural expressions in such diverse examples as shamanic bilocation, the Tunguska Event, the Hypops apparatus, La Doppiatrice, and the Integroscope, which in different ways allow characters to bilocate or evade the normal passage of time. Modes of travel combining bilocation and temporal transposition make the case that, after traveling in space and time, everybody is “different.” The clearest example of this interpretation of bilocation is La Doppiatrice, the vanishing cabinet the Great Zombini has made at the mirror factory on the Isola degli Specchi in Venice. Zombini’s Cabinet of Mystery does not saw magicians’ assistants in half but creates “two complete individuals walking around” (355). These two originals, “slightly displaced in time” (571), go off on different life paths or time lines, which it would be impossible to retrace or make reconverge. Similarly, the Hypops apparatus, invented by Roswell Bounce to enable journeys under desert sands, is in effect a time machine, one that “translates oneself in Time” (426). Finally, the Integroscope, jointly developed by Bounce and Merle Rideout, traces life paths not only into the past but also into the future—though “there’s always the chance those little folks in the pictures will choose different paths than the originals” (1049). Time travel may be different for everybody, or time travelers may become different versions of themselves, or the worlds to which they travel may be different. Earlier Pynchon texts have of course alluded to the edge or cusp at which worlds separate and diverge. In Gravity’s Rainbow, for instance, a Polish undertaker aided by a head-mounted lightning rod and a heavenly discharge of electricity seeks entrance into an alternative world that “will look like the world you left, but it’ll be different.”11 Before reading Against the Day a reader might not have interpreted the undertaker’s ambition as one of time travel or bilocation but merely taken it as a tangential narrative, conjuring up a fantasyland where dwarves ride on eagles and wear infinity symbol masks and Carmen Miranda hats. In hindsight, however, there are similarities, if not congruencies, between the two texts and their mentions of other worlds “laid down on the previous one.”12 Bilocation and time displacement, as well as the suggestion that multiple, parallel, or tangential life paths may coexist, are phenomena associated with a wider range of mathematical, magical, and metaphysical experiences in the novel. Thus we see Yashmeen use Minkowski’s space-

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time continuum to suggest that, though the fourth dimension might approximate time, “it is really something on its own” (602). Here she alludes to the idea of the imaginary in quaternion theory (534) as well as the spiritual and mystical interpretation of Ouspensky’s ideas of the fourth dimension.13 Yashmeen also engages with Riemannian geometry and, apparently, travel in a higher dimension by exiting Kit’s rooms through a wall/“door” and emerging elsewhere in the coordinate system of Göttingen (592, 617); later she has a zeta-function revelation that releases her temporarily “into her past, haunting her old self” (816). Dally imagines Hunter, a fugitive from a European war yet to occur, to be a “time-traveler from the future” arrived by a not-yet-invented time machine able to travel back past the time of its own invention (577). Countless other figures and events—shamans, the Tunguska Event, Webb’s ghost, spiritist séances— test the boundaries between normal time and space relations throughout the book. Some of this time travel can be explained in terms of science or technology, but some slips into a gray zone where alternative time-space is the realm of magic or ghosts. Another instance of this gray zone is the apparent conflict between identified time travelers in Against the Day and the scientific rules of real time travel. The mysterious Trespassers, who ostensibly seek to exploit the resources of the past, and scientists who return to the Candlebrow Conferences on Time Travel seem ignorant of the fact that traveling into the past, or past the time in history at which a time machine was first invented, is thought to be impossible (except in fiction). Another conventional definition of time travel holds that it involves a physical journey; to their dismay, both these groups become suspected of not traveling in the required bodily sense but of being ghosts (410, 555). Pynchon’s texts have previously alerted us that, in a wider sense, ghosts and spirits are time travelers, if not corporeal ones. They travel more freely along the time vector than those of us who live our lives, age, and die in strict accordance with the forward “tickwise passage” of scalar time (457). Thus the Trespassers might be defined either as traditional time travelers or as ghosts, but the idea that they haunt the present from a point in the future rather than from the past is curious even to a traditional definition of specters. They are completely convincing neither as time travelers nor as ghosts. The Trespassers also occasion several discussions of the nature of mortality and of the possibility that messages, warnings, or prophecies may pass along the time axis where bodies may not follow. In Against the Day messages invite interpretation as ghostly or technological or wavering between the two. This is not just the case when a “pathetic balloon-boy faith” in the “Wonders of Science” (555) is challenged—as when the Chums seek to recategorize the Trespassers. We also see the possibility of a dual interpretation in the communication between Merle and Dally

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Rideout, across time and an ocean, in the last two sections of the book. Their apparent conversation comes about either through Integroscopic projection and a “million-watt wireless transmitter” (1061) or by “spiritual medium, talking to the dead” (1065), depending on the side of the exchange from which it is viewed. Pynchon, in fact, repeatedly leads us to question the relationship of technological invention to, on the one hand, magic and metaphysics and, on the other, science supported by capital.

MECHANISMS OF CAPITALISM AND ORTHOGONAL TIME The most obvious technology of time travel in Against the Day, Dr. Zoot’s time machine, might appear to be a mechanical indication of time’s pliable fabric, but its provenance is simultaneously another of the many subtle reminders of developing market capitalism throughout Against the Day. In many ways, Dr. Zoot appears to be a subversive in the relationship between time and money: an embodiment of the resistance to orthogonal time Pynchon champions in “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee.” Unlike the futuristic, glittering toy fashioned by Wells’s “Time Traveller,” for example, Dr. Zoot’s time machine is shopworn.14 Hinting at resistance to modernity, it “owe[s] much to the design preferences of an earlier generation” and to the careless maintenance of the self-taught Oldsmobile mechanic who had diverted revenue “from any but the simplest upkeep” (402). As if at odds with market logic and property rights, moreover, Zoot himself sells sample rides at half-price and siphons electricity from a generating station belonging to the Ninth Avenue El (401). Meanwhile the material components of other time machines in the text sound fictitious and not exactly the stuff of the future industrial order—“sheet-aluminum, vulcanite, Heusler’s alloy, bonzoline, electrum, lignum vitae, platinoid, magnalium, and packfong silver” (409). Yet these materials are real enough (most are man-made alloys) and tie time travel directly to the substance of the mining and processing industries, both integral to the United States’ rise as the world’s leading industrial power. Where Wells’s Time Traveller seems a well-to-do gentleman inventor and upper-class hobbyist, moreover, Dr. Zoot is an entrepreneurial type in “workingman’s fatigues” (402)—part Edisonian tinkerer, part “crazy promoter” (577)—who has bought his machine secondhand. His eye for a bargain, if not a steal, is of a piece with his price-cutting boosterism. According to “Plug” Loafsley, moreover, his electricity-siphoning arrangement is not necessarily surreptitious but the result of a practical deal with J. P. Morgan, financier and founder of General Electric, who also backed Edison’s early electrical experiments.15 Morgan’s involvement with Edison exemplified what Alan

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Trachtenberg calls the “evolving structure of experimental science and its alliance with industrial capitalism,” as does Scarsdale Vibe’s dubious involvement with Nikola Tesla’s revolutionary Colorado test facility in the novel (33–34, 99).16 A fictional manifestation of this broader integration, Dr. Zoot’s nominally unorthodox tinkering serves in part to harness capital, industry, raw materials, and invention; as such, his time machine may prove as much as anything a time-is-money machine. While Dr. Zoot’s shabby appearance and carpet slippers owe much to the carefully cultivated “homely genius” image of Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” his “peculiar helmet punctuated over its surface by not entirely familiar electrical fittings” (402) is also reminiscent of Gravity’s Rainbow’s crazy Polish undertaker, another Pynchonian instance of seemingly subversive science being weighed down by capitalist affiliation. A Ben Franklin fan and would-be lightning rod, the undertaker rescues Thanatz after he involuntarily disembarks the Anubis in a storm and wears “a Wehrmacht helmet through which he has drilled a couple of hundred holes and inserted nuts, bolts, springs and conductive wands of many shapes.”17 This passage presages concepts of time and the capitalist mind-set that appear in later Pynchon texts, including “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” and Against the Day. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Franklin’s crypto-Masonic ideas threaten to infiltrate the Polish undertaker’s project and improve his job skills. The monthly magazine to which a secret organization of the lightning-struck might subscribe, A Nickel Saved, refers not to Franklin’s proverbial penny adjusted for inflation but to “nickel-magnate” Mark Hanna—Cleveland industrialist Marcus A. Hanna, who helped the gold-bug Republican William McKinley defeat the “free silver” platform of William Jennings Bryan in 1896.18 Such political and financial issues of the American “bimetallist” era become central to the miners in Against the Day in very real ways (89, 274, 306–07). The human cost of Franklin’s association of money and time is also exposed in Pynchon’s sloth essay. Franklin may have felt, in Pynchon’s words, that sleep was “time away from accumulating wealth, time that had to be tithed back into the order of things to purchase twenty hours of productive waking.”19 But when time equals money, he argues, this equivalency has a deadening effect on the apparently unproductive hours of creative daydreaming. Franklin’s notion of the day that requires productive work and banishes dreams, ideas, and ghosts is in this sense pernicious. For here lie the origins of a time perception where “every second was of equal length and irrevocable”; “not much in the course of its flow could have been called non-linear, unless you counted the ungovernable warp of dreams.”20 With such an orthogo-

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nal mind-set, the regulated capitalist lifestyle aims to suppress and deaden magic, mystery, creativity, supernaturalism, or any subversive alternative; or, as Heinz Ickstadt formulates it, “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 electrical energy.”21 In nineteenth-century America, the orthogonal approach to time and money became the ruling perception—and, for a rapidly growing, immigration-fueled working class, the dominant necessity. As Herbert Gutman has explained, American industrialization required the labor force to be divested of its varied preindustrial traits and norms in the interests of capital and productivity; while in the grip of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, the workers thus primed were to be drilled to run like clockwork, maximizing output in relation to units of input.22 In Against the Day Kit and Tesla (whose ideas of free power distribution made him a genuinely revolutionary scientist) recognize this Franklinian legacy. In a conversation on Kit’s apparent ability to imagine shapes, Tesla tells him he had similar visions at his age: “When I could find the time to sit still, the images would come. But it’s always finding the time, isn’t it,” time outside work, through which one is constantly “tithing,” “giving back to the day” (104). In an easily overlooked dimension of Pynchon’s title, then, it is Franklin’s rigidly timed day—“the” day—that daydreamers find themselves running up against. According to this logic, the use of a time machine and other violations of its linear, “tickwise,” and one-way passage cheat the economy of time. Just as exchange rate mechanisms and Silver Purchase acts are instruments that can meddle with the “natural law” of a capitalist market economy, so time travel undermines orthogonal time or even the perceived immutability of time itself, leaving the present open to marauders or colonizers—one of whom the Trespasser named Mr. Ace seems to be. The Chums suppose the Trespassers treat time as “trade goods,” to be used as bribes or in exchange for native resources (416). When they appear not to have manipulated time by mechanical means, however, but to have arrived through a “shortcut through unknown topographies” where “the fabric of time [is] torn open,” the Trespassers’ approach seems to the Chums a “cruel confidence game,” a default on their promise to exchange eternal youth for work (555).23 The Chums and their airborne brethren work hard (sell out, even) to avoid aging and death. They seem to wish to confront the ultimate boundary of time and to break its deterministic rules by crossing into death and returning to tell the tale—the same “discontinuity in the curve of life” the Polish undertaker of Gravity’s Rainbow seeks.24 In Against the Day, indeed, the apparent finality of time and the struggles against it yield a variety of reactions.

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A FUTURE END OF TIME? Dr. Zoot’s machine underscores the capitalist logic of orthogonal time, even when one seems to be breaking out of it. But what precisely the experience Darby and Chick have inside implies about the nature of time remains unanswered. The contraption is a cylindrical viewing booth with a single, smeared quartz window, and quite possibly it is more cinema than vehicle.25 One way or another, the boys’ experience of time travel inside it is not bounded by the physical chamber they are in; it seems spectral, part of their nervous system or of a greater reality they have been “transported” to—until comic relief and a swift return to the present arrive in the form of a vaudeville hook. This implement is another subtle indication that time here is a spectacle, though one in which they participate rather than merely watch. The boys are participant-observers: “objectionable performers” (404), after all, not audience members, are pulled off the variety stage with such a hook. The boys’ function in the spectacle corresponds with the notions of late-twentieth-century quantum theorists, who assert that we are not just bound to one reality out of many, one eigenstate at a time, but rather we actually create our own worlds through observation-participation. Each time we observe an event, we have chosen and made real one of several possibilities. The reality Darby and Chick temporarily join is described as a great storm in which “masses of souls” move in a sweep of wind and rain (or time) and are “borne terribly over the edge of the visible world” (404), without control of their fate. Bearing the historical context in mind, many details point toward premonitions of war, especially considering Ryder Thorn’s later Flanders Fields lament (554–55). War—and not necessarily just the First World War toward which Against the Day slouches—seems to be the destiny that the time machine and the Trespassers foretell. The description of the smell of dead tissue and excrement evokes death in the trenches. But the apparent presence of crying beasts and an oceanic roar could also describe an ultimate, ahistorical end, as in The Time Machine. The end of the world in Wells’s novel involves a descent into darkness and night, reminiscent also of the horrifying, deterministic end of a historical time cycle, or “Untergang des Abendlandes” in Oswald Spengler’s terminology.26 On a different level, the preview of the end of time to which the boys are treated is not just one of an apocalyptic future or the end of history. It is also a description of a fact of human consciousness: the general powerlessness afflicting those who exist within time and space. The time machine seems to show the Chums the fate of humanity, in a world of “three dimensions and perhaps more [. . .] galloping in unceasing flow ever ahead, denied any further control over their fate” (404). Thus if Dr.

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Zoot’s machine treats Chick and Darby to a vision of the deterministic flow of humankind through time, it may be because the vehicle causes “unintended immersion in the terrible Flow over which [it] had been designed and built, so hopefully, to prevail” (409), as Pynchon writes of those (other) failed time machines the Chums find at Candlebrow when trying to trace the origins of Zoot’s model. A successful machine, in this case, is a vessel floating above the metaphor of time as a “river.” But the Chums are temporarily submerged; they seem to witness “human identities, masses of souls, [. . .] a spectral cavalry [. . .] borne terribly over the edge of the visible world” (403–04)—the very edge that Gravity’s Rainbow’s Polish undertaker actively sought to cross, the better to understand death and bereavement. Submitting consciousness to the inevitability of time’s passage may be necessary. But the dream of being able to shop around at the “Bazaar of Time,” where “many forms of time-transcendence, timelessness, countertime, escapes and emancipations from Time” (454) are available, gives hope of acquiring power over time as an otherwise ultimate determinant. The Chums seem to have counted on immortality as a means for stopping time. Other characters also wish that time could at least be put on pause, if not reversed or fast-forwarded, by treating it as in some ways spatial. Hunter muses that “political space has its neutral ground. 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?” (577). He wishes he could “remember” the future, whereas Auberon Halfcourt muses on either being trapped in the “Home Country of the Past” (759) or using the present tense as a place of exile. In scientific terms, true timelessness is only present in the moment (560)—the immeasurable point between past and future—or in death, where consciousness of time ends. Either way, time is “the merciless clockbeat we all seek to escape, into the pulselessness of salvation” (558).

THREE FIGURATIONS OF ALTERNATIVE, SUBVERSIVE TIME The horror of a Spenglerian end of time and the sloth essay’s ultimately pessimistic outlook on orthogonal time find a counterbalance in the different images of alternative time in Against the Day, which gives a sense that subversion, creativity, or at least nonorthogonal complexity endures. At Ostend, Kit Traverse overhears “Q-brothers” considering their status as imaginary, ghostlike, and diasporic. Wandering around, some are “destined for the past, others the future, even a few able to set out at unknown angles from the simple line of Time, upon journeys that no one can predict” (533). This language reinforces the connection between time and space travel and the spectral, which is also the territory of the

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Trespassers. While ghosts may be free from normal constraints on going back and forth in time, Kit’s subsequent train journey along the edge of the Qara Qum brings up one of the three figures of alternative or subversive journeys in time—circular, parallel or radial, and perpendicular. The idea that unknown angles can enter our quotidian passage leaves Kit unclear about the “roles of time and his own observing consciousness”—a reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which contributed to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Kit, whose surname implies lateral travel, continues: “The effect of rotating ninety degrees from a moving timeline, as expected, was delivery into a space containing imaginary axes—the journey seemed to be unfolding in three dimensions, but there were added elements. Time could not, somehow, be taken for granted. It sped up and slowed down, like a variable that was dependent on something else, something so far, at least, undetectable” (752). Thus the passage of time is not just affected by Kit’s subjective consciousness but may literally have changed because he has turned himself in relation to the x, y, z, and t axes. A second explanation is that, like other characters throughout the novel, Kit is on the verge of discovering that alternative realities do exist but that they lie, as John Gribbin writes, “not parallel to our own world but at right angles to it, perpendicular worlds branching off ‘sideways.’”27 This allows for time travel back and forth along the branches (radial tracks or forked roads) where alternate realities split off at 90o angles from each other. The final image in this cluster of time-space movements is associated with the ability to step sideways (as the Chums do in the time travel section), to take a 90o turn or to recognize the parallel, radial, or tangential worlds or histories to which forked paths might lead. Pynchon’s apparent deviation here from the scientific toward the territory of the excluded middle could in fact be congruent with aspects of quantum mechanics, a scientific field that seems creative, unpredictable, and philosophically fertile. In some senses, quantum mechanics allows for bilocation by accepting an infinite number of realities, which branch from each other and coexist unproblematically in superpositioned states. Of these three figurations of alternative time, the image of multiple parallel or radially distributed tracks in history both fits the many-worlds idea and mirrors ways in which characters navigate alternative conduits through time. Evidence of other realities often intrudes in Against the Day in the form of bilocated characters, ghosts, or, at the end of Kit’s journey, the Tunguska Event. Similarly, different characters seek and interpret variously alternative worlds like Shambhala. These other realities, or “worlds which are set to the side of the one we have taken, until now, to be the only world given us” (249), coexist with ours, though they are usually invisible. Access to these “sidelined” spaces is afforded by rotating

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or sidestepping from the linear in different ways. Technical means such as “mirrors, cylindrical or conical” (249), might, for instance, reveal a map space to have an extra dimension, as with the Sfinciuno Itinerary. Another example occurs when Quaternionists argue that it is possible to map a 90o departure (or right turn) from a time line, although time usually “moves on but one axis, [. . .] past to future—the only turnings possible being turns of a hundred and eighty degrees” (132). This proposed departure from the orthogonal “at right angles to the flow of time” suggests that linear time might even become curvilinear, circular, “and so achiev[e] eternal return” (132)—an idea to which Against the Day itself repeatedly, if not eternally, returns.

THE ONTOLOGY OF TRESPASSERS AND READERS If time in Against the Day is a railway depot from which many alternative but invisibly coexisting histories radiate (682), then one of the final questions to ask of the novel is why the Trespassers return along the lines. Do they do so to warn times past about what is to come (a typical task for literary ghosts and time travelers), to change tracks to an alternative future (another eigenstate) from the one that led to World War I, or (as readers of the novel could be expected to do) simply to observe the unfolding of past history and speculate about “the future history of these subjects” (1049)? Answers depend in part on the Trespassers’ own provenance, in particular their status vis-à-vis orthogonal time. Exchanges between Mr. Ace and Chick hint strongly at analogies between the Trespassers and the Pilgrim Fathers, though the former’s promised “Deliverance” across “that dark fourth-dimensional Atlantic known as Time” (415) involves a movement back in time, along the established orthogonal timeline to an age (that of the Chums of Chance) preceding their own period of “worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty” (415). Having returned, they may seek to settle—sharing “whatever few pathetic years we still have left,” as Lindsay imagines (416). If they return simply to “buy time,” they would continue orthogonally forward along the same time line, only delaying the inevitable future. Alternatively, they may return in order to change time lines, to bilocate to a perpendicular, radial, or parallel track. In this respect, Mr. Ace and Ryder Thorn exemplify two different levels of agency and volition, according to the way the Chums read them. Mr. Ace has traveled the time line freely and may presumably do so again— backward to seek refuge in the past or forward (though at 90o) to an alternative future—once energy levels are sufficient. His Trespassers already appear to live undiscovered in a time and space parallel to the one presented in the novel, until they choose to reveal themselves to the Chums

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and involve them in their plans (413–15). Ryder Thorn, by contrast, has fallen through a rift in the “fabric of Time” (555) and can only issue impotent cautions against the impending fall, prompting Miles to dismiss him as a mere ghost. The prospective loss of innocence is knowledge shared by Ryder and readers, insofar as both interpret from future points in history, able to look back on the First World War. Mr. Ace reveals another fall to come but describes the capitalist depletion of the Earth’s resources not in cautionary terms but as an explanation of why and how his time travel became necessary and possible: the logic of capitalism caused the problem; the machinery of capitalism provided the escape vehicle. On the one hand, then, Trespassers such as Mr. Ace appear to be unscrupulous operators who can move freely about time and for whom progression along the historical trajectory readers share with the Chums is of passing relevance. Control of time and space allows these Trespassers to return to a point in time, or a quantum event, from which they could pursue a parallel history with a different outcome. Miles, however, begins to suspect that they are neither disinterested observers nor innocent pilgrims seeking refuge but observer-participants; their arrival entails “some invisible narrative” that occupies or even defines “the passage of the day” (418) and starts a clock ticking on the timeless youth the Chums had previously seemed to enjoy. On the other hand, Trespassers such as Thorn seem bound to the orthogonal time line as it moves forward. His only chance of escape from passively observing the same playback loop would be to persuade the Chums, or whoever would listen, to alter their time line from one that leads to war to one that does not. In the first scenario, Trespassers can move to another branch and can afford indifference to the fate of those on our time line (except where interference is to their advantage); in the second, it would seem, salvation depends on changing our time line, on getting us involved in turning 90o away from the history we know now. One curious experience readers may have is a vacillation between identification with the Chums (whose historical trajectory we share to a degree) and with Ace and Thorn (whose observational vantage point we also share). Against the Day is therefore our rift in time: it curses us to “return, and return” via a “terrible singularity”—the black hole “enabled somehow” by what happened in Flanders (555)—or it encourages us to change tracks toward a future in which the destructive end of the “capitalistic experiment” is somehow avoided (415). In both cases, one wonders to what degree readers act on the text or the text acts on its readers. Reading in relation to time is thus very much put into question by Against the Day. Insofar as readers are not just observers of literature but observer-participants in a textual universe, a consideration of their role and function in Against the Day prompts answers that may be just as

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(fruitfully) inconclusive.28 The broadened sense of time travel developed in this novel might kindle in readers a recognition of the ways in which earlier Pynchon texts have already tackled such alternative topographies of time. In the case of Against the Day, suspended youths, visiting ghosts, and temporal trespassers return in the shape of disturbing, but not wholly unknown, travelers from the past and/or future to remind the reader of the lessons of history yet to come. A comparison of the novel’s participant-observers—not just Trespassers and readers but also the Chums of Chance themselves—is particularly worth dwelling on; so, too, the degree to which their reading can change the text. As with the Trespassers, the provenance—time, place, and identity—of readers of Against the Day cannot be known precisely. Indeed, that uncertainty is the very essence of the condition shared by readers and Trespassers, since both are migrants from their own times enabling themselves in some sense to transcend those times. Yet because Trespassers and readers of the novel enter its world with knowledge of its future, their creative freedom in relationship to the text is also subject to limitations. Most obviously, their familiarity with what lies in chronological wait for the Chums renders them less able to entertain alternatives: post hoc ergo propter hoc may be a well-known historian’s fallacy, but it still exerts powerful force on the imagination; in substantive terms, a rejoinder to poststructuralist treatments of the world as text—“go tell that to the Veterans of Foreign Texts”—remains apposite. In sum, then, the interventions of readers and Trespassers in the novel’s imaginative field are marked by both creative freedom and historical limits, within and beyond its covers. Trespassers and the Chums of Chance, meanwhile, seem to observe (and hence read and construe) each other through “visual conduits” (417) in the book, but with differing degrees of freedom. Trespassers are time travelers turning 180o from a linear future and therefore able to warn the past of impending war, but the Chums are suspicious readers, limited by their own time horizon, and they (dis)miss Ryder Thorn’s admonition by interpreting him as a ghost. Only when confronted with the war Thorn foretold does Miles review the significance of a “ghost” taking back from the future “some component [. . .] of our deaths” (1023). The Chums may read, analyze, and determine the Trespassers as pilgrims, raiders, or ghosts, but they do not change the trajectory of history by doing so. Trespassers, on the other hand, leave the Chums a sense of “having been psychically interfered with” (414), and in the time travel section their “Agency” defines or even changes the narrative within which the Chums live, even though the two groups only observe each other through “windows” (417) between their respective times and spaces. This may be an extreme dramatization of the idea—associated with Roland Barthes’s notion of the “writerly text”—that readers create their own subjective

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meaning, directed in part by their own interpretive schema, and that a text is to some degree fluid enough to accommodate changes of direction. Such changes of direction are much like those we see repeatedly in the time travel section, where the Chums believe themselves directed at various turns (now by their own Hierarchy, now by that of the Trespassers) to “[embark] on a journey of fateful discovery” (398) toward evidence of plots, paranoia, and treason.29 If the Trespassers articulate a model of reading with a high degree of creative participation, the Chums keep themselves at a distance from the text, willing to have boyish adventures in this as in other stories but almost always waiting for cues, contracts, and direction for action. They hover above the text, only dipping in and interfering as instructed by the Hierarchy or, later, independent clients. Unexpected directions, such as those of the Trespassers, destabilize their aloof position, and they “come to ground” for a while, losing or reformulating themselves at the Harmonica Marching Band Academy. Not even when they open their eyes to the horror of war, the lost innocence of “juvenile heroes of a WorldNarrative” (1024), and the significance of Thorn’s prophecy, do they recognize that they are themselves free to act (1029). In the end, their contact with the Sodality of Ætheronauts shows the orthogonal, hierarchical role preferred by the Chums; it is the girls who are “irregulars” and who “depart the ship at right angles to its official course to do the adventuring” (1083–84). The Chums of Chance seem, then, to represent a reactive reading strategy, one that seeks to hold on to a brand of innocence (as if maintaining a distance between text and reader keeps both pristine) by observing from above while delegating initiative and responsibility for participating to other authorities. The Chums are indeed childlike readers: they are safest within the predictable, fixed boundaries of their genre, and they have a sense of identity (their own and that of the Trespassers) as something predictable and uniform that is temporarily destabilized and multiplied in the time travel section. Confident, postmodern readers of a historical fiction such as Against the Day may be comfortable with the idea that a text is refashioned by their acts of reading, that interpretation is the way we inevitably trespass on and change texts to fit our subjective schemata, but such readers may also acknowledge that limits to that freedom are posed by a knowledge of history. When observer-participants are considered from the point of view of quantum mechanics, however, even the trajectory of history is subject to imagination. That is, the Trespassers’ future and that of the other characters may be just one of several superpositioned or bilocated originals. In retaining that imaginative trajectory in the face of the others may lie the innovative value of Against the Day: the idea that observing, in a quantum mechanical sense, entails one’s consciousness’s

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transforming reality by choosing one of many superpositioned realities and making only that “interpretation” of the world real. This applies across the fiction. Trespassers, therefore, are themselves observed and interpreted by other characters in the novel, and their meaning changes: they are variously time travelers, colonizers, and ghosts. The same logic also applies to readers, who have the power to decide among realities. The question is whether we are also enabled to see these interpretations as “multiple and not consecutive” (583). Readers may be Trespassers (participant-observers shaping and selecting in the very act of reading and open to proliferations of meaning) or Chums of Chance (who view the text mostly at a distance, preferring to “single up all lines” (4), and whose “involvement in the European war had really not begun until they took refuge on neutral ground” (1027)). In what sense, then, does Against the Day (enable us to) change our interpretation of (our part in) the Great War or wars yet to occur? If Pynchon’s archetypal participant-observer, Oedipa Maas, discovers that her own inadvertent quantum intrusion in The Crying of Lot 49 as nominal executrix of Pierce Inverarity’s will renders her ever-more uncertain if not unprincipled, then what of Against the Day’s extratextual readers, thrust voluntarily into the author’s (and our own) historical estate? Does observing/reading the book mean that we act and participate or seek refuge on neutral ground, unaware that we are “always [. . .] free to go” and pursue obligations to “different consequences” (1029)? Clearly, whatever readers take to or derive from the fiction, they cannot miraculously undeclare war or undo the carnage of Flanders. May we, though, not travel further back to worlds in other Pynchon novels and find new realities coexisting in those texts, at places where our earlier readings took another direction at the forked path of interpretation? Werfner argues that multiple worlds exist in space-time and that “hundreds, by now thousands, of narratives, all equally valid” can coexist (682), a possibility that both literary interpreters and certain scientists have embraced. Reviewing his work as a whole, David Wyatt has proposed that “Pynchon conceives of writing as a kind of time travel . . . ‘in the name of love,’” that he “ventures into the past so as to better provide us with what we most need”: “a history of the present,” a “‘hidden history’ of the twentieth century.”30 Against the Day adds to this itinerary by way of its interactive palimpsest of readers and characters and of time and space, placing everything, and everyone, both off and on watch. For as we read his Chums and Trespassers, they serve as a kind of Iceland Spar, offering a set of doubled refractions of our own temporality: against, around, but always within and of history. One important challenge Against the Day sets for us, therefore, is to keep accommodating the idea that a dominant interpretation can have several equally valid alternatives

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and still be true. The task for readers is not only to be Trespassers on the text but also to emulate “the aeronauts’ dual citizenship in the realms of the quotidian and the ghostly” (256).

NOTES 1. Pynchon, “Nearer,” 3. 2. Ibid., 57. 3. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, American Technology, 155–56, 189–91. 4. Pynchon, “Nearer,” 3. 5. Paul J. Nahin, Time Machines, 7-18. 6. Pynchon, “Foreword,” xii. 7. Spatial displacement of a time machine is also necessary because the universe itself is not stationary. The spot on which the machine stood a second before would have moved away as the earth moved in space. See Nahin, Time Machines, 23–25. 8. Inger H. Dalsgaard, “Something to Compare It to,” 88. 9. Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality, 782–85. 10. Ibid., 783–84. 11. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 664. 12. Ibid. 13. This passage is overtly dated to 1906, but Peter Demianovich Ouspensky’s book Chetvertoe Izmierenie (The Fourth Dimension), which is mentioned, was published in St. Petersburg in 1909. As with the premature presence of several known scientists at the F.I.C.O.T.T.—Bohr, Spengler, Einstein—this is an example of theorists of time getting ahead of themselves in Against the Day, possibly in a combination of poetic license and narrative time travel. 14. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, 10–14. 15. David E. Nye, Electrifying America, 31; Nikola Tesla, My Inventions, passim. 16. Alan Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 68. 17. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 663. For a treatment of this Gravity’s Rainbow character in relationship to Franklin and Tesla, as well as further analysis of Pynchon’s view of Edison, see Terry Reilly’s essay in this volume. 18. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 664; H. Wayne Morgan, Unity and Culture, 71–72. 19. Pynchon, “Nearer,” 57. 20. Ibid., 3, 57. 21. Heinz Ickstadt, “History, Utopia and Transcendence,” 233. 22. Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, 3–78; Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age, 35–39; Gail Cooper, “Frederick Winslow Taylor,” passim. 23. Shortcuts in the rent fabric of time are not in fact ghostly but a technical description of time travel via black hole rotation, which “distorts space-time in such a way that it opens a gateway.” See John Gribbin, Timewarps, 76. 24. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 664. 25. The cylindrical shape matches that of Frank Tipler’s design for the only time machine that would work, in theory, in terms of Einstein’s theories. Users could

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go back in time only to the time the cylinder was created and return to the point of departure in the future. See Nahin, Time Machines, 92–93. The F.I.C.O.T.T. and its conferees may or may not be under similar temporal constraints (407, 409–10). 26. The English translation of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22), Decline of the West, was probably an allusion to Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), but the apocalyptic image in the original title, of the destruction of a land of failing light, fits the vision of heat death and darkness conjured by Wells and also, in the short story “Entropy,” imagined by Pynchon. For more on Pynchon’s links to Spengler, see Dalsgaard, “The Linking Feature.” 27. Gribbin, Schrödinger’s Cat, 247–48. 28. On the ability of Pynchon readers to collaborate in navigating between fiction and history, see Dalsgaard, “Gravity’s Rainbow.” 29. Roland Barthes, S/Z, 4–6; Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 155–64. 30. David Wyatt, “September 11,” 147.

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S Narrating Tesla in Against the Day Terry Reilly

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uch has been written about “science” in Pynchon’s novels (particularly Gravity’s Rainbow), and most of the commentary can be grouped into one of three categories. A number of critics, including Dirk Vanderbeke and Joseph Tabbi, discuss ways that specific scientific concepts—entropy, for example—relate to broader metaphoric and thematic concerns in Pynchon’s works.1 Others, such as Alan Friedman, seek to link Pynchon’s representations of science, mathematics, and technology to an emerging postmodern cultural ethos: the shift from a sense of “universal connectedness” to “paranoia” in postmodern fiction, Friedman argues, parallels the historical relationship between Newtonian physics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.2 Yet another approach, one that began shortly after the appearance of Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, has evolved into a debate about whether or not Pynchon’s extensive use of scientific concepts categorizes his work as science fiction.3 While this essay acknowledges the validity and importance of such commentary, it takes a different approach, one that explores relationships between science and the paranormal through characterizations of actual scientists and inventors represented or alluded to in Pynchon’s works. My interpretation of Pynchon’s narratives about science follows Hayden White’s discussion of the interplay of history and metahistory. White refers to history not simply as a group of historical figures, objective 139

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dates, and facts, but rather as any number of competing narratives that result in a complex, relativistic historiography he calls “metahistory.”4 Similarly, science in Pynchon’s novels consists not simply of references to scientists, facts, or objective observations; it emerges rather as a number of dialogic and subjective narratives that Pynchon shapes into a variety of recognizable generic forms—tall tale, medieval romance, detective story, and others. Such an approach follows, but slightly alters, what Steven Weisenburger, writing about Gravity’s Rainbow, refers to as “the points of connection between (on the one hand) procedures of science and technology, and (on the other) the rituals of religion and occultism.”5 As I have argued elsewhere, Pynchon’s interest in science is matched by his interest in scientists, and historical figures of scientists and/or inventors often embody the link between the two hands Weisenburger notes.6 Most of the hundreds of scientists and inventors in Pynchon’s works appear either as cameos or as flat characters, but when Pynchon chooses to develop these figures into more rounded characters, he emphasizes unorthodox aspects of their personalities or their work. In other words, while rational empiricist scientists such as Edison are given short shrift in Pynchon’s texts (Edison is mentioned only three times in Against the Day, and not very flatteringly), those with quirky personalities, or with one foot in hard science and the other in some unorthodox field such as the occult or the paranormal—the so-called mad scientist aspect of many scientists—receive much attention. In Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, the “lightning head” Polish undertaker who rescues Thanatz from the water wears a metal suit and hopes to be hit by lightning after “reading about Benjamin Franklin in an American propaganda leaflet.” He wants to be more like Franklin and hopes his storytelling ability will improve after he is hit by lightning, but “what the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokesterism, of which the United States may well have been one.”7 Another practical joke, on a different level, the narrator implies, is the notion that being hit by lightning will improve one’s storytelling ability. Franklin again appears in Mason & Dixon, not only as a scientist and politician, but also as a nightclub performer, electrocuting people for the audience’s enjoyment. And in Against the Day, when Merle Rideout gets a job as a lightning rod salesman, Pynchon is again including a veiled reference to Franklin, the inventor of the lightning rod (73). Another, more complex example of this narrative process occurs in one of Pynchon’s many references to the Hollow Earth theory, first proposed by the English scientist Edmond Halley in a paper to the Royal Society in 1692.8 Early in Against the Day, the Chums of Chance fly into the Hollow Earth through the portal near the South Pole. The episode begins with a direct reference to the speculations of “some of the greatest minds in the

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history of science, including Kepler, Halley, and Euler,” of “the existence of a so-called ‘hollow earth’” (115). As the Chums enter the vast interior, they witness a war in progress between “diminutive combatants wearing pointed hats” and “a horde of hostile gnomes,” while a beautiful woman gazes down from a high balcony (117). The argument that ensues about whether the Chums should interfere in the battle is interrupted as follows: For a detailed account of their subsequent narrow escapes from the increasingly deranged attentions of the Legion of Gnomes, the unconscionable connivings of a certain international mining cartel, the sensual wickedness pervading the royal court of Chthonica, Princess of Plutonia, and the allbut-irresistible fascination that subterranean monarch would come to exert, Circe-like, upon the minds of the crew of Inconvenience [. . .], 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. (117)

In this remarkable three-page episode, Pynchon moves from an invocation of a scientific theory to a fantasy travel narrative in the Chums of Chance mode, then on to a Tolkienesque subterranean war between trolls and elves (including the obligatory beautiful damsel in distress), before redirecting the narrative and turning it into a both a sales pitch from a fictitious author for a fictitious book and a direct address to the reader from this fictitious author about complaints from other readers about the quality of the nonexistent book he is hawking. Or to put it another way, the reference to a “serious” scientific theory propounded by “Kepler, Halley, and Euler” leads to a fantasy narrative, which then morphs into metafiction and what we might refer to as “metascience”—a series of competing narratives about a scientific theory, fact, or person—before finally deconstructing (or decomposing) into banal complaints and advertising. While Franklin appears briefly, either literally or figuratively, in three of Pynchon’s novels, and Halley and the Hollow Earth theory briefly in several episodes of two novels, Charles Mason—astronomer and manic depressive—is a much more fully developed example of the link between a scientific historical figure and the interplay of scientific rationalism and the inexplicable. This essay argues that the characterizations of Nikola Tesla’s life and work in Against the Day represent the logical extension—and perhaps culmination or apotheosis—of this narrative process in Pynchon’s works. Any survey of the biographical information written about Tesla quickly reveals his incredible brilliance and innumerable contributions to science and the everyday world, as well as his myriad quirks and eccentricities—what Margaret Cheney refers to as “a festival of neuroses.”9 The rich texture of the multiple narratives and writings

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about Tesla and his work—science, weapons systems, corporate intrigue, paranormal experiences, government plots, and so on—make his life read like a Pynchon novel, and such a combination makes him, for lack of a better term, the perfect Pynchon character. My approach in this essay is relatively straightforward: I trace important occurrences in Tesla’s life and work and then compare them to Pynchon’s characterizations of Tesla and his work in Against the Day.10 The complexity of Pynchon’s novel precludes any sort of conventional “reading” of the text; instead, the main point I make is that Tesla does not simply make a “cameo appearance” in Against the Day.11 Rather, as facts and stories about Tesla’s biography and work map onto Pynchon’s text—the Chicago World’s Fair, New York, Colorado Springs, Wardenclyffe, the Velebit, and so on—they reveal not only a number of complex, multileveled allusions but also the pervasiveness of Tesla’s presence in the novel. Attention to references about Tesla and his work may also provide some insight into Pynchon’s research techniques, since Against the Day closely follows both Cheney’s biography of Tesla and Oliver Nichelson’s article about Tesla’s possible involvement in the Tunguska Event.12 Moreover, Pynchon’s Tesla-related writing both adumbrates and links many of the seemingly disparate but overlapping narrative “clusters”— the Airship Boys, the Western Revenge, the Geek Eccentric Scientist, the Flaneur Spy Adventuress, and so on13—though the variety of these genres and styles resists any single or overarching conventional literary theory of interpretation. Ultimately, such an approach sees Against the Day as, in part, a type of Pynchonesque tribute, homage, or encomium to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. This essay is divided into three parts. The first covers the period from Tesla’s birth in 1856 until 1899, a period that includes his early work on alternating motors, his work with Thomas Edison, his contract to light the Chicago World’s Fair, the construction of the hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls, and some of his subsequent work in New York City. The second part looks at the years 1899–1909, a period marked in Against the Day by Tesla’s work in Colorado Springs and at the Wardenclyffe Tower in Long Island and his possible involvement with the Tunguska Event. The third part covers the later stage of Tesla’s life, from 1909 until his death in 1943, and his legacy after his death. These later years were marked by poverty, ongoing litigation, and inventions and plans—such as particle beam weapons, devices for communicating with aliens and the dead, and antigravity and time machines—that many considered to be the bizarre fantasies of a madman. After his death, Tesla’s notes and unfinished work caused a great deal of speculation, rumor, and controversy, especially after the disappearance of many of his papers. The final part of this section examines some of the current, ongoing work concerning

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Tesla’s theories about innovative technologies, including weapons and their applications—so-called Advances in Tesla Technology—that are occurring around the world. In sum, a focus on the life and work of Nikola Tesla in Against the Day reveals a type of bifold narrative that moves two ways in time: one incorporates features characteristic of a traditional past-oriented historical novel in which a fictionalized version of Tesla participates; the other simultaneously includes elements of speculative futuristic science fiction based on Tesla’s work—by this I mean fiction about the future of science—in order to indicate, and perhaps to warn us, of possibilities to come.

I. THE EARLY YEARS, 1856–1899 According to several sources, including his autobiography, Tesla was born during a severe electrical storm “at precisely midnight between July 9 and 10, 1856” in Croatia (Cheney 25). Later in his life, he claimed that the weather conditions at his birth imbued him with a special knowledge of electricity. Tesla studied physics and mathematics at Graz Polytech, and while working as an electrical engineer in Hungary, he developed a theory about what is referred to as alternating current (AC). He soon designed and built an AC induction motor, which allowed for the longrange transmission and distribution of electricity.14 Tesla attributed his prolific inventiveness to what he called “a peculiar affliction” in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes accompanied by hallucinations.15 He would visualize an invention completely and then simply move on to the construction stage.16 In his autobiography, Tesla tells how his inspiration for the AC induction motor came to him one evening while he and his friend Anatal Szigety were watching a sunset in a park in Budapest. Tesla was reciting a passage from Goethe’s Faust when “the idea came like a flash of lightning, and in an instant the truth was revealed” (qtd. in Cheney 44). Tesla found a stick with which to draw a diagram in the dust. What Tesla was able to see, draw, and eventually accomplish was a way to develop an entirely new system of generating power “based on the principle of the rotating field produced by two or more alternating currents out of step with each other” (Cheney 44). In another instance, Tesla recalled his fascination as a child with the relationship between lightning and rain, during a storm in his native Velebit Mountains. He saw a lightning flash followed by a downpour. It was manifest that the two phenomena were closely related, as cause and effect, and a little reflection led me to the conclusion that the electrical energy

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enclosed in the precipitation of the water was inconsiderable, the function of the lightning being much like that of a sensitive trigger. Here was a stupendous possibility of achievement. If we could produce electrical storms of the required ability, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed. (qtd. in Cheney 94–95)

Tesla went on to conclude that if he could control lightning, he could harness the power of the Sun (Cheney 95). In a remarkably similar passage, Pynchon’s Tesla, whose idiosyncratic speech patterns closely parallel the writing style in Tesla’s autobiography (a melodramatic, hyperbolic accented voice part Henry Kissinger, part Bela Lugosi),17 explains his propensity for envisioning his inventions, and his particular affinity for lightning, to Kit and Colfax Vibe when they visit Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island. They discuss Tesla’s “visions” in the Velebit and the “far from conscious” discoveries to which they lead him (327). He goes on: “I was out in those mountains one day, the sky began to darken, the clouds to lower, I found a limestone cave, went in, waited. Darker and darker, like the end of the world—but no rain. I couldn’t understand it. [. . .] Not until a great burst of lightning came from out of nowhere did heaven open, and the rain begin. I understood that something enormous had been poised to happen, requiring an electrical discharge of a certain size to trigger it. In that moment, all this”—he gestured upward into the present storm clouds, which all but obscured the giant toroidal terminal nearly two hundred feet above, whose open trusswork formed a steel cap of fungoid aspect—“was inevitable. As if time had been removed from all equations, the Magnifying Transmitter already existed in that moment, complete, perfected. . . . Everything since, all you have seen in the press, has been theatrical impersonation—the Inventor at Work. To the newspapers I can never speak of that time of simply waiting. I’m expected to be consciously scientific, to exhibit only virtues likely to appeal to rich sponsors—activity, speed, Edisonian sweat, defend one’s claim, seize one’s chance [. . .].” (327)

Here, Pynchon conflates and reshapes the two earlier passages from Tesla’s autobiography. In another passage that references Tesla’s claims about visualizing his inventions before building them, Kit Traverse, working at Tesla’s lab in Colorado Springs, “helps” the inventor with his Magnifying Transmitter. In response to Kit’s suggestion of “a vector solution,” Tesla suggests he might be having a vision: “You see it,” Tesla half-inquired, looking at Kit with some curiosity. “I see something,” Kit shrugged. “The same began to happen to me also at your age,” Tesla recalled. “When I could find the time to sit still, the images would come. But it’s always finding the time, isn’t it.” “Sure, always something. . . . Chores, something.” (104)

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Tesla calls this plight “tithing,” “giving back to the day” (104). This passage, which combines the abstract visions of an inventor with the mundane quotidian mechanized workaday world, introduces the Tesla-related concept of what might be called “visionary time,” a theme that will be repeated throughout Tesla’s writings and throughout Against the Day. When Tesla arrived in New York in 1884, he was carrying a letter of introduction to Edison from a mutual friend named Charles Batchelor (Master of Lightning). Tesla was given a job immediately and worked for Edison for almost three years. Tesla and Edison had quite different personalities: Edison disliked Tesla for being “an egghead, a theoretician, and cultured,” and ridiculed him as “the poet of science” whose ideas were “magnificent but utterly impractical” (in Cheney 56–57). Moreover, they disagreed vehemently about the future development of electricity. By 1886, the growing dispute between Tesla and Edison about the efficacy of direct current (DC) versus AC, and about money Edison supposedly owed Tesla, caused Tesla to leave Consolidated Edison and form the Tesla Electric Company.18 From 1887 to 1891, with his own company, Tesla applied for and was granted forty separate patents (Cheney 62). His success attracted the attention of George Westinghouse, whose investment in and expansion of Tesla’s ideas helped initiate what is known as the War of the Currents, with Edison and his backers championing DC, while Tesla and his advocates promoted AC (Master of Lightning). The war culminated in 1893, when Tesla and Westinghouse won the contract to light the Chicago World’s Fair (or the Columbian Exposition) using AC to power machinery, pumps for fountains, and thousands of electric lights. The spectacle caused amazement among the thousands of visitors, and the bright lights playing off the brightly colored Beaux Arts–style buildings caused a member of the press to dub it “The White City” (Cheney 99–100). Not unlike Ben Franklin the nightclub performer in Mason & Dixon, Tesla the showman was in his element: clad in a white tie and tails (and thick corksoled shoes), he played the magician as he demonstrated both his Tesla coil and a completed polyphase electrical motor and performed for the crowds by passing huge amounts of electricity through his body, causing it to emit sparks and glow.19 The Chicago World’s Fair was enormously popular, and it also marked the end of the War of the Currents, as the success of Tesla and Westinghouse established AC as the electricity of the future (Cheney 100). The Chicago World’s Fair, and its corollary as the White City, is, of course, the ostensible chronological starting point for Against the Day. It appears initially on the first page of the novel in the Chums of Chance narrative as “the fabled ‘White City,’ [with] its great Ferris wheel, alabaster temples of commerce and industry, sparkling lagoons, and the thousand

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more such wonders, of both a scientific and artistic nature” (3), but this idyllic representation is soon undermined by a competing narrative as the Chums fly over the reeking stockyards of Chicago: “tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke, the effluvia of butchery unremitting into which the buildings of the leagues of city lying downwind retreated, like children into sleep which bringeth not reprieve from the day” (10). Here, as elsewhere, Pynchon characterizes the White City as an anomaly, as yet another promise, possibility, or opportunity for human betterment disappointingly lost somewhere during the course of American history: “The harsh nonfictional world waited outside the White City’s limits, held off for this brief summer, making the entire commemorative season beside Lake Michigan at once dream-like and real” (36).20 Having won the War of the Currents, Tesla and Westinghouse were awarded the contract to build hydroelectric generators at Niagara Falls in October 1893, the same month the Chicago World’s Fair closed. While construction at Niagara Falls was under way, Tesla became interested in a number of other projects, prompted, in part, by a trip to England, where he met and befriended William Crookes, the noted scientist and spiritualist.21 Tesla was skeptical of Crookes’s claim that people could communicate telepathically with the dead, until he had a vision one night: “[I saw] a cloud carrying angelic figures of marvelous beauty, one of whom gazed upon me lovingly and gradually assumed the features of my mother. The appearance slowly floated across the room and vanished, and I was awakened by an indescribably sweet song of many voices” (Master of Lightning). Tesla was certain in that moment that his mother had died—and she in fact had. Although he continued to maintain publicly that psychic and spiritual phenomena have “absolutely no foundation” (Cheney 93), Tesla attributed this vision to the fact that he and his mother were somehow tuned to the same frequency (Master of Lightning).22 He became increasingly convinced that remote communication, whether between geographically distant people or with the dead or alien life-forms, was merely a question of being able to find the right frequency (Master of Lightning). Such beliefs led to his work with vacuum tubes and high-frequency transmitters that formed the basis of modern radio and television. In one of these experiments early in 1895, Tesla was able to produce approximately one million volts using one of his new transformers (Cheney 121). In what begins as a very historically accurate account, this achievement is mentioned by Scarsdale Vibe in Against the Day: “It does not take a prophet to see where this is headed,” says Vibe. Tesla has the idea of “a ‘World-System,’ for producing huge amounts of electrical power that anyone can tap into for free, anywhere in the world, because it uses the planet as an element in a gigantic resonant circuit” (33). Tesla “is naïve enough to think he can get financing for this” from Morgan, Vibe, or oth-

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ers. But, Vibe scoffs, “no one can make any money off an invention like that. 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” (33).23 Vibe’s interlocutor in this scene, Professor Vanderjuice, the anti-Tesla,24 is charged with building a “counter-transformer [. . .] that will detect one of these Tesla rigs in operation and then broadcast something equal and opposite that will nullify its effects” (34). When Vanderjuice asks for drawings and calculations of Tesla’s transformers, Vibe says, “Bankrolling Tesla has given Morgan’s access to all Tesla’s engineering secrets,” and Morgan will send “photographed copies of anything we need to know” (34). Vibe’s anxiety about free electricity, his paranoia about the direction of Tesla’s research, and his allusions to an elaborate cabal of robber barons bent upon thwarting Tesla’s efforts are fictitious in Against the Day, but historically, they may have had some basis, for Tesla’s laboratory mysteriously caught fire and was totally destroyed in May 1895 (Cheney 128). With the help of other investors, however, Tesla was soon able to begin building a new laboratory at 46 East Houston Street (Cheney 130). In 1898, while experimenting with low frequency resonance at his East Houston Street lab, Tesla attached a small electromechanical oscillator to an iron pillar that went into the ground through the center of the building. In prior experiments, when he turned on the oscillator, it established resonance with various objects in the room, and, as he turned up the frequency, they would begin to shimmy and dance (Cheney 150). On this day, “vibrations from the oscillator travelling down the iron pillar with escalating force were being carried through the substructure of Manhattan in all directions”; Cheney adds that ordinarily, earthquakes have a greater effect at a remove from their epicenters (Cheney 150). Buildings shook, windows broke, people went into the streets. By the time the police showed up, Tesla had “dismantled” the oscillator (reportedly with a sledgehammer (Master of Lightning)), but he invited the police to return that evening so he could show them how the oscillator worked, and he mentioned later to reporters that, using such an oscillator, “he could destroy the Brooklyn Bridge in a few minutes if he felt like it” (Cheney 151). Pynchon alludes to Tesla’s resonance frequency experiments when Captain Padzhitnoff and his science officer, Dr. Gerasimoff, discuss the destruction of the Campanile with the Chums of Chance. While the Chums cartoonishly think that Padzhitnoff has dropped a load of bricks on the Campanile, Gerasimoff attributes the destruction to “something else [. . .] Vibrational rays [. . .]. Adjustable to target’s exact sympathetic frequency, thereupon inducing divergent oscillation” (257–58). Gerasimoff’s conjecture, framed within the context of a science fiction narrative, details exactly how Tesla’s oscillator worked.

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II. COLORADO SPRINGS TO TUNGUSKA, 1899–1908 By the time the August 1899 issue of Electrical Review, which contained his intentionally shocking article about how excessively high discharges of electricity into the atmosphere might actually set the sky on fire (in Cheney 148), was printed, Tesla had moved to Colorado Springs, in part because he felt that his experiments—often dealing with power surges of up to four million volts—had become too dangerous for his laboratory in New York City (Cheney 170). In Colorado, he supervised the building of his Magnifying Transmitter, which consisted of a barnlike structure with a tower reaching eighty feet above the ground and a metal mast that rose another 122 feet into the air, topped with a copper ball three feet in diameter (Cheney 174). Tesla insisted on strict secrecy; the compound was surrounded by a fence with signs reading “KEEP OUT—GREAT DANGER,” and a quotation from Dante hung over the entrance: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” (Master of Lightning). Once the tower was built and Tesla and his assistant, Kolman Czito, began testing in June, they were “able to emulate the electrical fireworks of even the wildest mountain storms. When the transmitter was operating, lightning arresters in a twelve-mile radius from his station were bridged with continuous fiery arcs, stronger and more persistent than those produced by natural lightning” (Cheney 176). Coloradans’ reactions to the experiments ranged from amusement to terror, as Cheney notes: “The prairie sky exploded with sound and color. Even the earth seemed alive and the crash of thunder from the spark gap could be heard for miles. Butterflies were sucked into the vortex of the transmitter coil” (Cheney 176). Distant witnesses “told of seeing tiny sparks flying between grains of sand and between their heels and the ground when they walked. They said that at three hundred feet away, arcs an inch long could be drawn from grounded metal objects. Horses grazing or trotting peacefully half a mile away would suddenly go berserk, feeling shocks through their metal shoes” (Cheney 176). Tesla and his staff, working so regularly in the lightning and thunder, “stuffed cotton in their ears and wore thick cork or rubber soles on their shoes. Even so, Tesla described a frequent bursting sensation in his ears” (Cheney 177). On the evening of July 3, 1899 (“a date I shall never forget” (Tesla in Cheney 181)), while observing one of the intense thunderstorms around Colorado Springs, Tesla measured the amount of electrical activity as the storm approached and then receded. He noted that the storm was moving at an almost constant speed and that the electrical activity “continued with undiminished force” (in Cheney 181). Tesla felt that he was watching stationary waves and that the earth was behaving as a limited conductor. He concluded that “stationary waves could be produced in the Earth with

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an oscillator” (Cheney 182); in effect, the Earth could be used to transmit unlimited amounts of power to any terrestrial distance and almost without loss. “This is of immense importance,” Tesla later noted in an interview with John O’Neill (in Cheney 182, Tesla’s emphasis). At this point Tesla realized not only that it was possible to transmit huge amounts of electrical energy over large distances but also that such transmissions could provide free unlimited electrical energy for everyone. This idea was to cause a great deal of trouble later with his financial sponsors, especially J. P. Morgan, as Scarsdale Vibe notes earlier (33). Still later in the summer of 1899, Tesla was able to generate millions of volts and tremendously heavy currents, which exploded from the top of the two-hundred-foot mast and tower structure. No one had ever done anything like this before, and the risk, simply put, was that the power generated would burn down the station and kill the experimenters and spectators (Cheney 182). On the night of one test, Tesla watched outside; he told Czito to throw the switch and not to turn it off until he told him. As Cheney notes, “The vibration . . . made the ground feel alive. There came a snap and roar of lightning exploding above the station. A strange blue light filled the interior of the barnlike structure. . . . Lightning exploded again and again, building to a crescendo . . . [with] lightning bolts shooting 135 feet from the top of the mast, and . . . the thunder was being heard fifteen miles away in Cripple Creek” (Cheney 183). Suddenly all went silent as the power surge overloaded the dynamo at the Colorado Springs Electric Company fifteen miles away, set the building on fire, and plunged the town into darkness (Cheney 184). In a characteristic narrative style that combines historical facts with the epistemology of the tall tale—much like the Hollow Earth episode discussed earlier—Against the Day reproduces many of the events that occurred at Tesla’s lab during the summer of 1899, conflating them into one night, July 3, 1899, the “amazing, world-reversing night of Fourth of July Eve”: Next day’d be full of rodeos, marching bands, and dynamite explosions—but that night there was man-made lightning, horses gone crazy for miles out into the prairie, electricity flooding up through the iron in their shoes, shoes that when they finally came off and got saved to use for cowboy-quoits, including important picnic tourneys from Fruita to Cheyenne Wells, why they would fly directly and stick on to the spike in the ground, or to anything else nearby made of iron or steel, that’s when they weren’t collecting souvenirs on their way through the air—gunmen’s guns came right up out of their holsters and buck knives out from under pants legs, keys to travelling ladies’ hotel rooms and office safes, miners’ tags, fence-nails, hairpins, all seeking the magnetic memory of that long-ago visit. Veterans of the Rebellion fixing to march in parades were unable to get to sleep, metallic elements had so got

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to humming through their bloodmaps. Children who drank the milk from the dairy cows who grazed nearby were found leaning against telegraph poles listening to the traffic speeding by through the wires above their heads, or going off to work in stockbrokers’ offices where, unsymmetrically intimate with the daily flow of prices, they were able to amass fortunes before anyone noticed. (97)

Cheney notes that the building nearest the Magnifying Transmitter was the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, a choice, she comments wryly, “reflecting some discretion” (Cheney 172). Not one to pass up such an interesting historical detail, Pynchon writes that after the nearapocalyptic events of the evening of July 3, “Kids in the adjoining Deaf and Blind School reported hearing and seeing frequencies hitherto unaccounted for in the medical science of the day” (103). Pynchon’s florid report of this night serves to introduce the Kit Traverse portion of the narrative, since, as the narrator tells us, “Young Kit Traverse happened to be in on the high-voltage experiment that had caused it all, working as a matter of fact that summer in Colorado Springs, for Dr. Tesla himself” (97). After Kit receives a scholarship to Yale from Foley Walker/Scarsdale Vibe, the next day, the bank teller in town asks Kit whether he’s “another one of Doc Tesla’s boys.” The reaction of Kit— “sleepless after thirty-six hours of voltaic frenzy and odd behavior human and animal”—suggests that working with Tesla may be a kind of earthly membership in the Chums of Chance: “Kit was assaulted all at once by a yearning, or that’s how he’d think of it later—a clarity of desire—to belong to that band of adventurers into the Æther and its mysteries, to become por vida, one of Doc Tesla’s boys” (103). Kit’s work with Tesla at Colorado Springs and his decision to attend Yale lay much of the groundwork for later Tesla-related portions of the narrative. Although Tesla spent only about a year and a half in Colorado Springs, some of his most important and far-reaching work was accomplished there, and he later claimed that the Colorado tower was his greatest invention (Cheney 174). While in Colorado Springs, using the Magnifying Transmitter and tower, Tesla worked on two other projects particularly relevant in Against the Day. The first involved his work with ball lightning. Cheney notes that Tesla, as did most scientists, thought that ball lightning was an optical illusion, “until they began to appear accidentally on his high-voltage equipment” (Cheney 189). Although Tesla regarded ball lightning as “merely a fascinating nuisance,” his studies of the phenomenon led him to claim that he could create it at will (Cheney 190). In Against the Day, Merle Rideout—the protoelectrician and lightningrod salesman—encounters and then befriends Skip, the sentient ball lightning. In Pynchon’s narrative, ball lightning transforms from being what Tesla refers to as “a fascinating nuisance” into a warm, bright little

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creature who helps the Rideouts whenever he can—starting cookfires, lighting Merle’s cigars, lighting Dally’s reading—until it is time for him to leave and join his mysterious “family” (73–74). Pynchon’s emphasis on the fantastic here underscores the fact that modern scientists still are not sure exactly what ball lightning is and have not been able to replicate Tesla’s claim that he could produce it at will (Cheney 191). Tesla began work on the other, more controversial project in Colorado Springs after he became convinced that he had received extraterrestrial radio communications. He first developed the Teslascope, a radio transceiver for communicating with life on other planets, and later said he had designed a variation for communicating with the dead. When he made his claims public, he was ridiculed, especially among the popular media. Tesla was reluctant to share the details of his invention with the public or other scientists, in part because of his past experience with Marconi and others misappropriating his earlier work and patents (Cheney 171–91). The theme of communicating with the dead is one to which Pynchon repeatedly returns in the Traverse portion of Against the Day. When they meet in Venice, for example, Kit and Reef have the following exchange: Kit shrugged inside an envelope of smoke. “Don’t know how scientific it is, but lately there’s this ‘Psychical Research’—laboratories, experiments and so forth.” “And ain’t it just the bunk.” “So were wireless waves, and not all that long ago. Roengten rays, whatever rays are coming next. Seems every day somebody’s discovering another new piece of the spectrum, out there beyond visible light, or a new extension of the mind beyond conscious thought, and maybe someplace far away the two domains are even connected up.” (670)

Reef responds, characteristically: “They build a wireless telephone that we can talk to Pa on it, you’ll let me know, won’t you” (670). Later, when Cyprian and Reef are looking for the Interdikt in Bulgaria, Gabrovo Slim takes them to what Reef recognizes as “one of those Tesla rigs.” Inside the transmission shack were one or two operators with their ears all but attached to speaker-horns, listening attentively to what seemed mostly at first to be atmospheric static. The longer the visitors listened, though, the more possible it became that now and then they were hearing spoken words, in a number of languages including English. Cyprian shook his head, smiling if not in disbelief at least in a polite attempt not to offend. “It’s all right,” said one of the operators. “Many in the field believe that these are voices of the dead. Edison and Marconi both feel that the syntonic wireless can be developed as a way to communicate with departed spirits.” Reef immediately thought of Webb, and the séance back there in Switzerland, and his jocular remarks to Kit about telephoning the dead. (950–51)25

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In this remarkable passage, Pynchon combines Tesla’s interest in communicating with alien civilizations and with the dead: moreover, he provides a glimpse of a military defense project Tesla designed for Yugoslavia that was never built (I will discuss this in more detail in part 3). In 1901, after he had returned to New York from Colorado, Tesla convinced J. P. Morgan to finance the building of a wireless transmission facility in Shoreham, Long Island, which he named Wardenclyffe (Master of Lightning). In Against the Day, Kit witnesses the building of the Tower— “a peculiar dark geometrical presence”—from his vantage point looking across Long Island Sound from the shore in New Haven, where he is attending Yale (322). The Tower becomes “the talk of New Haven,” and “at night, from that same general direction, came heavenwide multicolored flashes of light, which only the incurably complacent tried to explain away as heat lightning” (322). When Kit and Colfax Vibe subsequently sail across the Long Island Sound to visit Wardenclyffe one comically dark and stormy night, they meet Tesla, who thanks Kit for suggesting the modifications to the Colorado Springs transformer (328). Problems that were to plague Tesla for the rest of his life began soon after he started construction on the Wardenclyffe Tower. In December 1901, Marconi sent the first wireless transmission across the Atlantic, and his reputation as the Father of Radio enabled him to secure financial backing that might otherwise have gone to Tesla.26 Tesla’s relationship with J. P. Morgan deteriorated, in part because while Morgan thought Tesla was working on radio transmissions at Wardenclyffe, he was actually trying to find a way to enable the wireless transfer of large amounts of electrical current from one place on the globe to another (Master of Lightning). Tesla continued to work on several other projects at the same time, including the first radio-controlled boats and torpedoes (Cheney 208), but they produced little income, and he was unable to secure any sizable financial backing. Moreover, most of his patents for inventions relating to the AC motor expired in 1905, leaving him without a sizable source of income (Master of Lightning). On June 30, 1908, the disaster known as the Tunguska Event occurred in central Siberia—the (hypothetically) Tesla-related event with perhaps the greatest importance to Against the Day. The explosion had the power of ten to fifteen megatons of TNT and flattened an area of approximately 500,000 acres. “Whole herds of reindeer were destroyed,” Oliver Nichelson writes. “Several nomadic villages were reported to have vanished.”27 When scientists finally researched the site in 1927, nearly twenty years later, they attributed the explosion to a comet or meteorite, despite the fact that there was no impact crater and no metal was found (Nichelson 8). Narratives about Tesla’s possible involvement in the Tunguska Event are extremely muddled. Cheney does not reference Tunguska at all in her

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biography of Tesla, and no mention is made of it in the film Tesla: Master of Lightning. However, the idea that Tesla may have caused the Tunguska Event has made its way into the popular imagination, especially in cartoons, comic books, and science fiction novels. Many of these writings stem from a provocative article, in which Nichelson argues that Tesla may have caused the Tunguska Event when he directed a huge amount of electrical energy toward the ionosphere, hoping that it would be deflected downward and make impact somewhere near the North Pole, where Edmund Peary was exploring.28 Pynchon’s version of the story, as told by Professor Vanderjuice, is remarkably similar to Nichelson’s hypothesis of events: According to Professor Vanderjuice, the story was abroad that Tesla, seeking to communicate with the explorer Peary, then in the Arctic, projecting unspecified rays from his tower at Wardenclyffe in a direction slightly west of due north, had mistaken his aim by a small but fatal angle, causing the beam to miss Peary’s base at Ellesmere Island, cross the Polar region over into Siberia, and hit the Stony Tunguska instead. “Here is what puzzles me about the story. Did Tesla want to send Peary a message, or beam him a quantity of electric power, or for some undisclosed reason blast him off the map? Tesla may not even have been involved, for it is unclear just who is at Wardenclyffe anymore—Tesla seems to have abandoned the place after Morgan’s abandoned him. That is all I can find out at this antipodal remove.” “It sounds like capitalistic propaganda,” said Darby. (794)

Similarly, when the Chums encounter Captain Padzhitnoff, he tells them, “Okhrana believe this Event could have been man-made, and they want to know weapons implications” (780). When the Russian crew views the aftermath of Tunguska firsthand, they think the crater was caused by munitions, but “none [they] know of” (780). Still later, one of the crew of the Bol’shaia Igra says, “It certainly resembles a capacitance effect, though on a planetary scale—a slow, incremental investment of energy, followed by a sudden catastrophic payback” (781–82). Meanwhile, in Venice, Cyprian mentions to Bevis Moistleigh, “‘Something’s wrong with the light, Moistleigh,’ as if it were physics he hadn’t studied, some form of reverse eclipse that a cryptanalyst could explain, and possibly even repair” (801). Pynchon spends the next several pages noting the changes in the light quality in Europe, echoing Nichelson’s observation that “reports of upper atmosphere and magnetic disturbances coming from other parts of the world at the time of and just after the Tunguska Event point to massive changes in the earth’s electrical condition” (Nichelson 9). Nichelson cites newspaper articles from Berlin and London that reported “unusual colors . . . remarkable lights . . . and massive silvery

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clouds [covering] Siberia and Northern Europe. . . . A woman north of London wrote the London Times that at midnight of July 1st, the sky glowed so brightly it was possible to read large print inside her house” (Nichelson 9). In Against the Day, the main chapter on the Tunguska Event concludes: It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. 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. (805, emphasis mine)

Whether or not Tesla was responsible for the Tunguska Event, the Wardenclyffe Tower was doomed. Pynchon alludes to the eventual demise of Wardenclyffe when Kit and Vanderjuice discuss the latter’s sabotage of Tesla’s work: “‘Eventually,’ says Vanderjuice, ‘Vibe saw there’d never be a practical system of wireless power transmission, that the economy had long before devised means to prevent it.’” When Kit says that Tesla is building a transmitter now, Vanderjuice replies, “It doesn’t matter. If it ever gets to be too much of a threat to the existing power arrangements, they’ll just have it dynamited” (323). On July 4, 1917, the first charge of dynamite was discharged inside the building, but it took many more before, on Labor Day, the Wardenclyffe Tower collapsed and was sold for scrap (Cheney 219). III. LATER YEARS, 1908–1943, AND LEGACY AFTER DEATH As they discuss the Tunguska Event, Darby Suckling and Professor Vanderjuice have the following conversation about Tesla: “Dr. Tesla has always had his enemies in New York. The place is a nightmare of backbiting, tort lawyers, and patent disputes. It is the fate of anyone who does serious science. Look at Edison. Look particularly at our colleague, Brother Tom Swift. He spends more time these days in court than in the laboratory.” “The last time I saw Tom, he looked older than I do,” the Professor said. “Nothing like perpetual litigation to age a man before his time.” (794)

While this passage may seem bizarre—the fictitious Chums of Chance discussing the Tunguska Event and then comparing the legal problems

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of Tesla and Edison with the “serious science” and legal problems of the fictitious Tom Swift—it is actually very characteristic of the narrative progression from scientific fact to scientific speculation to “metascience” to metafiction that I alluded to earlier. Curiously, such a progression also characterizes the later years of Tesla’s life and his legacy after death. In 1909, Marconi won the Nobel Prize after misrepresenting much of Tesla’s work as his own (Master of Lightning). In November 1915, the New York Times announced that Tesla and Edison would share the Nobel Prize, yet a week later, the prize was awarded to someone else (Cheney 243–45). Shortly after this, Tesla was taken to court in New York for $935 in back taxes and could not pay them (Cheney 258). By 1917, when the Wardenclyffe Tower was torn down, Tesla’s future looked bleak. He continued to work on a number of inventions and projects, but increasingly he found himself caricatured as “the mad scientist” in science fiction movies and magazines of the time—another merger of the fictional and real (Master of Lightning). In 1917, Tesla invented a prototype for radar, which he tried, unsuccessfully, to sell to the U.S. Government. Similarly, in the 1920s, on the basis of work he had started in Colorado, Tesla invented a large-scale death ray (which he described as a particle beam “teleforce” weapon capable of massive destruction), and he tried to sell it to various governments, including the U.S., the UK, and Germany (Master of Lightning). Tesla’s ideas about this type of weapon continued to surface for the rest of his life, and it was the subject of parody in a 1941 Superman cartoon, The Electrothanasia Ray.29 In 1928, he also received patents for components of a vertical takeoff plane, which he referred to as “the flying stove” (Cheney 251), but none of these inventions produced any ample or sustainable income. Later in life, Tesla said he completed what he called “a dynamic theory of gravity,” which, although never published, argued for the reversibility of gravity.30 In 1933, he claimed he had invented a machine for photographing thoughts,31 an idea that Pynchon may have expanded upon with the “Integroscope” that Merle Rideout and Roswell Bounce invent near the end of Against the Day. At the time of his death, Tesla was working on what he called a “wall of light,” which he said would allow time, space, and gravity to be altered at will. Other proposals found after his death included ion-propelled antigravity airships (like the Inconvenience), teleportation, and time travel devices (Master of Lightning). During his later years, Tesla also worked on ways to use magnetism to “see” and/or communicate through various media. Although he never completed this work, Tesla laid the groundwork for modern magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and different sorts of tomography used to explore beneath the oceans and the earth’s surface.32 Against the Day includes a detailed representation of this form of Tesla technology

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when the Inconvenience flies over the water around Venice, and the Chums, looking for “Isola degli Specchi, or the Isle of Mirrors itself,” see nothing but “open water.” Randolph advises them to look “below the surface”: “Mr. Counterfly, stand by your lenses—we’ll want as many plates of this little stabilimento as you can get us.” “Snapshots of the empty sea—whoo-ee!” the embittered mascotte twirling a finger beside his temple—“but ain’t the old man just gone bugs at last!” [. . .] “Rays, boys, rays,” chuckled Scientific Officer Counterfly, busy with his photographic calibrations, “the wonders of our age, and rest assured none of ’em strangers to the spectrum of this fabled Italian sunlight. Just wait till we’re back in the developing room, and you shall see a thing or two then, by Garibaldi, that you shall.” (244–45)

In this passage, Pynchon alludes to Tesla’s early work on magnetic imaging, which he began in the late 1890s; however, the work was not completed and operational until the 1950s and later, after Tesla’s death. Here, though, the Chums of Chance, traveling around 1900, have access to Tesla technology that would not be fully developed for almost half a century. One of Tesla’s final projects, as war with Nazi Germany approached, was to design a particle beam weapon system for the defense of Yugoslavia. He felt that with nine transmitting towers (four in Serbia, three in Croatia, and two in Slovenia), he could effectively prevent any sort of armed invasion. When he attempted to sell the system to his former country, however, his offer was rejected (Master of Lightning). Tesla’s plan does come to fruition in Against the Day, however, in the form of the Interdikt, or Zabraneno. Although it was originally thought to be a 200-mile-long phosgene gas line, what Reef and Cyprian find is a series of toroidal Tesla towers known to the locals as the Zabraneno (950): “It seems this isn’t a gas weapon, after all,” said [Vamos]. “‘Phosgene’ is really code for light. We learned it is light here which is really the destructive agent. Beyond that the creators of the Zabraneno have proceeded in the deepest secrecy, though the small amount of published theoretical work seems to be German, dating back to the early studies of city illumination—they were devoting great attention to the Æther then, using as their model the shock wave that passes through air during a conventional explosion, looking for similar methods to intensify the light-pressure locally in the Æther. [. . .] The next step was to find a way to project it as a stream of destructive energy.” (953, emphasis mine)

Here Vamos’s characterization of the Zabraneno is about as clear a description of Tesla’s particle beam weapon as one can find outside the scientific literature.

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When Tesla died in his room at the Hotel New Yorker on January 7, 1943, at the age of eighty-six, among the first to be notified was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who removed about two truckloads of material, as well as about thirty barrels and bundles of papers that had been stored in the basement of the Hotel New Yorker, to a local storage facility (Cheney 334). An electrical engineer named John G. Trump made a cursory inspection of some of the material and wrote abstracts on some of Tesla’s project files (Cheney 334–37). Some of the files were impounded, but most of the rest of the material was released to Tesla’s nephew, Sava Kosanovic, in February 1943 (Cheney 331). Kosanovic left the material in storage until he had it shipped to Yugoslavia in 1952, at which time he found that a number of things were missing (Cheney 332). By mid-1945, some of the papers, those on particle beam weapons in particular, had made their way to Washington and were checked out to a Lieutenant Robert Houle in Air Technical Service Command, ostensibly to be copied and annotated. As Cheney notes: “The papers were never returned; the Navy has no record of Tesla’s papers; no federal archives have a record of them” (Cheney 339). In 1981, Cheney concluded, “For many years there have been rumors that these unpatented inventions or concepts of Tesla’s found their way not only to the U.S. Army Air Force but to Russia and to private American defense industries, and ultimately into certain university research laboratories engaged in beam weaponry” (Cheney 341). It perhaps goes without saying that rumors such as these would have fascinated someone like Pynchon, with his background at Boeing and his interest in weapons systems and conspiracy theories. In their book Angels Don’t Play This HAARP: Advances in Tesla Technology, Nicholas Begich and Jeanne Manning trace the development, extension, and application of several of these “unpatented inventions or concepts” to projects ongoing at various research facilities around the world. Their main focus is the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP) located in rural northern Alaska.33 According to Begich and Manning, one of the projects being developed at HAARP is an ionospheric heater, a shorthand way of identifying an array of antennae whose purpose is “ionospheric modification”: “transmitting extremely large amounts of radio-frequency energy (up to a billion watts) into the ionosphere.”34 An ionospheric heater works somewhat like Chick Counterfly’s cigarette lighter in Against the Day: it emits “certain energetic rays, which can be concentrated, by specially invented ‘radio-lenses,’ and focused to a point about where the tip of your cigarette is—scusi, was” (252). Modern ionospheric heaters follow patents developed by Bernard Eastlund, who in turn based his work on patents filed by Tesla in the first half of the twentieth century. According to Eastlund, ionospheric heaters have a number of applications, depending on how they are used.

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Theoretically, some nonmilitary uses include repairing depleted ozone layers, altering climate patterns to stop hurricanes, producing rain in drought-stricken areas, and providing remote downloadable sources of energy (cited in Begich and Manning 27–34). In the 1980s, the military applications of the ionospheric heater were regarded as far outweighing the peaceful uses, however, and so Eastlund’s research was supported mainly by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as part of the Star Wars initiative (Begich and Manning 33). Eastlund and his backers claimed that, depending on how much energy was directed skyward, the heater could “facilitate long range over the horizon communications, enable tomography from one medium to another, fry incoming missiles, disrupt global communications, change the chemical composition of the upper atmosphere, and engineer climate change by redirecting jet stream patterns over hostile nations” (Begich and Manning 32–34). Eastlund was featured extensively in the public media in the 1980s, including an article in Omni magazine and an interview on National Public Radio, but as details of the project became available, he became more reluctant to discuss his patents publicly, and several prominent scientists raised serious concerns. One of these, the physicist Dr. Richard Williams, warned that heating the ionosphere (what he called geophysical warfare) could result in a “tear” in the atmospheric fabric that could cause irreversible damage (Begich and Manning 34). As had Tesla, he suggested that under the “right” conditions, the atmosphere could be set on fire. Moreover, Williams warned, the transmission of electrical energy into the ionosphere during a period of high solar activity could trigger an amplified reaction that could transmit incredibly huge amounts of energy from space to Earth, much like an enormous lightning bolt (Begich and Manning 35). The flip side of the high-frequency aspect of HAARP are the ELF (extremely low frequency) projects, which also can use the antenna array to match and to amplify resonance frequencies by beaming low-frequency waves off the ionosphere and through the earth. Theoretically, such a process can destroy buildings and cause earthquakes and tsunamis, and social psychologists have noted significant behavioral changes when test subjects are exposed to low-frequency waves for extended periods (Begich and Manning 3). Although much of the work being done at HAARP and other facilities like it remains secret, it is fertile ground for conspiracy buffs, among whom Pynchon must be regarded as one of the foremost. The connection between HAARP and Against the Day first appears with the reference to “I.G.L.O.O.” when the Chums of Chance travel in the Arctic, where Pynchon describes a years-long “undeclared and largely imperceptible war”:

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All up and down the Northern latitudes, clandestine transmitters had been deployed amid pinnacles of ice, in abandoned mining works, in the secret courtyards of ancient Iron-Age fortresses, manned and unmanned, lonely and unearthly in the iceblink [. . .] Manœuvering in [camouflaged] vessels [. . .], scientist-skyfarers industriously gathered their data, all of deepest interest to the enterprisers convened leagues below, at intelligence centers on the surface such as the Inter-Group Laboratory for Optimagnetic Observation (I.G.L.O.O.), a radiational clearing-house in Northern Alaska, which these days was looking more like some Lloyd’s of the high spectrum, with everyone waiting anxiously for the next fateful Lutine announcement. (122)

During the dialogue that follows, the angry airship captain confronts an I.G.L.O.O. representative about the “dangerous conditions” relating to disturbances in the upper atmosphere caused by the testing of “rays.” The captain says, “You like to fricasseed a bunch of my boys the other day. D’ you care to address that?” The other replies that they “had ample warning. You know you don’t send a ship out on test days” (123). The exchange underscores the danger posed by these rays, and it is worth noting that officials at HAARP—as do those at I.G.L.O.O.—regularly close the airspace above the facility when testing is in progress. As in this and many other instances in the Chums of Chance section of the narrative, Pynchon weaves recent (and perhaps future) applications of Tesla technology—many of which are currently considered either secret or spurious, depending on your point of view—into a simulacrum of a late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century adolescent boys’ science fiction novel—or, to put it another way, Chick reminds us that the cigarette lighter he uses, a miniature ionospheric heater, “hasn’t been invented yet” (252). Characteristic of most of Pynchon’s other works, the fuzzy, feel-good Chums of Chance narrative contains within it signs of potential apocalypse, of the dawning of a new age of weaponry and warfare.

CONCLUSION At the prompting of the New York Tesla Memorial Society, 2006 was declared Nikola Tesla Year by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the governments of Serbia and Croatia, and various other international organizations. The award was the culmination of efforts by a number of scientists, politicians, and historians to restore the reputation of Tesla, who had been either forgotten or marginalized in the popular imagination shortly after his death in 1943. Moreover, it helped to foreground the importance of his inventions and accomplishments, which included hundreds of patents and pioneering

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work on AC, radar, radio and wireless communication, X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and tomography, and weapons systems that include a vertical takeoff plane and a particle beam weapon.35 Despite his pioneering work in the fields of electricity and radio, Tesla was not included with Edison and Marconi as one of the great inventors of the early twentieth century; rather, he was caricatured as the quintessential “mad scientist” by public media or—as the prepublication piece on Amazon. com for Against the Day indicated—grouped with the likes of entertainers such as Bela Lugosi or Groucho Marx.36 Assuming the importance of Tesla in Against the Day, it is probably more than mere chance that Pynchon’s novel was published in 2006, coinciding with the United Nations declaration. Perhaps the clearest indication of Tesla’s importance in the novel can be found during Kit’s exit interview with Scarsdale Vibe. When Kit thanks him for sponsoring him at Yale, Vibe says, “Don’t thank me. Become the next Edison” (331). Vibe “sat there smirking, secure in unquestioned might, unable to imagine how all he believed protecting him had just turned to glass—if not to be smashed to bits quite yet, then shaped for now into a lens that promised close and merciless scrutiny, or maybe someday, when held at the appropriate distance, death by focused light. And he should have said Tesla, not Edison” (331). Although the source of the voice in this passage is ambiguous—is it Kit or some unnamed narrator?—the message is clear: even at this early stage of the novel, Tesla occupies, and will continue to occupy, a significant—perhaps dominant—place in the text. But which version of Tesla will Kit become, the inventor of thousands of useful and now necessary devices, the great friend to the common man, and “feather in the cap of the whole human race” whom Vice President Henry Wallace and Fiorello LaGuardia eulogized at his funeral,37 or the sinister mad scientist of the popular media, who spent his later years designing apocalyptic weapons capable of destroying the entire world through “death by focused light”? Or both? Characteristically, Pynchon leaves those questions unanswered. NOTES 1. See Dirk Vanderbeke, “Subliminal Cues”; and Joseph Tabbi, “Merging Orders.” 2. Alan J. Friedman, “Science and Technology,” 69. 3. Mark Siegel, “Science Fiction Controversy,” 41. 4. See Hayden White, Metahistory, passim. 5. Steven Weisenburger, Companion, 2. 6. See my articles coauthored with Stephen Tomaske: “Hard Science”; and, forthcoming in Pynchon Notes, “Medicine and the Paranormal in Gravity’s Rain-

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bow: Anaphylaxis, Epheyre, and That Charles Richet.” I also revisit this topic, specifically with reference to Benjamin Franklin, in “Tempus Incognitus: Temporality and the Shapes of Time in Mason & Dixon,” also forthcoming in Pynchon Notes. 7. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 663–64. 8. Regarded by most today as a fanciful example of bizarre pseudoscience, the Hollow Earth theory was taken rather seriously in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in part because Halley was such a well-respected and accomplished scientist. In Mason & Dixon the title characters debate the theory extensively. In Against the Day, the numerous references to the Hollow Earth theory (115–18, 155, 274, 327, 380, 391, 393) are posed in terms of salvation or damnation and range from the simple to the extremely complex and convoluted. Traveling with El Espinero in the desert, Frank Traverse eats some hikuli, or globe cactus, which causes him to hallucinate (or travel, via astral projection à la Carlos Casteneda). He thinks he is wandering deeper and deeper through some underground tunnels until he arrives at a huge underground cave, where “it was raining, calmly but steadily” (393). Guided by a young girl, Frank hears of the history of the place, which is part creation myth, part tale of Eldorado, part explanation for the brutal living conditions of the people in the desert. In another episode, Hunter Penhallow’s exodus by train into the hollow interior of the earth is represented as an escape from a biblical version of the apocalypse occurring on the surface, complete with the quotation from Dante at the gates of the city—“I AM THE WAY INTO THE DOLEFUL CITY” (154). 9. Margaret Cheney, Tesla, 234. Subsequent references to this volume are given parenthetically. 10. Pynchon’s allusions to Tesla’s life and work are numerous and often very dense and complex. The examples I discuss here are merely a representative sample, by no means meant to be all-inclusive. 11. In 2006, a prepublication notice announcing the publication of Against the Day was posted on Amazon.com, purportedly by Pynchon himself. The notice promised “cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx”; see the Pynchon Wiki, “Against the Day,” http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki .com/wiki/index.php?title=Against_the_Day (accessed May 24, 2010). The novel’s publication on November 21, 2006, was greeted with a flurry of reviews, some of which made passing references to the appearance of Nikola Tesla in the text; none, however, discussed the importance of Tesla and his work in Pynchon’s novel. 12. See also Marc Seifer’s Wizard, passim, and the Tesla Memorial Society of New York Web site for more biographical references: “Tesla Biography,” http:// www.teslasociety.com/biography.htm (accessed May 25, 2010; cited hereafter as “Tesla Memorial Society biography”). In this essay, I cite Cheney’s biography extensively, since it is the most thorough and was used as the basis for the documentary film Tesla: Master of Lightning (which, as with Cheney, I cite parenthetically throughout). While it would be overreaching to claim with certainty that Pynchon read Cheney’s biography, the close parallels between passages in her text (some of which are drawn from sources available only in manuscript form at the Tesla Museum or the Library of Congress) and in Against the Day suggest that Pynchon was familiar with it.

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13. I am using John Clute’s identification and naming of narrative clusters, as found in “Aubade, Poor Dad,” 285. 14. See Tesla Memorial Society biography. 15. Nikola Tesla, My Inventions, 11. 16. See Tesla Memorial Society biography. 17. Part of my interpretation here is from Stacy Keach, who performs “the voice of Nikola Tesla” in the documentary Tesla: Master of Lightning. 18. The enmity between Tesla and Edison was to continue unabated until Edison’s death in 1931. Edison is referred to only three times and does not make a cameo appearance in Against the Day. 19. See Tesla Memorial Society biography. 20. For more analysis of the White City’s disappointments, see the essay in this volume by Jeffrey Severs. 21. Crookes is mentioned only once in Against the Day, with reference to his investigation, with Sir Oliver Lodge, of the mysterious Madame Eskimoff (228). 22. Pynchon may be parodying Tesla’s vision of “a cloud carrying angelic figures of marvelous beauty” with the appearance of the Sodality of Ætheronauts in Against the Day. Whereas Tesla says that his vision was due to “a shared frequency,” the Chums attribute the appearance of the mechanically powered “flying formation of girls, dressed like religious novices in tones of dusk” (1030) to shared trajectories (1030) and to vortices in the viscosity of the boundary-layer thickness (1031). 23. Once again, Pynchon is apparently conflating historical dates in this passage. Tesla generated a million volts in his lab in early spring 1895 (Cheney 121), but he did not begin to discuss the possibility of a “world system of intelligence transmission” until his return to New York from Colorado Springs in 1900 (Cheney 192). 24. Vanderjuice describes himself as a type of anti-Tesla when he tells Kit about his plan to kill Scarsdale Vibe: “Had a crack at him once, must’ve been after you’d left for Germany. Sort of a relapse into all-purpose loathing, saw how easily I’d been bought—flattered into thinking myself the equal of Tesla, though of opposite polarity” (1078–79). 25. The operator’s comment is inaccurate. Tesla felt that such communication with the dead was possible, but Edison and Marconi were among a number of scientists who scoffed at the idea. 26. The long conflicted relationship between Tesla and Marconi is too complicated to detail in full here, but the main point is that Marconi claimed credit for much of the work previously done by Tesla. When Marconi sent the first wireless message across the Atlantic in 1901, Tesla noted that Marconi was using seventeen of his patents (Cheney 203). In 1915, Marconi won the Nobel Prize, and Tesla sued him for patent infringements (Cheney 219). By 1927, Tesla simply referred to Marconi as “a donkey” (Cheney 230). The debate continued for another sixteen years, but in 1943, after Tesla’s death, the patent suit was decided in favor of Tesla, “striking down the fundamental Marconi patent” (Cheney 222) and establishing Tesla as the original inventor of wireless transmission and radio. In the Chums of Chance section of Against the Day, Pynchon tips his hand in this debate by referring to radios as “Tesla device[s]” (107).

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27. Oliver Nichelson, “Tunguska Explosion,” 8. Subsequent references are given parenthetically. 28. One of the main factual flaws of Nichelson’s argument (and in Pynchon’s representation) is that while the Tunguska Event took place on June 30, 1908, Peary did not leave New York to sail north until July 6, 1908. 29. See Max Fleischer, The Electrothanasia Ray. 30. See William R. Lyne, “Tesla’s Dynamic Theory of Gravity.” 31. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains, 46. 32. In 1956 Tesla was honored posthumously by having a unit of magnetic flux density named after him. The Tesla, which equals one weber (1 W) per meter squared, is the international unit used to calibrate magnetic resonance imaging machines, which produce visual images of internal soft tissue (see Tesla Memorial Society biography). 33. Cheney does not mention HAARP, since her book was published in 1981, before the facility was built and went online. The documentary Tesla: Master of Lightning has about a five-minute segment on HAARP, in which Joseph Butler, the spokesperson for National Air Intelligence Center, a department of the U.S. Air Force, states that although there is “no direct proof that Tesla’s plans were used in the Strategic Defensive Initiative,” he admits, “[a] considerable amount of effort has taken place in the United States and in a number of other countries trying to get these things up to a real weaponizable status. And we stop at that point.” 34. Nicholas Begich and Jeanne Manning, Angels Don’t Play This HAARP, 24. Subsequent references are given parenthetically. 35. See Tesla Memorial Society biography. 36. See n. 11. 37. See Tesla Memorial Society biography.

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III

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS

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8

S The Religious and Political Vision of Against the Day Kathryn Hume

S

ince V. appeared in 1963, Thomas Pynchon has exemplified American postmodernism, and Against the Day carries on the process of undercutting our ontological assumptions and denying us the stability that would support claims of truth or authenticity. Its 1,085 pages, its several hundred characters, and its settings—stretching from Colorado to New Haven to Venice to Siberia—combine to deny us the comfort of mastering this textual miniworld. In its religion and politics, however, this book differs from Pynchon’s earlier novels. From V. (1963) through Mason & Dixon (1997), many characters express their own ideologies or moral values, but Pynchon as author rarely pushes his own views. His political sympathies are leftist and pro-labor, and his spiritual concerns are attuned to nonmaterial realities, but they remain backgrounded, if only because his characters project so many different kinds of belief—Buddhist, Jewish, Orphic, and gnostic, as well as Christian. Critics have constructed political stances from Gravity’s Rainbow, but its ideology is not immediately evident, and neither is a religious program of action, beyond that of encouraging a sense of wonder. Vineland’s values are more obvious in that it decries totalitarianism and encourages us to think well of labor, but mostly through individual characters’ voices. Mason & Dixon trumpets a disapproval of slavery so persistently that we presume this to be authorial

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sentiment, but the argument that the Enlightenment scientific enterprise has done more harm than good had to be extracted by experts.1 Against the Day seems to represent a new departure for Pynchon. Not only is this his least paranoid novel,2 but in it he also articulates a stance on both politics and religion. In his other novels, multitudinous voices present their views, and identifying any one as Pynchon’s would be difficult to justify. In this novel, though, so many voices offer us bits of the same overall stance that something relatively coherent emerges. Furthermore, he gives us such statements often enough and with sufficient prominence that they do not disappear into the background, even though he overwhelms us with an untidy tangle of plots and a grotesque number of characters. If one approaches Against the Day expecting just another Pynchon blockbuster, one can read right over the politics of violence and the religion of penance. Hostility to terrorism as a tactic can make one fail to register the seriousness with which Pynchon appears to support political violence. Later rereadings, however, draw out the politics of the dynamiters and even imply that an apparently divine voice (humorously handled) considers dynamiting an acceptable act. Pynchon seems more politically aggressive here than in earlier novels, if only out of despair over a lack of effective peaceful alternatives.3 When DL and Frenesi engaged in acts of violence in Vineland, they were incompetent and comic; Against the Day’s Webb Traverse is not thus compromised. Pynchon’s support—at least within the novel—for violence has been ignored, perhaps because those politics and the religious views do not mesh well with postmodern relativism, possibly because they contradict our previous understanding of Pynchon novels as essentially ambiguous and infinitely complex, and probably because readers do not wish to contemplate either a serious call to violence or a life of penance. His changed sense of what should (and should not) be explicit and unambiguous appears to reflect intensified personal convictions or increased desperation over the direction America is taking.4 This essay will try to disentangle Pynchon’s presentation of religious and political positions in Against the Day and articulate the relatively coherent vision he offers in this novel. Its political program appears to favor attacking industrial infrastructures as the way to slow or derail capitalism, and he intertwines this program with a Christian and often specifically Catholic set of doctrines. According to one of Pynchon’s college friends, Pynchon attended Mass through college, a practice that suggests familiarity with basic doctrine and some identification with it for at least that period of his life.5 For this novel, we no longer seem to be dealing with the infinitely scriptible Pynchon, whose many luscious phrases can be arranged to harmonize with most of his readers’ ideologies. Certainly this anarchist and Catholic Pynchon would not be my choice were I constructing a Pynchon congenial to my reading of his earlier works, and that very

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discrepancy makes me think that something new has developed. Catholic anarchism bears some kinship to Marxist-inflected liberation theology from Latin America, which combines social revolution (sometimes with violence) and Catholic doctrine. Catholic anarchism also has a history in the United States that includes the nonviolent 1930s communities of Dorothy Day and the anti–Vietnam War protest of the Berrigan brothers. Pynchon’s combination of anarchist-Luddite dynamite and a penitential vision of life is his own extension of that tradition—more individual-oriented than is usual in Marxist ideology, and more industrial and technological in its targets than was the case in the American antiwar activism.6 Amid the many forms of spirituality present in Against the Day, Pynchon foregrounds three modes of religiously inspired engagement with this world. His via media, or middle way, has been a fugitive but relatively stable element of his vision since V., but his two contrasted extremes in this novel are newly explicit for him—entering a convent and becoming a dynamiter.7

THE POLITICS OF AGAINST THE DAY Because Pynchon’s religious leanings operate in tandem with his politics in this novel, let me outline the politics as background to his religious message. The political positions that critics extracted from his earlier novels were leftist, but Pynchon mostly limited himself to exposing inequities rather than recommending direct action. V. shows the modern process of the living becoming machinelike. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas exposes dark capitalist forces and many marginalized people, but she is more worried about her own sanity than about what she might do to change the political landscape. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop’s dropping out seems the only alternative to becoming a minion of the corrupt and all-encompassing empires of plastics, drugs, and arms that have taken over the World War II world. Zoyd Wheeler and others definitely give Vineland a hippie-Left slant, though Pynchon treats the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) members of the previous generation more respectfully than he does the political activists of the 1960s generation, the founders of the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll. Brock Vond, the novel’s villain, embodies totalitarian stereotypes that gain luster from the Orwellian 1984 setting. Mason & Dixon decries slavery and sees nothing beneficial about the line cut by the surveyors through the colonial American wilderness. How, though, should we respond to these negative representations of government, capitalism, industry, and empire? The texts do not show very effective political opposition, especially given that his most fully articulated alternative, the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll,

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is not presented as either admirable or practical. V.’s “Keep cool but care” expresses an attitude but does not supply a blueprint for action.8 In Against the Day, values emerge from a chorus of characters and from the narrative voice. One character announces that anyone not insulated by wealth is obliged to be a socialist by the injustices of the world (32). Capitalism is hostile to and destructive of magic (79). Capitalism produces “wealth without conscience” (83). The bourgeois cannot be innocent: “If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself?” (87). “The secret backlands of wealth” eventually depend “on some act of murder, seldom limited to once” (170). Yale, as a bastion of capitalism, reveals “toxic layers beneath” and concerns itself little with learning, “much less finding a transcendent world” (318). “All mathematics leads, doesn’t it, sooner or later, to some kind of human suffering” (541). Kit Traverse hears of a central Asian city that lives and operates although covered with sand, and it might be “Shambhala, as close to the Heavenly City as Earth has known, or Baku and Johannesburg [. . .], unexplored reserves of gold, oil, Plutonian wealth, and the prospect of creating yet another subhuman class of workers to extract it. One vision, if you like, spiritual, and the other capitalist. Incommensurable, of course” (631). Frank Traverse is the focalizing consciousness through which the railroad is decried for dividing landscapes and nature (930). A member of the Foreign Service deserts the British government, having found that he was only “the servant of greed and force” (974). When the Chums of Chance ascend to the Counter-Earth in their airship, they find “an American Republic [. . .] irrevocably into the control of the evil and moronic” (1021)—a phrase sounding like leftist anti–Iraq War rhetoric. Furthermore, one character laments the time “when the land was free, before it got hijacked by capitalist Christer Republicans for their longterm evil purposes” (1058). Reef Traverse heads westward, hoping to find some distant town not governed by “the capitalist/Christer gridwork” (1075). A schoolboy sums up being American as meaning “do what they tell you and take what they give you and don’t go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down” (1076). Simply put, the workers are good; the owners are bad.9 The more advanced the technology, the greater the oppression it imposes on the working class and the more damage it does to Earth. America is hopelessly enslaved to and complicit with the evil and moronic. Finally, in spite of the novel’s investment in Christianity, which will be discussed later, the narrative disparages the spirituality of Christer/Republicans. Some of these phrases sound shrill, but I detect no irony in these pronouncements and sense no suggestion that we are to resist such judgments.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF PENANCE AND ATONEMENT Pynchon’s novels have always presented multiple spiritualities—Christian, Orphic, shamanistic, Buddhist, and kabbalistic are some that have been analyzed. I argue that in this novel, Pynchon foregrounds the Christian without eliminating any of the others, partly by being more doctrinally explicit. The characters most responsible for making Christian issues visible in Against the Day are Lew Basnight, Cyprian Latewood, and the brothers Reef, Frank, and Kit, sons of the dynamiter Webb Traverse, though other characters have their moments of insight or transcendence as well. Some of the episodes seem specifically Catholic, some more generally Christian, and some just spiritual and only semicompatible with Christian doctrine. These less dogmatic spiritualities fit the community and Green orientation of contemporary postsecular religion.10 Pynchon’s emphasis on penance and atonement drew my attention, partly because of their Catholic rather than Protestant or indeterminate spiritual valence, and partly because they signal a more prominent presentation of Christianity in his writing. We meet penance early in the novel when introduced to the detective Lew Basnight. Lew’s past is mysterious; he has no memory of having done anything wrong, but all of a sudden, he becomes the object of moral horror, the “Upstate-Downstate Beast” (37). An associate attacks him in the street, and his beloved wife refuses ever to be under the same roof with him. In a strange dream state, he wanders into an alternate Chicago, where “remorse without an object is a doorway to deliverance” (39) and penitents stay at a rickety residential hotel. Lew is Presbyterian by background, a background that may influence the message he receives: no correlation exists, he is told, between the amount of sin and the length of his penance. His destiny is to do penance. One morning, while on a streetcar, he experiences “grace” and sees all his companions in the vehicle in the banality of their everyday actions, scratching, sneezing, reading, sleeping, but luminous withal. Later, in London, Lew decides that the many Catholics he has met may be right that life should consist of penance, and he remembers a point from his Chicago lessons: “Being unable to remember sins from a previous life won’t excuse you from doing penance in this one. To believe in the reality of penance is almost to have proof of rebirth” (689). While rebirth (in the world) is Buddhist rather than orthodox Christianity, it does appear in early heresies (such as those of the Bogomil founders of Cyprian’s Balkan nunnery), and Pynchon’s stress on the word penance has a Christian ring. For another such strangely handled conversion to the need for penance, consider Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, a British member of European high life. She attends a concert of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s sacred music

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in Gloucester Cathedral, where she levitates “halfway to the vaulting, where, tears running without interruption down her face, she floated in the autumnal light above the heads of the audience for the duration of the piece. At the last long diminuendo, she returned calmly to earth and reoccupied herself, never again to pursue her old career of determined pest” (896). She concludes, “Somehow, I alone, for every single wrong act in my life, must find a right one to balance it” (896). Her levitation is not visible to her companion, suggesting that the levitation involves her spirit only, despite the melodramatic phrasing. Nothing in her prior actions leads us to expect this penitential transformation, so it stands out, tantalizingly unexplained. Given her hitherto obnoxious behavior, one might whimsically conclude that God must exist for her to undergo so astonishing a change. Penance and atonement also appear in the warp and woof of smaller events, not just in big set pieces. During a peyote vision in Mexico, for instance, Frank Traverse sees a cave full of falling water that is located in a desert and learns that the desert was created to serve as the penance for those who became greedy for water (393). Cyprian sees a map, and on it is written the lesson “that pleasures would have to be paid for in later years again and again” (937). Whereas Pynchon presented the idea of penance in Buddhist karmic terms in Vineland and even gives us there a convent of sorts, he undercuts potential spiritual seriousness with slapstick. Against the Day seems committed to penance, and his vocabulary in this book is Catholic or at least Christian.

MYSTIC EXPERIENCES: LIGHT AND HOLY CITIES Spirituality with Christian overtones appears in two overlapping image clusters—images representing transcendent realities in terms of light and images of sacred cities. That light should signal spiritual material is conventional; many forms of mystic experience, including Christ’s transfiguration, use light as the best word we can find for invoking divine presence. We find the two images combined when Miles Blundell, one of the airship crew, claims his aeronaut friends are on a pilgrimage in Venice. Their journey is likened to performing the Stations of the Cross; it has taken them through the world, a “circuit of humble images reflecting a glory greater than we can imagine—to save us from the blinding terror of having to make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day of Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem” (251). Here we see a reality beyond the material world identified as blinding, and we find Venice loosely linked with the Holy City. Mystic experience is recognized by most religions, but this allusion makes explicit reference to Catholic practice, that is, the Stations of the Cross.

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Even physical light acquires religious overtones. A meteorite exploded above Siberia in 1908, producing light and a massive shock wave, but in Against the Day, this Tunguska blast and other explosions produce light with mystic associations and effects.11 Characters experience that blast from a great distance, or they undergo similar violent experiences with light at places of sacred power (770), or they worry about such an effusion of light caused by a mysterious weapon in the Balkans (954), or they are affected by dynamite blasts (185). Those living near the meteorite’s explosion reported seeing “a figure walking through the aftermath, not exactly an angel [. . .], a consoler” (785). Pynchon jokes that reindeer rediscover flight and “epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area” (784). More seriously, reindeer miraculously prove able to talk for a while after the Tunguska blast; in folk tradition, animals talk at midnight on Christmas Eve, but talking animals are also known to Siberian shamanism. A talking white stag insists on leading Kit to where he needs to go across the tundra (786). Light with a less obvious material source accompanies a voice heard by Reef Traverse as he escapes from the room of a woman whose husband has returned unexpectedly. He saw “an evening sky which had refused the dusk, chosen a nacreous glow instead, an equivalent in light of the invitation to attend that Reef was now receiving from the overhead voice—‘Really Traverse you know you must abandon this farcical existence, rededicate yourself to real-world issues such as family vendetta, which though frowned upon by the truly virtuous represents even so a more productive use of your own precious time on Earth [. . . than] death by irate Hungarian’” (802). Reef runs along the street in this “queer illumination” “for his life, or anyhow the resumption of it” (802). During the outbreak of World War I, Reef experiences light “so saturated with color, brought hovering to such tension, that it could not be borne for long, as if it were dangerous to be out in country filled with light like this, as if anyone beneath it were just about to be taken by it, if not over into death then some transformation at least as severe. Light like this must be received with judgment—too much, too constantly, would exhaust the soul” (963). Likewise, Frank sees whirling colored lights in his peyote vision, and they suggest to him “mythic cities at the horizon” (394). Pynchon gives us light at many levels of seriousness. Some are strictly physical and scientific, some more playful. For the Manichaeans, everything of this world is a trick of darkness and to be shunned, lest it “distract us from seeking union with the Light.” Chick’s response: “That’s the choice? Light or pussy? What kind of choice is that?” (438). Pynchon also gives us Lightarians, who live on nothing but light. They serve “fried light, fricasseed light, light à la mode” (60). Kit finds himself supported by light when crossing wills with Scarsdale Vibe (330). Ruperta’s levitation

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is accompanied by luminosity. Merle Rideout enjoys the company of talking ball lightning (73–74). Light also underlies many tangential allusions to film and cinema. Pynchon celebrates light in all forms, but defuses any tendency to idolize it or take it for God by joking about it as well as expressing wonder. If red-nosed reindeer and talking ball lightning represent Pynchon’s jeux d’esprit, other versions of light are more serious. The light that bolsters Kit when facing Vibe is the sort that Pynchon sometimes mentions when characters are on the edge of a revelation. Later in that scene, Kit feels “one pure and steady light he kept well within—the certainty that one day this would have to be put right—the moment his to choose, details such as how and where not as important as the equals sign going in the right place” (331). Kit knows he is being bribed to forget his father’s murder by the man who paid for it, and Kit realizes he will have to suffer for having let himself be bought. Lew learns that “we are light, you see, all of light—we are the light offered the batsmen at the end of the day, the shining eyes of the beloved, the flare of the safety-match at the high city window, the stars and nebulae in full midnight glory, the rising moon through the tram wires, the naphtha lamp glimmering on the costermonger’s barrow” (687–88). That light in the highest sense should be all of the things listed, including the lowest, most artificial, and ordinary, is paralleled in Cyprian Latewood’s “Cosmic Revelation,” that love is “more like the 333,000 or however many different forms of Brahma worshipped by the Hindu—the summation, at any given moment, of all the varied subgods of love that mortal millions of lovers, in limitless dance, happened to be devoting themselves to” (848). Cyprian had earlier reached a similar revelation about Christ’s being in all the most ordinary people attending a church service, however bored or distracted they may seem. The least form of light or love is connected to all the highest forms. Light is one of Pynchon’s images for signaling spiritual breakthrough. Visions of cities are another—somewhat oddly, given the degree of control that cities demand. True, San Narciso provides Oedipa with a mystic moment of vision in The Crying of Lot 49.12 Most of the cities in Gravity’s Rainbow, however, were described in terms of street grids, and those straight lines relate to the eponymous line in Mason & Dixon, a line excoriated for its destruction of the mythic and the ebullient in colonial America. Cities seem less negative in Against the Day; several provide points where the boundary between two worlds grows thin. Wandering the streets of Chicago, Lew Basnight finds himself in “another” Chicago. The Chums of Chance hear of a Turkish Corner in New York (431) where you can pass straight from New York to Asian desert. Strange ice formations called “Venice of the Arctic” (136) might permit transit to the real Venice. Frank Traverse sees a city both in a wound-fever dream and in his second

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peyote vision. Its plazas show folks on pilgrimage, temples, stables, mule trains. Frank in his vision confers with the priests as to whether “this is a city not yet come fully into being, but right now really just a pausing point of monochrome adobe, for this gaudy, bright city they hope to find someday” (925–26). While Frank’s vision fits in with Mesoamerican shamanism made famous by Carlos Castaneda, he decides that he must remember his vision “if he was to have even an outside chance of saving his soul” (928)—a phrase with a Christian sound. Frank’s concern with the city’s futurity sounds rather like Hebrews 13:14: “For we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come.” Some characters seek Shambhala, a holy city in central Asia. While the name belongs to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition rather than the Christian, the quest is Christianized for the aeronaut Miles Blundell, the Chum who, in Venice, thought in terms of Stations of the Cross and who now is “tormented by a prefiguration, almost insupportable in its clarity, of the holy City” (550–51). He senses that they approach a sacred place, and he can hardly talk or sleep or carry out his chores. Evidently in Pynchon’s world, sacred locations resonate for the seeker in the seeker’s own religious terms. Pynchon thus emphasizes the Christian tradition here without denying Shambhala the role it may play for Buddhists. Kit Traverse likewise sees cities that offer salvation. He chases after Shambhala. He goes through a monstrous natural gate and suffers a mighty release of light and sound (770), which may be the Tunguska Event or may be an outpouring of sacred power in this location.13 He experiences a visionary moment on Lake Baikal. Later, in a hallucination, he sees Baikal again: “From this precise spot along the shoreline it was possible to ‘see’ on the far shore a city, crystalline, redemptive” (1080). When Kit sees this redemptive city, he finds himself thinking compulsively about his wife, Dally, “aware that they’d separated, but unable to remember why” (1080). Having plighted his troth, he unconsciously intuits that his salvation must be worked out with her and will not be available if he truly abandons her. Pynchon suggests this connection earlier through the disparaging comment about Kit and Dally’s final arguments that “salvation was the last thing on anybody’s mind” (1074). Having made a commitment to marriage, Kit cannot now ignore that bond.14 Chick’s vision of “a giant airship of the future” serving as a kind of ark for resurrected bodies “from all periods of the past two millennia” (413), a refugee camp that he must administer, foreshadows the final metamorphosis of the airship in this book.15 The Chums of Chance plot, a Tom Swiftian pastiche kidding American positivism, is an unlikely source for a serious commentary on the future. However, the Chums all marry female aeronauts (who are first seen “dressed like religious novices” (1030)), and they multiply. “The ship by now has grown as large as

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a small city. There are neighborhoods, there are parks. There are slum conditions” (1084). “Inconvenience, once a vehicle of sky-pilgrimage, has transformed into its own destination” (1085). They sense the presence of “good unsought,” however, and anticipate its arrival. “They will feel the turn in the wind,” Pynchon writes in the book’s closing lines. “They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace” (1085). Both the Nicene Creed and Matthew 24:29 speak of Christ’s return as his coming in or with glory. The “grace” they head for is the freely given, unmerited favor of God that permits sinners to reach salvation. Pynchon seems to see in the ship and in the small city the possibility for sharing, for cooperation, for socialism and anarchism, or maybe just for the piety that emerges from a need for community. In Gravity’s Rainbow, he argued that any degree of organization inevitably resulted in hierarchy and control and that only temporary black-market arrangements remained free. He seems to be backing down from that monadic extreme, and via Tertullian, he expresses the possibilities for salvation to be found as part of a group of ordinary people. Tertullian’s credo quia impossibile est (I believe it because it is impossible) resonates in the description of Cyprian’s religious awakening.16 Cyprian glimpses that “precisely because of its impossibilities, the disarray of self-important careerists and hierarchyobsessed functionaries, the yawning and fidgeting town-lad choristers and narcotic sermonizing—it was possible to hope, not so much despite as paradoxically because of this very gnarled web of human flaw, for the emergence of the incommensurable mystery, the dense, unknowable Christ, bearing the secret of how once on a hilltop that was not Zion, he had conquered death” (497). Somehow the city, by offering a mélange of human types and behaviors, now gives some Pynchon characters faith, and grants Pynchon’s visionary cities some potential for good in human organization that was lacking in Gravity’s Rainbow.17

VOICES Beyond cities and light, Pynchon also uses disembodied voices to signal transcendent realities. While voices, like visions, might signal schizophrenia or epileptic seizure, what these voices say makes sense, and they almost all have an obvious moral point to make. None of the characters actually identifies the voice as God’s, but some treat it as if it might indeed be. Almost all of the voices are accompanied by strange light. I have already cited Reef’s extended parley with this higher power as he flees an irate husband. Yashmeen, Kit, and Günther visit a mathematics museum near the Brocken. These three young mathematicians, all of them about

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to abandon their studies, muse on their desire for “that terrible ecstasy known to result from unmediated observation of the beautiful” (635). They have sought transcendence in mathematics (Kit, 318, 675; Yashmeen, 749, 942) and have ignored as best they can the human suffering that mathematics can cause (541). As they leave the museum, a disembodied voice tells them that the museum might not be the same when they return, and when asked who he is, the sourceless voice responds, “You know who I am” (636). Other characters hear similar voices. Foley Walker, henchman of the plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe, hears a voice reminding him of his past in the Civil War, telling him that “at Cold Harbor, [you] lay between the lines three days, between the worlds, and this is what you were saved for? this mean, nervous, scheming servitude to an enfeebled conscience?” (335).18 Reef’s first encounter with a voice chides him for smoking a cigar he cannot afford on the basis of any honest work he has done, for abandoning his (common-law) wife and child, and for giving up on avenging Webb. The voice calls him “a promising young dynamiter, your father’s son, sworn to alter the social terrain, and now you’re hardly much better than the people you used to want to blow up” (660). Not all voices are to be trusted: Lew hears one voice suggesting suicide and sensibly decides that it may be his own (688). The hearers do not question the validity or reality of these voices, partly because the voices’ stance on moral issues seems right and partly because the auditors always feel that they know or half-know the voice. As many characters do throughout Pynchon’s novels, those in this book long to transcend the world we live in. Whereas that desire, expressed most infamously by Weissmann in Gravity’s Rainbow, has been seen as lifedenying, even murderous, most of the main characters in Against the Day long to go beyond the material world to something higher and finer, and they sense that higher reality through mathematics, light, vision, peyote, a geographical sacred place, or floating in an airship.19 A voice seemingly from that further realm may be welcome as a sign of the realm’s existence.

SACRED GEOGRAPHY Pynchon makes us notice the importance of the spiritual by making it physical. The landscape itself forces sojourners to feel irruptions of the sacred. One geographic feature that carries spiritual weight is a rock gateway. Kit passes through one such gateway, the astonishing Tushuk Tash (764), also now known as Shipton’s Arch. “Some spoke of the colossal gate as a precipice, a bridge, an earthen dam, a passage between high rock walls . . . for others it was not a feature of the landscape but something

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more abstract, a religious examination, a cryptographic puzzle” (769). Sometimes in his dreams thereafter, Kit becomes that thousand-foot-high arch or bridge. In the last such dream, “A voice he knew he should recognize whispered, ‘you are released’” (771). Beyond that gate supposedly lies Shambhala. Pynchon produces a similar piece of spiritual geography with the Halkata (955), the Balkan ring-shaped arch near which Cyprian finds his convent. Frank likewise passes through such an arch in a vision (993). He reaches his vision while staring at a tree full of luminous, blinking beetles, which are explained to him in Christian terms: “They all went to make up a single soul, really, in the same way that light was indivisible. ‘In the same way,’ amplified Günther, ‘that our savior could inform his disciples with a straight face that bread and wine were indistinguishable from his body and blood’” (991–92). Evidently, such arches link to light, sacred places, and mystic insight; they reflect the possibility of transition to a different mode of life; and they seem to be located in regions where the population lives traditional, low-tech peasant lives.20 Strange geographies relate to religion in other ways too. Frank finds himself in a region of Mexico known for its meteorite fragments. He picks up an odd rock and takes it with him, and every time he touches it, he hears a voice asking, “What are you doing here?” (984). The notion of a distant and hidden holy city is found in various parts of the world; Frank finds his in Mexico, while Kit searches Asia and sees his personal version of it as a vision across Lake Baikal. Shambhala is sensed by Miles Blundell as a prefiguration of “the holy City, separated only by a slice of Time” (551). Pynchon’s characters find landscapes or objects that seem imbued with the sacred in the arctic, in the tundra, and in the desert—all areas of low-tech human activity and life. Some kind of pilgrimage with its associated hardships increases the likelihood of an ordinary mortal’s sensing the sacred, and Pynchon sees sacred places as a means of sensing the world beyond the material. In this, he agrees with the Dalai Lama, who points out that “in the Buddhist tradition, the goal of pilgrimage is not so much to reach a particular destination as to awaken within oneself the qualities and energies of the sacred site, which ultimately lie within our own minds.”21

PYNCHON’S THREE PATHS OF LIFE: THE VIA MEDIA, THE CONVENT, AND DYNAMITE Pynchon’s via media is a life pattern to which most people can aspire. It demands the minimum of psychic and spiritual investment while encouraging right behavior. He illustrates this path aboard the Inconvenience, the airship grown to city size that is flying toward grace at the end of the

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novel. We find no saints among those characters, but we do find enough faith and enough decency to make them a functioning community. We see a similar level of spirituality among several of the main characters down on Earth. Yashmeen and Reef go to the Church of St. Spiridion in Corfu to offer candles and prayers in thanks for their escape from the Balkans (972). Pynchon treats marriage as indissoluble for Kit and will not let him off the hook when he and Dally have parted ways. Above all, Pynchon values the birth and nurture of children in a family; such nurture was foregrounded in Vineland, and it remains an unquestioned value in Against the Day. What seems most puzzling about airship life is that it is hardly lowtech. The novel’s solution is to make the airship as ecological as possible. In the early part of the novel, the aeronauts had used engines that were helped by wind; by the end, they have developed ways of coasting not only on light but on darkness too. The airship thus represents a leastdestructive technology, albeit one involving wishful thinking in current terms. This mode of transport is declared good by contrast to the railroad, which “penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love” (930). The airship avoids such divisive and destructive effects. Its nomadic drift from assignment to assignment does resemble the black-market dealings that Pynchon upheld in Gravity’s Rainbow, though Slothrop managed without the huge private-sector contracts now used (1084). As Slothrop does, the airship takes on what cargo or assignments it chooses and goes where it pleases. As with the black market, it does not respect the divisions that land-bound people make among themselves. The chief difference is that the ship is not as free of organization and hierarchy as Slothrop was when functioning as a lone agent. Pynchon seems to agree that some organization is needed for larger populations, and he has reconciled himself to that compromise. Organization, he concedes, need not destroy community. Where earlier the airship was “a vehicle of sky-pilgrimage,” it has become its own destination (1085). Living on the Inconvenience, rightly conceived, is pilgrimage toward grace but also life fully led and experienced in the community. This is more the religion of dwelling than of seeking.22 The airship permits them to make a living, but the community seems to be what they value most. For all that Pynchon’s terms are somewhat different in this latest novel, his via media seems much like McClintic Sphere’s memorable line in V.: “Keep cool but care.” A new ideal for Pynchon emerges in the final destination of the spy Cyprian Latewood. He is arguably the most fully developed religious

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character in any of Pynchon’s novels, and he reaches his spiritual breakthrough not as transcendence but by means of complete submission. Cyprian, for much of the novel a homosexual who craves to be dominated, and one who has enjoyed cross-dressing, becomes a nun in a Bogomil/Manichaean/Orphic/kabbalistic nunnery in the Balkans, Orpheus’s home territory. Cyprian had already found Christ through the very ordinariness of the people at a Church of England service. His sexual submissiveness, however, proves a prelude to his total submission to the divine, an interesting change for Pynchon, who in Gravity’s Rainbow suggested that sadomasochism was inherent in the state’s relation to its subjects and the key to totalitarian power.23 Submission in that paradigm encourages citizens to obey their leaders slavishly, no matter how vicious the orders. In Against the Day, by contrast, total submission leads Cyprian to a luminous clarity of mind. He experiences freedom from desire for the first time in his life, an “unexpected delight” as sharp as that of first orgasm. “He had not even been imagining desire. [. . .] The imbalance he was used to experiencing [. . .] was, somewhat mysteriously, no longer there—it was occupied by something else, a clarity, a general freshening of temperature” (839). He and Yashmeen and Reef, who had been living in a torrid sexual triangle, arrive at a natural rock arch; Reef and Yashmeen and their baby walk under it, and Cyprian learns from the locals that they will therefore love each other forever. Anyone who walks through unaccompanied, however, “turns into the opposite sex” (955). Although we do not see Cyprian walk through, he is greeted with “Welcome home” when he arrives at the convent of nuns. Here, Cyprian is sure, he will find “no more of these tiresome gender questions” (958). His discipline as a postulant involves remaining “acutely conscious, at every moment of the day, of the nearly unbearable conditions of cosmic struggle between darkness and light proceeding, inescapably, behind the presented world” (957). While this sounds more Manichaean than Catholic, the attitude is remarkably like Pynchon’s own in his writing. Read “dark” as forces of oppression, especially capitalist forces, and we see something important about most of his novels. Cyprian’s being termed postulant echoes a recent dream of Reef’s, in which he sees his dynamiter father in “a procession of miners in their long rubber coats [. . .] like postulants in habits” (887). That dream reminds Reef of his father’s unremitting struggle against what he saw as the darkness of capitalism. In discussing light prior to taking his vow of silence, Cyprian discusses the Shekhinah, “the feminine aspect of God,” “Moon to his Sun. Nobody can withstand pure light, let alone see it. Without her to reflect, God is invisible. She is absolutely of the essence if he is to be at all operative in the world” (960). This kabbalistic transformation of gender to make God visible to humans

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gives us a kind of precedent for the otherwise implausible or disturbing implications of a man’s becoming a nun. While the theology of Cyprian’s convent is not one of our readily recognizable orthodoxies, it claims to be Bogomil, a gnostic form of Christianity, and he willingly gives himself over to a convent in a geographical region that will soon be torn by a particularly brutal war. He knows what will happen to overrun convents, but he remarks that the rites of this particular one entail that not Christ but “Night is one’s betrothed, one’s beloved, one seeks to become not a bride at all really, but a kind of sacrifice, an offering, to Night” (959). Given my bald description of Cyprian’s vocation, one might think the episode parodic, particularly given the idea of a submissive male homosexual’s becoming a nun. However, Pynchon’s handling avoids irony; Cyprian’s earnestness, his sacrifice, his thoughtfulness, his pain at parting from his lovers, all seem to be presented without undercutting. Pynchon is famous for excessive and tasteless jokes, but this situation does not call forth that antic spirit. Cyprian’s moving beyond gender is treated as a spiritual desideratum, not the beginning of a bawdy fabliau. If entering a convent lies to one side of Pynchon’s via media, the other extreme is a life dedicated to overthrow of the capitalist order by violence, because no peaceful means have succeeded. While this could be called merely political, Pynchon seems to see Webb Traverse’s martyrdom as more literal than figurative. Though not a likable man, Webb is treated as an austere labor saint at the intersection between religion and politics. Like Cyprian and Pynchon, he is always aware of the powers of dark oppression, and he fights them skillfully. He plans with great care his dynamiting activities, while maintaining a respectable front as a miner with wife and family. His sons disappointed him because they did not carry on his anarchist program, but he acknowledges from the astral plane his own blame for driving them away: “I sold my anger too cheap, didn’t understand how precious it was, how I was wasting it, letting it leak away, yelling at the wrong people” (672). Scarsdale Vibe hires a pair of murderers to wipe out Webb. Vengeance and dynamite are not the usual tools of Christianity, but the voice that might be God’s seems to enjoin both dynamiting and vendetta on the sons of Webb when they stray too far from the path of political righteousness. While the voice admits that vendetta is not admired by those with high spiritual standards, it also states that such action makes better use of Reef’s potential than do his casual amours. By linking Cyprian as postulant with Webb looking like a postulant, Pynchon seems to be setting up two exemplary paths of life; one the submissive worship and withdrawal from the world to cloistered, contemplative life; the other action in the world, fighting the forces of capitalism, empire, slavery, expansion, and technology. Both may lead

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to martyrdom. While Pynchon seems to respect Cyprian, Webb appears more frequently throughout the book and repeats his message more often.24 Webb’s pattern is also easier for the earth-bound to follow; those who will not commit themselves to the extremes of dynamite may find lesser modes of sabotage. As Slothrop is told by a tree in Gravity’s Rainbow, he should swipe the oil filter from any unguarded logging operation’s tractor.25 If everyone of high morality and spiritual strength withdraws from the world, those left in charge will quickly destroy that world; if people willingly devote their lives to making society better, either by damaging the capitalists or trying to care for those in need, then perhaps the world too can be saved, not just the individual souls. Both of Pynchon’s extremes offer serious, considered action for people who want to do more than keep cool while caring.

RELIGION IN AGAINST THE DAY I have argued that Pynchon foregrounds Christianity more in this book than in his others. He invokes pilgrimage, performing the Stations of the Cross, grace, penance, monastic vows of silence, lighting candles in thanksgiving for escape, honoring marriage vows as indissoluble, and mystic visions. Taken together, these point to a Catholic-inflected Christianity—whether traditional or postmodern.26 Such formal elements of a religious life seem more central to this book than to his others, but this does not mean that he denigrates other forms of enlightenment. He complicates spirituality with Manichaean, Orphic, and kabbalistic references; with allusions to Islam; and with an extensive Buddhist subtext. Nonetheless, Christianity marks the overall tonality of the book and not just the lives of individual characters. This claim is controversial, but Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland do not seem nearly as signposted with theological terms (except for the passages devoted to William Slothrop), although they certainly explore spirituality. The faith in Against the Day could be called postsecularist or “weak” religion (Gianni Vattimo’s term) in that it does not demand that dogma be treated as absolute truth; it also seems postsecularist because of Pynchon’s focus on Green values and life lived as part of a community and family. The Christianity that Pynchon promotes in this novel is, among other things, a form of opposition politics. Fairness to fellow humans demands that any true spirituality fight capitalist injustices. While the most radical liberation theologians may condone violence, many would not go as far as Pynchon appears to go. I believe, though, that Pynchon is exploring such violence, at least within the framework of this novel. Dynamiting capitalist structures is worthy of a particular kind of sainthood in Against

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the Day’s spiritual economy. Webb tries to avoid killing bystanders but doubts that they are truly innocent. Fairness also seems to Pynchon to demand as much technological devolution as possible, and this is another reason for Pynchon to support blowing up industrial infrastructure (though he is not nearly this aggressive in his 1984 essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?”). William Burroughs reached similar conclusions about the need for devolution in Cities of the Red Night, where he states that the self-sufficient pirate communes were rendered impossible as an ideal way of life by the Industrial Revolution: “The chance was there. The chance was missed. The principles of the French and American revolutions became windy lies in the mouths of politicians. . . . In England, Western Europe, and America, the overpopulation made possible by the Industrial Revolution leaves scant room for communes. . . . There is simply no room left for ‘freedom from the tyranny of government’ since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare.”27 Pynchon’s reasons for desiring devolution differ from Burroughs’s, but they both see the damaging costs of our overdevelopment. Pynchon seems to think well of low-tech peoples in his novels: they often seem wise, and sacred sites are located in their realms, not near cities. He does not, though, examine their cultural patterns for fairness or recognize any unpleasant drawbacks to low-tech life. The airship and what little we see of low-tech peoples seem symbolic ideals rather than practical proposals. He knows we live in a technological world. While he wishes us to diminish our reliance on technology, he does not expect us to wait for that to happen before we may seek the transcendent world. We must quest within the world we have inherited—hence, the apparent contradiction of some characters finding their breakthroughs by means of math or technology and the new acceptability of cities to Pynchon as places for valid community living. The airship, though, is at best an allegorical rather than a practical answer. One of its characteristics, which seems important to Pynchon, is its nomadism. Nomads must limit their possessions to what they can carry. Pynchon may have been reading Bruce Chatwin’s speculation on nomadism’s being humankind’s most natural form of life;28 Pynchon suggests this with Ljubica’s complete adaptation to that life: “Reef was delighted at how easily this baby took to being out on the road. Ljubica cried for the reasons any baby would, but no more, as if she knew her trooper’s destiny and saw no point in delaying her embrace of it” (954). Those characters who show any sort of enlightenment triggered by a religious experience tend to live somewhat nomadically in this novel and try when possible to do some good in the world. Stray, a former girlfriend of Reef and eventually Frank’s wife, exemplifies this. “It wasn’t

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exactly a religious experience, but somehow, a little at a time, she had found herself surrendering to her old need to take care of people. Not for compensation, certainly not for thanks. Her first rule became ‘Don’t thank me.’ Her second was ‘Don’t take the credit for anything that turns out well.’ One day she woke up understanding clear as the air that as long as a person was willing to forgo credit, there were very few limits on the good it became possible to do” (976). She works supporting anarchist movements, getting medical supplies for them. Reef and Yashmeen, Frank and Stray, and their assorted children are shown leading simple, relatively rootless, but reasonably contented lives.

CONCLUSION Pynchon’s physical world continues to be ontologically unstable in recognizably postmodern fashions: an old head wound lets Foley Walker predict what horse will win a race (101–02); ingesting a hallucinogenic mixture of cyclopropane plus dynamite permits precognition of dynamite explosions (184); airships can sail under sand (434); an ocean liner splits into two ships, one military, one passenger (515–16); photographs of a corpse can be run back in time to show who killed it, or a portrait can be run forward to show what an old friend is doing now (1048–49). Since such a fictional world lacks any stable reality, readers tend to assume such a world to be empty of spiritual content, if only because such a fantastic realm resists granting any special truth to dogma.29 Pynchon avoids a clash between this world and traditional Christian claims to theological truth by presenting spirituality in a postsecularist, undogmatic form. The text alludes to doctrines but does not insist upon them. This spirituality lets Pynchon mesh his postmodern worlds with religion and even with Catholicism, not in ways that the pope would approve, but in ways upheld by postsecularist Catholic theorists. He also draws religion into his world as grounds for political action. The secular underpinnings of much postmodern criticism seem to have blinded us to the ease with which a nonrealistic world accommodates religious concepts of reality. If we waive our resistance to Chiapas Indian telepathy (992–93) or photographs run backward or forward in time, then why not do the same for miracles and divine splendor?30 Indeed, some of Pynchon’s postmodern departures from standard reality are so strange that hearing a voice that may be God’s or experiencing a blast of divine light seems familiar and less disturbing by comparison. Although Pynchon does not trumpet forth religious doctrines, enough seem present to suggest a Catholic-influenced vision. Characters speak of penance as a general necessity, though they do not discuss it as a sacra-

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ment. Hence, we may interpret it in Catholic terms, or in more general spiritual terms. Pynchon hints at marriage’s being a sacrament not to be laid aside but does not spell this out as a coherent ideal; we see it implied when Kit starts obsessively thinking of and seeking Dally after his mystic vision. The airship flies toward grace, but what grace consists of is unspecified. We have the choice: to acknowledge the terms’ religious meanings, or treat them as signs of nonspecific spirituality. Cumulatively, though, such terms suggest a Christian view and, when read in combination with invocations of Stations of the Cross, pilgrimage, a life of penance, lighting candles in thanksgiving, and cloistered withdrawal, a Catholic-inflected vision, although one can indeed find such practices separately elsewhere in the larger Christian world. To this religious vision, Pynchon has joined a Luddite, anarchist program to subvert the capitalist world. Enthusiasts for the ambiguities of postmodernism have had no trouble with Pynchon’s use of Buddhism. Those same postmodern values, however, make many academics hostile to Christianity in literary contexts. Pynchon, though, has always been concerned to resacralize and reenchant the modern world. Since history aligns Protestantism with the rationalizing processes of modernity and science, Pynchon’s turn to a Catholic perspective makes sense as a step in restoring the magic destroyed by the Enlightenment project.31 In conclusion, the argument that religion and politics are more overt in Against the Day can be clarified through reference to Gravity’s Rainbow. There, a minor character, Father Rapier (significantly, a Jesuit), actually argues in favor of murdering Them (the Elect, plutocratic owners of technologies and industries): “Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good.” Father Rapier fears that They have gained immortality and urges that They be killed.32 This passage, however, is framed. We see it only fleetingly, as if through a peephole. The priest’s call for violent action against the powerful is the sermonizing of an apparent crank; after all, even half a century since World War II, plutocrats still die. Pirate Prentice overhears an extended fragment of this sermon while passing through a nightmarish exhibition with booths and galleries and fantastic pastry carts. Given the distractions and anxieties of the situation, Pirate hardly remembers what he overheard, and readers likewise may not give it full attention. While many commentators have cited the line that freedom is over for good, my impression is that fewer have cited the passage about why the immortal few need to be killed. The fantasy of immortality renders it less urgent to readers than the warning about freedom. Pynchon does not generalize Father Rapier’s view or multiply it often enough throughout the novel to affect the overall tonality of Gravity’s Rainbow. Offering a major statement as a half-heard spiel in

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a grotesque carnival does not showcase it as the philosophy either of the author or of the whole novel. Against the Day, in contrast, does not veil the religion or frame the politics so that they are only glimpsed and forgotten. Moreover, much the same philosophy emerges from many of the characters, and this impresses the vision of anticapitalist violence joined with Christian beliefs on the whole novel. Looking back over the earlier novels, I now notice numerous Catholic references that once failed to hold my attention, and I suspect that Against the Day will affect future readings of earlier works. Religious and Luddite messages do appear in earlier novels, but they seem fugitive and veiled compared to their treatment in Against the Day, or they occupy delimited places and times, such as Puritan Massachusetts. This new urgency and clarity, with their implied applicability to any period, make Against the Day politically and artistically revolutionary for Pynchon.33

NOTES A version of this article appeared as “The Religious and Political Vision of Pynchon’s Against the Day,” Philological Quarterly 86, no. 1–2 (Winter 2007): 163–87. 1. Disentangling and articulating the Luddite elements of Pynchon’s vision in Mason & Dixon have demanded detailed observation and careful readings, possibly because the extremism of Luddite views does not appeal to most contemporary readers. David Cowart presents the argument for Luddite politics in “The Luddite Vision.” He ends by claiming that Pynchon is not a “perfect Luddite” but rather an “apologist for balance” (361). The anti-Enlightenment elements are presented by Victor Strandberg in “Dimming the Enlightenment.” 2. Scarsdale Vibe is not the demonic head of dark conspiracies; he is merely ruthless, and when he is shot, he dies. 3. Critics have noted in previous novels Pynchon’s apparent sense that the Counterforce “[does not] have the wherewithal to make available solutions work.” That summation is Peter Cooper’s in Signs and Symptoms (105). The failures of the opposition are elaborated upon for Vineland by M. Keith Booker and for Mason & Dixon by Brian Thill; see Booker’s “America and Its Discontents” and Thill’s “Sweetness of Immorality.” Harold Bloom analyzes Counterforce frustration as a kind of romantic agony in his “Introduction” to Thomas Pynchon (1–9). 4. Pynchon despairingly describes world leaders as “the succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945”; see Pynchon’s introduction to Slow Learner, xxix. 5. The only publicly available information on Pynchon’s religious convictions is in Jules Siegel’s “Who Is Thomas Pynchon?” Although the objectivity of the article may be doubtful, we have no further evidence on which to question the statement that as an undergraduate, Pynchon was a Mass-attending Catholic.

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Of course, Pynchon’s extensive knowledge of Buddhism, the Kabbalah, and colonial Protestantism undermines any easy assumption of continued Catholicism, whether traditional, postmodern, or noninstitutional. For an early study of Pynchon’s religious imagery (basically in V., and very scantily for Gravity’s Rainbow), see Victoria H. Price’s Christian Allusions. James Nohrnberg deals with a religious dimension of The Crying of Lot 49 in “Pynchon’s Paraclete,” and Edward Mendelson writes of “The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49.” See as well Catharine R. Stimpson’s “Pre-Apocalyptic Atavism” and W. T. Lhamon Jr.’s “Pentecost.” Dwight Eddins casts Pynchon’s religious interests in terms of gnosticism, Earth religion, and Orphic naturalism in The Gnostic Pynchon, passim. Pynchon’s use of Buddhist and other Eastern spiritualities is discussed by Joseph Dewey, “The Sound of One Man Mapping”; see also Kathryn Hume, “Books of the Dead.” 6. Pynchon’s famous discussion of the Luddite philosophy appeared in “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” 7. Samuel Thomas’s Pynchon and the Political was unable to discuss Against the Day in full, but his page on it at the very end does comment on “an ever-deepening understanding of the real ‘price’ of capitalism, an ever-more unflinching and sophisticated engagement with violence, with legitimacy, and with the reformulation of the public sphere” (156). David Thoreen identifies some of the nexus of religion and politics in his “‘Acts Have Consequences.’” Thoreen responds seriously to the violence of the anti-Reagan sentiments of Vineland in “The Fourth Amendment.” Another critic to note Pynchon’s increasingly engaged, active politics is Christy L. Burns, “Postmodern Historiography.” Against all of these claims for a Pynchonian stand, one might put Thomas Schaub’s argument for the essential ambiguity of Pynchon’s writing; see “Open Letter.” Although this was a necessary argument for the period, our definitions of postmodernism’s limits have changed in the intervening decades, and such ambiguity need not characterize every issue for Pynchon still to be seen as postmodern. 8. Pynchon, V., 406. 9. The reviewer Steven Moore (“The Marxist Brothers,” 10) notes, “A good warm-up exercise for reading this is the ‘Robber Barons and Rebels’ chapter of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States; Pynchon shares Zinn’s populist viewpoint.” 10. For a lucid analysis of postsecularism in contemporary fiction, see John A. McClure’s Partial Faiths. Drawing on Gianni Vattimo, McClure sums up postsecular religion, including postsecular Catholicism, as avoiding “absolute assertions and totalizing schemes” (that is, truth claims for doctrine) while stressing human finitude and fallibility and emphasizing the practice of charity over assertions about an afterlife (12–13). For Vattimo, see n. 29. 11. For interconnections among light, physical space, and mapping in this novel and Mason & Dixon, see Fabienne Collignon, “A Glimpse of Light,” esp. 553. 12. Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49, 16. 13. Kit’s thoughts about the strange landscape make this a very Tibetan Buddhist passage, similar to comments in Ian Baker’s The Heart of the World. This extended mystic experience, however, ends with Kit’s seeing himself as having taken “a step toward salvation” (778), not enlightenment.

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14. Oddly, Lake Traverse, Webb’s daughter who married one of his killers, also dreams of a city that is somehow linked to her marriage (1056). 15. So too does the dream of Yashmeen. She ascends, as she says, “to a great skyborne town and a small band of serious young people, dedicated to resisting death and tyranny, whom I understood at once to be the Compassionate” (749). The letter that includes this vision, however, is couched in mixed Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist terms (750). 16. Tertullian’s actual phrase is certum est, quia impossibile est (It is certain because it is impossible). Pynchon, though, echoes the popular misquotation. 17. For cities in Gravity’s Rainbow, see Hume, “Views from Above.” Pynchon’s softening toward this aerial city seems illogical if one applies the values of Gravity’s Rainbow, given that the vulnerability of anything airborne demands a strong command. Evidently salvation reached through community is more important to Pynchon in this novel than freedom from hierarchy and from the inevitable compromises demanded by organization. 18. Walker has also heard voices telling him what stocks to buy and the outcomes of sporting events, not usually the concern of a deity. These voices, though, are plural; they do not deal with morality in the fashion of the one voice. Pynchon thus does not narrow voices to one phenomenon any more than he narrowed light to a single kind. 19. Brian McHale points out that in Mason & Dixon, transcendence becomes horizontal, the push toward the West and to the subjunctivity of wishes and desire. See “Mason & Dixon.” 20. While Pynchon clearly prefers low-tech lives and thinks sacred geography more likely to exist where people live lightly on the Earth than in a Western city, he shows his characters’ becoming aware of transcendent reality through any means, including such technologies as photography and airships. 21. See the “Introduction” by His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso, in Baker, Heart of the World, 1–2. 22. McClure explains these terms in Partial Faiths, 192. Postsecular faith involves “open dwelling,” something anchored in the community and lived, not something absent that is sought with ascetic practices and self-denials. One is not, however, bound by vows of stability never to leave a closed community. 23. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 737. Pynchon’s positive handling of Cyprian and of the triangle suggests that he is trying to work free of the prejudices against deviant sexualities seen in Gravity’s Rainbow. That this is a conscious, ongoing attempt by Pynchon is argued by Julie Christine Sears, who shows Pynchon’s first steps in that direction in Mason & Dixon. See her “Black and White Rainbows.” Cyprian’s role as a spy reflects Pynchon’s love of cold war spy fiction; see Kyle Smith, “‘Serving Interests Invisible.’” 24. Apart from his scenes while alive, Webb enjoys several memorable postmortem appearances. Reef must travel with the body slung over a horse, and each night, he reads aloud to it (reminiscent of ritual use of the Tibetan Book of the Dead) and talks to the corpse (214); Webb returns through a spiritualist séance, channeled through Reef and witnessed by Kit, and admits that he wasted his politically and morally precious anger yelling at the wrong people (his family) (672–73); Kit then sees him in dreams (673–74, 887). In all of these appearances

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and others, Webb is the man he was, hectoring his sons for not contributing to the anarchist program, not distorted by dream nonsense. 25. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 553. 26. The practices listed can be found in Christianities other than Catholic; since acknowledgment of the pope is not at issue, they could be identified as High Church Anglican, and some Lutherans observe the Stations of the Cross. Nonetheless, the totality of these practices and beliefs is most readily found in Catholicism. 27. William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night, xiv–xv. 28. See Bruce Chatwin’s “The Nomadic Alternative” and “It’s a Nomad Nomad World” in Anatomy of Restlessness, 85–99, 100–06. Note, for instance, “The goldenbrown babies of the Kalahari Bushmen hunters never cry and are among the most contented babies in the world” (102). 29. Postmodern theology avoids making such truth claims and downplays strong doctrinal assertions. See Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo in Santiago Zabala, The Future of Religion, passim. 30. An exception to this critical blindness is McClure, who describes the program of postmodernism not just as ontological destabilization but specifically as juxtaposition of worlds (which does destabilize our sense of what is real). McHale certainly talked about juxtaposition (see Postmodernist Fiction), but McClure’s narrowed definition permits him to recognize a strain of postmodern fiction for which one of those worlds is spiritual. What makes the novels McClure discusses religiously postmodern is the refusal to make absolute demands for doctrinal belief and the emphasis on charity and local community. McClure’s book quotes Alasdair MacIntyre on the development of local religious communities toward the end of the Roman Empire and the new postsecular attitude that the larger political world may be unsalvageable, but local community may provide a way of living morally (21). Some of McClure’s arguments are advanced in his article “Postmodern/Post-Secular,” esp. 149–50. 31. For a discussion of what magic can mean in modern activities and worldview, see Randall Styers, Making Magic. One could argue that the Jesuits in Mason & Dixon are somewhat scientifically inclined, but they are also presented rather unsympathetically, whereas the Jesuit Father Rapier, in Gravity’s Rainbow, gets some of the best (and most Luddite) lines of the novel. 32. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 539–40. 33. I am deeply grateful to David Cowart, Jeffrey Gonzalez, Philip Jenkins, John McClure, Brian McHale, Sean Moiles, and John Whalen-Bridge for arguments, for disagreements, and for very helpful suggestions.

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S Daydreams and Dynamite: Anarchist Strategies of Resistance and Paths for Transformation in Against the Day Graham Benton

A

narchism—as a political philosophy, as a theory of history, and as a program for social change—has always been an important subject in Pynchon’s work. I have argued elsewhere that his texts are informed by an anarchist perspective that interrogates order-making impulses on multiple discursive fronts: not only does Pynchon create specific anarchist and cryptoanarchist characters and agencies, but he also treats with suspicion many state-sponsored institutions that serve to maintain and regulate social order.1 Additionally, this antiauthoritarian stance is reproduced on a structural level: Pynchon’s formal techniques—which favor heterogeneity over uniformity, spontaneity over conformity, and fragmentation over consolidation—align with an anarchist aesthetic that reflects a sustained skepticism toward all typologies and classification of genre. Yet while Pynchon frequently invokes a concept of anarchism as a powerful mechanism for social engineering, as a utopic horizon, and as a valued political philosophy, he is also wary of fully endorsing an anarchist position because he recognizes such a position to be open to any number of violent corruptions and betrayals. Pynchon explores the possibilities that a progressive anarchist stand may proffer but also makes a serious contribution to anarchist discourse by amplifying and probing the flaws inherent in anarchist theory. Let me briefly review anarchism in

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his previous novels before turning to my main subject: the idea’s difficult and prominent reemergence in Against the Day. Evidence of Pynchon’s interest in anarchist theory and practice can be traced to his first novel, V. This text, with its attention to nation-building and nation-destroying enterprises, its representation of street riots in Florence, and its narrative prolepses documenting the genocidal campaign against the Herero in Southwest Africa, stages several variations on the dialectic of creation and destruction that informs a great deal of anarchist thought. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon probes many ideas and ideals of anarchism as they were resurrected in the American New Left and countercultures of the 1960s, and he channels the confusion and paranoia of the age through Oedipa Maas, a Republican housewife whose life is fundamentally changed by the possible existence of a potentially malevolent, potentially emancipatory agency called the Tristero, which operates outside statist communication systems. If The Crying of Lot 49 can be characterized as a novel that records the changes in attitudes, beliefs, and positions of an American (counter) culture and represents the kind of social and psychic experimentations that were beginning to take shape at the time of that text’s production, Gravity’s Rainbow tracks the development of these explorations even as their location is displaced temporally and geographically. An analysis of anarchism as a textualized subject within Gravity’s Rainbow would necessarily engage with several significant characters and episodes: the Argentinean anarchist Squalidozzi and his hopes and fears surrounding the transitory utopic potential of an anarchist zone in immediate post–World War II Europe, Miklos Thanatz’s status as a leading theoretician of “sadoanarchism” (a psychosexual philosophy of domination and control), and the Afro-German Schwarzkommando as a sort of suicidal anarchist war machine. Furthermore, other narrative strands intimate an affiliation with anarchist activity: the Counterforce can be read as an (ineffectual) anarchist enterprise attempting to subvert The System through profane gestures, and Leni Pökler’s Weimar era Berlin’s “Revolution-in-exile-inresidence” is suggestive of a certain type of anarchist cell.2 In Pynchon’s next novel, Vineland, the author returns again to the 1960s, but from the perspective of the 1980s, allowing him to track the trajectory of anarchist and cryptoanarchist activity in the United States by evaluating the successes and failures of the American counterculture. A crucial component of the novel is a recognition of the ebb and flow of anarchist energy through history: this is made explicit in Pynchon’s representations of political and familial genealogies connecting 1930s Wobblies to 1960s radicals and both eras’ residual presence in the 1980s, even as the apparatuses of control have evolved to combat and co-opt transgressive behavior and politics.

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In Mason & Dixon, his fifth novel, Pynchon’s historical gaze extends backward to the creation of the American republic. Here, Pynchon remains committed to many of the social and political concerns that mark his previous novels—the gridding of natural space, potentially devastating technological advances, the intrusion of government and industry into public and private spheres—but a treatment of anarchism itself is conspicuously absent. In a review of Mason & Dixon, Peter Keogh identified an elegiac tone in the work when he remarked, “The wunderkind of 60s fiction is nearing retirement age, and he can be expected to be more reflective than revolutionary.”3 In 2006, however, Against the Day was published, and it soon became very apparent that Pynchon was not going gentle into that good night, that there is still some rage against the dying of the light (or, given the title, at least some rage against the day that brings the light). The novel treats anarchy and anarchists hundreds of times. We are witness to anarchist bombers, anarchist hunters, and anarchist preachers who frequent anarchist saloons, anarchist coffeehouses, and anarchist spas. We have an anarchist heaven, anarchist golf, and an anarchist shithouse. There are anarchist scum, anarchist angels, and anarchist chickadees. Anarchists are from Colorado and St. Petersburg, Mexico and Venice, London and Montana, and, to crib from Pynchon’s dust jacket, “one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.” The first instance occurs just four pages in, as a young aeronaut on the Inconvenience appraises the cabin dog’s reading material, Henry James’s Princess Casamassima, whose subject “is the inexorably rising tide of World Anarchism, to be found peculiarly rampant, in fact, at our current destination—a sinister affliction to which I pray we shall suffer no occasion for exposure more immediate than that to be experienced, as with Pugnax at this moment, safely within the leaves of some book” (6). Not only is “World Anarchism” privileged by capitalization as a proper noun, but it is a “sinister affliction” the boys hope to experience safely from the confines of fiction, which metaleptically stands in for the Pynchon novel of World Anarchism we have just opened. From its appearance just a few pages in and up through to the conclusion nearly eleven hundred pages later, the sheer weight of the references to anarchism raises many questions. Why such a direct confrontation with anarchism in this text? Why now? What has changed since the author’s previous, less conspicuous treatment of the subject? And, of course, what does it all mean? Shortly before his execution in 1894, the French radical Emile Henry (who is referred to in Against the Day by the preacher Moss Gatlin) characterized anarchism as that which “represents the egalitarian and libertarian aspirations that strike out against authority; it is everywhere, which makes it invisible.”4 If anarchism is “everywhere” and

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therefore “invisible,” then the work done by scholars of Pynchon’s anarchism in the first five novels was to make that anarchism visible—to draw it into the light. In Against the Day, this dimension has been exploded, and it produces concussions through the text as pervasive and as deeply felt as any of those from Webb Traverse’s sticks of dynamite. The question then becomes, What are we to make of this visibility? Given the novel’s tropes of darkness and light, by illuminating anarchism so dramatically, is Pynchon advocating a more wholesale adoption of anarchism as a political and social practice? Perhaps. Yet there are concerns as well: by making anarchism such an obvious (or “governing” or “dominant”) presence in the text, what might be lost in terms of the complex and slippery dialectical treatment of anarchism present in the earlier novels? And how does one read a novel, in our post-9/11 moment, that is sympathetic to a certain kind of terrorist? This essay situates Against the Day’s treatment of anarchism in relationship to these earlier texts, asking how his vision has changed, what has been maintained, what has been gained, and what might have been lost. This is not an exhaustive analysis of Against the Day’s anarchism; in fact, my own experience in analyzing this novel approximates the exasperation encountered by Gravity’s Rainbow’s Brigadier Pudding as he tries to write his monumental Things That Can Happen in European Politics: “‘Never make it,’ he found himself muttering at the beginning of each day’s work—‘it’s changing out from under me. Oh dodgy—very dodgy.’”5 Certain prominent anarchist narrative strands and allusions to historical anarchist events in the text—including the Balkan Wars, the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Haymarket Affair, and the growth and consolidation of a European anarchist community—are noticeably absent in my analysis. Likewise, a more fully developed exposition of the thorny and internally conflicted political philosophy of anarchism itself, which would serve to illumine Pynchon’s sophisticated play with the subject, is given short shrift.6 It is my hope, however, that readers will discover in other contributions to this volume complementary and contrary perspectives on different aspects of the anarchist presence in Against the Day.7 I first give a very brief overview of some of the salient features of the political and cultural philosophy of anarchism (including some observations on the binary of chaos and order that drives much anarchist theory), followed by some comments on the heterogeneous stylistics of the text as these emphatically advance what may be called an anarchist aesthetic. I examine Pynchon’s incorporation of both American and European anarchist traditions as they are folded together in Against the Day, specifically their fusion in his challenging vision of freedom and resistance. This vision hinges—more so than in any other Pynchon novel, I would

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argue—on categories of “the innocent” and “the family.” Finally, given the twin gears of globalization and terrorism that drive much of our sense of the contemporary world, I situate the novel as very much a product of its time. While “anarchism” as an object of inquiry proves stubbornly resistant to definitional impositions, a few principles are generally agreed upon, and it is useful to acknowledge these precepts briefly, if only to recognize that their inherent contradictions enrich an understanding of the anarchist dimension of Against the Day. First, anarchism has a rich historical tradition as a recurring political stance that critiques existing societies and their institutions.8 Even as anarchists proclaim their desire to liberate themselves and society from the dead hand of tradition, they like to believe that their roots run deep into the past. Second, anarchism encompasses a multitude of belief systems that have at their core a desire for the eradication of hierarchical, centralized systems of authority. Third, anarchist platforms suggest strategies for change involving the implementation of nonauthoritarian and decentralist alternatives, though the ways and means of achieving these changes vary radically from faction to faction. There is a utopian dimension in all anarchist prognostications, but the differences between a fiercely individualist anarchist utopia that envisions the ego unfettered from social captivity and an anarchist utopia based on volunteerism and cooperatism nearly outstrip any similarities they may share.9 Many seemingly discrete ideological positions that fall under the rubric of anarchism—from Left to Right libertarianism, from anarchosyndicalism to organic communalism—are embraced in Pynchon’s works and function in some way or another in the heady and intertwined plotlines that span his novels up through Against the Day. One of the more prevalent (and naïve) perceptions of anarchism is that it is a practice merely bent on destruction and violence—and it is often equated simply with disorder. A danger arises, however, in conflating anarchism with nihilism, or in reducing anarchism to a program of destruction and terror, for the celebration of chaos and disorder in certain anarchist discourses is offset and challenged by other anarchist stances that posit some orders as desirable and beneficial. Many late nineteenthand early twentieth-century anarchists understood that specific social and material orders are necessary and inevitable, and these orders are usually characterized as natural, harmonious, voluntary, or spontaneous to distinguish them from state-sponsored orders, which are condemned as unnatural, coercive, inequitable, or artificial. In George Woodcock’s lucid formulation, “the objection which anarchists have always sustained to fixed and authoritarian forms of organization does not mean that they deny organization as such.”10 Rather, continues Woodcock, “Man . . . was naturally social. And his natural form of social organization was that

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based on voluntary co-operation. Since it precluded the need for government, such organization would result in the fulfillment of the apparent paradox of order in anarchy. Organization that depends on coercion for its existence, on the other hand, is a perversion of natural order, and far from producing social peace, it ends always in strife and violence.”11 Thus, “far from advocating the breakdown of society at the same time as they seek the destruction of authority, the anarchists are in fact hoping to strengthen social bonds and social virtues by reinforcing community relationships at the most basic grassroots level.”12 Pynchon repeatedly imagines social orders that may appear in the absence of regulating structures, and such communities arise when government controls disappear (as is the case in the Zone of Gravity’s Rainbow), or when communities operate under the radar of “official” orders (the hippie communes of Vineland), or as non-European, “primitive” societies (the Herero tribes of Southwest Africa in Gravity’s Rainbow, the Yurok tribes of the Pacific Northwest in Vineland, and the indigenous peoples of Mason & Dixon). In Against the Day, anarchic communities crop up in the mountains of Colorado, Spain, and Macedonia; in the saloons of the western United States and the salons of Western Europe; in zeppelins above the Earth; in the “outlaw-friendly ship[s]” on the sea-lanes of the Atlantic; and, as one anarchist dreams, in a place all the Anarchists could escape to, “a place readily found even on cheap maps of the World, [. . .] a place promised them not by God, which’d be asking too much of the average Anarchist, but by certain hidden geometries of History, which must include, somewhere at least at a single point, a safe conjugate to all the spill of accursed meridians, passing daily, desolate, one upon the next” (372–73).13 Since the beginning of his career, Pynchon has also been fascinated by moments of spontaneously generated order in what outwardly appear to be very chaotic demonstrations, and this phenomenon is often explicitly identified with anarchism. In “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” his article for the New York Times Magazine in 1966, Pynchon notes of the rioting in the streets of Los Angeles that some “remember it in terms of music; through much of the rioting seemed to run, they say, a remarkable empathy, or whatever it is that jazz musicians feel on certain nights; everybody knowing what to do and when to do it without needing a word or signal.”14 This intuitive musical chaos is staged in Lot 49 in the description of the deaf-mute ballroom dance witnessed by Oedipa on her journey: “Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow’s head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined. [. . .] Jesus Arrabal would have called

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it an anarchist miracle.”15 As the essay by Krzysztof Piekarski, Martin Kevorkian, and Elisabeth McKetta in this volume makes clear, in Against the Day Pynchon returns to music—specifically jazz (or “Jass” (370))—as an aesthetic manifestation of ordered chaos that is in turn associated with anarchist theory. They also rightly see Pynchon’s description of the golf course at Yz-les-Bains as a variation on this theme insofar as the sport at the retreat is played without specific rules and with “no fixed sequence— in fact no fixed number—of holes, with distances flexible as well, some holes being only putter-distance apart, others uncounted hundreds of yards and requiring a map and compass to locate” (934).16 The irony of anarchists’ playing golf at a spa in war-torn Europe should not be lost on readers of a novel saturated with the ruthlessness of the leisure class. This is, perhaps, yet another example of Pynchon’s deliberate disruption of “order”: given the history of anarchist energy rising from the peasantry and lumpenproletariat, such a scene as that at Yz-les-Bains destabilizes conventional sensibilities of class immobility. The dialectic of chaos and order takes on another dimension when looking at the novel’s initial critical reception. As with Pynchon’s previous novels, early negative reviews referenced the text’s length, digressions into fantasy, lack of seriousness, and confusing plot, and the frustration is nearly palpable. In the aggregate reviews collected on the Against the Day Wiki and the Modern Word site, the novel is called “brilliant but uneven” (Boise Weekly); “a messy omnium gatherum” (Houston Chronicle); “a raggedy, meandering novel” (The Scotsman (UK)); “rambling, shambling, . . . seriously scattered” (Philadelphia Inquirer); and “startlingly discontinuous . . . a chaotic whole” (The Independent (UK)). In a wryly ironic comment, Tom LeClair writes, “I hope some future scholar will read the novel twenty times and either illustrate how it recapitulates the whole history of narrative or demonstrate how every piece fits together into a fourfold design that will replace four-base genetics as a model of all life” (Bookforum).17 The problem, it appears, is the text’s messiness, unruliness, excess, lack of order, and irrationality—all attacks that at different times have been levied against the political philosophy of anarchism. Others, more sympathetic, have noted Against the Day’s heterogeneous composition, which integrates disparate formal and stylistic elements. John Clute, for example, identifies several pre–World War I popular genres: “the western, boys’ adventure fiction, the Dime Novel in general, . . . the future war novel, the Lost Race novel, the Shangri-La thriller, the Vernean Extraordinary Journey, the Wellsian scientific romance, the European spy thriller à la E. Phillips Oppenheim, the World Island spy thriller à la John Buchan, [and] the mildly sadomasochistic soft porn tale as published by the likes of Charles Carrington in Paris around the turn of the century.”18 Such an assessment resonates with the claims of

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Lance Olsen regarding Gravity’s Rainbow: “Pynchon continually frustrates reader-expectation by jamming one lexical field against another” and triggering “verbal anarchy.”19 Pynchon clearly impedes readers’ desires to place his text in preexisting critical catalogs, and Against the Day’s refusal to be identified by (and thus limited to) the conventions governing formal and stylistic demarcations reflects a broader political concern with the way critics organize texts according to literary principles, especially for a novelist who writes historical fiction. While it is a tenet of postmodern and poststructuralist thought that any representation of history is a human construct imbricated in struggles of power and authority and thus distanced from universal truth claims, fantasy and other nonrealist modes still act as forms of resistance to historical accounts that favor realism for the depiction of past events. I read the tension that is generated in Against the Day on the level of genre as a textual embodiment of the tension on the level of historical representation. That is, the resistance of realism by fantasy is reproduced as a resistance of the forces of rationalization and totalizing empirical systems. In one sense it is difficult to take “seriously” a compelling, meticulously researched narrative of the very real hardships endured by miners and the devastation wrought worldwide by warfare when this same narrative records—on the same ontological plane—ships that sail under deserts, talking balls of lightning, and the existence of giant, toothy mountain snakes that retard the progress of the trans-European rail system (to cite just three examples). The anarchic play, the zest for the fantastic that has irritated more than a few critics, and the perceived need it drives in others to parse “the real” from the imagined can be analyzed in a different register—the heterogeneous poetic components of the novel actually encode the “problem of history” by underscoring the cognitive apparatuses that legitimize one historical account over another.20 Specific characters in this historical novel self-consciously reflect upon the history of anarchism itself. For the plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe, the “sulking Anarchists,” like Trotsky’s Menshevik opponents, will soon be relegated to the dustbin of history. After some time, he muses, no one will “remember the jabbering Union scum, the frozen corpses whose names, false in any case, have gone forever unrecorded” (1001). Colorado will become the playground of the wealthy seeking winter leisure, and “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” (1001). Conversely, the anarchists Reef Traverse meets while tunneling in Europe “had their own mixed feelings about history. They suffered from it, and it was also to be their liberator, if they could somehow survive to see the day” (654). This sentiment echoes that

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of the nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who, tracing a line of historical materialist thought from Hegel through Marx, writes: “History is the gradual unfoldment of Humanity,” and consequently “history itself set us this vast and sacred task of transforming the millions of wageslaves into a human, free society based on equal rights for all.”21 If Pynchon’s first five novels draw on two distinct anarchist histories— first, a nineteenth-century European tradition most closely associated with Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon, and second, a 1960s American revival that would characterize that decade’s antiauthoritarian counterculture—Against the Day provides part of the historical bridge between the two by drawing attention to the pollination of European anarchist thought on American shores. First, from a certain perspective, the anarchist menace is affiliated with the immigrant (and the exiled and the displaced) and thus in turn folded into the tropes of contamination and xenophobia that underscore a great deal of reactionary American rhetoric concerning immigration.22 When Lew Basnight gets the deliciously ironic job of protecting the Archduke Ferdinand against agitators in Chicago, it is the “damned anarchistic foreign-born south of Forty-Seventh Street” (46) that pose the problem. Scarsdale Vibe, too, identifies the threat of immigrants: “These communards,” he says, “speak a garble of foreign tongues, their armies are the damnable labor syndicates, their artillery is dynamite, they assassinate our great men and bomb our cities, and their aim is to despoil us of our hard-won goods, to divide and sub-divide among their hordes our lands and our houses, to pull us down, our lives, all we love, until they become as demeaned and soiled as their own” (333). Lest Vibe’s language appear exaggerated in order to accentuate hostility between the plutocrats and the immigrant anarchists, consider this denunciation of the German-born anarchist Johann Most by prosecutors at his trial in New York in 1886: “Just as the turkey buzzard spews his vomit on fair fields so Europe spewed Johann Most upon these shores, and just as the vomit of the turkey buzzard festers and corrupts whatever it touches so Johann Most defiles his associates.”23 Among those degenerate anarchist immigrants who would be cursed by Vibe are Veikko Rautavaara, Finnish exile, hater of Russian aristocracy, and dynamiting partner of Webb Traverse; Wolfe-Tone O’Rooney, Irish professional insurrectionist; Flaco, a Spanish veteran of Cataluna; and indirectly, one would assume, Leon Czolgosz, the Polish anarchist who assassinated the president of the United States in 1901, leading to the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903. Second, the threat of the anarchist immigrant would not carry much weight if it were not for Bakunin’s most infamous contribution to anarchism, his classic formulation of propaganda by deed. While his debt to Hegel is evident in his claim that “history appears to us as the revolutionary

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negation of the past,” the negative dialectic is rewritten as a zealous challenge to insurrection that became a rallying cry for anarchists and agitators across Europe: “There can be no revolution without a sweeping and passionate destruction,” he writes, “since by means of such destruction new worlds are born and come into existence” (Bakunin 381). (Roughly forty years later, Johann Most would come close to plagiarism when he wrote, “Let us rely upon the unquenchable spirit of destruction and annihilation which is the perpetual spring of new life.”)24 This dialectic of creation and destruction figures prominently in Against the Day, and no more so than with Webb Traverse’s exploits in the Colorado Rockies. On July 4, 1899, Webb figures it is “a perfect day all around for some of that good Propaganda of the Deed stuff, which would just blend right in with all the other percussion” (81). This extended episode, with its densely laden ironies, its meditation on the differences between the American and Russian revolutions, its condemnation of corporate greed, its references to the events at Cripple Creek, its fusion of religious rhetoric with a call for radical social justice, and its discourse on the meaning of “union,” is one of the text’s most powerful, most transparent expressions of the value of anarchism. Webb’s motivation—to disrupt the celebration of a nation created by ousting a colonizer—can be read as a perverted expression of patriotism against a tyrannical system. And if Francis Scott Key could once ask whether we can see, in the dawn’s early light through the bombs bursting in air, then Webb’s blast against the day both complements and undermines the traditional holiday fireworks. Later that night from their vantage point above it all, the Chums of Chance reflect on the scene: “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. (111)

Reflecting the anarchist alterations to the social and physical terrain below, this exchange signals a political metamorphosis taking place on the Inconvenience: from an initial desire to shield itself from possible anarchist contagion, as indicated by the censure of Pugnax’s reading material, to an implicit identification with anarchosyndicalism, to its ultimate manifestation as a kind of floating anarchist near-utopia.

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Dynamite, we are told, is both “the miner’s curse, the outward and audible sign of his enslavement to mineral extraction, and the American working man’s equalizer, his agent of deliverance, if he would only dare to use it” (87). The dual nature of dynamite positions it as a powerful symbol of both tyranny and resistance. This material enslaves the worker and despoils the land, but it is used to destroy the mines as well. It is used to create tunnels across the mountains of Europe, both fostering Europeanization and facilitating warfare. It is stolen by anarchists, and it is stolen by mine-owner affiliates to keep it out of the hands of anarchists. It is used by anarchists to kill people. It is used by Pinkertons to kill people and blame it on the anarchists. One function of dynamite, then, is as a mechanism of sabotage for the anarchist miner, and the representations of workplace sabotage in this novel prefigure later characteristics and actions of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the labor organization founded in Chicago in 1905 and explored in Vineland. To identify Against the Day as a precursor to the representations of radicalism in Vineland opens up interpretive vistas of continuity and convergence, specifically in the adoption by the IWW of the tactics of direct action and propaganda by deed.25 “Sabotage,” began one editorial in the IWW journal, “is an awakening of labor. It is the spirit of revolt.”26 Big Bill Haywood, a founding member of the IWW, leader of the Western Federation of Miners, and veteran of the Colorado labor wars, declared that “sabotage means to push back, pull out, or break off the fangs of capitalism.”27 Webb’s destruction of mine equipment can thus be situated within the rich history of American radical activity, as a gesture not unfamiliar to the kind of sabotage later practiced by Wobblies in the Northwest woods. (Nor would it be unfamiliar to the monkey-wrenching exploits of Edward Abbey’s West Coast ecoanarchists of the 1960s, to the readers of the Anarchist Cookbook in the 1970s, nor, for that matter, to the violent street theater antics of the Starbucks-smashing Northwest anarchists of the World Trade Organization riots in the 1990s.) If workplace sabotage represents one point on a spectrum of radical possibility, there are, of course, more deadly uses of dynamite. Found guilty at trial for his part in the Haymarket Affair, Albert Parsons sang the praises of dynamite: “It is the equilibrium. It is the annihilator. It is the disseminator of power. It is the downfall of oppression. It is the abolition of authority; it is the dawn of peace; it is the end of war, because war cannot exist unless there is somebody to make war upon, and dynamite makes that unsafe, undesirable, and absolutely impossible.”28 An article in the Alarm, a Chicago anarchoperiodical of the 1880s, exults, “Dynamite! Of all the good stuff, this is the stuff. Stuff several pounds of this sublime stuff into an inch pipe of gas, or water pipe, plug up both ends, insert a

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cap with a fuse attached, place this in the immediate neighborhood of a lot of rich loafers who live by the sweat of other people’s brows, and light the fuse. A most satisfying result will follow.”29 Pynchon, however, has always been attuned to the dangers of violent fanaticism, and he often offers an alternate voice to those who kill indiscriminately as a means of advancing the revolution. Think of the Gaucho’s bloodlust on the streets of Florence, which is checked by Signor Mantissa’s more tempered and cynical thoughts on the use value of rioting; or Weed Atman’s admonishment in Vineland against “picking up the gun because,” he muses, “in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. This forces us to be humane—to attack what matters more than life to the regime and those it serves, their money and their property.”30 Weed’s recognition that money and property hold more value than human life in an oppressive regime and therefore constitute legitimate targets in overthrowing that regime embraces a distinctly anarchist tactic that understands the inherent power of destroying the material of the establishment. But for some anarchist thinkers and Pynchon characters, this does not go far enough. Against the Day gives rise to many ideas, which together provide an ethical tapestry concerning the practice of propaganda by deed. Attention to “the innocent,” those who “slaughter the innocent,” and the “slaughtered innocent” (all categories I have in quote marks because they are repeated several times in the text) foregrounds a philosophicomoral treatment of terrorism for the post-9/11 reader. One perspective—that of Gatlin Moss, the rambling anarchist preacher of western mining towns—posits a belief in the necessity of destroying those who prey on the innocent no matter the cost: “If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day, from those absolute terms” (87). Curiously deploying the economic rhetoric of the ledger and accountability to legitimize the destruction of plutocrats, the preacher’s insistence that one must “devote every breath of every day waking and sleeping” to this cause resonates with Bakunin’s call to arms: “Day and night [the revolutionary] must have one thought, one aim—inexorable destruction” (Bakunin 372). Gatlin’s particular brand of anarchism is conflated, however, with an overtly mysticoreligious faith in some kind of second coming, and the whole framework is then infused with dramatic elements of betrayal, persecution, apocalypse, and salvation. In this sense, Gatlin’s anarchistic inclinations correspond to James Joll’s characterization of anarchists as those who “believe in the possibility of a violent and sudden transformation of society” precisely because they also adhere to a heretical temperament “that can often be explained only in terms of the psychology of religious belief.”31

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For Gatlin, the false category “innocent bourgeoisie” corresponds to the concept of original sin: “Being born into this don’t automatically make you innocent” (87). To join the violent resistance movement, moreover, “would have been almost like being born again” (87). Salvation can occur only when one recognizes and acts upon the evil perpetrated on the working class. Writing about the millenarian heretical sects, Joll claims that when “certain kinds of people feel a recurrent need to react violently against the existing order, to question the right of the existing authorities to rule, and to assert instead that all authority is unnecessary and evil,” this revolt is “accompanied, according to the temperament concerned, either by a belief in the healing properties of violent destruction, the importance of revolution as an end in itself, or . . . by a boundlessly optimistic belief in the possibilities of an immediate and radical change for the better, the building of a completely new social order on the ruins of the old.”32 Although this position is held in check by other narrative strands rejecting violence as a means of insurrection (to be discussed shortly), the degree to which Pynchon entertains this romanticization of terrorism must be acknowledged. The intersection of radical political fervor and religious zealotry is, of course, a dominant concern in our present historical moment, and Kathryn Hume has identified in Against the Day a critical turn in Pynchon’s writing: he is “more aggressive here than in earlier novels if only out of despair over lack of effective peaceful alternatives. . . . Pynchon’s support—at least within the novel—for violence has been ignored . . . probably because the reviewers do not wish to contemplate either a serious call to violence or a life of penance.”33 While I do not believe (as later parts of this essay should make clear) that Pynchon is as clearly aligned with a call to violence as Hume suggests, I do see him pushing harder on the edges of one kind of anarchist agenda than in any other novel, if only to show more clearly what is at stake. Some time after Gatlin’s sermon to the miners, the debate over when to kill and whom to kill continues in an exchange between Webb and Lew Basnight in the Anarchist Saloon. When asked whether he ever regretted setting off dynamite in “a purposeful way,” Webb replies: “only if there was innocent lives caught into it. But none ever was, not by me” (181). Earlier in the narrative, though, Webb is not so sure, because the tricky part of bombing lies in choosing the targets: “Lord knew that owners and mine managers deserved to get blown up,” but to attack the factories and mines—which deploy three working shifts—would result in other miners dying, “including children working as nippers and swampers—the same folks who die when the army comes charging in. Not that any owner ever cared rat shit about the lives of workers, of course, except to define them as Innocent Victims in whose name uniformed goons could then go out and hunt down the Monsters That Did the Deed” (85).

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The anarchist need to parse the guilty from the innocent is reinscribed later by Ewball Oust, radical son of wealthy landowners, who tries to make a distinction: “There’s plenty of folks who deserve being blown up, to be sure,” he says, “but they’ve got to be gone after in a professional way, anything else is being just like them, slaughterin the innocent, when what we need is more slaughterin of the guilty” (922). If Ewball’s comments rehearse a familiar dilemma in any anarchist program—how to lash out at a corrupt system without capitulating to the very dehumanizing actions with which you have characterized your enemy—then the actual representation of such an attack throws this moral quandary into sharp relief. In Nice, Reef runs into his old comrade, Flaco, and they duck into a streetside cafe to reminisce. Flaco is initially resistant, as the cafe is “just the kind of bourgeois target anarchists love to bomb.” They go in anyway, “trusting in the law of probability,” and when the bomb goes off, the resulting carnage is rendered in one of those dramatic Pynchonian phrases that unfold in descriptive minutiae and lyric intensity: a dense, prolonged shower of glass fragments, green and clear and amber and black, from windows, mirrors and drinking glasses, carafes and bottles of absinthe, wine, fruit syrups, whiskey of many ages and origins, human blood everywhere, blood arterial, venous, and capillary, fragments of bone and cartilage and soft tissue, wood splinters of all sizes from the furniture, shrapnel of tin, zinc and brass, from torn ragged sheets down to the tiny nails in picture frames, nitrous fumes, fluid unfurlings of smoke too black to see through—a huge glittering passage skyward and back again, outward and across the street and down the block, passing through the rays of a completely indifferent noontide sun, like a long heliograph message sent too fast for any but angels of destruction to read. (850–51)

Clearly, the scene is one of complete devastation, a scenario perhaps envisioned by Bakunin when he wrote: “Revolutions are not child’s play, nor are they academic debates in which only vanities are hurt in furious clashes, nor literary jousts wherein only ink is spilled profusely. Revolutions mean war, and that implies the destruction of men and things” (Bakunin 372). The scene corresponds with more horrific precision to the words of Emile Henry, responsible for heaving a bomb into the Café Terminus in Paris in 1894: “I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that their pleasures would no longer be complete,” he writes, “that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would tremble violently on its pedestal, until the final shock would cast it down in mud and blood.”34 Yet, significantly, in the aftermath of the bombing, Reef and Flaco— committed anarchists themselves—help as best they can: they lift wreckage, staunch bleeding with tourniquets, wrap those in shock in blood-

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stained blankets, cover the dead and dying, and slip away when the police arrive. Reef undergoes, if not quite an epiphany, at least a deepened sense of the tragic destruction wrought by terrorism: “Leaving these so abruptly wounded bourgeoisie,” he thinks, “crying like children, children again, with no obligation but to look helpless and pitiable” (851). The use of the simile here—the bourgeoisie crying like children—is not meant to infantilize them, I believe, but to suggest their relative innocence. For someone like Gatlin Moss, or Emile Henry, or the anonymous author of the Alarm article quoted earlier, merely being bourgeois legitimizes your death sentence. Pynchon is much more attuned to the real human cost of such a stance. Clearly, Reef is troubled by what he witnesses, yet the anarchist doctrine of propaganda by deed involves a psychological need to divorce oneself from any emotional pull in contemplating the consequences. This is put most bluntly by Bakunin: “All tender, softening sentiments of kinship, love, gratitude, and even honour itself,” he writes, “must be snuffed out in the revolutionary by the one cold passion of the revolutionary cause.”35 Bakunin’s proclamation is reformulated and redirected in the mind of Webb Traverse, who, in a rare moment of self-reflection, ponders the profound emotional toll that must be extracted in his commitment to the cause: Webb was no professor, he could only doggedly repeat to his kids the same old lessons, point to the same obvious injustices, hope some of it managed to sprout, and just continue with his own work [. . .]. If dynamite was what it took, well, so be it—[even] if it took growing into a stranger to those kids and looking like some kind of screaming fool whenever he did show up at home [. . .] Webb would have to set aside his feelings, not just the sentimental baby stuff but the terrible real ballooning of emptiness at the core of his body when he paused to consider all that losing them would mean. (95–96)

Since Webb’s paternal love for his children may interfere with his absolute need to fight tyranny, it appears that a devastating choice is set before him. It is a choice that progeny further down the family tree also face: Vineland’s Hub Gates (great-grandson to Webb) quits his leftist activism to raise his daughter, Frenesi, and conversely, Frenesi abandons her daughter, Prairie, as a condition of her radicalism. Yet the text also suggests that it is not a strict binary—Webb hopes that the anarchist spirit might “sprout,” and the fact that his children’s children and their children continue the struggle implies his life’s work has meaning and legacy. Just as the blood-bespattered streets of Nice ring with the cries of the innocent, we are told of Webb that “there’s still traces of his blood all up and down this country, still crying out” (675). His blood, his offspring, may sprout, grow, and cry out to lament the state of the world, but among the betrayals, the reversals, the

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setbacks, and, yes, the traverses, the family endures and, along with it, a commitment to social justice. Befitting the slightly skewed and tangled vines of the Traverse family tree, at the close of Against the Day, Frank is both uncle and father to Jesse, with Reef playing a mirror role. When Jesse’s homework assignment requires an essay on “What It Means To Be An American,” Reef gets excited, grabs the pencil, and has a “look on his face similar to that his own father used to get just before heading off for some dynamite-related activities” (1076). The dynamite stick is supplanted by the writing stick, and while Jesse’s essay is considerably shorter than the narrative we readers have before us, the implication is that anarchism will survive. Its history will be recorded, its practices passed down through the generations. Even though by many accounts Against the Day was long in the making (rumors of a massive tome about a female mathematician began to circulate in the 1990s), its release in 2006 inextricably binds it to the cultural and political ground of the early twenty-first century. The text is a product of the social consciousness of its age, and Pynchon, directly and obliquely, confronts the manifestations of globalization and the singular defining moment of this decade for Americans, the terrorist attacks in New York City. Many theorists of globalization—particularly in the aftermath of 9/11— invoke “anarchy” to describe various threats to desired social orders or the disintegration of older political systems in a rapidly shifting world. The title essay of Robert D. Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy, to cite just one example, deploys the term in its more degraded and alarmist sense to characterize the geopolitics of a post–cold war environment.36 Whereas for Kaplan a previously bifurcated world of two superpowers struggling over legitimate ideological differences maintained an uneasy but intelligible equilibrium, globalization, with its inequitable distribution of goods and services, is more unstable and chaotic. Kaplan looks specifically at Sierra Leone, with additional references to the Indian subcontinent and the former Soviet Union, to conclude that a distributed network of hot spots, or anarchic spaces, poses a greater menace to the “civilized” world than the nuclear detente effectively managed by competing superpowers. Of course, as a novel nominally set between 1893 and 1922, the represented events in Against the Day are informed by the reckless energies generated by the collapse of imperial structures, but any novel that begins at the “World’s Fair” with a concern for “World Anarchism” and ends in outer space on a kind of interplanetary ark registers deeply with the rhetoric used to describe globalization’s connectivity and global unicity. Benjamin R. Barber offers an account of globalization that differs greatly from Kaplan’s, but one still underpinned by a concept of anarchism. In his widely read Jihad vs. McWorld, jihad is shorthand for religious funda-

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mentalism, whereas McWorld is a “product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce”; the “struggle of Jihad against McWorld is not a clash of civilizations but a dialectical expression of tensions built into a single global civilization as it emerges against the backdrop of traditional ethnic and religious divisions, many of which are actually created by McWorld and its infotainment industries and technological innovations.” His analysis has been thrown into sharp relief since the events of 9/11, and his 2001 revised afterword to the text grapples with the implications of terrorism. In this essay Barber announces that “anarchism in the global sector is not an accident: it has been assiduously cultivated.” In fact, anarchy and anarchism appear as privileged terms in his dialectic even if he does often use them as homonyms for destructive practices when writing about acts of terror.37 It is evident that the American response to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks has had serious repercussions for all who voice antigovernment or even antiauthoritarian sentiment. Certainly Against the Day, with its sympathetic representations of home-grown and immigrant terrorists, would appear to fit into this category. If Pynchon’s support for violence against the state is deflected by the status of the work as fiction (and fantasticohistorical fiction at that, which for many may blunt the connection to the contemporary), then a less ambiguous yet complementary position may be found in the 2003 introduction he wrote for the centennial edition of George Orwell’s 1984. In this essay Pynchon claims that Orwell regarded the British Labour Party as “potentially, if not already, fascist” and “found an analogy between British Labour and the Communist Party under Stalin” as two movements “professing to fight for the working classes against capitalism, but in reality concerned only with establishing and perpetuating their own power.”38 The unpopular idea that the masses are exploited for their idealism and class resentment, only to be sold out later, gives rise to this curious passage, with its powerful shift into the first-person plural voice: Now, those of fascistic disposition—or merely those among us who remain all too ready to justify any government action, whether right or wrong—will immediately point out that this is prewar thinking, and that the moment enemy bombs begin to fall on one’s homeland, altering the landscape and producing casualties among friends and neighbors, all this sort of thing, really, becomes irrelevant, if not indeed subversive. With the homeland in danger, strong leadership and effective measures become of the essence, and if you want to call that fascism, very well, call it whatever you please, no one is likely to be listening, unless it’s for the air raids to be over and the all clear to sound. But the unseemliness of an argument—let alone a prophecy—in the heat of some later emergency, does not necessarily make it wrong.39

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Ostensibly still writing about Orwell’s critique of the British government, Pynchon’s words carry deeper import as those of a U.S. citizen living in New York City at the turn of the twenty-first century. The “unseemliness of an argument” is exactly what Pynchon demonstrates when he claims, “One could certainly argue that Churchill’s war cabinet had behaved no differently than a fascist regime, censoring news, controlling wages and prices, restricting travel, subordinating civil liberties to self-defined wartime necessity.”40 Substitute “Bush” for “Churchill,” and the unseemliness of the argument still fits, but this, also, “does not necessarily make it wrong.” The precariousness of the position is self-evident: those who (like Pynchon) have long advanced a grave concern for the loss of autonomy wrought by an increasingly powerful ideological state apparatus find themselves pinned by rhetoric and subsequent legislation in the name of “antiterrorism” that further erode civil liberties and may invite one to wonder, as does the narrator at the close of Vineland, “whether the United States still lingered in a pre-fascist twilight or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago.”41 The aims and objectives of the 9/11 terrorists are very clearly not those of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century terrorists who inhabit Against the Day, but the strategies of asymmetric warfare and the lashing out at a perceivedly oppressive system irresistibly invite comparisons. And when Pynchon does obliquely allude to the New York bombings, the episode is rendered in an extremely elusive, phantasmagoric episode. Scientists of the Vormance Expedition, taking what they believe to be a meteorite into New York harbor, soon discover that what they carry has not only a consciousness but “an ancient purpose as well” (149). The alien other hypnotizes the experts into believing it is some inanimate object before unleashing a devastating explosion resulting in “charred trees” and “flanged steelwork fallen or leaning perilously” (150). Taken from its home by explorers (who mask their imperialist plunder as science), “the creature” and the wrath it unfurls may be, suggests the narrator, a consequence of the country’s arrogant and naïve belief in its ability to control and contain all that it draws into its fold. “Down the years of boom and corruption,” the narrator writes of the city’s denizens, “they’d been warned about such a possibility. The city more and more vertical, the population growing in density, all hostages to just such an incursion. . . . Who outside the city would have imagined them as victims taken by surprise—who, for that matter, inside it? though many in the aftermath did profit by briefly assuming just that affecting pose” (151). This is an uncompromisingly difficult stance to take, for if we read this as an allegorical meditation on 9/11, Pynchon is asking us to imagine ourselves as implicit contributors to an unjust system, and to profess shock is to admit

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hypocrisy. The Power is “exacting an appropriate vengeance,” and the terms of retribution include “fire, damage to structures, crowd panic, disruption to common services” (151). Yet, significantly, Hunter Penhallow, at the end of the episode, finds himself in a room crowded with people preparing to flee. They invite him along—there is room on the strange conveyance—and he leaves, “on his way to refuge, whatever that might have come to mean anymore, in this world brought low” (155). Just as Reef and Flaco reach out to the suffering and dying in Nice, Hunter is aided by strangers in a time of crisis. In V., as many critics have noted, it is the jazz musician McClintic Sphere who is credited as that novel’s moral center: his admonition to others to “keep cool but care” has come to signify a humane stance in relation to a hostile world, and it is a stance from which Pynchon does not stray very far at the opposite end of his career.42 “Anarchy never sleeps” (49), we are told early in the novel, and I believe Pynchon holds to this concept throughout all his works. For those who see it as a volatile threat to a valued social order, anarchism is a nightmare; for those skeptical of anarchists’ lofty promises, the actualization of an anarchist society is just a pipe dream. For Pynchon’s anarchist characters, the struggle is to ground the dream, to take its promise into the day. Webb Traverse, in his “broken and soon-enough-interrupted dreams close to dawn in particular, [. . .] would find himself standing at some divide, facing west into a great flow of promise [. . .]. He would wake to the day and its dread” (86). In slightly different terms, Frank Palmeri notes of the novel that Pynchon gives expression to many different kinds of diminished anarchist utopias, which counterpose the several dystopian organizations. “The salient difference between these two kinds of place,” he writes, “is that the dystopia exists; it is the world, both historically and at present, whereas the reduced utopias are fantastic.”43 Yet for Webb and others (and for Pynchon) a retreat into the dreamscape, a withdrawal from the day, is unacceptable: “You must belong to this everyday world—be in it, be of it,” preaches the Reverend Moss (91). A daydream is the interiorized projection of a fantasy that exists only on the utopic horizon, and anarchists throughout history have been ridiculed for this dream. Yet, as noted by George Woodcock, “the vision of pure liberty may never be realized, but the very presence of such a concept can help us to judge our condition and see our aims; it can help us to safeguard what liberties we still retain against the further encroachments of the centralizing state; it can help us conserve and even enlarge those areas in which personal values still operate; it can help in the urgent task of mere survival.”44 Pynchon embraces this struggle, and from his earliest novels to his latest work, he has consistently mined this terrain: he recognizes the value in the presence of a concept of pure liberty even as he distrusts

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appeals to purity, he identifies encroachments upon our freedom even as he acknowledges that many of these encroachments are by our own doing, and he provides potential avenues of transformation that help imperfect beings navigate an imperfect world compassionately. Against the Day promulgates and extends his anarchist vision across historical and psychic territories. This is his most sustained meditation on anarchist possibility to date, and its presence is greater because the stakes are higher.

NOTES 1. See Graham Benton, “This Network of All Plots”; “Riding the Interface”; and “Unruly Narratives.” 2. See Benton, “Unruly Narratives,” 10. 3. Peter Keough, “Roman a Cleft,” n.p. 4. Quoted in Paul Berman, Quotations from the Anarchists, 32. 5. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 77. 6. As Gerard Gaus and John Chapman point out in their introduction to Anarchism Nomos XIX, the problem is that labeling all doctrines, movements, and moods that oppose authority and hierarchy anarchistic is highly uncritical: “Thinking about anarchism in general would make no more sense than lumping together all theories that call for a state. We might have to be content with appraising anarchisms but not anarchism” (xix). 7. For analyses that invoke the theme of anarchism, see the essays by Amy J. Elias; Krzysztof Piekarski, Martin Kevorkian, and Elisabeth McKetta; Kathryn Hume; and J. Paul Narkunas in this volume. 8. Depending on whom you read, anarchism either emerged as an activist movement in the nineteenth century or began to take shape during the nationbuilding era of the Reformation. Sympathetic historians trace anarchist thought through libertarian doctrines back to Diogenes and Lao-tsu or Heraclitus and heretical Christian sects. Bakunin invokes Ovid and Zeno as important precursors, and most anarchists like to claim a variety of social and political reformers as embracing an anarchist ethos: Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Thoreau, and Gandhi are all popular figures in the (very broad) anarchist pantheon. 9. Benton, “Unruly Narratives,” 5. 10. George Woodcock, Anarchism and Anarchists, 15. 11. Ibid., 19. 12. Ibid., 22. 13. Such spontaneously generated social orders resonate with the work of Hakim Bey. Bey is author of several broadsheets, pamphlets, and “communiqués” on mysticism, “ontological anarchy,” and “poetic terrorism,” but it is primarily his long essay, “The Temporary Autonomous Zone” in T.A.Z., that offers a fresh perspective on anarchist strategies of resistance. In it Bey first parts company with the Bakuninist program of confrontation because such a “dream” of “the Stateless state, the Commune, the autonomous Zone with

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duration, a free society, a free culture” not only is an unrealizable and idealized utopic aspiration, but any attempt to implement such a program would be disastrous: “Nothing but a futile martyrdom could possible result from a head on collision with the terminal State, the megacorporate information state, the empire of Spectacle and Simulation” (100). Bey “distrusts” the word revolution and instead suggests uprising or insurrection (terms normally “used by historians to label failed revolutions—movements which do not match the expected curve, the consensus-approved trajectory”) as conditions that should be more highly valued for their anarchic character. “Revolution,” he writes, “has never in human history resulted in the creation of a sustained anarchist community.” While the anarchist vision “may come to life in the initial moments of uprising,” “as soon as ‘The Revolution’ triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed” (100). Even the optimistic anarchist’s faith in the concept of “insurrection blossoming spontaneously into anarchist culture” is doomed to fail because “our own particular historical situation is not propitious for such a vast undertaking.” This awareness should not be cause for despair, though; instead, we should learn to value the ephemerality of localized, temporary insurrection: “We are looking for ‘spaces’ (geographical, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones—and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason” (103). 14. Pynchon, “Mind of Watts,” n.p. 15. Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49, 126–27. 16. See “Mapping, the Unmappable, and Pynchon’s Antitragic Vision” in this volume. 17. See the Pynchon Wiki, “Against the Day Reviews,” http://against-the-day. pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_Reviews; and The Modern Word, “Online Reviews,” http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_reviews.html (both accessed May 21, 2010). 18. John Clute, “Aubade, Poor Dad,” 285. 19. Lance Olsen, “Deconstructing the Enemy of Color,” 81. 20. Benton, “Unruly Narratives,” 98. 21. Mikhail Bakunin, Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 172. Subsequent citations from Bakunin are given parenthetically and are from this edition unless otherwise noted. 22. Cf. J. Paul Narkunas’s claims about racialization and worker politics in his essay in this volume. 23. See the New York Times, “The Anarchists’ Trial,” n.p. 24. Quoted in John Merriman, The Dynamite Club, 75. 25. By weaving into Vineland a narrative strand that draws upon the politics and practices of the IWW, Pynchon mines a rich vein of a particular American anarchist tradition that registers as well with the political resistance movements in Against the Day. Certain observations regarding IWW history serve to deepen the anarchist dimension of both Against the Day and Vineland. First, the IWW was most prominent in the Pacific Northwest in the early decades of the twentieth century, when transient workers in the lumber and mining industries sought

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to organize for better working conditions. Second, the IWW’s inclusiveness, its willingness to open its membership to all, regardless of race, religion, or immigrant status, finds its textual precursor in the multiple ethnicities that populate Pynchon’s West in Against the Day. Third, implicit in the “open door” policy of the IWW’s rolls is the idea that the “true” vehicle for economic change lies not with the skilled worker but with the transient labor force yo-yoing on boxcars from job to job. Such a concept corresponds to Bakunin’s observation that the real revolutionary element of society is to be found in the lumpenproletariat. See Bakunin, Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 286. 26. Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 162. 27. Quoted in Steward Bird, Dan Georgakas, and Deborah Shaffer, Solidarity Forever, 10. 28. Quoted in Alan Sandison, “A World Made for Liars,” 158. 29. Quoted in William M. Phillips, Nightmares of Anarchy, 28. 30. Pynchon, Vineland, 229. 31. James Joll, The Anarchists, 12. 32. Ibid., 11 33. Kathyrn Hume, “Religious and Political Vision,” 164. Hume’s essay is republished in edited form in this volume. 34. Joll, The Anarchists, 118. 35. Quoted in Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 31. 36. While Kaplan’s article appeared in 1994, its influence continued to grow after 2001. Indeed, a Web site devoted to potential global catastrophe—ComingAnarchy.com—continues to track what its authors deem to be significant tears in world systems. 37. Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 17, xvi, xcii. Speaking of the street demonstrators in Seattle, Prague, Stockholm, and Genoa, Barber acknowledges that “while a hundred thousand protestors do not take to the streets unless something is amiss, they have mostly been written off as anarchists or know-nothings” (xvi). Although some critics tried to equate the antiglobalization protesters with terrorists as like-minded “irresponsible destabilizers of world order,” such a declaration is simply wrong because “the protestors are children of McWorld, and their objections are not Jihadic but merely democratic. Their grievances concern not world order but merely world disorder, and if the young demonstrators are a little foolish in their politics, a little naïve in their analyses, and a little short on viable solutions, they understand with a sophistication their leaders apparently lack that globalization’s current architecture breeds anarchy, nihilism, and violence” (xvi). The majority of the protesters, Barber argues, resent not capitalism’s productivity but its capacity to serve the world in the “absence of global regulation and the democratic rule of law. . . . It is finally hypocrisy rather than democracy that is the target of their rage” (xvii). Thus, paradoxically, the global justice anarchists are actually fighting for entails the production and maintenance of principles (political, social, environmental) that would protect citizens of the (third) world from an unregulated, “free” global economic sector. “Total freedom from interference—the rule of private power over public goods,” he argues, “is another name for anarchy. And terror is merely one of the many contagious diseases that anarchy spawns” (xvii).

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Pynchon, “Foreword,” ix. Ibid., ix–x. Ibid., x. Pynchon, Vineland, 371. Pynchon, V., 406. Frank Palmeri, “Plutocratic Dystopias, Anarchist Utopias.” Woodcock, Anarchism and Anarchists, 43.

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10

S “The abstractions she was instructed to embody”: Women, Capitalism, and Artistic Representation in Against the Day Jeffrey Severs

Oh, Carrie, Carrie! . . . Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel. —Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (354–55)

W

hen Oedipa Maas speculates in the first paragraph of The Crying of Lot 49 that Pierce Inverarity’s “whitewashed bust” of Jay Gould fell from a shelf and killed him, Pynchon begins for his protagonist a lesson in the whitewashed history of capitalist “ikon[s].”1 Gravity’s Rainbow sends a similar signal about nineteenth-century capitalist expansion on its first page: the “fall of a crystal palace” suggests a nuclear shattering of that industrialist order celebrated in 1851 at London’s Great Exhibition.2 Thus do capitalist shrines come crashing down in Pynchon, who reminds us always that the “ennoblement of shining steel” depends on coal tar, “Earth’s excrement,” being “purged out”—or “passed over.”3 In Against the Day, Pynchon turns to the actual era of robber barons to present a story of capitalism wedded to colonizing and warring aims and producing only (as one of the Chums of Chance says) “groundhog sweat, misery and early graves” (1033). This novel’s first-page capitalist icons are the “alabaster temples of commerce and industry” the Chums 215

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anticipate seeing at the World’s Columbia Exposition in 1893 Chicago (3). The exposition’s “White City” was a lavish monument to prosperity contradicted by actuality: 1893 was a year of great financial panic in the United States at large. To tarnish such temples, to show their distance from reality—this may not be entirely new in Pynchon. But his method for doing so, I argue here, does shift in Against the Day, in no small part because of a new approach to gender, women’s economic roles, and women’s sexual selves. Dally Rideout, an impressionable four- or five-year-old at the World’s Fair, is the character who is most taken with—who remembers the longest—the promise of the White City’s glimmering temples, lit by electricity. To see Dally’s many meanings as she departs physically and mentally from those fascinating edifices is this essay’s main goal. In her, Pynchon writes a postmodern version of the belief in capitalism’s promise and despair over its disappointments epitomized in this same era by Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber, who continues dreaming, in her novel’s closing lines (quoted in my epigraph), of “such happiness as [she] may never feel.” Dally starts out as such a dreamer, but before the text’s end we see her cycle, Carrie-like, through a whole series of roles less ethereal economics press upon her, some low, some high: working with her father in Colorado mines, modeling for artists in New York and England, posing as a boy and living destitute on the streets of Venice, becoming the mistress of an international financier, and acting on the stage in London and Paris. In her initiation into capitalism’s truer order that follows 1893, Pynchon sends Dally on a set of encounters with fallen versions of those alabaster temples and toward an unconscious reckoning with the conception of pure, disembodied markets they represent. Dally is the only character we see grow from small child to adult over the novel’s 1893–1922 span—no small distinction, in a novel framed by the age-defying exploits of the Chums and a general desire to overcome the constraints of time. Not a pilgrim in search of a Shambhala (as so many others are) but a stability-seeking itinerant, she lives within capitalist orders over three decades, fighting off homelessness and sexual enslavement, persisting against economic and gender oppressions (and not, notably, taking up dynamite against them).4 There are also important contrasts to consider between Dally and V., the shape-shifting woman and degraded virgin who previously loomed over this turn-of-the-century world in Pynchon. Through Dally’s far less abstract and mythologized tale, Pynchon engages with the key women’s narratives of the historical period, both dime novels and their more literary cousins like Sister Carrie. In making these new allusions, Pynchon ends up asking—in a way that is far more nuanced and far more attentive to his own prolabor themes— questions he first took from The Education of Henry Adams some forty years

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earlier: How do women make capitalism go? And what is the relationship between capitalism and women’s bodies? In Dally and Yashmeen Halfcourt, Pynchon presents readers with two of his most fully realized female characters to date. Each commands long stretches of point-of-view narration and adds a comparatively rich female portrait to a corpus teeming with cartoonish, hypersexualized, and mythologized femininities—virgins, seductresses, and witches from V. and Katje Borgesius to Bianca and Geli Tripping. Against the Day thus also goes beyond its prequel, Vineland, which David Cowart claims, in its focus on women, gives the first “feminist genealogy” in Pynchon’s works.5 Vineland offered us the sardonic teenage Prairie and the powerful “Ninjette” DL (both precedents for Dally) but also became mired in a silly essentialism regarding its central character, Frenesi Gates, who explains her betrayal of her feminist film collective by saying, “You know what happens when my pussy’s runnin’ the show.”6 Stray and Estrella, Lake and Mayva Traverse, even the infant Ljubica and the Sodality of Ætheronauts—all provide further, if less fully formed case studies for Against the Day’s critics. These women’s stories—some realistic, some magical—sit alongside a quite unexpected event, given Pynchon’s previous work: Cyprian Latewood’s seeming transcendence of gender when he enters a Bogomil convent. “They are taking me in as exactly the person I am. [. . .] No more of these tiresome gender questions,” he says when the blunt masculinist Reef Traverse asks him whether the nuns will “chop” off his genitals (958). The rebuke—almost as though from a more mature Pynchon to a younger one—suggests a self-consciousness in its author about the deterministic roles gender imposes on individuals, in both life and art. Future critics may use that claim—along with the erotic threesome, uniquely tender in Pynchon, of Reef, Cyprian, and Yashmeen—to follow up on and nuance recent takes on gender and sexuality by Molly Hite, Stacey Olster, and Julie Christine Sears.7 Among its many critical futures, Against the Day seems likely to endure in Pynchon studies as a book in which he both puts aspects of gender in historical context and (as we will see later) casts some suspicious, if not regretful glances back on his previous characterizations of women. While the helpless women and caricatured prostitutes in Inherent Vice—not to mention the gruesome sex scenes involving Lake Traverse in Against the Day—should temper any expectations that Pynchon’s construction of female characters has undergone a lasting revolution, Against the Day nonetheless marks his studied revisitation of the tendencies of his earliest work, culminating in a late encounter Dally has with a resurrected figure from V.8 Women’s economic history, and Pynchon’s research of it, seems to be responsible for some of these transformations. In addition to being freshly central to the major cast of characters, women are (to use an oxymoronic

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but appropriate phrase) prominently backgrounded in Against the Day, which subtly registers the huge influx of women into the post–Civil War U.S. workforce and their role in shaping the West.9 As we might expect in Pynchon, there are frontier prostitutes in plenty. But other “working girls” appear too. At a speech by the traveling anarchist preacher the Reverend Moss Gatlin in Chicago early in the novel, for instance, Lew Basnight sees “women in surprising numbers, bearing the marks of their trades, scars from the blades of the meatpacking floors, squints from needlework carried past the borderlands of sleep in clockless bad light, women in head-scarves, crocheted fascinators, extravagantly flowered hats, no hats at all, women just looking to put their feet up after too many hours of lifting, fetching, walking the jobless avenues, bearing the insults of the day” (49). Insults of females and female invisibility are common in the novel, and occasionally underscored. Working in a saloon, Lake and Mayva keep up “a level of determined bustling” that the evil Deuce Kindred, fresh from killing Webb, takes for “female restlessness,” while Erlys Zombini, tending to her family, seems to her daughter Dally to be “everywhere, [. . .] all but invisibly taking care of chores, smiling, speaking little” (261, 353). Often, Pynchon’s tone in evoking women at (thankless) work is more plaintive, his method more expansive. On his 1890s travels across the Midwest, Merle Rideout, father to Dally—perhaps thinking of the potential fate of his daughter, perhaps of a possible new wife—has an extended reverie on young women working in cities and on farms. In one of Pynchon’s trademark Whitmanesque catalogs, Merle remembers girls [. . .] serenely dealing cards in the riverside saloons, slinging hash in the cafeterias you walked downstairs into out of the redbrick streets, [. . .] girls of the plains and of profusely-flowered season that may never quite have been, cooking for threshers far into and sometimes all through the nights of harvest, [. . .] dreaming of cavalry boys ridden off down the pikes, sipping the local brain tonic, tending steaming washtubs full of corn ears at the street corners with radiant eyes ever on the move, out in the yard in Ottumwa beating a rug, waiting in the mosquito-thick evenings of downstate Illinois, waiting by the fencepost where the bluebirds were nesting for a footloose brother to come back home after all, looking out a window in Albert Lea as the trains went choiring by. (71)

These are women seen in passing—they are preterite or “passed over” in the sense Pynchon, through many such lists of the socially marginal and forgotten, developed out of the Calvinist Westminster Confession of Faith: “The rest of mankind God was pleased . . . to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin.”10 Readings of preterition and its intricacies in Pynchon are myriad, but I want to suggest here that Against

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the Day gives us, in passages like the preceding one, the first distinctly feminine preterite in his work.11 This cataloging pattern in Pynchon’s prose is also laying the groundwork for an invention that seems to come out of nowhere late in the novel: the Integroscope, Merle’s project with Roswell Bounce that effectively turns photographs into films, showing the viewer the life a person went on to lead from that frozen moment— much as these girls continue in Merle’s imagination on the basis of a passing glance. Lew reconstructs the life of a murdered woman with the aid of the Integroscope, and Dally becomes strongly associated in the novel with both this passage’s elegiac style and the Integroscope itself. My aim here will be to elucidate how the cumulative force of Pynchon’s prose, the shock of a magical technology, and the historical attention throughout to “working girls” combine in the climax Pynchon chooses for Dally’s story. As a young novelist, Pynchon dwelled on international intrigues during this same turn-of-the-century era without working women’s passions or the realism of a Dreiser in mind; his source text for this era was instead Adams’s rather speculative Education. From it Pynchon derived the key concepts of the Virgin and the Dynamo and, from them, both an explanation for twentieth-century worship of the inanimate and, implicitly, a claim about the roles for “women” in that dynamic. In chapter 25, Adams reports on a set of realizations about technology and “force” that he says began (as does Against the Day) at the 1893 World’s Fair and culminated at the Great Exposition of 1900, where he has “his historical neck broken” by the massive dynamo on display.12 In 1900, the dynamo has fully supplanted the Virgin as that which moves the Western world. The Virgin “was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies,” but no longer, particularly in the United States, which shows a Puritan fear of sexual power and, of course, a great love of technology.13 As any reader in V. criticism knows, this was the thesis that led Pynchon to fashion V. as a Venus figure who ends up exposed for her imperialist treacheries and mechanized body, a clockwork goddess for a thoroughly disenchanted world. Adams’s thesis wedded two vastly different ways of understanding economy and productivity—the religious-metaphysical and the technological. But as Pynchon revisits this same historical period, Against the Day proposes women as dynamos of a different, more realistic sort: rather than inspire and serve as objects of worship or despoiling, they work—and work hard. Pynchon does retain, however, Adams’s language of temples: the idea that electric dynamos and stained-glass images of the Virgin Mary in the cathedral at Chartres could be juxtaposed no doubt continues to inform Against the Day’s repeated invocations of capitalist “temples” where Mammon is worshipped, from the White City to the “temple of money” Kit encounters in a Belgian casino (where the rich

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remain oblivious to proletarians’ “pain, lost souls, and canceled futures” (536)). The question for Against the Day is with what kind of allegorical female figures the more mature Pynchon fills these temples. While critics have been understandably reluctant to propose a key to all of Pynchon’s mythologies, the degradation of the Virgin, Venus, or White Goddess and her replacement by mechanization have often been the prime candidate, especially when analyzing the female characters in the pre–Mason & Dixon work. Judith Chambers, writing on the novels up through Vineland and drawing on Robert Graves’s term, synthesizes many critics when she finds V.’s tracing of the “violation” of a “fragmented, mutilated White Goddess . . . in a world now devoid of mystery and humanity” definitive for The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow as well.14 In Vineland Pynchon suggests Prairie as “the young and jaded Venus of the reconfigured world,” a “Venus at the Mall” in whom Chambers finds some hope for renewal.15 We could certainly see Dally as an extension of Prairie: like Prairie, she is teenage, sarcastic, and in search of a mother who abandoned her. And Dally does bear markers of White Goddess-hood and associations with springtime renewal: she is, after all, named after a flower—the dahlia. Likewise, there are associations of Dally with Persephone, the goddess of earthly fertility who, while gathering flowers, is abducted to hell by Hades (see, e.g., 70). Writing in a vein Chambers would certainly recognize, Pynchon seems to summarize the failure of Persephone’s cyclical return from hell to renew the spring when, late in the novel, with World War I under way, Kit muses on Dally’s inexplicable return to the lover who once tried to have her abducted into white slavery, Clive Crouchmas. Sullen, mixing strains of Orpheus and Eurydice with the story of Persephone, Kit imagines “a Hell that could never contain [his] abducted young wife, to which he would never go to rescue her, which was actually Hell-of-thefuture, taken on into its functional equations, stripped and fire-blasted of everything emotional or accidental” (1070). Modernity’s hell-on-earth is one of Against the Day’s greatest motifs, and, within Pynchon’s symbolics, Dally’s fall back into Crouchmas’s world signals hell’s ascendancy.16 Pynchon’s mythologizing of the feminine and its degradation is undeniable. But to continue to read Against the Day (and Dally in particular) according to Adams- and Graves-inspired logic would miss a much different, more naturalistic approach that coalesces around another titan of the era, Dreiser. There are many direct parallels between Dreiser’s first heroine, Carrie Meeber, and Dally. In scenes that recall Carrie’s train trip from rural Wisconsin to Chicago, Dally leaves Colorado on a train to New York, the quintessential country girl gone to the city to seek work.17 As does Carrie, Dally has a disillusioning experience in an overwhelming department store and struggles to find a job. As does Carrie, Dally

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distinguishes herself as a performer on the basis of a role she happens into (though Dally’s initial role is in the Pynchonian invention of “the white-slave simulation industry” (339)) and then rises to fame as an acting and singing star. And as does Carrie’s creator, Dally’s raises alarms throughout that she will become a mere sexual commodity. Perhaps Pynchon is obliquely alluding to Carrie’s first acting role as one of “a group of oriental beauties” in a sultan’s harem when Dally joins the white-slave simulation industry and, later, is nearly kidnapped into real white slavery.18 The chill of such a notion, though, arises in Dally’s very first scene, when Merle jokingly offers to sell his four- or five-year-old daughter into marriage ten or twelve years hence: “Or if you’re willing to wait, take an option now to buy, got her on special, today and tomorrow only, dollar ninety-eight takes her away, heartbreakin smile and all” (28). When she is a teenager Dally leaves Venice because her patron, the Principessa, tries “to pimp” her to an Italian man (892). In his own (for his time) frank suggestions about Carrie’s willingness to consider sexual relationships as a means to financial stability, Dreiser parodied the pieties of the “working-girl” dime novels epitomized by Laura Jean Libbey’s massively popular Lamplighter series, the type of fiction he found so laughably unrealistic while editing popular magazines. While the form varied between the 1870s and 1890s, as Cathy and Arnold Davidson show, the women in such novels, “female equivalent[s] of Horatio Alger’s heroes,” often moved to the city from country homes and rose from lowly factory positions to prestige, though not through their factory vocations.19 The books idealized their protagonists as impeccably virtuous women who, in spite of calamities that often left them orphaned in the opening pages, maintained a virginity ever-threatened by male suitors and harsh city life; eventually, they were rewarded with marriage to a noble hero, who was separated from his beloved for the length of the plot.20 These women usually had to escape the amours and clutches of a villainous bourgeois or aristocratic suitor—leading Michael Denning to read the plots as allegories for capitalists’ exploitation of labor.21 In Sister Carrie we find such common topoi, in the Davidsons’ words, “refracted and distorted, inverted and reversed” by Dreiser’s satire.22 Working-girl dime novels have been left out of the earliest critical accounts of Pynchon’s extensive genre play in Against the Day, but surely Pynchon has such narratives ironically in mind when he has Dally try to find work in the city, separates her from (and then reunites her with) Kit, introduces her to the evil financier Crouchmas, and even entangles her with Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, jealous female aristocrat (another staple obstacle in working-girl fiction). Brian McHale shows elsewhere in this volume how Pynchon queers the British spy novel and demystifies the western, all in the service of adding to the era’s self-representations

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the greater historical reality—bloodshed, antiheroism, sexuality—they evaded or excluded.23 To echo McHale, I would say Pynchon essentially globalizes the working-girl narrative, implying that the localized sexual interplay between powerful owner and vulnerable worker through which this form mediated anxieties about capitalism’s rapid advances omitted the worldwide conjunctions of money and empire that produced, Against the Day claims, World War I. This is why Dally’s narrative leaves the American map altogether, and why it coincides most clearly with the generic danger of the capitalist villain—and actual sexual slavery—when she investigates documents showing how Crouchmas’s financial dealings will lead to the Great War. In invoking a working-girl fiction refracted through Dreiser’s own contemporary parodies, Pynchon is in a characteristically doubled relationship to his materials, and this produces some unexpected valences for the Dally-centered genre play. As McHale notes, Pynchon handles genre differently for different characters, and not always parodically.24 Dally’s sexual experience—and her status as virgin—is an interesting topic to consider here. Pynchon is definitely in camp-parody mode when Dally begins acting in Hop Fung’s white slavery “comediettas” in the streets and tunnels of Chinatown (339). Through these site-specific plays, Pynchon is mocking the turn-of-the-century white slavery hysteria that imagined countless young white women moving to cities and being abducted into sexual slavery by Chinese gangs, hysteria that led to many dime novels, stage plays, and, ultimately, a few years after Dally’s time in New York, early feature films like Traffic in Souls (1913).25 On the other hand, such fears seem to be made frighteningly real when Crouchmas hatches his plan to sell Dally into sexual slavery in Hungary, after she has become his mistress. Pynchon then seems to reindulge the generic norms when, in a moment of grand, genre-inspired coincidence, the suddenly heroic Kit, on a train headed in the opposite direction, reappears in the Szeged station and rescues Dally from Crouchmas’s goons (909–10). Not long after, Pynchon seems to switch modes yet again and gives the couple a tenderly observed lovemaking scene in a paprika field that indulges sentiment and pastoral imagery but is also graphic: Kit “entered, and reentered, and so forth, and the cycle, now exclusively theirs, wet, high, and headlong, whirled away from time as other less-urgent lovers might have known it, until [. . .] they lay in warm semirefuge from the midday sun” (913). What emerges from this multivalent engagement with genre, then, is not an attenuated Dally, hopelessly derealized through parody and without a personality or “self” the reader can identify—like, say, Jessica Swanlake. McHale writes of Pynchon’s effort to “close the gap” between generic conventions “and what one imagines the historical experience” they purport to depict “must have been like,” by restoring, among other

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things, the sexuality these narratives leave out.26 In Dally’s case, such a method results in a woman who, compared to her generic counterparts and especially compared to previous Pynchon creations, has a knowing relationship to her sexuality. Her varied sexual becoming throughout the novel—and her understanding of sex as commodifiable—may grow out of the frank, “elementary course” Merle arranges for her at the Silver Orchid whorehouse in Telluride, which puts her off romanticized “‘Love,’ as defined by the heartsick and tumescent generations of cowpoke Casanovas” (304). Whether one calls her portrayal a triumph of psychological depth or just one more set of male-constructed poses, a longtime reader of Pynchon is bound to see that with Dally he has shifted away from his effort to sully notions of love and sexual purity primarily through recourse to the pornographic. Michael Bérubé identifies pornography, broadly defined as the effort to arrest and enframe, as the term coordinating Gravity’s Rainbow’s linking of sexual domination with both fascism and the obsession with theoretical and technological solutions.27 By contrast, there seems to be an almost protective bent in Pynchon’s arrangement of story for Dally, as though she were his Esther Summerson and he, while putting threats in her path, wants to keep her story relatively pornographyfree as long as possible—moves that could also be seen as fulfillments of the working-girl genre’s insistence on purity. The relationship is complex. Consider as well the contribution of voice to this development of Dally into a more meaningful Pynchonian Virgin: she is a speaking subject, and powerfully so. Her distinctiveness stems from her language, the pitch and texture of which no previous female character in Pynchon has ever quite achieved. She is probably the funniest female ever to grace Pynchon’s pages. Through voice she punctures (usually male) pieties. In fact, her witty, down-to-earth voice seems at times like Pynchon’s self-administered corrective to the oracular heights of some of his previous writing and concerns.28 Take her recap, complete with some added local color, of “that Pentecost story”: “Apostles are meeting in a house in Jerusalem, you’ll recall, Holy Ghost comes down like a mighty wind, tongues of fire and all,” she explains to Hunter Penhallow in Venice (580). The “crowd outside, who’ve all been jabbering away in different tongues, there’s Romans and Jews, Egyptians and Arabians, Mesopotamians and Cappadocians and folks from east Texas,” are “all expecting to hear just the same old Galilean dialect—but instead this time each one is amazed to hear those Apostles speaking to him in his own language” (580). Wide-ranging bits like this, along with much sarcasm, suffuse Dally’s scenes. Speaking out about her homelessness, she characteristically chides Hunter for seeking out chiaroscuro in Venice’s dark alleyways: “Easy enough for you, I guess, but nights out here on the masegni are not quite as romantic as they are for tourists” (582).

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Dally’s perspective here—that of a woman whose only means of survival may be to sell her body to sexual predators—is part of the novel’s wider focus on the ways in which real, individual bodies become obscured by capitalist mythology. Against the Day constantly undermines an abstracted version of capitalism with its material underpinnings— the harsh smells of mining camps, the sounds made by cattle going to slaughter. Through this attention to capitalism’s underside, Against the Day exposes a whole set of countertemples to those alabaster ones found in Chicago. Around the mines of Leadville, Colorado, for instance, heaps of waste from the venture accumulate, and “sometimes shadowy figures could be seen kneeling, reaching out to touch one of these slag piles, reverently as if, like some counter-Christian Eucharist, it represented the body of an otherworldly beloved” (275). Future people will wonder about the heaps, says Frank’s girlfriend, Wren Provence, “maybe take them for structures of some kind, government buildings, temples, maybe” (275). Beginning from the portrayal of capitalist spectacle, Against the Day is a kind of archaeological excavation of the messy, victimizing world that international capitalism, led by the United States, built on the ruins of the White City’s propaganda for markets. A national promise, a national dream, needs a sympathetic proponent to illustrate its full force—or so this late, less bitter Pynchon seems to believe—and Dally plays the role. Perhaps with Carrie in mind, Pynchon creates in the child Dally his greatest believer yet in capitalism’s ecstasies. The fair makes a giant impression on her child consciousness: “Rolling into [. . .] St. Louis, Wichita, Denver, she caught herself hoping each time that somewhere in it, some neighborhood down the end of some electric line, it’d be there waiting for her, the real White City again” (69). While too poor to buy, she “enjoyed the downtown stores smelling like yard goods and carbolic soap” (72). The fairgrounds, mostly torn down and burning by the end of the book’s first chapter, solidify in her memory as “this capital of dream she had once lived in, maybe was even numbered among the rightful nobility of” (70). Her unconscious life becomes a quest to resurrect that idealized city—and not just in childhood. Several years later, she first measures the actual Venice and its brilliant light against the simulacral version she saw in the White City—“The Chicago Fair was a long time ago, but she had kept a memory or two of silent boats on canals”—before deciding that this real Venice supplants “the story she thought she knew” (568). But she is no “nobility” in this city: she is saved from homelessness and prostitution by becoming an attendant to the Principessa. While the fairgrounds stand as her “capital of dream,” Dally could be said to spend her mature life in the novel trying to return to a (to reverse the phrase) dream of capital—capital in the idealized state against which Marxist theories of commodity fetishism militate.

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Pynchon has carefully timed Dally’s life in order also to represent through her another 1893, felt outside the White City. The Panic of 1893 was caused by railroad overbuilding and suspect financing, which resulted in bank failures. Unemployment may have been as high as 19 percent at the panic’s peak.29 Pynchon obliquely alludes to the Panic and ensuing depression (1893–95) as “the man-made bad times that had come upon Chicago and the nation”—and he does so precisely at the moment when Dally, an uncomprehending child, complains to her father about returning to the White City, which he cannot bring himself to tell her has been “pulled to pieces” (70). Her interior life seems formed almost wholly by the promises and disappointments of the White City: “As years piled on, [the fair] came to seem more like the memory of some previous life,” and she begs to be taken back (69–70). The language of political identity and colonization arises too: people playing the roles of Eskimos and Pygmies, now out of work, seem to Dally “refugees from the ‘national’ exhibits” (69). While it may conjure a type of refugee status (the exiled, the “riddenout”?), Dally’s and Merle’s surname is taken directly from Pynchon’s beloved jazz: the rideout is the final chorus of a piece; to ride in jazz is to improvise on a melody. One other key suggestion of the Rideout name is survival in the face of ongoing difficulty: whatever the effects of the depression, they will ride them out. And they do so in a literal sense: their “rolling photography lab” forms a sharp contrast to the railroad. Before settling down with amalgamating work in the Little Hellkite mines, Merle is a sometime-photographer and itinerant worker, among those “scanning like journeyman hawks for the next day’s work, [. . .] to get them through a couple more meals” (72). He supports himself and Dally with “shingleweaving, and mending some fence, and always frog-bonding work,” not to mention employment as a lightning-rod salesman (73). While it is centered on the dynamiting Traverse family, Against the Day describes many types of proletarian life, many means of survival, and many modes of being “against” the capitalist edifice. Rather than Traverse—with its suggestions of opposition and rough passage—why not Ride(it)out?30 In this opening familial binary, we could see Dally—loyal to her father to the end, if out of touch with him—as an opposite to Lake Traverse, a figure of inexplicably voracious and overwhelming female sexuality out of an earlier Pynchon, a woman who has grim threesomes with her father’s killers and then marries one of them. But Dally is also the crossover figure: Rideout will become Traverse when she marries Kit. In Pynchon, opposites will always be subject to merger. Still, Pynchon does structure earlier parts of the novel around major Traverse/Rideout bifurcations, which collectively suggest a distinction between not just action and passivity but violent and magical “solutions” to the problem of capitalism. We first see

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Webb as an anonymous visitor to Merle’s lab, where they discuss alchemy and explosives as two modes of opposing capitalism’s crimes (ironically, often involving some of the same materials). Webb rejects alchemy’s political potential, and the next time we see him, he is laying dynamite at a bridge with the fully committed Finnish anarchist Veikko. Merle (who later harangues Frank, Webb’s son, on similar topics) is in effect a proponent of excluded middles, that ever-renewing antidote to binaries in Pynchon—in this case the many metals left out in the debate between silver and gold, the “bimetallism” controversies over whether only gold or both gold and silver should guarantee American paper currency. Pynchon repeats the Rideout/Traverse split on a grander scale in the book’s middle, suggesting that it will be Dally who will somehow carry out Merle’s alchemical imperative. True to his parodic expansions of the plot mechanisms of the dime-novel world, Pynchon engineers a separation of his lovers on a massive scale. Shortly after their first acquaintance on board the Stupendica, Dally and Kit go off in separate directions—and separate Stupendicas. In one of the text’s literalizations of MichelsonMorley thematics, the passenger liner Stupendica is doubled by the battleship SMS Emperor Maximilian, and two distinct ships somehow emerge, with Kit on the warship and Dally on the civilian one. In Belgium Kit will encounter the Q-weapon, a mysterious beam device that foreshadows World War I, Tunguska, and Kit’s own work as a dive-bombing pilot. Bought and sold (via his tuition at Yale) more surely than any woman in the novel, Kit has a name that portends his being “played” or manipulated—a drum kit (which lays down a vibe?) or a tool kit. Traverse-style opposition, this development seems to confirm, can fall prey to co-optation, the imitation of the masters that besets so many Pynchon rebels. Dally, on the other hand, taking up the graceful momentum her last name implies, continues on the civilian Stupendica to Venice—or alongside it at least. In this curious ending of the chapter, Dally learns to depart her body and move at high speeds, “an alternate way to travel by land, port to port, faster than the ship was moving” (524). Dally never again displays this ability. Why? “The fatal temptation for a fiction writer who must accept the presence, often a necessity, of magic in his own work,” Pynchon wrote in his 1997 introduction to Jim Dodge’s Stone Junction (subtitled An Alchemical Potboiler), “is to solve difficulties of plot, character and—more often than is generally suspected—taste, by conveniently flourishing some prop, some ad hoc amulet or drug, that will just take care of each problem as it arises.” But “magic is in fact hard and honorable work. It cannot be deployed at whim, not without consequences,” Pynchon continues, praising Dodge for making his protagonist “earn[] [his] powers.”31 We might see Dally, too, as she passes into young adulthood, as an apprentice in the hard work of (materialist)

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magic, facing what Pynchon calls “uncompromisingly earthly” problems and working in a way that is more effective than Merle’s alchemy. This seems the point of only allowing her one moment of out-of-body travel, also of her brief, disappointing interlude in New York and Venice with her mother and the Zombinis, magicians in the conventional sense (and thus eventually uninteresting to Pynchon as subjects). For while it seems thematically connected to, for example, bilocation, no sustained personal revelation comes of Dally’s passage from Zombini’s “Cabinet of Mystery” to the Lower West Side through a “strange eclipse of time” (350). Wary of magical transformation, Pynchon instead engineers Dally’s growth, her sensitization to the underside of White City–style spectacle, through a series of encounters with other capitalist edifices. Pynchon has long been concerned with architectural enforcement—the instantiation of power relations in bricks and mortar and urban arrangements, what Nicholas Spencer calls “the spatial nature of power” in Pynchon’s novels.32 Vineland makes the point clearly when DL finds fronting the administration building of an evacuation camp “rows of white columns suggesting national architecture and deathless temple, intended to reassure, to discourage too many questions, to turn to use whatever residue of nation-love” is left among the “traumatized nuclear refugees it had been designed to impress” (emphasis mine).33 Pynchon, responding over a thousand pages to monuments to global capital, places on Dally’s itinerary new versions of the White City’s dwarfing temples, each holding insights into the true nature of capital (and capital love). The most lasting and visible legacy of the White City lies in urban American architecture, in particular the highly intellectual, highly rationalized Beaux Arts style that dominated Daniel Burnham’s building designs and became indeed a kind of “national architecture.”34 In Against the Day many cities imitate the pattern laid out there, that of “streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid” that the Chums see from above at the beginning (10). The Beaux Arts style also survives, more importantly for Dally, in monumental, designed-toimpress urban architecture, which she first encounters in the form of a New York department store, an everyday capitalist shrine. Pynchon links the store to his key image by having Dally’s friend Katie refer to the guards at the entry as “Guardians of the Temple, First Kings someplace” (346). The scale is breathtaking: the store “tower[s] in gray modernity twelve stories high and engross[es] an entire city block” (345). Both Dally and (in her parallel scene) Carrie make their way from what Pynchon calls “luminous, ornamental, beautifully swept” shopping areas (Dreiser: “Each separate counter was a show place of dazzling interest and attraction”) to off-stage areas dominated by workers, applicants, and dingy chill (346).35 Alan Trachtenberg writes that these “lavishly designed palaces of consumption” were “staging grounds” for a dissociation of

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commodity and production at the heart of my analysis: the stores “disguised links between goods and factories, the origins of goods within a particular mode of production,” keeping out of sight the “complex machinery . . . of hierarchy and control” lying “behind the glittering façade.”36 Interested in exactly this illusion, Pynchon writes that the store’s scale is “not due to whims of grandiosity” but dictated by a need to keep rigorously set a veil separating two distinct worlds—the artfully illusory spaces intended for the store’s customers and the less merciful topography in between the walls and below the bargain basement, populated by the silent and sizable regiment of cash-girls, furnace-stokers, parcel-wrappers, shipping clerks, needlewomen, featherworkers, liveried messengers, sweepers and dusters and runners of errands of all sorts who passed invisibly everywhere, like industrious spirits, separated often only by inches, by careful breaths, from the theatrical bustle of the bright, sussurant Floors. (345–46)

Here is another example of the invisible, preterite Many who form the real arms and legs of the spectacular entity, most of them undoubtedly women. (As Trachtenberg notes, women made up a vast majority of the department store workforce.)37 Two pages later Dally and Katie descend to the grim basement, where “workers slipped by silent as wraiths” and rooms are “crowded […] full of women at sewing machines who did not look up from their work except with apprehension when they felt a supervisor draw close” (347). Though Dally is the central consciousness of this scene, some of these revelations take place outside her view, in omniscient narration. Fixated on its retail areas, she finds in the department store an ersatz version of the novel’s concern with mirror worlds into which characters might step: the store’s mirrors merely reflect a hard-edged, duplicated reality, and among other “small humiliations,” “hayseed” Dally nearly walks into one (346–47). This first lesson in the big city lays the groundwork for other disillusionments, more viscerally felt, as Dally moves to Europe and falls further down the economic ladder. From oppressed department store workers she does not truly notice she moves to awareness of sexual slaves she hopes not to join. In Venice she begins to understand why White City effects cannot be created or sustained in real life. The actual Venice, as already noted, has become confused with the White City’s simulacrum in her mind, but here, near the novel’s midpoint, Pynchon marks the incremental maturation of her understanding by allowing her mind to begin to compare earlier experiences to new ones. Musing on comparisons for Venetian light, she recalls not the scintillation of the White City but instead, in a lyrical passage that echoes Merle’s musing on the girls of the Midwest, an “American light” that honors both much

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more of the landscape and the everyday realities it contains (580). Instead of a singular White City, her memory now opens to multiplicity, to “watching fields of windows lit and lampless, vulnerable flames and filaments by the thousands” in “great cities” and “small, perfect towns” (580–81). She “longed after the lights at creeksides and the lights defining the shapes of bridges over great rivers, through church windows or trees in summer, casting shining parabolas down pale brick walls or haloed in bugs, lanterns on farm rigs, candles at windowpanes, each attached to a life running and continuing on, long after she and Merle and the wagon would have passed, and the mute land risen up once again to cancel the brief revelation, the offer never clearly stated, the hand never fully dealt” (581). “Each attached to a life running and continuing on, long after [they] would have passed”: we are again being prepared for the Integroscope (and with “passed” we are again reminded of the meaning of preterite—passed over). The motley lives of the Many, extending across the landscape of America and emblematized by the many shapes of light they cast, have started to replace the homogeneous, electrically lit, and allegorical alabaster of the White City in Dally’s mind. But this vision is still of an idealized America, a product of nostalgia—lamps but not the people, a “mute land” made into a painting rather than made real, the edge of revelation but not revelation itself. Just as there are countertemples, the slag heaps that support from afar the retreats of the rich, Dally finds in her immediate surroundings, a few lines later, that there are “episodes of counter-light,” experiences of darkness that compel her acknowledgment of “absent faces,” those stolen away into the legendary Venetian sexual tourism trade. “So there was revealed to her, night by night in ever more depressing clarity, a secret and tenebrous city, down into whose rat-infested labyrinths she witnessed children her age and younger being drawn, infected, corrupted, and too often made to vanish, like a coin or a card—just that interchangeably held in contempt by those who profited from the limitless appetite for young bodies that seemed to concentrate here [. . .]” (581). We see Dally here on the edge of prostitution or sexual enslavement: a few paragraphs later is a scene of scarred men, “night predators” and “unwholesome customers” bearing flowers and cigarettes but also with, “visible beneath black suit-jackets, Bodeo 10.4 mm pistols as evidence of their dedication to business”—surely not part of the White City’s simulacral Venice (581). And yet with these men’s “dedication to business” and the likening of their sexual victims to interchangeable coins, Pynchon is suggesting a likeness between the sex trade and commerce more generally. Here is a “market” where the body is directly sold at a distressed price—contra the fantasy that corporations are a “compound organism, [. . .] a new living species” with new bodily laws (148).

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Gravity’s Rainbow read sadomasochism as the model for all state politics. Against the Day reads sex markets as the model for markets in general, which are always liable to fall into violence and rape, with guns enforcing the “bargain” in Venice just as surely as they do with Colorado strikers later in the book. We have no direct evidence at this point that Dally has yet lost her virginity, and as she rejects offers of “beautiful clothes, the Casino, the big hotels” in exchange for becoming a kept woman, we see Pynchon working on the question of a woman’s sexual/economic self in a new light, from her own perspective (581). This is an imperiling of a woman’s virginal sexuality with, by Pynchon standards, considerable psychological complexity and depth. Bianca of Gravity’s Rainbow would be wholly out of place in such writing. Dally’s pre–World War I activities culminate in London, where she becomes an actress and, subsequently, Crouchmas’s “kept crumpet” (900). Following the advice of Lew, she uncovers corporate connections, railway charters, and “foreign arrangements never made public” that, Pynchon implies, will lead to the Great War (904). The mysterious depository of records where she makes these discoveries, British Museum–like in certain respects, is “taller than any [building] in London, taller than St. Paul’s”— a connection to the temple theme and (since no building in London was taller than St. Paul’s dome until the 1960s) a signal it is a Pynchonian invention, an omen of the world to come and a marker of the triumph of disembodiment. The towering building reads like a perverse resurrection of the White City’s alabaster temples and the imposing department store: it has “caryatid faces” (features of ancient Greek temple architecture) along its edges and is of “a blackness nearly obsidian” (904). Perhaps one of the corporate order’s new organisms, it sits “hovering, all but breathing, descent built into its structure” (904). As Spencer notes, Pynchon often indexes the victory of malign forces through the erasure of, in Henri Lefebvre’s terms, “lived” and “social space” by “abstract space,” a “homogenizing and fragmenting social force” that replaces territory and texture with maps and geometry.38 The building Dally encounters in London is her reckoning with this abstract space, her entry into it an accessing of a whole order of power. It is “more a prism of shadow of a certain solidity, looming forever beyond the farthest street one knew how to get to. The exact way to enter, let alone visit, remained a matter of obscurity, indeed was known only to adepts who could prove they had business within” (903–04).39 The abstractness of the building and its overwriting of real bodies mesh with the unnatural and menacing mechanisms associated with its “undiscussed product,” transferred downward “from the upper levels to hidden cargo docks below [. . .]—though the commodity was not exactly a fluid, the equations governing its movement were said to be hydrodynamic in nature” (904). Water has somehow become pure

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math here, in another critique of commodity fetishism. The papers Dally finds inside, appropriately, concern the channeling of natural resources for profit—a tunnel and pipeline across the Irish Sea, for instance. Spotted upon her departure by Crouchmas’s detectives, Dally shortly becomes the target of his scheme to sell her into white slavery, which he hatches (naturally) on a visit to a brothel. The major question of this fifteen-page section—which takes us quickly from Dally’s arrival with Hunter in London, through the beginnings of her stage career and first meetings with Crouchmas, and onto the records scene—is whether Dally will finally be entrapped in this largest and most rapacious of sexual-capitalist networks. Pynchon stages this turning point as a competition among varying modes of artistically representing Dally, as well as the male handlers of these representations—handlers who include himself. In the novel’s last half, Dally is more and more deeply associated with art projects, as assistant, model, and subject. In this shift of terms lies the growth of Pynchon’s self-consciousness over a type of character he has never quite written before, as well as the entire subject of aesthetically representing women, of rendering them as (to pose two extremes) statues within an allegorical scheme or more dynamic creatures. “Here’s who she is. Exactly,” says the callow Hunter as he shows to Ruperta a charcoal portrait he has made of Dally, who hides her real identity from Ruperta (730). Pynchon means to suggest the actual inability of the artist to fix “exactly” the nature of his subject. This self-consciousness will culminate in his resurrection of a woman who was, per his old, pornographic conventions, gruesomely killed as part of an artistic production in V. Pynchon begins to build toward that climax through Dally’s encounter with the painter Andrea Tancredi, a proponent of “Divisionism” whose paintings are theoretically attempts to explicate the nature of time (584). Everything imaginable is “on the way from being one thing to being another, from past to Future,” Tancredi says. “The challenge to us is show as much of the passage as we can, given the damnable stillness of paint”—which entails “grammatical tyrannies of becoming” he overcomes with “dynamic” brushstrokes, splatters, and dots (586–87). It is quite tempting to see here an artistic manifesto for not just Tancredi but Against the Day itself; not only does he express the dissatisfaction with orthogonal time Inger H. Dalsgaard shows to be at the heart of the novel, his rant against “grammatical tyrannies” aligns with the celebration of the subjunctive over the more rigid indicative in Mason & Dixon.40 Likewise, in Tancredi’s dissatisfaction with the staticness of his medium, Pynchon is not only echoing Dally’s burgeoning openness to multiplicity but again preparing us for the Integroscope, through which dynamic photographs will be realized, the stillness of the medium be damned.

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But Pynchon is interrogating methods of aesthetic frozenness more thoroughly than a reading of Tancredi-as-mouthpiece would allow. This seems confirmed when Dally, romantically taken with Tancredi on page 587, never sees or mentions him again. Instead we find her working with yet another artist upon her return to London: the sculptor Arturo Naunt, known for his “Angel of Death” (or “A.O.D.”) statues, done in black marble and commemorating war dead in local cemeteries. The statues extend Pynchon’s career-long criticism of traditional commemorative forms, especially for wars. The example of Naunt’s work shown is “a sentimental sort of military pieta,” with a dying soldier lying “with his head in the lap of a hooded young woman, rendered in black marble, a pair of predators’ wings emerging from her back” (893–94). “In the market for a new model” for his “trade,” Arturo is the latest male figure to try to make Dally profitable. Through him, Pynchon is also extending (and humanizing) Tancredi’s ruminations on art’s ability somehow to honor the animate subject while offering her inanimate rendering—a corollary of Against the Day’s far broader exploration of what Pynchon calls the “dynamic ambiguity” of individuals.41 Accordingly, Dally reads a living dynamicism and specificity in the face of the first A.O.D. she sees: “She saw a face you could encounter at any time, turning a city corner or boarding the omnibus”—natural opposite to the “frieze creatures, upper-floor caryatid faces” she saw at the records depository (894, 905). As an A.O.D. model herself, Dally is “a dynamic athlete.” Her face is “too specific for prolonged viewing” (895). She sees “in the shadows of the gown the shape of an infant”—as though the Angel of Death has indeed been converted into the Mother Mary that the “pieta” posing of the sculptures (contra the black marble and predator’s wings) would suggest (894). We are in the familiar Pynchonian domain of the ambiguous or inverted Mother Mary, the metaphysical solaces available only in question form: of the A.O.D.’s hood Pynchon asks, “Why should the Angel of Death, acting as agent for God, need to be screened from grace? What other, unsuspected dark energy, then? What anti-grace?” (895). Yet inserted into this passage about the A.O.D. is Dally’s memory of working previously as a sculptor’s model in New York, a job we have not heard about to this point. It is telling that Pynchon makes the scene a memory, as though to suggest a replacement of her immature adoration of the White City with, again, the multiplicity of lives lived outside, in the global economy. The memory is a Dreiser-inspired insertion of realism in an otherwise Adams- or Graves-focused treatment of an allegorical figure more goddess than woman. In fact, the reverie evokes both the fluid bodies behind capitalism and the fate of Dreiser’s Carrie, who ends her own story (as my epigraph notes) dreaming in a rocking chair:

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Back in New York, in one of the capitalist temples downtown, among the allegorical statues lining a particular marble corridor, [Dally] could still be found as The Spirit of Bimetallism, face correct as a face on a ceremonial urn, garlanded [. . .] like the other models, little chance, in the expression she had assumed, of wistful regret for what she’d come to. What had they been like as girls, Supply, Demand, Surplus Value, Diminishing Returns? Had any of them sat on a porch at the edge of some prairie, riding a storebought rocker through the pearl afternoon, into the evening, imagining her family gone off without her [. . .]? Was she from even farther west, say up in the mining country, freezing through her days and nights in some shack above the snowline, was that how she’d come to be a child of gold and silver? Noticed by a mine owner, or an owner’s lieutenant, brought to the city, some city, introduced to some sculptor fellow, some smoothie who’d been to France, veteran of artists-and-models shenanigans [. . .] (894–95)

We are as close as we may ever be in Pynchon to feminist elegy, and this is another instance of the feminine preterite (recall that the hidden department store workers were called “spirits” as well). In the reverie we move from the hermetic enclosure and allegorical meaning of “capitalist temples” out onto the vast map on which capitalism is actually lived by some of its lowest figures—its itineracy and country/city mobility, its personally felt booms and busts. As the model for a statue, Dally is a part of a marble White City, the one she dreamed of returning to, and yet in this mature memory, she thinks of the material lives behind that “capital of dream,” her embrace of capitalism’s excitement now potentially replaced by “wistful regret.” She does more than her father did—more than she herself has ever done—to imagine her way into the lives of these easily passed-over women, and with “smoothie,” “shenanigans,” and the prospect of freezing, she does so in a voice that removes allegorizing distance from the scene. In the brief sketch of a woman seduced to the city, she even seems to have critical, self-conscious access to the language of the working-girl genre. We find out in the next paragraph that Dally was an atypical model: “She had taken the actress’s approach and actually read up on the abstractions she was instructed to embody, as a way of ‘getting inside the character.’ What was the point in trying to incarnate Bimetallism unless you could learn everything you could about It?” (895). The lines summarize much of her purpose in Pynchon’s narrative: to replace the static object with enacted dynamicism, to provide a “character” on the “inside” of capitalism’s effects, and to subvert the reign of new corporate organisms through acts of highly local “incarnat[ion].” The Integroscope is the last art project in which Dally participates, and by now it should be clear that we should take this invention as the superior art form in the novel, one that parallels the preterite-evoking and

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time-traveling ambitions of Pynchon’s own prose. As does Dally’s reverie on the girl models, the Integroscope allows individuals fixed at a certain moment through photography not only to continue their motion but to have multiple paths. Bounce links the standard photograph to the (in Bérubé’s terms, pornographic) staticness of mathematics: taking a picture is like “‘differentiating’ an equation of motion—freezing that movement into the very small piece of time it takes the shutter to open and close” (1036). In calculus, after differentiation, integration is performed: “release [the photo] back into action . . . even back to life” (1036). Thus, as with the implications of turning outward to a fluid world I read into the passages earlier, Merle puts “scenes from American lives, unquestionably in motion [. . .] One by one, across the land, [. . .] photos trembled, stirred” (1037–38). When Lew makes use of the Integroscope, it is notably to look into the murder of an Encarnacion—an Incarnation, like that Dally hopes to create in her posing (1042). The Integroscope is an alternative path for cinema, a secret, recuperative technology that restores life.42 When Merle uses the Integroscope, he sees (and, by synchronizing his radio, hears) Dally recording in a Paris studio. They connect across oceans and, as Pynchon ends part 4 with Merle watching in Los Angeles and begins part 5 with Dally in Paris, across a textual aporia. This organizational choice clearly recalls the way, in Gravity’s Rainbow, the scene of Greta Erdmann and Slothrop having sadomasochistic sex fades, across a section break, to Franz Pökler masturbating at a showing of the porn film Alpdrücken, a scene from which Greta and Slothrop were reenacting. Film permeates reality, and vice versa: Greta believes Bianca was conceived during the making of the film, while Pökler, thinking he conceived Ilse with his wife after he went home from the theater, ponders, “How many shadow-children would be fathered on Erdmann that night?”43 By having the Integroscope screen now bridge father to daughter across a similar textual divide, by having Lew use its power against Kindred (who has pornographic overtones: he works as a studio cop and is connected to “a whole string of orgy-type suicides” (1059)), Pynchon seems again to be offering the magic machine as an antidote to his earlier work’s inevitable mixture of women and film with the sadistic and pornographic. Has Pynchon truly staged Dally’s career as a corrective to his earlier work, as I have claimed throughout? A rather clear indication that he has occurs in the street scene that directly follows Dally’s communicating with Merle. Walking through Montparnasse, she is greeted by “a pretty young woman in trousers” who turns out to be La Jarretière, the ballerina star of L’Enlèvement des Vierges Chinoises (The Rape of the Chinese Virgins) in V. There, as Mélanie l’Heuremaudit, she becomes the sexual plaything of V., and in a gruesome ending, she forgets to wear a safety apparatus and is impaled through the vagina. La Jarretière indicts the scene as a

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product of the “eternally-adolescent male mind”: “Grand Guignol. They came to see blood. We used the . . . raspberry syrup. [. . .] A young beauty destroyed before her time, something the eternally-adolescent male mind could tickle itself with” (1066). Stephen Hock points out that we should associate the phrase with both the Pynchon of V. and the eternally adolescent Chums. They are at this point just twenty pages away from seemingly escaping their book time and going through a ritual—marriage and copulation—traditionally associated with the climax of novelistic bildung.44 A distinctive form of maturation is being marked out here, for his characters, for his readers, and for Pynchon himself. “Mon Dieu! [. . .] que les hommes sont bêtes!” (My God, men are stupid!), sings La Jarretière, and as Dally (who is already friends with her) joins in, “singing the harmony,” an image emerges of Pynchon trying to harmonize his early and late career, implicitly arguing that both portrayals have been attacks on a rapacious male culture—but that the latter character’s fullness of voice should redeem the sadistic and pornographic excesses in which his portrait of the former participated. Inherent Vice confirms that this is not a sea change in Pynchon’s portrayal of female characters, that it is brought about by the specific historical circumstances (and generic circumstances, McHale’s argument in this volume suggests) from which Dally is drawn. But history and genre, Pynchon shows in Against the Day, can change— and seemingly can change with the level of an artist’s skill, as it goes beyond a youthful reliance on “Grand Guignol” tactics. In 1963, Pynchon felt compelled to portray a virginal girl being raped and killed by the inanimate as proof that modernity had destroyed cyclical renewal on the eve of war. More than forty years later, he shows us another young performing woman—not bounded by the identity of “Venus” or “White Goddess”—who has survived this war and magically resurrected that first character. La Jarretière bursting from the pages of a book into—well, the pages of another book, but in such a way that we think of her as newly alive—should turn us again to the Chums, who seem by the novel’s end to have gone from a fictional timelessness to a realistic time line of aging.45 We might even see the opening narrator’s humorous admonitions regarding his previous Chums of Chance books and readers’ “displeasure, often quite intense,” being mirrored in this rewriting of Pynchon’s earlier work—work often accused, especially by women readers, of being in a “boy’s book” genre in a different sense (117). But while the Chums’ entry into “the real” may strike readers as artificial, unmotivated, or simply inexplicable, La Jarretière’s own leap is helped along by the harmonizing presence of Dally, who has inhabited a “real” world more fully than perhaps any previous Pynchon character. We see Dally refracted by La Jarretière—and, Pynchon hopes, vice versa. Both women are also, importantly, artists who will go on creating,

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reading up (in Dally’s case) for each new portrayal. Such women will not necessarily embody the abstractions—spiritual, economic, aesthetic, pornographic—they are instructed to by their (male) handlers or (male) creator. Rather, they will persevere, ride it out, go on being bodies as well as embodiments.

NOTES 1. Thomas Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49, 2. 2. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 3. 3. Ibid., 166. 4. On pilgrimage as the most accurate generic descriptor for Against the Day, see Amy J. Elias’s contribution to this volume. 5. David Cowart, “Continuity and Growth,” 187. 6. Pynchon, Vineland, 383, 260. DL (from her name on) seems especially akin to Dally. Both are tough women entangled in sexual markets and white slavery: Dally in Venice and with Crouchmas, DL with her rigged “sale,” by way of Ralph Wayvone, to Brock Vond. Both trade in pop cultural heroics: Dally wears a revolver and can shoot like Annie Oakley (303–04); DL has her ninjette skills. And both have a measure of revenge against their male oppressors: Dally by uncovering the records of Crouchmas’s international dealings, DL by rescuing Frenesi from Vond’s detention camp. 7. See Molly Hite, “Feminist Theory”; Stacey Olster, “When You’re a (Nin)jette”; Julie Christine Sears, “Black and White Rainbows.” 8. Laura Miller succinctly assesses the gender politics of Inherent Vice in her review: “Pynchon depicts women and sexuality with all the depth and nuance of a 14-year-old who has acquired his entire knowledge of these subjects from the dirty jokes printed on vintage novelty cocktail napkins.” I cannot disagree. See “Pynchon Lights Up,” n.p. 9. Laura Hapke notes that women were called to work outside the home in great numbers as early as the Civil War, filling in for the loss of a half-million soldiers. While industrialization and growing cities increased the female workforce in the 1870s and 1880s, nearly “4 million—close to 20 percent of all American women, a sizeable increase over the number of 10 years before—were by 1890 what the Census Bureau classed as ‘gainfully employed,’” Hapke writes in Tales of the Working Girl, 1–2. On women’s views of themselves as workers and strikers in the American West, see Elizabeth Jameson, “Women as Workers.” 10. R. Tudur Jones, Arthur Long, Rosemary Moore, Protestant Nonconformist Texts, 169. 11. In 1977 John Krafft set the basic terms for Puritanism-based readings of Pynchon and preterition in “‘And How Far-Fallen.’” See also the essay by Krzysztof Piekarski, Martin Kevorkian, and Elisabeth McKetta in this volume for further claims about the distinctive nature of preterition in Against the Day. 12. Henry Adams, The Education, 379. 13. Ibid., 387, 384.

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14. Judith Chambers, Thomas Pynchon, 46. 15. Ibid., 192, 184. 16. Christopher K. Coffman, in his essay in this volume, thoroughly treats Dally and Yashmeen in terms of spiritual and mythological allusions, including those to Persephone and Eurydice. 17. Dreiser’s novel covers the years 1889 to the mid-1890s. The Pynchon Wiki (“Against the Day 336–357,” http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/ wiki/index.php?title=ATD_336-357; accessed August 1, 2009) makes a connection between Dally and Carrie but erroneously states that Dally arrives in New York in 1900, the exact year of Sister Carrie’s publication. Since we are told two rival white-slave simulation groups had been “fighting in earnest since around 1900,” and since Dally—if about five in 1893—would be only about twelve in 1900, the actual year is likely at least a few years later (340). Another part of the Pynchon Wiki (“Timeline,” http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ index.php?title=Timeline; accessed August 1, 2009) claims it is 1903, which seems about right. 18. Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 301. 19. Cathy N. and Arnold E. Davidson, “Carrie’s Sisters,” 396. 20. Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, 38. 21. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents, 94–95. Denning also cautions against seeing dime novels simply as working-class cultural artifacts, though, since so many were written from a middle-class perspective (104–05). 22. Davidson and Davidson, “Carrie’s Sisters,” 395. This historicizing attention to the generic enriches the more salient critical attempt to read Sister Carrie as a centerpiece of nineteenth-century American texts’ exhaustive symbolic meditations on capitalist economy, whether in Walter Benn Michaels’s assertion that Carrie’s sexuality “turns out to be a kind of biological equivalent to capitalism” or Jackson Lears’s reading of Carrie as a prototypical consumer, in whom is visible the “desire” for goods missing from accounts of American cities—desire “for sensuous pleasure and luxury.” See Michaels, The Gold Standard, 57; and Lears, “American Longing,” 63. 23. See McHale’s essay in this volume for an account of Pynchon’s “genrepoaching.” For another early summary of poached genres that leaves out the working-girl novel, see John Clute’s review, “Aubade, Poor Dad,” 285. 24. See McHale, this volume. 25. David Nasaw, Going Out, 200–02. 26. See McHale, this volume. 27. Michael Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, 239–66. 28. The cliché “down-to-earth” is appropriate here: Dally’s “voice was hard to pin down to any one American place,” Pynchon writes, “more of a trail voice with turns and drops to it, reminders of towns you thought you’d forgotten” (298). 29. Elmus Wicker, Banking Panics, 81. 30. Merle resembles Zoyd Wheeler in Vineland, who (also a would-be artist) ekes out an existence on government mental disability payments and work as a journeyman carpenter, while raising a daughter abandoned by her mother. Along with Pynchon’s new approach to female characters a new set of options for patriarchal and masculine behavior arises, in both emotional and political terms. Merle

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and Zoyd read as harbingers of the fluid, apparently resentment-free improvisation of family that marks the end of the Traverse brothers’ wandering. 31. Pynchon, “Introduction” to Stone Junction, xiii–xiv. 32. Nicholas Spencer, After Utopia, 146. 33. Pynchon, Vineland, 255. 34. On the preference for “order and congruity” in Beaux Arts, see M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, 47–48. 35. Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 16. 36. Alan Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 131, 133. 37. Trachtenberg notes that by the 1890s Macy’s and Marshall Fields “employed small armies of sales and stock and office workers, predominantly women” (134) and writes of how the department store reflected industrial bureaucratization with a proliferation of clerks: “Increasingly the realm of women workers, the category of ‘clerical’ in the 1900 census showed a threefold increase in size since 1870, embracing a range of jobs such as bookkeepers, cashiers, bill collectors, stenographers, typists, secretaries, telephone operators” (135). 38. Spencer, After Utopia, 142. 39. Notably, adept entered English via the Latin adeptus, an alchemical term meaning one who has learned the secret of transmuting metals. Dally truly is carrying on her father’s magical work, though in more effective terms. 40. See Dalsgaard’s essay, this volume. 41. Pynchon, “Introduction” to Stone Junction, xii. 42. See Terry Reilly’s essay, in this volume, for the claim that Against the Day, as focalized through the work of Tesla, is all about alternative inventions, including those that allow for communication with the dead. 43. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 397. 44. Stephen Hock, “‘Eternally-Adolescent Male Mind.’” 45. For varying readings of this absolutely key transformation, see, in this volume, the essays by Elias; Piekarski, Kevorkian, and McKetta; and Dalsgaard.

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S Europe’s “Eastern Question” and the United States’ “Western Question”: Representing Ethnic Wars in Against the Day J. Paul Narkunas

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homas Pynchon’s Against the Day is a chaotic book of shifting characters, technologies, and spatiotemporal realities that spans the historical period roughly from the 1890s to just after World War I via the Balkan Wars (1912–13), Mexican Revolution (1910–20), and various labor insurrections in the western United States. The text reimagines modernity and modernism on a global scale to offer a rigorous analysis of failed possibilities and historical contingencies for a world that could have been. Pynchon specifically addresses the following dilemma counterfactually: What does it mean for a nation to remain a question? Against the Day dramatizes various unresolved “national questions” in the period leading up to World War I when states were consolidating “peoples” within their territories into nations and citizenries that they governed in the Balkans, Central Asia (on the cusp of oil discovery in Baku), and the Americas (Mexico and the western United States). In the latter case, the text depicts the United States’ dynamic dance of flexible sovereignty: simultaneously consolidating and edifying its geographic and political borders with Mexico and acknowledging the closing of the American frontier. At the same time, waves of immigrants to the United States needed for their cheap labor and their compression of wages offered complex problems of policing: how to regulate multilinguistic, multicultural, and multiethnic humans while leaving capital unregulated? Pynchon’s counterfactual 239

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histories in Against the Day draw insightful global political, historical, and economic comparisons between the Balkans and the American West. By staging the practices of the European Great Powers in its mythical civilizational other, the Balkans, and of U.S. capitalism in the American West, Pynchon reimagines the very logic of nationalism. Two historical “questions” of inchoate political identities, therefore— one eastern, one western—are at the heart of my analysis. First, let me take up the East. In southeastern Europe, also known as the Balkans, in the period Pynchon covers, various nationalist movements were striving to create identities from below against domineering, often remote colonial forces in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution and the reorganization of the nation-state system brokered at Westphalia in 1648. The Great Powers of Austria, Britain, and Russia were experiencing “blowback,” as Austria’s seizure of Bosnia and the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 left the entire region’s stability under the Ottoman Empire untenable. This was particularly apparent in the region of Macedonia, a contested space of Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Ottoman nationalist ambitions with a diverse population that was seeking its own liberation through competing nationalist movements, including the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and the Macedonian Supreme Committee in Sofia. Indeed, as Pynchon writes, “It was a commonplace among Balkan hands that if one was keeping an eye on liberation movements, and looking for members to turn double-agent and betray their own, the South Slavic populations would provide slim pickings, if any at all. Nationalists and revolutionaries here actually believed in what they were doing” (829). As a result of the proliferation of nationalist ambitions, the “Macedonian Question”—also commonly known as the “Eastern Question”—became one of the most vexing diplomatic issues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), the Treaties of San Stefano (May 1878) and Berlin (July 1878) divided up the region according to the balance-of-power ambitions of the British, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. The ethnic, linguistic, religious, and/or national consciousness of the human collectivities in the region, while nominally recognized through minority treaties, required protection by often distant imperial protectorates. Consequently, Britain, Russia, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottomans supported factions within inchoate nationalist movements to discipline and control peasant nationalisms and foster client states, thereby destabilizing the region and frustrating the political-economic ambitions of competing European powers. Macedonia was the bargaining chip of these 1878 treaties: the region was transferred to Bulgaria, Serbia, and the Turks within a four-month period, with massive population displacements or simply mass death occurring with every such transfer. The Balkan region raised difficult national ques-

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tions: how were several unified national populations to be created amid multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural, and multilinguistic populations as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated? Against the Day turns to the “Eastern Question” and the subsequent Balkan Wars to demonstrate how imperial forces, often unattached to centralized governments or states, regulate humans by actively fostering genocidal racial and ethnic struggles in order to maintain their power. They create and legitimate a world of ethnic intelligibility that has little to do with the “actually existing” people. This essay thus probes the “Eastern Question” as Pynchon portrays it to show how nations, states, and empires shift power from concepts of politics and economics to the biological ones of race and ethnicity that are paradoxically legitimated by religion, to justify an economic redistribution of resources and wealth. Differing factions deploy religious belief as coterminous with ethnic identity to consolidate their power through the negation or annihilation of religious or ethnic others. Yet this is only one half of Against the Day’s daring act of parallelism. Pynchon creates a fascinating historical convergence between the “Eastern Question” and the United States’ consolidation of capital and state in its western territory, what I will call the United States’ “Western Question.” It marks the vanishing frontier later mythologized by the political figurations of Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.1 Roosevelt’s noble, self-reliant, and individualist cowboys, miraculously willing to risk their lives to protect their bosses’ private property, as dramatized in The Virginian, become entangled in what Pynchon calls the “capitalist/Christer gridwork” (1083) of the United States. After the Spanish-American War and colonial occupation of the Philippines, the United States sought to expand its territorial frontier farther west into East Asia.2 Western frontier mythology served, moreover, to regulate various flows of immigrant workers who became increasingly ethnically and nationally marked as foreigners and “un-American”—precisely when they demanded higher wages. Indeed, ethnicity became all the more visible in the United States with each economic demand, and the association of immigrant workers with anarchism exacerbated the situation. As Alan Trachtenberg contends, the worker in America was converted, in effect, into “a foreigner” in relationship to the so-called natives, embodied by Anglo-Saxon elites who monopolized wealth and political power in the Gilded Age.3 Against the Day shows how this collapse of class into ethnicity galvanized both a theological argument and a religious war, culminating in a public-private partnership for putting down labor insurrections in the United States. Indeed, Pynchon shows how religion and ethnicity were visible sites in U.S. politics that became intertwined. By blurring religion and ethnicity, elites could then mobilize racism and ethnocentrism

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to justify the killing of certain populations in the name of religious good while destroying the possibility of peoples’ organizing along class lines. Thus the politicization of ethnicity so central to many inchoate nationalist movements, from the consolidation of Greece, Italy, and Poland to the rise of Germany, figured prominently in both the Balkans and Anglo-Saxon discourse in the United States, though in different ways.4 In Europe, the promise of nationalism drew together previously disparate forces and peoples who coexisted in a given terrain to organize against a colonial occupier. But in the United States, the roles were reversed: the European settlers solidified their citizenship through the annihilation of ethnic others, Native Americans and Mexicans. Thereafter, citizenship in the United States became a product of a contract that did not have ethnicity as its centralizing identity but instead relied on the ambiguous Herderian concept of “national character” for its modus operandi. At the same time, U.S. citizenship deployed anti-Semitism, anticommunism, and racism to incite and direct hostility toward an “ethnic” enemy within. Following Pynchon, I contend that the centralizing state of the federalist system emerged in the United States between the 1880s and World War I by focusing on a political and counterintuitive “ethnic cleansing” of the population of anarchists, who replaced the Native Americans as the enemy within that had to be extirpated to strengthen the nation. This culminated, in the events leading up to and including World War I, in the emergence of an increasingly racialized and ethnicized national subjecthood that defined the misnomer of U.S. “national character.”

CONSOLIDATION OF FORCE AND COUNTERFORCE: THE STATE Pynchon is no historicist and therefore depicts U.S. history as not limited by national space and time. Paul Bové has argued that his novels are contrapuntal histories of the United States, wherein Pynchon thinks through the chaos of time through the novel form.5 Pynchon demonstrates the possibility of several imaginative worlds, including the concept of multiple subjectivities and temporalities, in order to challenge historical concepts of nation and state as delimited territories with shared time and coherent national histories.6 His substantial research highlights how histories frequently flow beyond any state borders, challenging renderings that situate history within national space and time. Characters throughout Against the Day are doubled and mirrored to disturb further this national space-time, and therefore the theme of bilocation figures prominently.7 Bilocation entails being in two places at one time and perpetually crossing temporal thresholds of past, present, and future. As a concept, bilocation thus critiques the territorial and temporal fixing of the nation-state,

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of literary genre, and of the sovereign subject so essential to concepts of citizenship.8 Against the Day accordingly mixes revenge and adventure, among many other genres, as the story follows Webb Traverse in the Colorado mountains, a traveling foreman for mining companies who keeps losing his job when he tries to organize laborers. Webb’s double is the Kieselghur Kid, an industrial saboteur who dynamites the power and railroad lines of the mine owners. Pynchon’s unraveling of characters through bilocation, specifically through multiple personas, also figures in his critique of lineage, carried out through his depiction of the main set of characters, the Traverse family. Webb’s offspring, Kit, Frank, Reef, and Lake, while united biologically within the family, show no special indebtedness to their father or their national history, or consistency in character (national or otherwise). For example, Lake marries her father’s immediate assassin, while Kit’s education is sponsored by the man who ordered his father killed, Scarsdale Vibe. Vibe, a mixture of Rockefeller and Westinghouse, is a self-appointed member of the U.S. Elect in Against the Day. He assigns his economic interests as the sovereign goals of the United States, as the virtual embodiment of the U.S. national character. Yet Vibe is a cipher for the consolidation of capital and power around which Reef, Frank, and Kit revolve in their frustrated efforts to kill him and avenge their father, for reasons of economics rather than blood. Against the Day thus dramatizes in its content and form how capital and power serve as the motors of history and narrative and produce or co-opt peoples and states, even bilocated ones. As a consequence of such interests, Pynchon does not chart nation-states as sovereign legal entities that command or direct force in the name of national identities, and to whom citizens can turn for protection. Instead, he highlights contested forces, as well as specific elements monopolizing or deploying force on a regional or national scale through a sense of perpetual threat—that is, the “permanent siege” of war generalized in the creation of society.9 Pynchon illustrates this tendency early in the text through a rival band of boy adventurers to the Chums of Chance, the Garcons de ’71, who were formed during the 1871 siege of Paris, when balloons were the only way to get supplies to the Communards: “As the ordeal went on, it became clear to certain of these balloonists, observing from above and poised ever upon a cusp of mortal danger, how much the Modern State depended for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege—through the systematic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities like those of the infamous pétroleurs of Paris” (19). The Garcons de ’71—who offer, as do all the balloonists in Against the Day, a celestial perspective on the machinations of the land of nations—now refuse to work with any national or state forces on the

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ground, instead floating “far above fortress walls and national boundaries” while “feeding the hungry, sheltering the sick and persecuted” (20). The Garcons de ’71 represent an alternative to the Hobbesian war without end that is waged, on the one hand, against enemies perceived to threaten the state from outside (in the United States, Native Americans, Mexicans, and later Germans, Russians, Vietnamese, and so forth) and, on the other, against internal, unassimilated immigrants whose very existence threatens the state’s ability to reproduce itself. Indeed, internal threats foster a state of perpetual siege from racial, ethnic, or economic difference, a state that can only end with the consolidation of difference into sameness by limiting who could be considered a member of the population, in both the western United States and the Balkans. Michel Foucault describes the power over life, biopower, as the flexible techniques of normalizing ways of life concomitant with modernity. Biopower is instructive for thinking through Against the Day, particularly its focus on how war creates society.10 Regulatory processes, for Foucault, dictate how human life should be conducted or lived, but also how it is recognized and what forms of life are worthy of protection within the population. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault diagnoses how biopower normalizes a state of struggle or war, the coalescence of forces that are deployed in what he calls the “microphysics” of power when sovereign states and legal orders are themselves in flux. Racism plays a special anthropogenetic role in this arrangement, establishing a hierarchy of populations that should be allowed to live in a political order while rendering others expendable. The disposable can be driven to a reservation, township, labor camp, or extrajuridical zone, where their life can be killed without legal and ethical recourse. For Foucault, the anthropomorphic order defines the human as species through greater specification of knowledge. He writes: What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological-type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat . . . the species [as a mixture of races], to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races.11

Thus, Foucault shows us, racism and ethnocentrism fragment the idea of the human species to generate a hierarchy of life where none should exist.

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In a similar way, Scarsdale Vibe deploys racism and ethnocentrism throughout Against the Day to establish a social structure of human life with corporations and their captains of industry at the self-anointed top. According to Trachtenberg, Anglo-Protestant populations in the United States monopolized money and thereby established themselves as the norm of “citizen,” ushering in a hierarchy of forms of life during the Gilded Age that were measured through ethnicity and religion. Vibe’s address to the “Industrial Defense Alliance” indicates how the Elect use immigrant workers in the United States: 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 are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture of the race? We take what we can while we may. [. . .] We will buy it all up, [. . .] all this country. Money speaks, the land listens. (1000–01)

Vibe’s speech is reminiscent of the social Darwinist hierarchy put forward in Andrew Carnegie’s 1900 “Gospel of Wealth.”12 In short, AngloProtestants had greater access to citizenship, and the new immigrants from southern Europe could not be properly assimilated, given the dominant religious-ethnic determination to “further the culture of the race.” The striking worker, demanding higher wages, was one form of life that needed to be incorporated or vanquished from the face of the earth. According to Carnegie and Vibe, the Elect—chosen by a joint venture between God and nature—effectively make what used to be the sovereign decision of kings and governments: who lives or dies. In sum, Pynchon and Foucault critically analyze how exercising power entails the creation and policing of the population by (in Foucault’s terms) making certain forms of life live and letting others die. Death is the outside of biopower because power cannot manage it; consequently, life and the species become the primary site for exercising control.13 As a result of these processes, the institutional powers of the state (schools and so forth) are merely one part of a fluctuating network of economic, social, and political power relations marking and policing the limits of the population, a web of relations Foucault calls “govern-mentality,” a mentality to govern, which Vibe’s social Darwinism embodies. Foucault’s later work on governmentality highlights the role of economic liberalism, especially neoliberal economics, in the art of governing and in the production and policing of the population.14

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The corporation is one of the privileged sites in Against the Day that produce and reproduce society in concert with the state. Pynchon documents the rise of the corporate element and neoliberal economics in the United States, forces protected by the state and yet destructive of the state’s sovereign power. He demonstrates how corporations have played a central governing role. Corporations in fact exercise the sovereign function of governments and monopolize power in the United States, deciding how and what members of the population can work and thereby how they live and when they die. Specifically, Pynchon creates a scene where a debate takes place among several nameless and faceless members of the Elect at the Explorers’ Club. They reflect on what would happen if another form of life—such as corporations—would use humans like dogs: “Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what’s the next step—human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood—a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is” (147–48). Pynchon may be referring directly here to the 1886 Supreme Court decision of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which took the Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection of freed slaves and conferred it on corporations. Corporations have equal rights as all legal persons do; they govern de facto and de jure and are a “new species” that usurps the rights of humans at the crux of modernity. Corporations exercise governmentality; they have given themselves the right to govern and suggest a raison d’etat that puts their economic interests in line with that of the sovereign nation-state. Pynchon emphasizes this corporatist governing function most concretely through the railroads’ production of the modern U.S. state and the concentration of wealth and poverty. Indeed, the railroads were the primary forces exercising the power to govern, as well as mark out, territorialize, and divide, the nation.15 They rationally dissected the nation through an interconnected web of transportation to allow for the movement of goods and people. For Pynchon, the railroads carve lines through the land, putting ever greater swaths of it under their control while expropriating the labor needed to create them and, furthermore, causing the financial panics of 1873 and 1893: the railroad “penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers [. . .] who ruled with unchecked power” (930). The railroads ruled “with unchecked power” because they exercised governmentality while having greater resources than the U.S. government at the time. As I will discuss later, the railroads thus had a fundamental role in the events leading to World War I.16

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RAILROADED: INCORPORATION AND GOVERNING Pynchon stages decentralizing statist forces—Foucault’s governmentality—early in Against the Day through the exploits of the Chums of Chance as they travel to the White City, the 1893 Chicago Exposition. The Chums of Chance, whose very name highlights the contingent nature of human relationships, are doubled characters, for while they participate in the diegetic “real world” as balloonists frequently subcontracted by sovereign governments for spying, they are also self-consciously fictional characters whose exploits are “documented” in a popular series of boys’ adventure novels. They are sent by a mysterious home office to the World’s Fair to enter into a contract to spy on labor movements with White City Investigations, a private detective agency, militia, and rival to the Pinkerton Detective Agency (we hear of “[the] Pinkerton[s], who, having assumed American Anarchism was their own personal cookie jar, wondered how an upstart like White City dared aspire to more than crumbs” (51)). The significance of Pynchon’s beginning Against the Day at the White City should not be overlooked. It was the architectural symbol of republican virtue and the imperial subjugation of others by the Roman and Greek empires, in whose spirit the U.S. claimed to continue. Furthermore, as Pynchon notes, at the 1893 World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his frontier thesis to the American Historical Association, ascribing the uniqueness of America to its invention of “citizenry” through western expansion, which fostered rugged individualism through encounters with the harsh natural environment.17 Ironically, Turner proposed this thesis precisely when the West had been fully colonized and the subjugation of the native peoples, through genocide or confinement in reservations, was complete. These native peoples were seemingly excluded from what Turner hailed as the status of the rugged individualist.18 Moreover, the privatization of public land on the western frontier, in the wake of the Homestead Act of 1862, would result in the greater concentration of wealth and the rise of large corporate farms and ranches.19 Pace Karl Marx, the real subsumption of slavery by wage slavery usurped the gentleman farmer and plucky individualist of the Homestead Act.20 White City Investigations also comments on the Pinkertons and the rise of private detective agencies, militias, and national guards in the place of organs of centralized, sovereign state governments. According to the historian Anders Stephanson, the Pinkerton Detective Agency was larger than the U.S. Army and known for its efficiency in breaking strikes.21 After the Homestead Strike of 1886, the Pinkertons became renowned for prompting violence from strikers in order to legitimate their repressive responses to riots. While such events would result in atrocities against strikers and calls for government regulations, the Congressional Oversight

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Commission determined that it would enact no legislation to curb these privatized armies but would rather leave it to the discretion of states to decide.22 Companies funded their own privatized militias through agencies akin to the Pinkertons, who themselves were hired by the U.S. government when necessary.23 For example, the Pinkertons were the model for the Federal Bureau of Investigation when it was established.24 (It should be noted further that the Pinkertons were hired to police Abraham Lincoln’s preinaugural train ride from Chicago to Washington, D.C., a voyage recreated by Barack Obama in 2009, now with a professional national militia, the Secret Service.) Throughout the nineteenth century, as a result of a fear of a standing army, hostility to a centralized government, and faith in the free market, security, basic policing, and military work were often outsourced to privatized entities. As a result, the National Guard Association was financed not by the federalist state but by prominent businessmen, who funded armories to control the supply of weaponry and supplement the weak U.S. Army.25 In sum, the military in this era was decentralized, a private-public venture hired by the state until the Militia Act of 1903.26 There was no concerted effort to found a unified federal military until the National Defense Act of 1920 established the Army of the United States, which comprised the army, the organized reserve corps, and the National Guard (when called into federal service). Scarsdale Vibe, who made his fortune betting on Standard Oil and the railroads, is not alone in his governing; nor is he isolated to U.S. territory, as his investments make him a veritable transnational corporation. Pynchon takes readers, therefore, all over the world, through Central Asia and the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), to show more and more of the world being conducted within states or by corporations, guided by the railroads. The specter of World War I haunts the entire text because it is the “illogical” outcome of all this rationalization via the railroad: it was Austro-Hungarian aspirations for a railroad to monopolize trade in the area that set in motion the events leading to war. In southeastern Europe, the Austro-Hungarian seizure of Bosnia in 1908 to facilitate the creation of the railroad destroyed the arrangements of power promulgated by the Treaty of Berlin. Moreover, the railroads would shepherd people, munitions, and supplies to the various eastern and western fronts of World War I, facilitating the mass slaughter. As an unnamed character anonymously overheard speaking on a city square says: “Vienna must no longer be content with drifting along ‘occupying’ us as it has since 1878, bringing us the blessings of Austrian progress—railroads, prostitution, horrible furniture—.” A second voice chimes in, “Jesuit operatives everywhere trying to turn us all Catholic.” The first continues, “—yet till now it was all delusion, a sort of gentle madness, for we remained a

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part of Turkey, as we have always been.” The second replies, “And now Austria’s harmless phantasy has become acute suicidal mania. The ‘annexation’ is a Habsburg death-warrant” (826). Indeed, throughout Against the Day, states seem driven by a suicidal mania to exercise power regardless of consequences, even if it may destroy the precarious arrangement of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, English control of Greece, and Russian dominion over Bulgaria.27 The anarchist spa at Yz-les-Bains is one of the few zones that counter this system of governmentality heading toward mass death. The anarchists are paradoxically trying to organize an international movement against the corporations, which are themselves rather anarchistic (they never saw a state they liked, except when they needed to be bailed out).28 Interestingly, this spa has become a space to congregate and hide out for the broken flotsam of revolutions, for disaffected former spies, and for members of the True Worshippers of Ineffable Tetractys collective (T.W.I.T., a covert spiritual-mathematical group). The anarchists spend their days playing anarchist golf, which has no fixed sequence or number of holes. The British spy Ratty McHugh has chanced upon a map of the Belgian Congo that is in fact a code for the Balkans and indicates what the Great Powers are planning in the region. The map itself is bilocated and fluctuating, representing two separate realities by the transposition of forms, but also, according to one declaration written on it, “Having failed to learn [. . .] that pleasures would have to be paid for in later years again and again, [. . .] thus has the Belgian Congo descended into its destiny” (937). (This may be a Pynchonian aside on the fractured situation that would emerge in the Belgian Congo in the 1940s, as well as the genocidal aftereffects in “postcolonial” Rwanda of the 1990s.) After looking at the map and its configurations of force and ruling, Cyprian and Reef interject that it could be of “Bosnia” or “South Texas” (935). In sum, the map is a dynamic metaphor for land grabs that monopolize resources, regardless of the displacement or mass killing of peoples. Thus, although it is supposed to represent the Balkans, McHugh’s fluctuating map indicates that the very same colonial and political structure for “ethnic others” may indeed be in place around the globe, regardless of the specificity of culture, religion, language, and ethnic or racial makeup. The South Texas reference could, for example, indicate the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded more than a million hectares of land to the United States after the Mexican-American War. Later attempts by Mexico to recapture this land, led by Pancho Villa, resulted in Woodrow Wilson’s using 158,000 members of the U.S. National Guard to patrol the border in 1916, a set of incidents suggested in Pynchon’s text. This training would prove essential when those very same troops were sent to fight in Europe for the United States in World War I. According to McHugh’s

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analysis, on the cusp of World War I, the map depicts the very crisis of the nation-state: Today even the dimmest of capitalists can see that the centralized nationstate, so promising an idea a generation ago, has lost all credibility with the population. Anarchism is now the idea that has seized hearts everywhere, some form of it will come to envelop every centrally governed society—unless government has already become irrelevant through, say, family arrangements like the Balkan zadruga. If a nation wants to preserve itself, what other steps can it take, but mobilize and go to war? Central governments were never designed for peace. [. . .] The national idea depends on war. (938)

The use of war to create friction between peoples destabilizes alternative arrangements such as anarchism or the extended family ties of the zadruga, both of which were challenging the sovereign nation-state leading up to World War I. As the Ottoman Empire fragmented as a result of events on the ground, the European powers saw that the only way to put the pieces back together was to consolidate their interests through a state of generalized war, pitting emerging national entities against each other in a contested terrain, be it Serbs against Turks, Serbs against Bulgarians, or other conflicts. As a result, such wars between nations were also ethnic and religious wars that established a divide between good and evil, us and them, civilized and barbaric, edifying a structure of governance essential to human organization and granting conflicts an intelligibility they would otherwise not have had.29

CREATING AND POLICING THE BALKANS: EASTERN QUESTIONS To probe these historical processes in the Balkans further requires a brief excursion into the knotty history of the region, or, as one of Pynchon’s characters, Professor P. Jotham Renfrew, puts it, “[The] 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” (689). Pynchon shows an encyclopedic awareness of the events leading up to World War I in the Balkans, as well as the region’s prehistory as a European chess piece. Indeed, commentary on understanding World War I beyond Western European history is common in the last three hundred pages of Pynchon’s text. While speaking to Cyprian Latewood, a British secret service agent, Danilo Ashkil, a potential double agent, notes Europe’s universalizing tendency, despite its regional provincialism: “What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Differ-

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ent sorts of Christian killing each other, and that’s about it. 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” (828). In other words, an Elect in Western Europe makes decisions about the lives of peoples in southeastern Europe, and, as I show later, this procedure of managing the region from a distance was not isolated to the nineteenth century. Throughout the majority of the Ottoman Empire’s six hundred years of rule, most humans in the region defined themselves in term of religious beliefs or economic necessity rather than in modern romantic terms of culture, language, or inchoate national identity. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire was a theological order, premised on the centralized figure of the sultan, whose empire as late as the sixteenth century drew admiration from Renaissance thinkers for its organization, in comparison to the anarchistic and disorganized Christian armies. Because the Ottomans determined their system through religion rather than the secular imaginations of nationalism, inchoate nationalist movements in the region frequently had religious and economic overtones. The sultan’s vast empire was organized at both a local and a regional level through the millet system, which in turn funneled money up to the sultan. The millet system allowed for religious autonomy with the understanding that non-Muslims (Jews and Christians) were taxed at a higher rate and, much as with blacks in Jim Crow America, had less access to the full force of the law.30 In this system, Muslims were granted the primary positions of power; however, religious conversion took place for obvious economic reasons rather than any system of belief. Through the millet system, the sultan and porte used Christian priests to extract their own levies as a way to do business efficiently in the Ottoman Empire. The system also led to abuse of a colossal order, as every single functionary along the hierarchy fed from the trough. As a result, many of the peasants viewed both religious Islam and the Orthodox Church suspiciously, and yet they needed something to believe in to assuage the precariousness of their lives.31 The Orthodox Church served a dual function, however: it united differing peoples against a dominant Muslim hierarchy but also separated peoples by language. Indeed, as many scholars of nationalism have argued, national identities emerge in negation of other peoples who reside in proximity, compete for resources, and do not speak the same dialect or linguistic register.32 Mark Mazower argues that the dominant language among the educated and religious classes in the Ottoman Empire had been Greek, which, like Latin in medieval Europe, was the lingua franca of Christianity within the Empire.33 Nevertheless, Serbian and Bulgarian languages and national consciousnesses emerged to compete not only

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with Islam but also with Greek national and linguistic hegemony. Only with the nineteenth century and the precedents of Napoleon, the U.S. and French revolutions, modern romantic ideologies, economic modernization, and, most pertinently, the creation of the centralized Italian nation-state, did nationalism gain a foothold with the very impoverished peasantry.34 Nationalism was tied primarily to economic modernization, which the Ottoman Empire stifled through its expropriation of tariffs. In sum, the material needs of elites were the basis of nationalism, rather than some faith in an overarching national or religious consciousness. Inchoate nationalisms in Macedonia, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Serbia, and Albania were, nevertheless, reconfigured, in Europeans’ thinking, as the effect of systematic “Balkan irrationalities” based in colonization by an Islamic empire. Mazower, Misha Glenny, and Maria Todorova have all argued that the “Balkans” is a European construct, a figure that only gained prominence in the European imagination in the 1880s.35 The term employed a geographical feature, a mountain range previously known as Haemus, to define numerous multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious populations that coexisted in the region under the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, what had previously been called “Turkey in Europe” represented an “other” to European minds, an entity that had been under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire and Islam for centuries. The “Balkans” thus became reconfigured by the Great Powers as a space of savagery to the east of Europe, creating an East-West divide. The concept was legitimated by selective history and identification of the “East” as barbarous because of its rule by a non-Christian people, along with anachronistic claims of Slavic hordes, despite the fall of the Roman Empire several hundred years before. Furthermore, religious arguments like the East-West Schism, also known as the Great Schism, depicted the Greek Orthodox Church as an eastern frontier of savagery and barbarism. Independent nations in the region, including Serbia and Greece in the late nineteenth century, were often very weak and could only survive the Ottoman army if they were protected by larger clients among the Great Powers—Russia in Serbia (against the Austrians) and the British in Greece (to frustrate Russia). As Pynchon’s character Ashkil claims, “Now imagine a history referred not to London, Paris, Berlin, or St. Petersburg but to Constantinople. The war between Turkey and Russia becomes the crucial war of the nineteenth century” (828). Nationalism in the region was thus exacerbated by the politics of the European powers in the region after the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. Pynchon exposes the situation through a conversation between British operatives: “Well, Turkey has been in Bosnia for nearly five hundred years. It is a Mahommedan country, in fact a Turkish province. It was a staging area for the Turks on their way to the Siege of Vienna [1529], and of course Vienna never forgot that. Thirty years ago

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Austria finally had its revenge. The infamous Article 25 of the Treaty of Berlin took Bosnia away from Turkey and put it under Austrian ‘protection’ [. . .] The understanding was that one day Austria would leave, and Turkey would re-establish herself [. . .]” (809). The Treaty of Berlin negotiated the peace after the Russo-Turkish War and often neglected even to entertain delegates from the region.36 While Serbia gained greater national sovereignty and territory in the region after 1878, other nations were restored to the umbrella of the Ottomans (Bulgaria, Macedonia) or bestowed to the Austro-Hungarian empires (Bosnia). The population of Bosnia was primarily Muslim and became a protectorate of Catholic Austria. In realpolitik terms, the Ottoman Empire functioned as a client state for the Austro-Hungarians and British to counteract Russia’s ambitions in the region. Indeed, the Ottomans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were heavily indebted to Britain, France, and the AustroHungarians. Most of the major military officers in the Ottoman Empire were Austrians. Russia’s client state, Bulgaria, operated as another front in this conflict, as did the nationalist ambitions of the Serbs, who, following the example of Italy (that is, the Piedmontese uniting all of Italy), wanted to create a pan-Slavic nation with Serbs dominating it. As a balance to Russia’s ambitions in the region (they eyed Constantinople as a trading route), Britain and France negotiated a return of Thrace (presentday southern Bulgaria) and the present-day Republic of Macedonia to the Ottomans in the Treaty of San Stefano. The transfer of Macedonia would galvanize the Bulgarians, who had composed a greater Bulgaria for several months and speak even today of a “Greater Bulgaria,” including contemporary Macedonia. Whoever could lay claim to the region of Macedonia would be at the heart of the “Macedonian” or “Eastern Question.” Since the actual lives of the people in these respective territories were never taken into consideration, the rearrangement of alliances may have fostered the nationalist ambitions that would later have a terrific effect on the independence struggles waged in the 1912–13 Balkan Wars. Inside the borders of the Great Powers themselves, these national questions festered. A common sentiment was that the “Macedonian Question” would become the “Austrian Question” as the Austro-Hungarian Empire went through its death throes, and many of these unsettled national questions came to a head in the Balkan Wars and World War I. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 were the end result of the unresolved “Eastern Question,” and they transformed a power struggle into an ethnic and religious war. Illustrating the conflict, Pynchon stages extraordinary scenes in Against the Day amid the collapse of governments and the creation of new regimes. The anarchist bomber-dandy Reef Traverse, the vector mathematician Yashmeen Halfcourt, and their child, Ljubica, find

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themselves ensconced in both the Balkan Wars and the Eastern Question. They run from Albanians, Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Macedonians, and Greeks, who are all fighting over a fluctuating territory. As Reef puts it, “The job now’s just to get out of here [. . .] [T]hey’re comin in from all directions, [. . .] Serbs from the north, Greeks from the south, Bulgarians from the east. Turks on the run everyplace” (963). Serb, Greek, and Bulgarian armies declared war against the sultan because of their nationalist ambitions in the region. The Ottomans were at the time supported by the Austro-Hungarians, who wanted to take the entire region through Greece. Each of the warring factions was supplied weapons by one or more of the Great Powers in their attempt to determine the destiny of the Balkans. But the Eastern Question had not quite worked out the way the Great Powers envisioned, because religious, ethnic, national, and economic allegiances were frequently at odds. At a certain point, people lost the rationale for the state of war; as Pynchon puts it, this was “a theatre of war where everybody shot at everybody” simply for the reason of being “pissed off” (968). The novel represents a multiplicity of forces struggling over territory and peoples, peoples that had once coexisted because their identities were configured around religious, topographical, and regional rituals, as well as the daily practice of survival, ritualized or not: “[Reef, Yashmeen, and Ljubica] went down the footpath to Sveti Naum [Ohrid, Macedonia] and crossed into Albania. Traffic was unremitting both ways, Mohammedan refugees driven from their home in Albania by the Greek invaders, and Turkish remnants from the defeat of Monastir [present-day Bitola] fleeing south trying to find their way to the fortress at Yanina, the last residue of the Ottoman empire in Europe [. . .]. The guards at the gate [. . .] shrugged everybody through. They were no longer sure, for one thing, who they were reporting to” (968). Although the state structure itself was falling apart for the Ottomans, new states and forms of governmentality were being created. While described in Western Europe as a simple act of terrorist barbarism, Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Franz Ferdinand I in Sarajevo, the act that ushered in World War I, was viewed by Croat, Serbian, and Bosnian Muslim nationalists, particularly those in the Young Bosnian movement with which Princip was aligned, as an antiimperialist, nationalist gesture aimed at ridding them of their Austrian colonial patrons. “Balkanism,” as Todorova describes it, is more complicated than Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism because the former lacks a simple “us” versus “them,” East versus West configuration at the level of religion and race; many of the Balkans’ populations are Christian and ethnically and linguistically similar. To describe the Balkans as the West’s other required different types of narration, the reading of ethnic differences as national ones, in order to foster internecine differences between peoples. Although

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“the Balkans” was little more than a hundred years old as a defined spatial concept in the Western European imagination, so-called centuries-old ethnic hatreds among the Balkan peoples served to distinguish the area as a space of “irrational balkanization.” Indeed, balkanization has become a general term to describe the fragmentation and specification of identities that disrupt states of union. This pesky discourse continues to be repeated today in the Euro-American press as the reason for the Balkan Wars, World War I (Young Bosnians/Black Hand), World War II (Catholic Ustashe), and the failure of Tito’s “communist” policies in Yugoslavia; it is also a self-fulfilling legitimation for European ambitions in the region in light of a large Muslim population. The ethnic and religious friction generated between peoples has stemmed, though, not from some Balkan “will to ethnic hatred” brought about by being ruled by the barbarous Ottoman Empire, but from limited economic resources, excessive taxation, and the Eastern Question. The political and economic ambitions of the Great Powers to use the Ottomans’ dying empire as part of their own strategies played a significant role in the collapsing of ethnicity and religion in the region. Ethnicity and religion later justified atrocities and wars that frequently had as their primary impetus the economic and imperial agenda of a distant Great Power.

EAST MEETS WEST: WESTERN QUESTIONS From this complex history of the East, I now turn back to the West, and to Pynchon’s parallels of the United States and the Balkan states. In the western United States, emergent forms of governance were able to consolidate their identity through excluded others, such as Native Americans and organizing laborers. The cosmopolitan or international perspective represented by the anarchists at Yz-Les-Bains had to be wiped out. Corporations had to be the only transnational entities. Indeed, as Against the Day progresses, Scarsdale Vibe becomes more and more involved in his proclaimed “mission,” a term that embodies the synergy of Christian missionaries and capital while also suggesting a religious war on U.S. territory. Vibe advocates a wholesale slaughter of difference, making it his personal quest to destroy anarchists and labor leaders, wherever they are. Referring to the U.S. Civil War (which he avoided fighting in by hiring a replacement), as well as the Homestead Strike (put down by Pinkertons hired by Henry Frick) and the Coeur d’Alene mine insurrection, Vibe says, I didn’t have my war then [. . .]. Just as well. I was too young to appreciate what was at stake anyway. My civil war was yet to come. And here we are

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in it now, in the thick, no end in sight. The Invasion of Chicago, the battles of Homestead, the Coeur d’Alene, the San Juans. These communards speak a garble of foreign tongues, their armies are the damnable labor syndicates, their artillery is dynamite, they assassinate our great men and bomb our cities, and their aim is to despoil us of our hard-won goods, to divide and sub-divide among their hordes our lands and our houses, to pull us down, our lives, all we love, until they become as demeaned and soiled as their own. O Christ, Who has told us to love them, what test of spirit is this, what darkness hath been cast over our own understanding, that we can no longer recognize the hand of the Evil One? [. . .] The future belongs to the Asiatic masses, the pan-Slavic brutes, even, God help us, the black seething spawn of Africa interminable. [. . .] What we need to do is start killing them in significant numbers, for nothing else has worked. All this pretending—“equality,” “negotiation”—it’s been a cruel farce, cruel to both sides. When the Lord’s people are in danger, you know what he requires. (333)

Foley Walker, Vibe’s bilocated subjectivity and Civil War proxy, answers: “Smite.” As a self-appointed member of the Elect to fulfill the grace of God and save the “Lord’s people,” Vibe perceives himself as being “tested” to lead a religious war on U.S. territory. Such a religious war offers an efficient means of assimilation through annihilation, while avoiding the ramifications or discourse of a civil war. Note that Vibe identifies disposable humans through ethnic and racial groupings: “the Asiatic masses, the pan-Slavic Brutes, the black seething spawn.” His Crusade can only end with the complete extermination of difference. For while the political project of anarchism must indeed be contained for Vibe, there are other strategies—literally changing the terms of politics so that resistance becomes consolidated in ahistorical biological categories, such as ethnicity. Anarchists who disturb “his” law and order are rendered biological and ethnicized as an inferior race in the eyes of Vibe’s “chosen people.” Economic wars are thereby reconfigured as religious wars, as crusades against leftism throughout U.S. territory; in the process humans are ethnically marked, much as in the Balkans, to differentiate who can be counted and who must be purged. Thus Vibe recasts political groupings as racial and ethnic groupings to create an identifiable enemy. Foucault has also diagnosed a second political function of races and racism, the role of consolidating and strengthening one race through the annihilation of another race: “The death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.”37 These examples immediately call to mind Pynchon’s chilling discussion in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow of the Hereros of Southwest Africa, who, themselves put down in 1904, then engage in racial suicide through zero birth rates when they are transported to Germany (dur-

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ing the time in which the events of Against the Day unfold). Vibe’s social Darwinism describes anarchists, a political group, as a degenerate race: “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” (1001). Thus anarchists are marked for extermination not as political beings but as ethnic others whose annihilation will purify the corporate elements represented by Vibe. Money is the only thing that can be figured as growing “like the bluebells in the meadow.” Indeed, what has begun here is the systematic extermination of the possibilities of opposition loosely thrown into the rubric of criminalized undesirables, a rubric consolidated by Woodrow Wilson during World War I. Wilson famously stated in 1916, “Hyphenated Americans . . . have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. . . . Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed out.”38 Wilson was true to his word: hypernationalism would be consolidated most prominently in the United States by the Sedition Act of 1917 and Espionage Act of 1918, which made it illegal to criticize the World War I effort and any government action. The Palmer Raids of 1919 also allowed for the forced relocation and expulsion of labor leaders such as Emma Goldman and destroyed the labor movements, such as the International Workers of the World. Later, immigration laws created literacy requirements for immigrants in 1917, and the 1921 and 1924 laws established the ethnic/national quota system directed against southeastern and southern European countries, determining immigration policy in the United States until the civil rights era. In effect, the Sedition and Espionage Acts and immigration acts de facto and de jure created and increasingly standardized and concretized the concept of U.S. citizen subjectivity that replaced Jefferson’s yeoman farmer. The “biological” order for protecting the nation created a convergence of business and governance—governmentality—while radicalism and non-Anglo Protestants, or at least non-European ethnicities, were identified as the enemy. Against the Day does ponder an alternative to all this, before the consolidation of the United States and the twentieth-century Pax Americana. Pynchon emphasizes how the United States served as a dumping zone of the European powers’ economic and political ambitions, where refugees or the damned fled oppression only to experience a more flexible type of control. Indeed, an unintended consequence of the Balkan Wars, for example, was the mass migration of peoples from southeastern Europe to the United States. According to Lampe and Jackson’s Balkan Economic History, 250,000 Greeks had left for the United States by 1912, nearly 10 percent of Greece’s population. Such an influx would later result in the 1921 immigration laws, based on ethnic identity and designed to stem the

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flow of immigrants from southeastern Europe.39 In describing the flows of immigration to the United States from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, Pynchon claims that the purported history of national hatred they experienced in the Balkans dissipated once they arrived in the United States, in favor of a united anticapitalist front. Here he describes a scene in Trinidad, Colorado: There were militiamen all over the place, unhappy-looking young men in stained and ragged uniforms, unshaven, insomniac, finding excuses to roust the strikers, who were Greeks and Bulgarians, Serbs and Croats, Montenegrins and Italians. “Over in Europe,” Ewball explained, “all busy killing each other over some snarled-up politics way beyond any easy understanding. But the minute they get over here, before you can say ‘Howdy,’ they just drop all those ancient [sic] hatreds, drop them flat, and become brothers-inarms, ’cause they recognize this right away for just what it is.” Somehow they kept coming west to these coalfields, and the owners put out stories about sharpshooters from the Balkan War and such, and Greek mountain fighters, Serbs with an appetite for cruelty, Bulgars with a reputation for unspeakable sex, all these alien races coming over here making miserable the lives of the poor innocent plutes [. . .]. (1002–03)

Pynchon brilliantly identifies the ethnic stereotypes as, in fact, a marketing campaign by the owners to generate fear of new immigrants, just as the latter organized their labor and power politically, outside any national identity. Class identities were thus engulfed by ethnicity, as part of a containment strategy. Although the United States would not join World War I until 1917, it was, Pynchon suggests, waging a national/ethnic war in its own territory against strikers. He juxtaposes the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in Colorado and the Balkan Wars as flash points of violence that immediately preceded the global slaughter of World War I. Yet via worker immigration, both these wars interestingly converged on the territory of the United States. Southern Slavs and Greeks who were former strike breakers joined the strike with the United Mineworkers of America and held out for several months. In Against the Day, Frank Traverse, previously in Mexico helping the Madero Revolution, waits with his partner, Stray, and her son, Jesse, for the militias to put down the striking workers camp in Trinidad. As discussed earlier with the Pinkertons, because of the weak U.S. military and state, companies hired these militias or helped subsidize them in order, they claimed, to protect private property. In Pynchon’s Battle of Ludlow, the militias, a mixture of private security guards, National Guard, and state militia, efficiently kill twenty people, including eleven children. This scene in Against the Day encapsulates the entire history of labor and counterrevolution in the territorial expansion of the

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United States. Immigrants from throughout Europe, many exiled for political activities, were, along with others, merely economic refugees (to use our contemporary market language) who shared a belief in economic self-determination, which the Elect would not tolerate. Instead, such immigrants were marked when they arrived as ethnic others, who could be killed without any legal repercussions in order to strengthen the law and order of the state. Regardless, this history is erased—or, as Pynchon notes in his portrayal of the Ludlow Massacre, “it happened, each casualty, one by one, in light that history would be blind to. The only accounts would be the militia’s” (1016). The convergence in Trinidad of East with West indicates for Pynchon not only the unrealization of freedom in light of ethnicizing economic concerns but also the need, in literature, to struggle for a concept such as freedom in ways that go beyond the heroic narratives offered by nation-states. I turn to this final concern in my conclusion.

CONCLUSION: MANUFACTURING CITIZENS IN/OUT OF AMERICA Near the end of Against the Day, Reef and Yashmeen have arrived in the United States with their daughter, Ljubica, born in the Balkans; they are initially stateless because of Reef’s past as a dynamite terrorist. After a quick intervention by a former striker currently employed by the immigration authority at Ellis Island, they get on the path to U.S. citizenship. They end up living with Stray and Jesse—who is Stray’s son with Reef, though she is sleeping with Reef’s brother Frank now. At one point, Jesse is asked to write an essay on what it means to be an American. He composes his response very quickly in front of Reef: 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 Cour d’Alene back in the olden days. Guess I forgot to mention that.” (1076)

Through his experience of East meeting West at Camp Trinidad, Jesse has seen what the contract of citizenship gives him and what it denies others (it denies them their lives). As a young child, Jesse is a futural subjectivity who cannot believe in the national utopian premise of the U.S. project; he is also entangled within an extended familial structure (one we will see again, with Jesse as patriarch, in Vineland). The family members in a sense

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are sharing each other, creating an alternative mode of organization that would be perceived as deviant by the state. In Against the Day, indeterminate vectors of possibility, including the imagination, the invisible, the unknown, space, time, ether, and even human collectivities themselves (anarchists, labor dissenters, revolutionaries, nationalists, populists, scientists, intelligence agencies, and mystics), converge and become rationalized, conducted, and domesticated within delimited national territories by the consolidating and binary forces of capital and state. We encounter these processes quite horrifically in the stereotypical ways of envisioning the Balkans and the United States as spatial entities that will consistently redraw boundaries. For the Balkans, the spatial boundaries were designated to control and police a region; for the United States, the boundaries were global, encompassing an emergent military and neoliberal economic policing of the world. Frank, while touring archaeological sites in Mexico with Wren Provence, remembers what El Espinero tried to teach him about human colonization of the earth leading to human colonization of humans in the western United States: “He understood for a moment, as if in the breeze from an undefined wing passing his face, that the history of all this terrible continent, clear to the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic ice, was this same history of exile and migration, the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern corporations moving in on the white man, and their incursions with drill and dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains, the sacred land” (928–29). To avoid the theological and spatial thinking Against the Day diagnoses and critiques, Pynchon evokes time and exile as where the action is. Land and space lead to capture and a slow march to death. Pynchon thinks time as a series of fracturing dimensions, rendering several temporal planes and possibilities. As a result, his poetics offers counterhistories and radically proposes history and time as composed of often paradoxical and unrealized lines of force. The historical and the temporal are manyfaceted crystals of simultaneous possibilities, much like the Iceland Spar that plays such a central role in the text. Against the Day unravels narrative, history, and literature; moves beyond historicist and nationalist accounts; and reveals resonances between Europe’s “Eastern Question” and the United States’ “Western Question.” As Pynchon noted in the blurb released to Amazon.com (one that would be substantially revised before publication on the book’s dust jacket): “The author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-thefact occurrences occur. 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.”40 According to Pynchon, there are no preexisting,

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transcendent structures or a priori concepts of power and organization that persist for the two main forces of capitalism and governance—no coherent “Them,” as Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow would put it. Instead there are distributive figurations like Jesse, Reef, and the bilocated characters. His blurb’s portrayal of literature and history suggests alternative possibilities of world making that may coalesce and be expressed as a struggle of forces. Pynchon’s novel thus shows how literature can also be a form of life, the real conceived as perpetual creation to offer new insight into the past, instead of merely as a form of existence that can be killed or controlled. So literature is for Pynchon: he expects his readers to think what has been, what is, what could be, but also the future anterior, what will have been— to think again, anew. Or as Pynchon put it, again in the original blurb: “Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.”41

NOTES 1. Owen Wister, The Virginian. 2. Roosevelt merely echoed Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier hypothesis in The Frontier in American History, 1–38. For more on U.S. aspirations and internal and external colonization of Asia, see Colleen Lye, America’s Asia. 3. Alan Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America. 4. Gregory Jusdanis describes this politicization of ethnicity in The Necessary Nation. 5. Paul Bové, “History and Fiction.” 6. The splitting of time is not the perpetual nihilistic fragmentation of the endless play of postmodernism, as Hanjo Berressem’s Pynchon’s Poetics argues, but rather a process to entangle the reader in the messy stuff of life. The concept of life I am using draws from the work of Bruno Latour and his depiction of “nature cultures” as themselves facets of a continuum of life. See We Have Never Been Modern. I also draw extensively from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. 7. Samuel Thomas’s “Metkovic´ to Mostar” also highlights Pynchon’s focus on narrative and historical time and the latter’s relevance to the present by critiquing the legacy of colonialism, imperialism, and contemporary neoliberal economics in the Balkans. Thomas’s reading of Pynchon emphasizes, through extensive readings of Slavoj Žižek and analysis of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, how Pynchon disturbs contemporary European powers’ attempts to create a Balkans of their imagination that legitimates their domination while exoticizing the Balkans as Europe’s other: “The Balkans, Pynchon shows us, have functioned (and continue to function) as a blank screen upon which the mirror image of hegemony is projected . . . [particularly for] the utopian ideal which regulates the European community” (371). My analysis instead compares this creation of otherness in the Balkans to the United States’ internal colonization. Nevertheless, both Europe’s and the United States’ mobilization of civilizational and religious arguments fosters and legitimates genocide in both places.

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8. See, for instance, the ideas behind Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, passim, is the bildungsroman for the production of citizen-subjects that will function as effective civil servants for the state. Hegel was, of course, writing at the moment of historical consolidation of the German state, and his celebration of France’s Napoleon Bonaparte lingers throughout the text. 9. War as perpetual struggle or “permanent siege” between competing forces has been an ongoing concern in Pynchon’s texts, from the struggle against corporatism and Yoyodyne’s dominion in The Crying of Lot 49 and V. to Gravity’s Rainbow’s analysis of how war will be the constant even when Slothrop and others are gone. Mason & Dixon stages a war between reason and irrationality (with the former being put to the most irrational ends), while late in Against the Day, the Russian balloon captain Padzhitnoff offers this summary: “War is not over. May never be. Consequences may never end” (1029). 10. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Foucault writes, “It is a matter of taking control of life, and the biological processes of man-as-species, and of ensuring that they are not disciplined, but regularized” (246–47). 11. Ibid., 254–55. 12. See Andrew Carnegie, “Gospel of Wealth,” 1–12. 13. As Foucault writes in Society Must Be Defended, “For millennia, the human remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; the modern human is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being into question” (147). The Aristotelian notion that humans separate themselves from animals because they can communicate with each other through reason and language is upset, because humans can annihilate life with amazing efficiency. The category of living beings leaves open a permeable boundary between human and inhuman forces and between humans and animals. This may be why animals figure prominently in anthropomorphic form in Pynchon’s text: they underscore the potential for multiplicity of selves that different regimes try to domesticate through human agents claiming dominion over life. 14. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, passim. 15. This is the subject of David Haward Bain’s Empire Express. 16. It is important to recall how weak the U.S. government was throughout the Gilded Age. Many of the centralized institutions taken for granted in the post–World War II United States—such as the Federal Reserve, an obscenely large and powerful military, and income taxes—did not exist at the time, and the contestation between states’ rights and federal rights was still in play. Moments of economic crisis like the silver fiasco in the wake of 1893 required the federal government to turn to titans of industry such as J. P. Morgan, who organized the financialist syndicate of 1895 to keep the federal government afloat. 17. See Turner, The Frontier in American History. The year 1893 is also significant for the Panic of 1893, brought about by overspeculation on the nation’s railroads, and the White City’s Krupp’s Gun Pavilion, which featured the largest cannon ever at the time—it would be used soon enough in the Balkans during World War I. The year 1893 also represented a brief interlude before the largest labor action of its time, the Pullman Strike of 1894. These are merely facets of the forgotten violence on which the White City was built.

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18. For more information, see Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America; Patricia Limerick Nelson, The Legacy of Conquest; Richard Drinnon, Facing West; and Richard Slotkin’s trilogy, Regeneration through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation. 19. The Homestead Act granted between 160 and 640 acres of land to any citizen and required only five years of residence. Blamed for the dust bowl and the consolidation of land within limited hands, the act was an early federalist measure in the midst of the Civil War. 20. Karl Marx, Grundrisse. 21. Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny. 22. One of the main defenders of the Pinkertons was Patrick Foley, head of the Pinkerton Protective Patrol, which oversaw the protection of private property during labor actions. Given Pynchon’s encyclopedic knowledge of history and love of whimsy, his character Foley Walker may be an amalgam of Patrick Foley and George Herbert Walker, who was once head of W. A. Harriman & Co. The latter would marry into the Bush family, and his company would become Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. Prescott Bush was alleged to have done work with the Nazis in 1942 and was the grandfather of George W. Bush, who was president during the privatization of many military functions through the first decade of the twenty-first century. The second Bush administration oversaw incomparable privatization of the military, in a sense an attempt to return the United States to the deregulated period of the Pinkertons and Pynchon’s text. See Daniel Singer, Corporate Warriors, esp. 99. 23. Pynchon’s fascination with American history and its interesting amalgamation of antistatism with excessive faith in security industries and the militarization of everyday life has been a subtext in such works as Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland, and Mason & Dixon. 24. See Frank Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps. 25. The National Guard Association, according to an Illinois colonel Morn quotes (97), “grew out of our riots of 1877 [the railroad strikes of 1877], previous to which times we had no cavalry in the State. During the riots, it was found necessary to have cavalry, and we hastely [sic] organized a battalion of cavalry among our business men who had seen cavalry service during the war. Our cavalry was not equipped by the state. It belongs to the National Guard, but was equipped and uniformed completely by the Citizens’ Association of the City of Chicago. The association is composed of business men, who look after the best interests of the city.” 26. The 1903 Militia (or Dick) Act formally put the U.S. militia and military under the discretion of the U.S. government. This act emerged in response to paltry funding for defense, the poor performance of the United States in the SpanishAmerican War, and the emergence of the United States’ policy of political imperialism. Before that the National Guard and the army were two distinct agencies, one a professional army, the other a volunteer service. The Dick Act attempted to discipline and professionalize the volunteer army. See GlobalSecurity.org, in particular “Army National Guard History,” http://www.globalsecurity.org/ military/agency/army/arng-history.htm (accessed May 10, 2010). 27. Pynchon’s concept is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of microfascism, a moment when the state becomes suicidal and desires its own

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destruction. See A Thousand Plateaus, esp. 213–18. In the United States, this arrangement of power suggests a moment before the New Deal, when the state was often a parasite in the smooth movement of capital. Only with the New Deal and the general crisis of capital did the state become the borrower, employer, and insurer of last resort. The rise of the American military-industrial complex documented in Gravity’s Rainbow dramatizes these public-private transformations; Vineland shows that, because of the shared antistatism of the counterculture and free market capital, the state was able to include even forces of opposition within the American imperial project (for instance, the Peace Corps—created to win hearts and minds abroad and spread Jeffersonian democracy by creating U.S. client states wherever they go). Against the Day shows that it need not have been this way. 28. Foucault’s conception of power as fluctuating networks has been directed at challenging historical concepts of the organized and centralized state. When the role and function of the state are overdetermined, including the ease with which Far Right and Far Left can try to smash the state, other forms of power that may also be functioning remain unthought. 29. Hannah Arendt argues that after World War I, faith in the comity of nations lay in ruin as the organizing principle of the nation-state; the unity of a people, state, and territory failed in relationship to events on the ground. See her “Decline of the Nation-State.” 30. This only changed at a moment late in the Ottoman Empire when the system was in effect bankrolled by the British and French governments to serve as friction and a counterweight to Russian and Austrian ambitions in the region. Abdul Hamid II declared Islam the “religion of state” in 1876 as a result of foreign meddling and Christian nationalist uprisings in Bulgaria. 31. Mark Mazower, The Balkans. 32. See Anthony King, Culture, Globalization; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments; Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought. 33. See Mazower, The Balkans. 34. Ibid. Mazower’s main thesis discusses the effect of the Western European imagination, including the creation of the United States, on national elites in the Balkans. As their interests were denied by Ottoman functionaries who extracted taxes from peasants and the emerging middle class alike, the nation provided the frame of reference for resistance. 35. See Mazower, The Balkans; Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans; Misha Glenny, Nationalism, War and the Great Powers. 36. The Albanians, for example, were notoriously prevented from even going to the delegations, and the formal boundaries of Albania would not be “resolved” until 1920. 37. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 255. 38. Quoted in David Kennedy, Over Here, 24. 39. John Lampe and Marvin Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 195. 40. See the Pynchon Wiki, “Against the Day,” http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Against_the_Day (accessed May 10, 2010). 41. Ibid.

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Index

Flaco, 199, 204, 209; Sloat Fresno, 32, 40, 75, 79; Auberon Halfcourt, 129; Yashmeen Halfcourt, 8, 24, 32–33, 36–41, 51, 57–58, 61, 98–100, 103–105, 107, 111, 113, 123–24, 176–77, 179, 180, 184, 188n15, 217, 237n16, 253–54, 259; Ray Ipsow, 58; Kieselguhr Kid, 4, 75, 243; Deuce Kindred, 32, 40, 75, 218, 234; Cyprian Latewood, 4, 9, 24, 32–33, 36–40, 49–52, 57, 64n11, 94–95, 98–111, 151, 153, 156, 171–74, 176, 178–82, 188n23, 217, 249–50; Ljubica, 36–37, 100, 104–105, 183, 217, 253–54, 259; “Plug” Loafsley, 119, 125; Magyakan, 94, 97, 105, 108, 110, 113n12; Ratty McHugh, 61, 109, 249; Melpómene, 60; Prof. Edward Morley, 75, 226; Charles “Blinky” Morgan, 75; J. P. Morgan, 145–47; Arturo Naunt, 232; Wolfe-Tone O’Rooney, 199; Ewball Oust, 40,

Adams, Cassilly: Custer’s Last Fight, 79 Adams, Henry, 232; The Education of Henry Adams, 216, 219–20 Against the Day (Pynchon): characters: Ætheronauts, 32–33, 53–54, 134–36, 162n22, 175–76, 217; Lew Basnight, 1, 18–19, 26n7, 27n10, 27n23, 28n25, 31, 33, 36, 38, 78–79, 83, 111, 171, 174, 199, 203, 218–19, 234; Roswell Bounce, 123, 155, 219, 234; Estrella Briggs, 42; Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, 36, 171, 221, 231; Chums of Chance, 1, 4, 9, 15–16, 20, 22, 25, 26n8, 27n13, 27n22, 27n23, 28n25, 31–37, 41, 48–55, 58, 62–63, 64n9, 64n10, 64n11, 65n23, 82–83, 92–93, 95–97, 102, 105–106, 108, 110–11, 115, 117–24, 127–35, 141, 145–46, 150, 153–54, 156, 158–59, 162, 170, 172, 174–75, 200, 215–16, 227, 235, 243, 247; Vlado Clissan, 57–58; the Doosra, 41, 95, 105–110, 114n22; 279

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280

Index

204; Hunter Penhallow, 77, 97, 111, 124, 129, 161n8, 209, 223, 231; Philippe, 98; Pugnax, 55, 106, 193, 200; Günther von Quassel, 176, 178; Veikko Rautavaara, 63n1, 199, 226; Prof. P. Jotham Renfrew, 32, 48, 75, 111, 250; Dahlia “Dally” Rideout, 4, 32, 42, 104–105, 124, 151, 175, 179, 185, 216–36, 238n39; Erlys Rideout/Zombini, 4, 218; Merle Rideout, 4, 33, 123–24, 140, 150–51, 155, 174, 218–29, 234, 237n30; Skip, 150; Andrea Tancredi, 231–32; Tatzelwurms, 31, 97–98, 102, 105, 107–108; Derrick Theign, 32, 50; Frank Traverse, 17, 20, 23, 33, 40, 42–43, 60, 66n29, 75, 77, 79, 94, 95, 109, 111, 161n8, 170–76; 178, 183–84, 206, 224, 226, 243, 258–60; Jesse Traverse, 206, 258–59, 261; Kit Traverse, 4, 8, 17, 22, 32–37, 41–43, 54, 66n29, 67, 79, 94, 96–97, 99, 104–106, 110–11, 124, 127, 129–30, 144, 150–154, 160–61, 162n24, 170– 79, 185, 187n13, 188n24, 219–22, 225–26, 243; Lake Traverse, 17, 27n9, 33, 37, 47, 99–100, 188n14, 217–18, 225, 243; Mayva Traverse, 217–18; Reef Traverse, 17, 22, 24, 27n23, 32–33, 36–38, 40, 42–43, 54, 60–61, 66n29, 75, 97, 99–100, 103–105, 107, 109, 112, 151, 170–71, 173, 176–77, 179–81, 183–84, 188n24, 198, 204–206, 209, 217, 238n37, 243, 249, 253–54, 259, 261; Webb Traverse, 4, 5, 17, 33, 36, 40, 59, 124, 151, 161, 171, 181–83, 188n14, 188n24, 194, 199–205, 209, 226, 243; Trespassers, 9, 117, 119–20, 122, 124, 127–36; Prof. Heino Vanderjuice, 16–17, 50, 75, 147, 153–54, 162n4; Colfax Vibe, 152; Fleetwood Vibe, 36, 65n20, 96; Scarsdale Vibe, 4, 5, 32, 36, 39–40, 49–50, 76, 80, 126, 146, 149–50, 154, 160, 162n24, 173–74, 177,

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181, 186n2, 198–99, 243, 245, 248, 255–57; Foley Walker, 40, 76, 80, 150, 177, 184, 188n18, 256, 263n22; The Great Zombini, 123, 227; Dr. Zoot, 4, 118–29 aesthetic representation, 231–36 Alberti, Leon Battista, 87n41 alchemy, 226–27, 238n39 Alger, Horatio, 5, 221 alternating current (AC), 143, 145, 152, 160 Altman, Robert: The Long Goodbye, 21; McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 23 anarchism, 43–44, 58; against capitalism, 185, 199, 225–26, 249, 255–57; communities and, 8, 38–39, 109, 176, 250; counter-anarchism, 78, 247; ethnicity and, 241–42; family relations and, 36, 181, 184, 189n24; formal experimentation and, 8, 30–31, 42, 48–49, 54–66; in Pynchon’s fiction, 191–98; religion and, 9–10, 38–40, 43, 93, 168–69; theories of, 191–213 Anheuser–Busch, 80 architecture, 227, 230, 247. See also White City Arendt, Hannah, 264n29 Aristotle, 3, 8, 30, 41, 43, 59, 64n13, 262n13 Augustine of Hippo, 33 Austria, 240, 248–49, 253–54, 264n30 Austro-Hungary, 240, 248–49, 253–54 Bakunin, Mikhail, 39, 199–204 Balkans, 10, 17, 31, 32, 33, 94–95, 178–80, 104, 173, 240, 242, 249–56, 258–60, 261n7, 262n17, 264n34 Balkan Wars, 194, 239, 241 ball lightning, 31, 150–51, 174 de Balzac, Honoré: Ferragus, 72; Le Père Goriot, 72 Barber, Benjamin R., 206, 212n37 Barker, Robert: Grand Fleet at Spithead in 1791, 69 Barth, John: The Sot-Weed Factor, 25 Barthes, Roland, 133

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Index Batchelor, Charles, 145 Beebe, Thomas O., 43 Becker, F. Otto, 80 Belgian Congo, 109, 249 Belgium, 85n9, 85n12, 226. See also Belgian Congo Benito-Vessels, Carmen, 31 Berressem, Hanjo, 66n30, 260n6 Bérubé, Michael, 223, 234 Bey, Hakim, 210n13 bildungsroman, 29, 31 bilocation, 9, 31, 94, 111, 119–23, 130, 227, 242–43 bimetallism, 126, 226, 233 Black Mask, 19 Bogomilism, 9, 38, 98–108, 180 Bohr, Neils, 121–22 Bolter, Jay David, 68, 72, 74, 77–78 The Border Trilogy (McCarthy): 23 Bosnia, 110, 240, 248–49, 252–55; Bogomilism and, 108, 113n18. See also Bogomilism Bové, Paul, 242 Brownlee, Marina S., 31 Bryan, William Jennings, 126 Buchan, John, 5; Greenmantle, 18, 20, 24 Buddhism, 35, 41, 167, 171–72, 175, 178, 182, 185, 187n5, 187n13, 188n15 Bulgaria, 37, 151, 240, 249, 252–54, 258, 264n30 Bunyan, John: The Pilgrim’s Progress, 46n33 Burnham, Daniel, 227 Burroughs, William S.: Cities of the Red Night, 25, 183 Bush family, 262n22 Calvinism, 40, 186, 218, 236n11 Cambridge, 24, 37 capitalism, 10, 30, 33, 37, 38–40, 44, 180–82, 215; and magic, 170; and time, 116, 125–28, 132 Carnegie, Andrew, 245 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring, 91 Castaneda, Carlos, 175 Catholicism, 9, 36, 51, 167–86

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Chambers, Judith, 220 Chandler, Raymond: The Long Goodbye, 21 Chartres, 219 Chatwin, Bruce, 183 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 34 Cheney, Margaret, 141–42, 144, 161n12, 163n33 Chicago, 1, 15–17, 33, 42, 49, 52, 54–55, 82–83, 88n55, 142, 145–46, 171, 174, 199, 201, 216, 218, 220, 224–25, 247–48, 256, 263n25. See also World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; White City Childers, Erskine: Riddle of the Sands, 18, 20, 24 Christ. See Jesus of Nazareth Christianity: capitalism and, 39, 112, 224, 241, 255; concept of hell, 97; dualism and, 107; Orphism and, 100–103; politics and, 10, 40, 76, 95, 167, 189, 251, 254; time and, 94. See also Bogomilism; Catholicism; Jesus of Nazareth; pilgrimage Cities of the Red Night (Burroughs), 25, 182 citizenship, 54, 76, 136, 242–43, 245, 257, 259, 262n8 Civil War (United States), 76, 177, 218, 236n9, 255–56, 263n19 Clute, John, 5, 197 Cody, William (Buffalo Bill), 17 Cold Mountain (Frazier), 7 Collignon, Fabienne, 44n1, 96, 114n24, 187n11 Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Ondaatje), 23 Colorado Springs, 142, 144, 148–52, 162n23 Comment, Bernard, 85n12 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, 18 corporations, 31, 76, 105, 229, 245–49, 255 Cowart, David, 41, 186n1, 217 Croatia, 143, 156, 159 Crookes, William, 146, 162n21

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282

Index

The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon), 21, 34, 60–61, 135, 169, 174, 187, 192, 196, 215, 220, 262n9 Custer’s Last Fight (Adams), 79 Czolgosz, Leon, 199 Dante (Dante Alighieri), 148, 161n8 Davidson, Cathy and Arnold, 221 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 158 Deleuze, Gilles, 261n6, 263n27 Denning, Michael, 221, 237n21 Derrida, Jacques, 43 DeWitt, Bryce S., 121 direct current (DC), 145 Dixon, Jeremiah, 3, 4, 43 dime novels, 5, 17–26, 83, 216, 221–22, 226, 230 disembodiment, 10, 176–77, 216 Doctorow, E. L.: Ragtime, 82; Welcome to Hard Times, 23 Dodge, Jim: Stone Junction, 226 double refraction, 34–35 Dreiser, Theodore, 215–16, 219–22, 227, 232, 237n17, 237n22. See also Sister Carrie Eastwood, Clint: Unforgiven, 23 Eco, Umberto, 79 ecology, 9, 42–44, 91–112, 179 Eddins, Dwight, 113n15 Edison, Thomas, 5, 9, 125–26, 140–45, 151, 154–55, 160, 162n18, 162n25 The Education of Henry Adams (Adams), 216, 219 Einstein, Albert, 121, 136n25 Eliade, Mircea, 105–106, 108 environment. See ecology ethnicity, 46n32, 241–42, 245, 255–56, 258, 261n4 Eurydice, 104–105, 220, 237n16 Everett, Hugh, 121 Faust (Goethe), 143 Ferdinand, Franz, 1, 26n4, 199, 254 Flanders, 16, 128, 132, 135

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Fleming, Ian, 28n34: From Russia With Love, 18 Fletcher, Angus, 48 Foley, Patrick, 263n22 Forster, E. M., 86n22 Foucault, Michel, 10, 244–45, 247, 256, 262n10, 262n13, 264n28 Fowles, John: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 25; A Maggot, 25 From Russia with Love (Fleming), 18 Franklin, Benjamin, 116, 126–27, 140–41, 145 Frazier, Charles: Cold Mountain, 7 The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Fowles), 25 Friedman, Alan, 139, Frow, John, 43 Gaia (Lovelock), 92 gender, 216–17, 236n8; Cyprian Latewood and, 37–38, 180–81 genocide, 241 genre, 3–5, 7–8, 16–28, 29–32, 43–46, 222–23, 233, 235, 243; tragedy as, 54–61 Gilded Age, 241, 245, 262n16 Gnosticism, 38 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Faust, 143 Gold Fools (Sorrentino), 23 Goldman, Emma, 257 Goodman, Paul, 38–39 “Gospel of Wealth” (Carnegie), 245 Gould, Jay, 215 Graham, Neill, 121 Grand Fleet at Spithead in 1791 (Barker), 69 The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 76 Grau, Oliver, 73, 77–78 Graves, Robert, 220, 232 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 2, 15, 21, 27n20, 38, 40, 91–93, 123, 126–27, 136n17, 139–40, 167, 169, 174, 176–77, 179–80, 182, 185, 188n17, 188n23, 189n31, 192, 194, 196, 198, 215, 220, 223, 230, 234, 256, 261, 262n9, 263n23, 264n27

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Index Great Britain, 240 Great War: See World War I Greece, 242, 249, 252, 254, 257 Greene, Graham: Stamboul Express, 18 Greenmantle (Buchan), 18, 20, 24 Gribbin, John, 130 Grusin, Richard. See Bolter, Jay David Guattari, Felix, 263n27 Guthrie, W. K. C., 101, 103 Gutiérrez, Ellen Turner, 30 Gutman, Herbert, 127 Halley, Edmund, 140–41 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 55, 60, 64n17 Hammett, Dashiell, 19 Hanna, Marcus A., 126 Hapke, Laura, 236n9 Harley, J. B., 63n5 Hayles, N. Katherine, 84 Haywood, William (“Big Bill”), 210 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 18 Hegel, G. W. F., 199, 262n8 Heisenberg, Werner, 121–22, 130–31, 139 von Helmholtz, Hermann, 74 Henry, Emile, 193, 205 High-Frequency Active Aural Research Project (HAARP), 157–59 Hinduism, 174 historiography, 21, 25, 112n8, 139–40 Hock, Stephen, 235 Hohmann, Charles, 113n15 Holmes, Sherlock, 18 Homestead Act (1862), 247, 263n19 High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood), 60 Hinduism, 41 Hite, Molly, 29, 30, 217 Hume, Kathryn, 44n3, 86n27, 99, 113n13, 203 hyperreality, 79 Iceland Spar, 31, 33–34, 69, 94, 117–18, 135, 260 Ickstadt, Heinz, 99, 127 IMAX, 85n6 Inherent Vice (Pynchon), 3–4, 11n6, 21, 115, 217, 235, 236n8

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Integroscope, 123, 155, 219, 229, 231, 233–34 “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” (Pynchon), 187n6 Islam, 41, 95, 182, 188n15, 251–55, 264n30 James, Frank, 20 James, Henry, 56, 64n17, 73, 75; The Princess Casamassima, 55, 193 James, Jesse, 20 Jameson, Frederic, 25 jazz, 60–61, 196–97, 209, 225 Jefferson, Thomas, 257, 262n8, 264n27 Jesus of Nazareth, 35, 37, 40, 103, 174, 176, 180 John of Patmos, 96 “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” (Pynchon), 196 Joyce, James, 16 Judaism, 167, 223, 251 kabbalah, 40, 113n13, 171, 180, 182, 187 Kakutani, Michiko, 2, 11n6, 73, 75, 84 Kaplan, Robert D., 206 Karrow, Robert, 48 Keough, Peter, 193 Kim (Kipling), 17 King Lear (William Shakespeare), 55, 64n17 Kipling, Rudyard: Kim, 17 Krafft, John, 236n11 labor, 10, 33, 37, 116, 127, 167, 170, 181, 199, 201, 216, 225, 239, 241, 243, 245–47, 255–58, 260, 262n17; International Workers of the World (IWW), 169, 201, 211n25, 257; and women, 216, 217–21 LaGuardia, Fiorello, 160 Lamplighter series (Libbey), 221 Landour, Gustav, 38 Latour, Bruno, 260n6 Lears, Jackson, 237n22 LeClair, Tom, 5, 92–93, 197 Lefebvre, Henri, 230

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284

Index

Levinas, Emmanuel, 37 Libbey, Laura Jean: Lamplighter series, 221 liberation theology, 169 light, 26n1, 27n23, 31, 33–34, 77, 98, 117, 137n26, 151, 153, 179, 187n11, 194, 216, 224, 228–29; as religious symbol, 41, 92–93, 98, 103–105, 112, 112n8, 172–78, 180, 184, 188n18; Tesla and light, 143, 152, 155–56, 160; and electric lighting, 142, 145 Lincoln, Abraham, 248 London, 69, 153–54, 171, 193, 215–16, 252; Lew Basnight and, 19, 27n10; Dally Rideout and, 230–32 The Long Goodbye (Chandler), 21 Los Angeles, 33, 196, 234 Lovecraft, H. P., 96 Lovelock, J. E.: Gaia, 92 Lugosi, Bela, 160 Macdonald, Ross, 21 Macedonia, 196, 240, 252–54; Macedonian Question, 240, 253 A Maggot (Fowles), 25 Manichaeism, 98, 100, 173, 180 Marconi, Guglielmo, 155, 160 Markels, Julian, 64n16 Marx, Groucho, 160 Marx, Karl, 39, 199, 247 Mason & Dixon (Pynchon), 2–4, 7, 11n6, 21, 33, 35, 37, 52, 92, 140, 145, 167, 169, 174, 186n1, 189n31, 193, 196, 231, 262n9, 263n23 Mason, Charles, 3, 4, 43, 141 Mazower, Mark, 251–52, 264n34 McCarthy, Cormac: The Border Trilogy, 23 McHale, Brian, 64n9 McKinley, William, 126 McLaughlin, Robert L., 92 Menand, Louis, 2, 59, 84 Mensch, James Richard, 42 Mexican Revolution, 239 Mexico, 16, 42, 193, 239, 242, 249, 258, 260; mystical experiences and, 79,

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172, 178; Western genre and, 17, 23, 39 Michaels, Walter Benn, 237n22 military-industrial complex, 42, 264n27 Miller, Laura, 11n6, 59, 73, 75, 84, 236n8 mining, 42, 59, 77, 95–97, 107, 125, 141, 159, 201–203, 211n25, 216, 224–25, 243, 245 Minkowski, Hermann, 123 Mitchell, Peta, 63n7 Moore, Thomas, 36, 40 Morgan, J. P., 125, 146, 149, 152, 262n16. See also Against the Day (Pynchon): characters Morinis, E. Alan, 35 Most, Johann, 199–200 Muslims. See Islam National Guard, 248–49, 258, 263n25, 263n26 nationalism, 240, 242, 251–52, 257 National Public Radio, 158 nation-states, 8, 39, 242–43, 246, 252, 259, 264n29; maps and, 62, 250; nation-state system, 240 Native Americans, 41, 95, 105, 186, 196, 242, 244, 247, 255, 260 “Nearer, My Couch, To Thee” (Pynchon), 116, 125–26, 129 negative theology, 35, 37 Newton, Sir Isaac, 139 New York, 55, 76, 115, 118, 163n28, 174, 199; 9/11 and, 206, 208; Dally Rideout and, 216, 220, 222, 227, 232–33, 237n17; Tesla and, 142, 145, 148, 152, 154–55, 159, 162n23. See also 9/11 Nichelson, Oliver, 142, 153 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 60 9/11, 5, 10, 194, 202, 206–208 1984 (Orwell), 169, 207 Oakley, Annie, 236n6 Obama, Barack, 248 Obolensky, Dmitri, 98, 100–101, 107 Oetterman, Stephan, 69–70, 82

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Index Olsen, Lance, 198 Olster, Stacey, 217 Omni, 158 Ondaatje, Michael: Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 23 Orphism, 9, 36–38, 41, 43, 98–108, 167, 171, 180, 182 Orwell, George, 208; 1984, 169, 207 Ostend, 34 Ottoman Empire, 240–41, 251–55, 258, 264n30 Ouspensky, P. D., 124 Panic of 1893, 216, 225, 246, 262n17 Paris, 5, 72, 197, 204, 243, 252; and Dally Rideout, 216, 234 Parsons, Albert, 201 Peary, Edmund, 153 Persephone, 220, 237n16 Peckinpah, Sam: The Wild Bunch, 23 Phelan, Peggy, 63n6 penance, 10, 109, 168, 178, 182, 185 photography, 78, 85n6, 156, 184, 188n20, 219, 225, 231, 234 picaresque, 21, 29, 30, 32, 42, 44 pilgrimage, 7–8, 30–46, 54, 58, 62, 110, 132, 172–79, 182, 185, 216 The Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 46n33 Pinkerton Detectives, 201, 247–48, 255, 258, 263n22; and Lew Basnight, 19, 27n10 Pold, Søren, 72–73 Poor Richard, 117 pornography, 223, 231, 234–36 Preston, James J., 32–33 preterition, 40, 48–53, 62, 218–19, 228–29, 233, 236n11 The Princess Casamassima (James), 55, 193 Prince, Gerald, 29 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 39 prostitution, 217–18, 224, 229–30, 248; Venetian sex trade, 229–30 Pynchon, Thomas: works. See Against the Day, The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Inherent Vice, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?,”

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“A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” Mason & Dixon, “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee,” Slow Learner, “Under the Rose,” V., Vineland quaternions, 34, 121, 123–24, 131 racism, 241, 244–45, 256–57 Ragtime (Doctorow), 82 railroad, 59, 97, 170, 179, 225, 243, 246–48 realism, 4, 6, 30–32, 42, 72–73, 84, 86n26, 198, 217–19, 232, 235 Reed, Ishmael: Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, 23 revenge, 2, 17, 20, 23, 142, 236n6, 243; tragedy and, 59–60, 65n29; of Earth, 97, 107 Riddle of the Sands (Childers), 18, 20, 24 Riemann, Bernhard, 39, 51, 124 Roosevelt, Theodore, 241 Russia, 39–40, 50, 110, 153, 157, 199– 200; southeastern Europe and, 240, 253, 264n30 Russo-Turkish War, 240 Said, Edward, 254 Schaub, Thomas, 32–33, 91 Schödinger, Erwin, 121 Schwab, Gabriele, 91 Serbia, 156, 159, 240, 251–54 Sears, Julie Christine, 188n23, 217 Serres, Michel, 55–56 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 55, 60; King Lear, 55 shamanism, 38, 41, 94–96, 106–109, 118, 171, 175 Shambhala, 16, 34–36, 41, 104, 110–11, 130, 170, 175, 178, 216 Shekhinah, 99–100, 104 Siberia, 16, 33, 94, 152, 154, 173 Siegel, Jules, 186n5 Silent Spring (Carson), 91 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 215–16, 220–21, 224, 227, 232, 237n17, 237n22 Slow Learner (Pynchon), 3

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286

Index

Sorrentino, Christopher, 2 Sorrentino, Gilbert: Gold Fools, 23 The Sot-Weed Factor (Barth), 25 Southern California, 19, 92, 97. See also Los Angeles sovereignty, 239, 243, 245–46 Spanish-American War, 241 Spencer, Nicholas, 227, 230 Spengler, Oswald, 128–29 Stamboul Express (Greene), 18 state, 39, 242–46, 254, 259–60, 262n8, 263–64n27, 264n28; and anarchism, 207, 210–11n13; and Gravity’s Rainbow, 180, 230 Stations of the Cross, 35, 36, 172, 182, 185 Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath, 76 Stephanson, Anders, 247 Stevenson, Robert Louis: Treasure Island, 18 subjunctive, 5, 35, 36, 105, 231 Swift, Tom, 16, 18, 20, 154 “Star Wars” (Strategic Defense Initiative), 158 Stone Junction (Dodge), 226 Superman, 155 systems theory, 7, 116; ecology and, 91–92; ethics and, 34–36, 42–43; genre and, 25; state and, 48–50; world-system, 146. See also genre; state Tabbi, Joseph, 139 Taylor, Frederick, 127 technology, 25–26, 41, 43, 68, 72, 82, 116, 139–40, 169–70, 179, 181, 207, 219, 223, 234; Ludditism and, 183; time travel and, 118, 122–25; Tesla and, 143, 155–57, 159 Telluride, 223 Tesla, Nikola, 1, 9, 126–27, 139–60 The Thirty-Nine Steps (Buchan), 20 Thomas, Samuel, 261n7 Tipler, Frank, 136n25 Todorova, Maria, 252, 254 Trachtenberg, Alan, 125–26, 227–28, 238n37, 241, 245

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Treasure Island (Stevenson), 18 Tunguska Event, 27n13, 95–97, 108, 111, 113n12, 123–24, 130, 142, 152– 154, 163n28, 173, 175, 226 Turkey, 249, 252–53 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 17, 247, 261n2 Turner, Victor, 34, 37–38 Ulysses (Joyce), 16 “Under the Rose” (Pynchon), 27n19 Unforgiven (Eastwood), 23 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 159 V. (Pynchon), 21, 27n19, 81, 91, 167, 169–70, 179, 187n5, 192, 209, 217, 219–20, 231, 234, 235, 256, 262n9 Vanderbeke, Dirk, 139 Vattimo, Gianna, 182 vectors, 34, 112, 121, 124 Venice, 16, 33, 76, 151, 167, 172, 174–75, 193; Dally Rideout and, 216, 221, 223–24, 226–30, 236n6; Isola degli Specchi and, 109, 123, 156 Venus, as goddess, 219–20, 235; as planet, 92, 99 Vienna, 24, 248, 252 Vineland (Pynchon), 21, 65n29, 92, 167– 69, 172, 179, 182, 192, 196, 201, 205, 208, 211n25, 217, 220, 227, 237n30, 259, 263n23, 264n27 The Virginian (Wister), 241 virtual reality, 80 Vonnegut, Kurt, 64n13 Walker, George Herbert, 263n22 Wallace, Henry, 160 Welcome to Hard Times (Doctorow), 23 Weisenburger, Steven, 140 Wells, H. G., 18, 26n8, 115, 118, 121, 125, 128 von Werner, Anton, 70 western United States, 196, 239, 244, 255, 260; and frontier, 16–17, 32, 50, 239–41, 247, 261n2

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Index Westinghouse, George, 145–46, 243 White City, 1, 16, 83, 88n55, 247, 262n17; and architecture, 230; and capitalism, 216, 219, 224–25, 227–29, 232–33; Tesla’s lighting of, 145–46 White Goddess, 220, 235 White, Hayden, 139 white slavery, 220–22, 231, 236n6, 237n17 Wicks, Ulrich, 31 The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah), 23 Williams, Ralph Vaughn, 171 Williams, Richard, 158 Williamson, Ronald, 34 Wilson, Woodrow, 249, 257 Woloch, Alex, 56 Wood, James, 73 Woodcock, George, 195, 209 working-girl fiction, 221–23, 233, 237n23

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World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, 1, 33, 16, 17, 20, 82–83, 142, 145, 206, 216, 219, 224–25, 247 World’s Fair of 1893. See World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 World War I, 5, 19–22, 25–26, 28n25, 28n35, 32, 46n33, 173, 220, 226; Balkans and, 239, 242, 246, 248–50, 253–55, 257–58, 264n29; money and, 222, 230; Trespassers and, 131–32, 135 World War II, 169, 185, 192, 255 Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (Reed), 23 Yz-les-Bains, 109, 197, 111, 249, 255 Zappala, Michael, 31 Zipp, Yvonne, 2 Žižek, Slavoj, 46n41, 261n7

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About the Editors

Jeffrey Severs is assistant professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He has articles and interviews published or forthcoming in Pynchon Notes, Studies in American Fiction, and the Mailer Review. In 2008–09 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas–Austin and the recipient of a Dorot Family Foundation Fellowship to study the archives of Pynchon, Norman Mailer, and Don DeLillo at the Harry Ransom Center. Christopher Leise is assistant professor of English at Whitman College. He is coeditor (with Crystal Alberts and Birger Vanwesenbeeck) of, and contributor to, William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2010) and has articles published or forthcoming in Studies in the Novel and Pynchon Notes. He is currently at work on a book manuscript exploring the cultural memory of Puritanism in contemporary American fiction.

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About the Contributors

Graham Benton has published articles on anarchism and Pynchon in Pynchon Notes and The Oklahoma City University Law Review and is at work on a book-length study of the subject. He is associate professor and Coordinator of the Program in Culture and Communications at The California State University–Maritime in Vallejo, California. Christopher K. Coffman is lecturer in the Humanities at Boston University. His recent and forthcoming publications include Framing Films (Kendall, 2009) and articles in Genre, Critical Engagements, Postscripts, and Comparative Literature. He is currently at work on, among other projects, a book entitled Rewriting the Americas: Contemporary Representations of the Colonial New World. Inger H. Dalsgaard is coeditor (with Luc Herman and Brian McHale) of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge, 2011) and has written numerous articles and reviews for Pynchon Notes, including a recent essay comparing terror in Pynchon’s Germany and America’s 9/11. Her essays have also appeared in Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works, edited by Thomas H. Schaub (Modern Language Association of America, 2008) and Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the Fiction of

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About the Contributors

Thomas Pynchon, edited by Anne Mangen and Rolf Gaasland (Novus, 2002). She is associate professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. Amy J. Elias, associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins, 2001), winner of the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Her articles on contemporary literature, media arts, and history have appeared in New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Re-Thinking History, and other journals and collections. She is the creator and current president of A.S.A.P., the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and organized its launch conference in 2009. Kathryn Hume is the author of, among other books, Pynchon’s Mythography: An Approach to Gravity’s Rainbow (Southern Illinois, 1987) and American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960 (Illinois, 2000). She is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. Martin Kevorkian, associate professor of English at the University of Texas–Austin, is the author of Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America (Cornell, 2006), as well as articles on Ashbery, Beckett, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. He is completing a book on Emersonian prophecy and the aftermath of the American Renaissance. Brian McHale is Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at the Ohio State University. The author of three books on postmodernist fiction and poetry—Postmodernist Fiction (Methuen, 1987), Constructing Postmodernism (Routledge, 1992), and The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems (Alabama, 2004)—he has also published many articles on modernist and postmodernist fiction and poetry, narrative theory, and science fiction. He is coeditor, with Randall Stevenson, of The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (Edinburgh, 2006) and, with his Ohio State colleagues David Herman and James Phelan, of Teaching Narrative Theory, forthcoming from the Modern Language Association Press. He is currently editing, with Luc Herman and Inger Dalsgaard, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon and, with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbon, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Elisabeth Sharp McKetta completed her Ph.D. in English at the University of Texas–Austin in 2009. She is founding editor of Farfelu Magazine and author/performer of “Zelda Speaks of Swans.” She resides in Boise, where she writes and teaches.

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J. Paul Narkunas is assistant professor in the Department of English at John Jay College/City University of New York. He has articles published or forthcoming in Theory and Event, Modern Fiction Studies, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, and several collections. He is presently completing two manuscripts: Flotsam and Jetsam in Global Capital Flows: Global English and the Future of Literature charts the effects of globalization and “dollar diplomacy” on the formation of U.S. literature and culture and analyzes the institutionalization of English as the United States’ state language; The Ahuman: Thinking beyond the Global Human critiques “humanitarian imperialism” through readings of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Culture Organization (UNESCO) cultural heritage programs, human rights law, and World Bank educational policies. Krzysztof Piekarski, a doctoral student in English at the University of Texas–Austin, has research interests in the postmodern novel, technology studies, and the digital humanities and is completing a dissertation on David Foster Wallace. With Martin Kevorkian and Elisabeth McKetta he presented at the 2007 MLA Convention the paper that was the basis for their essay in this volume. Terry Reilly is associate professor of English at the University of Alaska– Fairbanks. His essay on Tesla and Against the Day is part of his ongoing study of science, the paranormal, and eccentric scientist figures in Pynchon. He has coauthored articles with Stephen Tomaske that have been published or are forthcoming in Pynchon Notes. He has also published on Gravity’s Rainbow in The Oklahoma City University Law Review. Justin St. Clair, assistant professor of English at the University of South Alabama, specializes in teaching postmodern American and world literature. He has presented on panoramic painting and fiction at the 2008 Northeast Modern Language Association and the Humanities and Social Studies Colloquium series at the University of South Alabama. He received a grant to spend the summer of 2008 conducting research into the DeLillo and Pynchon holdings at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas–Austin for inclusion in his current book project, titled Novel Listening. This study argues that one of the formal logics of postmodern fiction is heterophonia: a pluralism of sound.

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