The list may be the manifest sign of research the novelist can’t bear to throw away—anyone with a little dangerous knowledge knows how deep Pynchon’s reading runs. He is rarely as poetic as when indulging himself in lists, arias to the material probity of the world, to the existence whose dissolution the novel makes its stuttering stand against—a dissolution toward that greater entropy predicted by Newton’s second law of thermodynamics, the law Pynchon would have loved to discover. That doesn’t mean the author hasn’t realized the humorous dimension to this, like a fourth hovering above the material three—the matter of matter is almost always farcical in accumulation, from Dickens’s dust heaps in Our Mutual Friend to Imelda Marcos’s shoes.
The list, taken to such extremes, is a provision beyond the reader’s appetite, a local surfeit that imitates, if it does not divine, the overindulgence intimate to the long novel itself. The meaning of the title, should Against the Day mean anything, lies in shoring up the present against those ruins of the future—and, to that end, the list stockpiles odds and ends, like boxes of Civil Defense crackers, as a specific against destruction. The question is not why Pynchon’s one short novel and his stories seem trivial; it’s why most of his epic novels do not.
Webb Traverse & Sons & Daughter
Dynamite, the anarchist Webb Traverse believes, is the “medium of truth.” Patriarch of the clan that makes Against the Day far more a family saga than previous novels, Traverse makes his journeys through western mining camps where ten-dayers and nippers and swampers fight it out with mine bosses. His sons emerge into a world where the antagonists are less clearly identified and the moral choices less easy. Shortly after being introduced, Webb blows up a railroad bridge, allowing Pynchon to digress, as he is all too delighted to do, on the methods in favor among dynamiters of the day—gelatin vs. sticks, oak magneto box and spool of wire vs. two-dollar Ingersoll watch and time delay. The use of modern explosive (one character snacks on a variety of it) warns of that terrible future the novel cannot avert, where warfare employs more and more monstrous ways of blowing men up. Dynamite, introduced after the Civil War, was once called Nobel’s Safety Powder, one of the few facts Pynchon doesn’t mention.
The novel uncovers anarchists wherever it goes—even Pugnax, the canine mascot of the Inconvenience, is seen reading The Princess Casamassima. Pynchon’s absorption in anarchist thought might suggest a curiosity born in aesthetic prejudice, given that his novels, should they require a justification of form, might find it more easily in Bakunin or Kropotkin than in the divine right of the author or the democracy of plot. (If science were wanted, the equations describing Brownian motion were scribbled down by the young Einstein during the annus mirabilis of 1905.) Pynchon’s novels begin in confusion and end in mystery, with so many diversions, divigations, and dead ends a reader would at times like to blow up a few railroad bridges himself.
Webb, who may moonlight as a dynamiting outlaw named the Kielselguhr Kid, is assassinated by agents of the plutocrat R. Scarsdale Vibe, whose own family saga shadows the Traverses. The knop on Vibe’s walking stick is a miniature gold-and-silver globe (the stick houses a gun with which he wounds anyone who crosses him), a nicely judged symbol for a man who dominates the world by buying and selling it. Though Webb’s sons diverge in their occupations, scattering across the planet of which Vibe controls so much, they are haunted by their father’s death and vow to avenge it. The eldest, Reef, becomes a wandering gambler mixed up in various bunco schemes, rejecting yet almost helplessly drawn to his father’s legacy. After an avalanche in which he is presumed killed, he takes a new identity as a neurasthenic easterner before hightailing it to dig tunnels in the Alps. The next son, Frank, a metallurgist for hire in a Mexico on the edge of revolution, is jailed in a fantastical underground prison complete with cantina, fandango girls, a nickelodeon theater, and gambling tables. Shortly after his escape, he kills one of his father’s murderers. (A daughter, Lake, eventually marries the other. Pynchon’s women are dishrags when they fall in love—they don’t just stand by their men; they sit, kneel, and flatten themselves.) The youngest boy, Kit, a math whiz and the most important character in the novel, has even before his father’s assassination been lured into unholy alliance with the Vibe Corporation, which pays his tuition at Yale.
The labyrinthine journeys of the Traverses through North America and Eurasia form the most dramatic feature of the novel, which might be called a revenge comedy—the narrative, against a background of great-power maneuvers, consists largely of liaisons between the boys and such mutable and seductive women as Estrella “Stray” Briggs, who marries Reef but ends up with Frank; Dahlia Rideout, who marries Kit long after meeting him on an ocean liner that turns into a battleship and then back again; and Yashmeen Halfcourt, a woman with mysterious and perhaps extratemporal powers who eventually becomes Reef’s lover. The sexual reticulations are Byzantine, unrepentantly sleazy, and cheerfully absurd.
Plot is the most irrelevant portion of a Pynchon novel, as character sometimes seems superfluous in James, whose great character is the prose itself (Aristotle no doubt said that, with access to one of Pynchon’s time machines). As it includes as many unidentifiable and miscellaneous ingredients as a fruitcake, however, the telling is itself the form of genius. Even an admiring reader might admit that Pynchon has an aversion to design or just doesn’t show much talent for it. He trusts that, if he marshals a battalion of characters and hurls a cannonade of ideas at them (improvising madly the while), when the smoke clears some kind of incoherent coherence will result. This worked fairly well in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, fairly ill in Mason & Dixon (the most dazzlingly written of the novels), and not at all in Vineland. Even to begin to compass the historical mechanisms of Against the Day, a reader would have to go beyond anarchism to the turn-of-the-century battle between the Vectorists and the Quaternionists, played out in universities across North America and Europe; to the aftermath of the “War of Currents” between Tesla and Edison, Tesla’s AC power illuminating the Columbian Exposition; to theories about the ether (Pynchon is largely a bore about ether); to the Tunguska incident in Siberia (which conspiracy theorists blame on Tesla instead of a meteor); and to various sideshows in the Great Game (V. was Pynchon’s earlier novel on the subject), including some vicious skirmishes in the Balkans. Pynchon is not a polymath but an omnivore, so far as arcane learning is concerned.
Infiltrating these real-world events are the imaginary shenanigans at the imaginary Candlebrow University, periodically assaulted by a peculiarly long-lived tornado dubbed Thorvald and infiltrated by visitors from the future; the roguery of a mad inventor operating a secondhand time-machine deep in Greenwich Village (which lets Pynchon drag in notes from Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York—much of the bloated farce takes place in the demimonde of cities); the search for Shambhala, which may or may not exist; the hunt for a Quaternion weapon, which may be the A-bomb (or just another MacGuffin); and various ideas about double worlds and lateral realities, islands both present and absent, Earth and Counter-Earth, Venice and contra-Venezia, phantom railways, ghosts, and more bilocation than a Christian saint could manage. If someone mentions that he owns a certain map, off the characters go on another Pynchonian wild-goose chase—but the novels are all wild-goose chases, whether the characters are in search of V. (V.), or a V-2 rocket (Gravity’s Rainbow), or some ancient conspiracy involving the mail (The Crying of Lot 49). In Mason & Dixon, the novel seems to be in search of the story itself.
Sex
Pynchon’s sex scenes are unconvincing at best, and he finds it hard to keep them in register between slapstick and blouse-tearing Harlequin romances (sometimes he seems to be trying both at once, with hazardous result). Most people believe they’re good in bed, so it’s no surprise that most novelists think their characters are good in bed, too.
“Quickly now. Into his mouth Reef in one stroke, no more, and then you must be perfectly still and allow this wicked little fellatrice to do all the work. A
nd you, Cyprian, when he spends you must not swallow any of it, you must keep it all in your mouth, is that understood?” By now she could barely maintain the tone of command, having aroused herself with kid-gloved fingers busy at clitoral bud and parted labia now sleekly framed among the foam of lace around her hips. “You are both my … my …” She could not quite pursue her thought, as Reef, having lost all control, came bursting in a great pungent flood, which Cyprian did his best to accommodate as he had been ordered to.
It isn’t clear whether this parodies popular fiction or merely succumbs to it. Gravity’s Rainbow, after being selected by the judges, was turned down for the Pulitzer Prize in part because the Pulitzer board found it obscene. The current novel has more pneumatic coupling than Updike in his heyday. That board might have expired of apoplexy could it have read the already infamous passage of doggy sex:
He stroked the diminutive spaniel for a while until, with no warning, she jumped off the couch and slowly went into the bedroom, looking back now and then over her shoulder. Reef followed, taking out his penis, breathing heavily through his mouth. “Here, Mouffie, nice big dog bone for you right here, lookit this, yeah, seen many of these lately? come on, smells good don’t it, mmm, yum!” and so forth, Mouffette meantime angling her head, edging closer, sniffing with curiosity. “That’s right, now o-o-open up … good girl, good Mouffette now let’s just put this— yaahhgghh!”
Reader, she bit him.
Pynchon in Style
Pynchon is more a mechanic of sentences than a stylist, even when the prose doesn’t drop into Late Hipster, which may be his default tongue. As he says in the most complete aesthetic statement he has made, the introduction to Slow Learner, “But as we all know, rock ’n’ roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.” The line was written in 1984, a little late to be a hepcat. Apparently Pynchon never grew up, or the world grew up, leaving him behind. His famous Garbo act has had obvious advantages—but what if it has kept his diction isolated, even mummified his syntax, too?
In his novels, Pynchon tends to stutter out phrases in workmanlike fashion, pushing the boulder of narrative uphill like a Sisyphus. (Compared to that of a master like Melville, Pynchon’s dialogue is disastrous—he has charmingly blamed this on an affliction known as “Bad Ear.”) There are, however, passages of consummated beauty, often a vision of capital where the phrases pile up like consumer goods.
Against the greased writhings of these dark iron structures, a brightwork of brass fittings and bindings, kept a-shine through the nights by a special corps of unseen chars, flashed like halos of industrious saints in complex periodic motion everywhere. Hundreds of telegraphers, ranked about the great floor attending each his set, scarcely looked up from their universe of clicks and rests—uniformed messenger boys came and went among the varnished hardwood labyrinth of desks and sorting-bureaux, and customers leaned or paced or puzzled over messages they had just received, or must send, as cheerless London daylight descended through the windows and rising steam produced an all-but-tropical humidity in this Northern Temple of Connexion.
These are almost the rhythms of Dickens, whose freakish surplus of characters, juddering episodic plots, and teary sentiment Pynchon half imitates, though in each case with a nearly lethal dose of irony (no one has ever wept over the death of a Pynchon character the way thousands wept over Little Nell). Something in the long sentence draws out his craft, just as the hammering together of obscure ideas sparks something remarkable in his intelligence:
“The sauce was invented as a new sensation for jaded palates at court by the duc de Richelieu, at first known as mahonnaise after Mahon, the chief port of Majorca, the scene of the duc’s dubious ‘victory’ in 1756 over the ill-fated Admiral Byng. Basically Louis’s drug dealer and pimp, Richelieu, known for opium recipes to fit all occasions, is also credited with the introduction into France of the cantharides, or Spanish fly. … What might this aphrodisiac have in common with the mayonnaise? That the beetles must be gathered and killed by exposing them to vinegar fumes suggests an emphasis on living or recently living creatures—the egg yolk perhaps regarded as a conscious entity—cooks will speak of whipping, beating, binding, penetration, submission, surrender. There is an undoubtedly Sadean aspect to the mayonnaise. No getting past that.”
Undoubtedly is a touch bullying, but a paragraph like this—improbable, brilliant, ragged with learning—is what keeps his cult in fresh recruits. (The Thomas Pynchon wiki is likely to prove a permanent resource on the Web—authors who traffic in obscurity are perfect subjects for the slow accumulation and manic trivia of the wiki.)
There are some things Pynchon does superbly well as a novelist, and others he does intolerably ill, though his fans can be counted on to call his sins saintliness. He writes like a savant missing significant parts—a piston here, a gearbox there—of the necessary machinery. If I say Pynchon is ungraceful, I don’t mean beyond grace, because he can whip up a landscape of which any Dutch painter of the seventeenth century would have been proud:
For the sunlight had to it the same interior darkness as the watery dusk last night—it was like passing through an all-surrounding photographic negative—the lowland nearly silent except for water-thrushes, the harvested fields, the smell of hops being dried in kilns, flax pulled up and piled in sheaves, in local practice not to be retted till the spring, shining canals, sluices, dikes and cart roads, dairy cattle under the trees, the edged and peaceful clouds. Tarnished silver.
That last touch of color returns to photography’s silver-nitrate solutions, quietly surrendering to the metaphor that binds these lines like the sheaves themselves. “Grace” is the last word in the novel.
Pynchon the Pub Bore
On the other hand, Pynchon launches himself into numerous lectures on great-power politics of the day, lectures that would suffocate an audience at a hundred paces. Let a character say, “But you’re itching to be filled in, I can see that,” and the author scurries to the library table to pot some history (he’s suspected of relying on the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica for his facts, but his reading is far richer and more mutinous). The more he writes, the more stiff-necked the movements of armies and politicians, though these are Astaire waltzes compared to the global wars in mathematics:
“And that’s what has kept driving Cantor back into the Nervenklinik, ” added Humfried, “and he was only worrying about line-segments. But out here in the four-dimensional space-and-time of Dr. Minkowski, inside the tiniest ‘interval,’ as small as you care to make it, within each tiny hypervolume of Kontinuum —there likewise must be always hidden an infinite number of other points—and if we define a ‘world’ as a very large and finite set of points, then there must be worlds. Universes!”
If this sort of thing gives you goose bumps, there are more than enough passages in Against the Day about zeta functions and the Riemann hypothesis to gratify you, as well as any of your relatives who happen by (like a gas, the math expands to fill the space available). Pynchon is perhaps the only novelist who could have written that “all mathematics leads … to some kind of human suffering.” After the publication of V., he was supposedly turned down for graduate work in math at Berkeley. He avenges that humiliation here.
Whimsies
Pynchon is so full of intrigue, so full of intriguing idea, each chapter casts off a premise whose particulars a lesser novelist might have taken a novel to tease out. The Chums of Chance are ordered south to Antarctica to go north to the Arctic, their route mapped straight through the Earth, where a vast civilization is secretly lodged. They stop, merely for a page, to render the denizens of the hollow Earth assistance against an army of gnomes. The author—in as much of a hurry as the Chums, it seems—apologizes for not giving the details, referring the reader to The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth. The unwritten novel has been written, only to join the Borgesian library of books whose spines have titles but whose insides are blank
, at least to us—the library of all fictional books mentioned in fiction. (This incident seems curiously to be the only place in the novel the Chums prove of much help—mostly they lumber along above, well-meaning but feckless, accomplishing little except perhaps the accidental destruction of the Campanile.)
When Dr. Watson alluded to the case of the giant rat of Sumatra, he piqued the reader with a world beyond his grasp, a world composed of the lost passages of fiction, availing but unavailable (how different this is from knowing the titles of Sophocles’ lost plays, yet in the end how frustratingly similar). Apart from the deft and childish joke of it, this reminds the reader of all an author imagines but has chosen not to explore. The titles of other Chums novels are tauntingly scattered through the text, naming adventures left undetailed. Perhaps Pynchon has all these years been writing a series of boys’ adventure novels (the sort he himself read as a boy)—in this guise, some aspects of his fiction make more sense.
Pynchon’s indulgence in Borgesian whimsies, though they barely skirt outright doltishness (the sophistication of the author’s humor has always been in doubt—you get the feeling that he cracks himself up a little too often), is often where his most appealing contrivances occur. In Against the Day, these include:
• The Book of Iceland Spar (spar is a form of calcite used as a polarizing filter), which contains an up-to-date record of an Arctic expedition, “even of days not yet transpired,” presumably due to the double refraction of which the crystal is capable;
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