by Christopher Fulkerson
CF Conducting Maxwell Davies'
Vesalii icones
Thomas Pynchon is that Great American Novelist who doesn’t want anyone to know who he is. A few facts seem to have congealed about him, but we don’t have many sources we can really trust. After all, the photo alleged of him from decades ago might be of someone long deceased, something purchased or inherited; at this point we can even wonder whether he’s a man or a woman. The recordings of him speaking could be of someone else, or altered.
To my mind Pynchon’s novels GRAVITY’S RAINBOW and MASON AND DIXON are indisputable masterpieces. The latter probably has his most carefully crafted and detailed prose. AGAINST THE DAY is a more casual read and at 1085 pages it’s a lot longer than Pynchon’s other books: you’d better not take time off work to read it, or you might find yourself staving off eviction. It has some of Pynchon’s most enjoyable and irreverent romps. Some of my favorite passages are of the youthful dirigible troop surprising a busty nude, Chevrolette McAddoo, on an outdoor photo shoot, and the British mountaineer who confronts his American travel partner with one of the most important things that every American ought to confront but generally doesn’t, when the Brit rightly savages the American for believing everything he is told. For me, that was a core nexus in the novel.
The story is about the most epic and fantastic politics achieved through adventure travel, often giddy or strange, facilitated by a plethora of real or imagined sciences, everything except rocket science and undersea travel: dirigibles, earth-digging machines, time traveling vehicles, psychical anti-gravity, occult sciences; there are different kinds of political and physical fallout, and reasons for the selection of their use, for every form of travel. There are tongue-in-cheek parodies of a wide variety of beloved “grade B” literary genres, such as Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys (so obvious you don’t need to have read this stuff recently to get it, in fact, they are advertisements conveniently found in the text), Star Trek, Babylon Five (to get these references you have to have a good knowledge of these sources, they are fairly well-woven into the fabric of the story). There are some refreshingly easy boy-meets-girl encounters that we can be grateful for, some of the encounters in troops, as when the ballooning boys meet the girls with wings and, by the end, build a city in the clouds. And oh yeah there are tons of references to higher grade literature too.
It isn’t clear what particular day it is that Pynchon, or his novel, is against. There is a lot of real and imagined history here to have to choose from and many time references to consider. There are so many alternative universes that the most help I can be is to say keep your eyes open for them. Of course we could hang loose about a particular day; we could allow the usual literary generality to a title as key to a method; but we might want to speculate that it might be the day of the Tunguska Fireball, which features in the story; or it might just as well be some other day; the expression “against the day” appears quite a few times (and has appeared in other Pynchon novels). July Fourth gets mentioned a lot. What with time travel being an important theme in the story, it might not matter what day he is talking about. There are many means for achieving alternative reality in this novel: some you have to be astute to notice; some are screamingly funny, such as the new universe you are in each time a particular harmonica band is mentioned – the band’s name is slightly different each time you hear it, because it has a different name in every universe. There is a fear that there will be a glut of time machines on the market, as common as cabs… but wait, that’s reality. Some dimensional shifting is quite fluid indeed, as on page 570, “Isola degli Specchi appeared on some maps and was absent from others. It had seemed to depend on how high the water was in the Lagoon from day to day.” As the character Coombs De Bottle says on page 937, “Remember, everything on this map stands for something else.” “’Children.’ The voice could not be located, it was everywhere in the corridors. ‘The Museum is closing now. The next time you visit, it might not be exactly where it stands today;’” from page 636. The credulity of the characters is part of the charm of the piece, as when, a page before, another character expresses fear of explosives of strange technologies that might “burst in silent invisible clouds,” the reader visualizes the correct unselfconscious rolled-eye adolescent look of greater wonder than fright.
Pynchon’s invention with strange names, character motivations, and stupid songs is up to his own and current fashion, and then some. “Disrespecting” and “tumbleweeding” are both verbs. A plurality of young females is “a turbulence of girls;” of tour vehicles, “a solemnity of omnibuses.” There is death by mayonnaise, but an angel of deep s**t. In the “dubiously attributed” painting by Marco Zoppo, “Peasants could be seen urinating on their superiors;” this seems to be an anarchist trait, mentioned more than once. But some of the bizarrerie are real: the albino deer mentioned on page 785 do exist; they are all over the place in Ithica, New York.
The inferences-a-clef number in the thousands. The more you know the more you will enjoy reading this novel. In general this book is completely off-the-shoulder. Most paraphrases have comic or ironic effect, as when on page 575 we learn of “an English painter type, maybe even the genuine article, named Hunter Penhallow… with an easel and a kit…” Pen-hallow scans to Shake-speare and the kit to Kit Marlowe. The stream of references is continuous… I was particularly happy to read “Dum vivimus, bibamus,” a reference to Heinlein’s GLORY ROAD; I didn’t catch the alleged Bela Lugosi cameo, but there is a Dracula cameo on page 680.
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First uploaded June 30, 2014.