Against the Grain

DIALOGUE
8

Edited by

Michael J. Meyer
Against the Grain
Reading Pynchon’s
Counternarratives

Edited by
Sascha Pöhlmann

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover Design: Pier Post

Cover Image: Zak Smith, Red Ninja House, 2005.

Acrylic and ink on paper. 40 x 30 inches
Courtesy of the Artist and Fredericks & Freiser, NY.

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.

ISBN: 978-90-420-3072-5
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3073-2
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Printed in the Netherlands
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editor would like to thank everyone who made International
Pynchon Week 2008 possible. Generous financial endorsement was
granted by the US Consulate General in Munich, the Bavarian
American Academy, Pynchon Notes, and the Amerika-Institut of
Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Many individuals also gave
their invaluable support in countless ways: Klaus Benesch, Thea
Diesner, Meike Zwingenberger, Jasmin Falk, Fabian Diesner, Bruno
Arich-Gerz, John Krafft, and Veronika Schmideder. The conference
itself could not have worked without the help of Fabian Diesner,
Markus Faltermeier, Helmut Fuchs, Nathalie Aghoro, Jola Feix,
Maximilian Heinrich, Sebastian Huber, Gabriella Nikitina, Thoren
Opitz, Almut Ringleben, and Julia Stamm. The editor is also indebted
to William Clarke, Andrew Estes, Taylor Hagood, Jessica Lawson,
Amy Mohr, Daniel Rees, Rodney Taveira and Celia Wallhead for
their help with the manuscript.

In memory of Sharon Krafft.

Abbreviations

AtD: Against the Day

CoL: The Crying of Lot 49

GR: Gravity’s Rainbow

MD: Mason & Dixon

SL: Slow Learner

VL: Vineland
 General Editor’s Preface

The original concept for Rodopi’s new series entitled Dialogue

grew out two very personal experiences of the general editor. In 1985,
having just finished my dissertation on John Steinbeck and attained
my doctoral degree, I was surprised to receive an invitation from
Steinbeck biographer, Jackson J. Benson, to submit an essay for a
book he was working on. I was unpublished at the time and was
unsure and hesitant about my writing talent, but I realized that I had
nothing to lose. It was truly the “opportunity of a lifetime.” I revised
and shortened a chapter of my dissertation on Steinbeck’s The Pearl
and sent it off to California. Two months later, I was pleasantly
surprised to find out that my essay had been accepted and would
appear in Duke University Press’s The Short Novels of John Steinbeck
(1990).

Surprisingly, my good fortune continued when several months

after the book appeared, Tetsumaro Hayashi, a renowned Steinbeck
scholar, asked me to serve as one of the three assistant editors of The
Steinbeck Quarterly, then being published at Ball State University.
Quite naïve at the time about publishing, I did not realize how
fortunate I had been to have such opportunities present themselves
without any struggle on my part to attain them. After finding my
writing voice and editing several volumes on my own, I discovered in
2002 that despite my positive experiences, there was a real prejudice
against newer “emerging” scholars when it came to inclusion in
collections or acceptance in journals.

As the designated editor of a Steinbeck centenary collection, I

found myself roundly questioned about the essays I had chosen for
inclusion in the book. Specifically, I was asked why I had not
selected several prestigious names whose recognition power would
have spurred the book’s success on the market. My choices of lesser
known but quality essays seemed unacceptable to those who ran the
conference which produced the potential entries in the book. New
 General Editor’s Preface

voices were unwelcome; it was the tried and true that were greeted
with open arms. Yet these experienced scholars had no need for
further publications and often offered few original insights into the
Steinbeck canon. Sadly, the originality of the lesser-known essayists
met with hostility; the doors were closed, perhaps even locked tight,
against their innovative approaches and readings that took issue with
scholars whose authority and expertise had long been unquestioned.

Angered, I withdrew as editor of the volume, and began to think

of ways to rectify what I considered a serious flaw in academé. My
goal was to open discussions between experienced scholars and those
who were just beginning their academic careers and had not yet
broken through the publication barriers. Dialogue would be fostered
rather than discouraged.

Having previously served as an editor for several volumes in

Rodopi’s Perspective of Modern Literature series under the general
editorship of David Bevan, I sent a proposal to Fred van der Zee
advocating a new series that would be entitled Dialogue, one that
would examine the controversies within classic canonical texts and
would emphasize an interchange between established voices and those
whose ideas had never reached the academic community because their
names were unknown. Happily, the press was willing to give the
concept a try and gave me a wide scope in determining not only the
texts to be covered but also in deciding who would edit the individual
volumes.

This is the first time that a volume in the series has arrived full-
blown and whose editor was unsolicited. Nevertheless, the resulting
book is clearly very well assembled and addresses a wide variety of
issues in Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day. As noted in the
acknowledgments, the essays offered here were first presented during
International Pynchon Week in 2008 at a conference held in Munich,
Germany. Attracting Pynchon scholars from all parts of the world,
this conference has produced a volume that varies somewhat from the
original Dialogue concept in that almost all of the contributors are
Pynchon experts. Still, all the contributors engage in significant
assessments of Pynchon’s style, imagery, and thematics while
interacting with each other to evaluate a very complex author indeed.
As you will see, many of the authors break fertile new ground in the
process and offer approaches which will help readers see the novel
General Editor’s Preface

from several new angles. This volume will soon be followed by

studies on Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, Ford Maddox Ford’s The
Good Soldier and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It is my hope
that as each title appears, the Dialogue series will foster not only
renewed interest in each of the chosen works but that each will bring
forth fresh interpretations and will open doors to heretofore silenced
voices. In this atmosphere, a healthy interchange of criticism can
develop, one that will allow even dissent and opposite viewpoints to
be expressed without fear that such stances may be seen as negative or
counter-productive.

My thanks to Rodopi and its editorial board for its support of this
“radical” concept. May you, the reader, discover much to value in
these new approaches to issues that have fascinated readers for
decades and to books that have long stimulated our imaginations and
our critical discourse.

Michael J. Meyer
2010
 CONTENTS

Introduction: The Complex Text 9

Sascha Pöhlmann

Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of

Thomas Pynchon 35
Heinz Ickstadt

Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art 49

Keith O’Neill

Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day 63

Simon de Bourcier

“Perchance to Dream”: Clock Time and Creative Resistance

Against the Day 81
Inger H. Dalsgaard

“When You Come to a Fork in the Road”—Marcuse, Intellectual

Subversion and Negative Thought in Gravity’s Rainbow and
Against the Day 97
Toon Staes

Imperfect Circles: Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim

to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 113
Ali Chetwynd

Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 133

Rodney Taveira

As Far as Pynchon “Loves Cameras” 157

Clément Lévy

A Medium No Longer: How Communication and Information

Become Objectives in Thomas Pynchon’s Works 167
Georgios Maragos
“It’s My Job, I Can’t Back Out”: The “House” and Coercive
Property Relations in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland 185
William D. Clarke

The Tao of Thomas Pynchon 213

Michael Harris

“The Real and Only Fucking is Done on Paper”: Penetrative

Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 231
Jessica Lawson

Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in Thomas Pynchon’s

The Crying of Lot 49 251
Manlio Della Marca

The Underworld and Its Forces: Croatia, the Uskoks and Their
Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 263
Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 291

Celia Wallhead

“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in

Against the Day 307
Leyla Haferkamp

From Science to Terrorism: The Transgressing Function of

Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 323
Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

“Vectors and [Eigen]Values”: The Mathematics of Movement

in Against the Day 349
Hanjo Berressem

Contributors 369

Index 375
 Introduction: The Complex Text

Sascha Pöhlmann

Abstract: This introduction takes Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against the Day as
an occasion to raise the question of whether it is still legitimate to classify Pynchon as
a postmodern author. The essay presents two major ways in which Against the Day
transcends the category of the postmodern and thereby invites readers to reevaluate
Pynchon’s whole oeuvre anew while emphasizing once again its political dimension.
Firstly, Against the Day is interpreted as a postnational novel that challenges the
metanarrative of nation-ness in a variety of ways and thereby continues a project
Pynchon has been pursuing at least since The Crying of Lot 49. Secondly, Against the
Day is conceived of as a complex text in the sense of combining real and imaginary
aspects, discussing the use of mathematics in the novel with special emphasis on
aspects of describing, imagining and changing this world as well as many other
worlds. Both these aspects illustrate how Against the Day exceeds the boundaries of
postmodernist fiction and imply that Pynchon’s novels in general are always so much
more than postmodern.

We may have to stop calling Thomas Pynchon a postmodern writer.

This is not because his works are not postmodern, but because they
are more than that, and referring to them with that term only is even
more of a simplification than it usually is, and also a misleading one.
It has virtually become an axiom in literary studies to say that
Pynchon is a postmodernist, if not the postmodern author, and I
believe this statement should be questioned time and again because of
its axiomatic status, especially because it all too often leads to the
unfortunate and careless inference that whatever Pynchon writes is
postmodern by default. The publication of Against the Day (2006)
offers such a chance to reconsider the postmodernism of Pynchon’s
writing, and I will argue that there are certain ways in which it
significantly transcends the limitations of that concept. Again, this is
not to claim that Pynchon’s writing is not postmodern, but that it is
also other things, and that it seems more and more inappropriate to
10 Sascha Pöhlmann

limit one’s view of these texts to a postmodern framework. Without a

doubt, Gravity’s Rainbow is still the defining text of postmodernism
in literature, with The Crying of Lot 49 probably a close second;
Mason & Dixon is one of the most important examples of the
postmodern genre of historiographic metafiction; the critique of
consumer and media culture offered in Vineland even surpasses that
of DeLillo’s White Noise by also including a critique of the
countercultures; the “mock-modernism” of V. (McHale, Constructing
Postmodernism 63) may well be seen as a variety of postmodernism;
finally, Against the Day is full of postmodern elements such as
ontological and textual play, rewritten histories, and a radical
multiplicity of viewpoints, characters and narratives. Yet the
postmodernism of Pynchon’s texts should not be regarded as a natural
given, and it should especially not be assumed when a new novel is
published; instead of making the novel fit the oeuvre, one does well to
read the oeuvre anew and see how it is changed by the addition. T.S.
Eliot’s assertion in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is still worth
pondering in this context: “what happens when a new work of art is
created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of
art which preceded it” (5). While Eliot means literally all earlier
works, it is beneficial in particular to apply this concept to the earlier
works of that respective author. Doing so still implies a belief in a
certain continuity provided by the author-function, but it also
counteracts the exaggerated assumption of coherence within an
author’s work that Foucault warns against when stating that the
“œuvre can be regarded neither as an immediate unity, nor as a certain
unity, nor as a homogeneous unity” (27). Against the Day presents an
opportunity and a necessity to question this unity of Pynchon’s œuvre,
to re-evaluate his earlier texts and to reconsider even basic
assumptions about them, and to keep them open towards such
reinterpretation without necessarily rejecting accepted ideas; this
seems a much more useful approach to the novel than to label it
“postmodern” by interpolation. It is obvious how the latter approach
would limit the potential of readings of Against the Day, and the
refusal to assume such limits may well point out how they have
constricted readings of Pynchon’s earlier novels as well. An essay by
Sara Solberg has given us every right to compare apples and oranges,
so let me do just that to illustrate my point: Joyce’s Ulysses remains
the modernist novel despite Finnegans Wake, and the postmodernism
The Complex Text 11

of Finnegans Wake allows for readings of Ulysses (as well as

Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) that go beyond
the analytical framework provided by the concept of modernism.
Finnegans Wake meant, although nobody could possibly know it in
1939, that people would have to stop calling Joyce a modernist despite
the fact that Ulysses would remain the defining novel of modernism.
Similarly, I believe we do not have to diminish the significance of
Pynchon’s texts for postmodernism by arguing, as I will in the
following, that Against the Day exceeds the conceptual framework of
postmodernism, and that it asks us to check if and where Pynchon’s
earlier texts did so as well. Brian McHale emphasizes the need for
such conceptual flexibility in order to prevent theoretical short-
sightedness:

Period terms like postmodernism (and modernism, for that matter) are
strategically useful; they help us see connections among disparate phenomena,
but at the same time they also obscure other connections, and we must
constantly weigh the illumination they shed over here against the obscurity
they cast over there. From the moment when the obscurity outweighs the
illumination, and the category in question becomes more a hindrance than a
help, we are free to reconstruct or even abandon it. (“What was
Postmodernism?”)

Pynchon’s readers may appreciate the idea that we should, if possible,

regularly check our paranoia, our desire to connect, our need to
establish a narrative to help us make sense of what is going on.
Against the Day serves well as a reminder that, after all, every
categorization of period, genre, etc. is a construction that should not
be mistaken for something like a “natural law,” no matter how well it
works.
The impulse for this reading of Against the Day stems from the
event this book resulted from: International Pynchon Week 2008, held
at the Amerika-Haus in Munich, Germany. The title of the conference
was “Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives,” since
this seemed not only a neat pun that allowed the blatant plagiarism of
the original cover of Against the Day for the conference poster, but
also one option among many to describe all of Pynchon’s texts, which
was readily embraced by many presenters. These texts are
counternarratives, not only to dominant narratives, but even
sometimes to themselves and each other. It is in this spirit I want to
offer an analysis of Against the Day as a counternarrative to the
12 Sascha Pöhlmann

dominant postmodernist readings of Pynchon’s novels, and therefore

also as a counternarrative to its own postmodern elements; it is by
refusing to be only postmodern that Against the Day rejects
postmodern strategies while at the same time employing them.1 The
papers presented at the conference, and the essays collected in this
volume that are based on these presentations, provide fertile ground
for such an analysis, and their diversity surely was an inspiration to
any participant in the conference (as they will be, hopefully, to the
reader of the present collection). International Pynchon Week 2008
was a remarkable event in that it showed the Pyndustry as work in
progress, as everyone was trying to make sense of Against the Day,
which was published not long before the call for papers went out, and
to relate it to Pynchon’s other novels. During the four days of the
conference, presenters and audience members witnessed and
participated in what can be called critical reception in the making, and
the sheer variety of topics, opinions, interpretations and
contextualizations attests to the productive diversity of Pynchon
studies as well as to what turned out to be the accuracy of the
conference title: the narratives and counternarratives offered at the
conference resisted being reduced to a single reading or explanation,
and I hope readers of this collection will be content that this reduction
has not been attempted in the editorial process. As the very first
collection of essays on Against the Day—and I emphasize that this
also means those essays focusing on Pynchon’s other novels, since
these readings are informed by Against the Day—this volume seeks to
provide readers with a variety of possible approaches to the novel,
either regarding its entirety or more detailed aspects. Let me
summarize briefly what the reader can expect from this diversity.

The collection opens with Heinz Ickstadt’s “Setting Sail Against the
Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon.” As its title suggests,
the essay can be seen as a point of departure for the others that follow,
since it not only reviews many of the most important aspects of
Against the Day, but also places the novel in the context of Pynchon’s
other texts. Ickstadt offers an overarching analysis that connects
particular concerns of Against the Day, ranging from mathematics to
anarchism to light, with the more general issues that have haunted
Pynchon’s writing since V.—potential, subjectivity, history, a
counterworld to the one we know all too well.
The Complex Text 13

Keith O’Neill continues this critical contextualization of Against

the Day in “Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art” by drawing
on the dispute between Henry James and H.G. Wells that is an
emblem of the rupture in literature between so-called “high culture”
and genre fiction. Using Pynchon’s essay “Is It O.K. to Be a
Luddite?” as a background, O’Neill argues that Against the Day
reflects and takes sides in this debate and thereby more generally
invests its own aesthetics with subversive political significance.
Simon de Bourcier picks up the reference to Wells in “Travels in
the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day.” He shows how the novel
frames its encounters between possible worlds by narrativizing a
debate contemporary with its setting, which involves different
interpretations of the fourth dimension by Wells, Zangwill, Hinton,
Ouspensky, Bergson, and Minkowski.
Even if the fourth dimension in Against the Day is not necessarily
time at all, it would be a mistake to conclude that time is not relevant
in the novel. Inger Dalsgaard approaches the subject from a different
angle in “‘Perchance to Dream’: Clock Time and Creative Resistance
Against the Day.” Taking Pynchon’s 1993 essay “Nearer, My Couch,
to Thee” and its spiritual-political concept of sloth as a starting point,
she discusses constructions of (and resistance to) linear concepts of
time, and places Against the Day within both a scientific tradition of
relativity and quantum physics and a literary tradition going back to
Hamlet.
Toon Staes reads Against the Day within the tradition of the
Pynchonian canon itself. His essay “‘When You Come to a Fork in the
Road’—Marcuse, Intellectual Subversion and Negative Thought in
Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day” applies Marcuse’s
philosophy to the relationship between potentiality and actuality in the
two novels, especially with regard to the individual facing a capitalist
society in which the real and the rational are allegedly one. Staes
employs Marcuse’s ideas not only to offer an insightful analysis of
each novel, but also to trace a more general heterogeneous continuity
of narrative resistance in Pynchon’s writing, as exemplified in the
foreword to Orwell’s 1984.
Ali Chetwynd focuses entirely on Pynchon’s 1973 novel in his
essay “Imperfect Circles: Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim
to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow.” He argues that critics have
unduly privileged the notion of the “perfect rocket arc” as a structural
14 Sascha Pöhlmann

metaphor in the novel, and offers various related models in a

comprehensive fresh reading that compellingly demands a re-
evaluation of earlier ideas about that text. Ballistic arcs, spirals and
vortices offer interpretive imagery that sheds new light on well-
established topics such as the Rocket, Slothrop’s scattering, and the
various attempts at approaching holy centers.
Rodney Taveira addresses Pynchon’s imagery literally in his essay
“Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse,” in
which he approaches Against the Day from the angle of visual culture.
His rich interdisciplinary discussion uses art history, photography, and
cinema not only to place the painters in Pynchon’s novel in their
Futurist context, but also to offer a comprehensive analysis of
visuality in Against the Day that has remarkable implications for a
wide range of its crucial elements, including light, bilocation, Deuce’s
murders, the city of Venice, and physics.
Clément Lévy offers a different take on visuality in a more
specialized analysis of photography in Pynchon, appropriately entitled
“As Far as Pynchon ‘Loves Cameras.’” He traces the use of cameras
throughout Pynchon’s works and reads major topics anew along the
lines of this motif, offering fresh insight into the treatment of
communication, spying, larger structures of control that relate to
concepts of urbanity, and ultimately representation and its difficult
relationship to the real.
Georgios Maragos stays with the topic of communication in “A
Medium no Longer: How Communication and Information Become
Objectives in Thomas Pynchon’s Works.” He adds to the well-
established scholarship on this issue by offering a straightforward
thesis based on a complex and comprehensive analysis: in Pynchon’s
novels, media cease to be means to an end, but become objectives
themselves.
William D. Clarke focuses on a single novel in his essay “‘It’s My
Job, I Can’t Back Out’: The ‘House’ and Coercive Property Relations
in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.” He draws on socio-economic theory
to discuss property as a “strange” and elusive metaphor that offers at
best a shaky foundation for capitalism, and goes on to argue that,
accordingly, Vineland effectively employs inherently conflicting and
contradictory concepts of property in its cultural critique.
Michael Harris, in his essay “The Tao of Thomas Pynchon,”
complements this economic perspective with an analysis of spiritual
The Complex Text 15

aspects in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day.
Pynchon’s use of non-Western spirituality has been of interest to early
critics already, but the more recent novels demand that even more
attention be paid to it. Harris offers a concise and varied interpretation
of Eastern religion in Pynchon’s texts, arguing that it is a significant
motif as well as a meaningful structuring device.
Jessica Lawson concentrates on the carnal side of Pynchon’s
writing in “‘The Real and Only Fucking is Done on Paper’:
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text.” She considers the
complex relation between Gravity’s Rainbow and its readers in the
light of theories of the erotics of language, writing, text, and
interpretation, and offers valuable insights into this profound set of
questions about the novel: “how we get inside it, how it gets inside us,
and who exactly comes out on top.”
Manlio Della Marca deals with quite another kind of fluid in his
essay “Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in Thomas Pynchon’s The
Crying of Lot 49.“ He takes his cue from Marx, Engels, and Zygmunt
Bauman, and places Pynchon’s novel at a point of transition between
the solidity of a modernity focused on hardware and the fluidity of a
postmodernity focused on software, thereby presenting a dialectic that
opens up new readings of that text.
Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša returns to Against the Day by looking
closely at one of its major settings: the Balkans. In “The Underworld
and Its Forces: Croatia, the Uskoks and Their Fight for Autonomy in
Against the Day,” she parallels a literary analysis of narratives of
underworlds and exile in the novel with a historical account of
Croatian struggles for national independence, showing how Pynchon
represents fictionalized human and supernatural forces of the
underworld as agents in a political process.
Celia Wallhead continues the discussion of imperialism by
drawing on an intertextual connection between Against the Day and
Kipling’s novel Kim, which was published during the time in which
the former is set. Her essay “Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the
Day” points out parallels between the texts and employs them in order
to show how Pynchon’s novel can be read as a postmodern reworking
of the spy-adventure story.
Leyla Haferkamp analyzes Against the Day with regard to some of
its major scientific aspects in “‘Particle or Wave?’: The ‘Function’ of
the Prairie in Against the Day.” She argues that the prairie works in
16 Sascha Pöhlmann

Pynchon’s text as a complementary spatial modality that has both

political and poetic ramifications in its metaphorical potential to
combine dichotomies such as order and chaos or culture and nature; to
that end, she also relates the prairie along with the particle-wave
duality to the smooth and striated spaces theorized by Deleuze and
Guattari.
Francisco Collado-Rodríguez addresses the scientific background
of Against the Day by contextualizing it comprehensively within
Pynchon’s oeuvre. “From Science to Terrorism: the Transgressing
Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day” goes back as far as
V. in its argument that Pynchon uses three basic strategies in
employing the organizing principle of energy (manipulation of
scientific notions, use of intertextuality/metafiction, recurrent and
ironic exploitation of alphabetic letters), adding that Against the Day
expands this project to include terrorism and light as major tropes.
Hanjo Berressem closes the collection by moving the discussion of
science in Against the Day to the field of mathematics, which is
certainly the scientific dominant of the novel, and by taking it to other
spheres of knowledge from there. In “‘Vectors and [Eigen]Values’:
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day,” Berressem
argues that Pynchon employs a “vectorial poetics” in his novels that is
especially prominent in Against the Day, and that can be approached
usefully by further theorizing ideas Pynchon mentions in his texts:
eigenvalues, sinuous cycles, and habits.
It will be fascinating to see how these essays, this early criticism of
Against the Day, work for other readers, how they make new
connections possible, invite expansion or criticism, and how these
narratives spawn more narratives, counter- or otherwise.

Let me now come back to the narrative of Against the Day and
postmodernism. How exactly does the novel overspill that concept?
What leads me to argue that a postmodern lens allows for many exact
readings but leaves other possibilities out of focus? In short, it is
Pynchon’s globality, or what I call elsewhere his postnational
imagination.2 While postmodernism has worked a great deal towards
the deconstruction of hierarchies in the contexts of gender, sexuality,
race, colonialism, class, and a few more, it has either insufficiently or
not at all paid attention to the nation as a governing principle of being,
knowledge, thought, identity, and politics. Nation-ness, the abstract
The Complex Text 17

concept instead of a more particular nationality, is one of the most

dominant ideas of modernity, and probably the most successful
secular structural concept not only of group identity and geopolitics,
but also of personal identity and self-definition. As Anthony Smith
argues:

In a sense, nothing so clearly marks out the modern era and defines our
attitudes and sentiments as national consciousness and nationalist ideology.
Not only in everyday political and social life, but also in our underlying
assumptions, the nation and its nationalism provide a stable framework for
good and ill and define the goals and values of most collective activity. The
modern world has become inconceivable and unintelligible without nations
and nationalism […]. (106)

It is surprising that postmodernism has not singled out nation-ness as a

primary target of its deconstructive efforts; apparently, this is one
metanarrative it was still very hard to be incredulous toward. While
postmodernism is actually well-equipped to challenge and deconstruct
nation-ness, it has not applied its discursive tools to this particular
problem, but has chosen to focus on others instead. Postnationalism,
which I define as the theory and practice of challenging the hegemony
of nation-ness, can build on a postmodern framework, but was not an
integral part of it. “Being national is the condition of our times” (Eley
and Suny, “From the Moment” 32), but so far it has not been
sufficiently recognized as a condition that needs to be questioned and
changed. It is crucial to note in this context that the important and
impressive postnationalist efforts in American Studies do not go far
enough, since they mostly seek to transcend nationalism, whereas a
postnational practice works to think beyond nation-ness in general.
Pynchon’s novels, I argue, are very important examples of such a
postnational (not only postnationalist) practice, but it is a practice that
has been outside the visible spectrum of a postmodernism that, like
Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, could not let go of nation-ness, that
last albatross around its neck. To be sure, some critics have
recognized that Pynchon’s texts operate beyond a national framework,
most notably Edward Mendelson, who argued early on that
“Pynchon’s international scope implies the existence of a new
international culture, created by the technologies of instant
communication and the economy of world culture” (164-65). Paul
Giles included Mason & Dixon in his study Virtual Americas:
18 Sascha Pöhlmann

Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary, and Terry

Caesar and Takashi Aso published an essay on “Japan, Creative
Masochism, and Transnationality in Vineland,” yet these are the only
significant attempts to read Pynchon at least from an international or
transnational perspective, and none of them goes as far as
acknowledging Pynchon’s full-blown deconstructive effort directed
against nation-ness itself, and they thereby illustrate a more general
postmodern reluctance towards postnationalism.
While Pynchon’s project of a postnational imagination can be
traced back to at least The Crying of Lot 49 and even to some extent to
V. (and continues in his 2009 novel Inherent Vice), it is Against the
Day that makes the most pressing demand to (re-)read Pynchon’s
novels in that light. Against the Day is the most explicitly global of
Pynchon’s texts; yet its globality is not a new aspect of Pynchon’s
fiction, but merely a clearer manifestation of earlier phenomena. This
globality, of which the postnational imagination is a part, is also what
marks the move beyond the epistemological boundaries of the
postmodern which all too often coincided with national boundaries;
Wai Chee Dimock summarizes this tendency with regard to American
literary studies by writing that “[i]t is as if the borders of knowledge
were simply the replicas of national borders” (3). Many passages in
Against the Day illustrate perfectly how Pynchon’s postnational
imagination counters this replication, the most explicit of which is
Ratty McHugh’s anarchist speech on the effects of a “general
European war”:

“Anarchists would be the biggest losers, wouldn’t they. Industrial

corporations, armies, navies, governments, all would go on as before, if not
more powerful. But in a general war among nations, every small victory
Anarchism has struggled to win so far would simply turn to dust. Today even
the dimmest of capitalists can see that the centralized nation-state, so
promising an idea a generation ago, has lost all credibility with the population.
Anarchism now is 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. Their structure is line and staff, the same as an army. 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. The national idea would be
The Complex Text 19

reborn. One trembles at the pestilent forms that would rise up afterward, from
the swamp of the ruined Europe.” (AtD 938)

McHugh acknowledges that nation-ness once was a concept with

revolutionary potential but argues that it has become a mere tool to
create a group identity that can then be employed to control that
group. This is why the anarchists are “when possible working across
national boundaries” (AtD 933). He fears the rebirth of the national
idea and what it would mean for the world, and of course the history
of the twentieth century proved him to be painfully right, especially
with regard to the idea that nation-ness depends on war. In passages
such as these, nation-ness is presented as a flawed narrative whose
claims to be a metanarrative are highly problematic and need to be
challenged; Against the Day takes this assumption as a normative
starting point for an elaborate and varied deconstruction of nation-ness
and its derivative concepts and entities, such as national identity,
nationalism, and the nation-state. The diversity of postnational
strategies employed in Against the Day includes and expands those
already used in Pynchon’s earlier novels; let me give a few examples.
Against the Day relentlessly dismantles the myths and symbols that
work to transform the narrative of nation-ness into a metanarrative, as
can be seen in the heated debate on board the Inconvenience about
how to celebrate Independence Day, which ends with one of many
nods to Homer Simpson’s idea of pedagogy:

In the U.S.A., it was almost the Fourth of July, which meant that tonight, by
standing orders, there had to be a shipboard celebration out here, too, like it or
not.
“Lights and noise, just to keep us hoppin like trained baboons,” was Darby’s
opinion.
“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. “I say let’s set off our barrage tonight in
honor of the Haymarket bomb, bless it, a turning point in American history,
and the only way working people will ever get a fair shake under that
miserable economic system—through the wonders of chemistry!”
20 Sascha Pöhlmann

“Suckling!” the astounded Lindsay Noseworth struggling to maintain his

composure. “But, that is blatant anti-Americanism!”
“Eehhyyhh, and your mother’s a Pinkerton, too.”
“Why you communistic little—” (AtD 111-12)

Lindsay’s nationalist attitude—and it is not “just” patriotism, which is

only a word for one’s own good nationalism as opposed to the
disgusting chauvinism of others—is contrasted with Darby’s anarchist
views, and the juxtaposition demands a reevaluation of one’s
understanding of America. While Lindsay wants to symbolically
maintain and support the national narrative and its binary opposition
between us and them, which is the basis of any national identity,
Darby seeks to redefine America beyond national identity in terms of
class. In deconstructing the symbolism of the Fourth of July within the
narrative of the Chums of Chance, which originally starts out as an
example of patriotic young adult fiction that perpetuates a national
imagination, Pynchon challenges the official discourse of American
national identity not only by investing its most cherished holiday with
subversive meanings but also by showing that the ideological
production of national identity occurs by way of nationalized
narratives.
Against the Day parodies these symbolic acts in order to
undermine the authority of nation-ness and question its legitimacy.
The Chums of Chance, enrolled in the Harmonica Band Marching
Academy, find themselves “reprimanded like everybody else for
improvising during the more tightly arranged pieces like ‘My Country
‘Tis of Thee’” (AtD 419); this shows that the practices of nation-ness
cannot accept individual deviances from its prescribed structures. The
passage presents the performance of national identity as highly
regulated and its reiterations under strict control, but it also shows that
improvisation is possible even within its framework, and that such
acts of deviance and self-assertion work to undermine a dominant
discourse: these improvisations amount to seeing “America as it might
be in visions America’s wardens could not tolerate” (AtD 51). In a
similar way, Against the Day works to dismantle the national myths of
a cult of personality, for example when Kennedy’s famous 1963
speech in Berlin is not used to convey any usual sense of the greatness
of a national leader etc., but serves as a starting point for a comical
exaggeration of the popular misunderstanding that Kennedy in this
speech actually told everyone that he was a doughnut. The phrase “Ich
The Complex Text 21

bin ein Berliner!” (AtD 626) is taken out of its context so that it is not
available for purposes of national identity construction; instead, it is
reinscribed so that it runs counter to any such serious purpose. These
parodies efficiently show how national identities are constructed
discursively, and how these identities need to be denied any essential
status no matter how much they may claim to have it. Against the Day
shows the absurdity of an alleged essential national group identity in
presenting national traits of character as completely unjustified
assumptions and as the clichés they are: this is how Englishman
Dwight Prance can be mistaken for a Japanese spy in the first place,
and his defense is a comic recursion to stereotype: “‘But I say look
here, I’m not Japanese. I mean am I walking about in sandals?
gesturing with fans, speaking in unsolvable riddles, any of that?’”
(AtD 783). National identity is unstable and at the same time the result
of ill-founded perceptions of group identities. Many of the instances in
Against the Day when characters revert to their national identity are
humorous ones, reminders of stereotypical constructions rather than of
actual essential traits, such as when Frank calls Wolfe Tone
O’Rooney’s bluff when he poses as Eusebio the Mexican:

“Got to say you speak some mighty fine English, there, Eusebio,” nodded
Frank.
“In Tampico everybody speaks northamerican, it’s why we call it
‘Gringolandia’ here.”
“I bet you see a lot of Irish around too, huh? those irlandeses?”
“Señor?”
“Oh they’re easy to spot—red-nose drunk all the time, jabbering, dirt-
ignorant, idiot politics–“
“And what the bloody fuckall would you know about it—este...perdón,
señor, what I meant to say, of course—”
“Ah-ah…?” Frank grinning and waving his finger. (AtD 641)

This passage does not assign O’Rooney a stable Irish identity that his
performance of a Mexican identity could not cover up. On the one
hand, O’Rooney is all too clichéd as an Irish character in the first
place: his name could not be more appropriate for an Irish
revolutionary, and he employs, of all things, a potato to forge the
documents that identify him as Eusebio Gómez (AtD 373). On the
other hand, he only really loses his temper when Frank mentions Irish
“idiot politics,” not after one of the earlier insults. He employs
nationalist politics as an anticolonial weapon, but he does not espouse
22 Sascha Pöhlmann

a hierarchic, nationalist exceptionalism. Instead, his political outlook

is global and not nationalist in that his anarchism overrides his
nationalism, as the development of his allegiances shows: “Wolfe
Tone O’Rooney was after weapons for the Irish cause, primarily, but
found himself drawn more and more, the longer he stayed in Mexico,
into the gathering revolution here” (AtD 642). Politics are always
already global and local in Pynchon’s novels; they are never merely
national (which is not to be confused with the local).
As the postnational imagination of Against the Day questions the
foundations of national thought, identity and politics, it offers a huge
counternarrative to a history that has been perceived as national.
Historiography and literature both have helped maintain the power of
nation-ness; Against the Day shows how both can work towards
questioning that power. One of the most fundamental acts of
redefinition occurs when young Jesse is supposed to write an essay on
“What It Means To Be An American” for school:

“Oboy, oboy.” Reef had that look on his face, the same look his own father
used to get just before heading off for some dynamite-related activities. “Let’s
see that pencil a minute.”
“Already done.” What Jesse had ended up writing was,
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 Coeur d’Alene
back in the olden days. Guess I forgot to mention that.” (AtD 1076)

Jesse radically moves beyond patriotic definitions and essentialist

views of national identity; to him, being an American is not about
innate traits of character or any of the glorious constructions of
ingroup versus outgroup any national narrative relies upon. Instead, he
writes about a condition common to a certain class of people that is by
no means limited to any national territory, and he effectively makes a
postnational anarchist demand: if this is what it means to be
American, then America must be abolished. The national narrative
turns out to be a fraud for those who do not submit to the rules;
national unity is invoked only when it serves a political purpose (e.g.
taxes or war), but there is no genuine community.
The Complex Text 23

This is also a lesson the Chums of Chance learn throughout the

novel. One could simplify their development as moving from national
to postnational. They set out in the service of a mysterious agency that
seems to be (at least connected to) the US government, and they are
constructed as binary opposites (yet also doubles) of their Russian
counterparts, the “Tovarishchi Slutchainyi” (AtD 123) or “accidental
comrades.” Yet both the formerly American and the Russian crews
end up severing their ties to their respective governments and their
national identities, opting for a global outlook instead. The
Tovarishchi Slutchainyi change the name of their ship from Bolshai’a
Igra (“The Great Game”), with its connotations of nationalism and
colonialism, to Pomne o Golodayushchiki, or “‘Remember the
starving’” (AtD 1024), while the Chums of Chance end up working
neither for “‘American government’” nor “‘Large American
corporation’” but “‘Ourselves’” instead (AtD 795). In flying “far
above fortress walls and national boundaries” (AtD 20), they are all
espousing “‘the supranational idea […] literally to transcend the old
political space, the map-space of two dimensions, by climbing into the
third,’” knowing full well that such a move is not utopian in itself,
since some also see “‘the third dimension not as an avenue of
transcendence but as a means for delivering explosives’” (AtD 1083).
While the postnationalism of Against the Day retains a certain
skepticism towards all too optimistic ideas of “‘planetary oneness’”
(AtD 942), it nevertheless leaves no doubt that remaining within a
national framework of thought is not a viable option.
Against the Day therefore repeatedly and explicitly presents the
limitations of a national epistemological framework by countering it
with a global one. Lew Basnight experiences the movement from one
to the other after having been dynamited, literally getting his “first
sight of the world” (AtD 185) not only of Nigel and Neville, but also
of the world as a globe rather than a mere collection of nationalized
territories. After having left the US for England, they hear about a
hurricane that killed 6,000 people in Galveston, and Lew is devastated
by the news:

“Why Lewis, whatever is the matter?”

“Six thousand people,” said Lew, “to begin with.”
“Happens out in India all the time,” said Nigel. “It is the world, after all.”
“Yes, Lewis, wherever could you have been living, before that frightful
bomb brought you to us?” (AtD 188)
24 Sascha Pöhlmann

As he moves from one nation-state to another, Lew is forced to

consider the world and not only the nationalized place he had not
contextualized sufficiently within globality. The episode directly
shows him his epistemological and emotional limits, and it
furthermore shows that these limits coincide with national limits. The
insufficiency of the limited national view is stressed in Against the
Day since it is contrasted with global outlooks that acknowledge
connections not limited by national boundaries, as especially espoused
by anarchists such as Ratty or Veikko, who had “never seen much
difference between the Tsar’s regime and American capitalism. To
struggle against one, he figured, was to struggle against the other. Sort
of this world-wide outlook” (AtD 83). Or, as Hunter Penhallow puts it
when he comments on “‘a level of “reality” at which nations, like
money in the bank, are merged and indistinguishable’”: “‘in the realm
of pain and destruction, what can polarity matter?’” (AtD 903).
Against the Day leaves no doubt that a nationalized view of the world
is simply too narrow, even dangerously restrictive in many regards; it
emphatically demands a global approach from its readers.
To be sure, acknowledging that Pynchon’s novels seek to
transcend the epistemological borders of nation-ness through their
postnationalism and globality should not be mistaken for the simpler
argument that they are part of what is commonly seen as “world
literature.” This term always seems to plainly indicate that a text
comes from a culture other than one’s own, just like international
news is merely news from outside one’s own national context, which
again attests to the problematic epistemƝ of nation-ness. Even more
questionably, it may point towards a quasi-Arnoldian notion of “the
best which has been thought and said in the world” (Arnold 6), which
comes with the ideological baggage of all the well-known problems of
canon formation. Pynchon’s fiction is not global in these respects, or
at least it does not matter whether it is or not; it is global and
postnational in scope, and it is world literature in the sense that it
offers worlds, including this one. It is Weltenliteratur and not
Weltliteratur. Of course, this perfectly qualifies it as postmodern
according to McHale’s definition in Postmodernist Fiction, since it
conforms to the ontological dominant he sees as a crucial feature of
postmodern texts (10). Yet what also matters is the use this
ontological play is put to, and also the self-reflexive critique of this
imaginative play while carrying it out. This is most apparent in
The Complex Text 25

Against the Day, and it has implications for the earlier novels as well.
In the remaining pages of this introduction, I will try to illustrate that
point by analyzing one of the most crucial ways of imagining worlds
in Against the Day—mathematics—and by pointing out its
implications for a literary imagination that can be understood as
global and postnational, and which struggles with its own imaginative
practice. Just as Gravity’s Rainbow drew on chemistry and physics
and Mason & Dixon on (para)geography and astronomy, Against the
Day looks to mathematics and uses it as a leitmotif that offers a vast
variety of ideas, images and structures for the literary text, and it is
also used metaphorically itself. Literature and mathematics are
combined in order to comment on how both fields imagine the world;
this imagination is a well-known issue in all of Pynchon’s texts, as his
own blurb for Against the Day reminds us in what should go down in
literary history as one of the biggest understatements: “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.” As I
hope to show in the following, the novel uses concepts of the
mathematical imagination to pursue that purpose and to comment on
its own fictional strategies in the process.
Against the Day is a complex text. This statement should not be
understood as perpetuating the cliché that Pynchon’s novels are
difficult, but rather as saying that the novel is complex in the way
numbers can be complex. The text itself provides this metaphor in
passing when readers are told that the Irish mathematician William
Rowan Hamilton, when he “discovered” the Quaternions, carved “his
renowned formulae” into Brougham Bridge in Dublin “with a pocket-
knife part real and part imaginary, a ‘complex’ knife one might say”
(AtD 634). “Part real and part imaginary” is exactly what Against the
Day is, and the description provides a concise understanding of its
overall narrative project that ties in with Pynchon’s programmatic
blurb. Earlier, a panorama is described as “a zone of dual nature” that
contains a number of “‘real objects’ appropriate to the setting” that yet
“could not strictly be termed entirely real, rather part ‘real’ and part
‘pictorial,’ or let us say ‘fictional’” (AtD 633). It is remarkable that the
complementary term of “real” is “fictional” in this case, not
“imaginary”: while the fictional and the imaginary are clearly related
to each other, they are not equated, and it would lead to an
impoverished understanding of the imaginary in Against the Day to
26 Sascha Pöhlmann

view the terms as synonymous. The text emphasizes the power of the
imaginary by complicating a hierarchical binary opposition that would
construct it as the weaker supplement to the “real,” as happened in
some early reviews of Against the Day. Critics raised accusations
against the novel to the effect that it lacked realism, implying that its
worlds differed too much from the reality they recognized and sought
to understand through fiction that matched it closely; for example,
Adam Kirsch claimed that the “silliness of ‘Against the Day’ about
the very subjects where we are most urgently in quest of wisdom
proves that, whatever he once was, Thomas Pynchon is no longer the
novelist we need.” Against the Day comments on such simplistic
views of fiction, reality, and the imagination by drawing on
mathematics in order to show how foolish it is to dismiss the
imaginary as something “unreal” or fictional that is either opposed or
irrelevant to a consideration of reality. Apparently, the imaginary
world of a work of fiction must be defended against some literary
critics when it allegedly differs too much from the world in which
they read it, while at the same time no mathematician would consider
imaginary numbers silly or a waste of time even though, strictly
speaking, they do not exist. Here, the mathematician can teach the
critic about the benefits of thinking a world with new rules, and this
image of mobility, expansion, and resistance against the status quo
informs Against the Day as deeply as Pynchon’s other works. It draws
on imaginary numbers to show how it is possible to think even the
most fundamental ideas and experiences differently, which is exactly
what these numbers demand. They relate to an equation that is not
solvable in the realm of real numbers: x2 = –1, since every square of a
real number is necessarily a positive number. However, the equation
is solvable when introducing the imaginary unit i by defining i2 = –1.
Imaginary numbers are an expansion of the world that does not seek
to describe it, but to break with conventions of thought that constitute
our reality. Even though an imaginary number demands an
“impossible” operation, it can be related to real numbers and coexist
with them precisely in complex numbers—numbers of the form a+b·i
that have a real part and an imaginary part. Just as imaginary numbers
do not bring about a wholly different kind of mathematics, but rather
enrich mathematics by breaking with its established modes of thought,
Pynchon’s imaginary worlds are not separate from the “real” world of
their readers. Instead, they expand a “real” world that may never have
The Complex Text 27

been all that simple and homogeneous, a fact that only becomes
obvious when this world is overlaid with other worlds.
This process, which in Mason & Dixon has its representational
correspondence in the multi-layered cartographic practice of
“parageography” (MD 141), is exemplified best in Against the Day by
the material called Iceland spar and its double refraction of light. The
dust jacket of the novel’s first hardcover edition was designed to show
that effect of double refraction, which is commonly demonstrated by
placing a piece of Iceland spar over a written text. In the written world
of Against the Day, this multiplication occurs as a literal separation of
countless worlds, and it raises grave doubts about the original unity of
“the” world in the first place, or any “natural” system of ordering it
(such as nation-ness). After all, Iceland spar is said to be nothing less
than “‘the sub-structure of reality,’” and remarkably its “curious
advent into the world occurred within only a few years of the
discovery of Imaginary Numbers, which also provided a doubling of
the mathematical Creation” (AtD 133). The connection is strengthened
even more in the description of the capabilities of Iceland spar: it “‘is
what hides the Hidden People, makes it possible for them to move
through the world that thinks of itself as ‘real,’ provides that all-
important ninety-degree twist to their light, so they can exist alongside
our own world but not be seen’” (AtD 134). Ninety degrees is also the
angle by which the horizontal axis of real numbers in a geometrical
coordinate system is turned as a result of multiplication with i, thereby
creating the complex plane in which complex numbers can be
visualized. Both Iceland spar and imaginary numbers make possible a
“doubling of the Creation” (AtD 133) in separate yet closely related
ways, and both demand an imagination of worlds from the reader of
Against the Day while offering metaphors for this creative
multiplication; the text itself becomes a complex plane.
Yet the novel makes even further use of imaginary numbers than
that, especially with regard to Hamilton’s Quaternions, which offer a
space in which alternative worlds can be imagined. Quaternions add
three more numbers to real numbers, i, j, k, and their relation to each
other is: i2·j2·k2 = i·j·k = –1. Against the Day juxtaposes i, j, k with the
more familiar axes x, y, z of a Cartesian coordinate system and thereby
not only imagines alternative places, but also a whole alternative
space in which these places could exist. Yet this clash of coordinate
systems had devastating consequences for the Quaternioneers, since
28 Sascha Pöhlmann

“the xyz people, the party of a single Established Coördinate System,

present everywhere in the Universe, governing absolutely,” could not
tolerate the revolutionary “ijk lot” (AtD 533):

“Actually Quaternions failed because they perverted what the Vectorists

thought they know of God’s intention—that space be simple, three-
dimensional, and real, and if there must be a fourth term, an imaginary, that it
be assigned to Time. But Quaternions came in and turned that all end for end,
defining the axes of space as imaginary and leaving Time to be the real term,
and a scalar as well—simply inadmissible. Of course the Vectorists went to
war. Nothing they knew of Time allowed it to be that simple, any more than
they could allow space to be compromised by impossible numbers, earthly
space they had fought over uncounted generations to penetrate, to occupy, to
defend.” (AtD 534).

This is not just a war of ideas that has no effect on reality, it is a war
of the imagination in which the potential to think differently is at
stake, and in which the victorious dominant system has confirmed its
hegemony of interpretation of reality by preventing anything that, as
Yashmeen has it, “would allow access to a different […] ‘set of
conditions’” (AtD 618). Therefore, “the Hamiltonian devotees had
now, fallen from grace, come to embody, for the established scientific
religion, a subversive, indeed heretical, faith for whom proscription
and exile were too good” (AtD 526). Their heresy is a counternarrative
to space itself, to our everyday concept of reality, and to our
understanding of time. Against the Day here manages to invest the
most abstract ideas of mathematics with political significance by
celebrating potential in the face of the most rigid ideas of order, and
by asking readers to imagine a change of world view that could hardly
be more fundamental.3 The play of worlds of Against the Day is part
of these imaginative changes, and its multiplications matter most
where they show how petty the limits of reality actually are, and how
they are curbed and determined by forces that are eventually always
political; it functions like those “‘paramorphoscopes of Iceland spar”
that “reveal the architecture of dream, all that escapes the network of
ordinary latitude and longitude…’” (AtD 250). No wonder that many
characters in Against the Day see mathematics for a time as “a
reflection of some less-accessible reality, through close study of
which one might perhaps learn to pass beyond the difficult given
world” (AtD 749). For a long time, Yashmeen considered math as a
way to satisfy “her old need for some kind of transcendence—the
The Complex Text 29

fourth dimension, the Riemann problem, complex analysis, all had

presented themselves as routes of escape from a world whose terms
she could not accept” (AtD 942). However, her confrontation with the
world taught her that her hopes “for transcendence by way of any of
that, must be left behind, souvenirs of a girl’s credulity, a girl I
scarcely know anymore” (AtD 663). Similarly, Kit realizes early on at
Yale “how little the place was about studying and learning, much less
finding a transcendent world in imaginaries or vectors” (AtD 318), and
his mathematical quest remains unfinished (although he may be the
character who comes closest to a transcendent yet entirely non-
mathematical experience when he travels in Inner Asia). Even though
Against the Day uses mathematical ideas to challenge the imagination
and its boundaries, it is careful not to invest them with too much
significance and revolutionary potential. While they certainly have
epistemological and metaphorical value and fulfill an important
purpose on a metafictional level, and while they constitute a
valorization of the imagination as an important constitutive factor of
reality, the text does not end up advocating an idealism that denies this
reality any material character beyond this imaginative component.
Instead, it harks back to Gravity’s Rainbow and its questions of
technological determinism, weaponry, and violence: mathematics is
deprived of any purity of abstraction when Piet Woevre claims that
“‘all mathematics leads, doesn’t it, sooner or later, to some kind of
human suffering’” (AtD 541). The reminders of this materiality are
often brutal intrusions in Against the Day, and they often stand in the
tradition of Marxian materialism by betraying their economic origins,
as especially Kit has to learn the hard way:

Vectorism, in which Kit once thought he had glimpsed transcendence, a

coexisting world of imaginaries, the “spirit realm” that Yale legend Lee De
Forest once imagined he was journeying through, had not shown Kit, after all,
a way to escape the world governed by real numbers. His father had been
murdered by men whose allegiance, loudly and often as they might invoke
Jesus Christ and his kingdom, was to that real axis and nothing beyond it. Kit
had sold himself a bill of goods, come to believe that Göttingen would be
another step onward in some journey into a purer condition, conveniently
forgetting that it was still all on the Vibe ticket, paid for out of the very
account whose ledger he most wished to close and void, the spineless ledger
of a life once unmarked but over such a short time broken, so broken up into
debits and credits and too many details left unwritten. And Göttingen, open to
trespass by all manner of enemies, was no longer a refuge, nor would Vectors
ever have been Kit’s salvation. (AtD 675)
30 Sascha Pöhlmann

In this passage, the material world of life, death and money asserts
itself most forcefully, and all work of the imagination rather seems
like idle play, only reinterpreting the world instead of changing it, and
thus missing what actually matters. Yet even this harsh materialism is
in turn suspended only a few pages later in a description of Venetian
architecture in which the imagination reasserts its power through
another mathematical metaphor:

[Venice] was supposed to’ve been built on trade, but the Basilica San Marco
was too insanely everything that trade, in its strenuous irrelevance to dream,
could never admit. The numbers of commerce were rational, but among the
real numbers, those that remained in the spaces between—the irrationals—
outnumbered those simple quotients overwhelmingly. (AtD 732)

This time, real numbers are opposed to irrational ones, illustrating

another classic dichotomy in Pynchon’s novels. This powerful image
suggests not only that the rationality of commerce excludes the crucial
factor of the imagination and that it wrongfully denies the existence of
other ways of structuring the world, but also that its hegemony is at
the same time opposed to and shot through with the countless
repressed alternatives it denies. The metaphor manages to convey both
the undeniably existent reality of a rational capitalist system as well as
the undeniably possible alternatives to it.
Against the Day refuses to decide on the matter for the reader and
warns against deciding hastily any which way, and the novel itself
seems to suspend judgment on its own potential to mediate between
the real and the imaginary—as a complex text, it cannot get rid of
either term without losing its complexity. One could conceive of this
as oscillation between two poles, or rather as the constant doubling
mentioned in connection with Iceland spar, imaginary numbers and
bilocation in Against the Day. In closing, I would like to argue that the
Chums of Chance exemplify this phenomenon best, even though they
are certainly not the only ones in the text. There are also “‘semi-
imaginary badmen’” (AtD 180) or the Yogi in Bukhara, who “is a sort
of fictional character, though at the same time real” (AtD 766), and yet
the narrative of the Chums displays their status as complex characters
most clearly.
The Chums turn out to be travellers between worlds they
themselves did not expect to exist, a process that takes its course as
they free themselves more and more from the “political delusions that
The Complex Text 31

reigned more than ever on the ground” (AtD 19), especially as they
leave the safe and simple haven of the nationalist narrative provided
by their superiors. Right from the beginning of Against the Day,
readers are warned along with Chick Counterfly—by Lindsay
Noseworth, ever the voice of “reason”—not to imagine that “‘in
coming aboard Inconvenience you have escaped into any realm of the
counterfactual,’” but that even there one “must nonetheless live with
the constraints of the given world” (AtD 9). Yet even then, at least the
commander of the Chums seems to be aware of the possibility to
change worlds and enter a new set of constraints:

“So...if you went up high enough, you’d be going down again?”

“Shh!” warned Randolph St. Cosmo.
“Approaching the surface of another planet, maybe?” Chick persisted.
“Not exactly. No. Another ‘surface,’ but an earthly one. Often to our regret,
all too earthly. More than that, I am reluctant—” (AtD 9)

Towards the end of Against the Day, this is exactly the journey they
undertake, and by now Chick has figured out that “each star and
planet we can see in the Sky is but the reflection of our single Earth
along a different Minkowskian space-time track. Travel to other
worlds is therefore travel to alternate versions of the same Earth” (AtD
1020). In journeying to the “other Earth” (AtD 1021), they also travel
to a myriad of alternative worlds, and instead of reaching a single one
completely in time and space, they remain suspended and at least
doubled: “They were on the Counter-Earth, on it and of it, yet at the
same time also on the Earth they had never, it seemed, left” (AtD
1021). In their oscillation between worlds, the real of “this” world
asserts itself once more in that the Chums stumble upon the First
World War, and it is countered with the imaginary narrative of
transnational organizations like the Chums and their doubles, the
Tovarishchi Slutchainyi, doing their best to relieve the pain brought
about by a war waged in thoroughly nationalized terms. This
ontological complexity is also reinforced by the narrator, who reminds
readers of the fictional status of the Chums by quoting the title of an
earlier novel he wrote about them (AtD 1019), as if it were necessary
at this point to make sure the Chums are not mistaken for an entirely
“real” set of characters within Against the Day itself. Their ontological
status remains suspended; on the one hand, they really are characters
of a series of books of young adult fiction, on the other hand, it is
32 Sascha Pöhlmann

possible for them to confront other characters in the world of Against

the Day like Lew, and to question them about their reading habits:

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.” (AtD 36-37)

Ultimately, the ontological ambiguity of the Chums of Chance with

regard to both their fictionality and the world they exist in works
towards the same end as the motifs of Iceland spar, imaginary
numbers, or bilocation in Against the Day: all these are ways of
thinking about a complex universe that is always both real and
imaginary, and in which the terms are constantly renegotiated, and
neither of them can eradicate the other. It is an artist, Tancredi, who
explains this condition concisely: “‘everything that we imagine is real,
living and still, thought and hallucinated, is all on the way from being
one thing to being another, from past to Future […]’” (AtD 586). This
does not give precedence to the imaginary over the real but demands a
precision of terminology that prevents the erroneous assumption that
the imaginary is by definition what is not real. Heino Vanderjuice
argues in Against the Day that “‘the world we think we know can be
dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds, each as ‘real’
as ‘this’ one’” (AtD 1078), which is exactly what the novel does in
emphasizing the imaginary part of its complex world; at the same
time, it also makes sure that Yashmeen’s words to Cyprian retain a
political meaning that emphasizes the real part of the fictional
equation: “‘We can do whatever we can imagine. Are we not the
world to come?’” (AtD 879).
Therefore, by thus constructing itself as a complex text, Against
the Day not only reasserts the power of the imaginary in a world that
so often comes across as “the real” world, but it also maintains a
decidedly political tone. In doing so, the text positions itself far from
the postmodern excesses of too easily conflating the real, the
imaginary and the fictional, which ultimately deny any of them any
The Complex Text 33

power to change the other and result in a dangerous simplification of a

world that is complex in more than one sense of the word. We may
have to stop calling Thomas Pynchon a postmodern writer.

Sascha Pöhlmann, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich

Notes
1
This could be described in David Cowart’s words as “the paradoxical subversion of
the postmodern gospel” (4).
2
Obviously, others will be able to add more such possibilities, and I will offer only
the one I consider most important to Pynchon’s writing.
3
The postnational significance of this lies not merely in showing that everything
could be different no matter how natural it looks, including nation-ness; it also lies in
the fact that the Quaternioneers are a “band of varying ages and nationalities” that
speak only the “common language […] of the Quaternions” (AtD 525). Similarly, and
on a funnier note, Miles Blundell finds out that the “‘Italian number that looks like a
zero, is the same as our own American ‘zero.’ The one that looks like a one, is ‘one.’
The one that looks like a two—’” (AtD 243). Mathematics potentially creates a
transnational community whose mere existence proves that nation-ness is far from
being the only constituent of group identity in the world, and that its claims to
hegemony stand in the way of other forms of the common.

Bibliography
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Ed. J. Dover Wilson.
London: Cambridge UP, 1961.
Caesar, Terry, and Taskashi Aso. “Japan, Creative Masochism, and
Transnationality in Vineland.” Critique 44.4 (Summer 2003): 371-
86.
Cowart, David. “Pynchon and the Sixties.” Critique 41.1 (Fall 1999):
3-12.
Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature
across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.
Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Essays.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950. 3-11.
34 Sascha Pöhlmann

Eley, Geoff, and Ronald Grigory Suny, eds. Becoming National: A

Reader. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.
—. “From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural
Representation.” Introduction. Eley and Suny 3-37.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1969. London:
Routledge, 2002.
Giles, Paul. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the
Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.
Kirsch, Adam. “Pynchon: He Who Lives By The List, Dies By It.”
The New York Sun, 15 Nov. 2006. 15 May 2010
<http://www.nysun.com/arts/pynchon-he-who-lives-by-the-list-
dies-by-it/43545/>.
McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge,
1992.
—. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1993.
—. “What was Postmodernism?” electronic book review. 20 Dec.
2007. 15 May 2010 <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/
thread/fictionspresent/tense>.
Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Mindful Pleasures:
Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Eds. George Levine and David
Leverenz. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976. 161-96.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006.
—. Blurb. Against the Day. 2006. Pynchonwiki 7 Feb. 2008. 15 May
2010 <http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?
title=Against_the_Day_description>.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
—. Inherent Vice. New York: Penguin, 2009.
—. Mason & Dixon. New York: Holt & Co., 1997.
—. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966.
—. V. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1961.
—. Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1990.
Smith, Anthony D. “The Origins of Nations.” Eley and Suny 106-30.
 Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of
Thomas Pynchon1

Heinz Ickstadt

Abstract: The essay discussses the dominant themes, figures, semantic oppositions as
well as the overall structural design of Pynchon's Against the Day comparing them
with those of his earlier work. It attempts to thus bring out the continuities in
Pynchon's narrative world but also the peculiarities of this particular novel which,
despite its playfulness, evokes, with post-revolutionary melancholy, an American and
European past whose future is no longer open. In accordance with the many
ambivalences of its title, the fantastic balloon of Pynchon's narrative gradually turns
into an ever-expanding world of its own, moving subversively against, yet also
joyfully within the light of common day.

Of all contemporary American writers Thomas Pynchon has been the

most consistently cosmopolitan. Even when his novels seem to be
primarily concerned with the United States (or with a mythological
“America”), as they evidently are in The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland,
or Mason & Dixon, their narrative range extends from the American
continent to episodes and conflicts throughout the history of Western
civilization: its belief systems, its scientific thought, and its colonial
conquests. In Against the Day, his sixth and by far longest novel,
Pynchon has given his cosmopolitan interests even a global twist in so
far as the book’s tangled plotlines are placed at real and invented
places in the U.S., Europe and Asia, on the margins but also at the
centers of the political crises that mark transatlantic history between
the 1890s and the First World War.
Among its innumerable protagonists are ruthless robber barons and
bomb-throwing anarchists, private eyes and secret agents, gunslingers,
scientists and mathematicians, mystics and New Age charlatans,
magicians, migrants and globetrotters, as well as a dog able to read
Henry James and Eugène Sue “in the original French” (AtD 125).
36 Heinz Ickstadt

These characters roam the mountain ranges of Southern Colorado and

Northern Mexico; travel from one continent to another; move from
Chicago to New York, London, Göttingen, Vienna, Venice and Paris.
They circle the globe above and explore it below; they pass through
what was once thought to be the earth’s empty core, as well as the
earth’s invisible counterimage (the antichthon of Pythagorean
philosophy). They fight in the Mexican Revolution and against brutal
mine-owners in the Colorado labor-conflicts of the 1890s and after.
They flee from the blood-hounds of Capital and the secret agents of
the major European powers. They escape, during the First Balkan War
of 1912, from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire through the mountain
wilderness of Greece, Macedonia and Albania. They cross the oceans
and the polar icecaps in their dirigible, and travel underneath the sands
of the Inner-Asian desert in search of the sacred city of Shambhala.
They demand revenge for injustices suffered, and seek transcendence
and self-knowledge in the infinity of the Siberian taiga, the pure
spirituality of mathematics, or the orgiastic-orgasmic joys of the body.
As always, Pynchon’s figures are torn between yearning for the
Transcendent on the one hand, and for pure immanence on the other.
They live in a concretely experienced world of enacted desires—
desire for political and/or sexual power (or, inversely, for the
submission to that power), or a desire for the unheard of and
miraculous. In other words, they move in a narrated world that is as
much a particularized geographical, political and historical
space/place as it is a recognizable territory of the period’s
imagination: of its scientific thoughts, its religious and literary
fantasies, its dreams, nightmares and obsessions.2
In this respect, Louis Menand is right when, in his skeptical yet
perceptive review of Against the Day, he asks with ironic
exasperation: “So what was Pynchon thinking?” only to answer that
“he was apparently thinking what he usually thinks, which is that
modern history is a war between utopianism and totalitarianism,
counterculture and hegemony, anarchism and corporatism, nature and
techne, Eros and the death drive, slaves and masters, entropy and
order” (170). But the critics, too, were thinking what they usually
think, namely that Pynchon is unable to create “real characters”: that
his protagonists are never psychologically developed, have no depth,
are mere pasteboard figures out of comic books.3 However, by now
we should be used to Pynchon’s double role as painstaking historian
Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon 37

and bizarre fabulator, to his peculiar mix of genres, discourses, tones,

and styles.
With the exception of The Crying of Lot 49 (his most condensed
and economical work of fiction), Pynchon’s all-inclusive novels tend
to sprawl and openly display their imperfections. They are books of
“extraordinary incoherence,” as George Levine once wrote with
reference to Gravity’s Rainbow (181): they spawn plots and subplots
whose “arrows are pointing all different ways” (GR 603), or that
simply stop and lead nowhere; they also introduce a myriad of figures.
Of these, even those placed in the foreground are not characters
according to the conventions of the realistic novel but types we know
from other fictions, from novels, comic books, films or TV series,
since Pynchon’s narrative space is also highly intertextual and
intermedial. If all of this is part of what one might call the Pynchon
signature, it is nevertheless obvious that Against the Day is notably
different from any of its predecessors. What makes for that difference,
how the book relates to Pynchon’s previous work and to what extent it
marks a new direction in his writing are the focus of the following
observations.
Against the Day lacks the structural firmness and metaphorical
density of his earlier novels. Although the reader is confronted with
enigmas and ambivalences in abundance, he feels little need to solve
them. While there is no lack of mysteries, the text itself is less
mysterious, therefore less “difficult” than its predecessors—a test less
for the reader’s hermeneutic ingenuity than for her willingness to
follow the text’s spatial shifts and time leaps, its discussion of
mathematical theories and scientific speculations, its long string of
episodes of adventure whose length and sequence, apart from being
loosely determined by chronology, seem arbitrary. In contrast to
Gravity’s Rainbow, where the Rocket is not only the incarnation of a
technological Divine but also generates a network of metaphorical
(inter)relations, this novel’s symbolic equivalents (the sublime physics
and metaphysics of Light and of the newly discovered power of
electricity) are comparatively diffuse and lack the integrative potential
of the Rocket or the structural focus provided by The Tristero in The
Crying of Lot 49 or the letter V in V. And yet it would be wrong to say
that this new novel is without structure. Indeed, the mathematics of
post-Newtonian physics which figure so prominently here—such as
the theories of vectors and quaternions, Riemann’s Zeta function,
38 Heinz Ickstadt

Minkowskian space-time—serve as metaphors of the book’s structural

openness, its narrative space organized as a multidimensional space-
time continuum.
If we can speak of an overall design at all—apart from the
temporal frame provided by the thirty years of narrated time from
1893 to 1923 in which the multiple episodes and plotlines are placed
in a highly fragmented and yet slowly advancing chronological
sequence—it would have to be the loose pattern of simultaneous
occurrences. Things happen at the same (or almost the same) time at
different but often analogous places, such as the mountain regions of
northern Mexico, of the Balkans, and of northwest China. Persons,
places, situations and events are interrelated by similarity of action,
structure or of function.
They are also correlated through bilocation, “which enables those
with the gift literally to be in two or more places, often widely
separated, at the same time” (AtD 143). The world we know can
duplicate itself, mirror-like, as its counterworld, called into existence
by the double reflection of light in the pure crystal of Iceland spar that
can also be found in the Mexican mountains—another geographical
interconnection. The creation of double- and counterworlds via the
double refraction of light is a persistent metaphor of expansive and
unlimited interconnectedness.
Such interconnections in space by analogy, duplication and
bilocation have their equivalent along the axis of time. Past, present,
and future are fluid categories; in fact, they interact and mirror each
other. Time machines allow ambivalent glimpses of the future, and
Trespassers traveling back in time from times ahead invade the
narrative with ominous reports of doom, the future already lurking in
the present moment and location (e.g. in the fields that will become
the “Flanders Fields” of World War I), while most of the novel’s
future-trusting protagonists are unaware of the catastrophes we as
readers know are still to come. As one of these messengers of future
doom reports:

We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present—your future—
a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty—the
end of capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simple
thermodynamic truth that Earth’s resources were limited, in fact soon to run
out, the whole capitalist illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this
truth aloud were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic
Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon 39

faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day, we were forced to migrate,

with little choice but to set forth upon that dark fourth-dimensional Atlantic
known as Time. (AtD 416)

The addressees of this dark message (from a future much farther

ahead in time than the First World War) are the Chums of Chance, the
heroes of a late-Victorian juvenile adventure series modeled on the
popular Tom Swift dime novels of the period. They are benevolent but
by no means infallible guardian angels, who take their orders from
changing authorities and cross the skies in their dirigible trying to
prevent the worst. In contrast to their antagonists, the deeply
pessimistic Trespassers, the Chums of Chance are mostly optimists
with a childlike confidence in their time’s general progress. It is
therefore no coincidence that the novel begins and ends with them.4
In this intricate narrative network of plot(s) and events, the
protagonists move as if in a nonlinear field of multidimensional space-
time, pulled and pushed by forces they themselves can hardly
understand. The lines they form issue from a sequence of events or
moments, switch-points, forks in the road (a recurring metaphor in
Pynchon), so that turns and alternative directions are always possible,
if not always taken. Characters follow (and in a sense are) vectors of
the various desires that form their life- and plot-lines, that move (and
often shift) them into different directions of space or time, or into
different manners of fulfillment—paths that sometimes converge,
sometimes cross, and sometimes run parallel with each other: “‘one
might imagine a giant railway depot, with thousands of gates disposed
radially in all dimensions, leading to tracks of departure to all manner
of alternate Histories’” (AtD 682).
Pynchon’s protagonists might therefore be understood as post-
realistic ‘vectors,’ i.e. as figures primarily defined by movement and
directional shifts. The traits that remain stable even when the
protagonists change direction might be called eigenvalues
accordingly.5 The discussion of eigenvalues is part of the raging
debate on Riemann’s and Hilbert’s mathematical theories at
Göttingen. Although that debate has nothing to do with the concept of
“character,” the terminology used evidently derives from it—as it, in
turn, becomes strangely suggestive of matters beyond mere
mathematics. “‘There is also this…spine of reality,’” one of the
characters argues, this “‘Rückgrat von Wirklichkeit’” (AtD 604). But
40 Heinz Ickstadt

what, one may ask, makes for “self-value” and “reality’s spine” in the
multidimensional and relative world of space-time?
Early in the book, one of the minor figures becomes aware “that
there was some grave imbalance in the structure of the world, which
would have to be corrected” (AtD 170). Indeed, the question of justice
might well be the reality-constant (the “spine of reality”) marking the
path of human history as it unfolds in space-time. All the protagonists
relate to it in one way or another: as perpetrators, victims and
avengers, or as dreamers of change or of escape.
The first group makes for the scoundrels of the book—its arch-
villain Scarsdale Vibe, a banker and mine owner, and the very
embodiment of all Capitalist evils. Vibe’s antagonist among the
second group is Webb Traverse, a union worker in the Colorado
mines, an anarchist and expert handler of explosives during the strike
at Cripple Creek in 1894. He is murdered by two of Vibe’s stooges,
one of whom is later shot by Frank Traverse, the second of Webb’s
three sons, who are bent (with diminishing intensity) on avenging
their dead father. Reef, the oldest, first follows in his father’s footsteps
as anarchist defender of the cause of Labor in the San Juan
Mountains; then he becomes a man of many disguises, a gambler and
a drifter, who eventually drifts to Europe, where he uses his
underground expertise in the construction of Alpine tunnels.
Frank, the second son, is the most American-rooted of the Traverse
children, moving along a North-South axis between the mountain
ranges of southern Colorado and the Mexican Sierra Madre. He
continues the Traverse dynamiting tradition during the Mexican
Revolution and is the only one who fulfills the family’s revenge
project at least in part. Returning from Mexico to Colorado he joins
the strikers at Ludlow, where he also meets (and stays with) Estrella
(“Stray”) and her boy Jesse,—the family that Frank’s brother Reef had
left behind.
The youngest and most gifted of the Traverse sons is Kit, whose
interest in physics and passion for mathematics are brought to a boil
by meeting the famous Nicola Tesla, who is just then conducting his
pioneering experiments with high voltage and alternating current at
Colorado Springs. Vibe buys Kit’s scientific talent by sending him to
Yale, later to Göttingen. From there he begins a long journey East—a
“journey,” he hopes, “into a purer condition” (AtD 675)—which will
eventually take him to the Flaming Mountains of northeastern China.
Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon 41

Of the Traverse children, Kit travels farthest without really

knowing why. Although he is the most intellectual of them, he is also
the least aware of what is going on, a postmodern Parzival who misses
asking the right question (or making the right commitment) at the
right moment. Others make different choices—Cyprian Latewood, for
instance, another secret agent and a homosexual (with a bend for
masochism in the fulfillment of his sexual desires), who is yet in love
with the beautiful but mysterious Yashmeen Halfcourt (a female
mathematical genius and a spy). Cyprian meets Yashmeen again in
Venice together with Reef Traverse, who is her most recent lover.
During the Venice carnival (with its ritual transgressions, its
inversions of roles and positions), all three enter into a complex
love/sex-relationship that is as ecstatic as it is transforming. “‘The rule
is […] that there are no rules,’” says Yashmeen (AtD 943); and it is
clearly she, the free Nietzschean spirit, who is the energetic center of
this triangle. Her obsession with the absolute, the intensity of her
absorption into the abstract purity of Riemann’s mathematics, has
been transferred from mind to body; accordingly the “innocent
expression of faith” Cyprian sees on her face when she concentrates
on numbers and functions is also “that saint-in-a-painting look” (AtD
937) he sees when watching her reach orgasm with Reef. The union
results in a pregnancy of which Cyprian, in a complex way, has also
been an agent.
After the child is born, Cyprian leaves the others and, having
transcended self as well as desire, becomes a monk in one of Thrace’s
isolated mountain monasteries. For Yashmeen and Reef Traverse the
nomadic state is an Emersonian way of being in the world and yet
“unsettled.” Finding their way through the Macedonian mountains
amidst the fighting armies of the Balkan War of 1912, they and their
child form a Holy Family of anarchist unsettledness—just as, at the
very same time in the mountain ranges of Southern Colorado, Frank,
Stray and Jesse become their complementary mirror image when they
find each other and join the striking miners at Ludlow. Both families
eventually reunite, forming the nucleus of an anarchist community or
tribal family, its utopian potential centered in the Child. “[P]ropelled
by [Reef’s] old faith in the westward vector” (AtD 1075), they move
West together.
Like Yashmeen, Estrella/Stray is one of the strong women of the
novel, her quiet pragmatism allowing her to link self-preservation
42 Heinz Ickstadt

with concern for others. She is in that sense a star (estrella) that shines
and shows the way, can stray (perhaps even go astray) and yet be
straight. She is thus vector as well as eigenvalue. Can the spine of
reality, the reality-constant in multidimensional space-time, also be
regarded as a moral constant that defines eigenvalue? The figures that
might be said to have eigenvalue (that is, who combine the steady
with the unsettled) are, on the one hand, the mystics, the seekers and
the dreamers of what might be and, on the other, the dissenters and
resisters to what is. While those in the second group are entirely
secular in their desires, those in the first are religious in their yearning
for a God that has either disappeared or appears only in “visions of the
unsuspected […]. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of
day […]” (AtD 853).
If there is a development in the personal history of these seekers, it
is a movement away from all substitutes of the Transcendent (be they
the abstract religions of science, mathematics, or technology) and
toward those luminous glimpses of, and “chance encounters” with, the
“unseen world” (AtD 853) that is revealed in and through the body
and its senses. This shift in the trajectory of personal histories is also
noticeable on the symbolic level. The central metaphor of light is, of
course, first connected with mystic illumination but also with the
revelations of divinity in the “breaches in the Creation” (AtD 853):
such as the awesome power of electricity, or of the mysterious
Tunguskan Explosion.6 Like all such revelations of the extraordinary,
however, these are fleeting moments that succumb to the steady pull
of the everyday.
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 electric energy. Electricity has
turned night into day and turned the once-miraculous into the very
sign of what is normal now: the illumination of the cities, the
everyday blessings of the alternating current, or wireless transmissions
from one continent to another. When the Chums of Chance cross the
continent westwards toward California, they notice “how much more
infected with light the night-time terrains passing below them had
become” (AtD 1032). The conquest of light over darkness is therefore
paradoxically associated with the Prince of Darkness, who is,
however, also called “‘Lucifer, son of morning, bearer of light’” (AtD
1033).
Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon 43

If this is paradox, it is also balance. Against too much light there is

the relief of darkness; and the more dominant light is, the more
darkness becomes a counterworld of mystery and fascination. To be
“against the day” would therefore seem to imply resistance against the
Western cult of light and Enlightenment. Except that the contrast is
not at all that clear-cut. This is already implied in the novel’s
epigraph, an aphorism by Thelonious Monk: “It’s always night, or we
wouldn’t need light.” Although emphasizing, tongue-in-cheek, the
prevalence of darkness/blackness over white light, Monk nevertheless
acknowledges the need for both. The metaphors of light and darkness
also give the novel’s title several shades of meaning. If “against” is
understood as a term of resistance, then embracing night may help us
face whoever or whatever rules the day. However, if “against” is
understood (Webster’s Dictionary also suggests this) as preparing or
providing for, then getting through the night is also a getting toward
the light of day that has its own merits. To move against the day
(against the grain of what is and toward the mysteries of darkness)
does not exclude acceptance of the everyday (its life-preserving rituals
and habits), nor does it exclude preparatory exploration of what the
“dim light of the future” might still bring: a day of salvation or
judgment. The implications of the title thus also comprise the various
functions of Pynchon’s storytelling, combining resistance to the world
that is with sounding the rich gamut of the possible, miraculous and
counterfactual.
Appropriately, it is the Chums-of-Chance—those always hopeful,
yet slowly aging heroes of the sky—who bring the novel to a close, if
not to closure. In the course of its last section, they not only happily
and trivially marry a complementary set of flying young women, but
their airship also has absorbed so much of the world that it has grown
to the size of “a small city” (AtD 1084) and become a self-sufficient
world of its own. Protecting themselves against too much light by
absorbing a welcome amount of darkness, they fly against the day
toward an uncertain future, and yet continue in their path with
childlike trust: “They know […] 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” (AtD 1085).
44 Heinz Ickstadt

We who still remember the Trespassers’ denunciation of the

Chums’ “pathetic balloon-boy faith” (AtD 555) may wonder whether
such grace is indeed a blessing or only another of their optimistic
delusions. However, it is perhaps not far-fetched to assume that the
air-ship Inconvenience—like the balloon in Donald Barthelme’s short
story of that title—has, by now, become a metaphor of Pynchon’s own
narrative endeavor. In writing “against the day,” Pynchon has turned
his novel into a Noah’s Ark of the imagined and the imaginable, into a
fantastic counterworld that rejects, absorbs and conserves as much as
it transcends the Real.
How then and where can we place Against the Day within the
larger context of Pynchon’s narrative work? I have argued elsewhere7
that V. can indeed be said to contain the thematic and formal
repertoire of all of Pynchon’s subsequent fictions—even though the
two following novels were pushed into a new direction by the impact
of the 1960s. In The Crying of Lot 49 and even more so in Gravity’s
Rainbow, Pynchon gave his fictional probing into the “moment with
its possibilities” (GR 159) a new twist by placing both novels at the
brink of the possible (be it either catastrophic collapse, miraculous
renewal, or simply the grayness of continuing entropy). In Vineland,
published 17 years after Gravity’s Rainbow, this openness has given
way to closure. I read Vineland as the last part of a trilogy that deals
with the contemporary moment of the sixties and thus with a
generation that was eventually swallowed by the system it had set out
to change, its revolutionary fervor not strong enough to withstand the
pull of television and image culture. The book’s final vignette of the
sleeping child and her loving, face-licking, tail-wagging dog becomes
an emblem of pure faith in a world in which all counterforce has
ceased to matter.
As all of Pynchon’s novels—but especially Gravity’s Rainbow and
later Mason & Dixon—make clear, America has never, at any point in
its history, been exempt from the burden of its European past. Rather,
it has continued that past under new conditions. It has functioned as a
screen on which Europeans have projected their desire for origin,
paradise or new beginnings and then proceeded, even as settlers of a
“new world,” to create structures of oppression. The Rocket as well as
the Tristero are thus products of a common Western (transatlantic)
history conceived of as a long sequence of ruined utopian dreams and
squandered chances, of which the last and perhaps greatest was
Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon 45

“America.” Alternative visions—which Pynchon always locates

between parody and hope—can therefore only point in two directions.
Either they are directed nostalgically backwards toward a vision of
Nature as yet untouched by Western man; or they push sideways and
against historical linearity toward the niches or the marginal spaces of
the passed-over. Therefore, Pynchon’s novels place value on people
and objects out of order—on “waste” in the largest sense—and on
moments of malfunction and anarchic openness when a system breaks
down and the new order has not yet taken shape (as in the Zone of
Gravity’s Rainbow or the Visto in Mason & Dixon); or they invest
hope in those (most of all in children) who embody a continuous
promise of the possible.
Although Against the Day, in its playfulness, has reminded some
critics of V., it yet seems closer to Mason & Dixon in that both are
narratives about a past whose future is no longer open. This is what
distinguishes them from the preceding fictions, which cut through the
“moment and its possibilities” and dwelt on the puzzle of its hidden
meaning: the ambiguity of what was still to come. Both Mason &
Dixon and Against the Day lack the intensity as much as the semantic
density of the earlier novels, that sense of being immediately involved
(intellectually and pragmatically) in the confusions but also in the
shaping of a still unfolding moment of collective experience. Instead,
they playfully and nostalgically indulge in imagining what once was
richly, even chaotically, possible (or at least imaginable), yet has since
been discarded by forces powerful enough to define what we have
come to accept as a linear path from past to present.
To regain the dangerous and chaotic openness of what once was an
experienced moment in a still undecided present is one aspect of
Pynchon’s writing against the day. The other is affirmative against all
better knowledge: a primary acceptance of the world that is, even if
such an act of faith can be maintained only with a great amount of
either sentiment or irony. In his foreword to George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four, Pynchon seems to engage in an act of empathetic
identification when he comments on a 1946 photograph showing
Orwell with his adopted son:

It is not difficult to guess that Orwell, in 1984, was imagining a future for his
son’s generation, a world he was not so much wishing upon them as warning
against. He was impatient with predictions of the inevitable, he remained
confident in the ability of ordinary people to change anything, if they would.
46 Heinz Ickstadt

It is the boy’s smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and radiant,
proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, is
good and that human decency, like parental love, can always be taken for
granted—a faith so honorable that we can almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps
even ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done
to keep it from ever being betrayed. (“The Road to 1984”)

On the strength of such unhesitating trust in life, Pynchon has

launched the giant balloon of his fictional counterworld which, even if
it cannot interfere with or replace the Real, has risen high enough
above it to be apart from it and yet a part of it—able to move against
but also obliquely in and with the day.

Heinz Ickstadt, Free University Berlin

Notes
1
An expanded version of this essay appeared in Pynchon Notes Spring-Fall 2008
(“History, Utopia, and Transcendence in the Spacetime of Pynchon’s Against the
Day”).
2
Accordingly, Pynchon makes ample use of the various novelistic styles and genres
of the period, such as the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the Western
after Zane Gray, detective novels from Poe to Chandler, and adventure and dime
novels of the fin-de-siècle.
3
See e.g. Kakutani.
4
They have their “mysterious Russian counterpart—and, far too often, nemesis” (AtD
123)—in the airship Bolshai’a Igra (“The Great Game”) under the command of
Captain Igor Padzhitnoff whose path they often cross in missions of cooperation or
conflict.
5
See Hanjo Berressem’s essay in this collection.
6
Scientists are still not sure whether that devastating “Event”—which occurred in the
Siberian Taiga on June 30, 1908—was caused by an exploding meteor, by the
eruption of a subterranean volcano or an explosion of subterranean gases, of a cosmic
bomb or by the impact of antimatter. The energy released is estimated to have been
over one thousand times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Eighty million trees were destroyed. The sound of the explosion was heard hundreds
of kilometers away, and strange light phenomena were seen all over the world.
Scientists cannot explain why there were apparently several explosions in the sky and
why they cannot find meteorite fragments in the ground. Contemporary rumors (also
mentioned in Against the Day) had it that the “Event” resulted from a failed effort of
Nicola Tesla to communicate via wireless transmitter with Perry’s expedition to the
Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon 47

North Pole. According to another legend, Tesla was trying to use wireless electric-
power transmission to create a high-energy military bomb.
7
Cf. Ickstadt.

Bibliography
Ickstadt, Heinz. “Plot, Conspiracy, and the Reign of Chance: The
Fantastic as History in Pynchon’s Novels.” Faces of Fiction:
Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian
Period to Postmodernity, by Heinz Ickstadt. Eds. Susanne Rohr
and Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. 393-424.
Kakutani, Michiko. “A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon.” The New
York Times, 20 Nov. 2006.
Menand, Louis. “Do the Math.“ The New Yorker, 27 Nov. 2006: 170-
02.
Levine, George. “V-2.” Rev. of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas
Pynchon. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Edward
Mendelson. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1978. 178-91.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: The Penguin Press,
2006.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking Press, 1973.
—. “The Road to 1984.” The Guardian 3 May 2003.
 Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art

Keith O’Neill

Abstract: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day situates itself on several thresholds:
between the nineteenth and twentieth century, between gaslight and electric light,
between fantasy and rationalized “reality.” This essay proposes that another key
crossroads in the book is a literary one, between populist and “high” literary forms.
Specifically, I look at the novel’s references to two writers occupying very different
spaces at the fin de siècle: H. G. Wells and Henry James. James is commonly read as
a progenitor of the twentieth-century avant-garde; Wells, by contrast, is regarded as a
populist writer whose importance is qualified as being that of an early practitioner of
science fiction. The works of James became the embodiment of high culture—dense,
sophisticated, technically innovative—while those of Wells became synonymous with
familiar aspects of low culture—shallow, childish, and plot-driven. Wells and James
clearly saw a difference between their works in their own time; after a decade of
friendly correspondence, they had a famous falling out over their respective positions
on the novel: James declared his distaste for Wells’s “diversity” and politics, while
Wells satirized James’s “unity” and lack of politics. At its outset, Against the Day
announces itself as being part of the same disreputable literary territory as Wells’s
work: it incorporates elements of the ghettoized genres of western, pulp, serial and
science fictions, and, in that the book sympathizes with the anarchic Traverses,
Pynchon’s politics are clearly Wellsian as well. This paper proposes to see Against the
Day as a response to the James-Wells split, and as an announcement that perhaps the
art of the novel revered in the last hundred years was only one way the genre can go:
Pynchon’s return to a populist or “low” genre is in fact a radical political gesture.
After a century of the primacy of individual perception and consciousness, Pynchon’s
novel rejects James’s mastery and the High Modernism that technique helped
inaugurate.

“Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master,
but you can tickle his creatures.” (GR 237)

Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day situates itself on several

thresholds: between the nineteenth and twentieth century, between
gaslight and electric light, between the possibility of fantasy and the
50 Keith O’Neill

hegemony of rationalized “reality.” Another boundary line in the book

is a literary one, between populist and “high” literary forms. By
looking at the novel’s implicit and explicit references to two writers
occupying very different spaces at the fin de siècle, H. G. Wells and
Henry James, this study argues that there is a direct relation between
the historical-political and the aesthetic shifts outlined in the novel. At
its outset, Against the Day announces itself as being part of the same
disreputable literary territory as the work of Wells: Against the Day
incorporates elements of the ghettoized genres of western, pulp, serial
and science fictions. I argue that the book’s sympathies with the
anarchic Traverses are clearly Wellsian as well, that Pynchon’s
stylistic allegiance to genre fiction has subversive political
ramifications. Such sympathies suggest that the emerging dominance
of literary Modernism in the twentieth century becomes another one
of the “Days” that the novel is “Against.”

1
Henry James is commonly read as a progenitor of the twentieth-
century avant-garde, whose “mastery” of presenting the depths of
human consciousness is understood to be the beginning of modernist
literary fiction.1 Wells, by contrast, is regarded as a populist writer
whose importance is qualified as that of an early practitioner of
science fiction. The valorized works of James, in other words, became
the embodiment of high culture—dense, sophisticated, technically
innovative—while those of Wells became synonymous with familiar
aspects of low culture—simplistic, childish, and plot-driven. Wells
and James clearly saw a difference between their works in their own
time; after a decade of friendly correspondence, they had a famous
falling out over their respective positions on the novel: James declared
his distaste for Wells’s “diversity” and politics, while Wells in turn
satirized James’s “unity” and lack of politics. Indeed, this call for
politics on Wells’s part has cast a long shadow over his legacy: his
brand of socialism has marked him as too topical, too didactic for the
purview of lasting art.
By contrast, the reference to James in the opening scene of Against
the Day, in which the literate canine Pugnax reads The Princess
Casamissima, suggests playfully that James’s highbrow literature is
for the dogs. James’s novel is strongly critical of exactly the kind of
Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art 51

politics Pynchon offers as a viable option—at least at the turn of the

twentieth century. Lindsay Noseworth informs us that the subject of
James’s novel

“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 fictional leaves
of some book.” (AtD 6)

Traditionally, readers of James’s novel—which is not considered a

major one in the author’s oeuvre—have treated the topic of anarchism
tentatively, as if James has wandered too far from the realm of the
personal and psychological into the political.2 It is not only anarchism
that offends Noseworth; fiction itself seems to be an unimportant and
minor enterprise.
This disdain, however, is complicated by the narrator’s reminder,
at several points in the novel, that the Chums themselves are fictional
characters. In these sections, unlike the others in the novel, Pynchon
refers to a fictional bibliography consisting of a series of Chums titles.
Further, the Chums themselves seem to become gradually aware of
their own fictional status. Importantly, the kind of literature the
Chums inhabit is markedly lower, at least to Noseworth, than that of
Henry James. Later in the novel, after a contact hints at the existence
of a real time machine, Noseworth complains that “‘Mr. H.G. Wells’s
speculative jeu d’esprit on the subject has been adulterated to
profitable effect by the ‘dime novels’ of which our visitor, assuming
he reads, is no doubt a habitué” (AtD 398). Within pages of this
snobbish dismissal of “dime novels,” however, the Chums find
themselves at “The First International Conference on Time Travel,”
face to face with “a whole junkyard full” of

failed time machines—Chronoclipses, Asimov Transeculars. Tempomorph Q-

98s—broken, defective, scorched by catastrophic flares of misrouted energy,
corroded often beyond recognition by unintended immersion in the terrible
Flow over which they had been designed and built, so hopefully, to prevail...
(AtD 409)

As science fiction itself has traditionally been regarded as a childish,

sub-literary genre, here we see what happens to the byproducts of
such narratives. If we read the time machines as metonyms for the
52 Keith O’Neill

novels and novelists who invented them, we see the symbolic result of
the process of literary canonization: a trash heap of literary history
“scorched” by the fires of cultural guardians and proclaimed failures.
As Professor Heino Vanderjuice exclaims, “‘Walloping Wellesianism
[sic]’” (AtD 409) indeed.
The Chums effectively see what happens to the kind of populist
literature of which they suspect they are manifestations. As they begin
to doubt the motives of the mysterious authority they are working for,
Noseworth’s blanket dismissal of dime novels as trash becomes an
increasingly untenable position to hold. For Noseworth to continue to
dismiss “‘Mr. H.G. Wells’s speculative jeu d’esprit’” would mean the
relegation of the entire Chums of Chances series to the same “terrible
Flow” of critical neglect. Aesthetical decisions are always political
ones as well.
Pynchon proclaimed his allegiance to genre writing as early as
1984, in “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” In that essay, a response to and
a ridiculing of the supposedly ossified “Two Cultures” in academia,
Pynchon reserves special commentary for science fiction:

These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious

enough, and so they get redlined under the label “escapist fare.” This is
especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after
Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and,
quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat
movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than
mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by
the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a
nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to
have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite
persuasion. (40)

He also describes genre writing as a ghettoized form of literature,

judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the
only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely
defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love
conquers all. In whodunits, murder, being a pretext for a logical puzzle, is
hardly ever an irrational act. (“Luddite” 40)

Because genre writing does not cooperate by exhibiting the kinds of

complexity and depth championed by scholars since T.S. Eliot and,
especially, the New Critics, such writing has been cordoned off into
Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art 53

controlled areas by the marketing categories of publishers and the

refusal of many academics to take it seriously. It is important to note,
however, that much freedom is to be found lurking in the bad
neighborhood of genre fiction. Race, class, and gender are free to be
played with and critiqued in ways not found in serious literature.
Science fiction and other forms of popular writing, despite their
commercial origins, become a kind of literary parallel to the concept
of the Zone in Gravity’s Rainbow, a defeated territory where
inhabitants and visitors alike get to run relatively free.
While Pynchon’s work has always exhibited an interest in motifs
from popular culture, never before has one of his works been so
obviously and continuously pulp-ish. It is precisely this aspect of
Against the Day at which negative reviewers have bristled; yet at the
same time, the novel forestalls such reproof. For example, as the
Inconvenience is about to become embroiled in an underground (and
offstage) war like something out of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the
narrative cuts off and refers readers to another Chums book:

For a detailed account [...] 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. (AtD 117)

Pynchon’s playful apology anticipates perfectly the negative critical

reaction to Against the Day itself. Michiko Kakutani’s famously
cranky review of the novel in The New York Times expressed
“displeasure, often quite intense” at the novel for being “a
humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without
being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated
without being rewardingly complex” (Kakutani). Her review reads as
if it were written in the voice of Noseworth—one of the names she
singles out as “distinctly Pynchonian”: “These authorial trademarks
[…] are orchestrated in a weary and decidedly mechanical fashion,”
marked by “reams and reams of pointless, self-indulgent vamping that
read like Exhibit A in what can only be called a case of the Emperor’s
New Clothes” (Kakutani). Her complaint, however, is not that
Pynchon has changed, but that he is up to his old tricks again:
“Whereas Mr. Pynchon’s last novel, the stunning Mason & Dixon,
demonstrated a new psychological depth, depicting its two heroes as
54 Keith O’Neill

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” (Kakutani).
There are two poles in Kakutani’s view of literature, one marked
by “depth,” and the other betraying the shallowness of two-
dimensional “cartoons.” Implicit in such an argument, however, is a
bias for “high” literature, of the sort associated since the early
twentieth century with the “Master” of psychological depth, Henry
James. For Kakutani, the “bloated,” “halfbaked” quality of Pynchon’s
novel is a transgression against her humanist values, of which she saw
evidence in Mason & Dixon. Though she claims that Against the Day
“reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a
dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on
quaaludes,” by the review’s end it is clear that Kakutani’s disdain for
the novel is precisely because it reads like Pynchon’s most famous
novels. She remarks that the novel is “[l]ike V. and Gravity’s
Rainbow,” for “Mr. Pynchon’s earlier work tended to be cold, hard
and despairing: devoid of any real sense of human connection,
soulfulness, or redemption” (Kakutani).
Kakutani’s condemnation of the novel—in which she acts as a kind
of police officer for the safe neighborhood of Serious Literature—
recalls the same way that critics have attacked H.G. Wells in the wake
of his feud with James. Virginia Woolf, in an essay championing the
writers whose works would become the canon of High Modernism,
describes Wells as if he has tracked dirt into her home: “And yet even
in his case it indicates to our thinking the fatal alloy in his genius, the
great clod of clay that has got itself mixed up with the purity of his
inspiration” (147). Woolf, of course, is merely echoing James’s own
offended reaction to what he called Wells’s “bad manners,” an
assessment that has haunted Wells’s reputation for nearly half a
century (Edel and Ray 265).

2
The friendship and famous rift between Henry James and H. G. Wells
spans almost precisely the period during which Against the Day takes
place. James and Wells met in 1898 and they corresponded until about
1914, after which they stopped speaking. At the turn the century,
Wells had moved to Sandgate near James’s home in Rye, and the two
Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art 55

writers visited frequently. Besides the difference in age—James was

twenty-three years older—there was a significant difference in class as
well: Wells was from working-class stock, and he was constantly
aware of it even as he traveled in the literary circles of London. In a
book-length study of the feud, Leon Edel and Gordon L. Ray see the
differences between the two men as a philosophical one more than
anything else: “The essential difference between the two lay, however,
in the fact that Wells’s scientific training, combined with his need for
self-assertion, made him an exponent of a materialist kind of artistry
to which James was utterly opposed” (18). As James saw it: “It is art
that makes life, makes interest, makes importance” (Edel and Ray 9).
Wells, on the other hand, saw reality “with the eye of a statesman or a
trade union leader; reality was not something to be submitted to the
alchemy of the imagination” (Edel and Ray 19).
In other words, the friendship and subsequent separation between
James and Wells becomes an emblem of the seismic shift in concepts
of literature in the twentieth century. Edel and Ray claim that the
issues of the feud

touch one of the exposed nerves of our century: the distinction to be drawn
between literature as the voice of the individual and literature engaged in the
furtherance of social welfare […] In a sense it involved also two ways of life:
the way of the writer like Wells or Bernard Shaw who subordinates his art to
his social message, and the way of the dedicated artist like James or Proust for
whom art is the only valid means of encompassing and preserving human
experience. (11)

The James-Wells split becomes “a parable of the two great camps into
which artists have been divided in the twentieth century” (Edel and
Ray 12). For a critic like Edel, who would spend the next several
decades writing the definitive biography of James, Wells is clearly
misguided in his argument:

The novel was, for Wells, a convenience, something to be used for specific
ends; for James the novel was the most characteristic art-form of our time,
intricate and human, to be practiced with professional skill and all the
resources of the artist’s imagination. Wells’s mockery of James […] is more
than a failure in perception; it reveals that this remarkable man, whose
imagination could soar through space and time and create tales of wonderful
new worlds, was yet limited and earth-bound when it came to understanding
the true nature of art. (39)
56 Keith O’Neill

In 1914, James published an essay on “The Younger Generation” of

novelists, which featured a very public dismissal of Wells’s work as
“execrably, pestilentially” separating “method from matter”: James
claims his works “are so very much more attestations of the presence
of material than in an interest in the use of it” (Edel and Ray 190).
Using the metaphor of “leakage,” James implies that Wells’s novels
are shoddily constructed. Wells, who took great offense to that
characterization, responded by including a searing portrait of James in
his odd novel Boon, published anonymously in 1915: “You can see
from his books that he accepts etiquette, precedences, associations,
claims. That is his peculiarity. He accepts very readily and then—
elaborates. […] It is Leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent
but painful hippopotamus” (Boon 104, 110). As Wells wrote later in
life, “I bothered him and he bothered me. We were at cross purposes
based […] on very fundamental differences, not only of temperament
but also of training. He had no idea of the possible use of the novel as
a help to conduct” (Experiment 410-11). To Wells, James’s main
interest in the novel consisted of reputation: “From his point of view
there were not so much ‘novels’ as The Novel, and it was a very high
and important achievement. He thought of it as an Art Form and of
novelists as artists of a very special and exalted type. He was
concerned about their greatness and repute. He saw us all as Masters
or would-be Masters, little Masters and great Masters…” (Experiment
411). In other words, James was concerned with being in the canon,
and the political implications of a word like “Master” could not have
been lost to Wells, author of the first Human Rights Statement. Wells,
on the other hand, argued “against the ‘character’ obsession” in
English novels, complaining that throughout the nineteenth century
“the art of fiction floated on the assumption of social fixity”
(Experiment 416). Describing the “intensively conservative” novelist,
Wells argues that he “accepted, he accepted willfully, the established
social values about him; he had hardly a doubt in him of what was
right or wrong, handsome or ungracious, just or mean” (Experiment
416). To Wells, such conservatism has to do with comfort: “The
Novel in English was produced […] for the entertainment of secure
people who liked to feel established and safe for good” (Experiment
416). Wells sounds like a postmodernist, or, perhaps more germane to
the current discussion, a literary Luddite, when he claims that in his
work, “through a new instability, the splintering frame began to get in
Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art 57

the picture” (Experiment 416). Finally, he detests what he sees as the

apolitical nature of James’s works:

[…] if the novel is to follow life it must be various and discursive. Life is
diversity and entertainment, not completeness and satisfaction […] In all of
[James’s] novels you will find no people with defined political opinions, no
people with religious opinions, none with clear partisanship or with lusts or
whims, none definitely up to any specific impersonal thing. There are no poor
people dominated by the imperatives of Saturday night and Monday morning,
no dreaming types—and don’t we all more or less live dreaming? (Boon 107)

Wells’s description of what James’s fiction lacks tells us, by

implication, what he thinks should be in fiction, and it echoes
Pynchon’s own description of his characters in Against the Day as
“folks […] mostly just trying to pursue their lives” (Blurb).

3
Just as Mason & Dixon is a celebration and recovery of sorts of what
was lost with the onset of the Age of Reason, Against the Day
explores what was lost to the twentieth century with the advent of
Modernism. Modernism, the books implies, is integral to the path the
world took in the twentieth century, a path that forgot “‘the inexorably
rising tide of World Anarchism’” (AtD 6) that Noseworth—just like
Henry James—dreads so much at the beginning of the novel. Granted,
European and American artists and writers positioned themselves as
the enemies of fascism—the Spanish Civil War against Franco was a
cause célèbre of intellectuals, and the Nazis famously castigated
Modernist art as “degenerate”—but Pynchon hints that the avant-
garde and the extreme right were not as different as they appeared.
Indeed, though literary critics have tried anxiously to account for and
contextualize Eliot’s and Pound’s anti-Semitism, for instance, or tried
to dismiss charges that so-called High Modernism is classist and
elitist, Modernism’s distinction from fascism is becoming increasingly
blurred. As Mark Antliff puts it in an important essay on this
connection: “The terms fascism and modern art used to seem
comfortably opposed to each other, but the last two decades of
scholarship in history, art history, and literature have radically revised
that postwar complacency” (148).3 Pynchon’s text reminds us that
neither the left nor the right, neither the artist nor the industrial state,
58 Keith O’Neill

had any tolerance for the preterite realm of human experience he

terms “Anarchism.” Western history seemed to be moving from
multiplicity toward a binary choice, a “singling up of all the lines”:
democracy or fascism, capitalism or totalitarianism, 1 or 0. In the
meantime, any other possibility for living is forgotten, the excluded
middle that Oedipa, in The Crying of Lot 49, calls “bad shit” (CoL
150).
Late in the novel, Ratty McHugh explains succinctly why the
approaching World War, regardless of its outcome—will not favor
Anarchism:

“Anarchists would be the biggest losers, wouldn’t they. Industrial

corporations, armies, navies, governments, all would go on as before, if not
more powerful [...] 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. The national idea would be
reborn. One trembles at the pestilent forms that would rise up afterward, from
the swamp of the ruined Europe.” (AtD 938)

In the middle of the novel, Ryder Thorne, one of the mysterious

“Trespassers,” speaks obliquely of the approaching World War and
the Battle of Flanders: “‘The world you take to be ‘the’ world will die,
and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to
the history of Hell. […] They will all embrace death. […] The world.
On a scale that has never yet been imagined’” (AtD 554). The coming
century, as characters are reminded again and again, will involve a
terrible transformation in technology, politics, and, I argue, even
aesthetics, unlike any the world of has ever seen.
This “pestilent” form of twentieth-century death worship—note the
echo of James’s adjective for Wells’s transgressions—is most
obviously embodied by Scarsdale Vibe, who makes a similar
argument in his final scene in the novel:

“[…] who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum, the
frozen corpses whose names, false in any case, have gone forever unrecorded?
[...] 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.” (AtD 1001)

One can think of Against the Day as a kind of response to Virginia

Woolf’s famous Modernist proclamation that “On or about December
Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art 59

1910 human character changed” (“Mr. Bennett” 124). For Woolf, the
change was a positive one, a progress from the repression of the
Victorian Age. Late in Against the Day, Pynchon has a similar line:
“‘The World came to an end in 1914’” (AtD 1077). We should stress,
of course, that Pynchon is not bemoaning the end of mainstream
Victorian culture: Scarsdale Vibe is as much a portrait of the robber
barons of the nineteenth century as he is a capitalist of the early
twentieth century. For Pynchon, the shift to Modernism constitutes a
loss of possibilities, of forms of resistance: as humanity moves into
the new decade, he suggests, both the avant-garde and the fascists
share a kind of class blindness, a move away from the forms of
anarchism celebrated in the novel.
Against the Day, then, is a political novel much different than the
socialist calls-to-arms of Wells and others. It is significant that
Pynchon situates the novel in the years before the Great War, at the
brink of the decline of the twentieth century into total war,
totalitarianism, and genocide. Clearly, to him, the nineteenth-century
political tradition of anarchism is worth considering. Throughout the
novel, one sees a tug-of-war between this political tradition and
modernity. Even Kit and Reef Traverse, two of the main protagonists
of the novel, become seduced by the new technology of the twentieth
century, and in the process slip away from their anarchist moorings.
The narrator describes, at the outbreak of World War I, “[a]mong the
frantic popping of Mauser against Mauser, something new on Earth.
Machine guns, the future of warfare” (AtD 965). Within a few pages,
Reef gains possession of one of these weapons, and “entered the
domain of five hundred rounds per minute” (AtD 969). This entry is
followed by the even more dramatic transformation of Kit in the final
section of the novel. In the years right after their marriage, Kit and
Dally live in Turin, and Kit’s pilot friend Renzon teaches him the
seductive quality of the picciate, or dive-bomb:

They were soon going so fast that something happened to time, and maybe
they’d slipped for a short interval in the Future, the Future known to Italian
Futurists, with events superimposed on one another, and geometry straining
irrationally away in all directions, including a couple of extra dimensions as
they continued hellward, 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 it functional equations, stripped and fire-blasted of
everything emotional or accidental.... (AtD 1070)
60 Keith O’Neill

The reference to Futurism—the early marriage of Modernism and

extreme right wing politics—is unmistakable.4 Soon Kit finds himself
involved in divebombing “a Bolshevik-inspired strike of workers at
the weapons factory in Torino” (AtD 1071). As Dally later points out,
this is not typical Traverse politics, and Kit himself comes to a
moment of revelation:

[Kit] saw that here, approaching the speed of sound, he was being
metamorphosed into something else […] Renzo’s picciata had been perhaps
the first and purest expression in northern Italy of a Certain Word that would
not quite exist for another year or two. But somehow, like a precognitive
murmur, a dreamed voice, it had already provisionally entered Time. (AtD
1071)

That “Certain Word” is probably fascism, but Modernism applies

equally well.5 Though Kit finally rejects Renzo’s hobby, his final
position is in question at the end of the novel. At one point, he begs
Dally “to help me get to the right piece of trail at least” (AtD 1074).
We can read this, in light of Kit’s flirtation with Italian Futurism, as a
paean not just for Kit’s wrong turn, but also for that of the twentieth
century in general.
Against the Day is not merely a book about anarchists; it is an
anarchist act, a betrayal of class lines by a “serious” writer showing
his interest in, and allegiance with, the disreputable realms of
twentieth-century literature. If we read Against the Day as a response
to the split between James and Wells, it becomes an announcement, in
both form and content, that perhaps the art of the novel revered in the
last hundred years was only one way the genre can go: Pynchon’s
return to populist or “low” genres is in fact a radical political gesture.
After a century of stress on the individual perception and
consciousness, I read Pynchon’s novel as a rejection of James’s
mastery and the High Modernism his technique helped inaugurate. If
History, which Against the Day calls “Time’s pathology” (AtD 828),
has not been kind to Wells, Pynchon’s novel offers a kind of
counterhistory to the novel as a genre, as well as a suggestion for its
future.6

Keith O’Neill, SUNY-Dutchess

Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art 61

Notes
1
See, for a famous example, the opening pages of Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (3-
5). Though Kenner’s point is to contrast Pound and James as representatives of two
very different generations, his focus on this meeting effectively places James at the
beginnings of Modernism’s lineage.
2
In an essay titled “The Terrorist in Fiction,” Beli Melman argues, defensively, not to
confuse novels about terrorism with real terrorism: “it seems that a useful study of
terrorism in fiction should concentrate on the terrorist as he is perceived by the writer,
rather than on the terrorist as he was, or might have been in reality” (560).
3
See the January 2008 issue of Modernism/Modernity, which was dedicated to this
topic. In particular, the articles by Baackmann and Craven, Griffin, and Fogu offered
a varied interpretation of the implications Modernism/fascism connection. David
Antliff’s excellent “Fascism, Modernism, Modernity” is one of the first extended
arguments along these lines, and might be read as a kind of manifesto for this line of
critique. (My thanks to Professor Barbara Will of Dartmouth College for steering me
in the direction of Modernism/Modernity.)
4
Again, see Claudio Fogu’s article for a detailed analysis of the connection between
the supposedly progressively-orientated Futurism and regressive fascism.
5
One cannot help but note that the cover image on the U.S. paperback edition of
Against the Day—Nosedive on the City by Futurist artist Tullio Crali—draws
attention to not only the piccicate scene in the novel, but to that scene’s relationship
with Modernism as well. Though there’s no proof that Pynchon chose this image, he
has been known to be involved in all aspects of his publications in the past.
6
Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice, “a noir novel ... set in the world of 1960s
psychedelia” (Ulin), furthers his alliance with popular literary genres.

Bibliography
Antliff, Mark. “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity.” The Art
Bulletin 84.1 (March 2002): 148-69.
Baackmann, Susanne, and David Craven. “An Introduction to
Modernism—Fascism—Postmodernism.” Modernism/ Modernity
15. 1 (January 2008): 1-8.
Edel, Leon, and Gordon N. Ray. Henry James and H. G. Wells: A
Record of their Friendship, their Debate of the Art of Fiction, and
their Quarrel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1948.
Fogu, Claudio. “Futurist Mediterraneità between Emporium and
Imperium.” Modernism/Modernity 15. 1 (January 2008): 25-43.
Griffin, Roger. “Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism. A ‘Mazeway
Resynthesis.’” Modernism/Modernity 15.1 (January 2008): 9-24.
62 Keith O’Neill

Kakutani, Michiko. “A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon.” The New

York Times. 20 Nov. 2006. 15 May 2010 <http://www.nytimes.
com/2006/11/20/books/20kaku. html>.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: The University of
California Press, 1973.
Melman, Bili. “The Terrorist in Fiction.” Journal of Contemporary
History 15.3 (July 1980): 559-76.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: The Penguin Group,
2006.
—. Blurb. Against the Day. 2006. Pynchonwiki 7 Feb. 2008. 15 May
2010 <http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php
?title=Against_the_Day_description>.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking Press, 1973.
—. “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” The New York Times Book Review.
28 Oct. 1984: 1, 40-41.
—. The Crying of Lot 49. 1965. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.
Ulin, David L. “New Thomas Pynchon Novel Confirmed.” Los
Angeles Times. 03 Oct. 2008. 15 May 2010 <http://latimesblogs.
latimes.com/jacketcopy/2008/10/new-thomas-py-1.html>
Wells, H. G. Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil,
and the Last Trump. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1915.
—. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a
Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866). New York: Lippincott, 1966.
Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Common Reader. Ed. by
Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Trade, 2002. 146-54.
—. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Essentials of the Theory of
Fiction. Ed. by Michael J. Hoffman, Patrick D. Murphy. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996.
 Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day

Simon de Bourcier

Abstract: This essay looks at the theme of the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day.
Speculations about the existence of a Fourth Dimension proliferated in the period
during which the novel is set, and a four-dimensional space-time continuum became
part of the way mainstream science saw the world with the advent of Einstein’s
Theory of Relativity in the early years of the twentieth century. This essay looks at
texts from this period by H. G. Wells, Israel Zangwill, Charles Howard Hinton, P. D.
Ouspensky, Henri Bergson, and Herman Minkowski, as a way of approaching
Pynchon’s treatment of the Fourth Dimension.
Hinton proposed the existence of a Fourth Dimension of space; Wells, in The
Time Machine, called time the Fourth Dimension. The essay argues that these two
versions of the Fourth Dimension are equivalent in many ways, including the types of
narrative they enable, which tend to be variations on the ancient tale of the journey to
the land of the dead. Relativistic space-time, on the other hand, is something quite
different, as it denies the possibility of perceiving all of time as a static whole, which
is implicit in earlier accounts of the Fourth Dimension.
This essay argues that Pynchon explores the narrative possibilities presented by
both the pre-relativistic Fourth Dimension and relativistic space-time in Against the
Day, and that by doing so he situates historically the different models of time which
he has explored in his earlier writing.

During the years in which Against the Day is set, the Fourth
Dimension crossed the boundary separating esoteric speculation and
science fiction from orthodox science. Among the possibilities that
threatened to smuggle themselves across with it were time travel and
instantaneous travel across space. However, the version of four-
dimensionality that became scientific orthodoxy with the advent of
relativity is subtly but crucially different from the ideas about the
Fourth Dimension that were circulating in wider textual culture before
relativity. So, while relativity is sometimes taken to give credibility to
these speculations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it
in fact forces their abandonment in favor of something far stranger.
64 Simon de Bourcier

Pynchon dramatizes this process in stories about technologies of time

manipulation in Against the Day.
This essay reads Against the Day alongside texts by H. G. Wells,
Israel Zangwill, Charles Howard Hinton, P. D. Ouspensky, Henri
Bergson, and Herman Minkowski, all dating from the period in which
the novel is set. I hope to show that Pynchon stages not simply a
dialogue of ideas about the Fourth Dimension but an encounter
between possible worlds by giving narrative form to each of the three
main interpretations of the Fourth Dimension that can be distinguished
in writing of this period. The first is a fourth dimension of space, that
is to say, a fourth spatial axis perpendicular to the three familiar
dimensions of space, extending in a direction which we cannot point
to, perceive, or, without difficulty, even imagine. The second is time.
Finally, a four-dimensional space-time continuum was proposed by
Hermann Minkowski in 1908, which became one of the foundations
of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The first two of these
interpretations amount to different ways of saying the same thing, but
the third is fundamentally different. Pynchon’s novel recognizes this,
although Bergson and Ouspensky, among others, do not. The Fourth
Dimension thus becomes a motif through which Against the Day
adopts a stance toward the revolution in physics in the early twentieth
century, its philosophical implications, and the narrative temporalities
it enables.

Wells and Hinton: ‘only a kind of space’

The Time Machine is an important source for Against the Day. I make
this claim for three reasons. First, it is the earliest text in which an
explicit definition of the Fourth Dimension as time is developed in
any detail. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller says, “any real body must
have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth,
Thickness and—Duration. […] There are really four dimensions, three
which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time” (Wells
2005, 4). Second, this is part of a fictional narrative, and creates a
template for narrative explorations of the Fourth Dimension. The third
and most compelling reason is Pynchon’s pastiche of Wells: a remark
about “d’ toime machine” by a “street-Arab” at first seems to the
Chums of Chance to be a reference to “Mr. H. G. Wells’s speculative
Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day 65

jeu d’esprit” (AtD 397-98), but soon leads Chick and Darby to Dr.
Zoot’s machine. It seems old-fashioned to them, as Wells’s machine
does today. The “Breguet-style openwork of the indicator arrows”
(AtD 402) recalls the fact that the Time Traveller’s model, which he
demonstrates before boarding the full-size machine, is compared to a
“clock” (Wells 2005, 8). Zoot’s machine and the Time Traveller’s
both employ quartz (Wells 2005, 11; AtD 403). Like the Time
Traveller, the Chums visit two future times. In the first they see a vast
mass of “spectral” beings (AtD 403). The second finds them in a chaos
of darkness, inhuman cries, “the smell of excrement and dead tissue”
(AtD 404)—a vision, perhaps, of death itself. After all, Zoot does tell
them that “It’s different for everybody” (AtD 404). His second-hand
machine fails to create the disconnection of temporalities on which
Wells’s story depends, whereby the Time Traveller’s subjective time
flows independently of time as it passes for the rest of the world.
Without this disconnection, the machine propels one rapidly into
one’s own future, and can only be, in Darby’s words, a “death trap”
(AtD 405). There is grim comedy to this re-working of the time-travel
narrative.
Both Wells’s novel and Pynchon’s brief burlesque have elements
that mark them out as versions of a myth which depends on an
implicit substitution of space for time, the journey into the world of
the dead and back. Zoot’s machine seems “fiendish” (AtD 404), and
Chick’s best hope is that Zoot himself is “not altogether diabolical”
(AtD 403). To reach his workshop the Chums pass through an arch
bearing the words which greet Dante as he enters the Inferno (AtD
401). Several elements of The Time Machine position its narrative as a
variant on the netherworld myth. The Morlocks inhabit a literal
“Underworld” (Wells 2005, 47, 53-54) into which the Time Traveller
descends. Like the seething masses seen by the Chums, they are
“spectral” (54).
Wells’s story is not primarily an exploration of the four-
dimensional universe. The Time Traveller’s explanation of how his
machine works is an example of what Wells calls “scientific patter”
(qtd. in Philmus 2). However, the Zoot episode is about the
implications of the pre-relativistic model of the Four-Dimensional
universe, in which time is understood as “a kind of space” (Wells
2005, 5). This is highlighted by Pynchon’s joke of having Zoot offer
the boys a ride “then and back” for half price (AtD 402).
66 Simon de Bourcier

An early response to The Time Machine addresses a number of the

issues raised by this view of time and space, and exemplifies the way
that seeing time as the Fourth Dimension tends to imply that the
passage of time is illusory, and that past, present and future all co-
exist in what is often referred to as the “block universe.” Israel
Zangwill, in Pall Mall Magazine, notes that it is “one of the first
lessons of metaphysics” that “Time is an illusion,” and gives a classic
description of the block universe: “a vast continuum holding all that
has happened and all that will happen, an eternal Present” (Zangwill
153). However, Zangwill points out, “to introduce a man travelling
through this sleeping ocean is to re-introduce Time which has just
been expelled” (153). This is a version of what I will term the
“hypertime” argument, following the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s
article on “time.” According to this argument, the idea that time is
illusory, and that past, present and future all co-exist with equal
reality, is flawed because the illusion requires a higher order of time,
or hypertime, to unfold in. It does not require a Time Traveller but is
raised by the normal experience of the passage of time. The notion of
an “eternal Present” also prompts the question: present to whom?
Zangwill’s answer is: to God, “at the centre of vision, receiving all
vibrations simultaneously, and thus beholding all Past time
simultaneously with the Present” (154).
Kant’s understanding of space and time is a useful touchstone for
an engagement with these issues. He argues that time “does not inhere
in […] objects, but merely in the subject which intuits them” (79).
Take away the subject, and it is “nothing” (Kant 77). To lay out time
as if it were extension in space, and then to jump to different points
along its length, as Wells’s narrative does, is to adopt the
extratemporal point of view which Zangwill attributes to God. This
point of view is intrinsic to descriptions of the four-dimensional
universe because what Bergson terms the “spatialization of time”
(Duration 103) is always an attempt to visualize time, and to visualize
it from without is always to spatialize it. This is consonant with Kant’s
argument that time is our “mode of inwardly intuiting ourselves,” but
space is “the a priori condition only of outer appearances” (Kant 77).
If we try to translate time from something the passing of which we
experience as the condition of our subjectivity itself, to something we
can detach ourselves from, it inevitably loses exactly what gives it the
quality of being time, and becomes instead a type of space.
Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day 67

Conversely, to make time “only a kind of space” (Wells 2005, 5), as

the Time Traveller does, is to falsify the intuitive experience of time.
The Time Traveller’s exposition of the Fourth Dimension owes
much, as is widely recognized, to Hinton, on whom Yashmeen
Halfcourt in Against the Day partly blames the “vogue” for the Fourth
Dimension (AtD 591). Like Edwin A. Abbott in Flatland, Hinton
imagines a world of two dimensions, its inhabitants and their relation
to three-dimensional spaces, objects and beings. Thence by analogy he
speculates about the relation of four-dimensional spaces, objects and
beings to us and our three-dimensional world. Hinton’s ideas were set
out first in an essay called “What is the Fourth Dimension?” in the
1880s. They were elaborated further in A New Era of Thought and The
Fourth Dimension. Hinton disputes what he sees as the orthodox
interpretation of Kant’s “doctrine of space”:

It is generally said that the mind cannot perceive things in themselves, but can
only apprehend them subject to space conditions. And in this way the space
conditions are as it were considered somewhat in the light of hindrances,
whereby we are prevented from seeing what the objects in themselves truly
are. But if we take the statement simply as it is—that we apprehend by means
of space—then it is equally allowable to consider our space sense as a positive
means by which the mind grasps experience. (New Era 2)

If the properties of space are aspects not of outer reality but of our
perception, then the way to grasp things as they really are is by
transcending those aspects of “space sense” which are really “self
elements” (Hinton, New Era 21). Conversely, “[a]cquiring an intuitive
knowledge of four-dimensional space” can be thought of as “casting
out the self” (Hinton, Speculations 66). By learning the shapes of the
three-dimensional planes and sections of four-dimensional objects,
Hinton claims that he can “feel four-dimensional existence” (New Era
46). Note the role time plays in this process. Hinton grasps the “actual
appearances” of four-dimensional objects “not altogether, but as
models succeeding one another” (New Era 51). Employing the
“Flatland” analogy, he explains further:

Now, the two ways, in which a plane-being would apprehend a solid body,
would be by successive appearances to him of it as it passed through his
plane; and also by the different views of one and the same solid body which
he got by turning the body over, so that different parts of its surface come into
contact with his plane.
68 Simon de Bourcier

And the practical work of learning to think in four-dimensional space, is

to go through the appearances which one and the same higher solid has. (New
Era 58)

Hinton uses succession in time to represent extension in the Fourth

Dimension.
Another passage from Hinton suggests that the identification of the
Fourth Dimension with time is an inevitable corollary of imagining a
fourth spatial dimension:

[I]f there were four-dimensional objects we should only know them as

solids—the solids, namely, in which they intersect our space. Why, then,
should not the four-dimensional beings be ourselves, and our successive states
the passing of them through the three-dimensional space to which our
consciousness is confined? (Speculations 12)

If extension in the Fourth Dimension corresponds, as Hinton suggests,

to succession in time, the identification is inescapable, although not
stated explicitly. Hinton’s “successive states” correspond to the Time
Traveller’s portraits of a man at different ages, which he describes as
“sections” of the man’s “Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed
and unalterable thing” (Wells 2005, 5).
Hinton pursues further the image of “a four-dimensional existence
passing through a three-dimensional space”:

Each part of the ampler existence which passed through our space would seem
perfectly limited to us. We should have no indication of the permanence of its
existence. Were such a thought adopted, we should have to imagine some
stupendous whole, wherein all that has ever come into being or will come co-
exists. (Speculations 16)

Here Hinton finds that trying to imagine the Fourth Dimension leads
him inevitably to representing it as time, and, furthermore, to a vision
of past, present and future as, in the Time Traveller’s phrase, “fixed
and unalterable” (Wells 2005, 5).
Hinton’s work illustrates the impossibility of disentangling
speculation about a fourth dimension of space from the idea that time
is the Fourth Dimension. It is worth examining the emergence of
Wells’s use of this idea in detail, because it illustrates how this
interpretation is latent in Hinton’s work and crystallizes with a kind of
inevitability in Wells’s. Wells is the first to designate time the Fourth
Dimension in the period I am discussing. The Fourth Dimension was
Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day 69

first equated with time in 1754 by Jean le Rond d’Alembert

(Henderson 9), but there is no evidence of direct continuity between
Wells and this or other sources pre-dating Hinton.
Leon Stover argues that Wells’s identification of the Fourth
Dimension with time does not come directly from Hinton but was
suggested by an essay by E. A. Hamilton-Gordon (Wells 1996, 25-
26). Hamilton-Gordon’s essay “The Fourth Dimension” was
published in 1887 in the Science Schools Journal, which Wells edited.
It is a satire on Hinton’s “What is the Fourth Dimension?”, a question
which Hamilton-Gordon claims to have been asked with “monotonous
frequency” (238). He says: “It would be difficult to answer, were it
not for the fact that the questioner usually answers it for himself, by
suggesting some impossible thing. One thought it was ‘Time,’ another
‘Life,’ a third ‘Heaven,’ while a fourth suggested ‘Velocity’” (238).
Stover claims that Wells picked up on the first of these suggestions
and based the rationale for time-travel in The Time Machine upon it.
Whether or not Stover is right, it is clear from Wells’s later writing
that his thinking about the Fourth Dimension was shaped by
discussions of Hinton’s work among the circle of which he and
Hamilton-Gordon were part (Experiment 214; Conquest 71).
Linda Dalrymple Henderson maintains that there is in this period a
clear distinction between a spatial fourth dimension and the Fourth
Dimension understood as time (9). Might we not see the necessity that
Hinton urges of employing time in the visualization of the Fourth
Dimension as symptomatic of a more profound connection between
the two interpretations than Henderson’s account allows for?
Underlying Hinton’s understanding of the Fourth Dimension is the
Kantian assumption that time is the means by which we apprehend the
timeless.
The Fourth Dimension insists on equating itself with time not only
when visualized but also when narrativized. For example, Hinton
explains that “a being, able to move in four dimensions, could get out
of a closed box without going through the sides” (Speculations 18). A
similar trick enables Yashmeen Halfcourt to “apparently walk through
a solid wall” (AtD 592) to escape Kit’s boorish friends. No obviously
temporal, rather than spatial, anomaly has taken place here. However,
when Oscar Wilde, mocking the “vogue” for Hintonian ideas, allows
the Canterville Ghost to vanish through a wall by “adopting the Fourth
Dimension of Space as a means of escape” from two mischievous
70 Simon de Bourcier

children, he writes that the Ghost is driven to this expediency because

there is “no time to be lost” (Wilde 64). The Fourth Dimension,
though not directly identified with time, is a substitute for it.
Similarly, when Yashmeen vanishes, Kit has “scarcely time to register
puzzlement” before his friends burst in (AtD 592). In both cases
movement between two points in three-dimensional space is
accomplished without the passage of time which it would normally
require, by travelling instead along the Fourth Dimension, which thus
displays its equivalence to time.
Hinton gave the 1884 version of “What is the Fourth Dimension?”
the subtitle “Ghosts Explained.” The possibility that the dead might
inhabit a world displaced from our own along the Fourth Dimension is
explored by Wells in “The Plattner Story.” During his journey into the
Fourth Dimension Gottfried Plattner encounters “Watchers,” who
seem to be the dead. When he returns the left and right sides of his
body have been interchanged (Wells, “Plattner” 194-96). Pynchon’s
Dr. Ganesh Rao also finds that passing through the Fourth Dimension,
as well as miraculously transplanting him from one location to
another, causes alterations to his person (AtD 539, 557). In translating
a mathematical concept into narrative, these two narrative
manifestations of the Fourth Dimension—the transformations of
Wells’s Plattner and Pynchon’s Rao—both tap into a deep vein of
myth. Plattner’s bodily reversal expresses the idea first explained by
Möbius in the 1820s, and adopted enthusiastically by Hinton, that the
transformation of a three-dimensional object into its mirror image can
be thought of as its rotation in four-dimensional space (Speculations
vi-vii). However, it is interesting to consider the Plattner story in the
light of Carlo Ginzburg’s work on the mythological topos of the
journey to the land of the dead. Ginzburg notes that those who make
that journey almost always return marked by asymmetry (247). This
he takes to be the encoding of a primal aspect of human self-
consciousness, the recognition of the symmetry of the body:
“Anything that modifies this image on a literary or metaphorical plane
[…] seems particularly suited to express an experience that exceeds
the limits of what is human: the journey into the realm of the dead”
(241-42). To be lame or missing a shoe—like Oedipus or Cinderella—
Ginzburg takes as an important subset of this kind of asymmetry (226-
47).
Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day 71

When Wells’s Time Traveller returns from his journey into the
future, the narrator not only notes that he is “ghastly pale,” but also
repeatedly mentions his “limp” or “lameness” (Wells 2005, 13-14).
When Pynchon’s Dr. Rao twists himself through the Fourth
Dimension and returns transformed, the mathematical rationale is the
non-commutative transformations effected by Hamiltonian
Quaternions; but he also reappears “with his foot in a tub of
mayonnaise” (AtD 539), suggesting the one-footed lameness Ginzburg
notes in many of those who return from the other world, especially
since mayonnaise shortly afterwards nearly becomes the instrument of
Kit’s death (AtD 547). Like Plattner, Rao has undertaken a
transformative voyage into a world beyond the visible, and its
narration has a shape as much magical as mathematical.

Ouspensky: ‘the Eternal Now’

Peter Demianovich Ouspensky inherited an interest in the

mathematics of higher dimensions from his father, and discovered
occult philosophy in the literature of Theosophy, combining both in
The Fourth Dimension. Pynchon has Russian refugees arriving in
Göttingen in 1906 anachronistically clutching copies of this book,
which was not actually published until November 1909 (Henderson
246-47). In 1911’s Tertium Organum Ouspensky offers the reader a
glimpse of four-dimensional reality, compared to which the three-
dimensional world is unreal: “Imagine a consciousness not limited by
the conditions of sense perception. Such a consciousness can rise
above the plane on which we move; it will be able to see the past and
the future lying side by side and existing simultaneously” (28).
Ouspensky, like Zangwill, uses the word “simultaneously” in a kind
of extratemporal or hypertemporal sense. His language re-introduces
time even as he tries to banish it: the extratemporal point of view is
revealed as existing in or requiring hypertime.
Ouspensky is aware of this complication, and indeed gives a lucid
exposition of the hypertime argument:

Attempts have been made before to link the idea of the fourth dimension with
the idea of time. But in all the theories which attempted to link the idea of
time with the fourth dimension there was always the implication of some kind
of space in time and some sort of motion in that space. It is evident that those
72 Simon de Bourcier

who built these theories did not understand that, by retaining the possibility of
motion, they put forward demands for a new time, for no motion can take
place without time. As a result time moves in front of us, like our own
shadow, receding as we approach. (31)

Ouspensky counters this abyss of infinite regress—rhetorically if not

logically—by introducing, in place of ever-higher orders of
hypertime, one higher order of stasis, embodied in the word
“eternity”: “[W]e shall not be able to understand the fourth dimension
so long as we do not understand the fifth dimension. […] [I]n reality
eternity is not an infinite extension of time but a line perpendicular to
time; for if eternity exists, each moment is eternal” (32). The strength
of this argument is that the fifth dimension does not need to
accommodate change, merely to persist. The persistence of the past is
fruitful for narrative, allowing Wells’s Time Traveller to return and
tell his tale, effectively re-animating his long-dead friends. Imposing
stasis on the future, however, is problematic, not least because it
seems to abolish free will. (In this respect one can consider it as a
special case of the four-dimensional universe, and the rest of this
discussion considers Ouspensky as an advocate of the Fourth
Dimension.) Ouspensky addresses the issue of free will directly,
recognizing that there are “two main theories” about the future: the
“predestined future” and the “free future” (29). He seeks to transcend
this dichotomy by suggesting that the future is “predestined
conditionally” (30). Surprisingly, he claims that “[t]he past and the
future are equally undetermined” (31). This will be worth hanging on
to when it comes to considering how Pynchon’s fiction engages with
different accounts of the Fourth Dimension. “In the past,” writes
Ouspensky, “in what is behind us, lies not only what was, but also
what could have been. In the same way, in the future lies not only
what will be but also all that may be” (31). In his fiction, Pynchon
depicts aspects of that greater past, episodes of what could have been.
Fiction also sometimes expands the present to include more than just
what is. As Pynchon writes himself about Against the Day: “Maybe
it’s not the world, but with a minor adjustment or two it’s what the
world might be” (“Blurb”).
With various caveats and complications, then, Ouspensky states
that “time is the fourth dimension of space” (33). To describe the
universe in which past, present and future all co-exist, which Hinton
calls a “stupendous whole” (Speculations 16), Ouspensky’s term,
Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day 73

borrowed from Hindu philosophy, is the “Eternal Now” (Ouspensky

29). This phrase—recalling Zangwill’s “eternal Present”—warrants
some further consideration. The word now is deictic. That is, it
belongs to a class of words, which also includes personal and
demonstrative pronouns, whose referents vary depending on where,
by whom, and (crucially, in the case of now) when they are uttered.
They thus have the effect, in written texts, of implying and locating a
subject position from which the text represents itself as being uttered.
Ouspensky’s “Now” invokes a privileged, even godlike point of view,
and illustrates how intimately the articulation of time is tied up with
subjectivity. Kant even goes so far as to say that “if the subject, or
even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be
removed, the whole constitution and all the relation of objects in space
and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish” (82). It is
precisely Ouspensky’s project to transcend time and space, and in
developing it he draws on the language of Theosophy, for example the
term Linga Sharira, which originates in Hindu philosophy and is
another term for the Time Traveller’s “Four-dimensioned being” of
which our three-dimensional bodies are cross-sections (Wells 2005,
5). Ouspensky explains that “if we try to form a mental picture of a
man—stretched out in time, as it were—from birth to death, with all
the details and features of childhood, maturity and old age, this will be
Linga Sharira” (38). Such an image is familiar from Kurt Vonnegut’s
novel Slaughterhouse 5 in which the Tralfamadorians see humans as
millipede-like beings “with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s
legs at the other” (Vonnegut 63). One might also see a version of it in
Deuce Kindred’s vision of the departing Sloat Fresno as “a creature of
dust miles long” (AtD 272).
In stark contrast to Bergson, discussed below, Ouspensky asserts
that language is “unadapted to a spatial expression of time concepts”
(98). He must indeed resort to the temporal term “simultaneously” to
describe the co-existence of past, present and future. Nevertheless, it
is also arguable that the expression “Fourth Dimension”
communicates a powerful idea despite, or even because of, the
impossibility of visualizing such a thing. It is comparable to octarine,
the eighth color invented by Terry Pratchett in The Colour of Magic:
we can grasp the logic of the simple increment of one beyond the
usual number of dimensions or colors, and this communicates the idea
of something which is simultaneously a possible concept and an
74 Simon de Bourcier

impossible image, even if we are left looking at the Buddha’s pointing

finger rather than at the moon.
Ouspensky and Bergson both interpret, or misinterpret, relativistic
space-time as a denial of time. Ouspensky cites approvingly this gloss
of Minkowski by N. A. Oumoff: “In the universe all is given: for
there is no past or future, it is—the eternal present; it has no limits
either in space or in time. Changes take place in individualities and
correspond to their displacement along the world ways in the four-
dimensional, eternal and boundless manifold” (105; italics
Ouspensky’s). Pynchon’s Yashmeen doubts whether Minkowski
would recognize Ouspensky’s Fourth Dimension (AtD 616), but
Ouspensky finds in Minkowski’s theory confirmation of his own
vision of timeless eternity: “We must admit that the past, the present
and the future do not differ from one another in any way, that the only
thing that exists is the present—the Eternal Now of Indian philosophy
(29). This vision of the “Eternal Now” is for Ouspensky inseparable
from his understanding of the Fourth Dimension:

From the point of view of eternity time in no way differs from the other lines
and extensions of space—length, breadth, and height. This means that just as
space contains things we do not see or, to put it differently, more things exist
than those we see, so in time ‘events’ exist before our consciousness comes
into contact with them, and they still exist after our consciousness has
withdrawn from them. Consequently, extension in time is extension into an
unknown space and, therefore, time is the fourth dimension of space. (33)

Yashmeen and Kit agree that to believe one can see “future, past, and
present […] all together,” as if from “outside,” is “to interpret the
fourth dimension as Time” (AtD 617). Ouspensky’s “point of view of
eternity” will be met again as Henri Bergson’s “position outside of
time which flows and endures” (Duration 112), but for Bergson such
a position means detachment from the real nature of time, rather than
a privileged point of view from which to apprehend it.

Bergson and Minkowksi

The conception of time as the Fourth Dimension tends to lead to the

conclusion that time is illusory. Yet since Henri Bergson is committed
to the reality of time, he responds to the incompatibility of the
“stupendous whole” with time by denying that time is the Fourth
Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day 75

Dimension. He argues that any “spatialization of time […] fails to

capture time’s true essence” (Duration vi). Bergson provides a way of
approaching the final version of the Fourth Dimension, Minkowski
and Einstein’s space-time continuum. Pynchon’s Yashmeen explains
that “‘Dr. Minkowski suggests a continuum among three dimensions
of space and one of time’” (AtD 602). Since in this model the
temporal axis of one observer is not necessarily parallel to that of
another observer, it is not strictly true to say that time is the Fourth
Dimension. For different observers, in different frames of reference,
space and time may be distributed differently among the four axes of
the continuum.
Bergson criticized the unconscious substitution of “a fourth
dimension of space” for time as early as 1889 (Time 109), and in 1922
stated many of the same arguments again in his critique of
Minkowski’s explicitly four-dimensional model of time and space.
Bergson insists on the inadequacy of any description of time as the
Fourth Dimension, which he argues has “always been implicit in our
science and language” (Duration 103). He grants the Minkowski
model mathematical validity, but criticizes it as a species of a wider
genus of spatializations of time (Duration 103), which always fail to
capture the essence of time. In particular, they do not express the
uniqueness of the present. Relativity and Minkowskian space-time, in
fact, specifically challenge the idea of a single objective present, and
this Bergson cannot accept (Duration 114-15).
In Bergson’s view Minkowski, by spatializing time, abolishes time.
He argues that “mathematical time”—time that can be measured—is
indeed “an additional dimension of space” (Duration 105). This view
of time, which “dates from Plato, who held time to be a mere
deprivation of eternity,” responds to a need which human
understanding has “to extract certain unchanging relations from the
changing flux of things” (Duration 111-12). A spatial view of time,
however, by “taking up a position outside of time which flows and
endures” will always “eliminate something, even what is essential, in
replacing the singly passing states of the universe by a block universe
posited once and for all” (Duration 112).
I have argued that Pynchon explores the Victorian, pre-relativistic
universe of four dimensions in Dr. Zoot’s machine. The Minkowskian
space-time continuum is represented by means of a different piece of
fantastic technology. The lecture given by Minkowski at Candlebrow
76 Simon de Bourcier

is evidently a version of the September 1908 lecture in which he first

set out his theory (Minkowski 73-91). This is clear from the
conversation between Merle and Roswell after the lecture:

After everybody else had left the hall, Roswell and Merle sat looking at the
blackboard Minkowski had used.
“Three times ten to the fifth kilometers,” Roswell read, “equals the square
root of minus one seconds. That’s if you want that other expression over there
to be symmetrical in all four directions.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Merle protested, “that’s what he said, I’ve got
no idea what it means.”
“Well, it looks like we’ve got us a very large, say, astronomical distance
there, set equal to an imaginary unit of time. I think he called the equation
‘pregnant.’”
“Jake with me. He also said ‘mystic.’” (AtD 458)

The section of Minkowski’s lecture they are referring to appears in its

published translation thus: “[…] the essence of this postulate may be
clothed mathematically in a very pregnant manner in the mystic
formula 3.105 km = −1 secs” (Minkowski 88). Roswell leaves the
hall determined to “translate” Minkowki’s ideas into “hardware” (AtD
459). Pynchon thus implies that the lecture inspires Merle and
Roswell to build the Integroscope, which allows people in
photographs to be viewed following their lives on into the future, and
which enables Lew Basnight to achieve some kind of limited
redemption, but only when set in the way that sends people in
photographs along “different tracks…other possibilities…” (AtD
1060).

Philosophical Questions, Narrative Possibilities…

This discussion has touched upon some far-reaching philosophical

questions about time, the most important one concerning two opposed
ways of describing time. One says that only the present is real; the
past has ceased to exist and the future does not yet exist. Steven Savitt
calls this “presentism” (Savitt 2.1). It can be traced back at least as far
as Heraclitus, and Bergson is its champion in the period I am
discussing. An alternative is the model Bergson calls the “block
universe” (Duration 112), which is associated with the Eleatic
philosopher Parmenides. In this view, which Savitt terms
Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day 77

“eternalism,” past and future exist just as surely as the present, and
only our limited consciousness prevents us from perceiving them
(Savitt 2.1). The idea that time is the Fourth Dimension is, I have
suggested, difficult to separate from the “block universe” model.
The block universe presents a number of difficulties: it seems to
exclude free will; it is difficult to describe in the tensed verbs of
natural language; and it requires an additional time dimension to
accommodate the movement of consciousness through the timeless
universe. In fact, attempts to banish time arguably reintroduce not just
one higher order of time, or hypertime, but an infinite regress of
hypertimes. This I have been calling “the hypertime argument.” Both
conduits through which time insinuates itself into the timeless block
universe—tensed language and hypertime—can be thought of as
issues of point of view. They arise if we try to describe or visualize
the universe and its extension in time from a point of view that is itself
timeless. The idea of an “Eternal Now” or “Eternal Present,” for
example, invokes both a point of view and time.
Minkowski’s four-dimensional space-time is for Ouspensky a
version of the block universe or “Eternal Now.” However, it is
precisely in relativity’s rejection of a single, absolute “Now” that the
Minkowski-Einstein model distinguishes itself from the static,
Parmenidean universe. Miliþ ýapek persuasively argues that the
“elimination of time” is—as Bergson claims—implicit in the classical
picture of space, time and causality (139), but that it is a wrong to
interpret the Minkowski-Einstein model as a spatialization of time
(164-68). Part of this tradition of spatializing time, and thereby
implicitly abolishing it (ýapek 161-62), is Pierre-Simon Laplace’s
classic statement of determinism:

An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and
the position of all things of which the world consists—supposing the said
intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis—would embrace
in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and
those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future,
like the past would be present to its eyes. (qtd. in ýapek 122)

The point of view Laplace adopts is recognizable as Ouspensky’s

“point of view of eternity” (Ouspensky 33) or Bergson’s “position
outside of time which flows and endures” (Duration 112). Laplace’s
wholly determined universe is equivalent to Hinton’s “stupendous
78 Simon de Bourcier

whole” or Ouspensky’s “Eternal Now.” ýapek points out that

relativity undermines Laplace’s model because by relativizing
simultaneity it necessarily disallows Laplace’s “given instant” (216).
The contradictions inherent in the block universe make it rich in
narrative possibility. In The Time Machine, the picture of time laid out
as if it were space, in some senses a denial of time, is reinvigorated by
a new time dimension, or hypertime. The subjective temporality of the
Time Traveller is detached from that of the world at large. When he
returns to the nineteenth century, his narrative is still advancing, but
time, for the rest of the world, effectively runs backwards. His long-
dead friends return to life. The persistence of the past gives the block
universe its uncanny narrative potential.
When travel in the Fourth Dimension manifests itself in narratives
recognizable as Ginzburg’s “journey into the realm of the dead” (242),
it becomes apparent that that mythic journey always involves an
implicit spatialization of time. The journey into the world of the dead
is for most of us a one-way trip. What enables the return journey, with
its reversal of time, is the very fact of making death into a place. From
this it becomes clear that the type of time-travel described in The Time
Machine depends very specifically on conceiving time as “a kind of
space” (Wells 2005, 5). The return makes the narration of the journey
within the framing narrative possible, and makes it recognizable as an
underworld myth. Without the return, travel into the future is
equivalent not to the abolition of time or its spatialization, but to the
subjective suspension of its passage which forms the basis of “Rip van
Winkle” or Planet of the Apes.
Ginzburg argues that the story of the journey into the netherworld
persists because it speaks of the engagement with the absent that is at
the heart of all narrative: “To narrate means to speak here and now
with an authority that derives from having been (literally or
metaphorically) there and then” (307). Against the Day celebrates the
multiple nows of the relativistic space-time continuum, rather than
confining itself to the “there and then” accessible via the pre-
relativistic Fourth Dimension. Molly Hite argues that in Gravity’s
Rainbow Pynchon rejects the spatialization of time implicit in an
“outside” perspective on history in favor of a plurality of present-tense
narrators (Hite 100-41). In Against the Day he situates these
competing perspectives in a new historical context, the shift from the
Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day 79

Fourth Dimension of Hinton, Wells and Ouspensky, to Einstein and

Minkowski’s four-dimensional space-time continuum.

Simon de Bourcier, University of East Anglia

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 “Perchance to Dream”: Clock Time and Creative
Resistance Against the Day

Inger H. Dalsgaard

Abstract: Like a number of his earlier novels and short stories, Thomas Pynchon's
Against the Day (2006) displays a concern for the ways in which mechanisms of
standardization, dominance and destruction appear woven into the very fabric of
existence, and it is sensitive towards the endurance and potentials of alternatives to
and exceptions from such machinery. Using as its point of departure Pynchon’s 1993
contribution (on sloth) to the New York Times Book Review series on the seven deadly
sins, this chapter explores some of the ways in which time in Against the Day
becomes a locus of control and resistance. Whereas sloth once constituted a sin
against God, within a United States modernizing to the tune of figures such as
Franklin and Hamilton it took on secular form as a sin against time—or at any rate
against the time that became ever more identified with clocks and equated to money:
an integral element of a mechanized industrial capitalist order. Against the Day takes
up tropes in which sloth is associated with imagination and creativity, with dreams,
death and ghosts, in the process adumbrating other states of existence that stand at
odds with or apart from dominant temporalities. Set in the very era during which the
commodification of standardized time was proceeding apace, the novel offsets this
process against the simultaneous elaboration—within literature, philosophy, mass
media, psychoanalysis and the natural sciences—of speculations concerning other
(dis)orders of time. Drawing on the musical figure of rubato, in which a standard
tempo is subject to expressive disregard, this chapter shows how Against the Day
explores these alternative ideas of time. By way of the suspension, distortion, reversal,
even neutralization of time, it argues, individuals and groups, fantastic contraptions
and anachronistic events in the novel articulate imaginative forms of resistance to life
lived by clockwork. In the process, they also enact Pynchon’s critique of an industrial
capitalism bent on colonizing and subordinating not simply the material world but
also the very fabric of space and time. Ultimately, however, the extent to which the
novel’s scoring for a rubato of the mind extends to its orchestration of a more public,
political counterpoint in time is left suspended in Against the Day’s chronometric air.

The very first word in the title of Against the Day is a preposition of
direction, one that allows for many of those ideas of resistance or
turning, even reversal, which we frequently detect in Thomas
82 Inger H. Dalsgaard

Pynchon’s texts. In this case, because against premodifies day the title
reads like a bold statement about time travel, especially the kind that
goes against the clock-wise, usually irreversible, forward movement
of days and takes us into the past. Against the Day does not, on the
surface of things, announce anything about going forward into that
good night, or moving towards the light of a new day; it has us facing
the other way from the very start. However, though the book is about
the direction of time, it is also, when you come to the end of the text
and look back towards its beginning, about spiritual direction—the
two very last words of the book being, after all, “toward grace” (AtD
1085).
This essay compares Pynchon’s discussion of time and its
changing association with different realms of mind and spirit as it
appears in Against the Day and in an earlier piece of writing, “Nearer,
My Couch, to Thee,” in which Pynchon associates the manipulation of
time with changing levels of spiritual distress or anesthetization in the
USA. Furthermore, this essay explains how the ideas of time travel
and dream-time present in Pynchon’s 2006 novel were already being
rehearsed in his 1993 article. In it, he initially identifies a medieval
loss of spiritual direction, acedia, which also opens up avenues of
what I would term creative or resistant “time travel.” This is found
either in the shape of ghosts, who travel against the direction of time
from the past to the present (be they the old King in Hamlet or Webb
Traverse in Against the Day) or in the form of daydreams (like those
of Melville’s life-denying Bartleby) which challenge the productive
but dispiriting use of time for which Benjamin Franklin—and the
USA which he helped found—came to stand according to Pynchon’s
article. This essay shows how Pynchon’s writing exposes and
challenges not only a dominant world view of time as linear and
always forward-moving but also bolsters earlier critiques of the
orthogonal and capitalist perception of time as a resource to be
controlled and exploited. Those characters who dream and loaf or seek
to get out of the cycle of life are in essence time-travelers accessing
different ways in which to resist the tyranny of time-management and
mind-control. Against the Day, as I shall go on to show, develops and
adds to the variety of forms and methods of time travel of earlier
Pynchon texts also in more traditionally recognizable ways. Examples
of both science fiction modes of mechanical time travel as well as
scientific concepts of temporal changes, which align themselves with
Clock Time and Creative Resistance in Against the Day 83

quantum mechanics as much as with mathematics, will be given.

Against the Day, I proceed to argue, adds spiritual forms of time travel
to the technologies and theories of time travel found in science fiction
and hard science alike. Alternate routes through time were being
discovered in new fields of inquiry contemporary to the time-setting
of the novel at the turn of the century, such as dream interpretation
and early psychoanalysis as well as spiritualism. These fields, for
which professional recognition was sought at the time, let the chaotic
time-scape of daydreams and ghosts’ worlds contend with linear and
orthogonal time as they had done earlier but now through the rhetoric
of science. Finally, this essay returns also to the idea of time as
exploitable resource and the ghost in the machine which Pynchon’s
renewed focus on the technical side to the medium of film in Against
the Day invokes. It describes actual experiments with time and
moving images performed at the turn of the century by pioneering
camera auteurs, who resurrected their subjects and reversed the
progression from life to death in the mind of the beholder. It links
these with the revolutionizing stance taken by Bounce and Rideout
against clock-time in living pictures—developed from DREAMTIME
MOVY to the time-transcendent technology of the Integroscope in
Against the Day—and with Pynchon’s 1993 speculation about video
technology as a vehicle for creative resistance to the capitalist
colonization of time perpetrated on couch potatoes by the dream
factories of the film industry. The essay finishes by returning to the
final question of time and spiritual direction which Pynchon’s last
time-out with the Chums of Chance poses to the reader.
Direction, spiritual as well as temporal, has been a subject in
earlier Pynchon texts. In 1993, The New York Times Book Review
published his contribution on sloth to a series on the seven deadly
sins. Its title, “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee,” announces that a key
point in Pynchon’s investigation is the way in which proximity to God
has been replaced by a more comfortable location. Thomas Aquinas,
to whose classical discussion he refers, defined sloth or “acedia” as a
turning away from God and his world—the creation of which was an
expression of “God’s good intentions” or grace—and a “loss of
spiritual determination” (“Nearer” 57, 3). Today, Pynchon suggests,
acedia manifests itself where dedicated couch potatoes idle aimlessly
in front of the Tube,
84 Inger H. Dalsgaard

where we might feed, uncritically, committing the six other deadly sins in
parallel, eating too much, envying the celebrated, coveting merchandize,
lusting after images, angry at the news, perversely proud of whatever distance
we may enjoy between our couches and what appears on the screen. (“Nearer”
57)

But the circumstances and results of sloth are not quite so

uncomplicatedly negative as this image of godless passivity at first
implies. Aquinas’ medieval acedia, Pynchon argues, translates into
more than just sorrow and apathy. It is also expressed as a restlessness
of the mind. Writers in particular find creative outlets for this
imperfectly contained imaginative energy.1 Acedia takes the forms of
curiosity and mental travelling—during episodes of which “writers are
known to do good work, sometimes even their best, solving formal
problems, getting advice from Beyond, having hypnagogic adventures
that with luck can be recovered later on” (“Nearer” 3). The source of
fiction could, in other words, be found in our access to spirits, to
ghosts, or to our own ability to (day)dream. In Against the Day ghosts
and dreams continue an earlier Pynchonian strategy of challenging
conceptions and perceptions of time directly. Narrative loops,
sidetracks and excursions ambush the sense of linear progression of
plot and thwart attempts at a straightforward reading. Likewise,
haunting and dreaming ambush a linear progression of time. They
represent communication across traditional boundaries and are a kind
of narrative time travel in their own right.
“Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” argues that the saving grace of
submitting to sloth is the fact that works of fiction may emerge from
the idle day-dreaming it encourages. Sloth might thus be the cause of
a good story being written, or it might be the very topic of such a
story. As a topic for early European literature, sloth “had a few big
successes, notably Hamlet (Pynchon, “Nearer” 3). Hamlet is a
veritable Prince of Sloth. His father’s ghost haunts him with requests
for agency and, as does Auberon Halfcourt, he considers “self-
slaughter” (AtD 760) because “not to be” (III.1 56)—simply to stop
existing—should obviate getting involved at all. Suicide is the most
decisive turning away from the world, but Hamlet speculates that
there might be a problematic acedic component to this most slothful
action: “To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s
the rub” (III.1 64-65). Acedia implies apathy, sorrow and a desire for
the “quietus” of death, but Aquinas’s definition also includes spiritual
Clock Time and Creative Resistance in Against the Day 85

restlessness. Indeed, Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide rehearses the fear

that the ungovernable, creative space of dreaming is not ruled out by
death: “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come [...] Must
give us pause” (III.1 66-68). Nor is a continued existence after life
ruled out. The apparition which appears in the first act suggests to
Hamlet that there is a possibility of a parallel ghost world and that
those who have passed away also have the ability to cross back over
the river of time—not to be and yet to be. The nature of the afterlife is
a point to consider when your father has returned from death to haunt
you.
The old king demands filial vengeance, claiming that Hamlet is
bound to hear his complaint and “to revenge, when thou shalt hear,”
which draws from Hamlet only what could pass for an incredulous
Pynchonian response: “What?” (I.V 7-9) In Against the Day, however,
the father Webb Traverse turns out to be the kind of ghost unable to
haunt his son Frank “real intensely” (AtD 316), and who instead
reassures the other ghosts that his son will do the right thing—when
the moment comes. A question which remains open through most of
Pynchon’s American tragedy is which of Webb’s several sons, if any
at all, will eventually take up arms against the slings and arrows of
“outrageous fortune”—a term invested with new meaning by plutocrat
Scarsdale Vibe, who seems the ultimate agent behind Webb’s
execution at the hands of Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno. The ghost
in Hamlet asks his son to “lend thy serious hearing” (I.5. 5) to his
grievance and request for vengeance and leaves the boy dithering—
tied in existential knots over fate and duty—for the next four acts. In
Against the Day Frank is too pragmatic to be stuck in that rut, but also
too determined to pay real attention to Webb’s directions. Later, Reef
and Kit summon Webb at a séance, wanting to hear him insist “with
the omnidirectional confidence of the dead, that seeing Scarsdale Vibe
had hired his killers, the least the brothers could do at this point was to
go find him and ventilate the son of a bitch” (AtD 673). Instead,
Webb’s spectral soul-searching leaves Reef “oddly unsure of
himself,” of his own mission, his choices and his identity: “‘I don’t
even know who I fuckin am anymore’” (AtD 673). Avenging the
death of a father might be a straightforward call to action, but his
ghost and the uncertainty it creates about the nature of death itself
cause sons to lose their way in existential quandaries and sloth.
86 Inger H. Dalsgaard

Pynchon’s texts play with different types of direction (and the lack
or perversion thereof), be they temporal, spatial, existential or
spiritual. In “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” he argues that a particular
transformation of sloth took place when capitalism redirected man’s
focus from the spiritual towards the material. Sloth evolved in a
secular direction when encountering the United States of America at a
time when the early republic was “consolidating itself as a Christian
capitalist state” (Pynchon, “Nearer” 3). This meant that “Sloth was no
longer so much a sin against God or spiritual good as against a
particular sort of time, uniform, one-way, in general not reversible—
that is, against clock time” (“Nearer” 3). The pursuit of faith was
being replaced by the pursuit of happiness in the form of money, with
which time had an ever clearer exchange rate of which writers are
presumed to be particularly aware (“Nearer” 3). The early eighteenth-
century Hamiltonian idea of industry—the “American System” which
combined domestic manufacture and internal improvement—needed
“first-generation factory workers” to be regulated (Luxon 259;
Gutman 21). For the factory system to work, it was necessary to teach
potential workers of an industrializing nation to recognize and obey
the same time frame. Only thus could factory owners count on
workers getting up in the morning and reporting at the factory door at
the same time every day. Humans were being standardized along with
time itself. From the mid-nineteenth century on, the growing network
of railways and the need to run efficient supply lines for industrial
production and consumption also fuelled a movement towards
standardized time, which succeeded in systematizing the arbitrary or
subjective measures of time existing in the USA up to 1883
(Trachtenberg 59-60; Stephens 17-20).
Clock time was not docilely accepted by the intelligentsia.
Bergson’s durée, gravitational time dilation in Einstein’s general
theory of relativity, and temporal experiments in modernist literature
offered resistance to uniform concepts of time. Today we rarely
question the mechanical regulation of time, but the text of Gravity’s
Rainbow reminds us that time is “an artificial resource to begin with”
(GR 412), which can be constructed and manipulated by the System
demanding “that ‘productivity’ and ‘earnings’ keep on increasing with
time” (GR 412). The System lays waste to the rest of the world by
removing “vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate
fraction showing a profit,” due to which “sooner or later [the System]
Clock Time and Creative Resistance in Against the Day 87

must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more
than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls
all along the chain of life” (GR 412). These lines suggest that the
economic necessity installed in our consciousnesses along with clock
time will lead to a system crash, the one also described as having
happened in the future by Mr. Ace in Against the Day, and which has
Trespassers returning to the past looking for old new energy sources
to tap into and, presumably, suck dry (AtD 415-17).
In “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” Benjamin Franklin is an agent of
that all-devouring System, and “Poor Richard” is an early
spokesperson for this sense of time and the demand for productivity.
Sloth had been a capital sin in the spirituality of the Middle Ages, but
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became a capitalist sin.
Time is money, and time not used to create wealth therefore has to be
tithed back. Sloth—or work-shyness—simply piles up a budget deficit
which will have to be recouped eventually. Franklin, Pynchon claims,
saw non-fiction as the model for productive life implying that
American society could afford no time for “speculations, dreams,
fantasies, fiction” (“Nearer” 57). Nonetheless, some writers, of which
Melville’s Bartleby is one, steal time from the capitalist project in
order to daydream. In the passive sorrow of Melville’s scrivener we
see active resistance, a civil disobedience “right in the middle of
robberbaron capitalism” (Pynchon, “Nearer” 3) directed against the
logic of trading one’s time and energy for “a few miserable years of
broken gleanings” (AtD 1000). A more extreme mode of sloth as
resistance to “outrageous fortune” is death in the form of suicide.
Anarchist bombings actively intend to destroy the railroad or deprive
mine owners of their lives, or at least their property (AtD 84-85).
Some Hereros in Gravity’s Rainbow turn away from life, and their
deaths, intended to deprive colonizers in Südwest of “laborers for the
construction or the mining” (GR 317), turn their dying into civil
disobedience. Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” (Melville 80) and
Hamlet’s “not to be” (III.1 56) are literary expressions of the
relationship between existential sloth and the end of life. Hamlet
eventually chooses an activist strategy to end the rotten system around
him, leaving behind him a wake of death almost worthy of an
anarchist suicide bomber. Bartleby’s resistance to the systems he is in,
and to necessity itself, consists instead of his turning away from life.
88 Inger H. Dalsgaard

Pynchon’s texts expose the oppressive systems of capitalism,

colonization or standardization, though rarely as the orthogonal or
unambiguous systems they pretend to be. Alongside them are several
possible models of resistance—other than bombing and suicide—to
the terminal commitment of the capitalist system to productivity and
regulated daytime “where every second was of equal length and
irrevocable” (Pynchon, “Nearer” 3). We may ask what can be placed
against the idea of time which had come to rule “Poor Richard’s day”
so that “not much in the course of its flow could be called non-linear”
(Pynchon, “Nearer” 3). Against that day, I would argue, Pynchon’s
text places alternative, irregular ideas of time. Ghosts and (other) time
travellers freely cross the River of Time and the finality of death in
Against the Day, thereby enacting the kind of resistance to (but not
complete disruption of the fabric of) linear time which Pynchon calls
the rubato of the day in “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee.” In musical
terms, rubato means an “expressive disregard of tempo,” but this
resistance to the “stern pulse beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving” is
merely a localized and limited phenomenon (Pynchon, “Nearer” 3).
Rubato is a temporary departure from the metronomical but does not
usually alter the overall pace of a piece of music. Time, according to
(quaternion) weapons dealer Viktor Mulciber, is the “one force no one
knows how to defeat, resist, or reverse,” and the only escape from its
“merciless clock-beat” according to quaternioneer Dr. V. Ganesh Rao
is “into the pulselessness of salvation” (AtD 558). Yet there are many
ways in which characters in Against the Day resist the one-way time
vector towards surrender and death. Time, and ageing or dying with it,
is suspended or reversed to some extent, for example by the Chums of
Chance, the Dynamite Lazarus, the Trespassers, ghosts, and time
travellers at the First International Conference on Time Travel.
Time travel takes place by at least three different means: memory,
science and technology. Of the several types of time travel presented
in Against the Day, some are more traditional and direct than others.
At one end of the scale of material presence we have Dr. Zoot’s pre-
owned time machine in New York (AtD 402) and the wealth of “failed
time machines—Chronoclipses, Asimov Transeculars, Tempomorph
Q-98s” at the municipal junkyard outside Candlebrow, all destroyed
by “misrouted energy” and the terrible “Flow” in the “River of Time”
(AtD 409-10). At least some forms of physical time travel must have
succeeded because participants at the Candlebrow Conferences keep
Clock Time and Creative Resistance in Against the Day 89

returning from the future (AtD 415). Niels Bohr is present at the
Conference in 1895, at which point in chronological clock time he
would have been about ten years of age, unless he travelled back in
time as an adult. Participants appear not just to travel across the river
of time but to bilocate to Candlebrow insofar as time travel is almost
always also space travel: after all, bilocation is also defined as a
“‘Translation of the body, sort of lateral resurrection, if you like’”
(AtD 431). The conference participants are both inside and outside the
linear progression of time in the sense that they may have died but are
never seen to age as the conferences converge “to a form of Eternal
Return” (AtD 409). This sounds much like the definition of a ghost—
such as Ryder Thorn whose Trespasser status is downgraded from
time traveller to eternally returning ghost (AtD 555)—but these “were
solid bodily returns, mind you, nothing figurative or plasmic about
them” (AtD 410). This is not a case of haunting but of resurrection
inside the “precinct of the enchanted campus” (AtD 410). However,
like the rubato, this time and space travel is also only a localized and
limited disruption of the laws of time and space. It is bounded by the
perimeter of Candlebrow University and by the time at which the
conferences take place.
The fourth dimension offers another, scientific option for time
travel.2 Vector and quaternion theories dominate the text, and
especially the latter seems to promise the possibility of reversing
directions along vectors and to open up the realm of the imaginary.
Mathematics and physics are not just scientific expressions of what is
often seen as a clockwork realm. They also seem to provide a space
for creativity and daydreaming. Ever since Edison’s clever media spin
on behalf of innovation, popular imagination often has it that
paradigm shifts can be brought on by dreams. Accordingly, Kit
receives “one of those mathematicians’ dreams that surface now and
then in the folklore” (AtD 566). Science also inspires practical ideas
for alternative modes of time travel. At Candlebrow, Merle Rideout
and Roswell Bounce pick up the idea of Minkowskian space-time and
think of ways to rearrange space to alter the “one-way vector ‘time’”
(AtD 457). They ponder the effect gravity has on time—as did
Einstein in 1916—but also the effect time has on gravity: ideas which
eventually lead them to develop their Integroscope. Theorists who
paved the way for general relativity, such as Riemann, appear along
with the fathers of quantum mechanics. The uncertainty principle is
90 Inger H. Dalsgaard

demonstrated just like the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat,

which is accidentally practiced by Luca Zombini. In his Cabinet of
Mystery, La Doppiatrice, subjects are twinned by being “slightly
displaced in time” (AtD 350-55, 571). Furthermore, it is not just the
Chums of Chance who engage with the “Mysteries of Time” (AtD
427-28, 454): when Yashmeen thinks of Ramanujan’s Formula or the
ζ-function she “was released into her past, haunting her old self” (AtD
816). Life is usually lived forwards and comprehended backwards, to
paraphrase Hamlet’s equally existentially challenged compatriot,
Søren Kierkegaard. Yashmeen gets a chance to turn that aphorism
around while Frank thinks he is haunting his own present (AtD 461).
In addition to ghost worlds parallel to (and trespassing into) the
real world, there is also the translation of the “architecture of dream,
of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude”
(AtD 250), provided by the paramorphoscope and its makers, which
“reveals worlds which are set to the side of the one we have taken,
until now, to be the only world given us” (AtD 249). This kind of
reference, along with the more direct mentioning of “multiple worlds”
and space time as “tracks of departure to all manner of alternate
Histories” (AtD 682), indicates that quantum mechanics plays a role in
understanding bilocation in the text. Quantum mechanics is not just
the Copenhagen Interpretation, which Bohr first presented in 1927 and
which has come to include theories of uncertainty, complementarity
and the theory that observers disturb the systems they observe
(Gribbin 121). In the 1970s, DeWitt’s and Graham’s theories in
philosophy of science, which suggested that our perceived world is
but one among multiple possible worlds, were added to the
Copenhagen Interpretation’s legacy. Out of quantum equations Bohr
“conjures [...] ghost realities, ghost worlds that only exist when we are
not looking at them” (Gribbin 176). Bohr’s complementarity,
Schrödinger’s cat paradox and the Multiple Worlds theories (each of
them a comment on the idea of bilocation in its own way) technically
emerged outside the indicative time frame for the plotline of Against
the Day, which seems to cover a period from 1893 to 1925 (AtD
1034). However, Pynchon places Bohr at the first time-travel
conference at Candlebrow and thereby handily lets quantum
mechanics in the back door to resonate with the contemporary
discussions of time and space theory he has included.
Clock Time and Creative Resistance in Against the Day 91

This anachronistic inclusion of the philosophical repercussions of

subatomic physics is an example of how Pynchon’s setting of Against
the Day around the turn of the century situates it in a time in
intellectual history where multiple branches of theory were also
challenging the concept of clock time in different ways. Temporary
subversion of clock time was not just implied in the new theories
within physics, but also in contemporary psychology where the
“ungovernable warp of dreams” to which Pynchon also referred in
“Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” (57) suggested a new concept of
dreamtime. In an 1897 letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud comments on
the “temporal distortions he observed in dreams and fantasies” (Kerns
31), and the period covered by Against the Day increasingly saw a
number of psychologists, sociologists and philosophers “observe
modifications of the continuity and irreversibility of time in dreams
and psychoses and in religion and magic” (Kerns 31). In the realm of
the mind, imagination, or consciousness, the steady rate of established
clock time was now being challenged by those who studied it and
tried to describe it. In The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918
Stephen Kerns writes of the way in which artists and intellectuals
began to envision “times that reversed themselves, moved at irregular
rhythms, and even came to a dead stop. In the fin de siècle, time’s
arrow did not always fly straight and true” (29). The point here is that
the period in which Against the Day mainly takes place saw a
recognition of an irregularity in time, a rubato of the mind, explored
and expressed in psychological realism and modernist texts but
otherwise only imagined to be accessible in dreams, psychosis, or
through haunting.
Finally, the period covered by Against the Day also saw
revolutions in image media, from photographic techniques to moving
pictures.3 An increasing availability of new visual recording and
projection technologies is reflected in the text by the public
proliferation of Kodak’s Brownie camera and of film projection—
from “DREAMTIME MOVY” in Iowa (AtD 450) to ghosts haunting the
silver screens in Venice (AtD 572). In The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's
Rainbow and Vineland, the relation between acts of filming or
watching films to the order of time, to causality and reality, even to
life and death, has been addressed in various ways. In Against the
Day, the workings of the camera itself—which makes a film the
mechanical expression of time—become another area in which
92 Inger H. Dalsgaard

resistance to clock time can be exercised. Bounce considers

timepieces “a sort of acknowledgement of failure, they’re there to
glorify and celebrate one particular sort of time, the tickwise passage
of time in one direction only and no going back” (AtD 456-57), which
is why modeling movie projectors on the same technology as watches
and clocks means the “[o]nly kind of movies we’d ever get to see on a
machine like that’d be clock movies, elapsing from the beginning of
the reel to the end, one frame at a time” (AtD 457). This recognition
starts Roswell Bounce and Merle Rideout on the path toward the
invention of the Integroscope, which embodies “the strange relation
these moving pictures had with Time” (AtD 451).
Very early filmmakers, inventing the craft in the 1890s, had also
experimented with temporal direction and reversibility, just like other
artists who also “envisioned times that reversed themselves, moved at
irregular rhythms, and even came to a dead stop” (Kerns 29). A
French pioneer of cinema, George Méliès had his camera temporarily
jam while filming a street scene one day in 1896 and accidentally
invented a special effect when his finished footage showed an
omnibus apparently turning into a hearse. The technique was also
immediately employed in The Vanishing Lady from the same year,
“where a skeleton suddenly becomes a living woman, implying both a
jump in time and its reversal” (Kerns 30).4 In applying such new
techniques to his cinematographic fictions, Méliès was stretching what
was possible along the time vector both by creating a rubato on
celluloid as well as a bodily resurrection. In Against the Day Roswell
and Merle eventually invent the kind of “living pictures” in which
“the future history of their subjects” (AtD 1049) can unfold from the
“indefinite future [which] had been there in the initial ‘snap’” (AtD
1038). Their technology can also bring the past of those subjects
“back into action...even back to life...” (AtD 1036). Needless to say, in
Pynchon’s universe, they need to protect this time machine from a
“dark criminal enterprise” (AtD 1036) based, logically, in Hollywood.
According to “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” the twentieth-century
advent of film and television in particular has reversed and
commodified the process by which writers struck by sloth and
sleeping produce dreams and fiction. Instead, the couch potato
consumes the products of dream factories, so that now dreams
produce sloth in the dedicated TV viewer. However, the advent of the
VCR and remote control made it possible to resist both the orthogonal
Clock Time and Creative Resistance in Against the Day 93

standardization and the passive acceptance of Sloth which Pynchon

saw born of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the USA
(“Nearer” 57). These new technologies allow the viewer to alter the
tempo and reverse the flow of narrative time: “Television time is no
longer the linear and uniform commodity it once was. Not when you
have instant channel selection, fast-forward, rewind and so forth”
(“Nearer” 57). For Pynchon, the VCR provides a direct, technological
reader response of the kind which the Internet has since
revolutionized: the couch potato has become his own film director.
Typically, perhaps, Pynchon undercuts any conviction that the “non-
linear awareness” attained by channel-surfers and VCR-jockeys
promises salvation after all. VCR technology resists the uni-
directional “clock movies” tubed in, but technology allows only “the
illusion, the effect, of controlling, reversing, slowing, speeding and
repeating time—even imagining that we can escape it” (“Nearer” 57).
Pynchon sticks here to the idea of a rubato, the localized resistance to
the “tickwise passage of time” (AtD 457), which is merely temporary
after all. If there is a hopeful note in Pynchon’s historical reading of
the development of sloth, it is the opportunity to reject new
technologies, such as those of Virtual Reality, and their “idle,
disposable fantasies” which threaten to absorb the last vestiges of our
spiritual awareness, of “faith and miracle,” which sloth at least
implied back in the medieval age when “[b]elief was intense,
engagement deep and fatal” (“Nearer” 57). If there is a preachy note
in here, the question (which could also be asked of Against the Day) is
whether Pynchon is acting the spiritual minister or the Anarchist
preacher; whether it is about the loss of moral and spiritual direction
or about a failure of public will, which is “primarily political”
(“Nearer” 57). “Occasions for choosing good,” Pynchon writes,
“present themselves in public and private for us every day, and we
pass them by” (“Nearer” 57) because of the effort required or the
inconvenience suffered by offering political resistance, moral
sustenance or maybe charity.
The Chums of Chance, whose relation to the normal tempo of
clock-time is somewhat suspended throughout Against the Day,
finally enter a present tense at the very end of the novel. They give up
on eternal youth in order to join the stream of time, get married and
have children, who will also grow up in turn. However, the question
remains whether their airship Inconvenience has its name because the
94 Inger H. Dalsgaard

Chums have resisted sloth and made the effort to provide either a
salvage raft for the temporally displaced or an anarchist haven.
Earlier, Chick had a vision of the inside of a “giant airship of the
future, crowded with resurrected bodies of all ages [...] a throng of
visitors [...] who must somehow be fed, clothed, sheltered” (AtD 413),
and victims of a red scare thought that “there might exist a place of
refuge, up in the fresh air, out over the sea, some place all the
Anarchists could escape to” (AtD 372). In my reading, this chance to
do good, at some expense to one’s own leisure, comfort or sloth, is not
what the Inconvenience finally comes to stand for. The ship may have
“grown as large as a small city” with “neighborhoods,” “parks,” and
also “slum conditions” (AtD 1084), but none of these seem populated.
The airship is a closed family community which stays aloft, striking
outsiders with blindness and members of the crew who return to earth
with “mnemonic frostbite” (AtD 1084). In other words, the
engagement of the kind allegedly valued in “Nearer, My Couch, to
Thee” might be personal and spiritual but certainly not public and
political. And what is the state of spiritual direction on board? The
Inconvenience is no longer on a voyage of pilgrimage in the world
outside. Instead it is “its own destination” (AtD 1085). “Sure, but is it
Sloth” (“Nearer” 57)? The Chums may have turned their ship away
from the world, but not necessarily in sorrow or rejection of the gift of
life. The Inconvenience teems with living souls and is “clamorous as a
nonstop feast day,” and “good unsought and uncompensated” is
“approaching” and “invisible” (AtD 1085). Though it may be unclear
(except to the individual reader’s own mind) exactly who acts as
granting authority, grace is available in the future. However, it is
attained actively—by asking or by flying toward it—rather than by
waiting and hoping.

Inger H. Dalsgaard, University of Aarhus

Notes
1
The couch to which Pynchon’s title refers is one on which day-dreaming can
channel spiritual energy into creative writing or the couch in front of the TV, whose
Clock Time and Creative Resistance in Against the Day 95

program channels threatens to reverse that process. It is not Freud’s therapeutic couch
where the day-dreams, which published creative writers are compelled to share with
us, are exposed as neurotic wish-fulfillment, childish regression or the result of a
“mental situation which once more undoes the contrast between play and reality”
(Freud 144).
2
Simon De Bourcier covers this extensively elsewhere in this collection.
3
See Clément Lévy and Rod Taveira in this collection.
4
In 1895, Louis Lumière’s Charcuterie Méchanique runs film backward: “a mass of
broken glass ascending through space and reforming on a table into a perfect original”
(Kerns 30), Cubism in reverse.

Bibliography
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data
of Consciousness. Trans. F.L. Pogson. 1889. London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1910.
Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special and General Theory. Trans.
Robert W. Lawson. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920.
Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud. Vol. IX. Eds. James Strachey and Anna Freud. 1908.
London: Hogarth Press, 1959.
Gribbin, John. In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and
Reality. 1984. London: Black Swan, 1993.
Gutman, Herbert G. Work, Culture & Society in Industrializing
America. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
Kerns, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962. 3. ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Luxon, Norval Neil. Niles’ Weekly Register: News Magazine of the
Nineteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1947.
Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street.”
Billy Budd, Sailor & Other Stories. Ed. Harold Beaver. 1967.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. 59-99.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. London: Picador, 1975.
96 Inger H. Dalsgaard

—. “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee.” The New York Times Book Review

6 June 1993: 3, 57.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare. Ed. Harold
Jenkins. London: Routledge, 1982.
Stephens, Carlene. “‘The Most Reliable Time’: William Bond, The
New England Railroads, and Time Awareness in 19th Century
America.” Technology and Culture, 30:1 (January 1989): 1-24.
Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture & Society
in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
 “When You Come to a Fork in the Road”—Marcuse,
Intellectual Subversion and Negative Thought in
Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day

Toon Staes

Abstract: In an effort to establish a parallel between the intellectual subversion in

Gravity’s Rainbow and that in Against the Day, this paper will draw on Herbert
Marcuse’s critique of modern technocracy. Starting from the forks in the road, “tracks
of departure to all manner of alternate Histories” (AtDFehler! Textmarke nicht
definiert. 682), I will exemplify how Pynchon goes beyond official, teleological
history in an attempt to restore the flattened one-dimensional man to his full
multidimensional autonomy. Against the Day shares with Gravity’s Rainbow a
skepticism towards the culture of social conformism and passivity installed by the
rationalized use of language and technology. The mediated truth that is imposed in the
public domain through discourse closes all meaning down to the presupposed
meaning. Since the corporate structures appear to be insurmountable, effective dissent
is neutralized, and there seems to be no other option than to join the one-dimensional
synthesis of opinions. Dissent is co-opted, repressive tolerance bars any real change.
The result is an impression of technological determinism: the system’s configuration
is exactly how it is meant to be. Both Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day point to
the necessary incompleteness of any final explanation, but it can be argued that
Marcuse’s claim that advanced industrial society bars authentic liberty resonates in
Pynchon’s novels. What is more, it is exactly the insight into this necessary
incompleteness that still allows for certain possibilities. Marcuse refers to the
possibility of intellectual subversion, the effort to go against the established train of
thought and find the forks in the road that step outside teleological history.

Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was one of

the most ardent political philosophers in the U.S. at the time when
Pynchon started writing, and there are numerous ways in which his
critical theories can be made relevant for a reading of Pynchon’s
novels. The common ground between Marcuse’s texts and Pynchon’s
is a shared skepticism towards the culture of social conformism and
passivity installed by the rationalized use of language and technology.
As the Argentine anarchist Squalidozzi phrases it in Gravity’s
98 Toon Staes

Rainbow, we thus inhabit a “closed white version of reality” (GR

264): a wholly bureaucratized world of order and discipline, in which
all possible faculties of negation or dissent appear to have been
desublimated to mindless pleasures. Readers of Pynchon or Marcuse
would know that within this closed reality, entropy is at work. Change
is giving way to sameness, and what appears to be diversity is merely
a masked version of sterility. As a result, oppositional views have
taken on the guise of harmless “lifestyles” that only work to reaffirm
the system. One need only think of the failed Counterforce in
Gravity’s Rainbow to see how Pynchon illustrates the all-enveloping
nature of late capitalist society, in which even the purest of character
are just “as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of
money, as any of the rest of us, and that’s the hard fact” (GR 712).
Similarly, in Pynchon’s novel Against the Day all characters who still
dream of evading the system’s rational power structures are merely
holding on to “a timeless faith,” while “[t]hose whose enduring object
is power in this world are only too happy to use without remorse the
others, whose aim is of course to transcend all question of power”
(AtD 249). Avoiding the pitfalls of cultural pessimism or relativism,
however, Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day—like Marcuse’s
One-dimensional Man (1964)—still hint at certain forks in the road
that would subvert the established train of thought and step outside
teleological history. In the following paper I intend to explore these
forks in the road by pointing out the parallels between Marcuse’s and
Pynchon’s methods of working both in and against the day.
In a comprehensive essay on the contexts of rationalization in
Pynchon’s novels, Joseph W. Slade links the various forms of
repressed sexuality and aberrant behavior in Gravity’s Rainbow to
Marcuse’s depiction of the functionalization of lust and force as
market values in contemporary society. Slade consequently refers to
both Pynchon and Marcuse to argue that because of the commercial
exploitation of sensuality, the healthy release of sexual tension has
presently been turned into yet another form of social control,
comfortable but harmless (190-91). The doomed love between Roger
Mexico and Jessica Swanlake provides a fitting example of such
repressive desublimation in Pynchon’s novel, illustrating that in our
rationalized culture “we are meant for work and government, for
austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the
senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle
Marcuse, Intellectual Subversion and Negative Thought 99

and mindless hours of the day” (GR 177). Yet Slade goes on to claim
that “Marcuse’s warnings notwithstanding, Pynchon peoples his novel
with freaks who do manage small insights even as they imitate more
authoritarian power structures” (192). Of course the epithet “freaks”
already suggests that within the present dispensation, those who refuse
to conform to Things As They Are cannot be taken seriously.
Moreover, while this dismissal typifies the self-validating impetus of
contemporary society, the resulting one-dimensional worldview is
precisely what both Marcuse and Pynchon indict. Therefore it is
useful to argue that Marcuse’s concept of intellectual subversion does
inform a possible reading of both Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the
Day. This would mean that by sidestepping the closed white version
of reality without indulging in solipsistic utopianism, both novels
narrativize the gap between the actual and the potential dimensions of
reality in order “to demonstrate the liberating tendencies within the
established society” (Marcuse 254). Whereas in the wholly
rationalized scientific worldview the actual and the potential have
become subsumed to the single rational variant of the world as it is—a
grammatical ambiguity I will pick up later on—Marcuse argues that
only when this gap is made apparent, individual possibilities for
autonomy and qualitative change can be restored. As late capitalism
keeps itself in motion, it truly seems to herald the end of history. Yet
it will appear that Pynchon and Marcuse both appeal for a tentative
merger of “truth” and “fiction” in order to understand reality as part of
a broad historical process.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon links the convergence of science,
capital and technology in modern society to a specific social project:
the cooptation of the metaphysical, or the charismatic, in the realm of
quantification and therefore of exploitation. The newly emerging
corporate state symbolized in the “octopus IG” (GR 284) takes on the
guise of an all-encompassing sublime network that is in total control
of all facets of society, and in which individual responsibility is
infinitely deferred. All characters that are directly involved in the
novel’s action can only vaguely comprehend the system as “Them,”
and They control Us. This labyrinthine rational hierarchy even
stretches so far, as Inger Dalsgaard makes clear, that its actual
participants are wholly interchangeable and insignificant. The White
Visitation’s manipulative behaviorist Edward Pointsman is clearly one
more cog in Their all-encompassing structure, but even SS Captain
100 Toon Staes

Blicero and British Member of Parliament Duncan Sandys are merely

“disempowered personae within the systems they thought they
commanded” (Dalsgaard 101). They are but the masks through which
the Corporation speaks. The implicit suggestion in Pynchon’s novel is
therefore that corporate and technological development now have
their own wants and needs. They run the course of history, “fanning
the wastes of original waste over greater and greater masses of city”
(GR 167), and we seem to have no option but to comply. Hence
Gravity’s Rainbow hints at an ongoing historical process typified by
the transformation of nature into a web of domination, violating the
earth’s organic cycle and favoring death over all possibilities of
return.
By setting off the rocket’s one-way path from launch to explosion
against the rainbow’s true but invisible cyclical shape, the novel
provides us readers with a sense that we have become progressively
alienated from our environment through the cultural predominance of
scientific reason, “the gift of Daedalus” (GR 428) that has placed a
barrier of epistemologies and technologies between us and the natural
world, making it impossible to return. Eventually such disconnection
culminates in a linear and seemingly objective movement toward
annihilation that is publicly accepted as rational in all its appearances
in society. This passive acceptance delineates the terrible “Oedipal
situation in the Zone” that typifies the implications of the scientific
worldview: “generation after generation of men in love with pain and
passivity serve out their time in the Zone, […] desperately addicted to
the comforts others sell them, […] willing to have life defined for
them by men whose only talent is for death” (GR 747). In the Zone’s
Oedipal situation we can already recognize a first sign of Marcuse, as
he claims that since the corporate system continuously provides its
participants with the “material ground of increased satisfaction,” we
have become entirely dependent on its technical apparatus (72). The
result is that advanced industrial society now determines a priori the
individual’s needs and aspirations, which means that the freedom of
choice the individual still has is subsumed to “the spontaneous
reproduction of superimposed needs” (Marcuse 8). Furthermore, since
we are desperately addicted to this self-sustaining chain of production
and consumption of desire, both Marcuse’s and Pynchon’s texts imply
that we have learned to take the good with the bad: the system has
completely rationalized its exploitation of resources and its inherent
Marcuse, Intellectual Subversion and Negative Thought 101

capacity of annihilation. As Franz Pökler comes to realize in Gravity’s

Rainbow, “[l]iving inside the System is like riding across the country
in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide” (GR 412). And so,
instead of autonomous individuals, we get one-dimensional characters
framed in the structures favoring death.
This process of rationalization is tantamount to an active
suppression of historical alternatives, as it leads to the impression that
history is taking the unidirectional course of information and money,
the “conspiracy between human beings and techniques” (GR 521) that
Oberst Enzian intuits when discovering that the war has not in the
least affected the Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG. A telling analogy is
drawn in Gravity’s Rainbow when Slothrop considers the railroad
tracks on his trip to Zürich as a metaphor for the resulting
reconfiguration of time and space. “What appears to be destruction is
really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he
can only […] begin to feel the leading edges of” (GR 257). This
railroad teleology in the novel precisely underwrites Marcuse’s
argument that technology is now used to engender new, more
effective and more pleasant forms of social control and social
cohesion. In Pynchon’s words, in modern technocracy “the pointsman
[…] throws the lever that changes the points. And we go to
Happyville, instead of to Pain City” (GR 644). The result is that we
have come to identify the good with that which prevails in society, a
process Marcuse ascribes to the Happy Consciousness: “the belief that
the real is rational and that the system delivers the goods” (84).
Modern technocracy therefore obliterates the distinction between the
real and the possible. As I will argue, this distinction is precisely what
lies at the root of the many alternative realities and lateral worlds in
Against the Day.
Pynchon’s 2006 novel does not emphasize the harrowing effects of
the scientific worldview as much as Gravity’s Rainbow does. Rather,
Against the Day narrativizes how the modern scientific method
became geared towards the justification of the prevailing society.
Tropes of reversal and return abound in Against the Day, and they are
as significant as the rhetorical figure of hysteron proteron in Gravity’s
Rainbow. These tropes illustrate how contemporary society is merely
one among various historical alternatives, even though it may appear
the most rational one. Correspondingly, it is the metaphysical or
irrational that does not fit inside the given reality and which therefore
102 Toon Staes

seems the most capable of redemption in Against the Day: magic,

shamanism and alchemy. Yet considering the previous arguments on
the cooptation of the metaphysical and the closing down of the
historical universe, all chances for alternatives appear to be barred, as
if at some point “capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic
anymore” (AtD 79). The possibilities for return have therefore been
subverted by the naïve “balloon-boy faith” in progress (AtD 555),
resulting once more in a one-way departure that is symbolized in the
singling up of all lines at the opening of the novel. However, by
juxtaposing the rational with the irrational, Pynchon creates a curious
double bind that underlies many of the narrative strands in Against the
Day.
This double bind can be connected with the specific historical
process previously mentioned with reference to Marcuse. As
suggested, the scientific creation of a more rational and true reality—
cut off from all metaphysics and therefore blurring the opposition
between the real and the possible—defines in itself all historical
possibilities (Marcuse 229). In this sense art and non-positivist
philosophy also belong in the realm of metaphysics, a vague term that
is presently used as a general misnomer for all modes of thought that
are not directly geared towards the given reality and that are not
immediately verifiable. The predominant logic in advanced industrial
society is an affirmative logic of instrumentalism: things are “real” if
they can be experienced, manipulated, and consequently exploited. A
fine illustration from Against the Day is the common assertion that
any dimension that lies beyond the given space of experience is no
more than “algebraists’ whimsy,” only accessible in a “mental way”
and thus readily cast aside into the remote category of the “[s]piritual”
(AtD 602-03). This instrumentalism engenders a process of rational
“disconnection,” epitomized by the touring groups visiting the
Chicago slaughterhouses at the beginning of Against the Day (AtD
53). The negative features of the rational conquest and transformation
of nature, such as the mass production of waste material, the
exploitation of people and resources, and the threat of annihilation, are
now regarded as inevitable byproducts of the overall positive story.
Yet the resulting self-validating and seemingly rational society is in
effect an irrational outcome of what Marcuse calls “the premature
identification of Reason and Freedom” (234). It is precisely this
Marcuse, Intellectual Subversion and Negative Thought 103

process of “unshaped freedom being rationalized” that Pynchon refers

to as “a progressive reduction of choices” (AtD 10).
If the scientific worldview delimits the given reality, it appears that
the various possibilities of the world as it could be are subsumed
under the single rational variant of the world as it is. This may seem to
require some abstract thought, but it is precisely the argument that
comes up when the assembled “Quaternioneers” in Ostend are asked
the seemingly hilarious question, “what ‘is’ a Quaternion?” (AtD 538).
In response, Barry Nebulay quotes Bertrand Russell’s observation
“that most of Hegel’s arguments come down to puns on the word ‘is.’
In that sense the thing about a Quaternion ‘is’ is that we’re obliged to
encounter it in more than one guise” (AtD 538). A relevant
implication of such an observation can be found in Marcuse’s
philosophy of grammar. Marcuse argues that, on the purely linguistic
level, non-positivist philosophical thought implies a tension between
appearance and reality that is inherent to any statement of the type “to
be.” More concretely, being implies a transition from potentiality to
actuality that allows for the development of so-called metaphysical
propositions about the nature of reality. These propositions make it
possible, for instance, to develop a general conception of ethical
values such as truth, freedom, and beauty, which can then be engaged
in critical abstract thought. Marcuse refers to this process as negative
thinking, since metaphysical propositions invariably contain both an
affirmation and a contradiction: a general concept of truth that
transcends the mere given reality “affirm[s] something that is not
(immediately) the case; thus [it] contradict[s] that which is the case,
and den[ies] its truth” (132). Correspondingly, “the predicative ‘is’
implies an ‘ought’” (132). A simple example is that “man is free” can
thus be read as “man ought to be free.”
Yet remember Pynchon’s assertion that all forms of timeless faith
inevitably fall prey to the questions of power they wish to transcend, a
claim that finds its correlative in Marcuse’s disavowal of Hegel’s
optimistic maxim that the real is rational. Since both Marcuse and
Pynchon refute all “unbending refusals to consider the passage of
time” (AtD 322), it remains crucial to understand that universal
concepts such as “freedom,” “truth,” and “the good” are necessarily
subjective, in that their relevance is always particular. As the
formation of these concepts is influenced by that which is the case,
they should function to assess the given reality. This implies that so-
104 Toon Staes

called metaphysical propositions are not merely timeless—or

universal—concepts, as much as they are geared toward the present—
the particular. Claiming that these are two mutually exclusive
dimensions of meaning would be no less than excluding middles.
Applied to the social realm, such concepts would then make it
possible to strive for the realization of their potentiality into their
actuality, which accordingly delimits a historical process. That is,
negative thought implies a two-dimensional dichotomy between
potential reality and actual reality, with “the potentiality as historical
possibility” (Marcuse 97). In that sense, reality is not so much a single
state of “being” but rather a continuous state of “becoming.” This
multiplicity designates the development of an immeasurable set of
historical alternatives that are inherent to the given reality. In
reductive terms, this means that while there is one actual reality, the
underlying potential realities remain uncountable.
Note, then, that the dichotomy between actual and potential is also
inherent to the quaternion, which combines a scalar part consisting of
real numbers with imaginary or complex numbers as unit vectors
directed along the axes of these scalars. Therefore, a quaternion can be
seen as both real and imaginary, even “now and then you’d say
contrary-to-fact” (AtD 539). Applied to the question asked in Ostend,
as Dr. Rao considers the quaternion “subjectively,” it not precisely is
something as much as it designates “an act of becoming” (AtD 539).
This implies a whole new take on what delimits the real: “If you were
a vector […] you would begin in the ‘real’ world, change your length,
enter an ‘imaginary’ reference system, rotate up to three different
ways, and return to ‘reality’ a new person” (AtD 539). Yet such
transcending concepts, as I have argued, are not geared directly
toward the organization of the predominant society, nor toward the
rational domination over nature: non-positivist thought is inherently
different from scientific thought. Consequently it does not seem
immediately applicable to the mere “being” of reality, which in the
scientific worldview amounts to its stigmatization as no more than
speculation or fantasy. This viewpoint for instance culminates in the
efforts of positivist philosophy to debunk transcending concepts and
get to exact thinking, devoid of any metaphysical connotations and
thus resulting in one-dimensional positive thought. A good example
would be Wittgenstein’s assertion that philosophy must “leave
everything as it is” and that the use of the words “‘language’,
Marcuse, Intellectual Subversion and Negative Thought 105

‘experience’, ‘world’ […] must be as humble as that of the words

‘table’, ‘lamp’, ‘door’” (Wittgenstein qtd. in Marcuse 173, 177).
In view of Lieutenant Weissmann’s and Kurt Mondaugen’s
decoding of the atmospheric radio disturbances in V. as “[t]he world is
all that the case is” (V. 278), and considering the reappearance of both
characters in Gravity’s Rainbow as inspired rocket-mystics, the
previous reference to Wittgenstein is not just coincidental. While
oppositional thought implies that one signifier can have several
potential meanings, affirmative thought posits that something is either
rational or metaphysical, with the latter in the prevailing societal
framework being no more than irrational fancy. In other words, while
the “world we think we know [is] real” in a more wholesome mindset
“can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds” (AtD
1078), because of the triumph of positive thought in modern society,
the given world is all that is the case. It appears that the prevailing
scientific worldview has posited a whole new artificial reality on top
of the organic reality, a rational “Counter-Earth” that veils the
multiple realities underneath. “Travel to other worlds” in Against the
Day “is therefore travel to alternate versions of the same Earth” (AtD
1020). Having worked that out, the Chums of Chance aboard the
Inconvenience eventually “could almost believe some days that they
were safely back home on Earth,” yet on other days “they found an
American Republic whose welfare they believed they were sworn to
advance passed so irrevocably into the control of the evil and moronic
that it seemed they could not, after all, have escaped the gravity of the
Counter-Earth” (AtD 1021).
Accordingly, echoing the famous phrase from Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass which also appears in Pynchon’s Against the Day,
negative thought implies that in order to critically assess the given
reality it is necessary to contain multitudes: “Do I contradict myself?
Very well, I contradict myself” (AtD 491). Not only can this self-
contradictory critical faculty be found in such fictional violations of
the laws of nature in Against the Day as double refraction or
bilocation—which even make it possible for a person to be in more
than one place at the same time—but it also appears in the generally
accepted insight in modern physics that light should be considered as
both particulate and wavelike. According to critic N. Katherine
Hayles, this multidimensionality even sheds new light on the long-
standing debate between the human and physical sciences about the
106 Toon Staes

extent to which reality is a social construction. If there is only

epistemology and no ontology, universals can never reflect reality
itself. Yet Hayles claims that this statement is “both true and false”:
all knowledge is only representational, but some representations “can
express universals that are true at many locales” (214-15). The second
law of thermodynamics for instance has historically gathered many
different interpretations, yet this does not affect the central core of the
matter. Just as Marcuse, she therefore maintains that some balance
between the particular and the universal should be found. “Finding a
balance implies finding a way to say that entropy always does
increase, at least in this universe, and also that entropy is a social and
historical construction that has meant different things to different
people for different reasons” (Hayles 215). While Hayles’s statement
implies that there can be no timeless truths, like Marcuse’s philosophy
of grammar it still leaves room for universal propositions to have
relevance at different local sites. If, as I will argue in the remainder of
this paper, Pynchon’s novels succeed in representing reality’s
constructedness through fiction without indulging in mindless
pleasures, they attest to a similar balance.
Contrary to all forms of Orwellian language, in which war and
peace and progress and annihilation are no longer perceived as
contradictory, negative thought makes the opposition between the
actual and the potential apparent. Thus it functions both in and against
the given social reality (Marcuse 100). Pynchon knows full well that it
would be irrelevant to deny the many wholesome possibilities
engendered by the scientific revolution, as he makes clear for instance
in his essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?”, yet he also insists on the
unblinkingly accepted fact that the scientific revolution has
simultaneously installed a permanent and potentially destructive
power establishment against which the individual inevitably falls
short. Failure to see that both contradictory capacities are gathered
under the same signifier “science” is precisely what engendered the
“nation of starers” (GR 374) in Gravity’s Rainbow, and what explains
the many instances of Trespass in Against the Day. In the words of
Trespasser Ryder Thorne to Miles Blundell: “‘You have been so easy
to fool—most of you anyway—you are such simpletons at the fair,
gawking at your Wonders of Science, expecting as your entitlement
all the Blessings of Progress, it is your faith, your pathetic balloon-boy
faith’” (AtD 555). Note, then, that in his preface to Orwell’s 1984,
Marcuse, Intellectual Subversion and Negative Thought 107

Pynchon writes that being able “to believe two contradictory truths at
the same time” (xi)—as long as the center of meaning remains unfixed
and therefore the difference between actual and potential “truth”
remains apparent—might allow us to achieve a better awareness of
our own condition rather than to passively accept the given
organization of society as some larger plot beyond our understanding.
Hence, as Pynchon exemplifies with some famous examples, the
ability to “transcend opposites” and believe in something and in its
contradiction at the same time, or in other words the ability to include
middles, can also be liberating: “For Walt Whitman […] it was being
large and containing multitudes, for American aphorist Yogi Berra it
was coming to a fork in the road and taking it, for Schrödinger’s cat, it
was the quantum paradox of being alive and dead at the same time”
(Foreword x). All three examples can in some way be connected to
Against the Day. Moreover, this ability to “doublethink” is precisely
what determines the willingness of the characters in that novel to
accept their role in the rational hierarchy of the day. That is, as
Marcuse argues, “[a]ll liberation depends on the consciousness of
servitude” (7).
For one, this point is illustrated in Against the Day when the
detective Lew Basnight discovers that the professors Renfrew and
Werfner “were [in fact] one and the same person […] [who] somehow
had the paranormal power to be in at least two places at the same
time” (AtD 685) As Lew starts digging into the nature of bilocation,
he learns to transcend the binaries and understand that both “sides” of
the geopolitical sphere are really driven by the same will to power.
And “[o]nce he was willing to accept the two professors as a single
person, Lew felt curiously released, as if from a servitude he had
never fully understood the terms of anyway” (AtD 685). Initially Lew
feels “the desolate stomach-spasms of exile,” understanding that he
had “tumbled early” into some official version of History (AtD 688-
89). Yet apparently, he now also has the capacity to see beyond things
as they merely “are.” That much becomes clear once again when Lew
reappears later on in the novel, bumping into Dally Rideout at a party
in London. After finding out that Renfrew and Werfner are merely
separate manifestations of the same underlying principle, it appears
that Lew has discovered “a level of ‘reality’ at which nations, like
money in the bank, are merged and indistinguishable” (AtD 903). This
level of reality is precisely the insight that history is not necessarily
108 Toon Staes

what it is given out to be. Or rather, just as Marcuse’s concept of

negative thought implies, Lew has come to understand that underneath
the apparent reality—that which is the case—there might be a whole
set of contradictory truths. “One hears mathematicians of both
countries speak of ‘changes of sign’ when wishing to distinguish
England from Germany—but in the realm of pain and destruction,
what can polarity matter?” (AtD 903) This depolarized insight, then,
illustrates Pynchon’s claim that doublethink can overcome opposites.
The “deeper level of reality” in Pynchon’s novel once more
stresses the necessity to keep meaning unfixed, without being wholly
solipsistic or relativistic. It implies that history cannot be contained in
some overarching Holy Text. Hence—as Werfner himself suggests
when considering the unsolved mystery of Jack the Ripper’s
Whitechapel murders—the only way to approach history is in
“‘[h]undreds, by now thousands, of narratives, all equally valid—what
can this mean?’ ‘Multiple worlds!’” (AtD 682) I have illustrated that
these multiple worlds in Against the Day hint at “alternate versions of
the same Earth” (AtD 1020), the alternatives underlying the prevailing
historical process. Yet I have also argued that these alternatives have
effectively been negated by one-dimensional positive thought: the
rational imperative to stick with “that which is the case,” so
predominant in the present scientific worldview, can only leave
everything as it is. The result is an active suppression of historical
alternatives, in favor of the “railroad teleology” toward annihilation
that is the all-but infinite market present. However, once the binaries
between the rational and the so-called metaphysical are overcome and
positive thought gives way to negative thought, instead of a single
straight historical line from departure to arrival, “[o]ne might imagine
a giant railway-depot, with thousands of gates disposed radially in all
dimensions, leading to tracks of departure to all manner of alternate
Histories” (AtD 682).
Similarly, the “[d]irections for journeying to Shambhala” in
Against the Day—which can be found in a book on “a Yogi, who is a
sort of fictional character, though at the same time real”—state that it
is of the utmost importance to “remember one thing—when you come
to a fork in the road, take it” (AtD 766). Referring back to Pynchon’s
preface to 1984, this “Yogi” clearly alludes to the capacity to
understand two contradictory truths at the same time, or, with
reference to Marcuse, to the capacity to see the difference between
Marcuse, Intellectual Subversion and Negative Thought 109

that which merely “is” and that which “ought to be.” Once Colonel
Auberon Halfcourt reaches this insight in the novel, he is no longer
“the servant of greed and force [for whom] the only form of love […]
was indistinguishable from commerce” he once used to be (AtD 974).
In that sense, Halfcourt has not discovered Shambhala as a real place,
but as another type of departure: “the act of leaving the futureless
place where [he] was” (AtD 975).
Negative thought thus engenders some form of “mirror-symmetry
about departure,” not a single straight line of “possibilities […] being
progressively narrowed” but “a denial of inevitability, an opening out
from the point of embarkation, beginning the moment all lines are
singled up […] an expanding of possibility” (AtD 821) The ability to
see the whole range of possible meanings beyond the official
historical narrative is precisely the intellectual subversion required to
step outside teleological history and critically assess the given reality,
both from within and against the day. In a way, just as the “Yogi” in
the text with directions to Shambhala is as much a real as a fictional
character, this ability requires the necessary awareness that all
interpretations of history can be viewed as both real and fictional. And
as illustrated with reference to Marcuse’s philosophy of grammar and
the multiple worlds in Pynchon’s novels, such a willingly held fiction
does not need to attest to relativism or solipsism, but allows for
various approaches to the unattainable core of reality, a continuous
form of Holy-Center-Approaching.
The unfixed center of meaning allows for the ability to believe in
something that both is and is not “real,” which is precisely what it
means to contain multitudes. And when Lew remembers bilocation
toward the end of the novel, he remembers that “long ago he had even
found himself now and then going off on these forks in the road.
Detours from what he still thought of as his official, supposed-to-be
life” (AtD 1049-50). Nonetheless, since returning to the U.S.—
precisely the country which is typified in Gravity’s Rainbow as “a
nation of starers” (GR 374)—these detours from Lew’s official life
had tapered off and stopped “as if they had been no more than vivid
dreams” (AtD 1050).
It is no coincidence, then, that the final scene of Gravity’s Rainbow
is set in an American movie theatre, where the final rocket is already
reaching “its last immeasurable gap” (GR 760) above the heads of the
passive audience. And as the narrator is now addressing his readers
110 Toon Staes

directly, it is clear that this audience is “Us.” As illustrated, Pynchon

and Marcuse both suggest that the self-justifying tendency of
advanced industrial society to maintain the status quo has perverted
the wholesome possibilities inherent to the scientific revolution into
new and more comfortable forms of control. That this perversion has
generally been accepted as rational, or worse, that it is not even
recognized anymore, only attests to the efficacy of the synthesis and
control of advanced industrial society. In Marcuse’s words,
“domination—in the guise of affluence and liberty—extends to all
spheres of private and public existence, integrates all authentic
opposition, absorbs all alternatives” (17-18). Willingly accepting the
organization of society “as it is” turns us into no more than spectators
at the movies—“one huge captive audience” as Marcuse calls it
(245)—until inevitably the time comes when the film breaks and the
system runs out of resources, or the final rocket strikes.
Consequently, it appears that the inability to see the alternatives
inherent to the given reality has placed us all inside some official
movie version of history, “elapsing from the beginning of the reel to
the end, one frame at a time” (AtD 457), in which individual
autonomy is completely determined by the demands of the wholly
rationalized society. Yet it can be argued that negative thought,
“freedom of thought in the only sense in which thought can be free in
the administered world—as the consciousness of its repressive
productivity,” might guarantee a way back toward “self-
determination,” in that it would render the individual “capable of
knowing and comprehending the [given] facts and of evaluating the
alternatives” (Marcuse 252-53). Therefore, while it is impossible to
merely transcend the given reality, it might still be possible to develop
a critical faculty that functions in and against the day. As Pynchon’s
novels illustrate, this ability to be of two minds at once—one attuned
to that which merely “is,” one to that which “ought to be”—makes it
so that “there [might] always [be] the chance that those little folks in
the pictures will choose different paths than the originals” (AtD 1049).

Toon Staes, University of Antwerp

Marcuse, Intellectual Subversion and Negative Thought 111

Bibliography
Dalsgaard, Inger H. “Terrifying Technology: Pynchon’s Warning
Myth of Today.” Approach and Avoid: Essays on Gravity’s
Rainbow. Ed. Luc Herman. Pynchon Notes 42-43 (1998): 91-110.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder In
Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1990.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of
Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Vintage, 2000.
—. V. London: Vintage, 2000.
—. Foreword. 1984. By George Orwell. New York: Penguin Books,
2003. v-xxv.
Slade, Joseph W. “Religion, Psychology, Sex, and Love in Gravity’s
Rainbow.” Approaches To Gravity’s Rainbow. Ed. Charles Clerc.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983. 153-98.
 Imperfect Circles: Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from
the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow

Ali Chetwynd

Abstract: This paper reconsiders the rarely uncontested consensus that the core
rocket-arc metaphor in Gravity’s Rainbow has to be read as a symbol of rigid
binarism, of fall latent in rise, death latent in birth, and thus that figures associated
with, or whose trajectories follow this arc are to be associated with entropy and the
novel’s more destructive forces. Instead, it proposes that the “Perfect Rocket Arc”
discussed by pessimistic figures in the novel is in fact only one way of reading the
flight path. Taking into account the distorting effects of resistance on the flight path of
non-spherical objects, as much of Gravity’s Rainbow does, gives us a different, less
perfect, more ‘ecologically valid’ asymmetrical rocket arc. This paper addresses the
many different thematic implications that arise from this shift in perspective, most
notably the importance that it gives to the gravitational power of centre. Most extant
readings of the novel see Gravity’s Rainbow as engaged in a standard postmodern
project of de-centering, and the “holy centres” it discusses as avatars of outdated
delusion. Instead, this paper proposes that the novel closely associates the rocket
centre with a zero-membrane between negative and positive realms, and with the
movements of electric current, and thus that rather than being an indefinitely
postponed and fallacious centre, the rocket is a crossable, operant centre that plays a
fundamental role in the outward-looking movements of the novel’s later pages. The
paper redraws previously mapped flight paths, interpreting the move from
symmetrical Rocket Arc to an asymmetrical rocket arc, to a spiral approach to centre,
to a vortical passage through centre. It posits, and begins to answer, the question of
just what it might mean to read a Pynchon for whom figurative centres do valid
political work.

This paper was originally proposed and delivered at International

Pynchon Week 2008 under the title “Pynchon’s Vocabulary of
Curves—Circular Motion Metaphors Beyond the Rocket Arc.” I had
intended to provide a survey of the various images relating to
circularity in all of Pynchon’s books, and to try to show a common
thread between them. I still think such a project can be carried out, but
what actually emerged was a paper that had to proceed from the
114 Ali Chetwynd

correction of what I saw as a ballistic misreading of Rocket-Arc

symbolism in Gravity’s Rainbow. This issue seemed so fundamental
to me that it could hardly coexist with an overview in a paper of this
length; it would have to be put forward on its own. As such, this paper
is not so much a survey of curves as a redrawing of flight paths, a
tracing of implication from a symmetrical Rocket Arc, to an
asymmetrical rocket arc, to a spiral approach to centre, to a vortical
passage through centre. The wider engagements for this tracing within
Pynchon criticism, as with its relationship to the wider vocabulary of
curves in Pynchon’s other novels, I hope to map in future work. For
now, though, I refrain from straining too intently beyond the rim of
geometry.

Symmetry and Asymmetry

The most visible and most discussed of Pynchonian curves is the

symmetrical flight arc of what Pökler calls with capital letters “the
Perfect Rocket” (GR 426). Its symmetry makes it a symbol of binary
opposition, of cause and effect, of teleology, entropy and
mortification, of fall latent in rise, of death latent in birth. In all this it
has frequently been aligned with another Pynchonian governing
metaphor, the V-shape. I clarify this now because my major proposal
in this paper is that this vision of a Perfect Rocket Arc is not the
encompassing authorial meaning it has been discussed as, nor the only
curve that the fired rocket follows, nor the only thing that its ballistic
path signifies. It is only one perspective, one interpretation, and is
elucidated mostly through the perspectives of characters whose
worldviews already tend towards teleology, entropy and mortification.
Taking into account the distorting effects of resistance on the flight
path of non-spherical objects, as much of Gravity’s Rainbow does,
gives us a different, less Perfect, more—to use experimental
language—‘ecologically valid’ asymmetrical rocket arc, and this has
its own entirely different thematic implications.
The notion of the Perfect Rocket Arc as an epitome of the
architectonic metaphor per se has had a somewhat exclusive effect.
Edward Mendelson wrote in the late 1970s that Slothrop’s quest
follows the Arc’s parabola and that “outside the disintegrating
Slothrop the book insists on calling attention to real tasks and
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 115

purposive choices that cannot be avoided” (13), and since then,

despite a move towards discussing Slothrop’s final diffusion in more
positive terms, it has been conventional to look for the
“real…purposive” moral and philosophical energy of the novel in any
movement of its story except the Rocket’s flight path.
Molly Hite’s book Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas
Pynchon, probably the fullest analysis of Pynchon’s structural
figures,1 demonstrates how the novel allows differing framework
metaphors to coexist, but in prioritizing her exposition of the Perfect
Rocket Arc as an epitome of traditional narrative teleology, Hite
conflates all of these metaphors to the same fallacious purpose:
“Pynchon makes the providential plot the type of all attempts to make
sense out of the world by giving events narrative coherence” (20).
Yet alternative flight shapes are discussed within the novel, and
skepticism about the typical perfection of the rocket’s flight is
encouraged. As such, I would question Hite’s conflation of “all
attempts” into this one single Perfect structure. Rejecting reliance on a
single structural motif in Gravity’s Rainbow, as Hite quite rightly
does, should lead us to look at how each of them is constructed. One
aspect of the Rocket parabola that has generally gone uninterrogated
is the fact that the Perfect vision is itself a subjective idealization,
opposed in the novel to the ballistic path of the Rocket in actual flight.
I call it a subjective idealization because the passages in which the
symbolism of the symmetrical arc is expounded do not come from an
omniscient narrator. Instead, the widely discussed link between
symmetrical arc and entropic, teleological, restrictive mindset is
constituted throughout the text by insistent but not infallible voices.
They may be projections from characters whose worldview is already
morbid, paranoid, hypercoherent and teleological; they may be,
whether narratorial or within reported thought, projections onto the
philosophy of a culture or ideology. In either case, however, we are
given no reason to believe that this explicated symbolism is the sum
total of what the Rocket and its flight path can represent, and above all
we are shown repeatedly that its association with symmetry is a
construction opposed to practical physics.
By way of a brief example, consider Slothrop’s conviction that he
and Katje are restricted by the determinism of the perfect arc, a belief
that arises out of discussions with Dodson-Truck (GR 207) and Katje
herself (GR 209):
116 Ali Chetwynd

It is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola […]

everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape
latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet
they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad
news…. (GR 209)

The language of purification and binary opposition here emphasizes

that this arc is a refined or idealized version of an unrefined or impure
counterpart. This is the height of Slothrop’s paranoia, his wish to
construct and understand his relation to control (GR 207); in the
surrounding text it is made clear that the ideas of control and
symmetry, summations of Dodson-Truck’s job and Katje’s sensibility
respectively, have merely been adopted by Slothrop in response to
Tantivy’s death. Just as we are not led to take seriously his hopes of
discovering the mechanisms of a “they” that control his life in secret,
neither should we endorse unquestioningly his vision of the Rocket’s
arc as a “purified” teleology.
The idealization of the rocket’s flight is similarly questioned by
hindsight. Early on, we see how hindsight changes Blicero’s
geometric vision: first he conceives of “[m]irror-metaphysics,” and is
“[s]elf-enchanted by what he imagined elegance, his bookish
symmetries” (GR 101). Elegance and symmetry are tied to
bookishness and imagination; in practice, however, because of “the
shape to which the War has now grown […] [t]hose symmetries were
all pre-war luxury” (GR 101-02). I will not dwell too long on this
undermining of the Perfect Rocket Arc, in order to focus rather on
showing where Pynchon offers alternative readings of the Rocket that
proceed from its “operational” (GR 400) arc. It is worth stating once
more, however, that even though the Perfect Rocket Arc certainly
does represent absolutist determinism and the death-wish, this
symbolism is not itself given a totalizing power by Pynchon’s novel; it
is shown to be merely one way of reading the rocket’s flight, and
others are offered.
Before looking at the most central of these oppositions of the
rocket operational to the Perfect Rocket, let me clarify the basic
physics involved. The Perfect Rocket Arc is symmetrical because
ideally, in a vacuum, direction and acceleration on either side of a
parabola’s highest point above a globe are identical, so the arc’s shape
similarly is identical on either side. To go back to Blicero’s notion,
this is mirror physics, without the meta. However, it can only be a
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 117

metaphysical conception of the arc, because when air resistance is

factored in, acceleration decreases as the parabola goes on, and the
shape of the arc becomes unbalanced.2 Thus what had been a
symmetrical arc with an apex above a gravitational point becomes the
widest arc of a spiral. Whereas in a symmetrical orbit the gravitational
centre merely dictates movement around it, the direction of a spiraling
centripetal orbit is eventually towards that centre. If there is no
surface—that is if the object providing gravitational centre is infinitely
small and has infinite mass—then the orbiting object, in this instance
the rocket, will keep approaching the spiral’s centre until the spiral
becomes tight enough to bend and destroy the object through G force.
Other things that preclude symmetry in flight paths include a non-
spherical shape for the propelled object (GR 403, 422-23), changes in
the object over the course of its flight (GR 424), and artificial
propulsion on the rising part of the parabola (GR 402-03, 409).
Pynchon describes the problems caused by all these factors.
These allusions to practical ballistics, which demonstrate the
spuriousness of the symmetry projected onto the arc, cluster densest in
the central chapter covering Pökler’s career in rocketry. Pökler, as
someone working on the rocket both at the stage of its ideal
conception on paper and then once again after it becomes an
operational proposition, is the character most clearly associated with
the forces that make the flight arc’s asymmetry physically axiomatic.
His companion in resolving “a problem with getting the rocket’s long
axis to follow the tangent, at all points, to its trajectory” (GR 403) is
the mystical “aerodynamics man” (GR 403) Fahringer, who despite
his title is less concerned with practical flight than idealized
identifications of engineer and equipment (GR 403). In this
environment, Pökler must take the vision of the Perfect Rocket,
handed down to him by his superiors, and make it operationally
effective, forcing the text to make a distinction between ideal and
pragmatic concerns—“While the military wallowed in victories not
yet won, the rocket-engineers had to think non-fanatically […]” (GR
401).
The most personal scene of physics to Pökler, in which he does
submit to Fahringer’s conflations, is the one that shows how
destructive asymmetry can be to a flying object. It comes when he is
simulating G force and air resistance in the wind tunnel; there he has
118 Ali Chetwynd

seen the true profile of the Rocket warped and travestied, a rocket of wax,
humped like a dolphin at around caliber 2, necking down towards the tail
[…]—and seen how his own face might be plotted, not in light but in net
forces acting upon it from the flow of Reich and coercion and love it moved
through … and known that it must suffer the same degradation, as death will
warp face to skull…. (GR 422-23)

In the Rocket curled up by centripetal force and the flow of resistance,

Pökler, Pointsman-like, conflates death and the flight path even as he
elucidates its asymmetry. It is worth noting that the R of “true Rocket”
is capitalized and the r of “rocket of wax” is not. In viewing the
undistorted pre-flight rocket as “true,” Pökler betrays that for all his
awareness of the arc’s imperfection and his conception of approach to
death as approach to a centre rather than descent on a wheel, he yet
shares a reverence for the Rocket’s terminality with the idealists and
rocket-mystics whose visions of symmetry he knows to be wrong. An
awareness of the difference of the operational rocket arc from the
Perfect Rocket Arc, then, is not necessarily enough to attain a non-
deterministic worldview. Rocket-reverence can still persist.

Asymmetry, Spiral and the Rocket-Centre

The two rocket arcs are similarly synthesized earlier in the Pökler
chapter, when we hear how “[t]he Serpent that announces ‘the World
is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally returning,’ is to be
delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking
and not giving back…” (GR 412). Here as for Pökler, there is the
implication that an idealized cycle will be the aegis under which a
practical system must become centripetal and “sooner or later must
crash to its death” (GR 412). This establishes that the distinction to be
made is not just between spiral descent from orbit to centre and an
ideal arc that launched from earth thus crashes to earth, but between
that spiral approach to a gravitational point and a full circle/cycle
around a gravitational point. In order to begin differentiating the
implications of the asymmetrical path, it is necessary to view these
images of the rocket subject to gravity as parallel with the imagery of
the Rocket itself as a centre of gravity—not only the object travelling
along its various launched parabolae, but also the gravitational force
by which these curves are dictated. While Rocket-determinism is
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 119

sometimes presented in Gravity’s Rainbow as a force that attaches

characters to a revolving wheel of fate, the Rocket is also frequently
depicted as a central force drawing paths in and out of a spiral centre,
an image conferring greater agency than the imagery of wheel or rim
that it counterpoints.
It is notable that the central Pökler chapter takes the opportunity to
hark back to the shape of the rocket’s place of manufacture (GR 402).
The double integral SS shape is used in mathematics to calculate
centers of circles or centers of gravity, and the most extended
reference to the shape’s significance, which proceeds from the shape
of the Mittelwerke (GR 302), explicitly links the idea of the Rocket in
flight and as a centre of gravity; “what is the specific shape whose
center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point?” (GR 302) Throughout the
text the one object that attracts most imagery related to gravitational
centre is the Rocket itself. Where the Rocket has previously been seen
evolving from a “determinist […] piece of hardware” (GR 275) to a
force “generating items” (GR 275) outside its orbital arc, it is here
shown to have actually shifted its determining mathematical power to
the centre.
The clearest imagery of the Rocket as a centre comes in the
passage on the death-wish of the Herero: “Vectors in the night
underground, all trying to flee a center, a force, which appears to be
the Rocket: some immachination, whether of journey or of destiny,
which is able to gather violent political opposites together […] for the
sake of its scheduled parabola” (GR 318). The concomitant imagery
here of gathering and attempted flight, motivated by a single centre
which exercises its power “for the sake of” an arc, links vectors drawn
outward from a single centre-point with the need to escape a
gravitational pull. We are told within a page that “the Final Centre can
easily be seen as the Final Zero” (GR 319). With the express
stipulation that this Herero perception is subjective, the Rocket here
represents for them a final zero that should be quested towards.
However, most others who view centre as final are more compelled
towards that punning notion of flight as fleeing.
Pökler is one of these. His relation to the Rocket is consistently
expressed in terms of center’s pull rather than of attachment to the
wheel or rim of its arc. His knowledge of the inevitable decline of
Perfect orbit into concentric spiral means that his visions of escape
tend to involve reversing this process: justifying his work to Leni
120 Ali Chetwynd

before the rocket becomes operational, he says “‘[w]e’ll all use it,
someday, to leave the earth. To transcend. […] Borders won’t mean
anything. We’ll have all outer space…’” (GR 400).3 Meanwhile, as
the specter of the rocket takes over his life, he finds refuge by taking
his alleged daughter’s rocket-dreams of space travel and regressing
into them himself—“[…] sometimes Ilse whispered to him bedtime
stories about the moon she would live on, till he had transferred
silently to a world that wasn’t this one […] in which flight was as
natural as breathing” (GR 410).4 Earlier on, pre-rocketwork, Pökler
had hoped that Leni might “carry him away to a place where Destiny
couldn’t reach. As if it were gravity” (GR 162). Here, the link between
final destination, struggle for volition and gravitational pull that
structures Pökler’s later rocketry chapter is introduced, but what is
most remarkable is that when this relationship to gravity is directly
recapitulated in the rocketry chapter, the operational rocket has fully
taken the place of abstract destiny at the gravitational centre. In an
earlier passage with Leni, Pökler ponders that “real flight and dreams
of flight go together” (GR 159). Harking back to the pun of the Herero
passage, it is clear that in his dreams that stay the specter of the
rocket, Pökler is in “real flight” from his own agency. Where the
symmetrical 360-degree rim arc represents passivity in determined
orbit, a spiral pull towards the centre demands volition, either a quest
towards the centre or a striving away from it.

Rocket-Centre, Agency and Labyrinth

Pökler wishes to escape the rocket-centre by clearing the rim of its

gravitational force, whereas the Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow’s first
half wishes to escape the determinist rim by pursuing the rocket and
thereby approaching the centre. This geometrical opposition is crucial
to the novel. It also shows how closely gravitational geometry and
personal agency are linked. When Slothrop is recaptured in
Rocketman costume as he attempts to conclude his drug run, we are
told that “he’s away, on the Wheel, clutching in terror to the
dwindling white point of himself” (GR 383). There are two ways to
read this, the first being that the Wheel threatens to tear Slothrop away
from the dwindling point and remove his selfhood in the sense of his
agency, and the second that it is the clinging to this selfhood that
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 121

drags him along on the Wheel and thus denies him agency. The latter
certainly endorses Mendelson’s view that the “centripetal” Modernist
concern with selfhood finds its Pynchonian analogy in the determinist
Perfect Arc (4, 11). However, such a reading cannot provide a positive
account of the subsequent diffusing of Slothrop’s personality into a
“scattered” (GR 712) spirit for the counterforce. I want to suggest that
this scattering comes neither from a happy abandonment of all pursuit
nor from entropic attachment to the arc, but is a consequence of his
approach to a gravitational rocket-centre. Those “purposive” choices
Mendelson correctly identifies as the final offering of the book are to
be found not “outside” the wheel, but somewhere along that line to
and through the centre.
The opposition between point and wheel persists throughout the
novel. While Slothrop is taken away on the Wheel, his self is
shrinking to a point; later, as he and Närrisch are “Holy-Centre-
Approaching” (GR 508), we are made aware for the first time that
Slothrop’s shape of self is widening—he “has begun to thin, to
scatter” (GR 509). In the Pökler section on the “rocket of wax,” we
have seen that a spiral approach to a centre has a distorting effect on
physical bodies, and here it seems to be distending Slothrop’s once
‘point’-like sense of self. Gilbert-Rolfe and Johnston point out,
regarding the form of the mandala, that a circle around a central cross
is “a juxtaposition of open and closed limits” (74). That central cross,
modeled by both Slothrop and the Herero (notably the two perceiving
subjects who approach rather than flee the zero rocket centre) on the
Rocket’s fins, posits the Rocket not only as a centre, but also as a
point facing isotropically outward, and hence as a possible opening
force.5
The relationship between central point and circumscribing wheel
opposes opening and closing, generation and limitation, throughout
the text. That well-quoted passage about cusps and cathedral spires
which leads into Pökler’s chapter offers a series of images on points
as meetings of arc. The last point described, however, is not on an arc
but “the infinitely dense point from which the present Universe
expanded” (GR 396). The list culminates in contrast, with a vision of
point as centre, and point as creative, expansive centre at that. “Do all
these points imply, like the Rocket’s, an annihilation?” we are asked
(GR 396). The ending of this passage, though, would allow us to
answer in the affirmative only if we imagined annihilation and primal
122 Ali Chetwynd

generation as located in a single point and happening absolutely

concurrently. This brings us back to whether or not a central zero is
always and only a point of terminality.
I have already noted that the Herero both identify zero with centre
and—with exceptions like Enzian—actively seek that centre as
extinction. Their idea of zero/extinction in this sense chimes with that
of Pointsman and his fellow Pavlovians in the first section of
Gravity’s Rainbow, for whom its title Beyond the Zero refers to the
fact that to destroy a reflex you must continue to decondition it even
after it has stopped manifesting. Here, zero is a point of insufficient
mortification on a parabola, and what goes beyond it is purely
destructive. Pointsman’s relation to zero-centre, meanwhile, is
elucidated in terms not of rocket-flight but of labyrinth. His dream of
receiving the Nobel Prize is likened to a final minotaur (GR 142), but
only after we have been told that compromises made in his past await
restitution at the centre of another labyrinth (GR 88). His coexistent
fear of being inevitably drawn to a “central chamber” (GR 88) where
he will be punished, and wish to rush into “the last room” (GR 142)
where he will prove himself, lead his most vivid thoughts on labyrinth
to depict self-limits opening up and melting away: “[…] he begins to
expand, an uncontainable light […] what there is of labyrinth
collapsing in rings outward, hero and horror, engineer and Ariadne
consumed, molten inside the light of himself, the mad exploding of
himself…” (GR 143). Resolution of his self-engineered ambivalence
is only conceivable in terms of an annihilatory movement outward
from a central crux-point. There is a linear Ariadne-path inward, but
his only imaginable outward motion is total, destructive of limit but
also of self.
Despite being a man of spiral rather than symmetry in rocket-arc
terms, Pökler’s methods for keeping the Rocket’s specter at bay share
the image: “his own engineering skill, the gift of Daedalus that
allowed him to put as much labyrinth as required between himself and
the inconveniences of caring” (GR 428). Labyrinth then is constructed
around a central zero point, and the text hints at its relation to spiral
approach by the frequency with which it links the entry into “final
rooms” with turning (GR 589), curves (GR 485), or corners (GR 177).
Labyrinthine constructs that keep characters away from a spiral-centre
they identify with a terminal zero also keep them away from the open
limit at the heart of the mandala shape, and hence involve shying
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 123

away from “caring” and from “purposive choices.”6 Essentially,

through labyrinth, the Pökler or Pointsman view remains of spiral
towards zero as another form of restrictive, symmetrical, determinist
arc, and elicits agency only in the avoidant sense. Nevertheless, these
labyrinths each propose a centre that dictates action around it just as,
in certain imagery, does the rocket.7

Two Conceptions of Zero and its Holiness

As the book posits various notions of centre—effectual, absent,

terminal, generative—it also posits divergent concepts of zero. Like
labyrinth, one of these is deployed defensively: the idea of zero as a
point of rest at which there is no longer any need to struggle against
gravitational pull. “Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to
find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero” (GR 404).
Pökler, avoidant of centre, expresses a wish for this kind of zero state:
“[…] in something like this extinction he could be free of his
loneliness and his failure […]. So he hunted […] across the Zero,
between the two desires, personal identity and impersonal salvation”
(GR 406). The two desires here seem similar to the two conceptions
Pointsman had of labyrinth, and again extinction is posited as the
solution, something like the unconstructive “meta-solutions” (GR 102)
that arise within the closed limits of Blicero’s Oven-state. But Pökler,
as with his awareness of the symmetrical and asymmetrical rocket
arcs, is again the character across whom two versions of the same
concept, in this case zero, are drawn. Particularly in the first part of
the novel the imagery of boundaries between two states abounds;
Slothrop at one point is even described in the same terms as Pökler,
“hunting across the zero between waking and sleep” (GR 119). What
is novel in Pökler’s wish, though, is the idea of zero not only as a kind
of membrane that can be crossed repeatedly but as a membrane that
could be inhabited. Pökler’s wish to rest is an explicit abdication of
purposive choice, but it does represent a definite shift away from the
Pointsman/Herero notion of zero as terminal point. It is a notion of
zero not as point but as interface.8
How, then, can this idea of crossing the zero, of an opposite world
on the other side of the zero interface, be conceived of in terms of the
spiral, whose terminus zero is a single point? The most explicit
124 Ali Chetwynd

encounter with any kind of zero in the book is Tchitcherine’s

experience at the Kirghiz light, which the Aqyn’s song links to the
linguistic zero of aphasia, and to notions of rebirth: “But if you would
not be born / […] the Light will never find you” (GR 358-59). The
idea of rebirth through re-emergence from the terminal point hints that
a zero like Kirghiz does not have to be final, indeed that if it is
conceived of as final it will remain asymptotically distant like
Pökler’s “someday” moon-rest. Tchitcherine’s ride out to the Light is
described in fairly simple, intentional terms, without the imagery of
curve, corner or turn, and it is perhaps because of this that he “will
reach the Kirghiz Light, but not his birth” (GR 359). To merely reach
the zero end of an approach is not enough to pass through it, to make
it an interface.
Another way in which characters seek the spiral-zero, in this case
the Rocket, and then fail to cross it is expounded when Thanatz and
Greta approach the old launch site. They walk on with a growing
sense of ruin until “[a]head of them, the path curved on, into trees. But
something stood now between them and whatever lay around the
curve […]. They were both terrified. They turned, feeling it at their
backs, and moved away quickly” (GR 485). The image of the
approach to something hidden behind a curve certainly endorses a
tightening spiral conception of an approach to centre. Here however,
unlike Tchitcherine who reaches the zero point and comes away
having failed to pass through, Thanatz and Greta turn around before
they actually reach that point. The outward freeing from limit offered
by the cross at the centre of a mandala is no freeing at all if the turn is
made before the central point of the cross.
Slothrop and Närrisch, visiting the same site soon afterwards, are
compared to Tchitcherine in terms of being “ill-equipped to approach
a holy Center” (GR 508). Associating no conscious teleology with the
centre, they are not overcome by a need to turn away. Regarding
Slothrop, the narrator apostrophizes the “Egg the flying Rocket
hatched from” (GR 509): “forgive him his numbness, his glozing
neutrality. […] Forgive him as you forgave Tchitcherine at the
Kirghiz Light” (GR 510). Here, the links between Kirghiz Light and
Rocket—flying rocket, rocket operational—are made explicit, but
Slothrop, unlike Tchitcherine, does not attempt to undergo revelation
at his Holy Centre. Of course, Slothrop actually meets Tchitcherine at
the launch-site (GR 512), but it is Slothrop and not Tchitcherine
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 125

whose movement away from this centre is described. Slothrop is not

hoping for the centre like Greta, for whom “that first glimpse of it”
remains “an absolute need, a ruling target” (GR 509), yet who had to
turn away when she approached final curve before that glimpse.
After this entry and immediate flight, this movement in and out of,
this crossing of the rocket launch site, the compassionate Slothrop
described in Michael Harris’s essay in this collection, “wandering into
enlightenment” and “walking away” from war, takes his place in the
text. Unlike Greta—who turns before the Holy Centre and remains
teleologically obsessed with it—or Tchitcherine—who goes expectant
to the Kirghiz Light, “reaching” it rather than letting it “find” him, and
hence remains “drawn” by other similar centers—Slothrop crosses the
site of rocket-centre unconsciously, with “numbness,” and walks away
changed. When he and his pig companion, who is “a wandering
eastern magus” (GR 575) that Slothrop by now merely drifts along
with, enter Zwölfkinder, they see that “the great wheel, dominating
the skyline for miles out of town, leans a little askew” (GR 575). Now
that Slothrop is a passive wanderer rather than a determined seeker,
the horizon-wheel imagery to which he had felt bound is itself subject
to decay.
Joseph Slade sees Slothrop as “approaching the final zero in an
asymptotic curve” (200), but I would contend that going beyond the
asymptotic is precisely what differentiates Slothrop from all the other
approachers in the novel, and that the finality of zero is elided because
of this. In spiral terms an asymptotic curve is one that never quite
touches the centre; consider for example Enzian and Tchitcherine
finally walking past each other and moving onward unaware (GR 734-
35). As I mentioned earlier, this can apply to an object orbiting a
centre of gravity that is infinitely small and of infinite mass, in other
words the perfect spiral arc. Hite’s mention of “asymptotic approach
to an unavailable centre” (Hite 22), meanwhile, could only be
visualized as a spiral. This notion of the center’s “unavailability” is
essential to how we read the novel. Does it mean that the centre is not
accessible, not knowable, not present? All of these? Since
Tchitcherine is present at the Kirghiz Light, at the Rocket-site and
finally on the same stretch of road as his half-brother, and yet fails to
achieve any sort of revelation,9 it is clear that the physical accessibility
of these centers is not in doubt. What is in doubt is Tchitcherine’s
ability to metaphorically pass through them.
126 Ali Chetwynd

To allude again to Michael Harris’s paper on the Tao, it is

precisely the seeking for a determined centre that ensures it will not be
passed through. In Pynchon’s repeated imagery of the delta-t, it is
made clear that arrival and rest at the precise final zero, rather than an
infinitesimal distance either side of it, are not consciously possible.
Centre is not somewhere that can be experienced, known or
revealed,10 just as Pökler’s wish to come to rest at a zero state that
absolves him of the struggle against the weight of the Rocket’s zero is
a fallacy. But with the imagery of a crossable zero and an alternative
world on its other side so prevalent in Pynchon’s work, we may think
of those who have been to a Holy Centre and emerged again without
intentional revelation as having actually crossed the zero. If so, the
shape that they have followed is no longer a spiral, but a vortex.

Vortex—A Motion Through Centre

The Vortex11 is a shape that takes the spiral’s outline and allows it a
mirror version. Whereas a spiral has no symmetry, a vortex passes
through a central point and recapitulates the spiral on the other side in
the opposite direction. As such, it is one shape that allows us to
reconcile the ideas of zero as a central point, and zero as a boundary
on an interface between two states.12 In terms of Gravity’s Rainbow,
this allows the zero point of a vortex to be the point that offers
Mendelson’s “turn away” from “dead ends” and towards “purposive
choices” (13). As Daniel Albright says in his book Quantum Poetics:
“A vortex is a turning, and it is specifically the kind of turning in
which something turns into something else” (177). The last sections of
the novel, with their numerous recapitulated images of rebirth, of
return, of rising, of reversal, are turnings, and turnings into something
else. Moreover, they are “drawn” into this turn by the momentary
charisma of the Rocket’s launch.
At the end of Gravity’s Rainbow the Rocket is a site of integration
and of outward potential. As it becomes fully identified with gravity,
the Rocket’s significance as centre shifts from a terminality to be fled
to a crucible in which dead matter is revivified, drawing objects
inward to unite and re-mold them. Rocket launching day is “a
Collection Day, and the garbage trucks are all heading north toward
the Ventura Freeway, a catharsis of dumpsters all hues, shapes and
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 127

batterings. Returning to the centre with all the gathered fragments of

the Vessels…” (GR 757). This echoes an earlier passage in which the
mystic concern with “Outer Radiance” is linked to myths of ultimate
return: “Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday,
somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home” (GR 148). The
Collection Day finally delivers Pökler’s “someday.” There is a
plausible apocalyptic reading of this passage, to the effect that the
gathering return to home is a last preparation for “the end.” However,
there is not only gathering late in the book, but also generation and
transfigurement, an insistence on outward movement and futurity. In
Lyle Bland’s own late turn, he finds that Gravity has, “having hugged
to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed,
transmuted, realigned, and rewoven molecules to be taken up again
[…]” (GR 590). Gravity is described as “messianic” (GR 590). Centre
here is significant as a locus for change, and—to extend the religious
or mystical tone of the earlier passage—the transmuting of wastes for
offering outwards has implications for the conversion of the Preterite
into potentially viable, electable spiritual vessels. This work of
redemption seems to be the work of the Rocket’s launch, drawing all
inward with its centripetal force, but at its heart, just as each
approaching figure begins to warp and to diffuse, offering
opportunities to pass through its vortex centre and look outwards,
much as Slothrop’s passing through turned him into a distended
positive force that could be widely scattered. That super-
comprehensive world hinted at in the “Outer Radiance” passages of
the novel’s first part becomes a figure for a certain kind of
enlightenment to be gained through crossing the zero, an
enlightenment that makes “purposive choice” more viable.
Gravity’s Rainbow eventually presents the making of such
“purposive choices.” Where Slothrop’s works after his turn represent
selfless small-scale kindness, when Pökler finally loses his struggle
against centripetal force he goes through a turn of his own and finds
that he has at last to care. The Dora concentration camp had been on
the other side of his workplace all along, and in his aversion from the
other side of the zero centre he had never known it. But moving
purposively into the darkest part of the abandoned camp, he finds a
woman and performs his one act of outward-looking care. He gives
her a ring, perhaps a symbol of a more positive cycle that he now,
beyond the zero, has access to (GR 433). The positive implications of
128 Ali Chetwynd

a zero-crossing become clear in that Pökler, the most determined

resister of centralizing pull in the novel, can yet cross the zero when
his resistance is exhausted, and begin to do good.

“But what’s north? […] what good’s a bearing?” (GR 706-07)

As the novel accelerates to its close, the Rocket—through an

identification with Gravity that proceeds from its increasingly explicit
centrality in the text—becomes a centre for change as its launch
approaches. It can offer the perspective for outward-looking
“purposive choice” and hence provide a simultaneous counterpoint to
its general conception as determinist hardware that denies change and
restricts choice. The Rocket can be figured as the crossable zero point
of a vortex because the imagery proceeding from the asymmetrical
operational rocket arc posits the Rocket itself as the centre of a spiral.
I have hopefully made clear to what considerable extent all meanings
of zero and of flight arc in Gravity’s Rainbow are contingent on
character-perception, but these are the ones that proceed from
practical ballistics as opposed to idealizations. Nevertheless, I also
hope to have shown that my alternative readings of the arc exist
concurrently with rather than counter to the existent readings that they
complicate.
The problem with attributing vortical structure to a work of art is
that the term has such historically vague connotations that the
specificity of the analogy cannot be taken for granted. Albright notes
that the Vorticists in the 1920s chose the vortex as their emblem not
because of any specific physics, but because it was a “pan-theistic
atom; deliberately neutral, applicable on the broadest possible field,
suggestive of no specific art form, only a focused dynamism” (9). In
my understanding, Pynchon uses the vortex differently from the
Vorticists precisely because he does not just use it as a figure of force
and dynamism, but employs its specific geometry in essential ways.
The specific ballistic analogies traced in this paper may help to
contribute to a framework for looking at notions of stability and
influence in Pynchonian structure, particularly as regards the way that
ideas of centre and boundary function. The scientific element may
also provide a perspective on how Pynchon ratifies or undermines the
various structural metaphors his texts offer. This relates to the ongoing
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 129

examination of which parts of Pynchon’s philosophy, his plots and his

worlds can be elaborated on what epistemological grounds, and thus
how we can hope to elaborate the “purposive choices” posited by the
text on any basis beyond pure skepticism.
To end on the level of mere geometry, though, the conception of an
alternative vortical structure to the rocket-arc and to the text—a
structure that begins with descent towards a terminus yet leads to a
look outward to compassion and purposive choice—provides one way
that Pynchon’s idea of zero as terminus and interface, his use of
circular motion metaphors for destructive teleological forces and
ongoing narratives of return, may be reconciled in a single structure
without endorsing an overt teleology.

Ali Chetwynd, University of Michigan

Notes
1
In terms of focus on the imagery of circle, wheel and rim, Thomas Moore’s The
Style of Connectedness is richer than Hite’s book, indeed truly comprehensive, but
does not deal in much depth with other circular metaphors.
2
It is a pleasingly elegant irony that what complicates the vision of the Perfect Rocket
Arc as a perfect analogue of entropic symmetry should itself be an entropic factor like
air-resistance.
3
The first section of the novel uses a great deal of gravitational rim imagery in its
distinctions between two spiritual worlds. This is particularly true of the passages on
“Outer Radiance” (e.g. GR 150). The idea of gravitational pull constituting a spherical
boundary layer that separates two states of existence is relevant to the latter part of
this paper.
4
In this section, the word ‘someday’ that characterized Pökler’s conversation with
Leni years earlier is repeated: “‘Someday,’ Pökler told her. ‘Perhaps someday to the
moon’” (GR 410). His dreams of escape constitute an indefinite target perpetually
postponed that correlates with the absent-centre structures of Gravity’s Rainbow
proposed by Hite, David Seed and others. However, as will be shown when I look at
labyrinth imagery, there are different centers for Pökler that are pressing and not
indefinitely postponable. Indeed, to be very literal, what is absent or perpetually
delayed for him is that escape which is outside the rim, and which a present
metaphorical gravitational centre denies him.
5
The text also contains mandala images that are associated with the forces of
determinism, such as Jamf’s fob (GR 413). In that instance the outer circle is bent into
straight lines, evoking the closing off of possibility, the delineation of rim-like
130 Ali Chetwynd

boundaries. It seems that there is a contrast between mandalas that establish new
boundaries and those that encourage movement towards the central ‘open limit.’
6
This negative tone to labyrinth imagery is one thing that makes it hard for me to
accede to the idea of Pynchon as a committed deconstructionist. As opposed to J.
Hillis Miller’s notions of labyrinth, especially his approving comment that each and
every text leads us to confront an “aporia […] that blind alley, vacant of any
minotaur” (112) at the heart of the text, Pynchon’s labyrinths certainly reflect a
different view; the centers of Pynchon’s labyrinths contain minotaurs referred to as
such. For Miller, text is labyrinth, authentic text performs labyrinth, and this is its
virtue. For Pynchon, it seems, labyrinth is some kind of inauthentic insertion between
experience and knowledge, self-awareness and agency, in other words between “text”
and the action it could prompt.
7
Although it is far too large an argument to engage with fully here, it is worth
considering what this labyrinth imagery might mean for the numerous readings of
Pynchon that see him endorse Derridean notions about the perpetual absence of
centre. David Seed for example writes, not specifically about the rocket, of “an absent
centre which paradoxically by virtue of its absence still attracts characters towards it”
(188). While it is certainly possible to think of absence attracting action as a vacuum
pump draws in water, it makes less physical sense to consider action motivated
outward by absence. Central force in Gravity’s Rainbow does not always attract, and
as with Pökler the action it induces is not always towards it. To exert a consistent
influence, as does the central pull of the rocket on Pökler, implies that even if the
centre cannot be touched or marked or notated, it is still present through its
measurable and unshifting influence. Pynchon makes it clear that mathematical
calculation of centre is not a guarantee of its objective existence (GR 700).
Nevertheless, this calculable centre remains practically useful in terms of its dictating
and our predicting action, just like the concept of centre in Gravity’s Rainbow as a
whole.
8
To hark back to the passage in which rocket arc and rocket centre are first linked,
Pökler’s thoughts here bind his own self-perception with earlier narratorial
speculation about the Rocket; the shape whose centre is a Brennschluss “is most
likely an interface between one order of things and another” (GR 302). Pökler’s wish
to establish a rest-point at interface-zero is in this respect a further rejection of an
already authorially hinted opportunity to change, a further subscription to the “order”
under which he suffers.
9
It could actually be argued that this last movement past Enzian is a change-enabling
crossing for Tchitcherine, and that to have “passed his brother by, at the edge of
evening […] without knowing it” (GR 735) is analogous to Slothrop’s unknowing
movement past/through the rocket launch site. This would be endorsed by the
similarity between our last reported action of Tchitcherine going “back to his young
girl beside the stream.” (GR 735) and the kind of outwardly directed compassion
(again, see Michael Harris’s paper in this collection) enacted by Slothrop after his
turn.
10
Hite’s consideration of Holy Center as a figure only of revelation (22) is interesting
for this topic. Again focusing on structure as innately teleological, she does not
Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow 131

consider that Holy Center may be a boundary between inward and outward
movement, essentially a point of change that is less important as revelation in itself
than the future its change makes possible.
11
There are numerous conceptions of vortex in different scientific fields where all
that is meant is a spiral with depth and motion. Toroidal vortices, on the other hand,
which are commonly studied in aerodynamics, operate on the lines I am describing
here. Certain quasi-mystical conceptions of energy and aether, of the sort that
Pynchon seems to have been interested in throughout his career, rely on the same
vortical model.
12
It is worth bearing in mind that electrons are often considered to be vortices. Given
the preponderance of electrical flow imagery in Gravity’s Rainbow, this notion of the
vortex as the vehicle of constant electrical flow between positive and negative
charge—the vehicle that makes electrical circuit possible—resonates with the ideas of
vortical structure I discuss here. I omit a full consideration of those resonances
because they are not directly contingent upon the circular geometries of the novel.

Bibliography
Albright, Daniel. Quantum Poetics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, and John Johnston. “Gravity’s Rainbow and
the Spiral Jetty, Part 1.” October 1 (Spring 1976): 65-85.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Walter Pater, a Partial Portrait.” Daedalus 105:1
(Winter 1976): 97-113.
Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983.
Mendelson, Edward. “Introduction.” Pynchon: A Collection of
Critical Essays. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1978. 1-15.
Moore, Thomas. The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and
Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987.
Schaub, Thomas. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1981.
Seed, David. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1988.
Slade, Joseph W. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Peter Lang Press,
1990.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Vintage,
2000.
 Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s
Graphic Impulse

Rodney Taveira

Abstract: In the photographic technique of contre-jour, the camera is pointed directly

at a source of light. The intervening figure is registered in sharp contrast that elides
detail, concentrating the image on a play of borders that focuses on shape and line. In
Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon employs contre-jour (and titles the novel as such)
to stage an encounter between the visual and the literary. Sean Cubitt’s digital theory
of the cinema is used in this essay to investigate the possibility of representation and
effects sought by Against the Day’s Futurist painter and anarchist, Tancredi. Working
in Venice, Tancredi rages against the “damnable stillness of paint” (AtD 586) in his
efforts to create an Infernal Machine of destructive transformation. Three pictures by
Luigi Russolo, René Magritte, and Umberto Boccioni currently hang in the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection in Venice and resonate with Pynchon’s representation of
visual culture and the work of Tancredi. Moving through these paintings and the
Futurist and Cubist movements, the association between “wound culture” (Mark
Seltzer) and photography is forged. The pataphysical and cinematic technology of the
“Integroscope” then animates photography, (re)producing the Barthesian punctum that
comes with the temporal aberrance of what Pynchon thematizes as “bilocation” (that
is, being in two places at the same time). Akin to Walter Benjamin’s “optical
unconscious,” what I call Pynchon’s “graphic impulse” plays out the tension between
the moving and the still image. Further, the content and form of Pynchon’s
representation of visual culture reveals the historio-graphy of his graphic impulse. His
focus on other sensorial modes of apprehending the visual—smell and sound—
complicates the encounter between the visual and the literary, coloring the ending of
the Against the Day with a darker tone.

of Spirits who dwell a little over the Line between

the Day and its annihilation
—Mason & Dixon

In one of the better reviews to appear upon the publication of Thomas

Pynchon’s Against the Day in 2006, John Clute wrote:
134 Rodney Taveira

Hundreds of characters, but hardly one you’d recognise in your dreams of

reading Against the Day for ever. They flicker in and out of view as though lit
from behind […]. The hundreds of figures who jam into Against the Day […]
are utterands: people-shaped utterances who illuminate the stories of the old
world that their Author has placed before us in funeral array; they are codes to
spell his book with. (par 22-23)

Apart from describing a mode of representation that utilizes a contre-

jour technique, Clute recognizes the cinematic temporality of
Pynchon’s obsessive evocation of light that flickers throughout his
“aubade” (par 23), where the coming day whitewashes “in funeral
array” the modernity to follow. Writing on that other vast medi(t)ation
of memory, Fredric Jameson notes:

I take it that Proust’s great theme is not memory but rather our incapacity to
experience things ‘for the first time’; the possibility of genuine experience
(Erfahrung) only the second time round (by writing rather than memory). This
means that if we stare at our immediate experience (Erlebnis) head-on, with a
will towards assimilating it all at once, without mediation, we lose it, but the
real thing comes in, as it were, at the corner of the eye, and while we are
consciously intent on something else. (32n10)

At the corner of our eye is that point of contrast between the light and
the dark, that forever collapsible, unresolved limit where opposites
exist in apposition. The photographic technique of contre-jour
exploits this undecidability between two ostensibly opposite states:
the camera is pointed directly at a source of light, the intervening
figure is registered in sharp contrast that elides detail, and it
concentrates the image on the play of borders, focusing on shape and
line.1
Pynchon employs contre-jour on numerous occasions in Against
the Day; one example among many is the disappearance of Alonzo
Meatman:

Around the edges of his form, a strange magenta-and-green aura had begun to
flicker, as if from a source somewhere behind him, growing more intense as
he himself faded from view, until seconds later nothing was left but a kind of
stain in the air where he had been, a warping of the light as through ancient
window-glass. The bottle he had been holding, having remained behind, fell
to the floor with a crash that seemed curiously prolonged. (AtD 410-11)

The ambiguous syntax of the “curiously prolonged” crash of the bottle

equivocates between a temporal and sonic reference, a product of
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 135

“crash” being onomatopoeic: the arbitrariness of signification is not so

arbitrary here, as the signifier sonically repeats the signified. It also
repeats the scene that assembles before the cameras of the Japanese
tourists in Telluride: “the ball took a bounce and hung there in midair,
just as if everything in the scene were trying its best to accommodate a
photograph or two” (AtD 292). The crash either came “too late,”
hanging in the air “longer than it should have” after it was dropped by
Alonzo as he disappeared; or, the crash of the bottle hitting the ground
sounded for “longer than it should have.” Both possibilities indicate
that something is out of joint. The ancient glass-window is an
outmoded screen (insofar as it can only work metaphorically) against
which this temporal multiplicity can play out. Light is warped,
refracted, staining a world forever changed by the flicker and
violation of chronology. Pynchon’s execution of contre-jour reveals
his awareness of the way Time violently undergirds visual media—
painting, photography, and cinema—as they appear and work in
Against the Day. The paintings in the novel play out this tendency
toward the cinematic, which might be seen to culminate in the ability
of the Integroscope to see into the future, bearing the light over the
ranges of time and place.

“Of course it’s to do with Time,” Tancredi frowning and intense […],
“everything that we imagine is real, living and still, thought and hallucinated,
is all on the way from being one thing to being another, from past to Future,
the challenge to us is to show as much of the passage as we can, given the
damnable stillness of paint.” (AtD 586)

So declares Tancredi in Venice, one of the major locations in Against

the Day: the famous glass-blowers of Murano provide the means to
read the Sfinciuno Itinerary leading to the fabled city of Shambhala; it
includes Isola degli Specchi, an island devoted to mirrors, good for
magic shows (especially making people disappear in conjuror’s
mirrors, like those used by the magician Zombini, who unwittingly
creates doubles that go on to lead lives separate from their originals,
constituting new lines of space-time); the Chums of Chance take out
the Campanile in St Mark’s Square (which actually did collapse in
1904) as they battle their Russian counterparts; Reef, Yashmeen, and
Cyprian execute their perversely immaculate conception of Ljubica
during “Carnesalve” (a counter-Carnivale that celebrates the flesh);
136 Rodney Taveira

and it is in Venice that the Futurist painter Tancredi attempts to

assassinate the evil billionaire, Scarsdale Vibe.
Venice thus provides a heuristic by which I am structuring my
argument around the manifestation of Pynchon’s graphic impulse in
Against the Day. This impulse is akin to the “optical unconscious”
Walter Benjamin discerns in the operations of the motion-picture
camera, where film came and “exploded this prison-world with the
dynamite of the split second” (“Work of Art” 265). The new modes of
perception made possible by the technological visuality of cinema,
with its range of shot scales, slow and fast motion, and its unique
practice of montage, reveals the habits and capacities of the visual
imagination. My formulation, while deriving value from different
theorizations of the cinema, encompasses the field of “visual culture”
writ large. In the Peggy Guggenheim collection situated on Venice’s
Main Canal hang three pictures that resonate with the representation
and theorization of visual culture in Against the Day. I want to say
that Pynchon himself saw these pictures when he spent time
researching in Venice, but, more importantly, I will draw out what
these pictures, and others, in their graphic, technical, and theoretical
specificity, reveal about Pynchon’s lifelong project of investigating
modernity—its Enlightenment roots, its bloody battles, and its
fascistic aftermaths. The first picture I want to discuss was painted by
Luigi Russolo, a signatory on the original Futurist Manifesto (Morgan
138). It is titled Solidità della nebbia (1912)—The Solidity of Fog.2
What is difficult to pick up in the online reproduction, but very
apparent in the original, is the way Russolo has mobilized the fog, and
what this mobility does to the figures. The space of the painting is
broken up into a series of striations that creates a dimensionality in
what is, following Benjamin, homogeneous empty space. Of course,
this space is never just empty nor homogeneous—it always has
dimensionality, always “There, but Invisible” (AtD 1083), to recite the
Chums’ motto by the end of the novel—but Russolo specifically
creates a sense of separate yet continuous spaces. We can trace this
line back to the Cubists who, along with the chronophotographic
studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, provided
the formal means by which the Futurists could attempt their project;
their works broke up movement and space into a series of
simultaneously perceivable moments. The “Futurist photodynamic
photography, cinema’s rival offshoot” (A.G. Bragaglia in Lista 21) of
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 137

the brothers Arturo Giulio and Anton Bragaglia displays Tancredi’s

urge to extend beyond the moment and to “show as much of the
passage” of “everything […] all on the way from being one thing to
another” (AtD 586). What is more, the fog, the nebbia (the Italian
word Pynchon also uses), has the effect of refracting the figures in
Russolo’s picture. For the figure on the centre right, this appears to be
an instance of double refraction, as a third figure is seen in apposition
to the initial copy, like a string of paper dolls. Unlike Cubism and its
Primitivism, depth is not eschewed, as Russolo represents the
contingency of space and position, and speed and velocity, which will
be discussed below.
Double refraction is a fundamental figure and device in Against the
Day. It was used in the Michelson-Morley experiment in an attempt to
detect the presence of the luminiferous aether;3 it occurs when
characters “bilocate,” that is, manage to be in more than one place at
the same time; and finally, it is a property of Iceland Spar, a common
calcite eagerly sought by many of Pynchon’s characters. Iceland Spar
was prized in experiments with optics due to its ready availability,
relative purity, and occurrence in large pieces. When it is placed over
an image, not just a double, but a treble appears—this, that, and the
other thing. The light from the original object is split into two beams,
and so there are two doubles, which means three instances, or
manifestations, of the object at the same time. Bilocation is also
trilocation.
Tancredi is again instructive: “‘In Venice we have a couple
thousand words for fog—nebbia, nebbietta, foschia, caligo, sfumato—
and the speed of sound being a function of the density is different in
each. In Venice, space and time, being more dependent on hearing
than sight, are actually modulated by fog’” (AtD 587). This is exactly
what was supposed to happen in the Michelson-Morley experiment if
the luminiferous aether existed—with light instead of sound. The
delay as the speed of sound changes, a phenomenon that like Alonzo’s
contre-jour disappearance is both temporal and sonic, allows a
genuine experience to occur, the lag becoming a form of writing or
commentary without which the thing is lost.
The second relevant painting that is exhibited in Venice is by René
Magritte, and is one of a series on the same subject, reproductions that
vary with their repetition. Its title is interchangeable, I think, with that
of Pynchon’s novel: Empire of Light (1954).4 The incongruity of this
138 Rodney Taveira

picture derives not from fantastic elements seen in other Magritte

paintings, such as the falling or floating men in bowler hats in his
famous Golconde (1964), but from the simple apposition of night
against the day: the blue and white of daytime loses its simple
opposition to the darkness of night as Magritte brings the two
together. Existing side by side, they take on a new mode of existence
as their boundaries push up against one another and become very
difficult to resolve.
This liminal play that destabilizes a consistent and central point of
focus is keenly figured in the tree that extends up from the space of
night and darkness into the bright, airy space of day; it is another
“unthinkable” tree, like those “blown ninety degrees” (AtD 796) by
the Tunguska Event (which Pynchon hypothesizes was the result of
Nikola Tesla unleashing an awesome power of light). The tree’s
extension into the day does not have the effect of its being
illuminated; on the contrary, its darkness becomes boldly apparent.
The tree exists as a kind of counter-part of itself as the weightless
daylight also simultaneously bears harshly upon the tree, hitting it
from behind, eliding any detail of branch or leaf. All we have is the
bilocational outline, the contre-jour limit that can now only signal
difference between light and its absence, as the tree exists in two
places at once, because the position of the tree becomes internally
separated by the temporal incommensurability of night and day.
The photographs of the Tunguska Event, “degraded nearly to the
most current of abstract art…blown the unthinkable ninety degrees—
flattened for miles” (AtD 796), are probably a reference to Pablo
Picasso and Georges Braque, who were just beginning their founding
movement into Cubism at that time. I would specifically cite Picasso’s
Maisonette dans un jardin (Maisonnette et arbres) (1908) and
Braque’s Houses at L’Estaque (1908), his reaction to seeing Picasso’s
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1908, initially only shown privately to
friends and fellow artists). The new kind of (previously)
“unthinkable” spatiality that emerges after the mysterious explosion in
the outer reaches of the mapped world indicates a shift at the level of
the human sensorium, something that fundamentally alters the
conception of space.
In both paintings trees and houses are removed from the primacy
of classical Renaissance perspectival representation. They recede,
impossibly, into a two-dimensional surface, appearing as the world
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 139

has been laid flat, evacuating depth. Light is used arbitrarily.

Pynchon’s conflation of painting and photography, emphasizing the
“copies of copies,” figures “the special conflict in which painting has
become enmeshed by the technological reproducibility of the image”
(“Work of Art” 264), and also the simultaneously representational and
anti-naturalistic art of Cubism.
Following this, I argue that the photographic and cinematic images,
but also those painted and theorized by the Futurist Tancredi, as they
appear and are described in Against the Day, partake of “wound
culture,” a concept Mark Seltzer conceives in his work on the
phenomenon of serial killing:

Serial killing has its place in a public culture in which addictive violence has
become not merely a collective spectacle but one of the crucial sites where
private desire and public fantasy cross. The convening of the public around
scenes of violence—the rushing to the scene of the accident, the milling
around the point of impact—has come to make up a wound culture: the public
fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a
collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound. (1)

This happens not only at the level of the human and the human body,
but also in the space in which this tearing open takes place. And so
readers witness the photos of limbless men in field hospitals,
“reproduced not in simple black and white but varying shades of
green” (AtD 968), the crowds at the execution of Blinky Morgan (AtD
66), the State-sanctioned serial murder of World War I, the
unthinkably flattened and recombined figures of movement in Futurist
paintings, and the curiously Cubist killer career of Deuce Kindred.
The serial killer as a definable category of person, or as Seltzer
puts it, as a “career option” (1), becomes possible toward the end of
the nineteenth century, with the solidification of industrial modernity
and the emergence of new technologies that triggered the movement
of people around urban centers, setting up a strangely crowded space
of anonymity in which Georg Simmel identified an “intensification of
emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and
internal stimuli” (325). This led to people’s need for new ways to
work out who they were and how they fitted in, which in turn led to
“ordinary” people performing extraordinary acts of violence to answer
these questions. Deuce Kindred is one of them:
140 Rodney Taveira

Deuce had been one of these Sickly Youths who […] had absorbed enough
early insult to make inevitable some later re-emission, at a different psychical
frequency—a fluorescence of vindictiveness. He thought of it usually as the
need to prevail over every challenge that arose regardless of scale, from
cutting a deck to working a rock face. (AtD 193)

A fluorescence of vindictiveness: here is murder as performance art, a

very modernist attempt at an assimilated subjectivity through the
execution of a series of strongly defined acts. What Seltzer would call
the “hypertelic violence” (45) of this performance—“hypertely” being
the “extreme development of size, patterns of behaviour, mimetic
coloration, etc. beyond the degree to which these characteristics are
apparently useful,” (OED, my emphasis)—is seen in Deuce’s
determination to prevail over every challenge, regardless of scale. In
order to combat the haunting he felt from the murder of Webb
Traverse, Deuce reasons that he “could go out and kill a whole lot of
other folks? and then I wouldn’t feel nearly as bad about just the
one…” (AtD 476), a characteristically mimetic act of the serial killer
that Seltzer notes is “a redundant violence that has routinely been
described as a tendency toward ‘over-kill’” (45).5
But we also see here a disregard for space, or at least a new
relation to it; fluorescence refers to the colored luminosity produced
by transparent bodies by the direct action of light, while luminosity
itself is an absolute insofar as it is independent of distance. Deuce
absorbs and re-emits (AtD 193) insult like a body absorbs and re-emits
light, but the re-emission involves some work by the penetrated body,
as it does not conform to conventional display—scale is not an issue.
This again points to a Cubist engagement with space, where “working
a rock face” (AtD 193) could as equally refer to a portrait of a person
as a landscape, and, as prosopopoeia, does. As Paul de Man notes in
his discussion of the figural language of prosopopoeia in Romantic
poetry, and William Wordsworth’s evocation of a mountainside as a
face (that is, a “rock face”): “Language originates with the ability of
the eye to establish the contour, the borderline, the surface which
allows things to exist in the identity of the kinship of their distinction
from other things” (91). This rhetorical spatiality describes the
relations of sameness and difference as well as the possibilities for a
bilocational confusion between self and other if language loses its
determining function.
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 141

Thus, Deuce is readily hired to kill the troublesome anarchist

Webb Traverse with a minimum of obstruction in the late-nineteenth-
century American West, but becomes a nocturnal serial killer that
stalks women in Hollywood in the 1920s. This attests to the effect of
space on those performing in it, the pressures of mise-en-scène or
milieu, what Seltzer calls “the subject’s assimilation to ground: his
melting into or fading into or being devoured by space” (45). Deuce’s
initial appearance to Lake displays this fluid and fuzzy conception of
subject and spatial relations:

What was it, exactly, that had started in to ringing so inside Lake, tolling,
bone deep, invisible in the night…was it the way his face that morning, even
with the smoke in the room, had slowly emerged into clarity? Like an old
memory, older than herself, something that’d happened before, that she knew
now she’d have to go through again…. (AtD 262)

Deuce emerges from the space, like an apparition (a degraded copy of

an original, a reproduction with its own type of aura, perhaps a kind of
Thanatoid6 deproduction), but also from time, like an old memory, as
if from a developing bath. The American West means Deuce can kill
with near-impunity—but only in this space. The mode of murder must
change when he moves into a cinematic, modernist milieu. The
exploitation of the visual and sexual, in pre-Hays Code Hollywood,
means Deuce focuses his murderous gaze on the specular and
spectacular: female, orgy-going movie extras.
This brings me to the third picture, a 1909 drawing by the
emblematic Futurist Umberto Boccioni. Again, the title proves
important, as it demonstrates the technique utilized by Magritte in
Empire of Light, and, as seen, by Pynchon in Against the Day. It is
entitled Controluce, or, as it is translated into “English” by the
curators of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Contre-jour. It is a
study for a later fully-colored painting of the same name, which shows
the woman, Boccioni’s mother, in her entirety. The charcoal study, a
singular object that has not been granted the ontology of reproduction,
is a portrait of a woman’s head in front of a window. She is backlit.
The window provides an easy point of separation between outside and
inside. The shading is executed in a series of parallel and
perpendicular lines. The woman’s head is shaded horizontally.
Everything on the other side of the window, and the window itself, is
executed in vertical lines. For present purposes, the most interesting
142 Rodney Taveira

part of the picture is what Boccioni has decided to do with the vertical
window frame that is situated behind the woman’s head. Instead of
stopping the vertical lines when they reach her hair, Boccioni
continues to draw the lines down into her face, where they intersect
with the horizontals, resulting in a new and singular density in the
picture, like that left by Alonzo’s disappearance, “a kind of stain in
the air where he had been, a warping of the light as through ancient
window-glass” (AtD 411). This plays out how the subject gives into
its environment, a disavowal of the eye’s ability to establish the
borderline, a mimetic representation of the milieu Boccioni had before
him, or the picture in his mind, when he made the drawing. When
faced with the apposition of different states of light—the frame of the
glass window that changes the outside light as it passes through—
Boccioni was met with, gave into, and then represented, to use a
single-sentence paragraph from Roger Caillois’s discussion of
mimesis, “a temptation by space” (28).

within the malodorous Grotto of the Selves… Something that knows, unarguably as it
knows Flesh is sooner or later Meat
—Mason & Dixon

Boccioni’s is the technique and ideology that Tancredi employs in

Against the Day, a vectorial version of the pixelated divisionismo that
seeks to break apart the “energies of motion, the grammatical
tyrannies of becoming” (AtD 587), to blow up the “dark conjugate”
(AtD 10) and access something else.

“Some define Hell,” says Tancredi, “as the absence of God, and that is the
least we may expect of the infernal machine—that the bourgeoisie be deprived
of what most sustains them, their personal problem-solver sitting at his
celestial bureau, correcting defects in the everyday world below…. But the
finite space would rapidly expand. To reveal the Future, we must get around
the inertia of paint. Paint wishes to remain as it is. We desire transformation.”
(AtD 586)

We see precisely this rapid expansion in finite space in Russolo’s

Automobile at Speed (1913). We have also seen a similarity between
Russolo and Tancredi in the subjects and execution of their paintings,
even the colors: “Tancredi’s paintings were like explosions. He
favored the palette of fire and explosion” (AtD 585). Here is the
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 143

specific desire for transformation that wishes to change, get beyond

stillness and inertia, while retaining something of itself—therefore
transformation, not metamorphosis.

Using his thumb against a brushful of orpiment yellow, he aimed a controlled

spatter of paint at his canvas, followed by another brushful of scarlet
vermilion and a third of Nurnberg violet— the target patch seemed to light up
like a birthday cake, and before any of it could dry he was at it with an
impossibly narrow brush, no more than a bristle or two, stabbing tiny dots
among larger ones. “The energies of motion, the grammatical tyrannies of
becoming, in divisionismo we discover how to break them apart into their
component frequencies…we define a smallest picture element, a dot of color
which becomes the basic unit of reality….” (AtD 587)

If we take Russolo’s 1911 Music as a manifestation of the colors,

impulses and techniques Pynchon describes in his ekphrasis of the
painting Tancredi uses for the demonstration of his theory, we see a
familiar trope occur in Hunter Penhallow’s appraisal of the work: “‘It
isn’t Seurat […], none of that cool static calm, somehow you’ve got
these dots behaving dynamically, violent ensembles of energy-states,
Brownian movement…’” (AtD 587). While the Pointillism of Georges
Seurat turns his luminous dots into a field approaching
monochromaticism, Tancredi’s paintings reject this stillness in their
urge to move beyond the single plane of their existence, toward an
“accelerated Pointillism,” to borrow Hanjo Berressem’s description of
Russolo’s paintings in his essay in this collection.7 Again, we have
scientific language used to describe art. Sean Cubitt writes similarly
on the lineage of the cinema:

There is a history of the processes of perception […]. The nineteenth century

moved from the physics of light to the physiology of vision. The twentieth
century shifted from the physiological thesis of retinal retention to the
cognitive theses of the Phi effect, from the eye smoothing over the gaps to the
brain by interjecting the “missing” elements of intermittent images. Looking
back from the twenty-first century, film’s visual coherence depends on
suturing light, eye, and brain, optics, physiology, and psyche—the ensemble
film theory calls the cinematic apparatus. In the pixel, film, retina, and mind
are not distinguished. The cut distinguishes them, then reassembles them into
an apparatus for organizing space and time. The atomic jostling of silver
nitrate grains produces a directionless flux of pure movement, independent of
beginning or ending like waves on the sea. Its oceanic primal temporality
becomes navigable only once the cut instigates endings: a delimited field of
vision, composited spatial relations, and the spatiotemporal assemblage of
shots into sequences. No longer adrift on the sea of duration, the spectator can
144 Rodney Taveira

now steer past chartered landmarks. The aimless event and its associated
reverie is spatialized, this preparing directionless duration for directional
temporalities like hiding and revealing, moving on, causality. (66)

In Cubitt’s theory, which draws on both art history and science, the
cinema is trilocational (and thus bilocational): pixel, cut, vector. The
single image in a filmstrip is defined as a pixel, a self-identical unit
that does not do much because it lacks the energizing force of
difference. Painting may only approach the Brownian movement of
film’s “atomic jostling […] the directionless flux of pure movement”
(Cubitt 66) since paint wishes to remain as it is, no matter how fine
the instrument that tries to control or motivate it. Tancredi can only
theoretically define the pixel and call it “the smallest picture element”
(AtD 587), a basic unit of reality. As a unit, self-identity precludes it
from identifying other things in which their “kinship of difference”
(de Man 91) allows them to enter into (symbolic, visual, chemical,
imaginary, kinetic) relations. The cut seen (or precisely not seen) in
cinema is the frameline. The Anarchist Tancredi rages against the cut
and its “grammatical tyranny” (AtD 587) as it acts as an entropic
organizing principle. He wants to deny this sorting mechanism and
bring his art and the world, in their constituent elements as pixels,
together in an anarchic assemblage.
Tancredi does not realize, or perhaps does not accept, that nothing
can happen in this state because difference is denied, and this is
precisely what the cut introduces. With only the pixel and the cut, we
have cinema as Tancredi’s hellish infernal machine, correcting defects
of the everyday world through the second sight of framing and
selection. Tancredi, like all the Futurists, is always caught in the lag of
mediation, and will be eternally and structurally frustrated in his
desire to effect change in the world. For all their looking to the future,
they are stuck in the present as they deny the cutting edge that reels
out along a vector, Cubitt’s third term in his theory of cinema. A
vector is anything that has direction and magnitude—a tendency, an
urge, a path, a becoming—formed by the cut, comprising pixels. The
Futurist obsession with speed, a value independent of direction, fails
to recognize the interdependence of velocity, a physical vector
quantity, speed with respect to its milieu. Tancredi’s frustration comes
from the directional temporality of his paintings that means they
cannot be finished—a section “seems to light up like a birthday cake”
(AtD 587), but Tancredi immediately goes past this as he uses a
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 145

single-haired brush in an attempt to get to the atomic level, to make

the paint move independent of the act of painting.
Quite surprisingly, Tancredi later reveals himself to be a
sentimentalist and confesses to loving Venice.

Dally thought she could see emerging from the glowing field of particles, like
towers from the foschetta, a city, a contra-Venice, the almost previsual reality
behind what everyone else was agreeing to define as “Venice.” These are in a
stack of canvases in a corner she hadn’t noticed before. They were all
nocturnes, saturated with fog. (AtD 587)

Again: “‘In Venice space and time, being more dependent on hearing
than sight, are actually modulated by fog. So this is a related sequence
here. La Velocità del Suono [The Speed of Sound]. What are you
thinking?’” (AtD 587) If we return to Russolo’s Solidità, we have the
picture of what Tancredi wants, the tableau-object of his desire, but
again not the thing itself. Solidità figures the speed of sound by
depicting its modulation in its striated space, and so also describes
Tancredi’s La Velocità del Suono. It is a nocturne, saturated by fog, in
which Tancredi represents almost exactly the same relation of audition
to experience as olfaction to the thing being detected when the Chums
catch “the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality—like
the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction” (AtD 10) when they first fly
in to Chicago. The two elements that keep the processes from being
exactly the same are telling, but both come back to the same
phenomenon: light. Firstly, olfaction involves exterior bits entering
into a kind of indexical dialogue with the perceiving subject; the
molecules of the thing being perceived act directly on the olfactory
receptors whether the subject likes it or not. Solidità and La Velocità
work differently. Perception occurs through a symbolic dialogue that
is mediated by waves of sound being modulated by the density of
space, mimicking the hypothesized movement of light through the
luminiferous aether. Of course, it is light itself that makes hearing
visually sensible in the paintings, and so the perceiver is
simultaneously a listening and seeing subject. Secondly, the painted
“fiction” is a nocturne; it is not “daylit” but requires an illumination
by the light of a historicized subject—Tancredi’s sentimentality is a
posture of and to the past, an affective bilocation that exists in the
here that is also the now and the then. The two-state existence of light
as particle and wave separates the Chums’ olfactory dark conjugate of
146 Rodney Taveira

the slaughterhouses, which exists only as particle (or pixel), from that
of Tancredi’s and Russolo’s paintings, which invoke but cannot
partake of both states of light. For this, we need not just a “related
sequence” (AtD 587) of images, but a contiguous, vectorial, cinematic
technology.

Mason has seen in the Glass, unexpectedly, something beyond simple reflection,—
outside of the world,—
—Mason & Dixon

This “thing itself” is the “contra-Venice” (AtD 587) that Dally detects
but cannot see directly in Tancredi’s paintings, what Pynchon calls
“the almost previsual reality behind what everyone else was agreeing
to define as ‘Venice’” (AtD 587). Dally only “thought” she could see
it “emerging,” reflecting what Jameson sees as the motivating impulse
for Proust’s project, the “incapacity to experience things ‘for the first
time’” (32n10). Compare this with The Book of Iceland Spar in
Against the Day, which contains “family histories going back to the
first discovery and exploitation of the eponymic mineral up to the
present, including a record of each day of this very Expedition, even
of days not yet transpired” (AtD 133, original emphasis). It seems that
there is something significant about a play with temporality, an urge
to circumvent the onward march of the day, to enact new and
different(iating) vectors of possibility.8 “In a different relation to time
anyhow,” to quote the librarian on The Book of Iceland Spar, “perhaps
even to be read through, mediated by, a lens of the very sort of calcite
which according to rumor you people are up here seeking” (AtD 133).
From this moment during the Vormance Expedition, still quite early in
the text, we have the intimation of a very important event that is also a
technology—the final resting place (at the end of the novel at least)
for Iceland Spar in Merle Rideout’s and Roswell Bounce’s
Integroscope, a play with light that can realize the dreams of Tancredi.
Both are caught up in death, the ultimate previsual reality. Following
the Icelandic librarian, I will concentrate on Merle’s and Roswell’s
Integroscope, which, to ignore the pataphysical explanations they
give, is the animation of the still image, its vectorial becoming, that
which the Futurist paintings could only fail to achieve.
“So smoothly Chick missed the moment, the photo came to life”
(AtD 1037). Enabled by the Lorandite that also powers the terrible Q-
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 147

weapon that can annihilate the world (AtD 563-67), the Integroscope
animates photography. It is also the manifestation-as-apparatus of
Emilio the pot dealer’s ability to see the future and the past by looking
into a toilet bowl. After he is asked by Lew Basnight to help in his
investigation of the missing Jardine Maraca, Emilio, magically aware
of the subject’s assimilation to ground, arrives to the scene of the
probable crime and heads for the bathroom. He writes down the
address of Deuce and Lake on the back of a picture postcard, which,
now inscribed, becomes the dark conjugate of what he saw in the
toilet bowl—“‘[b]ad, big…many bodies’” (AtD 1044), a visual
encounter guaranteed by death. Again, we have the second time round
of writing that allows the initial experience to creep in at the corner of
the eye.9
Emilio’s abilities and the Integroscope are complemented by
Lew’s experience of bilocation, the phenomenon that Pynchon
helpfully brings up again as Merle and Roswell explain their invention
to him (AtD 1050). But once he has been in contact with this
cinematic rendering of simultaneously being in different times and
places—being there in front of the Integroscope, and also seeing the
paths back and forth that the machine can trace, Lew experiences the
death that underwrites all copies of a singular event:

Lew kept a close but sociable eye on Jardine Maraca, […] yet somehow more
than everyday déjà vu, the old two-places-at-once condition, kicking up again,
he couldn’t be sure if he was remembering this now or, worse, foreseeing her
in some way, so that he had to worry about the possibility that not only might
Jardine Maraca be dead but also that it had not happened yet…. Intensely,
abruptly, she reminded him of Troth, his ex-wife from so long ago. (AtD
1058)

This is precisely what Roland Barthes describes in photographs of the

about-to-die as the punctum. Looking at a picture of a man nearing
execution, Barthes says: “The photograph is handsome, as is the boy:
that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the
same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an
anterior future of which death is the stake” (96). This description of
photographic “flat death” is nestled in Camera Lucida, a book whose
recognition of the melancholia of the photograph coincides with
Barthes’s mourning for his dead mother. Similarly, in this terrible
moment of the possibility of seeing death both before and after it has
148 Rodney Taveira

happened, Lew thinks of his ex-wife, who had to leave him over
twenty years earlier because of his awful “sin” that Pynchon does not
divulge to the reader nor even Lew.
The qualitative movement from the studium to the punctum is that
from what is intellectually but transitively interesting in the
photograph to an incidental yet (once recognized) indispensable detail.
This is how wound culture operates in Against the Day, how the visual
and the wound—Barthes describes the punctum as something that
“pricks,” a “sting, speck, cut, little hole” (27)—figures an
apprehension of temporality with which the three exemplary readers
in the novel, Miles Blundell, Lew Basnight, and Kit Traverse, can be
overwhelmed. This occurs simply by the clear perception of seeing
how things are, the possibility of genuine experience the first time
around:

“Sometimes,” Miles [says] with a strangely apprehensive note in his voice,

“these peculiar feelings will surround me, Lindsay…like the electricity
coming on—as if I can see everything just as clear as day, how…how
everything fits together, connects. It doesn’t last long, though.” (AtD 24)

There is the “new luminosity” that Lew experiences in Chicago,

where “[h]e understood that things were exactly what they were. It
seemed more than he could bear” (AtD 42). Lew “learned to step to
the side of the day” (AtD 44)—here is apposition, contre-jour. And
finally, Kit “saw it. The vectorial expressions in the books, surface
integrals and potential functions and such, would henceforth figure as
clumsier repetitions of the truth he now possessed in his personal
interior, certain and unshakable” (AtD 99). In these three instances of
direct perception, electricity, light, repetition, ephemerality, and
vectors function as figures of the perception, but are not what is
perceived. This cinematic material tends toward Erfahrung and can
even mimic it, but is not, cannot be, Erfahrung itself. However, a
common denominator we can derive from the cinematic, and the
mimetic writing of the cinematic, is an ability to manipulate, make
apparent, and stage-manage temporal modalities. In the final section, I
want to exhaust the connection between Tancredi and Russolo, where
the end of (the) painting becomes a transformation, extending along a
cinematic vector from the pixel and frameline in the one place and
time.
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 149

Spheres of Darkness, Darkness impure,— Plexities of Honor and Sin we may never
clearly sight, for when we venture near they fall silent, Murdering must be silent
—Mason & Dixon

Andrea Tancredi was met by fellow painter Hunter Penhallow in

anarchist gatherings in Paris, and converted to Divisionism after
seeing the works of Seurat and Paul Signac. “He sympathized with
Marinetti and those around him who were beginning to describe
themselves as ‘Futurists,’ but failed to share their attraction to the
varieties of American brutalism” (AtD 584). This follows a similar
path to Russolo’s entry into painting, as he was a signatory on the first
two Futurist manifestos, and exhibited alongside Umberto Boccioni
and Carlo Carra in Paris (Morgan 138). We already have seen the
similarity between their subjects, the execution of their paintings, even
the colors.
Unfortunately, you cannot match the biography of Russolo to
Tancredi beyond this point, as he is killed attempting to assassinate
Scarsdale Vibe, even though “[h]is hands were empty, […] nobody
found a weapon (AtD 742). Tancredi appeared to hold an object
“carefully, as if it might explode with the slightest jar” (AtD 742): it
seems he finally managed to build the infernal machine he theorized
when discussing his paintings with Lake (AtD 585-87). As the infernal
machine is “a bounded and finite volume of God’s absence” (AtD
742), it cannot exist in a positive sense. Tancredi alone could sense
the light and heat it emitted. He could not surmount the “damnable
stillness” of paint, and in his empty-handed assassination attempt that
ends in his unarmed death, Tancredi enacts the failure of Futurism to
live up to its declared program in its First Manifesto; his violent
demise evinces in the Futurist project precisely what Marinetti had
decried in an “old picture,” where one finds nothing “except the
painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers
which obstruct the full expression of his dream” (42).
Yet Russolo also stopped painting around this time because, in
simple words, it did not work for him anymore. His last painting, Case
+ Luci + Cielo (1913), “projecting motion through geometrical shapes
that extend both upward and outward in space, encircling one another”
(Morgan 139), pushes the limit of representational painting up against
abstraction. He had previously tried painting music; now he decided to
create it. Considered one of the founders of electronic music, Russolo
has become more famous for his intonarumori (“noise intoners,”
150 Rodney Taveira

machines that used electricity to create infinite timbre and pitch) and
ascribing the label of “music” to what had previously been called
“noise.”10 In his “Art of Noises,” a pamphlet of 1913 that was
presented as a letter to Francesco Balilla Pratella, the recognized
composer of the Futurist movement, Russolo conceives of the noise
that resulted from the invention of the machine as sound that broke the
silence of ancient life. Every noise has a note—sometimes even a
chord—that predominates in the ensemble of its irregular vibrations.
The predominant note makes it possible, Russolo claims, to fix the
pitch of a given note. This means not a single pitch, but a variety of
pitches without the note losing its characteristic quality—its
distinguishing timbre. The noise can be transformed without changing
its essence if you can, as it were, find its pixel. Particularly significant
are the incarnations of the intonarumori known as the “Howlers,”
which mimic the noise of a motor engine.
Moreover, Russolo devoted an entire chapter of his 1916 book
(also called The Art of Noises) to “The Noises of War.” The battlefield
serves as a model for modern listening and an art of noises, since in
combat the ear is much more privileged than in daily life: it can judge
with “greater certainty than the eye!” (27) But this is not a new
phenomenon—it has been happening in Venice for hundreds of years
because of the fog. We can see from Solidità that Russolo knew this.
The vectorial operations of this phenomenon reveal that the
transformations made possible by new technology, pushed too far,
metamorphose into fascism, that temptation to which the Futurists
famously folded.11

They were soon going so fast that something happened to time, and maybe
they’d slipped for a short interval into the Future, the Future known to Italian
Futurists, with events superimposed on one another, and geometry straining
irrationally away in all directions including a couple of extra dimensions as
they continued hellward […] which was actually Hell-of-the-future, taken on
into its functional equations, stripped and fire-blasted of everything emotional
or accidental…. (AtD 1070)

The picture here is that of Tancredi’s infernal machine in motion, its

irrational straining of geometry, already seen in Cubism, plunging Kit
and Rezno straight into the Hell-of-the-future. Readers of Pynchon’s
past fiction, for example of the future captured in Gravity’s Rainbow,
know this future to come by a kind of bilocation that is the product of
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 151

Pynchon’s project and recognize that this airplane will be transformed

into a supersonic Rocket as it is “taken on into its functional
equations” (AtD 1070)—as we knew “back” in the eighteenth century
of Mason & Dixon, “murdering must be silent” (MD 769).

Approaching the speed of sound […] Kit had a velocity-given illumination

then. It was all political.
The strike in Torino was crushed without mercy, strikers were killed,
wounded, sent into the army, their deferments canceled. Renzo’s picchiata
had been perhaps the first and purest expression in northern Italy of a Certain
Word that would not quite exist for another year or two. But somehow like a
precognitive murmur, a dreamed voice, it had already provisionally entered
Time. (AtD 1071)

Again approaching Tancredi’s painting, La Velocità del Suono (The

Speed of Sound), but denying the inertia of paint through movement,
Kit is given an illumination by velocity, not speed; as noted, velocity
is a physical quantity vector, while speed itself is an absolute scalar
value. Velocity needs the additional information of position in order to
be defined. Speed is the pixel of velocity, position its frameline, its
cut—the vector is the combination of these two that define its
tendency. The pixel and frameline, speed and position, vibrate
together, like the sound of Russolo’s howlers,12 precognitively
murmuring the Fascist future to come. As if looking through Iceland
Spar or the Integroscope, we see a record of days “not yet transpired”
(AtD 133, emphasis original).
This ambiguous future haunts Against the Day until its end, and it
sounds a darker tone for the supposedly happy ending of the Chums
flying toward grace.

May we imagine for them a vector, passing through the invisible, the
‘imaginary,’ the unimaginable, carrying them safely […]. A vector through
the night into a morning of hosed pavements, birds heard everywhere but
unseen, bakery smells, filtered green light, a courtyard still in shade… (AtD
1082-83)

We may, mais oui, but the sky-born vehicle of this passage (which is
both Pynchon’s prose and the vector on which the Chums travel) has
negative potential, with its “slum conditions” and ability to strike
ground-dwellers with “hysterical blindness” that makes them “end up
not seeing it at all” (AtD 1084). The description of “the vector through
the night”—the passage—employs all the different sensory
152 Rodney Taveira

modulations we have seen combine in cinematic fashion: the

modulation of sound indicating position without the aid of vision, the
unavoidable indexicality of olfaction, the green light of the postcards
of horrific war scenes, a courtyard about to emerge in a contre-jour
play between light and dark. Further, in his 1913 pamphlet, Russolo
quotes from Marinetti’s onomatopoeic poem, “Zang Tumb Tumb,”
which describes his experience at the Battle of Adrianople during the
First Balkan War through a kind of second sight. It ends with, “the
orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in
the high sky round golden balloon that observes the firing” (24). This
is an air balloon as a musical note, a surveillance of silence, the
Chums of Chance co-opted into Russolo’s music-noise enterprise that
celebrates war, speed, and death. “Now and then,” Walter Benjamin
warned, “one hears of something ‘reassuring’ such as the invention of
a sensitive listening device that registers the whir of propellers at great
distances. And a few months later a soundless airplane is invented”
(“Theories of German Fascism” 122). There may be no escape for the
Chums: they have either always been this soundless airplane (as they
suspect before breaking with their unknown High Command), or they
will fall prey to the Rockets that will come across the sky that they
will never hear, no matter how loud they may scream.

Rodney Taveira, University of Sydney

Notes
1
The French translator of Against the Day, Christophe Claro, blogged his formidable
project. Originally indicating he would translate the title as “Face à jour” in January
2008 (“Le style c’est l’ohm”), this changed in May 2008, apparently in line with “a
decision of the author himself [in English in the original]” (“Contre-jour”) who
wanted the French version of his book to be called Contre-jour. My thanks to
Clémént Levy for bringing this to my attention and translating the relevant entries into
English.
2
An online reproduction is available at the website of the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice: http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese/collections/artisti/
dettagli/pop_up_opera2.php?id_opera=404&page=
3
This “failure” of the experiment is generally considered to be the first strong
evidence against the theory of a luminiferous æther. It involved directing a beam of
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 153

white light onto a half-silvered mirror, which split it into two, reflected the beams
back and forth, extending their length. The Earth was supposed to be moving through
the æther, and so a kind of wind should have been detectable by variations in the
speed of light, depending on the different rates at which the Earth moved and spun.
No variations were observed. Of course, this does not stop Pynchon from utilizing the
rhetorical possibilities of the æther.
4
An online reproduction is available at the website of the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice: http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese/collections/artisti/
dettagli/pop_up_opera2.php?id_opera=404&page=
5
It may be a little slippery or presumptuous to take as given that we can talk about
Deuce as a serial killer—he is never named as such, and he does not conform to the
“classical” characterization: cold, calculated, charismatic. However, he fits in with the
standard definition of killing more than one person with a cool-off period in between
killings, and his difficulties in childhood also partake of the standard etiology (Seltzer
4-10).
6
“Thanatoid” means “‘like death, only different’” (VL 170). The Thanatoids are a
population of morose zombies who linger in the realm of the living because of karmic
injustice, and also because as “we are assured by the Bardo Thödol, or Tibetan Book
of the Dead, that the soul newly in transition often doesn’t like—indeed will deny
quite vehemently—that it’s really dead” (VL 218). Thanatoids are inveterate watchers
of television. If Takeshi Fumimota is correct, this demonstrates another instance of
the subject being assimilated to ground: “Takeshi’s opinion being television, which
with its history of picking away at the topic with doctor shows, war shows, cop
shows, murder shows, had trivialized the Big D itself. If mediated lives, he figured,
why not mediated deaths?” (VL 218)
7
We may recognize the urge, even if we do not see its realization—the gap between
what the Futurists said they wanted to do, or were doing, and what they actually
executed, was large. Even R. W. Flint, who in his swooning introduction to
Marinetti’s Selected Writings manages to pair the words “tame” and “Fascist” in
simple and congruent juxtaposition (4), admits the “bristling charm and bravura” of
Marinetti’s prose in the manifestos he signed “may often be a more than adequate
substitution for the works that followed” (4).
8
See Inger H. Dalsgaard’s essay in this collection.
9
To extend my reading of the cinematic here, it might be interesting to think about
how Slavoj Žižek describes the experience of cinematic spectatorship in his Pervert’s
Guide to Cinema, where looking at the cinema screen is the same as looking into a
toilet bowl, a perverse and traumatic experience, an Aristotelian scene of suffering:
“Desire is a wound of reality. The art of cinema consists in arousing desire to play
with desire, but at the same time keeping it at a safe distance—domesticating it,
rendering it palpable. When we spectators are sitting in a movie theatre looking at the
screen—remember at the very beginning before the picture is on it is a black, dark
screen and then there is light thrown on, are we basically not standing at a toilet bowl
and waiting for things to reappear from the toilet? And is the entire magic of spectacle
shown on the screen not a kind of deceptive lure to conceal the fact that we are
basically watching shit, as it were?” The comment is delivered in, and in the context
154 Rodney Taveira

of, the bathroom in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, a film that hinges on
sonic inflection and the asymmetry of sight and sound.
10
The best account of Russolo’s musical career and biography is to be found in
Barclay Brown’s introduction to his translation of Russolo’s The Art of Noises. That
Russolo ended up a penniless mystic whose last piece of writing was a book on
Theosophy seems entirely appropriate.
11
But not Russolo: it must be noted that he was the only Futurist not to join the
Fascist Party.
12
There are only two gramophone recordings of Russolo’s original machines. They
are titled “Corale” and “Serenata.” These are two compositions written by Russolo’s
brother Antonio, and scored for several intonarumori and a small orchestral ensemble.
The 3:58 track titled “Risveglio di una città” is a series of demonstrations of the
sounds of the intonarumori performed with reconstructions made at the Venice
Biennale. The reader is directed to approximately 1:15 into “Risveglio di una città”
for an approximation of this sound of the picchiata. My thanks to Luciano Chessa for
the detail of the recording history of the intonarumori, and for the sonic dimension he
opened up during a performance of Marinetti’s “Zang Tumb Tumb” in Sydney in
2009.

Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans.
Richard Howard. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theories of German Fascism.” Ed. by Ernst
Jünger. New German Critique 17 (1979): 120-28.
—. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility.” Selected Writings Vol. 4. 1938-1940. Ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2003.
Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” Trans. John
Shepley. October 30 (1984): 16-32.
Claro, Christophe. “Contre-jour.” [Weblog entry.] Le Clavier
Cannibale. 6 May 2008. 15 May 2010 <http://towardgrace.
blogspot.com/2008/05/contre-jour.html>.
—. “Le style c’est l’ohm.” [Weblog entry.] Le Clavier Cannibale. 24
Jan. 2008. 15 May 2010 <http://towardgrace.blogspot.com/2008/
01/le-style-cest-lohm.html>.
Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse 155

Clute, John. “Aubade, Poor Dad.” Rev. of Against the Day, by

Thomas Pynchon. Sci-Fi Weekly. 27 Nov. 2006. 15 May 2010
<http://www.scifi.com/sfw/ books/column/sfw14197.html>.
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
de Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984.
Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in
the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Lista, Giovanni. Futurism and Photography. London: Merrell, 2001.
Marinetti, F. T. Selected Writings. London: Secker & Warburg, 1972.
Morgan, Robert P. “‘A New Musical Reality’: Futurism, Modernism,
and ‘The Art of Noises.’” Modernism/Modernity 1:3 (1994): 129-
51.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: The Penguin Press,
2006.
—. Mason & Dixon. London: Vintage, 1998.
—. Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990.
Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises. Trans. Barclay Brown. New York:
Pendragon Press, 1986.
Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound
Culture, New York: Routledge, 1998.
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Modern Life.” 1904. On
Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1950.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Dir. Sophie Fiennes. P
Guide Ltd., 2006.
 As Far as Pynchon “Loves Cameras”1

Clément Lévy

Abstract: This essay studies photography as a technique and a metaphor in Thomas

Pynchon’s novels (from V., 1963, to Against the Day, 2006). As an object, a
photograph is very commonplace, but it can also be a fetish and, in some cases, a
crucial conveyor of information. Using the critical work of Paul Virilio, I show how
photography, after it has become a dreadful weapon in Pynchon’s works, smashes the
ordinary continuity of space and time to pieces. It gives way to contemporary political
and ethical problems about which Roland Barthes felt much concern. This could
explain why Thomas Pynchon hasn’t let any photographer approach him for more
than forty years while he publicly stated his love for cameras.

Photography addresses some of the most famous themes in Thomas

Pynchon’s novels: media, memory, and surveillance. It is one of the
oldest and most persistently recurring technologies in his works.
Moreover, Pynchon builds many important metaphors around this art,
as I will try to show. And yet, as a person, the author has fought many
times to prevent any publication of his own photographic image. This
paradox will introduce my reflections on the part that photography as
a technique (and also as an art) plays in Thomas Pynchon’s novels up
until Against the Day (2006). I will discuss a number of passages
where photography is described, in order to show how it is used in
Pynchon’s novels to convey information and to represent an
opposition to the writer’s freedom of creation when he describes
objects and persons that do not exist in the set of references—space-
time—that photography for a long time was thought to best represent.
Thomas Pynchon chose to appear publicly on TV screens as a
character in two episodes of season 15 and 16 of The Simpsons, the
cartoon series produced by Fox Broadcasting Company. In his first
appearance he is asked by Marge’s editor to dictate a blurb for her
novel, The Harpooned Hearts, a sentimental and shorter version of
Moby-Dick. This is what he tells her: “Here’s your quote: ‘Thomas
158 Clément Lévy

Pynchon loved this book. Almost as much as he loves cameras.’”

Shall we take his words seriously?
During this twenty-second speech he is talking to the editor by
telephone and is obviously joking about his legendary media shyness.
It has been reported that in 1963 Pynchon eluded a photographer sent
by Time Magazine to take his picture in Mexico City (Teresi, Ketzan).
Since then newspapers and magazines can only display pictures which
date back from his college and navy years, from sources unknown, or
the infamous paparazzo shot that is too indistinct to make a difference.
Yet once cartoon Pynchon has hung up the phone, he faces the
street and calls out to indifferent passers-by to take a photo with him
under a gigantic billboard that reads “Thomas Pynchon’s House.
Come on in!” He adds: “Hey, over here, have your picture taken with
a reclusive author! Today only, we’ll throw in a free autograph! But
wait, there’s more!” This would suggest that Thomas Pynchon really
likes cameras and wants to have his picture taken.
The fact that the autograph is offered “today only” seems to show
that Pynchon is used to welcoming lots of fans in his neighborhood
for these strange photo sessions: this is pure non-sense, as the author
is hiding his face under the now famous brown paper bag. He is very
well-known for his secrecy. Pynchon neither likes Marge’s novel nor
cameras. The billboard and signs are a way of showing this very
clearly. Nevertheless, two years after this ambiguous declaration of
love to cameras, Pynchon’s published Against the Day, a novel in
which photographers and descriptions of different photographic
processes abound to such an extent that there is a need to reconsider
photography in Pynchon’s works in general. I want to address this
need in the present essay.

Pynchon focuses on photography both as an optical and a chemical

process, and while it is one among many technologies central to his
works, it is also one of the oldest. Against the Day represents both
balloon-aeronautics (which began in the 1770s) and photography
(invented around 1839) with the Chums of Chance and Merle Rideout
respectively, among other characters. Yet one historical person was
both a balloonist and a photographer, and he may have inspired the
author. Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, took pictures of the most
famous artists of his time, like Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire,
Gérard de Nerval, Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, or Sarah
As Far as Pynchon “Loves Cameras” 159

Bernhardt, and as early as 1855 he even tried to develop aerial

reconnaissance using balloons and photography. However,
photography in Pynchon’s work is much more than a historical
marker. The very presence of photography on a large scale, and every
step of the history of this technique, forms a significant aspect of his
novels, as I will show in the following.
Pynchon includes many different types of cameras and
photographic processes. Some of them are very famous, as the Kodak
Brownie (from 1900 to the 1960s) in Against the Day, used by Wren
Provenance to document her research on Ute vestiges, and by Merle
Rideout after his apprenticeship with heavy tripods, wooden chambers
and glass plates:

As years went along, the film got faster, the exposure times shorter, the
cameras lighter. Premo came out with a celluloid film pack allowing you to
shoot twelve at a time, which sure beat glass plates, and Kodak started selling
its “Brownie,” a little box camera that weighed practically nothing. Merle
could bring it anywhere as long as he held everything steady in the frame, and
by then—the old glass plate folding models having weighed in at three pounds
plus plates—he had learned to breathe, calm as a sharpshooter, and the images
showed it, steady, deep, sometimes, Dally and Merle agreed, more real,
though they never got into “real” that far. (AtD 72)

The much smaller and more accurate 24x36 LEICA camera is also
mentioned by its brand name in V. (the company has been producing
cameras from 1925 to the present day), as it is used by Teflon to steal
pictures of Paola Maijstral and Benny Profane making love:

Groan, went the bed. Before either of them knew it:

Click, went Teflon’s Leica.
Profane did what was expected of him: came roaring off the bed, arm
terminating in a fist. Teflon dodged it easily. (V. 19)

This German camera is very famous among photographers (notably

because its shutter is very quiet, and the lenses very sharp and clear),
and Henri Cartier-Bresson did much for its reputation, calling it “the
extension of [his] eye” in the introduction to The Decisive Moment.
Michael Naumann, who was CEO of Henry Holt publishing company
(1996-1998) and became the German Secretary of Culture (1998-
2001), said in a radio interview that Pynchon once told him that what
all he wanted for his birthday was an old LEICA camera from the
160 Clément Lévy

1930s. Not surprisingly then, throughout Gravity’s Rainbow German

cameras are highly valued and used as a means of exchange:

Pirate, driven to despair by the wartime banana shortage, decided to build a

glass hothouse on the roof, and persuade a friend who flew the Rio-to-
Ascension-to-Fort-Lamy run to pinch him a sapling banana tree or two, in
exchange for a German camera, should Pirate happen across one on his next
mission by parachute. (GR 6)

For American soldiers, cameras are part of the spoils of war in the
Zone, “champagne, furs, cameras, cigarettes” (GR 302), and they were
used on the black market, as Säure Bummer recalls: “‘Remember how
the Wilhelmplatz used to be? Watches, wine, jewels, cameras, heroin,
fur coats, everything in the world’” (GR 370).
Cameras and photographs are mentioned so frequently in
Pynchon’s novels because they became part of everyday life in
Western cultures during the twentieth century. Photographic portraits
are everywhere, and everyone keeps pictures of their loved ones or of
people they admire. We can find “oversize photos of John Dillinger”
in the bar called Chicago in Gravity’s Rainbow’s Berlin (GR 374), and
when Mayva Traverse meets Stray Briggs near the end of Against the
Day, they exchange tintypes of their sons Jesse and Reef (AtD 980-
81). The sentimental mood of this encounter is made stronger by the
contemplation of pictures showing cherished but absent people.

Yet photography’s foremost function is to gather and communicate

information. Tourists take photographs of their travels to remember
them and show them to their friends once they have returned home, a
cliché Pynchon often exploits. It is parodied when the guide who leads
Slothrop down to the Mittelwerke in Nordhausen offers to rent him a
camera (GR 300), but the parody is most effective when it is
combined with that of national stereotypes. The Japanese in Against
the Day, as in Vineland during the strange Chipco incident, cannot
seem to help taking snapshots. Each member of the “Japanese trade
delegation” in Telluride “carried a pocket Kodak with its shutter
ingeniously connected to a small magnesium flashlight, so as to
synchronize the two” (AtD 292). And when in the Cosmopolitan
Gambling Club Merle Rideout tries to warn them against a nervous
Bob Meldrum,
As Far as Pynchon “Loves Cameras” 161

[a]ll at once, magnesium flash-lights were exploding everywhere, each

producing a column of thick white smoke whose orderly cylindrical ascent
was immediately disarranged by attempts of customers, in some panic, to seek
exit, the unexpected combination of brightness and opacity thus quickly
spreading to fill every part of the saloon. (AtD 293)

This great uproar is all the more funny as it sounds anachronistic. Yet
the tourists taking pictures of a traditional scene of the West are also
performing a pyrotechnical display, photography being a
technological show in itself.
This use of the photographic medium and its practice as a way to
build photo albums and put souvenirs together is quite harmless, even
when it drives a whole assembly of gamblers and drinkers to descend
into such mayhem. However, as it is also used for political purposes, a
shadow of mistrust is cast on photography. Spying relied on
photography in the twentieth century, whereas for ages it had only
relied on traitors. In Gravity’s Rainbow, aerial photo reconnaissance is
so widely used by Allied intelligence that “these days, with so much
death hidden in the sky, out under the sea, among the blobs and
smears of recco photographs, most women’s eyes are only functional”
(GR 235). Later in the novel there is a direct mention of Constance
Babington-Smith, a WAAF2 officer whose mission was to decipher
reconnaissance photographs, and who first identified a V-1 on its
launching ramp (GR 740). Of course, we also remember how Teddy
Bloat used his “midget spy-camera” (GR 17) to take a picture of
Slothrop’s map, “click zippety click” (GR 19). Modern spying
techniques have rendered the photographer obsolete, however, as
automatic cameras take pictures of areas under surveillance, and these
photographs are taken by satellites which have been on orbital flight
since the 1960s. The camera thus became ubiquitous, and from then
on most of the photos taken are discarded after careful study because
they do not convey the information desired. Modern spying
techniques thus created a new space of control where the now
classical conception of a space-time continuum does not make sense
any more. This is what the French architect Paul Virilio, in The Lost
Dimension (originally published as L’Espace critique in 1984), calls
“speed-space” (96). According to the author, this concept has many
applications for modern warfare, geopolitics, and social control. As
satellites glide around the Earth, they automatically record and
transmit digital pictures that are used to control troops on the ground
162 Clément Lévy

and missiles in the air. These recent advances in mass destruction,

developed during the Cold War, are addressed specifically in
Pynchon’s works. Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland help illustrate the
danger of war industries, simply because “[t]he true war is a
celebration of markets” (GR 107). But the new ways of finding and
transmitting strategic information do not correspond with the author’s
interest in photography, even if the objects described by Paul Virilio
in The Lost Dimension are creations that originate in the desire to
control military operations from above through optical devices. Air
reconnaissance gave birth to satellite surveillance, but digital pictures
took the place of photographies, and thus the image as an information
medium disappeared: it was replaced by an ever-changing flow of
electronic signals, pure speed without any space. We thus can read in
Pynchon’s novels the entire story of photography from its origins and
its use for military purposes until the disappearance of the
photographic picture in the very domain where it was supposed to
play a major role: war and intelligence.

As even the most powerful states can decline in a few years, we must
remember that every photograph is momentary and bears a strong
relationship to death. As a polaroid picture appears in a moment of
chemical revelation, older pictures in family albums tend to fade
away. In the process of its making, a silver print reveals itself to the
photographer when he plunges the sensitive paper into the developer
bath after projection of the negative film. It is not by accident that
Pynchon compares the Raketen-Stadt in Gravity’s Rainbow to a
photograph: “it resembles a Daguerreotype taken of the early Raketen-
Stadt by a forgotten photographer in 1856: this is the picture, in fact,
that killed him—he died a week later from mercury poisoning after
inhaling fumes of the heated metal in his studio” (GR 740). Here, as in
Against the Day, Pynchon displays an extended knowledge of the art
to his readers. The fluid metal also used in alchemy gives access to a
fatal understanding of the city through its photographic representation.
Of course, Raketen-Stadt “the ceremonial City, fourfold as expected,
an eerie precision to all lines and shadings architectural and human,
built in mandalic form like a Herero village” (GR 740) has a perfect
architectural and symbolic organization. But its form is always
changing: “there seems to be building, or demolition, under way in
various parts of the City, for nothing here remains the same, […]
As Far as Pynchon “Loves Cameras” 163

engineering changes to the Rocket create new routes of supply, new

living arrangements, reflected in traffic densities as viewed from this
unusual height” (GR 740). From high above the city (possibly from a
balloon?), the viewer can imagine the life of its inhabitants, and the
growing of the organism it constitutes with the rocket assembly lines.
We should add that a daguerreotype, a picture left on a metal plate
after an exposure to the natural light, is quite difficult to look at. One
has to alternatively lower and raise one’s gaze in order to understand
plainly what is printed on the plate. This could explain why the image
of this city is constantly changing. Another hypothesis could be the
uncertain situation in time of this ideal city. It is a strange vision of the
future for the main characters of the novel who see the first attempts
in rocketry, but if it is portrayed on a Daguerreotype, it could also be a
utopian metropolis of the 1850s.
Yet the most striking aspect in this passage is the way an
imaginary object, the Raketen-Stadt, is compared to an imaginary
photograph the narrator describes to the reader. This happens many
times in Pynchon’s works, and it deserves close attention because
unlike postmodernist writers who include pictures—drawings,
photographs, typographical assemblage—in their fictions (e.g.
William T. Vollmann, William Gass, or W. G. Sebald), Pynchon
seems to prefer to compare an object of his fictional world with a
fictional photograph which is absent from his work. In V., the plastic
surgeon Dr. Shoenmaker uses photographs as an evidence of real facts
opposed to zany theories:

“So with Lamarck, who said that if you cut the tail off a mother mouse her
children will be tailless also. But this is not true, the weight of scientific
evidence is against him, just as every photograph from a rocket over White
Sands or Cape Canaveral is against the Flat Earth Society.” (V. 47)

Of course, Pynchon’s novels are full of the phenomena despised by

Dr. Shoenmaker, from the Hollow Earth to Bigfoot, UFOs and the
underground mail system W.A.S.T.E. But such fantasy is a realm
where photography is totally useless.
However, by way of metaphor, on some occasions Pynchon has his
own imagination meet the photographic picture. In Against the Day,
when Miles Blundell goes for a bicycle ride in Flanders with Ryder
Thorn, he has a strange feeling that is compared to entering a
photograph:
164 Clément Lévy

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. (AtD 553)

Miles has not gone through the looking-glass, but he finds himself in a
bright and shiny world, silent, filled with scents, but bearing the
anachronistic stain of a future catastrophe that turns out to be World
War I. The photographic images bear the morbid aura that Roland
Barthes perceives in every photo. In his essay on memory and
photography, the semiologist writes:

in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a
superposition here: of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists
only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence,
the noeme of Photography. (Barthes 76-77)

The thing that will have been there (the ça-a-été: “that-has-been” as
Barthes puts it) may be found on this page of Against the Day, as the
peace of a summer that precedes the horrendous massacres and
trenches that are described in Brigadier Pudding’s story in Gravity’s
Rainbow (GR 78). Here, the comparison with a photo allows a pause
that fixes a landscape forever in a form that is bound to disappear.
Pynchon describes photographic images for the fatality they entail. In
Vineland, this darkness of death looming in every picture becomes a
reason to produces pictures and films, when young activists of the
24fps collective document the repression of junkies and left-wing
activists in the 1960s, claiming that “[a] camera is a gun. An image
taken is a death performed” (VL 197). This brief anarchist manifesto
sentences capitalists to death, and Frenesi as the camera-operator is
the executioner, as her daughter Prairie discovers later. But it is also
worth a remark that the People’s Republic of Rock ’n’ Roll movement
in which Frenesi is involved is also closely watched by her lover
Brock Vond (she even gives him her films). Vond is a federal
prosecutor, and at the College of the Surf, during the revolutionary
events,

No hour day or night was exempt from helicopter visits, though this was still
back in the infancy of overhead surveillance, with a 16mm Arri “M” on a
As Far as Pynchon “Loves Cameras” 165

Tyler Mini-Mount being about state of the art as far as Frenesi knew. (VL
209)

Aerial surveillance is also used much later in the novel, during the
War on Drugs in Vineland County led by Kommandant Bopp. The
“former Nazi Luftwaffe officer” leads “helicopter and plane crews” of
voluntary “antidrug activists” (VL 221). The reconnaissance
techniques even involve the use of airborne radar equipment:
“AWACS planes in the air round the clock” (VL 222).

For Thomas Pynchon, photography is a key element of twentieth-

century history because it gives form to our representation of the
world, an idea described in a similar way by Jean Baudrillard when he
makes simulation a crucial concept for his study of our societies and
art forms. The fact that photos are everywhere, and that they do not
mean much once they have had their effect on the consciousness and
triggered decisions that are always political, helps define the camera
as a ubiquitous and panoptic substitute of the eye to which not
everybody is given access. But in a fictional world cameras instead
become images of an eye that is taken everywhere, and of a gaze that
can lead to considerable knowledge but also to dreadful consequences,
as in the case of the Mason-Dixon line, which is run across the open
space of America after every point of it has been fixed by astronomers
gazing at the stars through their optical instruments. The precision of
Pynchon’s discourse on photography, and the ways he uses it as a
theme and as a metaphor, makes me think that he loves cameras as
much as he fears them.

Clément Lévy, Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne

Notes
1
I wish to thank my research center, the CELEC, and Jean Monnet University in
Saint-Etienne, from which I received the financial aid that made my participation in
International Pynchon Week 2008 possible.
2
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.
166 Clément Lévy

Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans.
Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux), 1981.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1952.
Ketzan, Erik. “Literary Titan Thomas Pynchon Breaks 40-Year
Silence—on The Simpsons!” Spermatikos Logos. Ed. Allen B.
Ruch and Larry Daw. 20 Feb. 2004. 15 May 2010 <http://
www.themodernword.com/pynchon/ketzan_simpsons.htm>.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
—. Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
—. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. London: Vintage, 1996.
—. V. 1963. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
—. Vineland. 1990. London: Vintage, 1991.
Teresi, Dick. “Haul Out the Old Cliches, It’s Time to Shoot an Author
Photo.” The New York Times, 12 Dec. 1993.
Virilio, Paul. The Lost Dimension. Trans. Daniel Moshenberg. New
York: Semiotext(e), 1991.
 A Medium No Longer:
How Communication and Information Become
Objectives in Thomas Pynchon’s Works

Georgios Maragos

Abstract: Media and networks of communication are abundant in Thomas Pynchon’s

works and are, as many critics have underlined, of prime importance in the
understanding of the American author’s universe. In fact, they are so significant that
they cease being means to an end and become the goal itself. “There’s a real
conversion factor between information and lives,” as is stated in Gravity’s Rainbow; a
side in a war does not gain advantage by acquiring information, but information is
why wars are happening in the first place. In this essay, I intend to describe the
various forms that media acquire within Pynchon’s work until they escalate to their
quasi-mystical qualities in Against the Day. On a first level, media are described as
factors for the shaping of consciousness in the modern-day era. Popular culture is the
agent of this creation of reality, and it is brilliantly described and exploited within
Pynchon’s world. On a second level, there is, without doubt, control. Media become
not only the means for an invisible authority (“They”) to control people, but also an
aspect of them. On a third level, we encounter the almost religious side of media.
They fill the seat of an absent god, a god that modernity can no longer tolerate. Media
and those who manipulate them, but at the same time are manipulated by them,
become omniscient and omnipotent, making control work in a decentered, subtler, yet
more powerful way. In the end, everything, science and technology included, seems to
start from and result in information. It is the workings of this process that I aim to
analyze.

Media, as Friedrich Kittler suggests, “determine our situation”

(Gramophone xxxix), and they also define, to a certain degree, the
works of Thomas Pynchon. We live in a world where information and
knowledge are not simply commodities, but perhaps the most
important assets of the current political, social and economic systems,
and media are their carriers. If a writer’s task is, among others, to
capture, decode and transform the Zeitgeist into art before it is given a
stable form by theory, then Pynchon is one of those writers capable of
168 Georgios Maragos

transcribing into novels the effects of the information age on humans

long before we had a solid understanding of the changes brought on
our nature by the communications revolution. He also works in
parallel with pioneering theorists, such as Norbert Wiener or Marshall
McLuhan, who were trying to decipher how those rapidly advancing
technologies were operating. However, in art, theory, and scientific
and technological advancement, there is no such thing as
parthenogenesis, nothing is born ex nihilo, and Pynchon seems to have
realized that from the very beginning. Instead of writing about the
contemporary era directly, he prefers to comment on it by finding the
roots of our present condition both in the distant (Mason & Dixon) or
the recent past (Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day). On the other
hand, the novels most abundant in explicit and implicit references to
information and media are those set in the postmodern age (The
Crying of Lot 49, Vineland). This paper seeks to tackle the problem of
how media are presented in Pynchon’s writing by focusing on all his
works, but mostly on Vineland and Against the Day, even if this study
could indeed be a book-length consideration of media in his novels.
Before I start to discuss the importance of media in Pynchon’s
novels, I would like to clarify how the word media and other terms are
going to be used in this essay. Since Pynchon is considered a
postmodern author (with all the practical and theoretical problems this
characterization brings), I will use Fredric Jameson as my guide to
mapping out media, even though there are other theorists more
specialized in them. Jameson states that “the word media conjoins
three relatively distinct signals: that of an artistic mode or specific
form of aesthetic production, that of a specific technology, generally
organized around a central apparatus or machine; and that, finally, of a
social institution” (67). These three aspects are not enough to define
media; the first “signal” permits the examination of Pynchon in
relation to the media both from the inside and the outside of his
works. The second gives us the opportunity to examine the
communication process in a broad sense so that both interpersonal and
mass communications can be included in the analysis, and the third
will help us analyze their effects. However, additional concepts will
be required, such as information systems or communication networks,
in order to embody the whole process of communication along the
lines of Claude Shannon’s famous schema.1
A Medium No Longer 169

I will try to show here how media, and the information they carry,
acquire such a central role in Thomas Pynchon’s works and for his
protagonists, so that they cease to be a means to an end but become
objectives in themselves. Not even wars in the world of the American
author happen for patriotic or territorial reasons, nor are they fought
for the (economic) welfare of the people:

Don’t forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and
the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The
mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as
diversion from the real movements of war. (GR 105)

And later: “Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it

any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the
only real medium of exchange?” (GR 258)2 Fighting and death in the
war, then, serve as a spectacle, however real they are and regardless of
how much pain they cause; nonetheless, wars themselves are fought
among technologies and media for the control and distribution of
information. Though the word medium is perhaps slightly misleading,
since it suggests that there is a middle ground that works as a bridge to
transfer a message from the transmitter to the receiver. In an ideal
situation the medium should be transparent, leaving the message
intact, but this is never the case, not even in verbal communications.
In fact, quite the opposite is true, and Marshall McLuhan’s famous
phrase “the medium is the message” and its implications are the best
summary of the situation. There will always be noise, and the
information transmitted will always be affected by the means of
transmission.
Keeping this in mind, I will demonstrate the role information
systems play within Pynchon’s novels, and how they can become the
primary objective in them. In other words, media do not merely serve
the purposes of those who seek power and of those who plan to
overrule it; they are not a means to an end, they are the final
destination. In fact, one could even argue that there is no individual or
collective (but nevertheless human) will behind the machinations of
the information systems. Enzian’s dilemma in Gravity’s Rainbow
about whether to blame people or Technology is not one that acquires
a resolution. Admitting that there is “somebody with a name and a
penis” (GR 521) who controls the flow of information is his own way
of humanizing the unknowable. However, at the same time he admits
170 Georgios Maragos

that there is a “planetary mission […] perhaps centuries in the

unrolling” (GR 521). There is no clear answer, and the subsequent
analysis will be based exactly on this elaborate obscurity.
Networks of communication in Pynchon can be found in three
basic forms, all interconnected and dependent on each other. The first
involves the shaping of the human experience of the world and its
modification by the media. The second relates to the power which can
be exercised through the media and the mechanisms for that
implementation. The third and most “magical” form deals with media
acquiring a transcendental identity, and it is closely related to similar
analyses that have been made about science and technology being
used in a corresponding fashion.
The first form stems from McLuhan’s aphorism. Here we are
dealing with the configuration of reality and the shaping of human
consciousness through media. When Nietzsche got his first typewriter,
which completely altered his way of writing, he said that “our writing
tools are working on our thoughts” (Kittler, Gramophone 200-06). In
our electric and electronic age, in our age of image and information,
our reality is not only influenced by our media, but it is created by
them. Perhaps the prime example of this can be found in Vineland,
where television not only plays an important part in the characters’
lives, but makes them adjust those lives to its commands. Most
characters, from Prairie and Zoyd to the extreme case of Hector
Zuñiga, understand the world through their favorite television series
and the conventions of that medium. For example, the phrase “prime
time” is used twice in the novel not to indicate anything on TV, but to
denote the time of day, even though no TV is on (VL 194), or to
signify Justin’s change of interests from his “newly met” grandfather
to the television programs (VL 370).
Right from the beginning of the text, when Zoyd needs to commit
an act of public madness in order to continue getting his check, his
decisions on how to do this are altered by the entertainment industry.
What is most important here is not that the various local channels
have made Zoyd alter his plans, but the fact that his act needs to be
public and on TV in order to exist; this is only the tip of the iceberg of
a much larger plot. Pynchon’s America of the 1980s, and
subsequently the whole world, has reached a state where the rule is: if
the TV does not say it, then it is simply not true, or in opposite
fashion, if the TV does say it, then it must be true.3 In our society of
A Medium No Longer 171

the spectacle, as Guy Debord would have it, “everything that was
directly lived has moved away into a representation” (1),4 and that is
where a contaminated truth lies.
Even though there is a clear distinction between television and film
in Pynchon’s novels, especially in Vineland, where the 24fps group
works as a counterbalance to TV, one can say that cinema plays, to a
lesser degree, the same role as television in both Gravity’s Rainbow
and Against the Day. “Cinema is equated with or placed among the
other cultural and scientific-technological forces that have shaped
modern consciousness” (Marquez 167). In Gravity’s Rainbow, Jessica
Swanlake tries to make sense of the war and her situation by resorting
to cinematic metaphors and analogies (GR 628), while in Against the
Day, in a discussion between Merle Rideout and Roswell Bounce, the
fact that people “can’t have enough” movies is referred to as “another
disease of the mind” (AtD 456). Against the Day is set in an era where
moving pictures are starting to evolve out of still photographs, and
Pynchon is at his best when describing this transition and its effects on
human consciousness.
One such effect is brought about by the transformation of time
through media, an aspect I will address by juxtaposing the relation of
time to film in Against the Day and to television in Vineland, in order
to see how this relation evolves through the timeline of Pynchon’s
fiction. According to Roswell Bounce in Against the Day, the film and
the movie projectors, which are built like clocks, manage to trivialize
time, to impose a single course from beginning to end (AtD 456-57). It
is the same Bounce and Rideout who, by the end of the book, manage
to construct a projector-like machine (AtD 1036) that can show the
past, present and future of a person, based only on a photograph, thus
releasing time from the confines of film, or film from the confines of
time. In Vineland, however, Pynchon describes time as “cut into
pieces” (VL 38), mainly because of television. Vineland’s America has
an “ever-dwindling attention span of an ever more infantilized
population” (VL 52), exactly because television has fragmented and
destroyed time, signs of which can be found retrospectively in Against
the Day.
These effects indeed go far deeper than those already covered.
According to McLuhan, our technologies, especially our media
technologies, have the power to alter the state of a whole nation and
regulate its behavior (30). Vineland is based on exactly that
172 Georgios Maragos

assumption; it shows a population conditioned, in the Pavlovian

manner of Tyrone Slothrop, to experience the world through
entertainment. The Vomitones manage to win their audience by
applying “an old show-tune tactic American audiences are
conditioned to meet with applause” (VL 105). As McLuhan puts it,
“the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or
concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and
without resistance” (19). In that sense, media work under the surface,
which leads us to the second aspect of communication networks
within Pynchon’s writings: the imposition of power and control.
The literature on this subject is immense, and the forms that power
and control take have been identified as key issues in the postmodern
novel in general and the novels of Pynchon in particular. But how are
media involved in this procedure, and how do they become the most
important part of this system? The answer is quite simple: without
today’s media technologies, power and control in their current form
would be impossible. It is easy to understand that, since the media
have the power to form reality and shape the consciousness of people
and groups, even on a national scale, and they have the ability to point
them in the desired direction. This can occur in various ways.
According to Kittler, information systems fill the so-called leadership
vacuum, reducing it to zero (Gramophone 94), depriving individuals
of their autonomy and leaving them with the illusion of free will.
According to Jean-Francois Lyotard, communication networks, and
the way they are used by the decision makers, lead to an increase of
the system’s efficiency, which in turn leads to a legitimation of power
(xxiv). For Guy Debord (who quotes Lewis Mumford), one does not
even have to go that far, since it does not matter how the media are
being used. It is enough that they isolate people and keep them away
from the streets (172).
There is, however, an alternate path we can take. Around the time
when Pynchon was starting to write his novels, the new science of
cybernetics set out to study the properties of messages and of the flow
of information. To define cybernetics one needs to combine
communication and control (Wiener 16). Of course, control here can
simply mean the way a person is handling a machine or even the way
a machine is handling another machine, but Norbert Wiener, the
founder of cybernetics, went to great pains to show that this control
can move on to social phenomena. It is the study of messages that can
A Medium No Longer 173

explain to a great degree how power and control are exercised in

society. Wiener considered the World State, Aldous Huxley’s
futuristic global dystopia, to be inevitable exactly because the
messages of the decision makers can reach the far ends of the world
(92). We can see here that our information technologies (and I use the
term information in its broader sense to include computers, without
excluding more traditional media) do not only allow or facilitate such
a situation, but practically impose it, because they are manufactured in
a way that allows it.
This is not the first time, of course, that cybernetics has been
linked to Pynchon’s work. In fact, he does it himself in the
introduction of Slow Learner (SL 12-14), where he describes how he
was influenced by Wiener’s study The Human Use of Human Beings
in order to write his story Entropy; there are also numerous studies5
analyzing the ways Pynchon juxtaposes informational entropy with its
traditional use in physics in all of his work, but mostly in The Crying
of Lot 49 (Nefastis’s machine with Maxwell’s Demon being the prime
example used). In this essay, however, there is an effort to converge
cultural criticism with those notions in cybernetics—such as the
possibility of Huxley having predicted a future that is closing in—that
can be considered the results of informational entropy. In a sense, we
can reach the same conclusions by either using Lyotard’s analysis on
the production of knowledge or Wiener’s idea of entropy within the
information systems; both options are viable and justified by
Pynchon’s writings, and it is not difficult to deduce how he fits in this
picture. Communication networks and media technologies (in other
words, closed cybernetic systems) are the tools with which these
decision makers, these nameless high commands, exercise their
power.
Conspiracy theories and paranoia are never far in this field. What
is even more important is the struggle between the upper echelons and
the people who stay outside the dominant communication networks,
those who belong to a past world and cannot keep up with the modern
way of things, the preterite, as they would be called in Gravity’s
Rainbow; and it is true that the alleged enemy is almost invisible. The
manifestations of this enemy are either mysterious yet unimportant, or
only seemingly powerful personalities, like Pointsman, the scientist;
Deuce Kindred, the lackey;6 Brock Vond, the ambitious middle-man;
or the communication devices themselves. Examples of the latter
174 Georgios Maragos

abound throughout Pynchon’s works. One characteristic example is

the notorious Tesla device in the airship of the Chums of Chance,
which receives messages from an unknown source, messages which
are effectively orders, deciding the actions of the crew. The reader can
never be sure about the loyalties of the Chums of Chance, at least not
until the end when they effectively go rogue, and there must also be
doubt as to whether the commands from the Tesla device come from a
powerful organization with hidden interests at all. We never learn who
is behind this machine, and in the end it does not matter; Pynchon has
once more established a so-called “They-system” (GR 638), which
can either account for every inconvenience those outcasts face or be
an excuse for their paranoia, a trait they have in common with so
many of Pynchon’s other characters.
Paranoia is closely linked with the circulation of information and
media technologies. The possibility of an all-embracing conspiracy
(and the subsequent paranoia) is only viable if there is a
communication network to build and support it. Once more, modern
media and information systems fuel the power of the decision makers
against the individuals. Computers in Vineland and their ability not
only to store, but even to change every detail of the lives of the people
are one form of this network. Zoyd knows that Hector Zuñiga “could
crush him with just a short tap dance over the computer keys” (VL
27). The “College of the Surf” was originally created to help “all
levels of command” (VL 204) in their quest for control, and the
courses taught there were “law enforcement, business administration,
the brand new field of Computer Science, admitting only students
likely to be docile” (VL 204). We can see that for Pynchon the
mechanisms of control rely on three different yet interconnected areas:
law, business, and information systems. To put it differently, the
acquisition of power counts on controlling the actions, the money, and
the knowledge of people. The corporate interests, so abundant and
obvious both in Gravity’s Rainbow and in Against the Day, need
extensive information and knowledge, especially in the modern world.
In fact, “the scale of activity of the transnational corporation is
unthinkable without the new information technologies” (Schiller 95).
Fredric Jameson suggests that

our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer

network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper,
namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism.
A Medium No Longer 175

The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and

fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some
privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and
control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole
new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself. (37-38)

For him, technology is a gateway, our way of understanding a system

that has assumed a life of its own and is beyond our comprehension.
This presents an excellent transition from the second to the third
aspect of media in Pynchon’s worlds, which are the magical, mystical
or even religious forms they take. Here media are even more closely
related to technology, and one should keep in mind Arthur C. Clarke’s
third law of prediction: “any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic” (21). In Pynchon, however, science
fiction does not need to project a future, anticipating upcoming
achievements. Every single miracle or wondrous invention is justified,
with few exceptions, by the technology available at the time the novel
takes place, or by the scientific theories that were prominent then
(even if they were proven false later in historical time). The
technologies of today are already present in the time of Pynchon’s
novels, only in Pynchon’s case practice goes as far as theory, and
there is no clear distinction between the two. In other words, what can
only be done in (even obscure) theory is probably already done in the
fictional world of his novels. Mason & Dixon with its mechanical,
talking, invisible duck and the balancing of the bathtub is indicative of
the pattern Pynchon follows. In Against the Day it is mostly media
technologies that acquire mystical properties. Conversations via gas
pipes, the Tunguska event being perhaps the result of Tesla’s effort to
emit radio signals intended for communication, the method of hiding
messages in pearls, and the Integroscope that can tell the past, present
and future of a person just by feeding a photograph into it are all
examples of how media and communication networks escape the
narrow boundaries of mediation. Similar cases can be found in all of
Pynchon’s novels. What is the Schwarzgerät if not a technological
miracle which carries a death message into the future? Besides, the
V2s themselves are parts of a communication network, since Katje
sends a message to Pirate Prentice in one of these rockets. At the same
time when magic turns into machine, our philosophy, as Kittler
suggests, deliriously makes the machine turn back into magic again
(Gramophone 77).
176 Georgios Maragos

Pynchon is not trying to invent a new religion of technology. His

critique is aimed at capitalism and the godlike qualities that
technology, and especially media technology, has allowed it to take.
Harold Bloom calls Pynchon a “playful Kabbalist” (250), but that
corresponds to the author’s style, the structure of his novels and his
erudition; his stance is highly political, in the manner of Walter
Benjamin who, in one of his earlier texts, tried to read capitalism as a
religion (288-91), which takes us back to the matter of power and
control. The way Pynchon describes them, media technologies and
communication networks seem to both acquire for themselves, and
give to the decision-makers, certain God-like qualities: because of
these information systems, those in power become omnipresent,
omniscient and omnipotent. However, all these properties can be
refuted, and this refutation is essential for Pynchon, as we will see
later on. Since those nameless high commanders become so powerful
because of these communication networks, it becomes difficult to
distinguish one from the other. In fact, in this case, these networks are
the equivalent of the Holy Ghost, if one wants to take the analogy
even further. The information gathered and the means with which they
are gathered become as important as the power they bestow, so they
end up being an objective themselves; and not only that, they also
become an inherent characteristic of that same mysterious power that
hides behind them. We have come full circle, and we can now see
why wars take place between technologies and information.
Yet Pynchon’s comments on today’s interconnected society and
the capitalist system run even deeper. Not only does he discern in
science and technology the properties of a deity, he also sees in them
the concepts that have replaced God in a world that operates without
needing one. If humans need a spiritual myth, then it is not up to the
old religious miracles to keep it alive, but to the new, secular miracles
of technological advancement. Every single peculiarity in Mason &
Dixon is both deeply founded within the Age of Reason—apart
perhaps from the Learnéd English Dog and the eleven lost days of the
new calendar—while at the same time opposing Reason whenever it
becomes too constraining. Traces of this mystical aspect can be found
throughout Pynchon’s writing. Scientific discussions among the
characters in the novels can often take religious tones, especially in
Against the Day, though they may sometimes appear comical. A
conversation among Vectorists and Quaternionists about functions and
A Medium No Longer 177

the possibility of their describing the Eternal Return is turned into a

religious matter when a Christian makes an analogy with born-again
believers. In another instance, the explanation of how it is possible to
communicate through the gas pipes is transformed into an esoteric
issue by describing those who use this system as part of a cult, and by
etymologically connecting gas with chaos.
There are two ways to approach this connection along with the
information systems and the communication networks. Firstly, one
can say that if there is any analogy between a particular technology
and God that is stronger than the rest, it is media technologies that
deserve this place, as they are indeed at the center of our every action.
In fact, they are so important that our age has been named after them,
that “labour and capital, the central variables of the industrial society,
are replaced by information and knowledge as the central variables”
(Kumar 12). The computer and the Internet are two inventions around
which scientific knowledge is being created and distributed. We have
reached a moment in time where we need supercomputers to carry out
calculations that we cannot perform. Our own creations have
surpassed us not only in what they can do, since we have always
invented devices that would make certain operations of our lives
easier, but also in what they know and how they can use this
combination of knowledge to enlighten us. We have no use for a
memory of our own as long as everything is stored in large data
banks. “Every microprocessor,” writes Kittler, “implements through
software what was once the dream of the cabala; namely, that through
the encipherment and the manipulation of numbers, letters could yield
results or illuminations that no reader could have found”
(Gramophone 247). In fact, we need to put restrictions on the
computational machines we make so that the production of knowledge
does not surpass our own abilities of comprehension.
Pynchon knows that, but he does not need to describe the computer
in order to provide an image of how media technologies can be used.
Still, it is the computer system in Vineland that offers the most vivid
representation of a communication network that can take control of
every aspect of human life. Pynchon also offers us a complete reversal
of the metaphor mentioned above by comparing God to a hacker,
where zeros and ones are the lives and deaths of people. Frenesi has
these thoughts when she goes to cash a check, the last one from her
superiors before she starts to run from them: “We are digits in god’s
178 Georgios Maragos

computer,” she says, “[…] and the only thing we’re good for, to be
dead or to be living, is the only thing he sees” (VL 91). This image,
however, tells us more about computers and media technologies than
it does about an absent God, especially when the night manager of the
store explains to her how the computer works: “‘The computer […]
never has to sleep, or even go take a break. It’s like it’s open 24 hours
a day…’” (VL 91). The computer, for Frenesi and for Pynchon, has
turned into a sentient being without any human needs and defects. It
rises above humans and is given the ability to know and control, if not
all, then a considerable number of important aspects of their lives. It is
not a paradox that a machine can achieve more than a human. From a
cybernetic point of view, there should be no distinction between a
machine and an organism; what does matter is its competency in
handling and, subsequently, manipulating the flow of information. If
the traditional religions give man some of the qualities of God, then
today’s faith in technology and science can give the exact same
qualities to human accomplishments. Pynchon’s characters are often
awed by things that are man-made, yet outside their intellectual grasp.
The second approach is related to the first aspect of media
mentioned above, and it has to do with how knowledge and
information are produced through science and technology, and with
the people who control these processes. Lyotard writes in The
Postmodern Condition that “science and industry are no more free of
the suspicion which concerns reality than are art and writing” (76).
Lyotard’s arguments proclaim that within the capitalist system,
science is not really searching for truth but for power; this happens
because, in simple words, science is costly and the people who do the
funding decide what is being researched. To put it differently, the
knowledge produced is the knowledge demanded or determined by the
nameless commanders, who belong in the corporate world rather than
in the governments. This is exactly the case of Scarsdale Vibe in
Against the Day. His every action is dictated by his will to acquire
power, to eliminate his enemies and, in the end, to manipulate the
truth. This is most apparent in his stance regarding Kit Traverse.
The decision-makers, with their ability to circulate this knowledge-
on-demand by controlling the communication networks, acquire once
more, and from a different path, omnipotence and omniscience. In the
end, all this power comes from information, and at the same time it is
is directed toward information. Under the technological advancements
A Medium No Longer 179

of our era, as McLuhan would put it, “the entire business of man
becomes learning and knowing,” and “all forms of wealth result from
the movement of information” (64).
That was a different route that took us, once more, close to the
conspiracy theories that run through Pynchon’s works. In the end, as I
have already mentioned, it all comes down to the struggle of the
individual to make sense of all the connections that are around him or
her, but not quite within his or her grasp. Pynchon is not only trying to
offer a glimpse of the invisible, powerful system that encompasses the
world, but also to describe the possibilities of resistance to those
networks of communication that try to control the individuals.
Pynchon’s protagonists are the hunted or the excluded, and they have
found themselves unknowingly in the middle of a conspiracy they
cannot fully understand, which results in paranoia. John Johnston, one
of the most prominent experts on the matter of media and literature,
claims that in Gravity’s Rainbow “paranoia no longer designated a
mental disorder, but rather a critical method of information retrieval”
(62). In other words, paranoia itself is a method of resistance, because
it forms a new information system which counteracts the
communication networks of the upper echelons. Tyrone Slothrop does
not decide to resist and then go on a hunt across Europe to retrieve
information. There is never such a decision; he resists exactly because
he goes on a hopeless chase to find information that will help him
understand his condition. Some characters in Vineland are not so
brave and, like Frenesi, become part of the system, only to be betrayed
by it once more. On the other hand, Slothrop’s punishment for not
complying is his integration with the environment, his complete
disappearance from this world. They do not absorb him, but do not
give him the chance to live by his own free will either, and finally the
noise or nuisance that is Slothrop fades out completely; either that, or
disappearing was his ultimate act of non-compliance. In Pynchon’s
world, where the commentator’s despair takes a whole new meaning,
one can never be certain.
It seems that Pynchon’s version of a “They-system” not only
allows resistance, but in fact predicts it and desires it, because it has
the ability to increase the system’s performance. Norbert Wiener, in
his study of messages, says that the higher administration relies not
only on controlling the messages that it sends, but also on the
information that is coming upstream from the lower levels towards
180 Georgios Maragos

them (49). It does not matter if this feedback is positive or negative; it

results either way in the proliferation of its effectiveness. If there is
any hope that comes from this resistance, it reminds us of the hope
that Kafka described. There is an infinite amount of hope in the world,
but not for the people (Brod 61). The hope belongs to God (or
whatever malevolent being has replaced the God concept in
Pynchon’s world).
Individuality, in the end, can only exist in those nooks in the social
structure where information, and hence control, is either missing or is
incomplete. Just like life can exist only in those places of the universe
where entropy is resisted and organization can appear, in the same
way individuals can exist outside the commanding communication
networks and inside their own. In Gravity’s Rainbow the counterforce
or anarchist network is almost as mysterious and powerful as its
capitalist counterpart, perhaps exactly because they tend to be
predicted and anticipated by the dominant system and to become a
mirror of it. In The Crying of Lot 49, the Tristero, for example, is a
powerful tool for people who want independence from a central
administration. It is also, however, a carefully kept secret, and its true
uses or potential are never revealed to the reader. Maintaining this
uncertainty shows that a successful anarchist group should be as
unknowable as the quasi-omnipotent They-system. The main
difference is that Pynchon seems to sympathize and to follow those
who are most afflicted by an invisible authority and whose role in the
flow of information is that of the conduit; to borrow the terminology
from information technologies, the protagonists, like Slothrop or Kit
Traverse, are never the end-users, irrespective of how much they think
they are.

To conclude this paper, I would like to point out that I have only
referred to the content of Pynchon’s works whilst neglecting the form.
Pynchon plays with the information he provides to his readers as
much as he troubles his characters with the information they are
acquiring. His own novels are immense labyrinths of data, from which
one can hardly distinguish what is actual information and what is
noise, if indeed there is any noise. The question of noise in particular
can be very effective in the analysis of the form of Pynchon’s novels.
Which pieces of information are there to further the plot, and which
are there only to puzzle the reader? Some reviewers of Against the
A Medium No Longer 181

Day complained about Pynchon not completing some subplots and

apparently forgetting about some of his characters. This, however, can
be interpreted benevolently as either of the following: a) a purposeful
disorienting technique (i.e. noise), or b) an attempt at creating a novel
inside a larger world (though not necessarily our own) where things
do not begin and end within the covers. An important question arises
from this issue of signal and noise: Pynchon is an artist, but he is also
a producer of information, and as such he may easily be regarded as
part of that system and as part of its effort to predict resistance. Leo
Bersani, in his article “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature,” describes it
best in relation to Gravity’s Rainbow:

Literature, far from saving us from controlling designs served by information

systems, is itself an information system that threatens its readers’ freedom by
the very elusiveness of the demands which it makes on them. The
unreadability that is the sign of the novel’s escape from the excessively
readable oppositions of plotters and victims (of They and We) cannot help—
however perversely—but reconstitute an opposition between Pynchon the
plotter and his reader-victims. Literature is never merely an agent of
resistance against networks of power-serving knowledge; rather, it is one of
the network’s most seductive manifestations. It can never stand outside the
oppressive manipulations of social reality and negate those manipulations by a
willed alienation from history. Literature is on a continuum with those forces
by which it has habitually proclaimed itself to be menaced. (116)

Bersani here puts Pynchon’s novels in the same place that TV

occupies in Vineland and cinema occupies in Gravity’s Rainbow.
What is valid inside is also valid for the outside, or, in Pynchon’s
words (which are a leitmotiv in Mason & Dixon): “As above, so
below” (MD 487). A book is a medium and cannot talk about itself or
other media in an innocent, distant manner. Perhaps Bersani’s
wording is too strong, but there is a lot in there to plant the seeds of
doubt. Pynchon’s sympathies probably lie with the counterforce, but
his persona and the way he presents (or does not present) himself to
the public may make us reconsider that. This same question can surely
be asked about Bersani, about everyone who comments on books or
other media or who is affiliated with the press, a university, or any
institution that produces either information or knowledge. If these
people cannot be considered part of the higher administration that
knowingly exercises power and control, can it be that the
182 Georgios Maragos

communication networks themselves, having escaped our influence,

are the ones behind this power and not human beings?
Pynchon gives no answer to that; in fact, his own reclusiveness can
perpetuate the problem by taking it outside his own writing and
carrying it over to the world. While there is a lot of ground to be
covered and a lot of analysis to be made about this issue, it falls out of
the scope of this essay. The point here is that “the blossoming of
techniques and technologies […] has shifted emphasis from the ends
of action to its means” (Lyotard 37). In that sense, media technologies
turn out to be more important than the actual results they achieve: the
proliferation of power and control.
In the end, the media always look back to themselves.
Understanding how media work, and forming the necessary
metalanguage to describe them, has become one of the most important
issues of today. According to Pynchon, this ‘today’ has been lasting
for over a century now. What used to be the means have now become
an end, and, in this way, communication and information become
objectives not only in Pynchon’s novels, but in the real world as well.

Georgios Maragos, Panteion University, Athens

Notes
1
This is Shannon’s schema of the communication process, as proposed in The
Mathematical Theory of Communication (34):

It can be applied regardless of medium and it is useful here since it was very
influential in the period in which Pynchon started to write. We will see later about the
importance of noise in that system, always in relation to Pynchon.
2
See also Kittler, Literature 102-03.
A Medium No Longer 183

3
A reference to the popular culture of the 1980s, so dear to Pynchon, is in order here:
Garfield makes the same claims about TV in one of the episodes of Garfield and
Friends. For more see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Must_Be_True!
4
There is no pagination in this particular edition of The Society of the Spectacle. The
number refers to Debord’s own numbering of the paragraphs.
5
See Slade, Schachterle, and Porush.
6
In Against the Day, there is the exception of Scarsdale Vibe, but in his case, he is too
much of a stereotypical capitalist. His character escapes the boundaries of “person”
and moves on to the range of “type.”

Bibliography
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25 (Winter 1989): 99-118.
Brod, Max. The Biography of Franz Kafka. London: Secker and
Warburg, 1947.
Clarke, Arthur C. Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of
the Possible. Madison: Harper & Row, 1973.
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. London: Verso, 1993.
Johnston, John. Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age
of Media Saturation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998.
Kittler, Friedrich. Literature, Media, Information Systems.
Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997.
—. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Kumar, Krishan. From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New
Theories of the Contemporary World. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1995.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
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Marquez, Antonio. “The Cinematic Imagination in Thomas Pynchon’s

Gravity’s Rainbow.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and
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Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. London: Vintage, 2000.
—. Mason & Dixon. London: Vintage, 1998.
—. Slow Learner. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1985.
—. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. London: Vintage, 2000.
—. V. 1963. London: Vintage, 2000.
—. Vineland. 1990. London: Vintage, 2000.
Schachterle, Lance. “Information Entropy in Pynchon’s Fiction.”
Configurations 4.2 (Spring 1996): 185-214.
Schiller, Herbert. Information and the Crisis Economy. New York:
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Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of
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Society. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1988.
 “It’s My Job, I Can’t Back Out”:
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in
Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

William D. Clarke

Abstract: This paper takes as its frame the work of political historian Ellen Meiksins
Wood, who maintains that most attempts to understand the history of capitalism have
tended also to naturalize it, imputing a transhistorical, latent tendency (with Adam
Smith) to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ onto the whole of human history. This in turn
results in an often unintentional mis-comprehension of modern capitalism as the
liberation of a natural tendency towards free exchange from the unnatural constraints
that tradition or outworn political systems have placed upon it. Wood posits, against
such a vision of Capitalism as latent opportunity, a ‘Culture of Improvement’ that
arose from coercive medieval English property relations. This ‘pristine culture of
capitalism’ never managed to shake the inner contradictions of its uniquely English
theory of property (which impelled landlords and tenants alike to continually increase
the rate of profit), even as it was exported throughout Europe and the British Empire,
and subsequently defined the trajectory of our contemporary, ‘globalized’ capitalist
expansion. Today, as Wood’s book Empire of Capital (2003) shows, that coercive
Culture of Improvement is caught in a most peculiarly capitalist bind, as the purely
economic ‘sphere’ both struggles to liberate itself from the boundaries of the nation
state even as it is dependent upon the nation state to provide the extra-economic force
required to enforce and to reproduce the ‘laws’ (imperatives) of the market.
Vineland, I would maintain, easily lends itself to just such a reading of property
relations, for there is always such a coercive ‘Culture of Improvement’ which
underlies every seemingly free commercial opportunity in the novel. Vineland is
bookended by the threat of extra-economic ‘persuasion’—by Zoyd’s compulsory
transfenestration on the one hand and by the sudden cancellation of Brock Vond and
his C.A.M.P. anti-marijuana crusade on the other. The tentacles of the shadowy
‘They’ who control the ‘House’ that Vond can only dream of entering are cast across
the globe: they figure the ‘insurance’ scam that could have kept the cash-starved
Kahuna Airlines from having to endure mid-air paramilitary boardings, are obviously
connected to the ‘Chipco incident,’ and are also the key to the entire subplot involving
the FBI, the ‘YakMaf grapevine’ and DL’s tale of indentured servitude.
Against this larger story of international commerce and coercion, I examine the
specific moments of local anxiety that surface in various characters’ relations to
property: in each case, behind the veil of commercial opportunity lies the hidden
capitalist imperative.
186 William D. Clarke

Scholars have noted that central to Pynchon’s aesthetic are the

“throwaway” (Berger, par. 26) gestures in his novels. This is never
more true that when he is dealing with politics, for as Charles
Hollander states, in these matters “Pynchon follows the rules of
cryptanalysis, never mentioning the most important thing. It is hinted
at, suggested, skirted ‘round. Alluded to, dealt with in books by other
authors mentioned or alluded to in Pynchon’s text” (6). In the case of
Vineland, we have allusions to such obscure political events as “Rex
84” (VL 353) and “NSDD 52”(VL 339),1 but we also have a number of
equally puzzling references to work and to property: in fact, the verb
to work and the noun job occur a hugely disproportionate number of
times in Vineland—two hundred and fourteen times in total, to be
exact—meaning that on almost every other page there is some
reference, either directly or indirectly, to the market imperative. To
put this in scholarly perspective, the effects of “television” on
characters and culture in the novel are a particularly popular research
topic, but the words tube (and its derivatives), TV and television
appear one hundred and thirty-six times in the novel combined. This
paper argues that a causal link exists between Pynchon’s portrayal of
property relations in Vineland and the omnipresent pressure that his
characters feel from the “free” market. It also takes its hermeneutic
strategy from Pynchon, in that his cryptographic method implicitly
invites the reader to read his text alongside of others, both theoretical
and historical. In fact, one of Pynchon’s characters explicitly urges us
to set Vineland in such context: when DL tells Prairie to “‘go to the
library sometime and read about’” Reagan’s plans for invading
Nicaragua, to “‘[l]ook it up, check it out’” (VL 264).2 It is in this
respect that this paper intends to read Vineland’s obsession with
“work” in light of the theories of Ellen Meiksins Wood, who argues
that property, though having a thoroughly historical origin, has
become completely “naturalized” (Wood, Democracy 13) in modern
capitalism, and therefore is largely unexamined by social theorists and
artists alike. As Frederic Jameson notes in his seminal treatise
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, our even
more thoroughly naturalized metaphor of the “market” is a “screen” to
mask our complete lack of a coherent theory of property (266). Even a
relatively contemporary theory of property, such as Robert Nozick’s
attempt to update Locke in his Anarchy and Utopia, ultimately
naturalizes the very concept that it is attempting to defend. Thus,
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 187

“property” and “market” are dead or unexamined metaphors: the

connotations of those words are presumed to be stable and
uncontentious—at least in those societies that no longer have anything
remotely resembling peasant populations or common lands. We in the
industrialized countries all tacitly agree to continue to build, as
Descartes once said of Galileo Galilei, without a foundation.
I would like to maintain that Pynchon’s Vineland is aware of the
intense “strangeness” inherent to the metaphor of property, which is
also something that political historian Ellen Meiksins Wood’s work is
concerned with. It is central to her thought how she locates the causes
for our current situation in the economically coercive social property
relations that were established in the late middle ages and which
England exported to its colonies in Ireland and America, thus setting
the stage for the future development of capitalism, such that all
subsequent capitalist nation-states had to develop in the umbra of this
first, pristine hegemon. The key feature of English capitalism, what
Wood calls its unique “culture of improvement” (“Modernity” 38), is
that it is a system driven by imperatives, which is what makes
capitalism historically different from all previous social formations:
under capitalism, finally, all economic actors have no other choice but
to rely upon the market for their very subsistence. All common lands
and customary rights have been “enclosed” (either literally and/or
metaphorically), and we are all forced into economic competition with
one another. Additionally, Wood maintains, even Marxists often
commit the error of forgetting this key point: that there is one
metaphor, “The Market,” which denotes two very different economic
realities. The first, the “market” of capitalism, a market to which we
are all driven, gets conflated with a second and historically prior
reality, the “market” of the pre-capitalist world. At that second
“market,” to which we are all free to go, there is the opportunity of
making a profit through buying cheap and selling dear. Capitalism,
however, becomes a historical reality if and only if the social relations
of production (who produces what, how it gets produced, and for
whom) change: when workers are deprived of direct access to the
means of their own subsistence, but are compelled to sell their labor to
others—to nascent Capitalists, who are themselves compelled to
continually increase their rate of profit.
In the “commercialization model” of the development of
capitalism, by contrast, the story runs quite differently. Here,
188 William D. Clarke

[…] rationally self-interested individuals have been engaging in acts of

exchange since the dawn of history. These acts became increasingly
specialized with an evolving division of labour, which was also accompanied
by technical improvements in the instruments of production. Improvements in
productivity, in many of these explanations, may in fact have been the
primary purpose of the increasingly specialized division of labour, so that […]
far from recognizing that the market became capitalist when it became
compulsory, these accounts suggest that capitalism emerged when the market
was liberated from age-old constraints [imposed upon] commercial society
and when, for one reason or another, opportunities for trade expanded.
(Wood, Origin 34-35)

Under the commercialization model, history is driven forward by

changes in technology, toward its own inherent teleology, which is the
increasing liberation of commercial exchange from unnatural
constraints. Cities, themselves “capitalism in embryo” (Wood, Origin
13), necessarily follow as facilitators of the market of exchange, and
are peopled by burghers or bourgeois, the meaning of which slips
from “town-dweller” to “capitalist” with an all-too-natural ease.
The increasingly powerful city then becomes an imperialist “core”
that exploits the price differentials in various goods between the
“peripheral” regions that it dominates and those in the domains of far-
flung trading partners. Capitalism in the commercialization model
thus develops in cities or countries that possess an edge in controlling
trade routes, such as Venice and Holland, who through exploiting
“unequal exchange” (Wood, Origin 18) with territories that were often
far more commercially and technologically advanced than they, are
enabled to grow wealthy via “primitive accumulation” and thus are
“able to make the final leap to capitalism” (Wood, Origin 18-19).
Wood’s model, by contrast, looks not to the commercial exchange
of urban burghers but to the social relations of agrarian Britain. The
true mainspring of capitalist development is (following the work of
Robert Brenner)3 the medieval agricultural social relationship amongst
the “triad” of aristocratic “landlord, capitalist tenant and wage-
labourer” (Wood, Pristine Culture 9). For Brenner, the “pivot” or
fulcrum in this triangular grouping is the tenant farmer: he who had no
rights to land other than his economic contract with the landlord, and
who was compelled “to increase productivity by innovation,
specialization and accumulation” (Wood, Pristine Culture 11).
Capitalism does not need, in other words, either technological or
political modernization in order to flourish. Its fundamental
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 189

prerequisite, rather, is a new social law of motion which compels

producers to reinvest, accumulate and innovate or face financial and
personal ruin.
This, then, is what Wood means by capitalism’s coercive “culture
of improvement,” what I would like to refer to here, in the context of
Pynchon’s Vineland, as the “house” of capitalism—a house that is not
only built upon the shakiest of foundations but which is also (as we
shall see) intimately related to the capital-H House of casino-style
capitalism that, of course, always wins.
If capitalism is a house, however, it is one beset by irreconcilable
contradictions, not the least of which is that its fortress-like
impenetrability is belied by, as I have said, an impossibly shoddy
foundation. It is the “property” of property (a thin layer of topsoil that
veils the fundamental, contradictory, tectonic impulses that are always
straining against each other beneath the surface) that it provides a
precarious enough building site for the “house” of capitalism, a house
that can give its tenants no rest, all of which Vineland, to my mind,
does a remarkable job of unveiling. In the novel, the pseudo-Romantic
generation of 1968 thinks that it can just ignore such imperatives, and
so they move north into Vineland County in search of a pastoral
escape from the economic realities of LA. But the hippies who
venture up north cannot escape the pressures of the market. Zoyd
himself feels the anxiety attending to incipient propertylessness
acutely; his relationship to his own house is a complicated one, and is
complicated still further by the fact that in issuing a federal RICO
(Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) writ against the
house, Brock Vond is undermining the very cornerstone of American
capitalism—the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of the sanctity of
private property. In any event, Zoyd’s house is depicted as a
ramshackle externalization of his own itinerant economic livelihood,
in that it specifically relates to the precariousness of being a property
owner: on the one hand, the house is “a set of problems waiting to get
serious enough to claim his time,” on the other it is built of “more than
wood” (VL 358)—of memories and relationships to be sure, but also
of the struggle to survive as a semi-skilled single parent through the
hard times of the 1970s into the boom period following the
Monetarist-induced recession of 1979-82, what was known even at the
time as a “jobless recovery.”
Zoyd’s mutation from itinerant hippie musician to Vineland
190 William D. Clarke

property owner comes about not simply because he follows the

Zeitgeist and joins the northward “mass migration of freaks that
followed the crash of 1973” (VL 305). What every hippie encounters
on his journey northward is the Golden Gate Bridge, an infrastructural
conduit that Pynchon pays close attention to, a link between the
supposedly half-uncolonized4 “fogbound” (VL 317), sublime land of
the ancient Yuroks on the far shore, and the financial centre of San
Francisco on the near. The bridge, Zoyd nervously observes as he
makes his way towards his “hideout” with little Prairie, is indeed awe-
inspiring, beautiful even, but in a bad way: he is justifiably troubled
by what Marx calls the “dead labour” (149) of the bridge that exists
principally as a vampiric conduit for the products of living labor from
the north country. It possesses, Zoyd notes, the “brute simplicity” of a
“firearm” (VL 315), and is thereby inextricably linked to the coercive
arm of the State even as it is itself unappeasable, spanning a river of
commerce with a sense of natural5 inevitability, a “finality” or
“relentless[ness]” that leaves one with an ultimately unfathomable
feeling of a “strange gold smothering” (VL 315, my emphasis). This is
the key to its hold on people, the “bad dream unreleased inside it” (VL
315) of economic brutality.
The northward movement depicted above is almost a cliché in
Pynchon studies: it typically represents a seemingly inevitable march
toward a thermodynamic heat death, and in human terms towards an
inevitable reification. These hippies, moving into the sublime fog with
“visibility down to half a car length” (VL 315) think they are, as
Joseph Campbell puts it, “follow[ing their] Bliss” (217), but capital-H
History has other plans for them. They are to be instructed on the
post-60s reality principle known as the economy:

Zoyd had gone down, climbed on, ridden out with other newcomers, all
cherry to the labor market up here, former artists or spiritual pilgrims now
becoming choker setters, waiters and waitresses, baggers and checkout clerks,
tree workers, truck drivers, and framers, or taking temporary swamping jobs
like this, all in the service of others, the ones who did the building, selling,
buying and speculating. First thing new hires all found out was that their hair
kept getting in the way of work. Some cut it short, some tied it back or slicked
it behind their ears in a kind of question-mark shape. Their once-ethereal
girlfriends were busing dishes or cocktail-waitressing or attending the muscles
of weary loggers over at the Shangri-La Sauna, Vineland County’s finest.
Some chose to take the noon southbound back home, others kept plugging on,
at night school or Vineland Community College or Humboldt State, or going
to work for the various federal, state, county, church, and private charitable
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 191

agencies that were the biggest employers up here next to the timber
companies. Many would be the former tripping partners and old flames who
came over the years to deal with each other this way across desktops or
through computer terminals, as if chosen in secret and sorted into opposing
teams…. (VL 321)

Here, the hippies find that haircuts are made near-compulsory by the
ever-present market imperative. This is a literal enactment of the
metaphor of “joining the squares,” or adapting oneself to life in a
world created by and run for “the Man,” i.e. “the ones who did the
building, selling, buying and speculating” (VL 321) from head offices
back in San Francisco and other financial centers. “Plugging on” in
the midst of a resurgent neo-liberalism (what Hector Zuñiga calls a
“groundswell” or “real revolution,” and which he juxtaposes to the
“little fantasy hand-job” that was the hippies’ pipe dream of change
(VL 27)) means the depressing reduction of human interaction to
reified exchanges mediated by “desktops” and “computer terminals”
(VL 321). The official economy forces labor competition onto those
who idealistically might otherwise prefer cooperative behavior, as
they find that they are soon “chosen in secret and sorted into opposing
teams” (VL 321). The “opposing teams” bit, of course, is a sober,
materialist twist on that old Pynchon Studies chestnut, the
Calvinist/Weberian6 (and therefore idealist) binary opposition between
the “Elect” (or saved) and “Preterite” (or damned): if you are lucky
enough to have been among the chosen few to have work up in
Vineland, you either toil for the logging companies7 or for the
agencies that administer the Preterite throng who lack any such good
fortune. For the most part, people are left to struggle against (even as
some of them feel opportunities in) the almighty Market.
One of those who is full of scheming “opportunity” is Prairie’s
boyfriend, Isaiah Two Four, who is even more obsessed with money
than he is with violence—the production, distribution and
consumption of violence—via his dream of a nationwide chain of
theme parks devoted to aggression. Isaiah would satisfy a latent
human need for violence with “standardized,” consumable
experiences, and reproduce these via “franchising” for a nationwide
“family clientele” (VL 19). Isaiah’s “dreams” have concocted a tale of
Opportunity that looms so large, and with such seeming-ineluctable
momentum, that even Zoyd feels as if he is about to be struck by a
naturalized wave of “white water” (VL 19), as he terms it—a wave of
192 William D. Clarke

the future that he almost cannot resist. This scene in the novel is
typically hyperbolic of Pynchon, yet despite the outrageousness of the
particulars, reducible to a remarkably simple concept: having
discovered a territory which has been hitherto uncolonized by the
processes of commodification, Isaiah wishes to enclose it within the
sphere of iterative rational “improvement.”
However entrepreneurial Isaiah’s dreams are, in his waking life he
is rather unheroically in sore need of a loan guarantor, and though the
Bank of Vineland and their ilk “love it when you owe money” (VL
20), Zoyd declines out of a real fear that “if the whole project went
belly-up, they’d take the house” (VL 20). Thus does property reveal
that behind every opportunity lies a hidden imperative, often
expressed to the would-be entrepreneur (or artiste) as “don’t quit your
day-job.”
Zoyd’s own day-job is “non-union oddjobbing” (VL 320), a
cobbled-together assembly of “sideline[s]” (VL 35), “jobs at the
margin” (VL 291), whose haphazard form is a fair correlative to the
baroque, ramshackle physical structure that he and his daughter
inhabit: from “gypsy roofer” (VL 20) to “gypsy construction” (VL 37)
work as well as landscaping for the “Marquis de Sod” (VL 46).8 He is
also engaged in a quintessentially 1980s/Californian form of arbitrage,
of buying cheap in one market and selling dear in another. He ferries
the abundant, essentially free crawfish or crayfish to where the market
commands a higher price for them, that is, “back down [that “golden”]
101 to a string of restaurants catering to depraved yuppie food
preferences […]” (VL 35). Zoyd and his business partners RC and
Moonpie (the ex-hippie back-to-the-landers who tellingly put their
children to work catching the critters) are thus only allowed to live
where they do to the extent that such traffic is ferried “down the two
sand grooves of the access road[s]” (VL 54), back over that “Golden”
bridge which connects them, ineluctably, to the exoteric economy.
As for Prairie and her boyfriend, although neither contributes to the
domestic income of their parents’ households, each is subject to some
of the same market pressures that beset the adults in Vineland. Prairie
works at the “Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple,” the managers of which,
while seemingly progressive in giving employees “meditation
break[s]” (VL 45), are always keeping them economically off balance
with unannounced shift changes. In fact, for all of their other-worldly
chanting, this crew is as intimately connected with real world
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 193

authorities as any other major employer: having been tipped to Tubal

Detox escapee and DEA agent Hector Zuñiga’s whereabouts on
Temple premises, Detox chief Doc Deeply familiarly “high-five[s]
Baba Havabananda on the way” out of the restaurant (VL 52). In this
sense “controlled and deliberate” (VL 100) is an appropriate
descriptive not only for the Temple’s meditative/religious practices,
but also for its dealings with both its workers and with government
authorities.
Later on, Prairie takes her culinary and organizational skills to the
Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, and finds that these “Ninja Nuns”
are about as other-worldly as her former employers—that is, not at
all.9 That they figure prominently in the niche-market magazine Aggro
World links them not only to Isaiah Two Four’s theme park scheme
“for the aggro connoisseur” (VL 19), but also indirectly to mafia
figure Ralph Wayvone, who is evidently one such connoisseur
himself. What is more, the Sisterhood had cunningly secured their
enviable mountainside property atop a “promontory” from an
unofficially Jesuit-affiliated convent which, due to “a series of bad
investments,” was forced “to put it up for rent and disperse to cheaper
housing” (VL 107). The former tenants were of course an economic
cooperative, but as Marx reminds us, under the imperatives of
capitalism, even workers’ cooperatives must eventually “become their
own capitalists” (440) in order to survive,10 and so there can be no
enduring shelter from the same irrepressible, creatively destructive
wind that blows across all property: the Catholic Sodality are even
“forced” out of production of their cucumber brandy, which is now
merely “market[ed]” (VL 107) in their name, and they are left to drift
into the future as part of the idle rentier class, of what Marx called
“coupon clippers” (Allen Wood 37). The market, of course, abhors a
vacuum, and the Kunoichi Sisterhood entrepreneurially rush in. Yet it
is imperative and not opportunity that drives them, too: for if they
aggressively “edge into the self-improvement business” (VL 37, my
emphasis), it is because, like everyone else, they are “looking for
some cash flow themselves” (VL 37), and have become ever more
fully commodified as time has passed:

Back then they let anybody who showed up crash here for free. Early days,
more idealistic, not so much into money. […] “Yeah now it’s group
insurance, pension plans, financial consultant name of Vicki down in L.A.
who moves it all around for us, lawyer in Century City, though Amber the
194 William D. Clarke

paralegal has been taking over most of his work since the indictment.” (VL
28)

This search for cash flow also haunts Isaiah, whose band had “been
having trouble lately finding work” (VL 20). Desperation leads them
to accept a gig at Mafia boss Ralph Wayvone’s daughter’s wedding,
even though they quite obviously lack the chops. Their playing so
insults the family that the band is in serious danger of what Ellen
Wood calls “extra-economic coercion” (Wood, Pristine Culture 37,
my emphasis): the mafia family’s typical display of machismo in
economic terms harkens back to that “age-old manner of non-
capitalist extra-economic exploitation in the form of tax and tribute”
that pre-dates capitalism (Wood, Empire of Capital 111): either you
pay the Mafia to “protect” you from other “Families,” or else.
However, in Vineland the Mafia no longer operate as shadowy feudal
kingdoms whose own imperatives function alongside each other in the
supposedly as-yet-uncolonized interstices of the official market, or as
the text puts it, “in business areas where transactions are
overwhelmingly in the form of cash” (VL 10, my emphasis); instead,
they are wholly integrated into a thoroughly globalized capitalism. It
is an unavoidable lesson that Ralph Wayvone feels he must give his
son if Ralph Jr. is to take over the business some day: the family is
now, he admits, a “wholly owned [corporate] subsidiary,” and
“strictly speaking [...] own[s] nothing” itself (VL 93). When Ralph Jr.
compares their situation to that of the British royal family, the analogy
is inadvertently apt: Ralph Jr. and the Prince of Wales are both in fact
“trophy sons” or brand ambassadors for the very corporations that
now, during the age of the leveraged buy-out, own the families. These
corporations, as Marx says, resort to such realms of mysticism and
theology (43) to thereby cloak, under veils of so-called tradition and
civility, the nakedness of the imperatives that drive them, which
Pynchon reveals in how Ralph Sr. chooses to display his estate (a
house that seems as allegorically constructed as Wemmick’s in
Dickens’s Great Expectations) to the world. While it “present[s] to the
street a face of single-story modesty […] behind it and down the hill
for eight levels sprawled a giant villa of smooth white stucco” that is a
kind of ecosphere, a “world” (VL 92) unto itself. Ralph is thankful for
the “fragile and precious” (VL 92) “microvacations” (VL 92) that the
house gives him (veiling as it does the nearby freeway and its links to
the pressure-filled world of commerce), and this says as much about
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 195

what lies beyond Ralph’s retreat as the “nose-tales of paradise” (VL

92) told by the flora of the dreams held captive within its walls: the
house is a physical embodiment of the compromises that Ralph has
made between his desires and the culture of improvement, whose
imperatives are pressing in on him particularly keenly at present.
Furthermore, that Ralph is so concerned with the problems of passing
all of this on to his son reveals the true meaning of primogeniture11
under the market imperative: the first born inherits not only what
remains of the feudal “estate” (VL 92) but also the ever-pressing
problem of finding a way to continually increase the rate of profit.
This is why Ralph Sr. takes “the trouble to explain” (VL 93) what the
situation is, as there is no way of getting out of the family business.
No wonder, then, that whenever Ralph Jr. is mentioned in the text, his
person is always modified by adjectives and adverbs expressive of
such disquiet: he is always seen as “anxious” (VL 10, 94), “desperate”
(VL 20), “nervous” (VL 95), and “sweating” (VL 356): if he does not
get his managerial act together soon, “Ralph Wayvone Enterprises”
may well have to metaphorically foreclose on itself, and his father’s
beloved house—his “belvedere”12 or “fair sight” would no longer
suffice to keep the pressures of the world at bay.
However, the intertwining of economic and extra-economic
coercion extends past capital’s own extensions into such previously
untapped markets for violence. The empire that Ralph manages for
some unspecified corporate entity has tentacles that both reach across
national borders as well as well inside the judicial branches of nation-
states, the intricacies of which are revealed in the backstory of how
Ralph eventually manages, after a botched first attempt, to seduce
DL—qua employer as well as lover. When he first approaches her,
after noticeably following her around like a groupie at various martial
arts meets, he produces a photograph of the man he would like her to
kill, FBI agent and “hot antidrug celebrity” (VL 160) Brock Vond,
because Vond is hurting the Mafia’s drug trade.

The photo was clipped to some stapled pages, where she saw federal seals and
stampings. “It’s all from the FBI. Perfectly legit.” [...]
“Well,” she inquired, “what’s ol’ Brock up to these days?”
“[...] He figures he won his war against the lefties, now he sees his future in
the war against drugs. Some dear friends of mine are quite naturally upset.”
“And he’s too big for them? Please, you’ve got to be rilly desperate, comin’
to me.”
196 William D. Clarke

“No. You’ve got the motivation.” At her look, “We know your history, it’s
all on the computer.”
She thought of the white armored limo at Inoshiro Sensei’s house, long ago
[...] there it was — he had her number, and it looked like he’d gotten it from
the FBI. What was going on here? Did Ralph have a line into their NCIC
computer? If they knew Brock was a target of Ralph’s friends, why fail to
protect one of their own? (VL 130-31)

At this point, DL is still naïve enough to think that Ralph had

somehow hacked his way into the FBI’s National Crime Information
Center, but it does cross her mind that someone inside the FBI should
also possibly want Vond dead badly enough to arrange it with the
Mob. This says a lot about the complexities of infra-class cooperation
and competition. But even more interestingly, Ralph has managed to
not only get his hands on the entire history of the animosity between
the FBI and 24fps, but also to use it to help retain the profitability of
his “business”: thus the coercive practices of one era can help lay the
foundation for the commercial activities of another.
DL not only seems to be naïve about the interpenetration of the law
and organized crime, she also mistakenly imagines that she is a free
economic agent: after she declines to do the job and foolishly tries to
change her identity and go on the lam, she is easily kidnapped and
taken to Japan, where she is auctioned into white slavery. Yet the
highest bidder (and thus her new “proprietor”), it turns out, is none
other than Ralph Wayvone. The point of all of this is that Pynchon
here is tracing the connections that tie all of these shadowy
organizations together: Ralph tells DL that he had heard about her “in
fact years before on the YakMaf grapevine” (VL 132, my emphasis),
and so we learn that the Mob has been globalized well before
globalization. What is more, it turns out that “there had always been
channels between the Yakuza and the American military” (VL 128). In
this context, Pynchon’s mentioning of the earlier incident of the
“white limo” bears further exploration.
The white stretched Lincoln had shown up at the house of DL’s
sensei years before 24fps, when she was a teenager who had just gone
AWOL from her home on an American naval base in Japan. Recalling
it years later with Ralph, she remembers, but does not yet process, the
message concerning the inevitability of her own indentured servitude.
At the time, she had seen the sensei get out of the limo and clasp
hands with “an elderly man in a suit and homburg hat [aka ‘the
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 197

Godfather hat’]” (VL 126), and had asked the all-too-human sensei,
who himself was no stranger to capitalism’s coercive culture of
improvement and who “was clearly under some time pressure so
heavy she didn’t want to know” (VL 123, my emphasis): “‘Uh-huh, tell
me, sensei, if you’re that tight with the Mob, and I’m working for you,
does that mean—’” (VL 126). He had responded by way of sending
her out on what she considers fool’s errands, to places like “pachinko
parlor[s]” (VL 123) and other “rendezvous more felonious than illicit”
(VL 124). Of course, pachinko parlors are as well-known for being
money laundering vehicles as casinos used to be in Las Vegas, so
although Pynchon does not make it explicit, this is all part of the script
that has been written for DL, and Ralph is being at least partially
disingenuous when he describes their new relationship as “‘working
for us’” (VL 139, my emphasis): “‘You might even get to like working
for us. Our benefits package is the best in the field. You get to veto
any assignment, we don’t ask for weekly quotas, but we do run a cash-
flow assessment on each of you quarterly…’” (VL 139).
Wayvone Enterprises may well have the superlative “benefits”
common to monopolist firms, but in the context of having a
“‘quarterly […] cash-flow assessment’” (VL 139) run on whatever
assassinations she is assigned to complete (meaning that the culture of
improvement has reached truly hegemonic proportions, even inside
the “Family”), “working” for Ralph gives the term “wage slavery” a
whole new meaning, and we read something more into Ralph’s
“purchasing” of DL. Moreover, this coercive and yet “free” exchange
between employer and employee also involves a libidinal economy
which is neither separable from the exoteric one nor wholly reducible
to a vulgar “economism.” Earlier, when Ralph had first tracked DL
down, she could not help noticing his “ultrathin expensive
wristwatch” and had almost immediately “checked out the cut and
surface texture of Ralph’s suit” (VL 130). Now, newly “hired,” she
cannot help but be appreciative that “his suit fit like Cary Grant’s”
(VL 138), and muses:

Even putting champagne and orchids aside, here was the first human in her
lifetime of running away who’d ever taken the trouble to come after her, not
to mention publicly buy her, however much in play, for the sticker price of a
Lamborghini plus options. How could a girl not be impressed? (VL 139)

She is, in short, subject to the same seductive impulses as Frenesi, and
198 William D. Clarke

feels a certain desire to be “owned” in this manner by those in

power.13 In this light, her squawky protestations over Sister Rochelle14
transferring “ownership” of her to Takeshi (whom she had mistakenly
attempted to assassinate instead of her intended target Vond) seem
somewhat hollow. She is sentenced to “Takeshi Prison” on revolving
one-year sentences—as he puts it, she is tied to him for the rest of his
life—but together they find a niche market in the “karmic adjustment
business” (VL 172), and opportunity goes hand in glove with
compulsion, like the shackles that had conveyed her to Ralph after
that auction in Tokyo like “something warm but unyielding, like
padded steel” (VL 137).
“Padded steel” is not only an apt metaphor for DL’s personal
predicament, it is finally also metaphorical of property itself: while it
seems to insulate us from the unpredictable outside world, it is also a
kind of iron cage, possessing its own logic and demanding that it be
served. Pynchon himself does somewhat of a “service” to property by
the attention he lavishes upon it, particular focusing on its nuances
whenever it is the cause of some anxiety to its owner. We have
already seen a number of instances of this: the intricate description of
Zoyd’s ramshackle hovel as he worries over debts and over the long
arm of the law; the Sisterhood’s deceptively pastoral retreat as they
attempt to carve out a niche in the burgeoning self-help movement;
Ralph Wayvone’s Janus-faced residence, which conveys a message of
stolid sobriety to the suburban workaday world while simultaneously
bathing Ralph in illusory yet therapeutic grandiloquence. But Pynchon
also gives us a very close look at five other private properties: at
Mucho’s mansion, at DL’s and Takeshi’s headquarters, at the offices
of Hollywood moguls Sid Liftoff and Ernie Triggerman, at Prairie’s
home-away-from-home, the Mall, and, finally, at “the House,” the
Casino that, “like a ritzy parable of the world” (VL 350), suggests that
“‘life is Vegas’” (VL 360).
Mucho Maas by 1968 has made good in the music business. Zoyd
and his baby daughter visit him at his home in “posh Telegraph Hill”
(VL 307). Pynchon’s description of Mucho’s house carries echoes of
Wayvone’s property, except that while the facade of the latter is quite
modest, that of the former broadcasts its nouveau riche vulgarity to
the world. From its “black iron gates to a long Spanish courtyard of
flowered tiles” (VL 307-08), this rococo palace positively trumpets the
news of Mucho’s newly found wealth. And though he is quite
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 199

impressed, Zoyd’s remark to his daughter that Mucho “‘must still be

payin’ the rent’” (VL 307, my emphasis) brings the reader back down
to earth: Mucho’s house is full of “exotic trees” that “smell like
someplace far away” (VL 307) because Mucho is living in a dream
world. The music business is enjoying its own brief economic bubble,
and “next week, next year it could all be gone, open to wind, salt fogs,
and walk-in visitors, phones unringing on the bare floors, echoes of
absquatulation in the air, careers being that volatile15 in those days
[…]” (VL 308, my emphasis). “That volatile” also refers to another
speculative period that has begun in the novel’s present, and which
expresses itself in the cultural sphere as the “yuppification” (VL 326)
of everything—even in what French historian Fernand Braudel calls
the economic “periphery” (39), that is, Vineland.16 Down the in “core”
of LA, we find a “yuppification run to some pitch so desperate that
Prairie at least had to hope the whole process was reaching the end of
its cycle” (VL 326, my emphasis).
LA is also where Takeshi and DL keep their head office.
Curiously, Pynchon chooses not to describe its interior other than
providing us with a list of the high-tech equipment lodged therein (VL
192), and so our eyes are drawn back outside, to the curious surface of
this postmodern complex, where finance capitalism and individual
consumption are to be separated only by a metaphorical forward slash,
and where the most important thing about the people who throng there
are their sartorial projections of themselves. Here, the narrator informs
us, “space devoted to make-believe had, it was thought, been
reclaimed by the serious activities of the World of Reality” (VL 192,
my emphasis)—but the passive construction of that sentence raises the
question: thought by whom, exactly? By Charles Jencks or Fredric
Jameson, theoreticians of the postmodern? In any case, the passive
phrasing of the sentence also suggests that the narrator does not share
that view. Instead, the narrator is interested in diagnosing the
“booming” activities of stockbrokers as “roman[ce]” (VL 192, my
emphasis) and, most pointedly, in metaphorically comparing the
inscrutable activities of the legal firms (high above the fray and
engaged, no doubt, in some insider trading, junk-bond deals and
hostile takeovers) with the ease at which city-adapted falcons17
capture their prey—which is strikingly similar to how Marx compares
the big “sharks” and “wolves” of the stock exchange to its little
“fishes” and “sheep” (Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works 239).
200 William D. Clarke

Takeshi’s and DL’s own business practices are, moreover, of a

piece with the other inhabitants of this space. While Takeshi and DL
seem to be genuine in personally “working on balancing their own
karmic account” (Berger, par. 34), their company is, in DL’s words, a
“demented karmology hustle” (VL 180). The narrator also sees their
career more as an “entanglement” (VL 180) than as an opportunity,
and their earlier history together is related to us as a progressive
enmeshment in other people’s economic mis-fortune: we are told that

Takeshi and DL became slowly entangled in other, often impossibly

complicated, tales of dispossession and betrayal. They heard of land titles and
water rights, goon squads and vigilantes, landlords, lawyers, and developers
[…], injustices not only from the past but also virulently alive in the present
day. (VL 172)

No less entangled is the tube-addicted narc Hector Zuñiga. Visiting

the offices of Hollywood producers Ernie Triggerman and Sid Liftoff,
Hector finds his thoughts tending to the “vertiginous” (VL 338) due to
the boom-time vibes he gets off of Ernie and Sid’s seemingly liquid
headquarters, “those breezy, easygoing offices up in Laurel Canyon
with the […] palm-filtered light” (VL 337) that mediates workaday
reality. The “fun” to be had there—the seemingly boundless
opportunities for quick profits offered in this breezy, second-floor
superstructural addition to the house of capitalism instantly dissolves,
however, when rumors of a (HUAC-like) investigation into
Hollywood substance abuse begin to circulate, causing the investment
to immediately dry up, so that when Hector, Ernie and Sid next meet,
Hollywood’s endless summer has given way to a “depressed” and
“autumnal” (VL 340) atmosphere, the palms replaced by the detritus
of the season, by an unused pool “gathering leaves and algae” (VL
340). The glorified prostitutes wielding coke spoons have vanished,
and “the only recreational drug inside the property line [is] a case of
Bud Light” (VL 340). Even more interesting is how the two producers
behave now that the easy money is gone, and how they seem to have
to jettison furnishings and people to pay the rent: “Both men were
nervous wrecks, covered with a sweat-like film of desperation to
ingratiate themselves with” (VL 340, my emphasis) Hector, and to cut
the deal that will keep them off of any potential federal “doper”
blacklist and by extension keep their production company afloat.
“[T]rembling and tense,” they attempt to negotiate, but Hector insists
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 201

on “‘gross participation’” (VL 341) of a most peculiar kind: that is, of

“‘half of the gross receipts after gross equals 2.71828 times the
negative cost,’” which causes Sid to “choke” and call it a “‘strange
multiple,’” while a twitching Ernie admits that it “‘sounds real
natural18 to me’” (VL 342). There are a number of reasons as to why I
think this rightly sounds “natural” to Ernie, one of which is that in
1984 investment banks and hedge funds had only just started to invest
in Hollywood films, and 2.71828 (the mathematical constant ‘e’) can
be easily related to the increasing financialization of all investment
throughout that decade (and beyond). ‘e’ is the mathematical base to
any exponentially growing “natural” process, such as cell division, or
more pertinently to our case, compound interest,19 and financial
innovators of the period such as Michael Milken20 were as shrewd as
Hector to realize that financing long term projects was possible with
extremely short term cash; the shorter the compounding term, the
closer we get to the irrational but “natural” value of ‘e’, that essential
constant of financial innovation—small wonder that Joseph
Schumpeter calls financial innovation “part of the core of the
capitalist process” (Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works 52). It is not
surprising that Sid and Ernie are having a nervous breakdown: not
only is Brock Vond’s anti-drug campaign blowing through
Hollywood, but the power of the hedge and pension funds will soon
change the business of Hollywood forever.
Yet it is not only Hollywood that is poised for change: the power
that these funds wield will utterly transform commercial real estate as
well, which is why Prairie and Ché already feel sentimental for those
“older” malls of their “youth” (VL 326). The financialization of the
1980s brings with it a nostalgia for an older, simpler capitalism in the
fantasies of the consumer in general and of Prairie in particular.
Prairie’s career as a mall rat is presented as a partly nostalgic, partly
problematic flashback to a simpler time, when a “kinder and gentler”
capitalism ruled the malls that Prairie and her partner in crime stole
from. In what is perhaps one of the most poignant set pieces in the
novel, Prairie arranges to meet with Ché for one last fling for old
time’s sake, and as they part we see that the forking paths along which
their separate futures will take them are not just part of the usual
journey from innocence to experience, but are intimately bound up
with capitalism’s own forward motion through history.
Ché and Prairie, only sixteen, are presented as old hands in the
202 William D. Clarke

mall rat subculture, as having been “aboriginal” to “Fox Hills [...] and
the Sherman Oaks Galleria” (VL 325)—this is how fast capitalism
moves, where four, perhaps five years in the life of a teenager are
presented as a generation in the evolution of mall “culture.” The new
malls, such as the “Noir Center” with its themed recycling of
Hollywood genre flicks, represent yet another stage in capitalism’s
relentless colonization of the lifeworld. The Center’s saccharine name
dropping, e.g. “an upscale mineral-water boutique called Bubble
Indemnity” (VL 326), along with its ubiquitous plastic foliage and its
tech-savvy, panoptical and quasi-fascist security team, is enough to
make Prairie long for “the malls [she]’d grown up with, when security
was not so mean and lean” and where finding someone in the food
courts “willing to swap a cheeseburger for a pair of earrings” (VL 326)
represented the residual existence of cracks, however feint, in the
power structures that controlled American life.
Commentators on the period now refer to the general arc of 1980s
finance capitalism as its progressive “Ponzification” (a Ponzi scheme
is where investors and ultimately whole economies rely on borrowing
to finance growth). Pynchon’s own metaphor for this is “‘life is
Vegas’” (VL 360). Moreover, Pynchon does not just assert this
metaphor straightforwardly; he embeds it into an almost-dialectical
conversation between Zoyd and his lawyer Elmhurst (over the DEA’s
seizure of Zoyd’s house), thereby forcing the clichés to yield fresh
insight:

“How can we win?”

“Get lucky with the right judge.”
“Sounds like Vegas.”
The lawyer shrugged. “That’s because life is Vegas.”
“Oboy,” Zoyd groaned, “I’ve got worse trouble here than I’ve ever
had, and I’m hearing ‘Life is Vegas’?”
Elmhurst’s eyes moistened, and his lips began to tremble. “Y-You
mean…life isn’t Vegas?” (VL 360)

Setting aside Zoyd’s specific concern with the coercive aspects of the
state over this RICO-justified seizure of his property, “Vegas” can be
viewed in a wider sense as a metaphor for the economy as a whole. In
that context Zoyd is still right, of course, to express dismay at the
“advice” he is receiving from Elmhurst here. In a very real sense, life
is manifestly not Vegas: as Doug Henwood notes, “a world that tends
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 203

towards ever more immateriality” (Wall Street: How It Works 48) still
has, under the credit system, quite real, material consequences for
living and breathing people such as Zoyd. Elmhurst gets teary-eyed
because, from his point of view, if life is Vegas, as a lawyer and
therefore someone who services “the house,” he always wins because
“the house always wins.”
Thus, “life is Vegas” connotes far more than just the cliché “life is
a crap-shoot.” It is that, of course, but it is also dialectically wedded to
another cliché: the house always wins. This coincidence arises out of
the manner in which the house—that is, the ruling, coupon-clipping
class that, I would argue, corresponds to the shadowy “They” that
Pynchon alludes to throughout his novels—has staged a “rentier
rebellion” (Henwood, “Wall Street: Class Racket”) in the late 1970s in
order to preserve their concentration of economic power. Under a
regime of financialization, the rentier class always wins, because each
new crisis allows them to redefine the protocols for who is worthy of
credit (and, by extension, worthy of property) and under what terms
(Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works 297). It truly is like the
“House” in Vegas:

[…] In other embedded rooms the croupiers called, the winners shrieked and
the drunks cackled, plastic foliage the size and weight of motel curtains
rippled slowly, just below the human threshold for seeing it, arching high
against the room lights, throwing lobed and sawtoothed shadows, while a
thousand strangers were taken on into a continuing education in the ways of
the House, and in general what would be expected of them, along with the
usual statistics and psych courses, and Frenesi and Hector had somehow
danced out into all the deep pile and sparkle of it, like a ritzy parable of the
world, leaving the picture of Prairie face up on the table, she and Desmond,
both squinting upward at nothing, at high risk for hostile magic against the
image, the two most likely means in here being fire and ice, but there the
Polaroid lay, safe, till it was rescued by a Las Vegas showgirl with a hard
glaze but a liquid center whom Prairie reminded of a younger sister, and who
returned it to Frenesi when she came around the next day, her heart pounding,
her skin aching for it still to be there, to find it again and claim it. (VL 350-51)

Pynchon depicts Vegas itself in a particularly striking, even

coruscating manner. His figurative sparks reveal much of what capital
would prefer to remain shrouded in darkness: the casino is constructed
of embedded rooms-within-rooms, suggesting that the purposeful
design of the house makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the
equally embedded consumer to comprehend the workings of capital as
204 William D. Clarke

a whole. For the novelist, however, such comprehension remains

possible by way of metaphor: Vegas is “like a ritzy parable of the
world” (VL 350), an indication that other parables, less “ritzy,” might
apply to those on the receiving end of a global financial re-structuring.
This amorphous “third world” is mentioned several times in the novel,
always ironically and with reference to being on the receiving end of
“first world” coercion: one of Isaiah’s proposed violence amusements
is “third world thrills” (VL 19), which allows consumers to rehearse
on the level of ideology what America is performing in the “world of
reality” (VL 192), i.e. ensuring that all territory lying outside of the
culture of improvement should return to “operationally speaking, the
third world” (VL 49).
Conversely, care is taken in the “first world” to furnish the Platonic
cave of Vegas with simulacra of the real world that is “just below the
human threshold for seeing” or understanding how the structure of the
house relates to the lessons its inhabitants are learning: these lessons
are of course concerned with “what would be expected of them” as
consumers and workers. These are the very qualities that “They” will
be expecting of us all, the “brute simplicity” (VL 315) of how we are
expected, under the imperatives of capitalism, to feel and behave: in
the terms of Vineland, we are all meant to be “plugging on,” not
“tuning in” let alone “dropping out.” If we are to keep “payin’ the
rent” (VL 307) we all have to be out there, “pitching [our] dreams”
(VL 19), and “edg[ing]” (VL 107) aggressively into any opportunity to
get “some cash flow” (VL 107) that comes our way. If we are not to be
easy prey, then we must act like falcons, wolves, or sharks. All of this
will leave us, no doubt, “anxious,” “desperate,” “nervous” and
‘sweating,” “chok[ing],” “twitch[ing],” “trembling and tense” (VL
341). “They” want us to be under “some time pressure so heavy” (VL
123), in other words, that we will all know, at some level, that what is
expected of us is that we shall admit to ourselves and to each other, as
DL is compelled to admit to Takeshi, that “it’s my job—I can’t back
out” (VL 176).

William D. Clarke, University of Warwick

The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 205

Notes
1
For a full explanation of which, see Thoreen.
2
By necessity, this paper will also contain a fairly large number of substantive
footnotes. These attempt to provide a more complete contextual picture of the
economic world that Vineland portrays (the period bracketed on one end by the
beginning of the “long downturn” (Brenner, Boom xiv) of “persistent stagnation”
(Brenner, Boom 7) and on the other by Reagan’s increasing turn toward
financialization) while keeping the body of the text more or less squarely focused
upon Vineland itself.
3
See Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development.” For insight into the
economic context of Vineland’s present day of 1984, see Brenner, The Boom and the
Bubble and The Economics of Global Turbulence.
4
Vineland would “someday [...] be all part of a Eureka-Crescent City-Vineland
megalopolis,” but when Zoyd first arrives it is still “not much different from what
early visitors in Spanish and Russian ships had seen” (VL 317).
5
My contention that Pynchon sees capitalism as “natural-ised” rather than as
“natural” is bolstered, I think, by a scene at the beginning of Against The Day in
which the billionaire Scarsdale Vibe complains to Professor Vanderjuice about
Tesla’s plans for a “world system” of free electrical power: “‘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 [...] It is a
weapon, Professor, surely you see that—the most terrible weapon that the world has
seen, designed to destroy not armies or matériel, but the very nature of exchange, our
Economy’s long struggle to evolve out of the fish-market anarchy of all battling all to
the rational systems of control whose blessings we enjoy at present’” (AtD 34-35).
6
It is, again, a cliché in Pynchon studies, but it is worth pausing here to view some of
Weber’s own words on election and the attitude toward the creation of wealth on the
one hand, and the attitude that the elect take towards the preterite on the other: “This
consciousness of divine grace of the elect and holy was accompanied by an attitude
toward the sin of one’s neighbour, not of sympathetic understanding based on
consciousness of one’s own weakness, but of hatred and contempt for him as an
enemy of God bearing the signs of eternal damnation. […] The most important
criterion [concerning the usefulness of a calling] is found in private profitableness.
For if that God, whose hand the Puritan sees in all the occurrences of life, shows one
of His elect a chance of profit, he must do it with a purpose. Hence the faithful
Christian must follow the call by taking advantage of the opportunity. If God show
you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to
your soul or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you
cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward, and to
accept His gifts and use them for Him, when He requireth it: you may labour to be
rich for God, though not for the flesh and sin” (Weber 122, 162).
7
The state of the logging industry in the pacific northwest is a good example of how
America’s attempts to solve the problem of its own productive post-war overcapacity
(by lending dollars for the reconstruction of Germany and Japan, who in turn
purchased American goods to help rebuild their economies) has come back to haunt
206 William D. Clarke

its economy: the “spatio-temporal fix”(Harvey 1990, 135-37 and McNally 1999) that
precipitated the long boom of 1945-66 means that increasingly, much of the lumber
produced in the region is being exported to pacific rim countries unprocessed, and this
lack of “added value” has a serious detrimental effect on employment in the region
around Vineland, as Pynchon notes: “Everybody knew it was high times for the stiffs
in the woods—though not for those in the mills, with the Japanese buying up
unprocessed logs as fast as the forests could be clear-cut” (VL 5).
8
Millard and his wife Blodwen had had their own encounter with the market
imperative (which is, again, framed as opportunity) on an acid-fuelled camp-out,
when they heard “gold-bearing cobblestones knocking together at night,” and returned
from “dreams about specializing in Brecht” to “come back to Earth” (VL 48).
9
As James Berger notes, “Karmic Adjustment, the Ninja Death Touch, DL’s whole
martial arts education, and Sister Rochelle’s Kunoichi sisterhood all are part of
Vineland’s comic treatment of the American interest in Eastern religion which took
off in the 60s and reached a commercialized apotheosis in the 80s” (36). For Dirk
Vanderbeke, the Sisterhood is an emblematic send-up of the New Left, which
ultimately “turned to a new irrationalism and the eclecticism of the so-called New-
Age-philosophy. The movement of the 60s, which never excelled in excessive
coherence, has [by 1984] further dissolved into a heterogeneous mass of solipsistic
and interchangeable ideologies.”
10
Marx is actually somewhat ambivalent about co-operatives, also seeing them as
potential harbingers of a transition away from capitalism; for a more thorough
grounding in the subtleties of Marx’s thinking on co-operatives, see Jossa.
11
Primogeniture, according to Alan Macfarlane “a great rarity in the world,” was a
peculiarly Western European phenomenon, yet, “even within Europe, England seems
to have been by far the most extreme in its application of this principle,” which is
“intimately interlinked” with the development of the institution of “complete
individual property in real estate” and thus “diametrically opposed” to the communal
links of the peasant family (Macfarlane 19-20). This fact, taken in isolation, at first
appears as though it might lend support to Wood’s thesis concerning the “pristine”
English culture of capitalism, but the thrust of Macfarlane’s greater argument, Wood
maintains, begs the question: such elements of English Common Law display an
unproven assumption that “capitalist property relations are simply the unfolding of
age-old principles embodied in the common law from the beginning,” and not a
historical victory of the common law (“the king’s law”) over other competing
“systems of law” and over custom (The Pristine Culture of Capitalism 153-54).
12
The OED defines the Italian belvedere as “a faire sight, a place of a faire prospect.”
13
See Paul Bové’s similar but quasi-Weberian observation on Gravity’s Rainbow:
“Pynchon dramatizes the intellectual’s difficulty in a time of interregnum but also
shows how alluring is the logic of the elect—alluring because it resonates with the
desires of the preterite seduced by the elect’s projection of a fetish-object that
apparently meets what seem to be universal desires” (671).
14
Who, it should be noted, responded to DL’s confession concerning the attempted
assassination of Takeshi in the following terms: “‘Just what I wanted today, just when
the cash flow’s starting to turn around, just as I’m finding my life’s true meaning as a
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 207

businessperson, I might’ve known it, in you waltz and suddenly I’ve got to be Father
Flanagan’” (VL 153-54).
15
There were, of course, parallels in the market as a whole as well. Consider how
contemporary I.F. Stone’s assessment of market volatility, circa 1971, feels even
today: “While President Nixon was celebrating Labor Day with a Billy Graham-style
sermon on the work-ethic, the really best way to make a fast buck was being
explained by a Congressional committee staff report [...] into the sharp rise in recent
years of conglomerate corporations. In the four years 1965-68 conglomerates
absorbed more assets in manufacturing and mining than in the preceding two decades.
This was one of the by-products of the Vietnam War, though the report does not
connect the two. The inflation and speculative fever the war engendered alone made it
possible for shrewd operators to buy up other business at inflated values and then
recoup with “growth stocks” on a booming stock market [...] The report [also] shows
how insurance companies are taken over so their surpluses can be used for speculation
[...]. One reason these conglomerates [other examples being G&W, ITT, Litton] ran
into trouble is because they grew [between 1964 and 1968] by paying far more for the
business they acquired than they were worth” (1-3).
16
Pynchon traces this to the arrival of George Lucas and his Star Wars Trilogy (VL
7), but its actual cause has far more to do with the underlying economy than with the
media.
17
The last two syllables of Takeshi’s previous employer, Professor Wawazume’s
name (“Tsume”) means “talon” in Japanese. It is not surprising, then, that he seems to
be “fading some of the action” (VL 146) from the Chipco extortion racket just as the
performance of Chipco shares has become “very—strange” (VL 170). Here Pynchon
seems to be metaphorically hinting at the coercive nature of the process of
financialization that economies periodically go through, and its intensity rising the
more credit is emphasized in an economy, as it was in the 1890s, 1920s, late 1960s,
and again in the period of 1974-87, after the U.S. dismantled the Bretton Woods
currency exchange system and left all traces of the “Gold Standard” behind. Though
1974 also marked the end of Nixon and of the Vietnam war (Diebold), it is tempting
to view Takeshi and DL’s attendance at the “Thanatoid Roast ‘84 [...] the tenth annual
get-together” (VL 219) as perhaps marking the tenth anniversary of the beginning of
the “long down-turn” and the turn to financialization by the U.S by way of attempting
to evade its consequences, as the resulting “dematerializing of money” led it to lead a
Thanatoid-like existence, “a ghostly electronic life” (Henwood, Wall Street: How It
Works 228).
18
According to Victor Goldberg, “haggling over net profits clauses has long been a
Hollywood sport, and the disputes often end up in litigation” (532). This is because,
says Henwood, “financial innovations are more than mere bankers’ fancy; hard issues
of power and risk are settled through them” (Wall Street: How It Works 52). The
object being, of course, to shift risk (and therefore the degree of market coercion)
from one’s own territory onto someone else’s. Hector here is ‘naturally’ employing
the “inequality of bargaining power” (Goldberg 534) that he temporarily enjoys over
Sid and Ernie, a power relationship that would normally flow the other way. Thus
Hector is shrewd in asking for a guaranteed profit of $1 million plus half of the gross
208 William D. Clarke

receipts after the gross reaches only a small multiple of the cost to actually shoot the
film. As Natural Born Killers producer Don Murphy says, “where you really get
fucked” if you are producer of or simple investor in a film “is if you have a gross
participant” like Hector skimming dollars off (from not only the gate but also “any
ancillary deal”) before the film even reaches its actual break-even point. This is part
of what “sounds real natural” to Ernie—power players such as stars and corporate
subsidiaries (such as video distributors) do this all the time, and so the actual “profit”
reported back to “net” participants can vanish into the aether of Hollywood’s
“Martian accounting” (Susman).
19 rt
e is the formula for interest earned at a particular rate of return [r] for a given
amount of time [t]. A casual perusal of the formula suggest that a simple rise of 1% in
the rate yields an exponential increase in profit over a given time, due to
compounding. It “sounds real natural” to Ernie for three reasons: first, because e is the
base for “natural logarithms,” which you would employ to figure out, say, how long
you would need to invest in order to double your money (i.e. if a film promised an
investor a high rate of return, this time would shrink radically); second, it sounds
“natural” because in this, as in any capitalist arena, such negotiations, and the
coercive nature of the financialization practices that go with them, are often the key to
making a profit, and Ernie knows an effective gambit (i.e. Hector’s) when he sees it;
third, because over time, realize that the emerging financial technology of junk or
“high yield” bonds could be employed great effect in the film industry as well as in
real estate and corporate takeovers financial innovations such as those employed in
Hollywood the ‘80s only give their “innovators” an edge for a short period of time,
after which they become “naturalized” and new “financial technologies” must be
invented to keep the rate of return acceptably high.
20
The trouble with high relative rates of return that “innovators” such as Milken were
seeking is that they always coincide with higher risk. As classical economist David
Ricardo says, “[t]o the question, ‘who would lend money to farmers, manufacturers,
and merchants, at 5 per cent. per annum, when another borrower, having little credit,
would give 7 or 8?’ I reply, that every prudent or reasonable man would. Because the
rate of interest is 7 or 8 per cent. there where the lender runs extraordinary risk, is this
any reason that it should be equally high in those places where they are secured from
such risks?” (cited in Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works 173)
But in the 1980s, Michael Milken turned this logic on its head with his “high
yield” [aka “Junk”] bonds, by “proving” that by spreading such “extraordinary risk”
out widely enough, investments that did pay off would far outstrip the losses of those
that did not. The key was to find enough money in order to spread the risk around,
and the answer to that was debt, or credit, which began with “the severance of paper
currencies from gold in the early 1970s, [and] waxed during the 1983-89 binge”
(Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works 224) that Pynchon is concerned with here. Film
companies called this “co-financing” but in reality it is much more than that, as by
bringing institutional investors such as hedge and pension funds on board, they were
able to off-load risk, maintain “creative” control, and have progressively larger
budgets (Vogel 113). If hedge and pension funds took on that risk, it was because the
technique of junk bond financing, being still new, almost guaranteed high returns.
The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Vineland 209

Interestingly, Milken himself concocted a theory about how such novel financial
“technologies” have a “multiplier effect” on the wealth of society as a whole:
“Because these financial technologies create anonymous, efficient markets, borrowers
are less dependent on the old relationship-based system. [...] It also contributes to
social capital by helping finance home building and strengthening communities.
(Social capital also includes the underlying incentives to invest provided by the rule
of law and secure property rights.) The multiplier effect of financial technology
suggests a theory of prosperity that I developed in the 1960s. It can be stated as a
simple formula:
P =™Fti * (™HCi + ™SCi +™RAi)
Prosperity equals the collective value of financial technologies multiplied by the total
of human capital, social capital, and real [...]. The multiplier effect of these financial
techniques produced an unprecedented economic boom over the past 20 years”
(Milken).
According to Henwood, however, these ‘technologies’ eventually drive all
economies into the third term of the sequence: ‘hedge-speculative-Ponzi’ (Henwood,
Wall Street: How It Works 222), ‘Ponzi’ referring a notorious scheme in which a
financier can only pay off debts to existing investors by finding new ones—which is
ultimately self-limiting in that eventually new creditors become scarce and the
scheme collapses under its own weight. In the Junk-bond 80s, says Henwood, “[...]
the U.S. economy unquestionably entered a Ponzi phase. Corporate takeovers were
frequently done with the open admission that the debt could never be comfortably
serviced, and that only with asset sales or divine intervention could bankruptcy be
avoided“ (Wall Street: How It Works 223).

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 The Tao of Thomas Pynchon

Michael Harris

Abstract: It is clear from numerous references in his novels that Pynchon has
considerable knowledge and interest in the subject of Eastern religion, yet so far
criticism has neglected to address this topic, with the exception of Robert Kohn’s
2003 essay “Seven Buddhist Themes in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.” Rather than
promoting a particular religious belief, Pynchon’s texts utilize Eastern religion as a
foil to contrast with the more familiar Western, Christian perspective. Referencing
Eastern religion thus serves as a defamiliarizing technique as well as a means of
suggesting an alternative mode of perceiving the world. Pynchon has at times
expressed an implicit desire to recover or return to a sacred past, once alive but now
eviscerated by state-run religion, capitalism, and technology. In this essay, I argue
that, given this general shift from the spiritual to the secular, Pynchon’s referencing of
Eastern religion is not only a signifier worth taking seriously, but also a meaningful
structuring device that he increasingly uses in his longer narratives: Gravity’s
Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day.

In 2003, Robert Kohn published an essay called “Seven Buddhist

Themes in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49” in the journal Religion &
Literature. To my knowledge, this is one of the only studies of
Eastern religion in Pynchon criticism. Nevertheless, it is clear from
numerous references in his novels that Pynchon has considerable
knowledge and interest in this subject. Rather than promoting a
particular religious belief, Pynchon’s texts utilize Eastern religion as a
foil to contrast with the more familiar Western, Christian perspective.
Referencing Eastern religion thus serves as a defamiliarizing
technique as well as a means of suggesting an alternative mode of
perceiving the world. Pynchon has at times expressed an implicit
desire to recover or return to a sacred past, once alive but now
eviscerated by state-run religion, capitalism, and technology. In
“Nearer, My Couch, to Thee,” for instance, he refers to a time, around
the mid-nineteenth century, the era of Melville’s “Bartleby the
214 Michael Harris

Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” when America was “consolidating

itself as a Christian capitalist state, even as [sloth] was in the last
stages of its shift over from a spiritual to a secular condition” (3). In
this essay, I argue that, given this general shift from the spiritual to the
secular, Pynchon’s referencing of Eastern religion is not only a
signifier worth taking seriously, but also a meaningful structuring
device that he increasingly uses in his longer narratives: Gravity’s
Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day.
Kohn’s essay is valuable in its placing of Pynchon’s early novel in
the unusual “context of Tibetan Buddhism” (73). The seven themes
range from the Tibetan belief in rebirth after death and the Buddhist
faith in karmic perfectability, achieved through the cycle of death and
rebirth, to the use of meditation to gain release from suffering.
Nevertheless, Kohn’s tracing of these seven themes at times becomes
strained and arbitrary, even reductionist, especially regarding
Pynchon’s use of the number 49 in his title and text. According to
Kohn, each of “the seven Buddhist themes underlying The Crying of
Lot 49 is matched with some aspect of Information Theory” (75), and
thus he can argue that Oedipa achieves inner peace in the novel’s end
as she learns to cope with “the mass of disparate information that
threatens to overwhelm her” (89). Although Oedipa’s “enlightenment”
is debatable, Kohn usefully points out other parallels Oedipa shares
with Hesse’s Siddhartha: late in the novel she stumbles upon “the poor
and the disinherited […], her compassion for them likening her to the
bodhissatva, Avolokitesvara, whom ‘the holy Om’ is meant to
invoke” (78). Kohn also reminds us that Oedipa Maas’s initials OM
form the well-known Buddhist mantra used in meditation.
Kohn’s essay on The Crying of Lot 49 is striking in part because
the seven Buddhist themes he traces are not something most readers
would pay attention to, or even notice. Pynchon’s novels—especially
the longer ones—contain a multiplicity of narrative threads, and to
trace and attach meaning to any one can be hazardous. As Professor
Werfner exclaims in Against the Day, “‘Hundreds, by now thousands,
of narratives, all equally valid—what can this mean?’” (AtD 682).
This plethora of narratives can be disconcerting to a reader. I can
recall feeling bewildered in my initial reading of Gravity’s Rainbow,
wondering why I was following the seemingly pointless narrative of
Slothrop meandering through the Zone, when there were other more
interesting narratives, such as that involving Roger Mexico, which, in
The Tao of Thomas Pynchon 215

typical Pynchonian fashion, was inexplicably dropped. Along these

same lines, Alan Nadel has expressed sympathy for his students’
difficulties in relating to Slothrop: “Who, for even one moment,
would think of himself or herself as Slothrop, much less admit it in
writing?” (160) On subsequent readings, however, I found myself
looking forward to and enjoying this crucial part of Gravity’s
Rainbow, connecting it to other key concerns of the novel, such as its
unremitting critique of war, capitalism, and Christianity. During these
readings, I began to see that Slothrop’s seemingly pointless wandering
in the Zone in fact bore intriguing similarities to the path toward
enlightenment familiar in Eastern religion. One might recall in this
connection that both Buddha and Mahavira, the founder of Jainism,
started out as “wandering sramanas” (Mishra 211-12) seeking
enlightenment. Pynchon is always interested in jarring the reader
loose from easy assumptions, and I suspect his numerous references to
Eastern religion in part serve this purpose.
Many readers have commented on the presence of religion and/or
spirituality in Pynchon. Kohn, for example, believes that among
“postmodern contemporaries, [Pynchon’s] spirituality stands out. He
is an author who can infuse the ordinary with the sacred” (91), and he
goes on to argue that “Pynchon’s powers in this respect continue to
grow” (94). In a similar vein, the novelist George Saunders has
observed that “in Pynchon, anything is fair game—if it is in the world,
it can go in the book” (Howard 30). Saunders finds “something
Buddhist about this approach, which seems to say that since the world
is capable of producing an infinity of forms, the novel must be capable
of accommodating an infinite number of forms” (Howard 30).
Another contemporary novelist, Richard Powers, has developed “a
private religious ritual” based on his reading of the episode in
Gravity’s Rainbow involving the “evensong service somewhere in
Kent” that Roger and Jessica attend. Re-reading this nine-page
passage from Gravity’s Rainbow every winter reminds Powers of “the
size of the made world, of what story might be when it remembers
itself, of the look of our maximum reach outward, of the devastating
charge of words” (Howard 40). Powers quotes the phrase “maximum
reach outward” from Gravity’s Rainbow to refer to the reach of the
writer through language to the reader, but also to refer to the human
reach to other perspectives, practices, and traditions. Putting the
insights of Saunders and Powers together, one could say that since an
216 Michael Harris

Eastern religious perspective exists in the world, then it should go in

the book, and as a result, Pynchon’s reader surely benefits from that
“maximum reach outward” (GR 136) to a different cultural
perspective and spiritual practice.
Pynchon displays an awareness of the East not only in his fiction,
but also in his non-fiction. In the introduction to Slow Learner, for
example, he describes the Sixties as an era in which “the wisdom of
the East came back in fashion” in America (SL xviii). In that
introduction, he acknowledges the early influence of the Beats upon
his writing, and singles out Jack Kerouac, often considered the father
of the Beats, as a “centrifugal lure” (SL xvi) for young writers like
himself. Kerouac, whose novels such as On the Road and The Dharma
Bums combine a loose picaresque narrative structure, a spontaneous
composition technique, and the author’s strong interest in Buddhism,
appealed to the young Pynchon as an example of that “maximum
reach outward” to a new generation of readers. Pynchon calls On the
Road “one of the great American novels” (SL xvi), and credits that
work along with Helen Waddel’s The Wandering Scholars, “an
account of the young poets of the Middle Ages” who “took to the
roads of Europe, celebrating in song the wider range of life to be
found outside their academic walls” (SL xvi), as early influences that
represented an attractive alternative to the more insular conception of
writing popularized by the “Chicago School” of literary criticism. We
might see Kerouac’s dharma bums and Waddel’s wandering scholars
as forerunners of Pynchon’s later spiritual seekers, such as Slothrop in
Gravity’s Rainbow and Cyprian Latewood and Reef Traverse in
Against the Day.
The traditional Hindu notion of the wandering sannyasin seeking
power and/or release from material existence—the fourth phase of life
in classic Hindu cosmology—dates back to the sixth century BC and
the influence of Buddha and Mahavira, who were roughly
contemporaries in India. The first three phases of life—those of the
child, the student, and the householder—covered the life span of most
Indian people. Upon successful completion of the householder phase,
however, those willing and qualified could undertake a fourth phase,
in which “the initiate renounced all worldly ties including all
relationships with wife and family” (Hopkins 83). By taking up the
begging bowl and embarking on a life of spiritual wandering, the
sannyasin would practice restraint of speech, action, and mind in
The Tao of Thomas Pynchon 217

order to “purify himself, attain desirelessness, and achieve knowledge

of self and Brahman that would bring final release from the
transitoriness of samsara,” or worldly attachment (Hopkins 83). This
aspect of Hinduism, of course, still continues, as wandering saddhus
and sannyasin choose to pursue their paths to enlightenment and
release in numerous Asian countries, including present-day India and
Nepal.
Slothrop’s wandering through the Zone has been interpreted in a
variety of ways, but rarely as a sannyasin-like journey toward
enlightenment. Ostensibly he is on a mission to post-war Potsdam to
pick up six kilos of “pure, top-grade Nepalese hashish” (GR 370) for
Säure Bummer and Seaman Bodine, but he soon abandons this quest
to wander aimlessly over the countryside that is being re-mapped by
the European powers meeting at this very moment in Potsdam. The
parallels between Slothrop’s experience in the Zone and the path
toward enlightenment familiar in Asian religions gradually begin to
emerge. Wandering through the Zone, Slothrop assumes numerous
beneficial roles, including that of Rocketman and Plechazunga, the
Pig-Hero, which he enacts for a local festival whose usual Pig-Hero
has been drafted into the army. In this part of the novel, Slothrop
shows compassion for all he meets, a key tenet of Buddhism, and the
reader encounters numerous references to the mandala, which in
Buddhist and Taoist traditions refers to a place marked off for
meditation, or something sacred to focus the eyes on during
meditation. In contrast to the linear vision of Christianity, ending
either with salvation or damnation, heaven or hell, Eastern religion
conceptualizes life as a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. The mandala
represents this cyclical view of life.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon criticizes various aspects of
Christianity. Roger Mexico scoffs at the “damned Calvinist insanity”
(GR 57) with its predetermined distinction between the elect and the
preterite; this form of Christianity overlooks the excluded middles, or
“the domain between zero and one” (GR 55). Pynchon also links
Christianity to European colonization, in particular that of the Hereros
in southwest Africa, referring to the “vulturehood [of] the Christian
missionaries” (GR 519). In contrast to that system of “death and
repression” (GR 317), Slothrop’s wandering represents a cyclical
concept of life, familiar in Eastern religion. At the beginning of part
four, “The Counterforce,” the narrator relates that Slothrop “is closer
218 Michael Harris

to being a spiritual medium than he’s been yet, and he doesn’t even
know it” (GR 622). By this point Slothrop has let go of his mission for
Bummer and Bodine:

He’s letting hair and beard grow, wearing a dungaree shirt and trousers
Bodine liberated for him […]. But he likes to spend whole days naked, ants
crawling up his leg, butterflies lighting on his shoulders, watching the life on
the mountain […]. Any number of places he might be moving, but he’d rather
stay right here for now. (GR 623)

This passage recalls Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Huckleberry

Finn, but also brings to mind the fourth phase of life in Hinduism, in
which the sannyasin consciously leaves the material world of
samsara, to wander through the countryside living upon the kindness
and mercy of others. Moreover, Slothrop’s preference to “stay right
here for now” (GR 623) aligns him with Buddhist teaching to live
with mindfulness and compassion in the present moment.
In the aforementioned passage and elsewhere, Slothrop has time to
meditate on his surroundings—a far cry from earlier in the narrative
when he was forced mindlessly to elude “Them” who were
determined to control him. An important aspect of the path toward
enlightenment in Eastern religious traditions is recognizing one’s
connection to nature. This is especially important for Hindus, who
believe that all reality is God, or Brahma, including plant and animal
life, but it is a key tenet of Buddhism and Taoism as well. It is
significant in this connection that Slothrop’s enlightenment, like the
Buddha’s, comes underneath a tree:

Trees, now—Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in

among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very
quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on
its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it, not just some hunk of
wood to be cut down. (GR 553)

Slothrop’s awareness of trees leads him to meditate on his family’s

paper business and their cutting down of trees in order to produce
paper: “bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more
paper. ‘That’s really insane’” (GR 553). Slothrop’s wandering
represents not only his enlightenment, but also his turning away from
the war and his problematic past, dating back to the experiment
conducted on him in his “sweet paralyzed childhood” (GR 754)
The Tao of Thomas Pynchon 219

involving Imipolex. Letting go of this past allows him to live fully in

the present: “The soft smell of Imipolex, wrapping him absolutely, is a
smell he knows. It doesn’t frighten him. […] it was there as he began
to dream. Now it is time to wake, into the breath of what was always
real. Come, wake. All is well” (GR 754).
Slothrop’s outcome in Gravity’s Rainbow has puzzled many
readers, and has thus, not surprisingly, been interpreted in a variety of
ways, most of which suggest something negative or lacking in
Slothrop. For instance, Edward Mendelson in “Gravity’s
Encyclopedia” sees Slothrop going through a process of
“disintegration” which “is not the work of those who oppose or betray
him, but is the consequence of his own betrayals” (183). This
“disintegration” proceeds, in Mendelson’s view, from Slothrop’s loss
of memory: although his memory is still intact in his interactions with
Katje, “his sense that acts have consequences in time” (183)
diminishes in the episode on board the Anubis with Bianca. “As his
‘temporal bandwidth’—the degree to which he dwells in the past and
in the future—diminishes, so must all his relations to the world”
(Mendelson 183-84). The variety of roles and perspectives of
Slothrop, including those in the seriocomic Radiant Hour episode
involving the Floundering Four and Pernicious Pop late in the novel,
makes him difficult to “read”; nevertheless, his trajectory is at least in
part a positive one. The major part of his journey through the Zone
takes place after he leaves the Anubis and Thanatz. Rather than simply
losing his sense of a past and future, Slothrop also gains a new
awareness of the present. As one who has been subject to constant
surveillance and experimentation dating back to his childhood—“if
he’s been seeker and sought, well, he’s also baited, and bait” (GR
490)—his return to a life of simplicity focused on the present might,
under the circumstances, be the only positive path available to him.
The description of Slothrop as a scattered “concept” (GR 740) might
represent the frustration of those wishing to keep him under
surveillance, and thus could also be seen as an indication of his
psychic survival, one in adherence to the Buddhist rejection of an
essential self based on worldly desires and attachments.
In his review of Against the Day, Michael Wood comments that
Pynchon has done something remarkable for a writer: “created a
career impervious to narrative” (12). Wood’s point is that there is a
remarkable consistency to Pynchon’s literary output, not only in his
220 Michael Harris

concerns but also in the extraordinary quality of the writing. As a

result, there is no story-line or “narrative” to Pynchon’s career. “This
amazing writer continues to be amazing, and in much the same way he
always has” (Wood 12). While agreeing with Wood’s assessment, I
also feel that some of Pynchon’s preoccupations have intensified in
his later work, one of which is his increasing attention to spirituality.
One finds the seeds of this preoccupation perhaps as early as The
Crying of Lot 49, but certainly in Gravity’s Rainbow, and its flowering
in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. In his essay “The Luddite
Vision: Mason & Dixon,” David Cowart remarks that in that novel
Pynchon underscores the “spiritual realities [that] have been obscured
by centuries of what Derrida calls ‘logo-centric metaphysics.’ One can
argue […] the mounting evidence of Pynchon’s spiritual and
metaphysical (even religious) seriousness” (279). Focusing on this
developing interest in spirituality—in particular Eastern spirituality—I
would like to briefly talk about Mason & Dixon before turning to
Against the Day.
Mason and Dixon would appear to be Slothrop’s counterparts in
their sojourn into uncharted Indian territory toward a possible
enlightenment, but this is not really the case. The two surveyors’
drawing of the Visto is anything but aimless wandering. Whereas
Slothrop’s journey represents his walking away from war and
suffering, Mason and Dixon are indirectly initiating a future war—the
American Civil War—by establishing an arbitrary boundary between
free and slave-holding states. Numerous people they encounter warn
of the long-term consequences of their actions, including Bets Harland
(MD 330) and the Indian delegation that accompanies the astronomer
and surveyor for the last leg of their project up to but not crossing the
Great Warrior Path. The Visto is far too linear, purposeful, and
teleological to qualify as a path to enlightenment. Nevertheless,
Eastern religion enters the narrative of Mason & Dixon in a significant
way in the ideas and viewpoint of Zhang, the Chinese mystic. Zhang,
who mysteriously enters the Visto narrative via Ethelmer’s reading of
the Gothic serial, The Ghastly Fop, is also an astronomer, but one who
sets the prime meridian not at Greenwich, as do Mason and Dixon, but
at “a certain Himalayan Observatory in Thibet” (MD 142). Zhang’s
perspective on the Visto serves as a counterpoint to the Western
enterprise of marking a boundary as an indicator of ownership of the
land. “‘Boundary!’” Zhang exclaims at one point,
The Tao of Thomas Pynchon 221

“Ev’rywhere else on earth, Boundaries follow Nature,— coast-lines, ridge-

tops, river-banks,— so honoring the Dragon or Shan within, from which
Landscape ever takes its form. To mark a right Line upon the Earth is to
inflict upon the Dragon’s very Flesh, a sword-slash, a long, perfect scar,
impossible for any […] to see as other than hateful Assault.” (MD 542)

Zhang explains to Dixon that he is of the Kan-cheu school of

Buddhism, “which places the Dragon of the land above all else” (MD
544): according to this school, the earth is alive, like a great dragon,
and feels the cut of the Visto upon it. Zhang’s commentary
undermines the Western, utilitarian, proprietary view of land
underlying the surveyors’ project, in favor of a view that endows the
earth with sacred, occult properties, as is typical in Eastern religion.
By the end of the narrative, Mason and Dixon both begin to question
the purposes and interests they are serving by drawing up the linear
border.
There are many more references to Eastern religion in Mason &
Dixon than in Gravity’s Rainbow. Given Pynchon’s usual multiplicity
of narrative perspectives and his myriad unstable shifts between
narrator and narratee, I would hazard the generalization that most of
these references foreground Eastern religious tradition as a positive
force. Zhang’s Buddhist perspective is contrasted with that of his
adversary, Father Zarpazo, also called the Wolf of Jesus, who is
connected to a shadowy group of Jesuit nuns known as the Widows of
Christ. Zarpazo recalls the aggressive tactics of the Spanish
Inquisition: he is “sworn to destroy all who seek God without passing
through the toll-gate of Jesus” (MD 543). Although a potentially
violent clash between these two eternal enemies, Zhang and Zarpazo,
is anticipated, it never materializes. Rather, the two ideologies,
Christian and Buddhist, are set in opposition, and since Zarpazo never
appears, Zhang, who works globally to serve the cause of Feng-Shui,
holds forth unopposed, except by a handful of skeptics in the Mason-
Dixon party who are convinced the Chinese mystic is mad. Zarpazo’s
failure to appear also, of course, raises the possibility that he and
Zhang might constitute opposing sides of the same person. More
importantly, Zhang serves as a spokesperson for the “subjunctive”
outlook, which is alive to possibility and aware of the conditional; by
contrast, Zarpazo and those cutting the Visto express the “indicative”
outlook, “winning away the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one
by one, and assuming them into the bare mortal World” (MD 345).
222 Michael Harris

I referred earlier to David Cowart’s assertion of “the mounting

evidence of Pynchon’s spiritual and metaphysical (even religious)
seriousness” (279). Although Cowart’s essay appeared well before the
publication of Against the Day, that novel certainly confirms the
accuracy of his observation. Against the Day includes numerous
references to Eastern religious views and practices, more than in any
previous Pynchon novel. Kit Traverse, for instance, devotes himself to
the spiritual quest of locating the mythic, lost city of Shambhala, a
sacred site for Buddhists. As Kit travels “into the beating heart of
shamanic Asia” (AtD 775) on assignment of sorts—to deliver
Yashmeen’s letter to her father, Colonel Auberon Halfcourt—he must
pass through a series of obstacles and markers in order to reach his
destination. His journey to locate Shambhala proves fruitless, but
nevertheless allows Kit to walk away from Scarsdale Vibe’s control
and to ponder his life’s path. Kit’s search for Shambhala is finally too
directed, and has too much of a specific telos to become a path toward
enlightenment. As Siddhartha discovers in Hesse’s novel, “Seeking
means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive,
to have no goal” (113). Despite his specific goal, Kit appears unsure
what he is looking for. He explains to Yashmeen that Shambhala is an
“ancient metropolis of the spiritual, some say inhabited by the living,
others say empty, in ruins, buried someplace beneath the desert sands
of Inner Asia. And of course there are always those who’ll tell you
that the true Shambhala lies within” (AtD 628). Against the Day
continually suggests that a journey toward enlightenment is internal as
well as external. Kit locates Auberon Halfcourt in the remote city of
Kashgar, but their meeting is anti-climactic, reminding Kit of
Stanley’s highly publicized “rescue” of Livingston in 1871: “The man
is not lost, and there was never any question of ‘rescue’” (AtD 753). If
Kit’s search for Shambhala seems almost stereotypic—like an episode
of Indiana Jones or Kipling’s Kim perhaps—the sojourn of Kit’s
brother Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian Latewood is taken more
seriously.
Shambhala obviously refers to a variety of different things in
Against the Day. Besides the name of a place, a “legendary kingdom
that was a source of learning and culture for present-day Asian
societies [and] a place of peace and prosperity, governed by wise and
compassionate rulers” (Trungpa 25), it also denotes a spirit of
compassion, represented by the group known as the Compassionate
The Tao of Thomas Pynchon 223

who inhabit Shambhala in Yashmeen’s dream, as well as an act of

discovering one’s proper path in life. In Shambhala: the Sacred Path
of the Warrior, Chögyam Trungpa associates Shambhala with a way
of life characterized by the warrior, although in this case it would be
an enlightened warrior of the spirit, living a life of renunciation and
daring. As Trungpa explains, “the word ‘warrior’ is taken from the
Tibetan pawo, which literally means ‘one who is brave’” (28).
Trungpa’s work on the figure of the spiritual warrior grows out of his
series of lectures known as the Shambhala Vision. Looking at Against
the Day as a whole, one might argue that Webb Traverse is the
dominant figure in the first half of the novel, as he carries on his
angry, personal war against Scarsdale Vibe and the plutocrats. As a
revenant, Webb returns to tell Reef that he “sold [his] anger too
cheap” (AtD 672), and this affects his entire family, probably
destroying his relationship with his daughter. In the second part of the
novel, Pynchon lays out a Shambhala Vision of his own, as Reef,
Yashmeen, and Cyprian carry out their own struggles against the
plutocracy. In this latter half of the narrative, however, the warriors
seem less angry than Webb and more in touch with the spiritual
dimension of their warriorship.
After the narrative thread involving Kit’s search for Shambhala is
suddenly relinquished, once again in typical Pynchonian fashion, the
reader begins to follow Latewood. As an agent working under the
supervision of Derrick Theign in the Foreign Office, Latewood serves
as a pawn for the British Government. When the reader first meets
him, Latewood’s homosexuality appears to define him, as others
dismiss him as a “sod” (AtD 491, 722), “pouffe” (AtD 709, 722), or
“nancy” (AtD 722). Latewood carries on a masochistic relationship
with his supervisor Theign, who controls him sexually and
professionally. Prior to Mason & Dixon, Pynchon at times displayed
traces of homophobia, as Julie Sears has argued, but in Against the
Day he “revise[s] his presentation of deviant sexuality” (Sears 120) by
endowing Latewood and his search for enlightenment with a
noteworthy seriousness. Kit Traverse’s largely external search for
Shambhala serves to prepare the reader to pay attention to the more
subtle changes Cyprian undergoes in his wandering journey. Thus,
although Latewood seems as unlikely a spiritual seeker as Slothrop,
the reader comes to regard him as such.
224 Michael Harris

Cyprian undergoes a remarkable transformation into a spiritual

warrior. Whereas most of Slothrop’s changes in Gravity’s Rainbow
take the form of a shifting assumption of comic book roles, such as
Max Schlepzig, Rocketman, and Plechazunga, Latewood’s changes
are internal, relating to his altering self-perception and outlook on the
world. Nevertheless, both battle forces intending to control or oppress
them. Latewood’s internal changes are charted in terms familiar in the
discourse of Eastern religion, such as compassion, desire, love, and
light. Moreover, in the context of Eastern religious traditions,
Cyprian’s changes are expected, for these traditions tend to regard life
in much more dynamic terms than Christianity. Not only will one pass
through many reincarnations of birth, death, and rebirth over time, but
in a single lifetime one is expected to experience many
transformations. Trungpa asserts that the “key to warriorship and the
first principle of Shambhala is not being afraid of who you are.
Ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of
yourself” (28). Latewood’s transformation, like Slothrop’s, has to do
with a renewed acceptance of himself.
Cyprian’s journey toward enlightenment might be said to begin
with his last mission as an agent for the Foreign Office. For this
mission, he is sent to Bosnia, which has just been annexed by
Austria—an aggressive takeover that historically moved the world
closer to World War I; Latewood’s job is to help protect Danilo
Ashkil, who is considered valuable by the FO for his ability to
navigate this newly problematic region. Danilo, a Sephardic Jew from
Salonica, Greece fluent in numerous languages, and the British
Latewood initially do not get along. It is Danilo who tells Cyprian that
his mission to Bosnia is a set-up, and his condescension toward the
British agent is clear as he delivers this information:

“I hesitated to disturb you with the news, Latewood, for you seemed another
of these neurasthenic youths one finds everywhere lately. But you must be
told. You have come to Sarajevo on a dummy assignment. All to lure you out
here to Bosnia, where it is easier for the Austrians to take you. Your English
employers have shopped you to them as a ‘Serbian agent’ […]. It seems you
owe England nothing anymore. I advise you to go. Save your life.” (AtD 832)

Deciding to take an out-of-the-way route to safety in Trieste, Cyprian

and Danilo must navigate unfamiliar terrain and soon find themselves
“adrift and mapless in a region of mountains and forest and
The Tao of Thomas Pynchon 225

unexpected deep ravines” (AtD 833). After Danilo falls and breaks his
leg and later contracts a fever, Cyprian has no choice but to carry him
to safety to his home in Salonica, relying on untapped physical and
spiritual reserves: “He was surprised to find emerging in his character
previously unsuspected gifts, notably […] an often-absurd willingness
to sacrifice all comfort until he was satisfied that Danilo would be
safe” (AtD 839). Here Cyprian exemplifies compassion—the ability to
feel with others—and according to Buddhist teaching, the highest
virtue, along with wisdom (Robinson 23). Their wayward journey to
eventual safety marks the beginning of a change in Latewood that is
not sought, but is nevertheless welcome.
Whereas Kit Traverse acknowledges that he is not like the
stranniki, the holy wanderers that Yashmeen recalls from her Russian
childhood, Cyprian now is. These stranniki, Yashmeen remembers,

had led everyday lives like other men, had their families and work […]. Then
one day they simply turned—walked out through the door and away from all
of it—whatever had held them there, history, love, betrayals forgiven or not,
property, nothing mattered now, they were no longer responsible to the world,
let alone the Tsar […]. (AtD 663)

Often sheltered in cellars, the stranniki came to be known as

“underground men” (AtD 663) but their calling was spiritual. “It was
not the day we knew that provided the stranniki their light” (AtD 663).
Cyprian begins his life as a wanderer by walking away from his
Foreign Office job, and indirectly away from the beginnings of World
War I. Yashmeen, evicted from her Viennese apartment on suspicion
of being Jewish, begins her path of wandering as well, asserting that
she now considers herself a strannik.
Just as he put Danilo’s welfare before his own, Cyprian also
sacrifices himself for Yashmeen. Their relationship is difficult to
define—and different than anything else in Pynchon—but the word
love would not seem too strong a term. Their “love,” however, is more
spiritual than sexual, although it has a sexual dimension. When the
two meet by chance on a street in Vienna after a long absence, the
narrator relates that “[f]or a moment they stared, both seeming to
recognize an act of mutual salvation” (AtD 716). Pondering the
question of love, Cyprian later has a “Cosmic Revelation” that, rather
than a “single Force at large in the world,” love “was in fact more like
the 333,000 or however many different forms of Brahma worshipped
226 Michael Harris

by the Hindu” (AtD 848). Cyprian continues his aimless wandering

away from his Foreign Office job when he accompanies Yashmeen
and Reef to the Balkan Peninsula to disarm the Interdikt line of
Austrian minefields during the outbreak of the Balkan Wars (1912-
1913). During this time, just as earlier during his experiences in
Bosnia with Danilo, Cyprian notices his absence of desire. The word
desire is repeated throughout Against the Day as both a positive and
negative signifier. The South African Piet Woevre, for instance, is
described as possessing “a desire so immoderate […], the desire for a
single weapon able to annihilate the world” (AtD 559). By contrast,
Cyprian is moving beyond desire:

But along with the mysteries of Desire, Cyprian was now feeling a shift in its
terms, an apprehension that something was coming to an end.... The sources
of Desire were as unknowable as those of the Styx. But no more accountable
was the absence of desire—why one might choose not to embrace what the
world judges, it often seemed unanimously, to lie clearly in one’s interest.
(AtD 890)

In Buddhist thinking, desire is considered “the first cause of dukkha”

(Armstrong 108) or suffering, and thus gaining release from one’s
desires represents an important step toward enlightenment.
The trio of Cyprian, Yashmeen, and Reef never disarm the
Interdikt line, but their journey is purposeful nevertheless. Against the
Day valorizes alternative forms of knowing and growing. Yashmeen
learns in a dream that “the Balkan assignment had never been about
secret Austrian minefields at all” (AtD 973), but that their journey was
rather about Cyprian entering the monastery, her baby Ljubica being
born, and Yashmeen’s chance meeting with her father. Auberon
Halfcourt tells his daughter that in his own search Shambhala “turned
out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place, but
the act of leaving the futureless place” where he was (AtD 975).
Despite the fact that Cyprian eventually winds up in a monastery, his
path to enlightenment seems distinctly Eastern. In Sanskrit Buddha
means “Enlightened One” or “Seeker of Light.” Light is also a
frequent reference in Against the Day; in Cyprian’s case, it almost
always carries a spiritual connotation. At the monastery, before
entering his final “realm of silence,” Cyprian is allowed one question;
his is “‘What is it that is born of light?’” (AtD 959) Latewood’s
disappearance into the monastery after meeting Father Ponko at the
The Tao of Thomas Pynchon 227

threshold recalls the equally mysterious, legendary disappearance of

Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism. “Confronted with this emptiness, it is
not hard to imagine that […] the center of the world, Shambhala,
might exist,” writes Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard:
“Tradition says that the venerable Lao-tzu, having propounded the
Tao to the Keeper of the Pass, vanished with his ox into such
emptiness” (172).
Given Latewood’s entry into the monastery and the many
references to Christianity in Against the Day, one might argue that
Pynchon’s ongoing critique of Christianity evident in the earlier works
has been muted, but that is far from the case. It is significant that the
plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe, the man who has Webb killed, is a self-
proclaimed Christian who uses his “faith” as a cover for his activities.
Before his sidekick Foley Walker shoots him, Vibe is supposedly
spending his time and money for the benefit of “some Christian
propaganda mill down south” (AtD 789). Moreover, Pynchon
repeatedly refers to Christians as “Christers” and links them to
capitalism in this narrative, as for instance when Reef leads Yashmeen
and Ljubica to seek out a new home in America: “They headed west,
Reef propelled by his old faith in the westward vector, in finding
someplace, some deep penultimate town the capitalist/Christer
gridwork hadn’t gotten to quite yet” (AtD 1075).
I suggested earlier that Pynchon uses the journey toward
enlightenment in part as a structuring device. It is significant that
these drawn-out journeys toward enlightenment in both Gravity’s
Rainbow and Against the Day occur strategically in the latter portions
of the respective works. Both these texts might be considered anti-war
novels, and these paths toward the light by Slothrop, on the one hand,
and Cyprian, Yashmeen, and Reef on the other, represent a rejection
of war. “‘The national idea depends on war’” (AtD 938), we are told
in Against the Day, and both of these spiritual journeys take place in
wartime or post-war zones in which boundaries between nations have
been temporarily blurred or erased. Their journeys transform the
mechanical, clockwork, profane world into a natural, seasonal, sacred
world. Many readers may feel that Pynchon novels lack structure, and
admittedly the disruption of the linear narrative in his work is
important and intentional. Nevertheless, various sections in Pynchon’s
novels contain narratives, if only truncated ones. The term Tao means
“path” or “way,” and placing these journeys toward enlightenment
228 Michael Harris

toward the end of a long narrative conveys a healing or therapeutic

effect, not only for those involved, but also for readers who follow the
sojourners’ aimless wandering. The aimlessness of the journey is
important, for it requires the reader, like the traveler, to be attentive to
the moment and the local environment, never quite knowing what turn
the path might suddenly take. Upon his arrival at Lake Baikal, Kit
realizes he has not been attentive enough to his journey, and feels an
impulse to return to “the great Gateway, and begin again” (AtD 769).
It is worth pointing out that the act of reading Pynchon requires a
similar focus on the moment, and thus bears intriguing similarities to
Zen Buddhist meditation. Pynchon’s readers soon learn to pay
attention, not to the unfolding of a master narrative, but to the myriad
insights conveyed by the narrator—something communicated page by
page, sentence by sentence, moment by moment. When Cyprian tells
Yashmeen that he will not accompany them further on their journey
but will instead remain at the monastery, he explains that the
monastery accepts him for who he is. Yashmeen responds, “‘You’re
free’” (AtD 958). Ideally, reading Pynchon has the same liberating
effect on the reader.

Michael Harris, Central College, Pella, Iowa

Bibliography
Armstrong, Karen. Buddha. New York: Penguin, 2001.
Cowart, David. “The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon.” Thomas
Pynchon (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. 261-81.
Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. New York: New Directions, 1951.
Hopkins, Thomas J. The Hindu Religious Tradition. Belmont, CA:
Dickenson, 1971.
Howard, Gerald. “Pynchon from A to V.” Bookforum 12.2
(June/July/August/September, 2005): 29-40.
Kohn, Robert. “Seven Buddhist Themes in Pynchon’s The Crying of
Lot 49.” Religion & Literature 35.1 (Spring 2003): 73-96.
Matthiessen, Peter. The Snow Leopard. New York: Viking Press,
1978.
The Tao of Thomas Pynchon 229

Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Mindful Pleasures:

Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Ed. George Levine and David
Leverenz. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976. 161-95.
Mishra, Pankaj. An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. New
York: Picador, 2004.
Nadel, Alan. “Teaching Gravity’s Rainbow: Correlation in Life and
Reading.” Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot
49 and Other Works. Ed. Thomas H. Schaub. New York: Modern
Language Association, 2008. 155-62.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006.
—. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1973.
—. Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
—. “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee.” New York Times Book Review
xcviii.23 (6 June 1993): 3, 57.
—. Slow Learner. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.
Robinson, Richard H. The Buddhist Religion. Belmont, CA:
Dickenson, 1970.
Sears, Julie Christine. “Black and White Rainbows and Blurry Lines:
Sexual Deviance/Diversity in Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason &
Dixon.” Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins. Ed. Niran
Abbas. London: Associated University Presses, 2003. 108-21.
Trungpa, Chögyam. Shambhala: the Sacred Path of the Warrior.
Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1984.
Wood, Michael. “Humming Along.” London Review of Books 29.1 (4
Jan. 2007): 12-13.
 “The Real and Only Fucking is Done on Paper”:
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text

Jessica Lawson

Abstract: Gravity’s Rainbow is an exercise in interpretive paranoia. The characters

develop strategies to decipher the coded worlds they navigate in the novel, presenting
the reader with different methods of textual engagement with which to discover the
meanings of the novel. These different approaches to interpretation cross-pollinate
intellectual inquiry with modes of physical, even erotic, engagement. Putting these
textual strategies in conversation with Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, I argue that
Gravity’s Rainbow aligns literary intercourse with sexual intercourse, making writing
and reading inherently sexual practices. This essay examines the link between sex and
text, in which erotics work through and around inscription, language, and sign. From
Pirate’s masturbatory decoding to Slothrop’s curious map, sexuality is inextricably
linked to the making of meaning. A series of counter-examples provide alternative
models for intimacies that elide code (Roger and Jessica) or break the rules of
Wittgenstein’s language games (the Casino Herman Goering), while continuing to
complicate the relationship between the physical interiorities and protrusions of the
human body and their fluid relationship with the interiorities and penetrations of
literary objects. Moving from the precedents of sexual reading set early in the novel, I
trace different and particularized approaches to the erotic, from Pointsman’s
pedophilia to Slothrop’s toilet fantasies, which are complemented by equally specific
practices of writing and interpretation. Finally, with this vocabulary of sexual and
textual methodologies at hand, I consider the interpenetrative possibilities for a
reader’s engagement with Gravity’s Rainbow: how we get inside it, how it gets inside
us, and who exactly comes out on top.

Does the text have a human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body?
Yes, but of our erotic body.
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (17)

In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love one another
decently, without shame or make-believe, under the uneasy likelihoods of their
sudden deaths […]. But the life-cry of that love has long since hissed away into no
more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. […] Homosexuality in high places is just a
carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper. (GR 616)
232 Jessica Lawson

Gravity’s Rainbow is an exercise in interpretive paranoia, both for the

characters as they attempt to read their world and for the reader of the
text presenting that world. Like the characters within this novel, the
reader has enough information to deduce the presence of a code, but is
waylaid in the attempt to decipher by snares placed in the message.
More broadly, these characters also present the reader with a myriad
of available methods of textual engagement with which to negotiate
the path through the blast sites of the story.
Roland Barthes theorizes the methods by which a reader engages a
text, cross-pollinating intellectual inquiry with physical participation.
Barthes calls for a reassertion of the bodily structures of both text and
reader: “The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body
pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I
do” (17). I argue that Gravity’s Rainbow aligns literary intercourse
with sexual intercourse, making writing and reading inherently sexual
practices. Readers in and of the novel work to gain access, to find
points of entrance, to probe, to penetrate, to occupy some position
other than passive reception, other than just laying back and taking the
weight of a big, hard book. I will begin by examining the link between
sex and text, in which erotics work through and around inscription,
language and code. Moving from the precedents of sexual reading set
early in the novel, I will examine different and particularized
approaches to the erotic which are complemented by equally specific
practices of writing and interpretation. Finally, with this vocabulary of
sexual and textual methodologies at hand, I will consider the
interpenetrative possibilities for a reader’s engagement with Gravity’s
Rainbow: how we get inside it, how it gets inside us, and who exactly
comes out on top.

Beating the Code: Ejaculatory Prose and Interpretive Pleasure

Pirate Prentice creates one template for erotic reading as he engages

with two documents enclosed in his rocket-delivered mail. One of
these is a pornographic sketch, a “dead ringer” (GR 71) for his former
lover, Scorpia, dressed and positioned for maximum appeal to his
personal sexual interests. Using this image as a starting point, he
fantasizes an erotic scenario and quickly reaches orgasm. He then
spreads his semen on the second document, a blank scrap of paper
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 233

chemically rendered to respond to this stimulus, and slowly a message

appears (GR 71-72). In other words, Pirate is presented with a text
which he imaginatively engages, giving something of himself to the
page in the process, all of which reveals another, hidden text. Pirate’s
orgasm is, in fact, an act of attentive close reading. Through a
sexualized version of conventional critical practices, Pirate makes the
text yield legible meaning. As an interpretive conduit, he is bodily
connected to the reading process, a subsidiary author who vitalizes the
text through his imaginary and sexual instruments.
Barthes’s description of textual erotics bears upon Pirate’s position
as interpretive conduit, negotiating between source-text (the sketch)
and hidden meaning (the blank sheet), a negotiation that is all the
more clear because these textual elements are presented on separate
pieces of paper. Using Sade as an example, Barthes comments on a
similar textual division:

Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge (the

language is to be copied in its canonical state, as it has been established by
schooling, good usage, literature, culture), and another edge, mobile, blank
(ready to assume any contours), which is never anything but the site of its
effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed. These two edges,
the compromise they bring about, are necessary. Neither culture nor its
destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which
becomes so. (6-7)

Barthes comments on the resonant tension within the text, in which

the static properties of language as a predictable cultural artifact
coexist with destructive and open-ended interpretive possibilities.
Metaphorizing this tension as a physical separation, Barthes imagines
the join that both hinges and separates the edges of the newly
separated text. Barthes posits neither of these codependent texts as
erotic themselves, but rather locates sexuality in the space between,
which delimits the edges and by separation defines them. This
metaphor is startlingly appropriate for Pirate’s role in the interpretive
process. The portrait is a conformist text, drawing on personal and
cultural clichés. The other scrap of paper is blank, like Barthes’s other
edge, and is literally positioned against the picture of Scorpia as “the
site of its effect,” the physical space upon which the portrait’s impact
is rearticulated through the capturing/recording of Pirate’s semen. Not
only is his situation orgasmic, but his position at the join between two
textual edges—one conformist and one interpretive—is itself an erotic
234 Jessica Lawson

position.1 He is a warped parody of a close reader, and his position

between two texts reinforces the necessity of his role in the creation of
meaning, constituting the textual event through an erotic separation of
source from interpretation.
Yet even this is an oversimplification. Pirate is able to perform this
interpretive gesture because the militarized bureaucracy that made the
message possible has already sufficiently penetrated his
consciousness. They have presented him with a highly personalized
image, despite the fact that he has never described his erotic
preferences, or revealed Scorpia’s identity, to anyone. His own
identity is porous. Rather than acting solely as the discreet and solid
hinge within an opened-up textual object, he is himself opened up; he
has been read and re-inscribed through cultural programming.2
Timothy Melley notes the panic Pirate feels at the intimacy between
his desires and his social conditioning, describing it as ultimately a
dissolution of body and identity, in which, “his person—that which
defines and controls him—has been dispersed into a network
extending far beyond his individual, material body” (84). His body
separates from itself in the moment of ejaculation, and this loss of
physical coherence encapsulates the ways that his subject position—
like the Barthesian separated message—is becoming extended and
diffuse. This cultural-conditioning model expands the accordion folds
in the authorship process, shuttling the message through the strata of
informational systems so that Pirate’s private ejaculatory penmanship
becomes one in a chain of inscriptions practiced both through and
upon him, opening up the text, his body, and the moment of writing
itself.3
The abstract and intangible bureaucratic interruptions which
punctuate and penetrate Pirate’s consciousness have as their
counterpart more immediate textual intrusions on his imagination and
personal history. In the midst of his paranoia, the imagined Scorpia
intervenes:

Could there be, somewhere, a dossier, could They (They?) somehow have
managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty…how else
would They know?
“Hush,” she whispers. Her fingers stroke lightly her long olive thighs,
bare breasts swell from the top of her garment. Her face is toward the ceiling,
but her eyes are looking into Pirate’s own. (GR 72)
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 235

Scorpia’s interruption halts the frantic pace of Pirate’s thoughts and

replaces them with an interactive erotic scenario, one in which they
make eye contact across the barrier of the page. Looking at the sketch,
“there is a taste in his mouth he would feel again” (GR 72). This
statement indicates that he both does and does not make contact, in
that it describes the literal reality of sensory information (“there is a
taste in his mouth”) as well as the remove at which that sense is held
(“he would feel again”). The shift from the free indirect style which
describes his paranoia to the removed, omniscient voice that details
Scorpia’s intervention emphasizes the outside intrusion she has made,
desirable though it may be, into the language of his private thoughts.4
Scorpia has crossed the boundaries of his imagination, the sensory
limits of his body, and the physical edge of the page. As a text made
flesh, this version of Scorpia inverts her introduction thirty pages
prior: “Incredible black-and-white Scorpia confirmed not a few
Piratical fantasies about the glamorous silken-calved English
realworld he’d felt so shut away from” (GR 35-36). Scorpia’s flesh
and blood incarnation is already prepared for this pornographic
sketch, rendered in black and white, straddling the boundaries of
accessibility and legibility. The decoding scene not only blurs the
distinction between literary and sexual entrance, but also between art
and life, manipulator and manipulated. Bodies and texts open up,
complementing the erotic content of messages by extending the
moment of writing. However one imagines this daisy chain of literary
penetrations, it disrupts the coherence of every corner of the literary
landscape, inducing readerly paranoia that the audience may be
themselves intelligible to the texts whose meanings they seek.

Polymorphous Perusal: Rival Codes and Illegible Intimacies

Legibility and the lack thereof are central concerns for Tyrone
Slothrop. The map Slothrop has made of his sexual conquests encodes
in two ways, one legible to Slothrop, and one not. Unbeknownst to
him, the sites of sexual intercourse which he marks with stars on this
map perfectly encode and predict the bomb sites of London. Within
his realm of knowledge, but never quite decoded by the map’s other
readers, are the patterned colors of the stars themselves. The narrator
reveals Slothrop’s own motivations as he muses over two of the
236 Jessica Lawson

women he has slept with, each of whom is marked with a silver star,
“He must’ve been feeling silvery both times—shiny, jingling. The
stars he pastes up are colored only to go with how he feels that day,
blue on up to golden” (GR 22). In this case, the methodology
governing his writing is one that reflects not the subject denoted, but
his own emotional state at the time of authoring. He also writes in
response to the rockets, recording observations in an activity he calls
“work-therapy” (GR 24), similarly using the occasion of inscription to
dually create a text and address his emotional state. Within one code
system, Slothrop’s authorship is sexually destructive, dubiously
legible, and uncomfortably public. Within another, his inscriptions are
intimacies that grant him access to himself through their private
readability.
Slothrop’s authorial power fluctuates based on the context in which
that authorship is decoded and given meaning, and his status as an
erotic reader is similarly complicated. While he can enter his partners
sexually, he cannot penetrate their textual counterparts quite as easily.
Recalling a series of lovers, Slothrop remembers: “snuggling for
warmth, blackout curtains over all the windows, no light but the coal
of their last cigarette, an English firefly, bobbing at her whim in
cursive writing that trails a bit behind, words he can’t read…” (GR
23). The woman’s writing is triply embodied: in the words on her
page, in the bobbing light of her cigarette as she moves her inscribing
hand, and in the cryptic smoke trails that follow from the cigarette’s
movement. Slothrop cannot read her words, whether directly or
through these secondary and tertiary levels of mediation and removal.
Like the texts of Pirate and Barthes, the legible object is presented
through a series of re-articulations that unfix the moment of
writing/reading, making it as difficult to tell which text Slothrop
should engage as it is for him to fix an interpretation to the object. The
rocket to which Slothrop is so intimately connected encapsulates
illegibility, the signified object travelling faster than its own sound,
repositioning the signifier as an afterthought rather than a precursor.
Yet the rocket remains exceptional, and Slothrop imagines it not
dislocated within its code, but totally divorced from all sign systems,
“nothing he can see or lay hands on—sudden gases, a violence upon
the air and no trace afterward…a Word, spoken with no warning into
your ear, and then silence forever” (GR 25). Never fully cognizant of
the code he could crack by the careful study of his own penis,
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 237

Slothrop craves a different kind of immediate, personal legibility: a

rocket with his name on it. Slothrop’s myopic reading is re-translated
into omnipresent writing as he ends his story through a bodily
dispersal that—like Pirate’s orgasm—pairs physical dissolution with
authorial extension.
Code-making and code-breaking also structure the affair between
Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake. At the surface, the highly
scripted nature of their relationship suggests that they are wholly
absorbed into the dominant social codes of sexual love. Their first
encounter “was what Hollywood likes to call a ‘cute meet’” (GR 38),
and even Roger’s desire not to be scripted is expressed with a colon
that offsets his comment as if it were dramatic dialogue, “his irritated
sigh: Jess don’t make me out some cold fanatical man of science” (GR
41).
Yet while this script provides the frame of their relationship, the
intimacy between them challenges the possibility of fully coding
erotic love. While Pirate and Slothrop’s communications disperse the
body and the text across interlocking code systems, Roger and
Jessica’s physical intimacy consistently presents itself as dislodged
altogether from those codes. Much of their affair happens outside of
language, in a space where both meaning and identity are diffuse:

The time Roger and Jessica have spent together, totaled up, still only comes to
hours. And all their spoken words to less than one average SHAEF
memorandum. And there is no way, first time in his career, that the statistician
can make these figures mean anything.
Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles
and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.
Apart is for all their flip film-dialogue, scenarios they make up to play
alone for themselves in the nights with the Bofors door-knocking against her
sky. (GR 121)

Their connection slips into the spaces between and beyond the coding
and scripting systems that could make their intimacy “mean
anything,” just as the paragraph describing their connection is slipped
between the bookends of memoranda and film dialogue. This
connection necessarily takes them out of their static subject positions.
Roger and Jessica’s intimacy dissolves identity through their
conjoined bodies, making them into a “long skin interface” that utters
“hardly a word beyond her name, or his” and refuses to fix either
name to any portion of their collective body. Beyond the codes and
238 Jessica Lawson

scripts of language and selfhood, their relationship engenders

connection through anonymity and unreadability, so that “when face-
to-face there has been no way to tell which of them is which” (GR 38).
The slippage from the meaning systems of code and script that
allow Roger and Jessica this private intimacy is further reflected in the
way these connections demonstrate a dispersal of the erotic body
itself, allowing sign and flesh to dislocate, cross-pollinate, conjoin and
anonymize:

The very first touch: he’d been saying something mean, a bit of the usual
Mexico self-reproach—ah you don’t know me I’m really a bastard sort of
thing— “No,” she went to put her fingers to his lips, “don’t say that.…” As
she reached, without thinking he grabbed her wrist, moved her hand away,
pure defense—but kept holding her, by the wrist. They were eyes-to-eyes, and
neither would look away. Roger brought her hand to his lips and kissed it
then, still watching her eyes. A pause, his heart in sharp knocks against the
front of his chest… “Ohh...” the sound rushing out of her, and she came in to
hug him, completely let-go, open, shivering as they held each other. She told
him later that as soon as he took her wrist that night, she came. (GR 120)

Jessica physically interrupts, with an attempted finger toward his lips,

the script of “self-reproach” that Roger has begun. He then interrupts
her gesture by grabbing her wrist. Now that both the verbal and bodily
systems of communication are halted, something strange happens. Her
orgasm is dislocated from the sexual center of her body, occasioned
by contact not with her genitals but with her wrist. This physical
displacement later characterizes Roger’s love, in which his “heart
grows erect, and comes” at the sight of her (GR 120). Jessica’s orgasm
not only moves within her body, but breaks the boundaries of her
body itself; the heart which beats “in sharp knocks” is located in his
chest, rather than hers, as if it is he who is having the orgasm. Her
irrepressible vocalization as Roger kisses her hand, and her
subsequent shivering, according to what Jessica later says, occur
shortly after the actual orgasm, which is to have happened “as soon as
he took her wrist.” Her moan and shudder are not themselves
orgasmic, but retrospective. Ecstasy is physically dislocated and
temporally dispersed. Orgasm is an event that occurs somewhere
behind or beyond the map of the body, the pinpoints of linear time, the
division between persons, and the reference systems of language and
code.5
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 239

Safe Words: Language Games and Consent Gambles at the Casino

Herman Goering

Simple codes work by one-to-one correspondences, the substitution of

an opaque sign for a covered word. Like the map of rocket blasts and
the map of Slothrop’s conquests, simple codes neatly overlay their
corresponding meanings point for point. Yet, as the maps’ frustrated
decoders already indicate, this is not how language itself works, nor
even how all codes work. In 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations broke with the then-prevalent approach
to linguistic meaning that relied on a theory of direct correspondence
between word and object (an approach largely pioneered by
Wittgenstein himself). Wittgenstein proposed the alternative model of
use-value and “language games,” in which language use is structured
by a set of rules governing allowable moves (4). Unlike simple
substitutions of sign for thing, these allowable moves are context-
dependent, creating a necessarily entanglement of expression and
reception, integrating signs into the rules of the social world.
Deviations from those rules are not simply transgressive, they are
unintelligible (48). As Slothrop and his rocket-predicting penis move
off of the London grid, the one-to-one correspondences between sex
and violence become more disorganized, and the inability to decipher
his penile code turns into an equally frustrating difficulty in trusting
the rules of the communication itself. In keeping with the house of
games in which he is lodged, the Casino Herman Goering offers a set
of Wittgensteinian language games in which meaning, money, and
pants are all easily lost.
Section 3 of “Un Perm’ au Casino Herman Goering” illuminates
the failures of the game-systems within which signs have legible
meaning. When Slothrop comments on the counter-intuitive visual
symbols of German technical writing, “whose resistors look like coils,
and the coils look like resistors,” he asks Stephen Dodson-Truck if the
Germans are trying to “camouflage” the meaning (GR 206). Unable to
categorize these signs within the system he recognizes, Slothrop
assumes these symbols are opaque or illegible. Dodson-Truck offers
German runes as the alternate sign system in which these strange
pieces play an appropriate role. This conversation inaugurates, at the
start of this section, a lingering exploration of the relationship between
signs and the systems/games that give them meaning. Even identity is
240 Jessica Lawson

on the table, as in the “game” of Prince, a drinking competition whose

resulting intoxication causes its players to make errors within the
larger conspiratorial game, leading to Dodson-Truck’s revelation of
his role in observing Slothrop. As the night wears on and sobriety
wears thin, the rules of the drinking game itself begin to change in a
boozy deconstruction of the relationship between players and their
parts: “By this time it is impossible to tell who’s making mistakes and
who isn’t” (GR 213).
Systems of shared meaning, as well as overlapping systems of
meaning whose significance is not equally shared between both
players, figure importantly in the relationship between Slothrop and
Katje in this episode. They began their play within a specific code of
allowable connections: “Seductress-and-patsy, all right, that’s not so
bad a game. There’s very little pretending” (GR 207). The first half of
this section describes the deepening intimacy between these two,
perhaps moving them beyond the game which robbed Slothrop of his
identity (and his pants). No longer able to fully play the social role
that this identity provided for him, Slothrop is now strangely free to
pursue Katje in a way that might—in other kinds of social games—be
considered romantic. This change from one system to another
manifests as their literal lack of interest in the casino games. They
ignore the gambling wheel in favor of one another: “Seeing the
number is supposed to be the point. But in the game behind the game,
it is not the point” (GR 208). The game behind the game, the narrative
implies, could be burgeoning love. Still, as a well-timed intercession
from Weimar Berlin shows, “[i]n love, words can be taken too many
ways” (GR 220).
Following the night of the drinking game, Katje and Slothrop begin
a fight that culminates in an act whose meaning—like words in love—
cannot be easily placed within only one game of signification. They
argue about Dodson-Truck’s revelation:

“What did he tell you?” She moves a step closer. Slothrop watches her hands,
thinking of army judo instructors he’s seen. It occurs to him he’s naked and
also, hmm, seems to be getting a hardon here, look out, Slothrop. And nobody
here to note it, or speculate why....
“Sure didn’t tell me you knew any of that judo. Must of taught you it in
that Holland, huh? Sure—little things,” singing in descending childish thirds,
“give you away, you know....”
“Aahh—” exasperated she rushes in, aims a chop at his head which he’s
able to dodge—goes diving in under her arm, lifts her in a fireman’s carry,
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 241

throws her against the bed and comes after her. She kicks a sharp heel at his
cock, which is what she should’ve done in the first place. Her timing, in fact,
is drastically off all through this, else she would likely be handing Slothrop’s
ass to him…it may be that she wants her foot to miss, only scraping Slothrop
along the leg as he swerves now, grabs her by the hair and twists an arm
behind her, pushing her, face-down, on the bed. Her skirt is up over her ass,
her thighs squirming underneath him, his penis in terrific erection.
“Listen, cunt, don’t make me lose my temper with you, got no problems at
all hitting women, I’m the Cagney of the French Riviera, so look out.”
“I’ll kill you—”
“What—and sabotage the whole thing?” (GR 221-22)

The clear signs in this scene are few: a lost fight and the exchange of
harsh words, which lead to penetration and Katje “screaming into the
pillow” (GR 222). Depending on how motives are attributed to these
actions, this episode could feature either a sexual assault that is re-
imagined in the false or distorting guise of consensual play, or an
implicitly consensual act which draws pleasure for its participants by
masquerading as assault.6 The narrator offers tentative explanations
for Katje’s misplaced kick, and Slothrop’s language is
uncharacteristically rough (as if he is acting), yet the text withholds
any simplifying categorization of the event. It may be that the
explanations offered are Slothrop’s own, justifying an actual rape. It
may also be that the characters are good enough at reading one
another (through “little things”) that they have negotiated, in the
silences between described movements, a spontaneous and consensual
domination scenario that only role-plays literal violence. It is possible
that Slothrop’s response, “What—and sabotage the whole thing?” to
Katje’s threat to kill him refers to the sexual game in which they are
currently engaged. Yet, the evidence that would lean toward
consensual role-playing is conspicuously noncommittal, positioning
the reader in an uncomfortable place between codes. The reader’s
position is further unsettled few paragraphs later: “But here’s only her
old residual bitterness again, and they are not, after all, to be lovers in
parachutes of sunlit voile, lapsing gently, hand in hand, down to
anything meadowed or calm. Surprised?” (GR 222) The word
surprised gestures to the surprised audience that has, up until this
point, been expecting a love story. The unintelligibility within this
scene is echoed by ambivalences of the narrative voice. The scene
hovers between systems of meaning, committing to neither, breaking
its contract with the reader to provide intelligible access to the reality
242 Jessica Lawson

of the events described. As the only one here “to note it, or to
speculate why,” the reader’s narrative trust is explicitly challenged.
However one interprets the scene between Katje and Slothrop itself,
the only wholly intelligible violation occurs not in the bed, but on the
page.

Between the Sheets: Pointsman, Prattle, and the Passive Page

Thus far, I have argued for a coincidence of encoding/writing and

decoding/reading with sexuality, and have explored the different ways
that adherence to code effects the erotically authoring body. Having
traced the more general alignment of erotics and semiotics, I will now
turn to the variance among these codes themselves, examining
Pynchon’s coupling of specific kinds of sex with complementary
approaches to the written word in and of Gravity’s Rainbow. Form
and content combine to yield one such literary complement when the
reader learns that Dr. Edward Pointsman is a pedophile: “How
Pointsman lusts after them, pretty children. Those drab undershorts of
his are full to bursting with need humorlessly, worldly to use their
innocence, to write on them new words of himself” (GR 50). The use
for which he imagines these children is described here as an act of
inscription, turning the children into passive sheets of paper, ready
receptacles for the self-realizations that he will imprint upon them,
these “new words of himself.” The children emerge out of a “wordless
ratcheting queue” (GR 51), and the bus station where he waits for
them is filled with unseen texts, “waste newspapers or propaganda
leaflets no one has read” (GR 50). Sex, for Pointsman, is an act of
writing that anticipates no audience. His partners are imagined as too
young to respond in the language of adult sexuality, and their
artlessness allows him to position them not as responsive readers for
his sexual text, but as blank entities inviting him to “impress them”
(GR 50).
Pointsman’s authorship is, to use Barthes’s terminology, an act of
prattle. Barthes describes the prattling author directly:

You address yourself to me so that I may read you, but I am nothing to you
except this address; in your eyes, I am a substitute for nothing, for no figure
(hardly that of the mother); for you I am neither a body nor even an object
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 243

(and I couldn’t care less: I am not the one whose very soul demands
recognition), but merely a field, a vessel for expansion. (5)

Pointsman, like the prattling writer, conflates the text he creates with
that text’s audience, making the act of writing an end in itself via the
forced elision of the reader’s presence. This is an authorial desire
which collapses back in upon itself, returning to the writer “whose
very soul demands recognition” at the expense of the reader. This
conflation, elision, and collapse characterize a peculiar stylistic move
Pynchon makes in this passage. The move in question begins with
Pointsman’s observation of a young girl in the St. Veronica’s
Downtown Bus Station. Using her as the starting point, Pointsman
considers more broadly the thousands of children passing through the
city, and the section ends with a description of the occasional child
who actually follows Pointsman home. This entire passage is the
novel’s first extended piece of second-person narration, a stylistic
change which both Barthes and Pynchon employ at moments when
readers are flattened by the textual event in which they have no
agency. Concurrent with Pynchon’s discussion of sexual inscription
upon passive subjects is a narrative conscription of the reader to the
uncomfortable position of direct address, co-opting us into the story in
a new and forceful way, like the children Pointsman wishes to pull
into the realm of the sexual.
Yet the character position in which the reader is placed, the “you”
whose role we momentarily assume in the story, is not the “artlessly
erotic” child (GR 50), but rather Pointsman himself. This doubly
reinforces the solipsism of Pointsman’s sexual and textual practices.
Not only are the words he will write upon these children self-
reflexive, but so is the narrative method by which these meetings are
then described. The only access that either the reader or Pointsman
have to the sexual object is mediated, always passing first through the
filtering circuit of how it affects Pointsman. For example, when
describing the physical and emotional state of the girl he sees in the
bus station, the narrator does not tell us plainly that she is tired, but
rather that “[y]ou feel her exhaustion, feel the impossible vastness of
all the sleeping countryside at her back, and for the moment you really
are selfless, sexless” (GR 51). The selflessness referred to here is
undercut not only by its ephemerality, but more pointedly by the fact
that the girl’s fatigue is never described as existing in the girl herself,
244 Jessica Lawson

but rather always and originally—and with no small amount of

irony—in the interposed and irrevocably present self of Pointsman.

Underwriting: Anal Sex and Cultural (Re)Inscription

Gravity’s Rainbow explicitly undertakes a critique of the relationship

between sexuality, writing, and power, a combination that offers a rich
set of possibilities for pairing specific sex acts with specific language
practices. In the novel, struggles for social dominance, in which two
partners vie for the right to control a cultural vocabulary, are
frequently articulated through anal sex. While not all acts of anal
intercourse are portrayed as competitive or negative, and not all
attempts at social control are complemented by this sexual practice,
Pynchon does with startling frequency take advantage of the
metaphoric valences of social struggle and anal sex. In part, this is a
way of physically dramatizing an analogous relationship between
language and feces which is developed throughout the novel in
contexts that are sometimes entirely asexual and sometimes heavily
eroticized.
This sexual and linguistic domination is particularly prevalent in
scenes of racial conflict.7 One such scene is presented to the reader
through a strange hallucination Slothrop has during a lab experiment
conducted to explore his uniquely American racism. To sketch this
hallucination roughly: he imagines/remembers a night of dancing,
dropping his harmonica (notably called a mouth-harp) down a toilet,
and diving into that toilet both to retrieve it and to escape—or
possibly invite—the threat that a group of black men now present to
his exposed anus. He wriggles fully into the toilet just in time to
escape the probing fingers of a young Malcolm X, and re-emerges in
the Wild West, where he can display sexual and cultural dominance as
he sees fit.
This social and sexual struggle carries with it the struggle over
language. As Slothrop becomes enmeshed in his hallucination, he sees
black faces whose dialect is recorded with bawdy exaggeration. Here
the lab technicians reappear, reminding both the reader and Slothrop
that this is a fantasized memory, asking specifically about the
language that has just been used: “That was ‘sho nuf,’ Slothrop?” (GR
62) Slothrop protests the interruption and the narrative voice moves
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 245

back in, describing now the speech of the white boys: “Eastern prep-
school voices, pronouncing asshole with a certain sphinctering of the
lips so it comes out ehisshehwle” (GR 62). The entrance and re-
entrance into this hallucination emphasize distinctive pronunciations
of words on both sides of the cultural divide. The tie between the
racial or sexual body and the physicality of linguistic expression is
emphasized as the white college boys transform their mouths into the
very assholes they describe, creating a strangely embodied
pronunciation of the word and forecasting the later prominence of one
particular white asshole.
The struggle for linguistic control reemerges along with the
aforementioned anus when a black shoeshine boy, referred to by
Slothrop only as “Red,” punctuates his attempt to penetrate Slothrop
by correcting his use of language, which Slothrop belatedly considers
on his way down the toilet, “the true name is Malcolm” (GR 64). To
anally enter Slothrop is to assert linguistic as well as bodily
occupation. The concern with language continues down the toilet
along with Slothrop. The walls of the pipe he moves through, also
anal, are encrusted with feces, “mixed with hardwater minerals into a
deliberate brown barnacling of his route, patterns thick with meaning,
Burma-Shave signs of the toilet world, icky and sticky, cryptic and
glyptic” (GR 65). The anal passage Slothrop penetrates is itself
readable. There is even a legible difference between the excrement
produced by black men versus white. In a text that often compares
words and shit, the anal passage already contains signs and meaning
produced by the owner of that passage, the author of their own fecal
signature. The potential for another person, another culture, to
sexually insert their own use of language into that passage is here
rendered in highly literal terms. Anal sex becomes, in this scene, the
possibility to culturally inscribe with an authorial finger or penis,
altering and revising the pre-extent language housed in the interior of
the body.
Slothrop’s feces are a recurring concern in his musings on the
textual product of his culture and others. Much later in the novel,
Slothrop is struggling with “[v]omiting, cramps, diarrhea” and “lies,
listening [to] the tramping and the voice out of earshot, the sound of
his country fading away” (GR 360). The “fading” of his historical
language manifests textually as “poor refuge pockets stuffed with
tracts nobody’d read” (GR 360). In the middle of these cultural
246 Jessica Lawson

quandaries, Slothrop remains dually preoccupied with black men and

his own anus: “Somewhere between the burning in his head and the
burning in his asshole, if the two can be conveniently separated, and
paced to that dying cadence, he elaborates a fantasy in which Enzian,
the African, finds him again—comes to offer him a way out” (GR
360).8 Less shitty (in every sense), but just as linguistically charged is
the relationship between sex and sign systems in the more explicitly
consensual partnership between Blicero and Enzian. Their relationship
is consistently punctuated by their attempts to control the linguistic
medium by which it is delivered, oscillating between “Liebchen” (GR
101) and “omuhona” (GR 100). When first sexually approached by
the young African man, who invokes the act of sex in his own
language and with reference to his own system of religious worship,
Blicero “feels the potency of every word: words are only and eye-
twitch away from the things they stand for. The peril of buggering the
boy under the resonance of the sacred Name fills him insanely with
lust” (GR 100). This perceived proximity of signifier and signified—a
proximity easily breached by bodily physicality (the twitch of an
eye)—allows the threat of linguistic and sexual transgression to
become all the more potent. Specific references to “buggering,” as
opposed to other erotic play (including oral sex) continue to connect
cultural struggle/entanglement to the particular act of anal penetration,
rather than homosexuality as an identity category. I believe the
epigraph of this paper complicates, though does not and cannot
dismiss, readings that would label the novel homophobic.9 The
linguistic struggle of their relationship also does not undo the
considerable emotional depth expressed through it; Blicero’s act of
giving his young lover the name “Enzian” is a simultaneous
expression of affection and control.

Fantasy and the Bibliophile: Can We Manage a Conclusion?

The code-tangled reader of Gravity’s Rainbow is incorporated into the

novel’s final scene, cast among crowd members in a theatre about to
be bombed. We are invited by the narrator to take comfort by touching
ourselves or one another, or singing a song we learn on the final page.
Just after being taught the song, we read the final two words of
Gravity’s Rainbow, which gesture to the performance we will possibly
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 247

continue beyond the story, with an anticipatory “Now everybody”

(GR 760), leading us to sing even after the book ends and the bomb
descends. This is the final act of both reading and writing, sexually
inflected, under the threat of a more literal bodily dispersal (i.e. via
bombing) than what Pirate experienced. The reader performs the text
(by singing), perhaps sexually (by touching), perhaps beyond the body
of the book itself, but how? Which of the available reading templates
applies to the novel?
Pirate Prentice, the first character/reader introduced in this text, is a
fantasy surrogate. He is employed by his government to manage the
imaginative lives of others. His experiences with this have been at
times violating, his mind penetrated by unwanted fantasies, forced
into a sexual response, “to get their erections for them” (GR 12). He
is, in one respect, a passive reader within his own mind, “his eyes
rolled back into his head reading old, glyptic graffiti on his own
sockets” (GR 14). Yet his is also a position of management, of
manipulation, able to enter the mind of another. As before, his
spectatorship is both a penetrated and a penetrating one, feminizing
the psychic interiors of his mind even as it erects his projective
telepathic equipment.
The first and final scenes of the novel both display examples of
fantasy management, one performed by Pirate in his bed, the other
performed by us inside a movie theatre. The structurally similar
nightmares are communicated with several internal commonalities
that further cement the bond between Pirate’s vision and the reader’s:
allusions to the rocket, to theatre, to blackout, and to spectatorship, all
of which align Pirate’s reading of the dream that starts the novel with
the reader’s confrontation with the dream of the novel. In each of
these reader-text pairings there appears a reminder that the narrating
voice knows its audience is watching and can talk back to it. Like
Pirate’s entrance into the minds of others, the novel-reader
relationship is co-penetrative, partners entering and manipulating one
another through language and imagination. The coordination between
phallus and rocket complicates any purely positive reading of this
interpenetration, whether we are in the rocket (like Gottfried), of the
rocket (penetrating the book as if it were the circular rainbow), or
pierced by the rocket (our minds entered, as Pirate imagines, by a
rocket that perfectly cracks upon the top of our skulls). The co-
penetration of these fantasies and nightmares nevertheless present us
248 Jessica Lawson

with a model of literary entrance that grants some power to both

parties, reader and text.10
Reading Gravity’s Rainbow is itself a kind of fantasy management.
We are passive in that we yield our mental interior to the paranoia-
inducing linguistic entrances engineered by Thomas Pynchon. Yet we
bring these signs to life, we enter the story and engage in imaginative
intercourse, we create the characters, we manage the fantasy. Like
Pirate, we act as the erotic hinge between creation and destruction,
between spectatorship and participation. We engage in a literary role
play that positions us as subsidiary authors. This is not a wholly safe
position, as we vie with the narrator for dominance, perhaps, like the
penetrating rocket, destroying language in our wake. We may also co-
ordinate, couple, fertilizing the text in the act of interpretation.
Gravity’s Rainbow allows for the possibility of interpenetration, a
reading practice in which we both give and take, submit and manage,
put out and produce.

Jessica Lawson, University of Iowa

Notes
1
There are elements of this analogy which do not map perfectly: notably the
“interpretive edge,” which in Pirate’s case is predetermined.
2
He is the one-man masturbatory proof of Wittgenstein’s argument against the
possibility of a private language.
3
What I have termed an extension of the authorial event, strung out over textual and
bodily stop-gaps which continually shift the moment of inscription, owes much to
Timothy Melley’s discussion of both bodily dispersal and Pirate’s inexact agency (82-
85). Where I have examined the changes in body and identity as markers of
fluctuation in authorship, Melley discusses communication technologies and power
structures that redistribute the body and identity-as-agency.
4
Melley also notes this stylistic shift (85).
5
Their story, like their bodies, eventually thins out and disappears from the events of
Gravity’s Rainbow. Their breakup is only reported after the fact, when the two
characters reappear hundreds of pages later, once Jessica has slipped back into the
comfortable system of her socially coded relationship with Jeremy.
6
I believe that to offer a firm interpretation in either direction deprives the scene of its
structural richness.
Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text 249

7
For other readings of the relationship between sexuality and race in Gravity’s
Rainbow, see Sears and Curtin.
8
Many thanks to Rob Latham for advising the early stages of this article, and for
directing me to this scene.
9
For a closer reading of the problem of sexual orientation in Pynchon’s work, see
Sears.
10
The metaphoric tie between the phallus and readerly penetration also creates a few
inconsistencies for readers with vaginas.

Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Curtin, Maureen F. Out of Touch: Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf,
Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker. New York and London: Routledge,
2003.
Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in
Postwar America. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
2000.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Penguin,
1994.
Sears, Julie Christine. “Black and White Rainbows and Blurry Lines:
Sexual Deviance/Diversity in Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason &
Dixon.” Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins. Ed. Niran
Abbas. London: Associated University Press, 2003. 109-21.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd Ed. Trans. G.
E. M. Anscombe. Malden, MA; Oxford; and Victoria, Australia:
Blackwell Publishing, 2001.
Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in Thomas Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49

Manlio Della Marca

Abstract: This essay reads Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel The Crying of Lot 49
“against the light” of Marx and Bauman’s “melting visions.” It seems to me a
stimulating perspective which might enable us to see The Crying of Lot 49 as only a
few frames of a much longer movie, a point on that line of Western thought which,
from Marx through Benjamin to Bauman, has tried to depict the collateral effects of
modern capitalism, the wounds inflicted by modernization, next to the positive
aspects of progress. It is within this larger framework that I want to show how
focusing on the solid/fluid dialectic might open up new ways of looking at The Crying
of Lot 49. On the one hand, I will try to chart how, throughout the book, the play of
memory is at the center of a force field shaped by the solid/fluid tension. On the other
hand, I will show how Pynchon’s story might be read as a semiotic reflection on the
value of the almost completely dissolved, fluctuating signs of postmodern America.

1
“All That Is Solid Melts into Air”

All That Is Solid Melts into Air is the title of a compelling book on
modernization by Marshall Berman; at the same time “[a]ll rusted
relations […] dissolve away […]. All that is solid melts into air” is a
quotation from the heart of the Communist Manifesto which in the
original German reads: “Alle festen eingerosteten Verhältnisse […]
werden aufgelöst […]. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft.”2
By using this image of evaporation, Marx and Engels not only
managed to grasp the spirit of modern capitalism, but they also
foreshadowed some of the features to come of the postmodern, late
capitalist societies we have been living in for the past few decades.3
No wonder sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in Liquid Modernity, after
reminding us that fluidity is a distinguishing quality of gases and
liquids, argues that the crucial feature of the present phase of
modernity is the transformation from solid societies into fluid—or
252 Manlio Della Marca

liquid—societies (1-2). In Bauman’s analysis, the transition towards

postmodernity has so far been primarily a traumatic, disorienting shift
from a heavy, solid, hardware-focused modernity to a light, fluid,
software-based one (Liquid Modernity 113, 116, 198, 200).
I do not think that it is old-fashioned Marxism to consider the
economy as one of the leading forces shaping history, and I would
thereby like to reconnect The Crying of Lot 49 to its moment and
place of production. Therefore, much as I admire Patrick O’Donnell’s
introduction to the collection of essays on The Crying of Lot 49 he
edited, I can only partially agree with him when he argues that “it
would be a mistake to assume that there is any definitive connection
to be made between ‘fiction’ and ‘history’ […]” (1). Pynchon’s
second novel is set—and was published—in the volatile atmosphere
of 1960s America, “a transition point” (SL 7) when the economic (and
cultural) configurations which had lasted for decades started to melt
into the late capitalist, postmodern, liquid environment depicted by
Bauman and prefigured by Marx. An understanding of this is a
prerequisite to grasp the affinity many contemporary readers feel for
Oedipa and Mucho. In fact, most of the disorienting features of
modernization experienced by Pynchon’s characters are the same we
find ourselves dealing with today, only on a much greater scale.

In the following pages, I will try to read Thomas Pynchon’s

postmodern novel The Crying of Lot 49 “against the light” of Marx
and Bauman’s “melting visions.”4 It seems to me a stimulating
perspective which might enable us to see The Crying of Lot 49 as only
a few frames of a much longer movie, a point on that line of Western
thought which, from Marx through Benjamin to Bauman, has tried to
depict the collateral effects of modern capitalism, the wounds inflicted
by modernization, next to the positive aspects of progress. What
should not be overlooked is that, perhaps because of the inevitable
melancholy implicit in any critique of modernity, the critical visions
of modernization developed by Marx, Benjamin, Bauman and
Pynchon follow a trajectory essentially different from—but sometimes
edging dangerously close to—those of many reactionary writers and
thinkers.
Alongside this transnational (and transhistorical) perspective,
however, the quintessentially American nature of Pynchon’s melting
vision should not be swept aside. As O’Donnell reminds us:
Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in The Crying of Lot 49 253

The struggle between fluidity and form in the construction of the self has been
one Richard Poirier, in several books including A World Elsewhere and The
Performing Self, has located within the specific historical progressions of
classical American and modern literature. Pynchon, according to Poirier, is
part of this tradition of progression, a descendent of Hawthorne, Emerson and
Melville in his projection of a vision of “cultural inundation, of being
swamped, swept up […].” (11)

It is within the larger framework suggested so far that I want to show

how focusing on the solid/fluid dialectic might open up new ways of
looking at The Crying of Lot 49. On the one hand, I will try to chart
how, throughout the book, the play of memory is at the center of a
force field shaped by the solid/fluid tension. On the other hand, I will
show how Pynchon’s story might be read as a semiotic reflection on
the value of the almost completely dissolved, fluctuating signs of
postmodern America.

The Melting Vision

Before discussing how the solid/fluid dialectic and the theme of

memory intertwine in The Crying of Lot 49, I would like to gloss the
idea of the “melting vision.” Let us begin by looking at the entire
sentence from the Manifesto I referred to before: “All that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled
to face with sober senses his real condition of life, and his relations
with his kind” (7). As Marshall Berman points out, “Marx’s second
clause, which proclaims the destruction of everything holy, is more
complex and more interesting than the standard nineteenth-century
materialist assertion that God does not exist” (89). According to
Berman, “Marx is […] working to evoke an ongoing historical drama
and trauma. He is saying that the aura of holiness is suddenly missing
and that we cannot understand ourselves in the present until we
confront what is absent” (89). If we agree with Berman’s reading of
the Manifesto, it is Marx’s tormented sensibility, his conception of
history as a melting process—a dramatic, disorienting, endless change
driven by capitalism—that bridges the gap between his era and ours,
making us perceive him as our contemporary.
It seems to me that Marx’s melting vision expresses an attitude
towards modernization very similar to that of Bauman and Pynchon.
Many of Pynchon’s characters, like us, inhabit a world where “all that
254 Manlio Della Marca

is solid melts into air” and all that is rusted dissolves away. Indeed,
Mucho leaves the used car lot and all its automobiles with their “rusty
underneath” (CoL 8) and starts to work for a radio station. But the
change, as Marx had predicted, is a traumatic one: “He [Mucho] had
believed too much in the lot, he believed not at all in the station” (CoL
9). The shift from the hard world of the used car lot to the soft world
of media encompasses the trajectory from modernity to
postmodernity. But the price to pay is a world which has lost even its
residual aura of holiness. The void must be filled with something else:
paranoia or memory.5 Both can be seen as last, desperate, postmodern
attempts to “re-enchant” and “resacralize” the world.6

Memory

Early in the book we read that Oedipa has “to decide what to liquidate
and what to hold on to” (CoL 12) of Pierce Inverarity’s legacy. I think
this sentence encapsulates the central dilemma at the heart of The
Crying of Lot 49, which is also the central problem of our present-day
liquefied, flowing societies.
Deciding what to liquidate and what to hold on to is a wonderful
image of memory, shaped by the tension between what is solid and
what becomes fluid. Harald Weinrich has argued that metaphors of
memory in Western thought could be grouped into two types or
“metaphorical fields”: the storehouse metaphors and the wax tablet
metaphors (Sprache in Texten 291-94). We can draw on Weinrich’s
brilliant intuitions to imagine an alternative “field” that could be used
to explore not only metaphors, but all images of memory: the one
created by the solid/fluid dialectic. While solidity stresses the stability
of memory, fluidity draws attention to the transient nature of it and its
need for perpetual self-reorganization.
Applying this model to The Crying of Lot 49, we can see that
memory exposed to liquefaction and dematerialization imposed by
modernization generates two clusters of recurring images in the novel:
one of hard materiality (junk, waste),7 which seemingly appears to be
an attempt to stabilize memory, and another of fluid, liquefied realities
(media, spectral figures).8 The following passage shows how “rusty”
cars become a hard, though temporary, deposit of memory—or
memories—which will be inexorably swept away:
Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in The Crying of Lot 49 255

Yet at least he [Mucho] had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could
he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a
parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins:
motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their
whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like
himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath […] inside smelling
hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations
of cigarette smokers, or only of dust—and when the cars were swept out you
had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling
what things had been truly refused […] and what had simply (perhaps
tragically) been lost: […] all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad
of despair, in a grey dressing ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes […].
(CoL 8, my emphasis)

This extract expresses a sensibility characterized by melancholy for a

“rusty,” heavy world which had been the last receptacle of memory.
But this world, like that of Marx and Bauman, seems to be dissolving
alongside the debris of its past. Or even worse, all stored information,
all the traces, the “bits” of the past must be swept away in order to use
the frame again. The hardware must be formatted and the old software
deleted to upload a new, faster and lighter version of the program for
the next user.
Memory, junk and computers merge into a single image in the
following scene where Oedipa meets an old sailor after her night’s
wandering around San Francisco.9 The old man’s mattress is

a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless

overflowing bladder, viciously tearfully consummated wet dream, like the
memory bank to a computer of the lost? […] Oedipa watched him make
adjustments so he’d fit easier against the mattress. That stuffed memory. […]
She remembered John Nefastis, talking about his Machine, and massive
deconstruction of information. So when this mattress flared up around the
sailor, in his Viking’s funeral: the stored coded years of uselessness, early
death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept
on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the
mattress burned. (CoL 87-88, my emphasis)

Once again, as in the car lot passage, there is almost an attempt to use
junk as a means of creating a storage device which can resist the
vaporization of memory. However, it is an attempt inevitably
condemned to failure.10
Besides the heavy, solid and only partially liquefied images of
memory discussed so far, throughout The Crying of Lot 49 we find
256 Manlio Della Marca

another cluster of much lighter, immaterial images of memory: media

and ghostly presences. I would like to focus on two passages from the
novel which seem relevant to our discussion. The first occurs in
Oedipa’s motel room. Metzger, the co-executor, watches a televised
movie with Oedipa in which he starred as a child years before (CoL
17-28). Since, for some inexplicable reason, the movie scenes are not
broadcast in the right order, what is described is not only a person
watching his dematerialized past on television, but also an account of
how we experience memory in everyday life. In fact, as the pictures
on the television screen shift from one temporal layer to the next,
present and past often ambiguously coexist in memory. The second,
related scene I want to discuss depicts Oedipa visiting the grave of
Driblette, the late director of the theatre production that included the
lines about the Tristero, who walked into the Pacific Ocean and whose
liquid fate had been “foreshadowed by his shower water dribbling
down the drain” (Hayles 108). Oedipa asks Driblette to bring her
“memories of the last night” while she tries to reach out

to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet
below, still resisting decay—any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself
for some last burst, […] just-glimmering, holding together with its final
strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host,
or dissipate forever into the dark. (CoL 111)

Yet again, what we have here is memory linked to a ghostly,

evanescent presence.
The mapping of images linked to memory that are generated by the
solid/fluid dialectic would not be complete without mentioning
another dimension of Pynchon’s melting vision closely related to
memory. In fact, one the most fascinating aspects of The Crying of Lot
49 is that it might be read as a disturbing exploration of the complex
relationship between collective memory and the construction of
American national identity. Throughout the book, Oedipa’s quest for
memory is repeatedly linked to some events endowed with a
foundational status in American history, such as the Civil War and the
clashes between the pioneers and the Native Americans. The problem
is that Oedipa’s efforts to reconstruct these events are constantly
frustrated by the impossibility to have access to the facts in any other
way than through the memories of other people—memories that are
often dissolving and frequently based on contrasting, unstable oral
Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in The Crying of Lot 49 257

narrations:11 “Two very old men. All these fatigued brain cells
between herself [Oedipa] and the truth” (CoL 65). Thus Pynchon
deconstructs American history—or better, the myth of America—at its
roots. The supposed historical truth on which America was founded
seems to be melting away. But, as Benedict Anderson reminds us, it is
exactly in this fluid space generated by the dialectic between memory
and forgetting that nationalist discourse operates to create “a narrative
of ‘identity’” (201, 205), because what “can not be ‘remembered,’
must be narrated” (204). Looked at from this perspective, the
discourse of memory in The Crying of Lot 49 configures itself as a
subtle attempt to uncover the constructed nature of what, extending
Anderson, might be termed America’s imagined past. At the same
time, the text foregrounds the persistence of the past in the present.
Like the homemade wine Genghis Cohen offers Oedipa (CoL 65-
68)—a wine made from dandelions picked in a cemetery that has been
destroyed for a new freeway—America’s present is a liquid
containing the fluctuating signs picked from a land no longer
existing.12

Signs

According to John Johnston, one the novel’s central motifs is “that the
dead never really go away or disappear, but persist as ‘signs’” (56).
Focusing on the persistence of the past in the semiotic texture of the
present, his words take us from the discourse on memory to the last
part of this essay, which is devoted to the different signs, inscriptions
and symbols that crop up in the novel. From the very first paragraph
we already find Oedipa remembering “a whitewashed bust of Jay
Gould […] the only icon” (CoL 5) in Pierce Inverarity’s house. By
opening with an “icon” and the name “Pierce,” the text inevitably
“evokes the name of the American founder of semiotics C. S. Peirce”
(Johnston 56). My point is that not only could all of The Crying of Lot
49 be read as a semiotic reflection on the value of postmodern signs
(Johnston 47, 50). but also on how they are shaped by the tension
between solidity and fluidity. Oedipa’s search first for the (paper)back
and then for the (hard)cover edition of Wharfinger’s collected plays is
just one example of that tension. But there is much more than that; the
central sign of the novel is at the centre of this force field as well.
258 Manlio Della Marca

Indeed, the muted post horn symbol appears on different kinds of

material or media. It is this calling attention to the texture of the signs
that contributes to create the sense that in this novel “the medium is
the message” (McLuhan 7), and that therefore the solidity of the
material whereby signs are transmitted is one of the central concerns
of this narrative.
This impression is reinforced when we follow Oedipa as she tries
to reconstruct the episode of the fight between post riders and
unknown assailants disguised as Indians. In her search she comes
across a hard sign, a bronze historical marker that reads:

On this site […] in 1853, a dozen Wells Fargo men battled gallantly with a
band of masked marauders in mysterious black uniforms. We owe this
description to a post rider, the only witness to the massacre, who died shortly
after. The only other clue was a cross, traced by one of the victims in the dust.
To this day the identities of the slayers remain shrouded in mystery. (CoL 62)

Once again, a hard sign is juxtaposed with—or better, is based on—a

series of fading, unstable signs: the oral testimony of the mortally
wounded post rider and the cross in the dust.13 By calling attention to
the deceptive solidity of the signs whereby a minor episode in
American history is transmitted, Pynchon seems to be suggesting a
much more disturbing question: What is the real nature of the signs
whereby America represents its past?
Indeed, Pynchon’s choice of the cross is not accidental, it hints at
another mysterious story of America’s foundation, the disappearance
of the Roanoke Colony, the first English attempt to establish a
permanent colony in North America.14 The colonists had been
instructed to carve a cross on a tree should they need to abandon the
colony. When in 1590 a rescue mission from England reached the
colony, the settlement had been deserted. All they found was the word
“Croatoan” carved on a tree. About seventeen women, ninety men and
eleven children had vanished.

Afterthought: Fluid Destiny

In the previous pages, I have been arguing that focusing on the

solid/fluid model might help to detect some intriguing aspects of
Pynchon’s attitude towards modernization. I have also tried to show
Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in The Crying of Lot 49 259

how Pynchon’s melting vision shares some significant features with a

persistent line of thought developed by such European thinkers as
Marx and Bauman: it is precisely the melancholic attitude implicit in
these visions of modernization, I have argued, that generates a
sensibility in some ways similar to—but, let me repeat it, in no way
isomorphic with—that of many reactionary thinkers. Alongside this
transnational and transhistorical perspective, whose full implications
remain to be explored by future readers, I have suggested that the
tension between solidity and fluidity might be used as an explanatory
matrix of the processes shaping memory and signs throughout The
Crying of Lot 49. The analysis of these processes reveals how the text
interrogates the symbolic construction of America. Now, I would like
to conclude by focusing on the particularly American nature of
Pynchon’s melting vision: Sacvan Bercovitch has written that “the
classic American authors were imaginatively nourished by [their
national] culture, even when they politically opposed to it” (16).
Pynchon too, then, is a paradigmatic example of a “classic American
author” who enters a complex dialogue with America’s imagination
by dramatizing the dialectic of fluid destiny that was already at the
core of Emerson’s essay “Fate”: “Every solid in the universe is ready
to become fluid on the approach of the mind, and the power to flux it
is the measure of the mind. […] The whole world is the flux of matter
over the wires of thought to the poles or points where it would build”
(Emerson 1119).

Manlio Della Marca, University of Rome “Sapienza”

Notes
1
I wish to thank Shelly Kittleson, Giogio Mariani, and Alessandro Portelli. Their
suggestions have been invaluable. They are of course in no way responsible for the
flaws of my work.
2
My quotations from the Manifesto are drawn from Moore’s classic translation
(1888), authorized and edited by Engels. Here, however, I have slightly deviated from
it. Moore’s original English translation reads: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with
their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-
formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,
260 Manlio Della Marca

all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real condition of life and his relations with his kind ” (Marx and Engels, The
Communist Manifesto 7). The passage differs significantly in German: “Alle festen
eingerosteten Verhältnisse mit ihrem Gefolge von altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und
Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern
können. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und
die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen
Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen” (Marx and Engels, Das
Kommunistische Manifest 465).
3
On the notion of “late capitalism,” see Jameson, Postmodernism 3.
4
I take the expression “melting vision” from Berman. According to him, Marx’s
melting vision “pulls like an undertow against the more ‘solid’ Marxian visions we
know so well” (89). Even though Bauman claims that the melting process described
by Marx is different from the one taking place in the contemporary phase of
modernity, it seems to me that Bauman’s analysis of modernization bear close
affinities with that of Marx. On this point, see Bauman, Liquid Modernity 3-4.
5
On paranoia and conspiracy theories, see Jameson, Postmodernism 83, and his The
Geopolitical Aesthetic 9-10. See also Portelli, Canoni Americani 291, and Simonetti
61-76.
6
On postmodernity “as a re-enchantment of the world that modernity tried hard to
dis-enchant,” see Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity x. On most postmodernist
fiction as “a post-secular project of resacralization,” see McClure 144.
7
On garbage and waste in Pynchon’s work, see Tanner, Thomas Pynchon 20, 31.
8
On ghosts in The Crying of Lot 49, see Portelli, The Text and the Voice 46. For a
more general study of ghosts in Pynchon’s fiction, see Punday.
9
For some stimulating reflections on the images of memory in our computer age, see
Weinrich, Lethe 5-6.
10
On the “sailor’s mattress” scene, see Tanner, “V. and V-2” 45. and Hinds 30. See
also Hayles 114-16.
11
For a discussion of the scenes of oral exchange in the novel, see Duyfhuizen 85.
12
Commenting on this passage, Mendelson speaks of “the sacramental content of
wine, the persistence of mythical time behind the profane world” (“The Sacred, the
Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49” 133-34).
13
On sandy areas as a metaphor for “oblivion,” see Weinrich, Lethe 4.
14
See Portelli, Canoni Americani 268. Steiner notes that “the reference to the Boston
Tea Party seems unavoidable here” (345).

Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge,
1992.
Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in The Crying of Lot 49 261

—. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the
Symbolic Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of
Modernity. 1982. New York: Penguin, 1988.
Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “‘Hushing Sick Transmissions’: Disrupting
Story in The Crying of Lot 49.” O’Donnell 79-95.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Fate.” 1860. The Norton Anthology of
American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym et al. 4th ed. Vol. 1. New
York: Norton, 1994. 1103-21.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “‘A Metaphor of God Knew How Many Parts’:
The Engine that Drives The Crying of Lot 49.” O’Donnell 97-125.
Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. “Thomas Pynchon, Wit, and the Work of
Supernatural.” Rocky Mountain Review 54.1 (2000): 23-40.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. 1984. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.
—. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World
System. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.
Johnston, John. “Toward the Schizo-Text: Paranoia as Semiotic
Regime in The Crying of Lot 49.” O’Donnell 47-78.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1888.
London: Penguin, 2004. Trans. of Das Kommunistische Manifest.
1848. Werke. Vol. 4. Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 1972.
McClure, John A. “Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction
and Spirituality.” Modern Fiction Studies 41.1 (1995): 141-63.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.
Mendelson, Edward, ed. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978.
—. “The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49.” Mendelson
112-45.
O’Donnell, Patrick. Introduction. O’Donnell 1-20.
—, ed. New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1991.
Portelli, Alessandro. Canoni Americani. Rome: Donzelli, 2004.
—. The Text and the Voice: Writing, Speaking, and Democracy in
American Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Punday, Daniel. “Pynchon’s Ghosts.” Contemporary Literature 44.2
(2003): 250-74.
262 Manlio Della Marca

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. London: Vintage,

1996.
—. Slow Learner: Early Stories. Boston: Little, 1984.
Simonetti, Paolo. “L’arcobaleno della Paranoia. Dalla Paranoia di
Gravity’s Rainbow alla dietrologia di Underworld.” Ácoma 35
(2008): 61-76.
Steiner, Wendy. “Collage or Miracle: Historicism in a Deconstructed
World.” Reconstructing American Literary History. Ed. Sacvan
Bercovitch. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. 323-51.
Tanner, Tony. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Methuen, 1982.
—. “V. and V-2.” Mendelson, Pynchon: A Collection of Critical
Essays 16-55.
Weinrich, Harald. Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. Ithaca:
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—. Sprache in Texten. Stuttgart: Klett, 1976.
 The Underworld and Its Forces: Croatia, the Uskoks
and Their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day

Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

Abstract: This essay tries to capture and explain the complex relationship of
underworld forces (both human and supernatural) represented in Against the Day with
the Croatian struggle for freedom in the context of Pynchon’s novel, drawing on a
historical and mythological framework. It addresses this question: how do
underground forces that are present in all of Pynchon’s novels function in this
particular context of narration, and how do they support a mythological structure tied
to the stereotypical beliefs that justify violence and unceasing struggles? The analysis
includes the investigation of Pynchon’s narrative framework that mostly hinges on
mythology and Western thought about more remote Eastern places, tolerating elisions
and imposed disfigurations, yet with a dose of criticism. Yet both the structure and his
arguments are more convincing because he interjects the re-writing of ideological
views and the demeaning stereotypes about the Balkans, as well as stressing Western,
external domination and control, while trying to illustrate the Easterners’ perception
of imperialist powers and their notion of self-determination.

“We are pirates, aren’t we, brutal and simple, too attached to the outsides of things,
always amazed when blood flows from the wound of our enemy. We cannot conceive
of any interior that might be its source, yet we obey its demands, arriving by surprise
from some Beyond we cannot imagine, as if from one of the underground rivers of the
Velebit, down in that labyrinth of streams, lakes, coves, and cataracts, each with its
narrative, sometimes even older than the Argonauts’ expedition—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?” (AtD 819)

Such made me the beast without repose

that, coming on against me, little by little
was pushing me thither where the Sun is silent
(Inferno, Canto I: ll. 58-60)

Just as Dante Alighieri began portraying the underworld (in his

masterwork Inferno) after being exiled from his birthplace of
Florence, so does Pynchon’s character in Against the Day, Vlado
264 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

Clissan,1 speak of the “lightless underworld” when he feels “exile[d]

in [his] own land” (AtD 819). The analogy between forceful
separation from one’s native land and underworld is symptomatic in
both instances, no matter if it is a literal separation as in Dante’s case,
who never returned to his hometown of Florence, or both a literal and
a figurative one as in Clissan’s circumstances. Clissan’s ancestors had
permanently left Klis in the sixteenth century, moving into literal
exile, and the fact that his homeland was under foreign rule implies
metaphorical exile.
Assailed by “the beast” (the Antichrist) that kept “coming on
against [him]” (Inferno, Canto I: ll. 59), dragging him toward sin,
Dante enters the pitch blackness of the underworld in his Inferno,
filled with sinners doomed to everlasting damnation, reflecting his
eternal banishment from Florence. Such sordid places or states as Hell
or exile, which Dante compares to spiritual death, enduring “the bitter
taste of others’ bread” and all too familiar with “how hard a path it is
for one who goes ascending and descending others’ stairs” (Paradiso,
Canto XVII: ll. 57-60), are loci where “’l sol tace”—“the Sun is
silent” (Inferno, Canto I: ll. 60). Thus, exile is always already
associated with underworld in Dante’s and Pynchon’s work, be it a
spiritual or literal withdrawal and/or separation (mostly both).
In Against the Day, Vlado Clissan’s domicile is Croatia, the
Southeastern European country located at the crossroads of the
Mediterranean, Central Europe, and the Balkans. With a geopolitical
history of invasion and rule by outside powers, Croatia was for
centuries the frontier where the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarians and
the Venetians converged, all with their own agendas. The
autochthonous population was often forcefully resettled within or
outside their country (as historical sources claim the Uskoks of Senj
were relocated at the beginning of the seventeenth century), some
departed on their own to avoid persecution (as Clissan’s ancestors fled
from the Turks), many stayed in their homeland and succumbed to the
new government, and some engaged in underground resistance
movements that struggled against the enforced authority (as the
Uskoks did in the sixteenth century and Clissan and his companions
did in the late nineteenth century). In his novel, Pynchon concentrates
on those that remained in Croatia and who felt themselves internal
exiles, just as Clissan acknowledges—at home but excluded from
governance, lacking control over administration, courts, and
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 265

education. Enduring the age-long subjugation, isolation and

triumphant attitudes that the conquerors did not hide made them yearn
for autonomy and engage in underground activities and in long and
recurring struggles for freedom throughout their history, which
Pynchon presents through Clissan’s and his comrade’s ventures, and
through his tale of the Uskoks.
This paper tries to capture and explain the complex relationship of
underworld forces (both human and supernatural) represented in
Against the Day with the Croatian struggle for freedom in the context
of Pynchon’s novel, drawing on a historical and mythological
framework. It addresses this question: how do underground forces that
are present in all of Pynchon’s novels function in this particular
context of narration and how do they support a mythological structure
tied to the stereotypical beliefs that justify violence and unceasing
struggles? The analysis includes the investigation of Pynchon’s
narrative framework that mostly hinges on mythology and Western
thought about more remote Eastern places, tolerating silences,
elisions, and imposed disfigurations, yet with a dose of criticism. But
both the structure and his arguments are more convincing because he
interjects the re-writing of ideological views and the demeaning
stereotypes about the Balkans, as well as stressing Western, external
domination and control, while trying to illustrate the Easterners’
perception of imperialist powers and their notion of self-
determination.
For the most part the underworld forces portrayed in Against the
Day are human, revealing the imagery of outlaw traditions and quasi-
criminal elements of society, in this case the Uskoks, a well-organized
group in sixteenth-century Croatia, and “the increasingly energetic
New Uskok movement” (AtD 697), as Pynchon names a resistance
movement active in late nineteenth-century Croatia. The theoretical
framework for the understanding of the Uskok community in this
paper is provided by a variety of Venetian, Croatian, and Austrian
sources and documents, and by Catherine Wendy Bracewell’s
monograph The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry, and Holy War in
the Sixteenth-century Adriatic (1992), published while Croatia was
afflicted by war. Bracewell, an outstanding Australian historian, is
balanced in her judgments, and I am certain that Pynchon used her
monograph as his main source on the Uskoks.
266 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

Other underworld forces that occupy the pages of Against the Day
are invisible supernatural powers that usually dwell in the regions
below the surface of the earth and lurk in the shadows for their
enemies. Pynchon’s tendency to write of the subterranean forces and
invisible underworld spirits that possess powers beyond the factual,
lurking for retribution in the margins of recorded history, has been
manifest in all of his work. Folklore, fables, legends, and all sorts of
tales that dwell someplace between myth and reality abound in his
texts. These restless creatures that roam in Pynchon’s novels belong to
“unknown purposes […] known only to the blood-scented deserts of
the Night” (MD 769).
In V., characters “yo-yo […] back and forth underneath 42nd
Street” (V. 31). They are the “king[s] of the subway” and sewer,
dreaming of their “own submarine country” (V. 217), crossing paths
with a whole “world downstairs” (V. 151) at “the other side of the
night” that “vanish[ed] again as if back behind some invisible curtain”
(V. 142).
The Crying of Lot 49 features “a calculated withdrawal” (CoL 124)
of who knows how many U.S. citizens. Thus, Oedipa feels “intrusions
into this world from another, […] the separate, silent, unsuspected
world” of “undergrounds” (CoL 124-25) that communicate by the
secretive subterranean mail system known as W.A.S.T.E. During her
ride she meets “drunks, bums, pedestrians, pederasts, hookers,
walking psychotic” (CoL 129), commuting with alternative,
underground, and marginalized representatives of American society.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, there is a doomed race of Herero exiles,
“known collectively as the Erdschweinhöhle”2 who are living in
“underground communities” (GR 315), opting “for sterility and death”
(GR 316). Their retribution to the whites is silent: “no more maids, no
field-hands” and “receptive darkness of limbs” (GR 317). The entire
tribe is “crawling away to die […] a whole people’s suicide” (GR
318). Another underground population is that of Dora “prison camp”
(GR 296), the “invisible kingdom” (GR 432) of “crematoria ghosts”
(Leonard 3) that “kept on, in the darkness” (GR 432), where “[t]he
walls did not dissolve—no prison wall ever did, not from tears” (GR
433).
In Vineland, “woge, creatures like humans but smaller” (VL 186),
felt “invaded” when Indians arrived so they withdrew “into the
features of the landscape, remaining conscious, remembering better
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 267

times” (VL 186). Yurok and Tolowa Indians were “exiled” when
Spanish and Russian settlers arrived, and “virtually erased from
memory” (Harris 204), but their spirits are still haunting new
generations. Thanatoids, a community of neither fully alive nor fully
dead people—“like death, only different” (VL 170)—grotesquely
underline our TV-based culture, a fantasy world welcomed from
comfortable armchairs and passively observed through the screen.
This last withdrawal seems particularly threatening, for it is a
consented withdrawal from the “real” world of not just a group but a
whole generation to “a comfortable masochism or diverting spectacle”
(Moore 138) that empowers yet another—in this case artificial—force,
the media.
Particularly imaginative, Mason & Dixon portrays a whole palette
of underworld figures, such as luminous phantoms, ghost-fish,
werewolves, black dogs, and “an Infestation of certain Beings
Invisible” (MD 560), for “[i]f an Actor or a painted Portrait may
represent a Personage no longer alive, might there not be other
Modalities of Appearance, as well?” (MD 165) These creatures are
“hiding, haunting, waiting” (MD 769); the only uncertainty seems to
be their idea of death, and “how are they going to deal with eternal
Rest? unless the World be already their Purgatory, and they no longer
classifiable as living” (MD 660).
Pynchon suggests in all of his novels that somewhere in the
landscape or below ground, buried, trapped, or willingly hiding from
daylight, or waiting in ambush on the other side of a screen or a glass
beyond simple reflection, there are invisible forces that camouflage
and prey upon us (even when their “outer shells” are visible as in V.
and Vineland). They seem to wait patiently, sometimes for centuries,
for some sort of vengeance. As John Leonard concludes: “invisible
forces mass to motion like an angry Wormwood, for payback time”
(3). Time is of no importance to them since their metaphysical
existence could be associated with that of “the unquiet dead” (AtD
1003). As noted by Ewball in Against the Day, they reappear
wherever there is some “unfinished business, it’s wherever there’s
accounts to be balanced” (AtD 1003). The hegumen of the convent in
Bulgaria, the head of a sect that “did not embrace the Roman Church
in 1650” but went “underground” (AtD 956), explains it: “And we go
back and forth, as Pythagoreans suspected, in and out of death as we
do dreams, but much more slowly” (AtD 961). Their spirits “dwell a
268 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

little over the Line between the Day and its annihilation” (MD 769),
accumulating strength, acquiring features and the spirit from secretive
underground forces, getting ready (even if subconsciously) for
payback time.
In Against the Day, geography and topology of the broader Balkan
region (and Europe in general) play one of the crucial roles in
elucidating mysterious underworld forces that haunt the area, and in
clarifying the spirituality of the inhabitants of the peninsula. The
Chums of Chance, a crew of protagonists that flies around the Earth
and below ground, and characters in their own series of adventure
books, conclude in one of their explorations under the sand: “As
above, so below” (AtD 439). This means that the underworld is
sometimes represented as a mirror image of the world above, as in
various African and Chinese myths. Pursuing their “dive into the
lightless world” past the boundaries of the visible, the Chums
encounter “darker shapes that kept pace with the ship’s progress”
(AtD 434).
Throughout the novel there is this idea of an ancient menace that
lurks from the insides of the Earth, enraged because humans treat it
disrespectfully, distorting its sacred territory (drilling tunnels below
ground, relocating its pieces—as the Iceland Spar figure—or
vandalizing it by mere human presence). This ancient force unleashes
“its pitiless gifts” (AtD 151), and the power “follow[s] its nature, in
exacting an appropriate vengeance” (AtD 151), at the same time
bequeathing its intensity to those that walk above ground so that it
incarnates within the inhabitants of the area.
In the Croatian territories of the novel these invisible forces are
said to “arriv[e] by surprise from some Beyond we cannot imagine, as
if from one of the underground rivers of the Velebit, down in that
labyrinth of streams, lakes, coves, and cataracts, each with its
narrative” (AtD 819). The mystical forces represent “that lightless
underworld” and are so powerful that the living folk cultures “obey its
demands” (AtD 819). In Croatian popular mythology one of the rulers
of the underworld is Dark, and during night all the underworld
apparitions (as Fear, Doom, and a variety of Passions) exit above
ground under Dark’s protection to “unfold their underworld
operations” (Suþiü 81-82, my translation). But in Against the Day,
these metaphysical powers also reflect the accumulated undying spirit
of the dead, deprived of freedom in life and in the afterlife, as chapter
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 269

headings of The Book of the Masked hint: “‘To Listen to the Voices of
the Dead.’ ‘To Pass Through the Impenetrable Earth’” (AtD 853).
Suþiü explains that heroic communities from Croatia refused to live in
subjugation and would rather choose courageous death: “Death gave
them to Earth as mortals. Glory returned them immortal to live a life
beyond this world” (109, my translation). This popular myth fits
perfectly with Pynchon’s tales of the Uskoks and their epic lives, but
also with his allusions, expressed through Ewball, to “Balkan ghosts”
or “the unquiet dead” who “surface wherever there’s a fight with the
same shape to it, same history of back-and-forth killing” (AtD 1003).
The otherworldly creatures of the Velebit, as well as humans, seem
to follow dreams as old as the world “before maps” (AtD 819), even
when they are masked as someone’s own ideas while the primal,
centuries-long objective urges for resurrection. Such a trans-
generational element is present in Clissan’s cherished The Book of the
Masked, which was

filled with encrypted field-notes and occult scientific passages of a

dangerousness one could at least appreciate, though more perhaps for what it
promised than for what it presented in such impenetrable code, its sketch of a
mindscape whose layers emerged one on another as from a mist, a distant
country of painful complexity. (AtD 853)

Although Vlado’s “living hand […] had made these marks across the
paper” (AtD 863), the readers are lead to believe that the ideas the
book embodies are not only his own but adhered to by generation after
generation, as old as the first settlers to the Velebit or even older if we
consider humans’ eternal pondering about life and death. Composed
in a hermetic mode that “could not be paraphrased even into the
strange holiness of Old Slavonic script” (AtD 853), with “the symbols,
vector and Quaternion notation” (AtD 863) that common folk were
definitely not familiar with, it is obvious that the majority of the
Croatian population cannot “conceive of” (AtD 819) the meaning of
the book. But the author implies they somehow follow its doctrine,
“obey its demands” (AtD 819). The substance of the text escapes
Yashmeen and those that are not natives of “those mountains, with
centuries of blood as security” (AtD 853), for when on the verge of
revelation, “when she felt herself about to grasp an intelligence so
grand and fatal […] she deliberately retreated” (AtD 863). Pynchon is
very secretive of the contents of the script, referring to it as “visions of
270 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

the unsuspected, breaches in the Creation where something else had

had a chance to be luminously glimpsed” (AtD 853).
Is Clissan’s book a key to the underworld, some “Invisible
Gateways” to it or to “God’s unseen world” (AtD 853), or are they one
and the same, or are they co-existing in a symbiosis, reflecting one
another? This question pertains to the duality of light and darkness
widely discussed throughout the novel. Digressing to this theme, we
will briefly look into Father Ponko’s explanations of day and night,
Moon and Sun correlation, into “some Balkan equivalent of
Transfiguration” (AtD 961). In reply to Cyprian’s question: “‘What is
it that is born of light?’” (AtD 959) the priest answers: “‘Oddly, if one
reads the Gospel accounts, the emphasis in all three is not on an
excess of light but a deficiency—the Transfiguration occurred at best
under a peculiar sort of half-light’” (AtD 960). He explains further:
“‘Nobody can withstand pure light, let alone see it. Without her
[Shekhinah] to reflect, God is invisible. She is absolutely of the
essence if he is to be at all operative in the world’” (AtD 960). Simply
put, light does not exist without darkness.
If we draw a parallel with Clissan’s book that contains “Ways in
which God chose to hide within the light of day” (AtD 853) and the
relentlessness of light during summer in the Balkans, perceived by
Reef while in Macedonia as “pitiless. Light so saturated with color
[…], that it could not be borne for long […], too much, too constantly,
would exhaust the soul” (AtD 963), it is probably easier to understand
why this light needed its dark counterpart to balance. This is also the
reason why Clissan’s comrades want revenge after his death and why
Ewball thinks “the unquiet dead” from the Balkans have some
“unfinished business […] all they feel is that unbalance—that
something’s wrong and needs to be made right again” (AtD 1003). We
see this principle as some sort of restoring balance. Even in their
torture practices the neo-Uskoks demanded symmetry. Zlatko,
Vlado’s cousin, tells Theign, their prisoner: “‘One eye was missing
from Vlado’s corpse […]. We shall take both of yours’” (AtD 874).
Vatroslav, his brother justifies: “‘Whenever you people torture, you
try merely to cripple […]. To leave some mark of imbalance. We
prefer a symmetry of insult—to confer a state of grace’” (AtD 874).
As if driven from “some Beyond” (AtD 819) the people from the
Balkans in the novel appear to restore balance with “a kind of
sacrifice, an offering, to Night” (AtD 959), they simply move through
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 271

“the arbitrarily assigned moment of darkness” (AtD 963) that allows

for the birth of the next day. Their state of grace is symbolically
presented as seeking proportion between the underworld and the
world above the ground. This is also why the folks from the Velebit
are at the same time described as carnal: “‘too attached to the outsides
of things, always amazed when blood flows from the wound of our
enemy’” (AtD 819), as well as “keeping to the shadows. ‘Ghosts’”
(AtD 873).
The powerful underworld energies appear destined to roam in-
between subterranean territories like pits, caves, ravines and fissures
(as well as realms of the afterlife) and the surface with its peaks,
ridges, and cliffs, so characteristic of karstic terrain that is specific of
Croatian coastal topology and the Velebit. In a similar manner, the
human counterparts of these energies—the Uskoks—were, according
to historical sources (Bracewell, Sarpi, Popariü, Horvat) and Clissan,
engaged in an unceasing movement through the secretive territories of
the Velebit and the Balkans, fighting for autonomy in the sixteenth
century. Assisted both by natural forces such as wind, terrain, and
weather, and otherworldly beings such as fairies (reported of in oral
myths and legends passed down the generations), the Uskoks persisted
in their fights against the Turks for the whole century. Preconditioned
by a shared history and ancestry in the centuries to follow, their
descendants, thousands and thousands of Croatian revolutionaries
(including Pynchon’s neo-Uskoks), continued to go underground and
fight for independence.
Partly supported by an actual mythological framework and
topology, and partly a brainchild of Pynchon’s imagination, the
otherworldly beings in Against the Day move within and beyond
ordinary human experience, which paradoxically associates them with
the characters’ daily practices. The spirits’ descent and ascent frames
the human process of relocation and return in the context of exile, for
both are trespassing between “here and there,” crossing some kind of
threshold. As Dawson and Johnson argue, “the betwixt and between”
characterizes the experience of the exiled, and “it is particularly the
transient—one might say liminal—quality of exile” (319) that
underlines cognitive movement and not just physical movement,
which is why Clissan feels exiled in his own land. Yet Clissan is the
leader of the neo-Uskok movement at the end of the nineteenth
century. He was born in Croatia under foreign rule, and while he is
272 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

struggling for freedom within his own land, he is constantly on the

move (very often in Italy) and actively engaged within the underworld
circles as his ancestors were. His predecessors came from the town of
Klis, as the first Uskoks from the sixteenth century arrived mostly
from inlands, from Bosnia and Herzegovina and places occupied by
the Ottoman Empire. Thus, their exile was also physical, marking
movement from one locality to another. Either way, all were involved
in leaving, arrival and return, symptomatic of the exiled. The notion of
return is definitely problematic since the exiled try to preserve their
roots but the experience of exile destabilizes fixed notions of ancestry
and cultural authenticity, which makes a simple recovery of origins
impossible.
As already mentioned, in addition to its analysis of the connection
between underworld and exile, this paper is also concerned with
Pynchon’s general presentation of the Balkans. Partly suggesting a
clash of civilizations, unending and implacable, including
innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages,
and cultures, and partly criticizing and subverting this collection of
irremediable national and ethnic questions in order to opt for
coexistence, Pynchon masterfully balances both sides. The larger
Balkans area, including Croatia, which the West geopolitically
considers to be part of the Balkans (and it would take another paper to
explain the status of its position), is represented as a territory that has
continued to fuel enormous change, struggle, bloodshed and
controversy throughout the centuries.
According to Todorova, the West was first seriously upset with the
Balkans at the time of the Balkan wars (1912-1913), hearing of the
barbarities committed on the peninsula (3). This “equipped” the West
with demeaning generalization and mobilization of disgust, isolation
and fear of the area and its populace, bringing about
misrepresentation, but also purposeful manipulation and
fictionalization of anything (allegedly) Balkan-related. Pynchon
transfers this idea through one of his characters: “‘The Balkan
Peninsula is the boardinghouse dining-room of Europe […]
dangerously crowded, eternally hungry, toxic with mutual
antagonism’” (AtD 808). As Todorova argues: “The frozen image of
the Balkans, set in its general parameters around World War I, has
been reproduced almost without variation over the next decades and
operates as a discourse” (184). This hardening of attitudes, contempt
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 273

and superiority that the West demonstrates toward the Balkans has
found a fitting correlative in Pynchon’s novel. This is how professor
Renfrew from Cambridge, one of the western “leading specialist[s]”
(AtD 226) of the Eastern Question and the Balkans, simplifies
solutions to the problems in the area: “‘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, the way master
chess players are said to regard the board’” (AtD 689). As is visible
from this quotation, the author is both playing along with the western
views of the Balkans, the novel testifying to the “otherness” of the
region, and at the same time he is being sarcastic and ridicules the
ideas of “balkanization” and “balkanism” (pejorative terms that
Todorova discusses in her work and that certainly draw on Said’s
“Orientalism”). It is important to keep in mind that “balkanization”
does not just designate fragmentation and division into small, often
hostile political units, but “had become a synonym for a reversion to
the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian” (Todorova 3).
By narrating semi-mythical constructs of ancient cultures and
myriad peoples that are ready to eat their enemies’ hearts (AtD 819-
20), Pynchon certainly emulates western views of the barbaric and
uncivilized behavior of the Balkans’ inhabitants. Yet it would be
wrong in the first place to claim that the term Balkans has ontological
stability. As Said claims, neither the concepts of the West nor Orient
retain firmness, “each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation,
partly identification of the Other” (xii), and as Todorova
acknowledges, it would be wrong to “create a counterstereotype of the
West, to commit the fallacy of ‘occidentalism’” (ix). That is why
Pynchon undermines Renfrew’s subscription to the homogeneity of
the Balkans and his ideas in general by introducing his doppelganger,
Professor Werfner of Göttingen, who “sure did look a hell of a lot like
Renfrew” (AtD 680). Werfner is equally eminent in his expertise on
the Balkans and sees the “‘long-range solution to the Macedonian
Question […] ‘to install all across the Peninsula […] das Interdikt’”
with “‘[p]oison gas’” (AtD 690). The resemblance of the two Western
professors and their “mutual loathing” (AtD 226) is in tune with their
views of the Balkan political units, which once again shows
Pynchon’s ingenuity. Since Pynchon’s novel is about power, cultures,
ideas and politics, both in the USA and in Europe, and is tied to the
274 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

tumultuous dynamics of ancient and contemporary history of the

Balkans, it presents both Western colonization and inscription of
“other” spaces with the superior attitude of instruction, as well as
criticism of such deeds, crusades, and highbrow posturing. It speaks of
the uncountable sediments of history, including histories of smaller
nations that went against the grain in their fight for independence.
Westerners have mostly avoided and isolated these lands. The
Balkans in general have been considered for centuries as a menacing
zone that separates Europe’s well-ordered civilization from the
unruliness of the Orient. As stated in Against the Day: “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” (AtD 939). The age-old
conflicts in the Balkans contribute to the view that the inhabitants of
this region somehow have animosity ingrained in their genes: “the
whole history of those Balkan peoples is revenge, back and forth,
families against families, and it never ends, so you have this
population of Balkan ghosts, shot dead” (AtD 1003). Balkan atrocities,
wars and instabilities have risen mainly from the political but also
religious and ethnic diversities of the peoples that both populated and
conquered these places.
While the West emphasized all too often the alleged Balkan
savagery, believed to be deeply ingrained in the psyche of Balkan
populations and to be exemplified by the Uskoks’ piracy and warlike
behavior, European history is itself cradled in conflicts among great
powers for domination. The imperialist striving of these forces
regulated the size and shape of different Balkan states, splitting the
territory as they pleased while among themselves following the rules
of the balance-of-power game. Regarding one of the smaller states,
Bosnia, Pynchon explains in Against the Day: “The German
ambassador had met with the Tsar, bringing a personal note from the
Kaiser, and shortly after that the Tsar announced that on second
thought the annexation of Bosnia would be fine with him after all”
(AtD 844). Subjugated countries like Bosnia were easily “turn[ed] and
swallow[ed]” (AtD 828), and smaller communities, such as the
Uskoks, were expected to know their place and to accommodate the
foreign policies that demonstrated an interest in the region. When they
rebelled they were considered uncivilized, and the imperialist powers
sent their armies to deal with the unruly, underworld subjects.
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 275

The imperialist struggles in the Balkans prove that violence is not a

predominantly Balkanic trait, assumed to stem from the tribal,
primitive and warrior ethos. As Todorova notes, Westerners are
violent too: “Indeed, there is something distinctly non-European in
that the Balkans never quite seem to reach the dimensions of
European slaughters” (6). Todorova mentions the Gulf War and
emphasizes that the Holocaust is a prime example of barbaric
behavior, concluding that the Balkans never were the powder-keg in
European conflicts but just one of the devices which might have acted
as detonator. The powder-keg was Europe itself. This substantiates the
idea that smaller communities like the Uskoks were simply trying to
survive “against the day” while greater powers were on crusades
plundering and stealing land and not just merchandise. Or as one of
Pynchon’s characters notes: “‘The Northern powers […] manipulate
other people’s history but produce none of their own’” (AtD 828).
In spite of all the crusades and insurgencies—“A great cascade of
blindness and terror ripping straight across the heart of the Balkan
Peninsula” (AtD 953)—the peninsula in Pynchon’s novel is described
as possessing a rare unspoiled and untamed beauty that could be
considered “as a charm against Balkan misfortune” (AtD 887).
Although this passage refers to a beautiful woman, Yashmeen, who
transforms during sexual intercourse with Reef, it can also be read as
hinting at the region and its invaders who “had arrived as […] agent[s]
of transfiguring—not so much because of as against [their] dogged re-
penetrations” (AtD 887). If interpreted in this way, the passage
suggests that it is only natural that Yashmeen and Reef named their
child Ljubica (Croatian for “Violet”), for the Freudian associations
that accompany the word include rape, violence and unacceptable
sexual desire.3 The couple conceived Ljubica while having sex with a
third person, Cyprian, which Pynchon’s narrator mockingly explains:
“south Slavic politics as well as sex-practices […] were widely
believed to include irregularities of gender. ‘Croatia-Slavonia!’” (AtD
704) This underlines the stereotypic belief that “Balkan mentality”
implies a predilection for exaggeration and indecency, but it also
shows that Pynchon has done extensive historical research of the area.
The quote refers to the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia which was an
autonomous kingdom within Austro-Hungarian Monarchy from 1868
until 1918.
276 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

Tracing this idea of “gender and political irregularities,” Pynchon

positions the “fornication” of Reef, Yashmeen and Cyprian on the
Orient Express just between Zagreb and Belgrade, where “for the first
time” Yashmeen approached Cyprian and “took his penis […] into her
mouth” (AtD 943). Even though they had strict rules about their
sexual games and Cyprian always took the subordinate position,
Yashmeen indulges into “strange things” just at the crossroads
between Zagreb and Belgrade and explains that “‘[t]he rule […] is that
there are no rules’” (AtD 943). Very bluntly and ironically, Pynchon
speaks of the Serbo-Croatian relationship as if echoing Glenny’s
observation: “The remarkable speed with which enmity could dissolve
into solidarity and back again became a hallmark of Serb-Croat
relationship throughout the twentieth century” (265). It seems that
their relationship, like the Candlebrow Conference participants,
“converged to a form of Eternal Return” (AtD 409). No wonder their
child was named Ljubica, evoking both love and hate/violence.
Although Pynchon’s characters wander into various parts of the
Balkans, stumbling upon their “painful complexity” (AtD 853),
insurgencies, and political plotting, in his treatment of the
underground phenomena, the author pays specific attention to the
Velebit. As the quotation at the beginning of this paper demonstrates,
the locals of the area “obey” (AtD 819) the same force that seems to
emit from within the land. They “cannot conceive” of the source of
the power that maps the region, but as if helpless, readily embrace “its
demands,” conforming to the “lightless underworld” (AtD 819) that is,
like the Iceland Spar figure, “an enforcer of ancient, indeed pre-
human, laws” (AtD 150-51) with its “labyrinths of streams, lakes,
coves, and cataracts” (AtD 819), each with its own pre-historical
agenda.
When writing of the Velebit region, Pynchon presents it as “veiled
in its own penumbra” (AtD 205), and associates both the area and its
populace with the mystical, intricate underworld force that abides
there. This force seems to release its powers (as the Iceland Spar
figure), burning “its way out of its enclosure” (AtD 152) and
manifesting itself in the inhabitants above ground. Just as the
underground rivers of the area have to find their ways out of the
menacing caves, so do the dwellers “brutal and simple” (AtD 819)
have to find a way to live against the adversity of topology and
incessant oppressors. Acclimatized to demanding environmental
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 277

specificities—for the Velebit is rather steep and particularly rocky

with climatic extremes and the wind that easily reaches hurricane
force in the winter—the natives usually lived a rugged life that made
them resistant to hardship. The mountain’s continental side is low but
steep and covered in deep forest. The seaboard side is rocky and
spreads beyond one’s sight. As Pynchon explains, the Velebit range
follows “the sea’s outlaw pulse” (AtD 818) in a bond with blue water
at its foot, abounding in fissures and ridges, with countless ravines,
peaks, pits, caverns and underground streams.
In Croatian culture, the Velebit has been invested with mythical
significance, aimed at evoking feelings of pride, admiration, and
reverence. Even Yashmeen in Against the Day, aware of the rich
folklore of the area, expects “abduction up into the Velebit, wolves at
night” (AtD 817). The Croatian populace cherishes a patriotic folk
song called “Vilo Velebita” (“The Fairy of the Velebit”4), about a
spirit that guards and protects the mountain. It chants of love for the
Velebit and Croatia, and reveals that God put the mountain where it
stands and would “soon grant freedom” to its populace (thereby
sustaining Croatians’ yearning for political autonomy). Even though
Croatia was dependent of various neighboring forces and under their
rule for a considerable time in history, the mountain always presented
an obstacle for incoming invaders, preventing breakthroughs from the
land. Approaches from the sea were prevented by the strong northeast
wind called bura. Remarkably, Yashmeen also encounters this force
but in a different context. “The bora” literally initiates sex between
her and Vlado Clissan, during which she thinks about how they may
both be taken “[o]ut to sea. Up above the town and into the
immemorial Karst” (AtD 816).
Apart from being a limestone borderline plateau region in
southwestern Slovenia (Kras/Carso/Karst) extending into northeastern
Italy, “karst” is a term in topography that characterizes an irregular
limestone landscape proliferating in sinks, ravines, caverns, and
underground streams. Coastal Croatia, parts of Italy and Slovenia that
Yashmeen and Vlado visit, abound in karst produced by erosion and
are the residence of the “wind of the dead” (AtD 815). Karstic terrain
is thus a favorable place where underground forces hide, and where
the Uskoks were sheltered from their enemies. When Cyprian and
Danilo were in Bosnia, trying to cross to Croatia, they were “chased
off, uphill, among rock pinnacles” by the Austrians, and “swept back
278 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

into the previous century” where “the limestone mountains seemed to

climb the sky, to grow more proud […], and cave entrances offered
not security but fear” (AtD 835-36). Yet they were saved since the
civilized European chasers did not dare pursue them where “[t]here
was no light from anywhere. They knew the terrain opened
everywhere into ravines whose walls dropped straight down” (AtD
836). Cyprian endured the passage through the mountains unharmed
while Danilo broke his leg, but still the adverse topology and the
“dark saved them” (AtD 835).
Because of the strong bura/bora gusts, the natives of
Senj/Zengg/Segna (a town at the foot of the Velebit) often tied their
boats on the shore for protection (Ljubiü 63). The greatest naval and
trading force of the medieval ages, Venice, complained about the
difficult nature of the coast and the narrowness of its bay which
impeded access of large Venetian vessels and prevented their direct
assault against the Uskoks (Grünfelder 21). When approaching the
shore in a steamer, Yashmeen and Vlado “stood off Zengg, facing a
fierce bora which came barreling down through a gap in the Velebit. It
was as if the sea would not allow them to enter. The sea here, Vlado
said, the currents and wind, were a composite being with intentions of
its own” (AtD 818). The last part of the quotation supports the idea of
some invisible spirit, just like the Iceland Spar figure—“in general not
friendly—an enforcer of ancient, indeed pre-human, laws” (AtD 150)
that abides in the area, harboring “an ancient purpose” (AtD 149) and
unleashing its “pitiless gifts” (AtD 151). Yet the force of nature also
displays its beneficial characteristics in offering protection from
invaders. The steamer is able to enter the port of Senj only because the
captain “is one of the Novlians, an old Uskok family. It is in his
blood” (AtD 818). This supports the folkloric “blood and soil” ideas
that Pynchon represents as well as criticizes in the novel, adding to the
complexities of the “balkanization” issues.
Not least due to the difficulties of access, for five centuries this
region and its population defended Western Europe from the Ottoman
conquerors, so that a Pope proclaimed Croatia and the Uskoks “the
bulwark of Christianity” (Bracewell 3). Venetians never succeeded in
conquering the Uskoks of Senj. As Clissan explains: “‘Our boats were
better, more nimble, they could go where vessels of deeper draft could
not, and if we had to land, we could beach and hide them by sinking
them, do our business, come back, raise them again and sail away’”
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 279

(AtD 818-19). Indeed, large galleys could not anchor in the bay while
the Uskoks’ boats were light enough to navigate the smallest creeks
and inlets of the shore, and were easily sunk and recovered if a
temporary landing became necessary.
The first Uskoks appeared in the early sixteenth century. Close to
the end of the century the Venetian archbishop of Zara (today’s
Zadar), Minuccio Minucci, spoke of the early Uskoks as brave men
who fought for their county and were sick of Turkish tyranny (218-
19). They found their way to the coast from inlands, being forced to
move mostly from Bosnia and Herzegovina and continental Croatia by
the Turks who were progressing north. This is how Vlado Clissan
narrates this history: “‘Until the early sixteenth century, we lived on
the other side of the mountains. Then the Turks invaded, and forced us
off our land. We came over the Velebit range and down to the sea, and
kept fighting them all the way’” (AtD 818). Since Senj and Klis are
naturally located at excellent strategic positions and the inhabitants
built strong, almost invincible fortresses, the Uskoks were able to hold
their forts from there and “defended Christendom even when Venice
could not” (AtD 819). When Klis fell in 1537, the Uskoks from
southern Dalmatia joined their comrades in Senj, protecting “the
fortress city” and the surrounding territory known as the Military
Frontier for almost a century.
The term uskok comes from the Croatian word uskoþiti which
means “to jump in,” because Uskoks continued to move into the
Ottoman territory and fight against the infidels: their primary goal was
holy war against Muslim “unbelievers” who chased them off their
land and forcefully Islamized the population that remained. Ratty in
Against the Day interprets the consequences of the Ottoman
domination in Bosnia by calling it “‘a Mahommedan country, in fact a
Turkish province’” (AtD 809). It is not surprising that the Uskoks
wanted to banish the Turks from their territory. Daniel Goffman
explains the Uskoks were “a chaotic mix of uprooted people and
irregular soldiers, many possessed with a zeal for revenge and holy
war” (102). Clissan sees his ancestors in a more glorious light: “‘We
were guerrillas. The Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I gave us an annual
subsidy. […] We fought the Turks on land and kept them on the other
side of the Velebit […]. For generations we defended Christendom
even when Venice could not’” (AtD 818-19). Indeed, throughout the
sixteenth century, they served as antemurale Christianitatis (the shield
280 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

of Christianity), which was recognized by the Holy See, assisted

perfectly the Habsburg territory services, and was supported by the
local Catholic priesthood, some of whom fought the “holy war” side
by side with the Uskoks (Bracewell 156). Gunther Rothenberg
describes them as “hardy and warlike Christian refugees from the
Turkish occupied areas of the Balkans” who provided “the Hapsburg
lands with a cheap but effective screen against Turkish incursions”
(148).
Pynchon seems to have chosen this particular community for its
controversial status in European history: since the Uskoks directly
affected, helped or blocked the great powers’ political schemes, and
for the abundance of legends tied to their past and the force with
which this historical and folkloric heritage is passed on from
generation to generation. Shortly summarizing the Uskoks’ past
through Clissan, Pynchon introduces readers to the predicament of the
nation that lives in the area, of a people that yearned for autonomy in
the sixteenth century as well as in the centuries to follow. Thus, as
depicted in the novel, revolutionary underground activities continued
in the late nineteenth century, for Croatians were still subjugated, and
as Clissan acknowledges, felt “exile[d] in [their] own land” (AtD 819).
Since the theme is very complex and in order to reveal the “hidden”
agenda behind the Uskoks in the context of Against the Day, I must
digress into historical accounts connected to the community that
support my interpretation.
Ferdinand I (1503-1564), Archduke of Austria, King of Bohemia,
Hungary, Croatia and Slavonia, who was proclaimed Holy Roman
Emperor in 1558, promised the Uskoks an annual subsidy in return for
their protection against the Ottomans, just as Clissan states in the
novel (AtD 819). But this arrangement did not function well even
though the Uskoks kept their promises and engaged in constant raids
against the Turks. The lack of payment to the stipendiati (a regular
army of Uskoks salaried for attacks against the Ottomans) over a
period of many decades left the whole community with grave
existential problems so that the Uskoks resorted to acts of piracy
(Bracewell 92, Popariü 138, AtD 819).
Apart from holding back Ottoman assaults “along the Military
Frontier” (AtD 697) or “Granitza” (AtD 326), as Tesla and Croatians
refer to it, the Uskoks preyed on passing merchant ships in order to
survive. Clissan explains: “‘And it was Venice who sold us out. They
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 281

made a deal with the Turks, guaranteeing their safety in the Adriatic.
So we did what anybody would have done. We kept attacking ships,
only now Venetian ships as well as Turkish’” (AtD 819). The difficult
economic situation in which the Uskoks found themselves in the
inlands and at Senj, and grudges they started to bear against Venice
when it turned their back on the Uskoks, made them channel their
aggression to piracy on the Adriatic Sea, which is why the West
considered them as bandits.
Since the peace treaty of 1573 between Venice and the Ottoman
Empire, and since the loss of Cyprus, the Serenissima, as Venice was
known, tried not to endanger peaceful relations with the Turks.
Ottoman diplomats demanded that Venice suppress the Uskoks’
attacks and plundering of merchants sailing under the Ottoman flag
along the Croatian coast because the northern Adriatic was under
Venetian rule. In peril of plunging into an open conflict with the
Ottomans over the Uskok raids, Venice shielded Turkish ships with an
escort of galleys. This saddened and infuriated the Uskoks who, as
Clissan discloses, “‘love Venice, and […] continue to dream of her
[…]. Venice is the bride of the sea, whom we wish to abduct, to
worship, to hope in vain someday to be loved by’” (AtD 819). A
quotation with somewhat similar meaning can be found in the passage
where Kit arrives at Lake Baikal: “There are places we fear, places we
dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, too
late” (AtD 768). Venice was for Croatians such a charismatic place of
beauty and their role model to a point where sometimes they became
her exiles even when staying home. We see Venice’s influence when
Cyprian, Bevis and Jacintha, aboard the John of Asia, “pass among
island cities, variations on the theme of Venice, domes, villas, and
shrines arpeggiated along the irregular Croatian coastline” (AtD 822).
Clissan’s last name is a perfect example of how Venetian rule left its
mark, and he “kept an address in Venice, a couple of rooms in
Cannareggio” (AtD 817), demonstrating this unbreakable bond with
Venice.
At that time Croatia was split among Venetian, Austrian and
Turkish rulers. Tesla explains it in Against the Day by saying: “‘My
native land is not a country but an artifact of Habsburg foreign
policy’” (AtD 326). As is visible from abundant historical data, both
Austria and Venice reacted with diplomatic skill to the turbulences in
the area, determined by specific state interests. Venice was reserved to
282 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

every Habsburg and Papal plea for help during the Austrian-Turkish
War of 1593-1606, at the same time not negating the possibility of
another league against the Turks, and claiming loyalty to a Christian
confederation.
The Habsburg dynasty, on its part, made an agreement with
Venetian diplomats to control the Uskoks’ behavior at Senj. But they
did not really wish to enforce the agreement, for their military system
relied heavily on irregular Uskok troops as a defense system for their
Croatian territories (Simon 5). In addition to these reasons,
Habsburg’s political interests were to curb Venetian demands on land
and at sea. They used the Uskoks as indirect pressure against Venice,
which still represented a rival power in the Adriatic region during this
period. These power plays of great forces (and against the welfare of
smaller nations and communities) are depicted throughout Against the
Day, with Danilo’s analysis as one of the most striking: “‘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’” (AtD 828).
Counting on “ancient tribal hatreds” (AtD 847) and religious
fanaticism, the great forces used smaller nations to secure their own
positions. The eminent Venetian scholar Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623)
explained that Habsburg’s arguments used for justifying the raids of
the Uskoks were simply that the Turks were enemies of the Christian
creed and, as such, were justly attacked (18).
On the other hand, the Uskoks were easily motivated to combat the
Turks. The Ottoman expansion into Christian Europe was reason
enough for them to fight back, since Christendom was to be protected.
Religious zeal was one of the best ways of inciting the people of
Dalmatia to cooperate, and the Habsburgs exploited this to a
maximum. The Uskoks’ creed guaranteed that they would fight
against the Ottomans and, from time to time, against the Venetians
(since friends of infidels are their enemies) without any, or at least
with minimal, regular payment. They provided an effective buffer
against Ottoman attacks and Venetian demands for domination of the
Adriatic. As Pynchon describes them, they were “a threat to Venice at
sea as to the Turks back in the mountains” (AtD 697).
But with the Treaty of Zsitvatörök in 1606, signed by the emperor
and the sultan, the relationship between the Habsburg and the
Ottoman Empires changed. Since the Turks could not penetrate
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 283

further into Habsburg territory, both powers employed a more

peaceful attitude, ceasing further aggression, which accelerated the
emergence of more clearly defined military and territorial borders.
“Warfare on the Adriatic Sea and in Croatian territory thus became a
more modern and calculable part of a formalized relationship in which
antagonistic and anarchic elements, like Uskoks, did not fit” (Simon
10). The effect of the Treaty on the Uskok community was disastrous,
for they were ordered to stop robbing the Turks. By the end of 1607
they complained to the Pope that “for fifty months they had not
received their pay” (Horvat 75). Without monthly subsidy the Uskoks
soon continued their plundering, which infuriated Venice. Hostilities
were rising on all sides. The Habsburgs demanded free use of the
Adriatic corridor but the Republic kept blocking the port. Finally in
1615, Venice declared war on the Uskoks and their Habsburg
protectors. The peace treaty of 1617, which ended the military conflict
between Venice and Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria, prescribed that
the Uskok pirates from Senj and from other coastal places under
Habsburg rule should be relocated (Lopašiü 72-76). Their boats were
burned and the remaining population transported inland, where they
remained as frontier troops, gradually losing their distinct identity.
As is visible from Uskok history and Croatian history in general,
topographical hardship was not the only component the folk had to
“live against” at the outskirts of the Velebit mountain. From the
seventeenth century onward, Croatia was ruled by a predominantly
foreign nobility while serving “as a buffer zone into which the Turks
had conducted raids and from which the Hapsburgs had defended the
remainder of their empire” (Stavrianos 233). Venetians on the other
hand controlled the Adriatic, and held Dalmatia and Istria until the
end of the eighteenth century. One of the Chums in Against the Day,
Miles Blundell, pauses while strolling through Venice “to contemplate
some expanse of Istrian stone and read in its naturally cursive
markings commentaries on a forbidden coastline” (AtD 250). Indeed,
Croatia was, to quote Pynchon, “stepped across” (AtD 250), for about
eighty percent of the stone used to build Venice was Istrian stone,
transported from Croatia (Begiü 9).
After the war with Napoleon, Austria obtained most of the
possessions of the Venetian Republic, including Croatian territory.
Yet it did not make much difference for the Croatian population,
which was hungry for independence. Having been forced to recognize
284 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

foreign rulers for a considerable part of their history, the Croatians

(and most of the nations in the Balkans) endured, as Ratty notes,

“the quite intolerable tyranny over people to whom the land really belongs,
land which, generation after generation, has been absorbing their labor,
accepting the corpses this labor produces, along the obscene profits, which it
is left to other and usually whiter men to gather.” (AtD 935)

Croatians have indeed lived on and off the same land, changing rulers
and borders, sometimes constrained to migration, while each authority
exploited them, plundered their riches and left a mark, whether
Turkish, Austro-Hungarian or Venetian.
Pynchon continues this tale of resistance through Clissan and a
group of young Croats from the early twentieth century that belonged
to “the increasingly energetic New Uskok movement” (AtD 697) that
would keep up struggle for independence by engaging in a variety of
“political errands” (AtD 819). While the Hungarian domination of
Croatia’s economic and political life during the last decades of the
nineteenth century tried to smother Croatian aspirations for autonomy,
the Croatian national movement was persistent in demanding
“freedom of the press, freedom of association, universal suffrage and,
above all else, the financial independence of Croatia and Slavonia
from Budapest” (Glenny 264). Their insistence on Croatian as the
official language as well as Hungarian is visible in the novel when
neo-Uskoks meet in Trieste and “[e]verybody was talking a dialect
part coastal ýakavština, part seventeenth-century maritime slang.
Opaque to Cyprian, but more important, to Vienna” (AtD 870).5 The
main task of the neo-Uskoks was to get rid of all the obstacles to
national progress and autonomy. The burning issue at the turn of the
century was, as Pynchon’s characters reveal, “the annexation” (AtD
808) of Bosnia and Herzegovina which Franz Joseph I proclaimed in
October 1908, and which poisoned European politics in general,
leading to a “general European war” (AtD 938). The shaky relations
between Croatians and Serbians deteriorated over Bosnian territory
again. This demonstrates that the turbulence in the Balkans has always
been more than the growing gap between the rulers and the oppressed,
for it comprises a very diverse ethno-linguistic region, an area where
Orthodox and Catholic Christianity collide, as well as a frontier
between Islam and Christianity.
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 285

The masses in the peninsula were worn down by centuries-long

conflicts and subjugation, sharing the same neighborhood yet
practicing different religious and cultural heritages, and being forced
into interdependence because of social, political and cultural
connectivity. Among them were Croatians whose struggle for
independence persisted, and Pynchon mockingly but realistically
captures this:

As the landscape turned increasingly chaotic and murderous, the streams of

refugees swelled. Another headlong, fearful escape of the kind that in
collective dreams, in legends, would be misremembered and reimagined into
pilgrimage or crusade…the dark terror behind transmuted to a bright hope
ahead, the bright hope becoming a popular, perhaps someday a national,
delusion. Embedded invisibly in it would remain the ancient darkness, too
awful to face, thriving, emerging in disguise, vigorous, evil, destructive,
inextricable. (AtD 964)

The last sentence characterizes the archetypal force that was described
earlier, lurking in a community that is, as Yashmeen says,
“summoning memories older than her present incarnation” (AtD 958).
Throughout the novel Pynchon follows these underworld forces, and
in the Balkans specifically, crowded with angry ghosts, dead ones that
resurrect (AtD 1003), and alive ones, as Vatroslav’s “[i]ndustrial
ghosts” which Theign and the Western powers reject: “‘Your world
refuses them, so they haunt it, they walk, they chant, when needed
they wake it from its slumbers’” (AtD 873). They demand justice and
balance, as neo-Uskoks put it, for centuries of abiding in a murderous
landscape, hiding, relocating, and because they became “exiles […]
and never learned it until, too late” (AtD 768). Although the entire
Balkan populations took part in migrations, this paper focuses on
Croatia, its underground forces and their yearning for political
autonomy, which is why it should be said that after centuries of
subjugation, “flags threatened, the sacred soils of homelands defiled”
(AtD 938), Croatia finally became independent in 1991. But “the
unquiet dead” (AtD 1003) in the Balkans still walk, the underworld
remains, regardless of the national orientation, and even though the
stories and adventures retold are said to be “some exaggerated
accounts, already half folkloric” (AtD 870).
In Against the Day, parallel to the region’s human force—the
Uskoks of Senj—the Velebit’s mysterious underground and its diverse
outside appearance are the habitat of yet another force; or, perhaps it
286 Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša

is more natural to say that this unique “ruling component” (AtD 151)
has shaped the location and its inhabitants. After all, the area appears
haunted “by forces which had never seen reason to declare
themselves” (AtD 887). According to the myths, the underworld of the
Velebit is populated with spirits that, angry for not being granted
freedom in life, continue their struggle in death, and constitute a force
of history that is alive from generation to generation, and not just
among the living, “some primordial plasm of hate and punishment at
the center of the Earth which takes on different forms” (AtD 655). One
of the Croatian characters in Against the Day explains this by saying
that “‘there is nothing you can tell us. Nothing you can pay us. You
have stepped into a long history of blood and penance, and the coin of
these transactions is struck not from metal but from Time’” (AtD 874).
Thus, “the lower parts of the compass rose, the faceless, the despised,
the Mavrovlachi of Croatia. Vlado’s own” (AtD 870). Even if this
underlines Pynchon’s inclination to exploit and subscribe to the
stereotype of “balkanization,” these quotations also stress the
consequences of centuries of Croatian struggle for autonomy. At the
same time, this longing was invested with the characteristics of a
religious yearning, a wish that could not die with one’s death but
continued to persist in the afterlife, “arriving by surprise from some
Beyond we cannot imagine […] before maps” (AtD 819).
Thus, most of the natives of the Balkans region, including Croatia,
have for too long lived “against the day,” just so they can reach the
next morning alive, in the middle of tensions and fights of both great
powers and smaller nations or groups. The following quotation,
although pertaining to the aftermath of the Tunguska event, fits
perfectly with how the Balkan nations lived, tired of historical
travails: “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” (AtD 805). This is partly how
Croatians lived, worn down by centuries-long conflicts, yearning for
independence and better days to come. The other, idealistic
constituents, like the Uskoks, obeyed some invisible, yet palpable
force of menacing and dark underworld provenience, “tolling, bone
deep, invisible in the night” (AtD 262), enlightening the cloaked
layers of history “with centuries of blood as security” (AtD 853),
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 287

marking their own path in the history of Croatian struggles for

freedom.

Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša, University of Rijeka

Notes
1
This proper name illustrates the linguistic complexities that abound in the text. Is
Pynchon mocking the readers by spelling the Croatian last name—Klisan, from the
town of Klis in Dalmatia—in the Italian way, or is he simply drawing attention to the
consequences of the Venetian rule and the flattening of cultural diversities?
2
In German, “Erde” is “earth,” “Schwein” is “pig,” “Höhle” is “cave.”
3
In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, he notes that dreaming of violets could be
associated with the words rape and violate and can symbolize violence and
defloration (247-49). It is also interesting to note that the name Ljubica is closely
related to Croatian word for love which is ljubav.
4
Suþiü explains that this fairy is one of the battle fairies that accompany their human
armies into battles (92-94).
5
Pynchon would have been more precise if he said “opaque to Vienna and Budapest”
since in the 1890s Budapest insisted on the sole use of the Hungarian language on the
state railway, which did not just mean they violated the nagodba which allowed for
the use of Croatian, but sabotaged Austrian interests. As Glenny explains: “The
Hungarian government blocked the construction of rail links between Zagreb and
Vienna so that all goods transported by rail would have to go either via Rijeka [the
port was under the direct administration of the authorities in Budapest] or via
Budapest” (260).

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Helmstadt (Verona), 1763. 217-62.
Moore, Thomas. The Style of Connectedness: Gravity's Rainbow and
Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1987.
Popariü, Bare. Povijest Senjskih Uskoka. Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska,
1936.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
—. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper & Row (1966) 1990.
—. Gravity’s Rainbow. Vintage (1973) 2000.
—. Mason & Dixon. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997.
—. V., Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1963.
Croatia, the Uskoks and their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day 289

—. Vineland. Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown and Company,

1990.
Rothenberg, Gunther. “Venice and the Uskoks of Senj: 1537-1618.”
The Journal of Modern History 33.2 (June 1961): 148-56.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Sarpi, Paolo. La Repubblica di Venezia, la Casa d’Austria e gli
Uscocchi. 1617-18. Bari: Laterza e figli, 1965.
Simon, Ruth. “The Uskok ‘Problem’ and Habsburg, Venetian, and
Ottoman Relations at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century.” Essays
in History. Vol. 42. Ed. Louisa Parker Mattozzi. University of
Virginia: Corcoran Department of History, 2000.
Stavrianos, Leften Stavros. The Balkans since 1453. Hurst &
Company, 2001.
Suþiü, Nikola. Hrvatska narodna mitologija. Zagreb: Tisak “Grafika,”
1943.
Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford UP,
1997.
 Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day

Celia Wallhead

Abstract: In Against the Day, The Russian balloonists under Captain Igor Padzhitnoff
fly in a skyship called BOL’SHAIA IGRA, or “The Great Game.” This is a direct
reference to Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (1901). Kipling sets his story in India in
what was for him the present, hence the time period coincides with that of Against the
Day, which overtly spans from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to just after
the First World War, round about 1922. Kipling’s young protagonist is torn between
two tendencies in his identity: he is a Sahib, and as such gets involved in “The Great
Game”, but having been brought up in India, his spiritual side is attracted to a Tibetan
lama, and he becomes his follower. Pynchon’s narrator refers explicitly to espionage
as “styled by Mr. Kipling, in a simpler day, ‘The Great Game.’” It is as if the narrator
is speaking from the days of the Cold War (the concept of the Great Game having
been taken originally by the Russians from chess), or later, for example, the beginning
of the twenty-first century, and looking back to the beginning of the twentieth
century, and seeing it as “simpler” then. Against the Day, therefore, contains, amongst
its myriad subjects and styles, a postmodern reworking of the spy-adventure story
with specific reference to Kipling. While investigating this possibility, I have come
across many parallels between the two novels: (conflicting) quest stories involving the
material and the spiritual; their “plotlessness,” where unity is provided through
images and symbols; similarities between Kim and Kit; parallels between Kim and
some of the other spies in Against the Day; the treatment of light; and the foretelling
of the future, with the war looming ahead as a sort of apocalypse. Kim is the least
pessimistic of Kipling’s works, but of the two moral precepts underlying the novel,
one is negative but unavoidable: a recognition of man’s mortal insufficiency.
Pynchon’s postmodernism eschews any moralizing, but the threat of death is ever-
present in all his works. Furthermore, his rejection of any monolithic vision is not
dissimilar to Kipling’s other moral precept in Kim: the appeal for ecumenical
understanding.

Almost every major character in Pynchon’s Against the Day is a spy.

It is said of Derrick Theign that he “might as well have worn
sandwich-boards fore and aft reading SPY” (AtD 706). While Kit is
spying on Tesla, Colfax Vibe is spying on him (AtD 328-29). The
292 Celia Wallhead

Chums of Chance (and their Russian counterparts) have a distinct

advantage in their spying, in that they see everything from the
vantage-point of Google Earth (AtD 437). Yashmeen, whose foster-
father, Auberon Halfcourt, is spying in Kashgar in western China,
works for the T.W.I.T. Out there, it is said that even the “Doosra” is
“yet another player joining the Great Game” (AtD 756).1 There are
amateurs and professionals: Nigel and Neville, who have Russian
counterparts in Misha and Grisha; Cyprian Latewood and Bevis
Moistleigh; the lady spy with her apprentice whom Cyprian sees on
board the John of Asia (AtD 822), which is all rather reminiscent of V.
(Duyfhuizen par. 8). Lew Basnight does it for a living, as he is a
professional investigator. Scarsdale Vibe pays people like Foley
Walker to arrange it for him.
The Russian balloonists under Captain Igor Padzhitnoff fly in a
skyship called BOL’SHAIA IGRA, or “The Great Game” (AtD 123). This
is a direct reference to Rudyard Kipling’s eponymous short story in
the Stalky stories and his novel Kim, published in 1901. Kipling
(1865-1936) sets his story in India in what was for him the present,
hence the time period coincides with that of Against the Day, which
overtly spans from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to just
after the First World War, round about 1922. Kipling’s young
protagonist, Kimball O’Hara, is torn between two tendencies in his
identity: his parents were Irish, which makes him a Sahib, and as such,
he gets involved in “The Great Game”; but having been brought up in
India, his spiritual side is attracted to a Tibetan lama, and he becomes
his follower.
When Pynchon’s narrator next refers explicitly to the subject of
espionage, he says that it was “styled by Mr. Kipling, in a simpler day,
‘The Great Game’” (AtD 226-27). It is as if the narrator is speaking
from the days of the Cold War (the concept of the Great Game having
been taken originally by the Russians from chess, but also signifying
the English game of cricket), or later, for example, the beginning of
the twenty-first century, and looking back to the beginning of the
twentieth century, and seeing it as “simpler” then. Against the Day
therefore contains, as I will argue, amongst its myriad subjects and
styles a postmodern reworking of the spy-adventure story with
specific reference to Kipling.
Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 293

Similarities: “Plotlessness,” the Wheel, the Mystic River

While investigating this theme, I have come across many parallels

between the two novels. They are basically quest stories, but there are
conflicting quests, involving the material and the spiritual or non-
material. The travels of the characters give the impression of a
“plotless” novel, where unity is provided through images and
symbols: in Kim, they are the Wheel of Life and the mystical River,
both of which appear in the Pynchon.
As Alan Sandison says in his introduction to the Oxford World’s
Classics edition of Kim: “Kim was described by its author as plotless
and it is true that the movement of the novel is highly episodic. There
is no dominant central action whose necessities dictate the shape of
the characters and the organization of all subordinate action” (xiv). If
we transfer this to Against the Day, we can see for example that in the
revenge story, the quest for the killers of Webb Traverse, Frank kills
Sloat Fresno by chance, and they never go after Deuce Kindred. Reef
only tries to kill Scarsdale Vibe if he happens to be around, and even
then, it is not he who does the deed, but Foley Walker, who had a
prior claim.
However, Sandison asserts that there is unity in Kim through the
symbols: “Yet the result is not a rambling, incoherent narrative, for a
powerful unity is established by other highly sophisticated means.
[…] These range from a subtle but powerful disposition of images and
symbols to a skillful manipulation of parallels and perspectives” (xiv).
The lama says mankind is bound upon a wheel, people go forth “from
life to life—from despair to despair” (Sandison xvi). When the lama
talks of the Wheel of Life, he is referring to the cycle of life, death,
and rebirth to which men are condemned because of their slavery to
earthly desires and ambitions. Were they to unfetter themselves, they
would be able to interrupt the cycle of continuous reincarnation and
reach Nirvana, that blissful union with the Great Soul which releases
them from all earthly involvement. “The lama is one who, in seeking
his river, seeks to free himself,” says Sandison (xix). The Nirvana that
certain people are seeking in Against the Day is the mythical
Shambhala,2 yet the mystical wheel of life is not the only wheel in the
novel: there is the Ferris Wheel of the Chicago exposition (AtD 36);
Cyprian Latewood’s visit to the Giant-Wheel of Vienna (AtD 699);
294 Celia Wallhead

and there are references to different forms, like bicycles or

mathematical problems or roulette:

The world, since the Chicago fair of 1893, had undergone a sudden craze for
vertical rotation on the grand scale. The cycle, Yashmeen, speculated, might
only seem reversible, for once to the top and down again, one would be
changed “forever.” Wouldn’t one. She drifted thence into issues of modular
arithmetic, and its relation to the Riemann problem, and eventually to the
beginnings of a roulette system which would someday see her past landlords
and sommeliers and other kinds of lupine liminality, and become the wonder
and despair of casino managers across the Continent. (AtD 503)

What is doubly curious about this passage is that Pynchon’s narrator is

able to talk about wheels without using the word, and he talks of
despair in a very different context. However, he does refer later to the
Wheel of Life, when Kit has passed through the Prophet’s Gate with
Lieutenant Dwight Prance, one of Professor Renfrew’s scholars of
geography and languages, and they find themselves, shortly after the
Tunguska Event of June 1908, in a place in Siberia called the Tuva:
“‘Everywhere one sees images of the Wheel of Life…. A Tibetan
Buddhist enclave in the middle of a prevailing Islamism’” (AtD 786-
87). The Tibetan prayer-wheel is referred to specifically on two
occasions, with the idea that if something is repeated often enough, as
if through wishful thinking, it will acquire “the force of a Tibetan
prayer-wheel” (AtD 130) and become reality: “on the Tibetan prayer-
wheel principle, repeat it enough and at some point something
unspecified but miraculous will come to pass” (AtD156). But, of
course, the person speaking to Kit here is Scarsdale Vibe, and we soon
find out how he “miraculously” manages to get his wishes fulfilled.
The Tibetan wheel brings together the physical and the spiritual in the
quest of life, but Pynchon, through his narrator, shows how there are
many different quests in life, and Scarsdale Vibe’s is a travesty of this
ideal quest.
Even more relevant than the wheel of life, the mystical river is
perhaps the most powerful symbol in Kim. It represents the meaning
of life and the desire for transcendence for the lama, and Kim gets
caught up in a quest that also becomes his own:

“We go to Benares,” said the lama, as soon as he understood the drift of

Mahbub Ali’s questions.
“The boy and I. I go to seek for a certain River.”
Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 295

“Maybe—but the boy?”

“He is my disciple. He was sent, I think, to guide me to that River. Sitting
under a gun was I when he came suddenly. Such things have befallen the
fortunate to whom guidance was allowed. But I remember now, he said he
was of this world—a Hindu.”
“And his name?”
“That I did not ask. Is he not my disciple?”
“His country—his race—his village? Mussalman—Sikh—Hindu—Jain—
low caste or high?”
“Why should I ask? There is neither high nor low in the Middle Way. If he
is my chela—does—will—can any one take him from me? For, look you,
without him I shall not find my river.” (Kipling 19-20)

For the lama, the quest is a “search for the mystical River which
gushed out of the earth at the precise spot where the arrow launched
by Gautama Buddha in his youth had landed. The River is a
miraculously purifying one which will wash away sin and raise those
so redeemed above all earthly considerations” (Sandison xviii). Kim’s
river is the river of life, and his quest becomes a search for identity,
without his being aware of it: “‘Who is Kim—Kim—Kim? […] I am
Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’” (Kipling 282)
Similar searches for identities occur throughout Against the Day.
The principal searcher is Kit, but his older brother Reef also has an
identity crisis after a séance: “‘I don’t even know who I fuckin am
anymore’” (AtD 673). On the capitalist side, opposed to the anarchist
Traverse family, there is Scarsdale Vibe’s son Fleetwood, who,
rebelling against his father, is searching for a hidden place, “home,”
more spiritual than physical, and obviously not his father’s house (AtD
165). The uprooted Tesla speaks of a mystical river in his homeland of
“Granitza”: “In the Velebit, rivers disappear, flow underground for
miles, re-surface unexpectedly, descend to the sea. Underground,
therefore, lies an entire unmapped region, a carrying into the Invisible
of geography, and—one must ask—why not of other sciences as
well?” (AtD 327)
What are the reasons for these crises of identity both in Kim and
Against the Day? Kim’s crisis is caused by the fact that he is torn
between his white roots, his physical identity, and his spiritual side,
fostered by his upbringing in India, a sort of nature/nurture question.
But it is aggravated by the loneliness that is inevitable when he
becomes a spy. After his final “passing-out” as a member of the Great
Game, he thinks: “‘Now I am alone—all alone,’ he thought. ‘[…] In
296 Celia Wallhead

all India is no one so alone as I!’” (Kipling 282) There is also the
physical danger that is entailed by the Great Game. Once a spy, you
must always be a spy. As Grisha—or is it Misha?—says to Cyprian
Latewood: “‘even the silliest cretin on their list knows that if you turn,
you die’” (AtD 704). (The use of the word “turn” is reminiscent of
Frenesi Gates in Vineland.) Or, as Derrick Theign says to Latewood,
talking about death—with an Oriental reference: “‘Yet in our business
it’s everywhere. We must tithe a certain number of lives yearly to the
goddess Kali in return for a European history more or less free of
violence and safe for investment, and very few are the wiser’” (AtD
709).
Both Kim and Kit feel their lives under threat, though Kit’s
situation has the added irony that he is pursued by the very man who
sponsored him. Both young men are fatherless and have no home
(AtD 331). They both have someone interested in their future pay for
their schooling. Kimball O’Hara’s education at St Xavier’s School,
apparently promoted by the British army, is really financed by the
lama, while Scarsdale Vibe foots the bill for Kit to study mathematics
at Yale. A painted sepulcher of a Christian, ostensibly, he feels guilty
for having Kit’s father killed, but his real motive is to control Kit and,
through him, Tesla and his discoveries. The project Tesla is working
on which he particularly wants to obstruct or prevent, or preferably
take over, is the one aimed at producing “free universal power for
everybody” (AtD 158).

Objectives and Methods of Spying

The lives and trajectories of both Kit and Kim seem plotless because
the characters are caught up in quests which they do not control. Their
routes move in circles or meander like rivers because they are
manipulated or because they flee from their spy masters. It is
interesting to compare the objectives and methods of the espionage in
the two novels. In Kim, one of the most important characters spying
for the British is Mahbub Ali, known as one of the best horse-dealers
in the Punjab. In Against the Day, Auberon Halfcourt disguises
himself as a Punjabi trader dealing in donkeys (AtD 759). Mahbub Ali
was registered as “C. 25. 1B” in one of the locked books of the Indian
Survey Department, which was a cover for spying, especially at a time
Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 297

of Russian expansionism. “Surveying” was code for surveillance or

spying, and so were both “great games,” cricket and chess.
Sandison tells us that the concept “The Great Game” was not
invented by Kipling:

It is thought to have originated in the writing of a Bengal cavalry officer

named Connolly who published in 1835 his Narrative of an Overland Journey
to the North of India. Arthur Connolly was a chess player and in using the
phrase was paying a compliment to the proficiency of the Russians at that
game; for he applied it to diplomatic and other manoeuvres followed by India
and Russia in the struggle for political ascendancy in Western Asia in the first
half of the nineteenth century. (Sandison xxiv)

The indulgence of chess players by the government had its roots in the
beginnings of the Soviet state, whose leaders saw in chess masters
exactly the qualities they saw as Bolshevik: self-discipline, analytical
strength and iron nerves. One could say that a spy needs these
qualities too. Kim keeps his nerve when he has to disguise and
transform the identity of his fellow spy E. 23 on the train in order to
save his life.
Intelligence, or knowledge, is the objective of espionage. At first,
Kim has sought it “for the sake of satisfying his curiosity about his
country and its people” (Sandison xxv). His love of maths at school,
and his sense of community—his nickname is “Little Friend of all the
World” as he is identified with communal life (Sandison xvi)—are the
motivating forces behind his accepting the idea of pursuing a career in
surveying. But the knowledge venerated by the Game’s players is
“British science at the service of empire” (Sandison xxiv); it has a
specifically utilitarian or political function. He points out the irony of
this intelligence-gathering in relation to the young Kim:

The sheet of “strangely-scented yellow Chinese paper” on which the lama has
drawn his picture-parable of the Wheel of Life is literally transformed into a
Survey map, and the Holy One’s rosary becomes a means of measuring
distance. Thus India is made to seem to depend for its unity not on a universal
élan vital, but on the skills of the Secret Service; and those in the forefront of
this secret war experience loneliness and isolation instead of universal
friendship. (Sandison xxv)

Kim is initially recruited by Mahbub Ali because the Punjabi horse-

dealer has found him dependable. He entrusts Kim with a message to
take to Umballa: “‘The pedigree of the white stallion is fully
298 Celia Wallhead

established’” (Kipling 20). Neither Kim nor Kit have direct contact
with the Higher Command. The seemingly innocuous message is not
taken literally by Kim, and he is also entrusted by Mahbub Ali with a
message in physical form: “Kim slunk away, his teeth in the bread,
and, as he expected, he found a small wad of folded tissue-paper
wrapped in oil-skin, with three silver rupees, enormous largesse”
(Kipling 21). When Kim examines the paper, he finds

an impersonal, unaddressed statement, with five microscopic pin-holes in one

corner, that most scandalously betrayed the five confederated Kings, the
sympathetic Northern Power, a Hindu banker in Pashawur, a firm of gun-
makers in Belgium, and an important, semi-independent Mohammedan ruler
to the south. (Kipling 22)

The five holes indicate that these five different forces are all
collaborating and are coming together to make an imminent attack in
the north-west of the British-occupied area of the Indian subcontinent.
Two points interest us here, first of all the gun-maker in Belgium:
in Against the Day, Kit is afraid that the Q gun he left in Ostend with
Umeki might have been stolen and used, the Tunguska Event being a
probable side-effect.3 There are weapons sales representatives in
Ostend, who come “as to some international chess tournament” (AtD
558), and in one of the few more-or-less explicit references to the First
World War, war is seen as chess (AtD 594). In Kim, the gun is an
important symbol, alongside the wheel and the river, as it represents
conquest. In the opening scene, Kim is sitting astride the cannon
outside the Lahore museum. Over the years, the cannon had fallen into
the hands of different people, but, as Sandison points out: “The most
recent to have acquired the gun are the British, of whom Kim is one”
(xv). Thus it is a symbol of conquest of the Punjab.
The second point is the subject of dynamite, which plays such an
important role in Against the Day. The narrator of Kim comments on
the message Kim carried: “Dynamite was milky and innocuous beside
that report of C. 25” (Kipling 22). Indeed, for the British to find proof
not only that the Russians were plotting against them in the East, but
that the weapons came from Belgium, made the collaboration of
Muslims with Hindus sound routine in comparison. The two factors of
double-dealing arms-dealers and Russians can be found wherever
Pynchon is setting scenes in the Cold War period, as in The Crying of
Lot 49,4 or is writing about other time periods in the past (as here or in
Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 299

Mason & Dixon) that can be compared forward to the late twentieth
century.
To go back to the methods of transmission of messages, in Kim,
messages and instructions to spies are put in food—the bread that
Mahbub Ali gives to Kim. In Against the Day, a parody of this is seen
when the Chums of Chance receive instructions in the food, and
Lindsay Noseworth almost breaks a tooth:
The orders had arrived with the usual lack of ceremony or even common
courtesy, by way of the Oyster Stew traditionally prepared each Thursday as
the Plat du Jour by Miles Blundell, who, that morning, well before sunup, had
visited the shellfish market in the teeming narrow lanes of the old town in
Surabaya, East Java, where the boys were enjoying a few days of ground-
leave. There, Miles had been approached by a gentleman of Japanese origin
and unusual persuasiveness, who had sold him, at what did seem a remarkably
attractive price, two buckets full of what he repeatedly described as “Special
Japanese Oyster,” these being in fact the only English words Miles would
recall him having spoken. Miles had thought no more about it until the noon
mess was interrupted by an agonized scream from Lindsay Noseworth,
followed by a half minute of uncharacteristic profanity. On the mess-tray
before him, where he had just vigorously expelled it from his mouth, lay a
pearl of quite uncommon size and iridescence, seeming indeed to glow from
within, which the boys, gathered about, recognized immediately as a
communication from the Chums of Chance Upper Hierarchy. (AtD 113)

The parody or mocking of the boys’ spy story comes through use of
three devices or effects: exaggeration (Lindsay’s agonized scream);
over-elaborate language (vigorously expelled it from his mouth); and
swear-words (the profanity one would never find in Kipling).
Furthermore, in Against the Day, messages are delivered in a far wider
variety of ways:

In New York for a few weeks of ground-leave, the boys had set up camp in
Central Park. From time to time, messages arrived from Hierarchy via the
usual pigeons and spiritualists, rocks through windows, blindfolded couriers
reciting from memory, undersea cable, overland telegraph wire, lately the
syntonic wireless, and signed, when at all, only with a carefully cryptic
number—that being as nigh as any of them had ever approached, or ever
would, to whatever pyramid of offices might be towering in the mists above.
(AtD 397)

Here, parody is achieved through excess. There are seven ways of

delivering messages, including use of the latest technology. The
excess breaks Grice’s Maxim or rule whereby one should employ
300 Celia Wallhead

enough information, but not too much, for a successful

communication. In London, the T.W.I.T. function in similarly covert
but imaginative ways: Yashmeen receives her spying instructions
through her “Snazzbury’s Silent Frock” (AtD 501), which is
excessively devious and comic. The equivalent of the white stallion in
Kim seems, in Against the Day, to be a reference to H. G. Wells’s
fairly recent The Time Machine (1895). A “street-Arab” delivers a
grease-stained envelope, and when Lindsay tips him with a
“Columbian Exposition Chicago 1893” silver coin, we learn that it is
ten years old, placing the action in 1903, the same year in which
Webb Traverse was murdered (AtD 321). The “street-Arab” is known
as “Plug Loafsley,” and he runs a child bordello, again an outrageous
parody of the child’s adventure story. But we must remember that
Kim was brought up in the company of prostitutes (it seems Kipling
enjoyed their company too), and it was prostitutes who transformed
him from Sahib to Indian when he left the school. Loafsley’s
reference to a “‘toime machine’” (AtD 397) makes them suspicious
and they follow him. They are led to Dr. Zoot, who had got a second-
hand time machine from Candlebrow University, where they regularly
hold conferences on time travel, and Chick and Darby are taken for a
ride (possibly metaphorically as well as literally).

Time-travel

Kim is set within a great sweep of history, often looking deeply into
the past. As Sandison says:

In his handling of these long perspectives of time Kipling, not unlike E. M.

Forster in A Passage to India, creates arch upon arch through which we are to
look. There is the crowded community close-focused around Kim; further
back there is the vastness of India, geographically and historically; but further
back still there is the infinity of time envisaged by the lama which can dwarf
even India. (xvii)

Pynchon’s novel reflects far more the popular obsession with time-
travel that Wells’s story initiated: “‘Mr. H. G. Wells’s speculative jeu
d’esprit on the subject has been adulterated to profitable effect by the
‘dime novels’ […]’” (AtD 398). Of the Chums of Chance, Miles
Blundell is the one most in tune with the non-material world. He feels
Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 301

very close to “the holy City” (AtD 551). He is aware of the presence
of Trespassers or Time Travellers, and, indeed, from Ostend goes on a
bicycle excursion with one of them, Ryder Thorn, who takes him to
Ypres and tries to describe to him what is to happen there in ten years’
time (AtD 554). Thorn is angry that even sensitive Earthlings like
Miles will not believe him, least of all take steps to avoid the
apocalypse. Miles thinks he is a ghost and will not shake hands with
him for fear of putting his hand right through his “body” (AtD 555).
So the Travellers from the future are doing their best to try to prevent
the First World War. But since they are also constructed as opponents
to the Chums, their motives are unclear, unless they want to be
admitted to Earth and offer peace-making as an “entrance ticket.”
Time-travel is also involved in the under-sand travel episode. The
Chums of Chance are in the “subdesertine frigate Saksaul” (AtD 435),
in search of the holy City Shambhala. To travel underground, without
dynamite and tunneling, the sand has to be converted, through
manipulating time, into something transparent, like glass:

Randolph wondered, “how can you travel underneath the sand and even see
where you’re going?”
“By redeploying energy on the order of what it would take to change the
displaced sand into something transparent—quartz or glass, say. Obviously,”
the Professor explained, “one wouldn’t want to be in the middle of that much
heat, so one must arrange to translate oneself in Time, compensating for the
speed of light in the transparent medium. As long as the sand has only been
wind-deposited without local obstruction, we assume the familiar mechanics
of water-waves generally to apply, and if we wished to move deeper, say in an
under-sand vessel, new elements analogous to vortex-formation would enter
the wave-history—in any case, expressible by some set of wave-functions.”
“Which always include Time,” said Chick, “so if you were looking for
some way to reverse or invert those curves—wouldn’t that imply some form
of passage backward in Time?” (AtD 426)

Captain Toadflax, who is in charge of the vessel, says that the true
Shambhala will be found underground, and three things are needed:
the map that the Chums of Chance had in their possession, the
Sfinciuno Itinerary; the ship’s Paramorphoscope; “‘[a]nd as any
Tibetan lama will tell you, the right attitude’” (AtD 435).
The espionage of the Chums of Chance is related to these Time
Travellers. Alonzo Meatman introduces Chick Counterfly, the newest
member of the Chums of Chance, to some of the Trespassers (AtD
418). They are people like Mr. Ace, who has fled the future, back into
302 Celia Wallhead

the past, on account of poverty, famine and the end of the capitalist
system. Mr. Ace asks Chick: “‘You are not aware that each of your
mission assignments is intended to prevent some attempt of our own
to enter your time-regime?” (AtD 415) They offer seductive rewards
like eternal youth in what could become a Faustian situation.
Knowledge is power, especially foreknowledge. The British
apparently believe in foretelling the future, in reincarnation and ghosts
(AtD 132-33), whereas their American counterparts are more
skeptical. But this skepticism does not prevent Chick and Renata from
foretelling the fall of the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco in
Venice through reading the Tarot (AtD 255). Since there is also belief
in mineral consciousness, neither does it prevent Frank Traverse from
“seeing” Sloat Fresno and locating his whereabouts in a piece of
Iceland spar in Mexico and, four pages later, suddenly coming across
him in a cantina and killing him (AtD 395).
The mineral consciousness can take the form of the nunatak or the
strange Figure (AtD 141) or Time Traveller in the “meteor” in the
Arctic. But in Against the Day, the journey itself is “a kind of
conscious Being” (AtD 765). Perhaps Kim’s lama would have
understood this. The narrator lives in the future in relation to the
events of the narrative and has journeyed into the past, because at one
point, he or she writes “[w]e of the futurity know that […]” (AtD 706).

The Ending

Against the Day has a more closed ending than most of Pynchon’s
novels, except perhaps Mason & Dixon, though some may find it
contrived. The ending of Kim brings us full circle, for we begin with
the “picture” of Kim sitting astride the cannon, as the lama approaches
him, and we end with the lama sitting in a similar position but on the
ground, watching over Kim. In a way, Against the Day also comes full
circle. Kit is in Torino, which he finds just like Denver: “The
mountains were close, and there was hydro-electric power
everywhere. ‘Well full fuckin circle,’ is what he muttered to himself,
‘ain’t it’” (AtD 1068). He has joined up the circle, but a lama would
believe that he had gone up a level, as he has learnt so much. Even
Dally, alone in Paris until Kit is “transported” there (AtD 1080)
(through bilocation?), feels that she is living her life over and over
Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 303

again: “selections from her life would repeat themselves in slightly

different form” (AtD 1067). As Professor Vanderjuice puts it: “‘those
Indian mystics and Tibetan lamas and so forth were right all along, the
world we think we know can be dissected and reassembled into any
number of worlds, each as real as “this” one’” (AtD 1078).
The ending of Kim was criticized because it apparently does not
settle anything. Kim has not chosen between the lama and
Government Service. That Kim should become a spy and not
apparently renounce these activities—as we saw, once a spy, always a
spy—was also criticized. Some readers chose to excuse him on
account of his youth. But Kipling no doubt saw no need at all to
excuse him for spying on behalf of the British Empire. Kipling was an
arch-imperialist, he had nothing but contempt for the aspirations of the
Indian National Congress to achieve self-rule. But he was not the
casual and unthinking racist portrayed by some. A recent biography,
Kipling Sahib, by Charles Allen (2007), shows how perhaps today we
do him an injustice. As the reviewer James Delingpole puts it:

Had Rudyard Kipling died of fever in 1899, as he very nearly did, he would
surely be revered today as one of our greatest writers. His contemporaries
certainly thought so. Henry James considered him “the most complete man of
genius” he had ever known. The Times rated his short stories as highly as Guy
De Maupassant’s. Among the thousands of fans who wrote to him on his
recovery were Kaiser Wilhelm, Theodore Roosevelt and Lord Curzon.
Unfortunately for his reputation, however, Kipling lived on for another 37
years: more than enough time for the backlash to develop. Leading the mob
was George Orwell, whose vicious caricature of him as a “morally insensitive,
aesthetically disgusting gutter patriot” still colours our assessment of him
today. (69)

Read in isolation, Kim should not earn this negative reputation for its
author. Patronizing, perhaps, but not full-blown racist. The love
between Kim and the lama—the text ends on the word “beloved”—
appears genuine, if idealized, and fits the plot. The lama returns from
Nirvana, which he has achieved, in order to tend to his “chela” Kim,
so he will not miss his way there when the time comes. Kim’s mentor
“dies” on earth but continues to guide him from “heaven,” while Kit’s
mentor dies on earth, full stop.
304 Celia Wallhead

Conclusions

Kim is the least pessimistic of Kipling’s works, but of the two moral
precepts underlying the novel, one is negative but unavoidable: a
recognition of man’s mortal insufficiency. Pynchon’s postmodernism
eschews any moralizing, but the threat of death is ever-present in all
his works. Furthermore, his rejection of any monolithic vision is not
dissimilar to Kipling’s other moral precept in Kim: the appeal for
ecumenical understanding. Pynchon, by contrast, is an anti-
imperialist. The Whitehall spy Dwight Prance gives Kit a strict lesson
on this covering the white man in America and African slavery,
beginning “‘Traverse, for God’s sake […] There is light and there is
darkness’” (AtD 777). The white man’s usurping Native Indian lands
is condemned as Lew Basnight, riding down the valley out of Denver,
surveys the land:

[T]he land held the forever unquiet spirits of generations of Utes, Apaches,
Anasazi, Navajo, Chirakawa, ignored, betrayed, raped, robbed, and murdered,
bearing witness at the speed of the wind, saturating the light, whispering over
the faces and in and out the lungs of the white trespassers in a music toneless
as cicadas, unforgiving as any grave marked or lost. (AtD 175)

“Saturating the light” is a theme that literally saturates the novel.

Light and its interplay with dark is one of the leading themes. There
are binaries, bilocations and bifurcations in Kim too. Kim is infused
with light: Indian scenes are illuminated in a very positive way.
Sandison drops the name of the English painter J. M. W. Turner to
bear in mind in relation to such illumination, and, of course, Kipling
was nephew by marriage to two painters: Sir Edward Burne-Jones and
Sir Edward Poynter. Pynchon focuses upon light, as the title indicates,
but his use of light/dark, day/night, matter/antimatter, good/evil and
other similar binaries, (not to mention the excluded middles!) is far
more complex, as indeed, is his novel in general, and it is a subject I
can no more than mention in passing here. In Kim, in the postcolonial
binary, the white man is apparently light, and the native “other” is
dark. Against the Day deals with the same period, but it addresses the
future. On the Oriental struggle against the West, Auberon Halfcourt
says “‘I’ve been out here twenty-five years, ever since old Cavi ate the
sausage at Kabul, and all the meddling of the Powers has only made a
convergence to the Mahommedan that much more certain’” (AtD
Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day 305

758). He could be talking about American foreign policy at the

beginning of the twenty-first century rather than the twentieth. But
perhaps on this metaphorical meaning of light and dark, we should
leave with the words of Dwight Prance. Kipling deplored barriers
between men of different faiths, and the conniving and spying they
engaged in to get the upper hand in ideology and land; Pynchon has
Prance urge Kit that the struggle is more against the dark side of all
religions: “‘Differences among the world religions are in fact rather
trivial when compared to the common enemy, the ancient and abiding
darkness which all hate, fear, and struggle against without cease […]
Shamanism’” (AtD 778). But every man has his price: “‘And the
money’s good?’” asks Kit (AtD 778).

Celia Wallhead, University of Granada

Notes
1
See Vernon 4.
2
See Michael Harris’s essay in this collection for a discussion of eastern religion in
Against the Day.
3
For other theories for that devastating explosion, see Wallhead.
4
See Hollander.

Bibliography
Allen, Charles. Kipling Sahib. London: Little Brown, 2007.
Delingpole, James. “Was Kipling on Drugs?” Rev. of Kipling Sahib
by Charles Allen. The Mail on Sunday 2 Dec. 2007, 69.
Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “‘The Exact Degree of Fictitiousness’: Thomas
Pynchon’s Against the Day.” Rev. of Against the Day by Thomas
Pynchon. Postmodern Culture 17.2 (January 2007). 15 May 2010
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v017/ 17.2duyfhuizen.html>.
Hollander, Charles. “Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of
The Crying of Lot 49.” Pynchon Notes 40-41 (1997): 61-106.
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 1901. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
306 Celia Wallhead

—. Mason & Dixon. London: Vintage, 1997.

—. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott,
1966.
—. V. 1963. London: Picador, 1975.
—. Vineland. 1990. London: Minerva, 1991.
Sandison, Alan. “Introduction.” Kim by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987.
Vernon, Peter. “It’s Just Not Cricket: Cricket as Metaphor in Thomas
Pynchon’s Against the Day.” Pynchonwiki. 6 Oct. 2007. 15 May
2010 <http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?
title=Cricket_in_Against_the_Day>.
Wallhead, Celia. “Tesla and the Tunguska Event in Thomas
Pynchon’s Against the Day.” Studies in Honour of Neil Mclaren.
Eds. Ángeles Linde, Juan Santana, and Celia Wallhead. Granada:
University of Granada Press, 2008. 371-86.
Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. 1895. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2005.
 “Particle or Wave?”:
The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day

Leyla Haferkamp

Abstract: In Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, the (meta)physics of light forms one
of the most significant theoretical as well as narrative contexts. In his treatment of the
issue, Pynchon makes use of the complementarity typical of the particle-wave duality
as a main reference. The concept of complementarity in the novel, however, is by no
means restricted to the metaphorics of light. In spatial terms, for instance, it also
informs Pynchon’s take on the reciprocal relations between the country and the city,
or, in more general terms, between nature and culture. Pynchon’s interest in the
complementarity of these two realms becomes particularly important in his
representation of the Midwest, which he envisions as a complex topological
plane/plain that aligns diverse oppositions based on the overall dichotomy of form and
flux; of ‘particle and wave.’ Against this background, the essay surveys the depiction
of the prairie in Against the Day as a complex spatial modality with both political and
poetological ramifications.

“[…] but they were each other’s unrecognized halves.”

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

In his sixth novel Against the Day (2006), Thomas Pynchon

introduces, or rather seduces, the reader (in)to the realm of
epistemological confusion. With its narrative constantly oscillating
between two incompatible aspects operative within the same
framework, namely “the realm of the counterfactual” and “the
constraints of the given world” (AtD 9), and thus at once highlighting
and obscuring the boundary between them, the novel’s overall logic
can be said to be based on the notion of complementarity. This general
inclination of the dichotomous towards the complementary is already
implied in the novel’s title as well as in its single epigraph by
Thelonious Monk: “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.”
Later on, in the novel’s fourth section “Against the Day,” the title
308 Leyla Haferkamp

phrase is taken up in a passage that reflects the reciprocal functionality

of ‘night’ and ‘light’ within the mundanely quotidian, which is itself,
at first sight, diametrically opposed to the promise of “a cosmic sign”
implied by the aurora borealis appearing in the Viennese skies:

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. (AtD 805, my emphasis)

The complementarity of night and light suggests neither a complete

unity of opposites nor their synthesis, but addresses a mutual
functionality crucial for encoding the world. In fact, light travels in
Against the Day along a sliding scale covering a wide analogical
spectrum from the “declarative light of the shopgirl’s day” (AtD 803,
my emphasis) to the subjunctive potentialities of the “occluded light
of a stormy day” in the “queerly luminescent” (AtD 804) nocturnal
skies.1
In a novel that employs the (meta)physics of light as its leading
metaphor, the notion of complementarity comes as an inevitable
reference.2 In Against the Day, the (meta)physics of luminiferous
aether—despite all its overtly metaphysical connotations still a
popular topic for debate among nineteenth-century physicists—finds
its counterpart in the physics of the wave-particle duality in a
transformation that stretches across the novel’s plot. First, there is the
primacy of the continuous wave over discrete particles, which is
suggestive of the mental disposition that favors the analog to the
digital3 and corresponds to the aetherists’ state of mind as well as their
conception of light:

“Lord Salisbury said [aether] was only a noun for the verb ‘to undulate.’ Sir
Oliver Lodge defined it as ‘one continuous substance filling all space, which
can vibrate light […].’ It certainly depends on a belief in the waviness of
light—if light were particulate, it could just go blasting through empty space
with no need for any Aether to carry it. Indeed one finds in the devout
Aetherist a propensity of character ever towards the continuous as against the
discrete.” (AtD 58).

However, industrialization accompanied by the advent of electricity

seems to have brought about a major shift and lent light a certain
“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day 309

discreteness and “particularity,” suggesting the digitalization of the

medium, but also the heightening of the nostalgia for the wave:
“Electric lamplight kept the scene hard-focused and readable, all
proceeding stepwise, by integers, little ambiguity allowed in the
spaces between. And somewhere, that unanswerable wave-function
the sea” (AtD 536). Finally, somewhere in between the ideal of the
continuity of the wave and the down-to-earth discreteness of particles,
there resides the idea of complementarity, presaging, however
anachronistically, the shape of things to come in the quantum world of
the twentieth century: “‘If we may move about these days beneath the
sea wheresoever we will,’ opined Professor Vanderjuice, ‘the next
obvious step is to proceed to that medium which is wavelike as the
sea, yet also particulate’” (AtD 426).
Importantly, however, as Abraham Pais has pointed out,
“[c]omplementarity can be formulated without explicit reference to
physics, to wit, as two aspects of a description that are mutually
exclusive yet both necessary for a full understanding of what is to be
described” (quoted in Plotnitsky 73). In fact, in Against the Day, the
complementarity in question is not solely restricted to the metaphorics
of light; it also spills over to the level of the spatial metaphor.
In a fashion similar to that in which the novel’s metaphorics of
light addresses the complementarity typical of the particle-wave
duality, the presentation of the Midwest in Against the Day tackles the
complementarity between two distinct spatial modes. Here, the prairie
serves as the surface upon which the encounter between the seemingly
incompatible forces of “smoothing” and “gridding” is realized. The
terms smooth (or nomad) and striated (or gridded) stem from the
writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who offer a theoretical
treatment of spatiality concerning both politics and poetics.4 In A
Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between
“smooth space” and “striated space” primarily on the basis of their
materiality. Smooth space is “filled by events and haecceities, far
more than perceived things,” and it is a space “of affects, more than
one of properties” (479). In the smooth, it is materials that “signal
forces and serve as symptoms for them” while in striated space, which
is by definition the gridded and sedentary space of the State, “forms
organize a matter” (479).
As such, the prairie also comes, metaphorically, to function as the
topological plane/plain complementarizing such dichotomies as form
310 Leyla Haferkamp

and flux, logos and nomos, order and chaos, territory and terrain,
discretum and continuum, or, in more general and problematic terms,
culture and nature. Along these lines, I will argue that the prairie in
Against the Day functions as a complementary spatial modality that
has both political and poetological ramifications.
Prior to Against the Day, Pynchon’s work already contained
allusions to the grasslands. In fact, once they are introduced to the
Traverse clan in the novel’s first section “The Light over the Ranges,”
the “faithful readers will remember” (AtD 3) Reef Traverse’s great-
granddaughter, Vineland’s teenage protagonist Prairie Wheeler. In the
context of Vineland, “Prairie” is obviously not any oddball name
reflecting the “back to nature” sentiments prevailing in the “Mellow
Sixties” (VL 38), not “Cloud,” “Rain” or “River,” but a name
connoting the novel’s long-term historical relations to a genuinely
American environment that served as the stage for the unfolding of
Westward Expansion.5
It is by virtue of Pynchon’s idiosyncratic nomenclature that the
prairie subsists, throughout Vineland, as an extended metaphor. Read
in this context, the novel becomes the account of a modern trans-
American quest, the trajectory of which consists of a series of
boundaries to be crossed. Alongside the telling name Prairie Wheeler,
other names in the protagonist’s family tree, especially those of the
left-wing activists on her maternal side, evoke similar associations
with the “frontier experience”: Gates and Traverse. This specific
choice of names suggests the process of traveling across the land, thus
implying transition and transgression, boundaries, gateways and
thresholds. In Pynchon’s doubly refracted universe, Prairie and her
family also have their direct counterparts in Against the Day: the
aspect of mobility is redolent in the name Merle Rideout, a character
who is in retrospect Zoyd Wheeler’s prototype. Merle’s daughter
Dahlia as well as her quest for her mother Erlys, who has run off with
Luca Zombini, resemble Prairie and her search for her mother Frenesi,
who has abandoned the family for Brock Vond. In fact, Pynchon
combines the two narratives by way of a single word: both Merle and
Zoyd, in the same lovingly consoling manner, call their “motherless”
daughters “Trooper” (AtD 71, VL 15). In Against the Day, the readers
are referred not only to Vineland but also to Mason & Dixon, once
again by way of the Traverse family tree: the Traverses are originally
“from southern Pennsylvania, close to the Mason-Dixon” (AtD 87).
“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day 311

Though they do not belong to the array of characters in Mason &

Dixon, the “faithful reader” will yet again remember that Mason and
Dixon’s method of survey consisted in a “Traverse” (MD 14), as
opposed to a triangulation.

The Prairie and the City

Early on in Against the Day, a first description of the Great West is

presented from the bird’s eye perspective of the Chums of Chance,
who, while approaching the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893
by air, float above the Chicago area that is characterized by the clear-
cut coordinate system of the Cartesian grid:

Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways

in a Cartesian grid […]. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on
adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-
changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that 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. (AtD 10)

The passage addresses the crucial shifts brought about by

industrialization: on the one hand, the subordination of the turbulent
dynamics of life to the teleological geometry of systematized killing
routines; on the other, the partitioning of the grasslands, the spatial
transition from prairie to pasture and from pasture to feedlot (Cronon
223); in other words, the transformation of open space into fenced
parcels of property. The reference to the Cartesian grid, which is the
strictest tesselation of any Euclidean plane by unit squares, marks the
completion of the colonization process.
At first sight, the more or less haphazard horizontal directionality
that can be associated with the “sweeping stretch of prairie” (AtD 10)
in Against the Day counters the strictly organized vertical
dimensionality of urban Chicago two decades after the Great Fire of
1871: “Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a
mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its
light as if from mighty immolation warped to the red end of the
spectrum […]” (AtD 41).6 However, as so often with Pynchon, this
seemingly clear dichotomy becomes, like Chicago itself, fuzzy at the
312 Leyla Haferkamp

conceptual edges, with urban space shifting around the outskirts from
the Cartesian grid into what Pynchon calls “the urban unmappable”
(AtD 131). When Lew Basnight is confronted with the randomness
and “unmapped wilderness” (AtD 131) residing within the confines of
urbanity (AtD 38), puzzled by this unexpected interpenetration of
“White City” and “Dark City,” he asks himself: “Was it still Chicago?
[…] the first thing he noticed was how few of the streets here
followed the familiar grid pattern of the rest of town […] increasing
chances for traffic collisions” (AtD 38). The same obscurity and
fuzziness around the edges is observed within the organization of the
Columbian Exposition: “how civilized […] and […] white exhibits
located closer to the center of the ‘White City’ seemed to be, whereas
the farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more
evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery” (AtD 22).
Chicago’s Columbian Exposition coincides, as Pynchon stresses,
with a significant turning point in American history, the end of the
frontier process as announced by Frederic Jackson Turner in his
famous thesis: “‘Back in July […] Freddie Turner came out here from
Harvard and gave a speech […] [t]o the effect that the Western
frontier we all thought we knew from song and story was no longer on
the map but gone. Absorbed—a dead duck’” (AtD 52). With the
frontier myth rendered “history,” what the Chums are viewing from
above is American smooth “wilderness” already turned into organized
State Space, within the bounds of which the “unshaped freedom” of
the grasslands is at the service of a teleological reasoning with deadly
instrumental ends. Meat industry is regarded here as one of the steps
of the “gridding” process, realized at the cost of abandoning the
prairie’s wandering and wavering nomos in favor of sedentary
schemes and “cultivating” strategies that display different shades of
the Western logos.7 What is reduced—within the image of the
industrialized slaughter—is also nature’s complexity, its cloudlike
patterns of diverse and dynamic processes, as well as the synergic
potential these processes might entail. As Pynchon notes in Mason &
Dixon, the schemes of “gridding” inherent in the process of
colonization were set forth as new territories were “seen and recorded,
measur’d and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known,
[…] reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of
Governments” (MD 345, my emphasis).
“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day 313

In Against the Day, the geometrical metaphor introduced by way of

the Cartesian grid is taken up once again when Dr. Vormance, at a
meeting of “The Transnoctial Discussion Group” with the topic “The
Nature of Expeditions,” summarizes the colonists’ journey into the so-
called “unmapped wilderness” as follows: “‘We learned once how to
break horses and ride them long distances, with oceangoing ships we
left flat surfaces and went into Riemann space, we crossed solid land
and deep seas, and colonized what we found [...]’” (AtD 131).
In this passage, Pynchon treats the “explorative” and thus
colonializing shift from flat space to spherical space—the shift from a
flat to a round world—in terms of the transition from Euclidean to
Riemannian geometry. In fact, the topological shift suggested in this
passage is redolent of the example given by Henri Poincaré in Science
and Hypothesis (1902), to illustrate the “entrance” into Riemann
space. For this purpose, Poincaré first imagines “infinitely flat animals
in one and the same plane, from which they cannot emerge” (37-38).
In case they are capable of reasoning, these flat creatures, Poincaré
argues, would come up with the idea of a geometry that attributed
space only two dimensions. When transported to the surface of a
sphere with constant curvature, however, the “flat animals” create
their own “spherical geometry” that supersedes the straight line by the
“arc of a great circle” (38):

What they will call space will be the sphere on which they are confined, and
on which take place all the phenomena with which they’re acquainted. Their
space will therefore be unbounded, since on a sphere one may always walk
forward without ever being brought to a stop, and yet it will be finite; the end
will never be found, but the complete tour can be made. Well, Riemann’s
geometry is spherical geometry extended to three dimensions. (38)

Instead of adopting a non-Euclidean geometry, the “flatlanders”

would, “if their minds are like ours, adopt the Euclidean geometry,
which would be contradicted by all their experience” (49), and
impose, for the sake of convenience and simplicity, its conventional
metrical grid upon the “new world.”8
When Deleuze and Guattari reference Riemann space, they treat it
as a mathematical model that corresponds to their idea of the smooth
and the striated. From their philosophical perspective, the German
mathematician Bernhard Riemann is ascribed a crucial role, for his
focus on multiplicity “mark[s] the end of dialectics and the beginning
314 Leyla Haferkamp

of a typology and topology of multiplicities” (483). In this context,

striated space is based on multiplicities of magnitude “that distribute
constants and variables” and, therefore, is metric, whereas smooth
space that depends upon multiplicities of distance “inseparable from a
process of continuous variation” (Deleuze and Guattari 483) is non-
metric. Riemann space as smooth space is the accumulation of
“patches of space,” it consists of a heterogeneous multiplicity of
“shred[s] of Euclidean space” and is best defined as “an amorphous
collection of pieces that are juxtaposed but not attached to each other”
(Deleuze and Guattari 485), thus allowing for ambiguity in the spaces
between.
In Against the Day, the conversion of the smooth in the striated is
also conceivable in the transformation of the manifold heterogeneity
of “multiply-connected spaces” (AtD 136), i.e. Riemann manifolds,
into the Euclidean metrics of suburban space as “a simply-connected
space with an unbroken line around it” (AtD 165). The closure of the
frontier that marks the completion of the first gridding process also
brings about the loss of interconnectedness, as the complex web of
potentialities is reduced to distinctly isolated units: “The frontier ends
and disconnection begins” (MD 53-54).

Sharks Patrol These Waters

Although the city contains its own “wilderness within,” its true
“other,” as Deleuze and Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus, is, in
terms of geography, the sea. Symptomatically, when Merle and Dahlia
travel across the Great Plains on a westward spree, the prairie
becomes literally aquatic and oceanic, with “morning fields that went
rolling all the way to every horizon” (AtD 71). The prairie is by now
“the Inner American Sea, where the chickens schooled like herring,
and the hogs and heifers foraged and browsed like groupers and
codfish, and the sharks tended to operate out of Chicago or Kansas
City—[…]” (AtD 71). In the image of the sharks, Pynchon shows
once again that the smooth and the gridded cannot be separated:
predatory capitalist forces that have their origin in the city already
move through the smooth wilderness, introducing a—even if
rudimentary—free market logic: “Waiting out there for them each
daybreak […] was always that map crisscrossed with pikes and
“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day 315

highways and farm-to-market roads” (AtD 72), and opening up “the

terrible American divide, between hunter and prey” (AtD 186).
With the image of the prairie as “the inner American sea,”
Pynchon pays tribute to a prairie/ocean analogy that was already in the
nineteenth century a cliché that informed the aesthetic appreciation of
the grasslands. Although sharks can easily move through it, in the
absence of efficient navigation, the prairie, like the ocean, poses a
major spatial challenge to the Western sense of orientation, and its
transformational spatiality is easily readable in terms of what Deleuze
and Guattari call the “maritime model” of smooth space. According to
this model “the sea [and thus the prairie] is the smooth space par
excellence, and yet was the first to encounter the demands of
increasingly strict striation. […] A dimensionality that subordinated
directionality, or superimposed itself upon it, became increasingly
entrenched” (479-80).9
It is in inscribing Against the Day into the tradition of American
prairie fiction that Pynchon, like James Fenimore Cooper in The
Prairie (1827) or Willa Cather in My Ántonia (1918), dramatizes the
interplay of the smooth and the striated during the grasslands’
transformation from smooth space into the grid of the “striated land of
the sedentary cultivator” (Deleuze and Guattari 481). In the novel’s
present, especially in the semi-fictional world of the Chums of
Chance, the movements of gridding and smoothing are no longer
restricted to the planet’s surface, but are about to extend into the next
dimention. There exists an intraterrestrial frontier, where “the
phosphorescent chains and webs of settlement” impinge upon
“wilderness still unvisited by husbandry” (AtD 116), the counterpart
to which is located in atmosphere: “Here at the high edge of the
atmosphere was the next untamed frontier, pioneers arriving in
airships instead of wagons, setting in motion property disputes […]”
(AtD 121).

Holey Spaces

If the relentless turning of terrains into territories and the

territorializing strategies of the frontier process may have contributed
to the coming into being of an American identity, as Turner would
have it, the very same phenomena also necessarily spark the drive for
316 Leyla Haferkamp

“de-territorialization” reaching beyond the bounds marked out by

strategies of clear representation. The urge for cultivation gives way to
the urge to come undone.
Within this context, it is, in Against the Day, at first sight anarchy
that is staked against the established state system with its determinate
coordinates, thus aiming at the loosening of the “grid”; however, in
analyzing the significance of the diverse feedback relations between
the smooth and the striated, Pynchon, like Deleuze and Guattari,
focuses on “precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at
work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its
striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces”
(Deleuze and Guattari 500). Without this realization, the promise of
smoothness would serve at most as a faulty utopia. As Deleuze and
Guattari note, “smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory, […]
[b]ut the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life
reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces,
switches adversaries. Never believe that smooth space will suffice to
save us” (500).
If anything, then, Against the Day shows that the relationship
between the smooth and the striated is not merely that of simple
opposition, but “a much more complex difference by virtue of which
the successive terms of the oppositions fail to coincide entirely”
(Deleuze and Guattari 474). It is this complexity that leads to the
unpredictable reciprocal dynamics between the two. As Deleuze and
Guattari emphasize the significance of the translational processes
between the smooth and the striated, it becomes apparent that,
although their definitions appear in counterpoint, the mutual
transformations of the smooth and the striated points towards a single
system that complementarizes opposites.
Not only would smooth space not guarantee salvation, even more:
“the metrics of striated spaces is indispensable for the translation of
the strange data of a smooth multiplicity” (486, my emphasis).
Without this translation that connotes both subjugation and impulse
for smoothness, “smooth space would perhaps die of its own accord”
(486). Although “all becoming occurs in smooth space,” Deleuze and
Guattari underline the fact that “all progress is made by and in striated
space” (486).
To clarify the aspect of translation between the smooth and the
striated, Deleuze and Guattari introduce a third and pretty much
“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day 317

intermediary mode of spatiality: holey space. A mathematical model

based on Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals, holey space “provides a
general determination for smooth space that takes into account its
differences from and relations to striated space” (487-88).
Fractals are aggregates with a number of dimensions that is
“fractional” rather than whole, or whole but with continuous variation
in direction. The non-Euclidean model is appropriate for the
visualization of holey space, for a fractal dimension is always in-
between, e.g. greater than a line but less than a surface or less than a
volume and more than a surface. The interplay in question is one
between directionality and dimensionality, i.e. between smoothing and
striation.

Fig. 1: Hilbert’s curve 10

The exemplary fractal structures Deleuze and Guattari use to visualize

the shape of holey space are Von Koch’s curve and Sierpensky’s
sponge (487); however, Hilbert’s curve, another “space-filling” curve
with labyrinthine fractal dimensionality, which was introduced by the
German mathematician David Hilbert in 1890, is equally suitable for
the demonstration of the approximation between a line and a surface
set forth ad infinitum (see Figure 1). Best conceived as the continuous
process of approximation down an ever-diminishing scale, this type of
curve has the remarkable property that it can “fill” a space of two or
more dimensions. In fact, there is no limit to the number of points that
can be covered by the curve in this manner. Hilbert’s curve can be
318 Leyla Haferkamp

said to imply the continuum of smoothness; any striator would tend to

draw the first possible line to end up with a neat and discrete quadratic
surface and never again worry about the continuous processes
descending towards infinity.
In Against the Day, Hilbert is not only featured as one of the
prominent mathematicians of the Göttingen circle, but Pynchon also
delivers a neat definition of the fractal structure of Hilbert’s curve,
embedded in a dialogue between the painter Hunter Penhallow and
Dahlia that takes place in Venice:

Imagine that inside this labyrinth you see is another one, but on a smaller
scale, reserved only, say, for cats, dogs, and mice—and then, inside that, one
for ants and flies, then microbes and the whole invisible world—down and
down the scale, for once the labyrinthine principle is allowed, don’t you see,
why stop in any scale in particular? It’s self-repeating. Exactly the spot where
we are now is a microcosm of all Venice. (AtD 575)

In spatial terms, Pynchon’s fractal representation of Venice nicely

correlates with the idea of the “infinite within the finite” suggested by
Riemannian geometry; in philosophical terms, it is reminiscent of the
Leibnizian principle of “a multiplicity within a unity” (Leibniz 269)
that prevails in “Monadology,” corresponding to the infinite amount
of detail contained within the bounds of the indivisible unit of the
single monad. “[T]his representation of the details of the whole
universe” poses, however, an epistemological challenge to any
observer but God, for it “is confused and can only be distinct with
respect to a small part of things” (Leibniz 276). If monads reach
infinity, they do so confusedly, in a manner dependent on perceptive
scale, i.e. “limited and differentiated by their level of distinct
perception” (Leibniz 276).
Fractal geometry makes its last appearance towards the end of the
novel; the reference in question concerning the “coastline approaching
infinite length” (AtD 821) between Pola and the Bocche di Cattaro on
the Adriatic coast. Pynchon provides a pretty straightforward
reference to the well-known article “How Long Is the Coast of
Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension” (1967),
in which Mandelbrot puts the emphasis on the scale-dependent
character of scientific measurement (336).11 According to his
hypothesis, the measured length of a coastline (or any natural
boundary) may display a fractal structure over a range of metric
“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day 319

scales. In other words, the translation of smooth variance into striated

metrics poses an empirical challenge to the observer, as the analog
resists complete translation into the digital.
In Against the Day, it is a specific physical movement that
embodies the smooth materiality of the unbroken prairie, of water, and
of the aether: undulation, which is, in physical terms, a motion to and
fro, up and down, or from side to side, in any fluid or elastic medium,
propagated continuously among its particles, but with no translation of
the particles themselves in the direction of the propagation of the
wave. Symptomatically, Cooper had already used the concept of
motion to define “the undulating surface, of what, in the language of
the country of which we write, is called a ‘rolling Prairie’” (11, my
emphasis).
The “wave-function of the sea,” the “rolling prairie” and the
waviness of light all imply the aspect of an “American identity”
obsessed with the flow of “unshaped freedom,” which finds apt
articulation in Huck Finn’s famous last words that emphasize the urge
“to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” (Clemens 226).
However, the yearning for smoothness is inextricably intertwined
with, fuelled by and complementary to the grid of cultivation
introduced by “sivilising” strategies.
Interestingly, even though he propagated—as a physicist—the
theory that light behaved like particles, Richard Feynman concludes
his popularly influential QED with the following compromise:

It is rather interesting to note that electrons looked like particles at first, and
their wavish character was later discovered. On the other hand […] light
looked like waves at first, and its characteristics as a particle were discovered
later. In fact both objects behave somewhat like waves, and somewhat like
particles. In order to save ourselves from inventing new words such as
“wavicles,” we have chosen to call these objects “particles” […]. (85)

As a metaphor, the wave-particle duality highlights the intricate

complementarity central to Pynchon’s prose. Despite endless
flirtations with science and philosophy, Pynchon’s work employs the
poetic license to manipulate scientific propositions and philosophical
concepts for setting up an experiment in poetics. On the whole,
Pynchon creates his universe by complementarizing problematic
dichotomies such as the sensuous versus the sensual, form against
flow, constancy versus change, the digital against the analog, the
320 Leyla Haferkamp

particle against the wave; or, in epistemological terms, by

complementarizing the pole of the clarity and distinction and that of
obscurity and confusion. Regarding them as distinct and separable
poles in counterpoint would only obscure their crucial connections.
While Pynchon’s political adherences remain “clearly obscure,”
his poetics reflect the properties of Deleuze and Guattari’s holey
space. Once refracted through Pynchon’s lens, it turns out that
“reality,” constantly undulating and particulate, comes to connote the
clearly indistinct as well as the obscurely distinct, thus enmeshing all
sorts of counter-strains in a web of relations to underscore two major
characteristics: their diversity and connectivity. And it is, one could
say, precisely this understanding that lends the Pynchonian universe
its unique complexity. On the one hand the “corrupted prairie” (AtD
55), on the other the ideal of an “undulating prose.” Not only
Pynchon’s politics, but also his writing is caught in the complexity of
this complementarity.

Leyla Haferkamp, University of Cologne

Notes
1
In Mason & Dixon, the process of triangulation brings about the transformation of
the subjunctive “dream” into the declarative (MD 345); the subjunctive is “contrary to
fact” (MD 365), it corresponds to “the counterfactual.”
2
Traditionally a wave-phenomenon, light in quantum physics is ascribed two
incompatible modes as particles and waves, complementarized for the sake of
scientific functionality and “complete” description. See Plotnitsky 6-7.
3
In Vineland, the analog and the digital seem, at first sight, diametrically opposed as
the focus is set on transition from “the Mellow Sixties, […] predigital, not yet so cut
into pieces” (VL 38) to the digital eighties, where everything is chopped up into
computable units and people are nothing but “digits in God’s computer” (VL 91).
However, the discrete and the continuous are rendered complementary in the realm of
aesthetics when Van Meter, while removing the frets from his Fender Precision bass
for the sake of smooth transition, still feels the need to draw lines where they had
been, “just to help him through the transition” (VL 224).
4
See especially chapters 12 and 14.
5
See also my “Prairie: Pynchon’s Poetics of Immanence” in Pynchon Notes
[forthcoming].
“Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day 321

6
The “lurid acropolis” is no less than the “reborn phoenix” (Cronon 348), whose epic
of metropolitan progress, while culminating in the fair, owes much to its worst
infernal disaster that put an end to its urban mediocrity.
7
Although the nomos has come to designate the law, it was originally associated with
the “nomadic trajectory” as “a very special kind of distribution, one without division
into shares, in a space without borders or enclosure” (Deleuze and Guattari 380).
While the nomadic trajectory suggests the distribution of people or animals in space,
“the function of the sedentary road […] is to parcel out a closed space to people,
assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares”
(Deleuze and Guattari 380).
8
“One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can be only more convenient.
Now, Euclidean geometry is, and will remain, the most convenient: 1st, because it is
the simplest […]; 2nd, because it sufficiently agrees with the properties of natural
solids, those bodies which we can measure and compare by means of our senses”
(Poincaré 50).
9
Deleuze and Guattari ascribe the property of smoothness to biomes as diverse as
“desert, steppe, sea, or ice” (484). In Against the Day, the Mexican desert also reflects
the smoothness of the prairie landscape: “They returned to the desert camp among
whirling colors […], affording glimpses now and then of some solitary band of
figures alone on the prairie toward sunset, the untouched depths of it windsweeping
away for hundreds of miles […]” (AtD 394).
10
http://www.mathgrapher.com/index.php?pagina=example_Lindenmayer&sub=input
/html/L_systems/lsysex02.inc
11
Mandelbrot’s article is also implicitly mentioned in Mason & Dixon: “[…] there
exists no ‘Maryland’ beyond an Abstraction, a Frame of right lines drawn to enclose
and square off the great Bay in its unimagin’d Fecundity, its shore line tending to
Infinite Length, ultimately unmappable [...]” (MD 354).

Bibliography
Clemens, Samuel Langhorne [Mark Twain]. Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Prairie. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1987.
Feynmann, Richard P. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.
Charlotte: Baker& Taylor, 1988.
322 Leyla Haferkamp

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “Monadology.” Philosophical Texts.

Trans. Richard Francks and R. S. Woolhouse. New York: Oxford
UP, 1998. 267-81.
Mandelbrot, Benoit. “How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical
Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension.” Science 156:3775 (May
5, 1967): 636-38.
Plotnitsky, Arkady. Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr
and Derrida. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.
Poincaré, Henri. Science and Hypothesis. New York: Dover
Publications, 1952.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York:The Penguin Press,
2006.
—. Vineland. London: Minerva, 1990.
—. Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.
 From Science to Terrorism: The Transgressing
Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day1

Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

Abstract: This contribution starts from the hypothesis that Pynchon’s organizing
principle of energy is mostly carried out by means of three strategies: 1) the
manipulation of scientific notions; 2) the use of intertextuality and metafiction; and 3)
the ironic exploitation of alphabetic letters, especially of “V,” as symbols of the
postmodern belief in the capacity of language to create reality. Accordingly, the main
aim in this essay is to evaluate Against the Day in relation to these three strategies and
to relate them to the persistent anti-categorical approach used by Pynchon in his
narrative. In light of his interpretations of energy and in his attack on categorical
interpretations of life, in Against the Day Pynchon aims at calling his readers’
attention to the present-day impact of terrorism and violence. The following pages,
then, focus on the importance of scientific discourse in the novel, especially on
interpretations given to the notion of energy as well as to the importance that light has
as a reiterative trope in the novel. Next, the essay evaluates Pynchon’s use of
metafictional and intertextual devices that aim at the blurring of physical and cultural
boundaries in a reality described within a modernist context. Finally, it addresses the
writer’s use of “V,” the letter that has increasingly represented Pynchon’s complex
quest for understanding the human manipulation of forces. In Against the Day “V”
establishes evident connections with early American terrorism and the beginning of
capitalist corporations, notions that finally stimulate an ethical reflection on the
collective posttraumatic condition of the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“Forty-five years of study had proved to be quite futile for the pursuit of power; one
controlled no more force in 1900 than in 1850, although the amount of force
controlled by society had enormously increased.”
(“The Dynamo and the Virgin,” The Education of Henry Adams XXV: 390)
324 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

The Manifestations of Energy and Pynchon’s Literary Project

Since the publication of his first novel in 1963, Thomas Pynchon has
built an increasingly complex literary universe of which many critics
have suggested the existence of an underpinning order.2 In effect,
following Henry Adams’s well-known metaphor of Venus and the
Virgin as a source of spiritual power, Pynchon seems to organize his
literary world systematically around the encompassing theme that
obsessed the American historian: the analysis of the different
manifestations of energy and their impact on society. The novelist
repeatedly signals the representation of energy by using the capital
“V,” the letter that also functions as the title for his first novel, V., to
which he added a period as a suggestion of the ever-changing identity
of energy. The letter reappears on many occasions throughout
Pynchon’s fiction, but since the beginning, V. has been following a
process of moral degradation, which increases along the twentieth
century, as energy mutates into capitalist demands and devastating
weaponry that take us closer to an apocalyptic end. From the spiritual
grounds represented by Adams’s interpretation of Venus and the
Virgin, throughout the period that goes from V. to Mason & Dixon
(1963-1998), Pynchon takes his readers along a path of energy
manifestations that evolve from early mechanical devices into the
more dangerous expressions of energy as electricity or nuclear power
(see Mendelson and Kupsch). I have elsewhere contended that, as
regards his fiction until 1997, the novelist’s organizing principle of
energy is mostly carried out by means of three strategies: 1)
Pynchon’s manipulation of scientific notions; 2) his use of
intertextuality and metafiction; 3) his recurrent and ironic exploitation
of alphabetic letters, especially of V, as symbols of the postmodern
belief in the capacity of language to create reality (Collado-Rodríguez,
El orden del caos). I have further argued that Pynchon’s literary world
works systematically to erase the reader’s predisposition to analyze
and interpret reality in the one-sided, categorical terms that Aristotle
defined in his Law of the Excluded Middle, one of the strongest
philosophical bases that support traditional Western thinking. In
Pynchon’s fiction, uncertainty eventually displaces any clear
monolithic interpretation of life and reality.3
My aim in this paper is to study Against the Day in relation to the
three strategies mentioned above and to the persistent anti-categorical
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 325

approach used by Pynchon to handle them. In doing so, I will attempt

to clarify some of the novel’s ideological implications. Most
important in the case of Against the Day, I think that in the light of his
interpretations of energy and in his attack on one-sided, categorical
interpretations of life, in this novel Pynchon compels his readers to
revise the impact of terrorism in our contemporary society. In the
following pages, then, I will focus first on the importance of scientific
discourse in the novel; I will pay special attention to some of the
interpretations given to the notion of energy as well as to the
importance that light has as possibly the main reiterative trope in the
novel. In the next section of the essay, I will consider Pynchon’s use
of metafictional and intertextual devices that aim at the blurring of
physical and cultural boundaries in a reality described within a
modernist context. Finally, I will address the new use that Pynchon
gives in the novel to “V,” the letter that has increasingly represented
his complex quest for understanding the human manipulation of
forces. In Against the Day, the letter V points again to Pynchon’s
game of undermining the limits of categorical, monolithic thinking.
But it also establishes evident connections with early American
terrorism and the beginning of capitalist corporations, two notions that
finally stimulate an ethical reflection on the collective posttraumatic
situation of the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Energy, Light, Excluded Middles, and Reading Reflections

The temporal setting chosen by Pynchon to unfold his story already

anticipates the importance of scientific discourse in the novel. I think
that the author revisits the turn of the twentieth century—also the
temporal setting for his first novel—as a way to draw the readers’
attention to the period when Einstein presented the new understanding
of energy in his renowned formula for relativity theory, E=mc2. In its
transgression of the Newtonian categories of space and time,
Einstein’s formula directly illuminates the reasons why Pynchon uses
again one of his recurrent experimental strategies: namely, his game to
confound spaces and times, once more avoiding a linear narrative and
mixing the different levels of fantasy and realism.4 In addition, the
period that Pynchon has chosen for Against the Day is also the time
when James Frazer’s research in anthropology insistently points to the
326 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

mixture of magical, religious, and scientific beliefs in human

societies.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein brought
about from scientific premises what might be defined as a resurrection
of pantheism by defending the idea that everything in life is energy
or—as he ambiguously called it—the Old One, an outstanding notion
that Western culture started to assimilate only gradually in the
modernist period.5 In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the
use of more precise microscopes had already led to the discovery that
the atom is not the smallest unit in the existing reality. It became a
well-known, albeit shocking fact that there is also a smaller,
subatomic world that does not quite correspond to what our five
senses perceive as “reality.” From that time on, magic and religion
had to share with science the notion of invisibility—an insistent trope
in Pynchon’s fiction: the world is what it is in scientific terms due to
the interactions of many factors that are frequently invisible to the
human eye. Gradually, the traditional frontiers between fantasy and
the real became rather blurred for the scientist and also for the
modernist artist (see Menand).
In Against the Day, Pynchon dedicates many exhaustive and
explicit passages to time travel, the fourth dimension, electricity,
Quaternions, bilocation, and light. In these passages readers can find
many references to the post-Newtonian understanding of life that at
the turn of the twentieth century was systematically subverting the
traditional limits imposed by Aristotelian categorization, Newtonian
physics, and traditional ideologies (Nadeau 17-64). However,
scientists such as Einstein were not the only ones contesting rationalist
theories at the time. In his noted essay “The Archetypes of the
Collective Unconscious,” Carl Jung—another important source for
Pynchon’s fiction—discusses different aspects of ancient
mythological knowledge in order to set up a convincing definition for
his Archetype of Meaning. Life is meaningless, he concludes, but it
has a nature that has to be interpreted, “for in all chaos there is a
cosmos, in all disorder a secret order, in all caprice a fixed law, for
everything that works is grounded on its opposite” (31). Jung’s
research into the intricacies of human behavior and rituals took place
at about the same time when Einstein was still dealing with relativity
theory, the photoelectric effect, and its aftermaths, which ultimately
resulted in the new field of quantum mechanics. The new turn in
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 327

contemporary physics paradoxically led to doubts about the scientific

possibility to reach exact measurements in the subatomic world. Such
doubts guided Werner Heisenberg to the promulgation of the
uncertain quality of the electron as a wave in time or as a particle in
space,6 but also to Niels Bohr’s subsequent formulation of the
Principle of Complementarity.7 Bohr’s formulation can be understood
as a scientific metaphor for the same kind of conciliatio oppositorum
proposed by Jung in the quotation above.8 Pynchon’s critics have
frequently noticed the insistent presence in his novels of some specific
phrases or maxims. “As above, so below,” “Keep it bouncing” or
“Karmic adjustment” have become Pynchonian mottos also traceable
in Against the Day. In my interpretation, they clearly point to
Einstein’s pantheism and to the Jungian (previously Romantic and
Classic) “conciliation of opposites” or necessity not to exclude any
middles from our reasoning about reality: “excluded middles; they
were bad shit” (CoL 125), a wiser Oedipa Maas finally realizes in The
Crying of Lot 49.
As he did in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon in Against the Day takes
his readers along an encyclopedic story with many and complex
scientific allusions that refer to some of the theories in vogue at the
turn of the twentieth century. From the field of mathematics some of
those theories resulted in the promulgation of relativity theory, the
fourth dimension, and hypothetical time travel, but eventually also in
the human interest in the manipulation of light (the only constant in
the Universe, according to Einstein’s formulae) to produce power and
weaponry. When dealing with electricity, or the way to transport and
use light as a source of energy, Pynchon only mentions Einstein on
one occasion. On the contrary, he frequently recalls the importance of
Nicola Tesla (1856-1943), whom his narrator soon associates with a
dangerous way of manipulating energy. Actually, Tesla’s theoretical
work on electric power formed the basis of modern alternating current
(AC) systems (see Seifer)—which offers one more indication of the
writer’s insistence on indeterminate grounds, to “keep it bouncing.”
Already in 1893—at the time Pynchon’s story begins in Chicago—
Tesla was successfully experimenting with the transmission of
electrical energy without wires, a fact that within the novel’s universe
allows the Chums of Chance to benefit from his inventions.
Furthermore, Tesla actually introduced AC power to visitors to the
first setting that appears in Against the Day: the 1893 World’s
328 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. At the end of his life and after

some problems with Thomas Edison, the Supreme Court of the United
States credited him as being the inventor of the radio, but by then he
had also won the reputation of being an eccentric or mad scientist,
obsessed with the wireless transmission of energy and the
development of electromagnetic weaponry. Pynchon possibly exploits
these aspects of his biography throughout the book because they also
find their present-time correlative in similar experiments currently
carried out by the U.S. Government in Alaska. Tesla is also associated
with ballistics and the development of the first radar units, recurrent
topics in Pynchon’s previous fiction that point to the writer’s political
and ecological criticism. In Against the Day, electricity, light, and
communication take readers to the historical stages where energy,
manifested in new weaponry based on scientific manipulation, comes
to its first big outburst in the First World War. From the spiritual
power manifested in the symbols of Venus and the Virgin, the
manipulation of energy—manifested as light—has turned now into the
most dangerous instrument of destruction.
Against the Day is full of passages that question the validity of
light as a positive force. Even if the Great Cohen affirms
pantheistically that “‘[w]e are light’” (AtD 687), and in biological
terms light is, together with water, the creator of all living creatures, in
Pynchon’s book it is also the great destroyer because its manipulation
by mankind brings about terrible apocalyptic implications. Light is the
instrument the Colorado militia uses to disturb the strikers’ sleep
before shooting at them (AtD 1008), it is the element used to produce
phosgene bombs (AtD 952-53), and it anticipates nuclear destructive
weaponry (AtD 954). Pynchon’s use of the trope in a negative sense
also helps readers to explain the novel’s puzzling title. Regarding the
mysterious explosion that happened on 30 June 1908, historically
known as the Tunguska Event, the narrator asserts that gradually its
effects became forgotten, its “sense of overture and possibility”
dissipated and people “went back once again to seeking only orgasm,
hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and
prepare them against the day” (AtD 805). Whether motivated by
Tesla’s Magnifying Transformer (AtD 794, 801), by a fallen star (AtD
791), or by any other unknown reason, the Tunguska Event is
described by the narrator as a “heavenwide blast of light” (AtD 779),
enhancing both the terrifying destructive limits to which light may
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 329

take us as well as the mysterious quality of the event itself. Should we,
then, favor darkness, the absence of light? There are indications in the
novel that “the ancient darkness” that the author parodies from old
mythologies is also to be understood as a source of evil (AtD 964), but
indications may come shortly after light has been considered again to
be a destroyer of life (AtD 963). When facing Pynchon’s use of the
binary light/darkness, the answer seems to be again “karmic
adjustment” or “keep it bouncing”: neither stands permanently in the
ethical centre as both may produce chaos and order, evil and good. In
Against the Day, light as destructive energy, be it in the form of
nuclear power, as magnified waves, or as energy concentrated in
phosgene bombs, is also complemented by the color white, the other
typical Pynchonian term that symbolizes death since it acquired such
meaning in the figure of Weissmann, the perverse Nazi officer who
first appears in V. He represents the whiteness of the North from
which the invaders still come in Against the Day (AtD 928-29), which
opens at the White City of Chicago’s Exposition, the first textual
expression of a simulated reality in the book (AtD 1). The phrase also
appears in the name of the sinister White City Investigations (AtD
1041). It can be inferred from Gravity’s Rainbow that in the
Pynchonian Universe the term white symbolically represents not only
the claims to ethnic predominance of the white man but also the
alleged purity of light. Paradoxically, such purity also absorbs in it all
the colors in the rainbow, so impeding the colorful variations of life
(GR 759). Darkness, on the other hand, is the territory of the
dispossessed, of the margins of social discourse where, however, the
forces of evil are also ready to accost the passerby. The notions of
good and evil, filtered through the prism of post-Newtonian physics,
do not have clear limits in Pynchon’s fiction.
In addition, the writer uses light and its manifestations in an astute
metaphorical sense by playing with the levels of the story and the
narration. Terms like illumination, reflection, reverberation—even
double refraction or doubleness—appear reiteratively in Against the
Day also to suggest that they also refer metaphorically to notions of
thinking, understanding, and truth. The strategy allows Pynchon, in
his presentation of past events, to guide his readers into a reflection on
our present sociopolitical conditions. Accordingly, narrator and
characters unfold a chain of thoughts and coincidences that frequently
transgress the temporal frontiers existing between the story time at the
330 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

turn of the twentieth century and the narrator’s—and the reader’s—

present situation. Thus, for instance, narrator and characters report the
Tunguska Event from several angles, including its association to
Tesla’s experiments on wireless communication. However, its
apparent nuclear spectrum also takes the narrator to invoke the
apocalyptic star Tchernobyl, which obviously reverberates in the
mind of the contemporary reader with the nuclear catastrophe in
Belarus twenty years before the publication of Pynchon’s novel (AtD
797).

The Literary Artifact: Mixing Generic Grounds, Metafiction, and

Intertextuality

Turning our attention to the literary structure of the novel increases

our sense of the overpowering presence of the many uncertain and
transgressing aspects embedded in it. Pynchon’s use of both narrative
devices and an intertextual modernist context aims at the same anti-
categorical ends.
The novel’s narrative build offers a first indication to support the
view that the writer is fighting once more against categorical thinking,
its conventions, and eventually its unnerving political effects. Against
the Day is divided into two (not so distinct) different ontological
levels: the fantastic and literary adventures of the always-young
Chums of Chance, and the more realist Traverse brothers’ quest for
survival and revenge, but both levels also become mixed at certain
times. Echoing the findings of relativity theory, Pynchon mixes times
and settings from both planes. Within the narrative frame of the book,
a typical Pynchonian narrator tells the story from the future (our
present?), jumping from different times and places, and adds to it
many references to previous literary works (especially to Eliot’s
poetry).
Accordingly, the author also plays an intertextual game on literary
history that results in the trespassing of the frontiers that delimit
conventional narrative genres. The trespassing of literary genres is a
reiterative device in some of Pynchon’s previous texts, but the
strategy is especially persistent in Against the Day. More than one
thousand pages allow him to illustrate it abundantly. The first two
noticeable genres appear at the novel’s beginning and at its end,
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 331

therefore encapsulating the rest of the book: science fiction and the
detective novel. Furthermore, the first one already comes out as a
blend of genres that combines the motifs of adventure stories in the
tradition of Jules Verne and children’s narratives with a parodic
suggestion of contemporary steampunk fiction.9 It features the Chums
of Chance, a group of young balloonists who also clearly show traits
known from the Star Trek TV series. As happens to the voyagers of
the Enterprise, the Chums have their Prime Directive that forbids them
to interfere with the people who live on the planet’s surface, even if it
seems to contradict their only way to make a living (AtD 444, 1021).
Like the Klingons or the Romulans in Star Trek, the Chums can also
cloak their ship and avoid detection (AtD 549). The result is that
sometimes they do intervene, are seen, and talked to by some of the
characters that belong to the main realist story (mostly Lew and
Merle) but frequently they remain invisible to everybody but the
reader. For some other characters, the Chums’ peculiar nature belongs
to the territory of the sacred invisible, of the angels. They even end up
marrying female cyborgs who fly the skies with the help of steampunk
wings (AtD 1030).
Pynchon has abundantly used the second encapsulating genre in
the book, the detective story, since his early fiction. In one of his roles
Lewis Basnight, the detective in Against the Day, is the link between
the fantastic Chums of Chance and the other, more realist protagonists
in the book. Nevertheless, from a sociopolitical perspective Lew is
also a trespassing or bilocated detective, as he himself realizes. He
started in his profession by serving the owners’ interests against the
workers, but he ends up helping the latter as a hard-boiled private dick
in California at a moment in which the cinema, real estate speculation,
and violent crime already go hand in hand in the construction of the
new American Dream of simulation and glamour (AtD 689-90).
Pynchon’s view of the situation chronologically anticipates—but
intertextually refracts—his own reflections on 1960s California in The
Crying of Lot 49. A Western that sometimes becomes the
representation of porn cinema scenes, spies attracted by séances and
Tarot cards, political quests that take readers to polar regions with
reverberations of horror and sci-fi movies, modernist quests of self-
discovery that take some of the characters to the dangerous territory of
the Balkans: in Against the Day, narrative genres constantly blend as a
332 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

literary warning against our human insistence on binding everything

in specific and clear-cut codes of representation.
Furthermore, on the level of the story the narrator involves his
characters in frequent acts of trespassing doors or arches. Modernist
anthropologists have frequently associated the motif of trespassing
doors with mythical and religious rituals of passage (Campbell 77-89,
217-28). Adding to the number of images of transgression, in Against
the Day the ritualistic motif affects the main characters on the realist
level. In the Balkans, the questing spy protagonists and sexual
threesome Cyprian, Reef, and Yashmeen have to pass under a rock
arch (AtD 955). At the beginning of his quest in inner Asia, Kit has to
pass through “the great stone Arch known as the Tushuk Tash” (AtD
769) and he is later visited by a “transparent doorway” (AtD 1080) a
little after his brother Frank has to undergo a similar experience,
apparently in his dreams (AtD 993). Dally is also helped by the
Zombinis to escape from a dangerous situation by means of a magical
door (AtD 350), and Lew Basnight also undergoes a similar ritual
(AtD 221). What comes out of such episodes is usually a (modernist)
revelation: the impression that one stands on new mystic grounds or
experiencing an epiphany related to the space-time continuum. As
Frazer concludes in The Golden Bough, cultural remains coming from
the ages of magic and religion persist in the contemporary stage of
human scientific development (711-14). However, as the influential
anthropologist also warned his modernist readers, in the process that
goes from chaos to cosmos “magic, religion and science are nothing
but theories of thought” (712) to interpret the universe. In his parodic
depiction of the modernist ethos, Pynchon abundantly joins the
magical and the religious with phenomena that today are explained
only in scientific terms. Time travel, bilocation, and the existence of
alternate worlds affect many of the characters in the novel. Even the
Chums of Chance have the possibility to test a time machine in a clear
literary evocation of H. G. Wells’s popular novel. Many of these
“fantasy” episodes in the book are, as Alan Lightman put it some
years ago, about Einstein’s Dreams: possibilities or versions of reality
suggested by relativity theory and quantum mechanics. On many
occasions, magic and religion interpreted events or states of being that
science explained later or is still trying to elucidate, with shamans and
bilocated Christian mystics on one side of the cognitive spectrum and
the double character of the electron as wave and particle on the
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 333

other.10 Hence, there are many characters in the novel that seem to
believe that relativity theory can finally account for states of religious
revelation. Furthermore, the blending of genres and the reiterative act
of trespassing doors and arches also have their metaphorical
equivalence in two other elements of the text’s narrative architecture.
On the one hand, metafiction and the playful condition of the narrator,
and on the other the use of literary parody of specific authors,
especially of Eliot’s poetry, also become transgressing strategies that
in Against the Day contest any singular interpretation of life.
As happens so often in Pynchon’s fiction, the novel’s narrator is an
anti-categorical drifter. Overt metafiction plays its part on a number of
occasions in which the omniscient narrator mixes narrative levels by
addressing the reader directly (AtD 666, 979) or sharing with us his
ironic position with a “we of the futurity” (AtD 706). On other
occasions he teaches his readers a lesson (AtD 768), openly shows his
doubtful approach to the story he is narrating (AtD 839, 972), or
refrains from further describing some sexual scenes with a “let us
reluctantly leave them” (AtD 883). Pynchon’s narrators have always
followed similar traits, playing with the notion of omniscience but
frequently contradicting themselves—Whitman’s famous line being
quoted more than once in Pynchon’s fiction. However, the crossing of
different narrative levels does not stop in the figure of the narrator. As
done so often in the postmodernist fiction written in the 1960s and
1970s and also in his previous novels, Pynchon plays with ideas that
recursively validate a metafictional understanding of literature and, by
extension, of a reality whose meaning is always trapped in the web of
human languages and codes of representation. Lew Basnight feels
soon that he could be an actor in the theatre (AtD 242). By then Reef
has already read a novel by the Chums of Chance (AtD 215) and,
recalling Borges’s celebrated story “Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius,”
readers may already think that perhaps the young balloonists have
trespassed from their fictional world of fantasy into the territory of the
more realist story that concerns the Traverses’ Western, spy,
modernist, and sexual adventures. Later on, in a museum the
mathematicians Günther and Yashmeen listen to a secretive voice that
talks about Time, the implication being that it could be the voice of
the author himself, as deus ex machina (AtD 636). An exaggerated use
of narrative chance11 also becomes a relevant strategy to downgrade
the story’s credibility. Frequently, the narrator addresses the reader
334 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

with a “who should appear but…” (AtD 849, 995, 1034), and
coincidentally the line of encounters among the multiplicity of places
and characters neatly allows for the progression of the plot. By the end
of the book, the balloonist Chick Counterfly unexpectedly meets his
father in California. Through him, Chick makes contact again with
Lew who then also meets the lost Traverse sister, Lake, thirty pages
before the novel ends, allowing for no loose threads for conventional
readers who expect to know what befalls every major character before
the story finishes. By then, Einstein’s dream of the possible existence
of parallel universes also accounts for Kit’s capability to contact the
Chums (AtD 1079) and eventually find what seems to be the
legendary mystic city of Shambhala. That happens, of course, once he
has crossed a space-time door and become, like Benny Profane in V., a
human yo-yo (AtD 1080). Three pages before the end, we find the
Chums looking down at a possible reconciliation between Kit and
Dally thanks to metafictional bilocation (AtD 1082), although perhaps
this is all nothing but another announcement of the apocalyptic times
to come; the novel’s end is anything but closed.
Apocalypse is one of Pynchon’s most well-known and reiterative
motifs. Since “The Small Rain” (1959), the writer has frequently
connected the religious notion to a mythic understanding of reality
and to T.S. Eliot’s poetry. In Against the Day, the story is often
presented in ways that evoke The Waste Land, especially in the
detective’s episodes in London. Not coincidentally, Eliot’s influential
poem is also an experiment at mixing memory and desire, past and
future, as its narrator soon asserts in the first part of the poem, “The
Burial of the Dead.” Explicit and implicit references to The Waste
Land abound in the novel. In Eliot’s work there is an accumulation of
séances, interpretations of the Tarot, and frequent allusions to the
twilight that insistently suggest the blurring of ontological frontiers,
while also connecting the poet’s modernist ethos to Pynchon’s
concern with the trope of light. The role of myth, being a well-known
topic in Eliot’s poetry, also offers an intertextual interpretation for the
novelist’s insistent use of Jungian archetypes, angels, centers of
power, gates to be crossed by the initiated, the role of Woman as
symbol of life, or conversations with the dead. Readers who know
Eliot’s poem in detail may notice the importance of certain motifs in it
related to the notion of social decadence and the end of the cycle of
life. In The Waste Land, the main narrative voice shows frequent
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 335

difficulties in saying what he wants: people—including the narrator—

are described as “neither living nor dead,” and twilight, a term often
repeated in Pynchon’s novel, continuously evokes in the poem the
process of decadence of Western civilization and the stoppage of the
cycle of life. Hence, although involved in his peculiar parodic vein,
Pynchon’s narrator conducts us along a new representation of the
mythic battle between light and darkness, that is to say, energy and its
absence; a battle that on many occasions is resolved in the twilight
that results from the trespassing of barriers between life and death,
energy and chaos, voice and silence, presence and absence. Dante,
Tiresias, anima figures, Baudelaire, or even a replica of Eliot’s hollow
men are all elements that saturate the pages of Against the Day and
that intertextually explain that persistent condition of decadence and
the announcement of an Apocalypse that never comes but is always
hovering above us in Pynchon’s fiction.

V., Terrorism, and the Subversion of Categorical Thinking

As discussed above, in Against the Day the presentation of a highly

entropic reality is linked to the manifestations of an almost purely
destructive energy manifested in the form of light, such as the one
displayed in the Tunguska Event or in the imminent outbreak of
World War I that hovers in the narrative for many pages. However,
the theme of destructive energy in Against the Day also reflects our
present condition in the author’s persistent presentation of terrorism
and its sociopolitical implications, a theme Pynchon links to his
metaphorical use of light as a trope that may bring about the reader’s
illumination. For its implications, I will start this part of the paper by
addressing first the writer’s game with the symbolic letter V as a
necessary step before the discussion of terrorism in the novel.
This time the main representation of the insistent letter refers to the
owners’ side of the class struggle, and specifically to the most
powerful tycoon in the book: Scarsdale Vibe. Although he also has a
double in Foley, the person who will eventually kill him, with his sons
Vibe also functions as the opposing double of Webb Traverse and his
own sons from the other side of the political spectrum. However, also
responding to Pynchon’s erosion of categorical frontiers, the Vibes
and the Traverses represent two political factions whose moral limits
336 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

are not clear-cut. They will fight in a social war manifested in the
overt use of terror, a war that, as “we of the futurity” know, will not
lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat, at least in the United States,
but to the rule of the ones who in the novel are frequently referred to
as the “Plutocrats.” Such a term also stresses the use of another well-
known strategy in Pynchon’s previous fiction: the game of
“meaningful” names. This time, the word helps Pynchon to further his
ironic critique on categorical thinking and to stress the pervasive
importance of light and energy in his fiction. Plutocrat comes from
Pluto, the ruler of the underworld in Roman mythology but also the
god of wealth in Greek mythology. In the Christian tradition, Pluto as
ruler of the underworld was replaced by Satan, a devil of many names,
including among them Lucifer, literarily the carrier of Light.
However, we should not forget that Satan was known as Lucifer when
he was still an angel in heaven, before his fall. The Chums of Chance
also engage in an interesting terminological conversation about the
name that again brings echoes from Henry Adams’s symbolic
understanding of spiritual energy as well as from Pynchon’s earlier
fiction. Lindsay recalls Christ’s vision in Luke’s gospel “of Satan
falling like lightning from heaven. ‘Complicated further by the ancient
astronomers’ use of the name Lucifer for Venus when she appears as
the morning star—’” (AtD 1033). That is to say, the text progresses
from plutocratic riches to the trope of light as Lucifer, and from the
latter to Henry Adams’s primordial illustration of spiritual energy as
Venus.
Energy manifests itself in unnerving ways in Against the Day. As
shown so far in this paper, in Pynchon’s literary universe Einstein’s
concept of energy fluctuates, perspectives and interpretations
multiply, and human values are continuously exposed to different
contexts and even to the author’s linguistic games. When dealing with
terrorism in Against the Day, as an initial hypothesis we might start
considering that it is a force that increases the entropic level in any
human system, that is to say, its tendency towards destruction and
stillness. Even so, the issue also has to be tackled from the symbolic
angles provided by the text’s central motif of light, its metaphorical
power of reflection and reverberation for the reader, and from the
present American posttraumatic condition.
There are no direct references to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in this
U.S. novel published in 2006 despite the fact that one of its main
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 337

concerns is precisely the impact of terrorism on American soil.

Literarily, readers remain in darkness regarding Pynchon’s direct
opinions about the attacks of 9/11, but nevertheless their implicit
reverberation should be obvious to them. Pynchon cunningly links the
absence of any clear reference to 9/11 to his manipulative game on the
reader’s conventional expectations for one-sided interpretations of
life. His overwhelming use in Against the Day of the trespassing, anti-
categorical strategies I have commented on so far is already a warning
against any traditional good-or-evil interpretations of his text, but also
against critics who want to see the figure of the writer as completely
adhering to the cause of political anarchism he presents in the novel.
To understand Against the Day in such either/or terms would be naïve
because in the novel political options are also continuously exposed to
the Pynchonian transgression of one-sided interpretations, whether
they concern a benevolent understanding of international anarchism or
evoke President Bush’s clear-cut presentation of the War on Terror.
Playing with the idea that the kings of industry are servants of
absolute wickedness, Pynchon tries to trap his readers in a traditional
moral dichotomy—as he already did in V. playing with Stencil and
Profane—by drawing the portrait of one of the most devilish
characters that he has ever created, Vibe, and opposing him to the
Traverses. The V-representation par excellence of the dangerous
human manipulation of energy in the text, Vibe’s evil nature reaches
its climactic point at his address to “Las Animas-Huerfano Delegation
of the Industrial Defence Alliance (L.A.H.D.I.D.A.)”—“mostly U.S.
white folks, pretty well-off in a flash sort of way” (AtD 1000). The
episode also represents Foley’s moment of (modernist) revelation,
which will take him to kill the despicable tycoon. Vibe’s speech,
concerning his abuse of the workers but extensive to his manipulation
of the middle classes, is totally obnoxious and reflects again a
Pynchonian conspiratorial interpretation of our own contemporary life
centered on modern slavery and realty speculation. Vibe this time
openly qualifies as one of the mysterious They that in Pynchon’s
previous fiction seem to control the whole planet:

“So of course 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
338 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood,
become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take
what we can while we may. Look at them—they carry the mark of their
absurd fate in plain sight. […] We will buy it all up,” making the expected
arm gesture, “all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the
Anarchists skulked, where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of
Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-
proofed, ready to build on. 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, industrial, 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.” (AtD 1000-01)

In the light of such speech, it seems clear that within Pynchon’s

literary universe of energy the letter V in Vibe represents the new
increasing power of capitalism in the United States at the turn of the
twentieth century. As described by some historians, the period also
meant the “personification” of American corporations, which were
granted important legal rights as if they were actual persons.
Meanwhile, workers were considered to be no better than machine
parts ready to be used and discarded according to the life span of their
profitability (Clymer 22-25, 178-83), as Vibe’s words clearly indicate.
In other words, V. responds again to the Pynchonian emphasis on the
animate/inanimate binary that was already a reiterative motif in his
first novel, but now it is also a trap to lure readers into a more
unnerving moral dichotomy referred to the very definition of
terrorism.
Together with the tycoon’s overtly obnoxious behavior and
ideology, we should not forget that a substantial part of the narrative is
presented from the Traverse brothers’ perspective, giving readers an
indication that, if they are the protagonists and main focalizers, likely
it means that they are also the good characters in the story. In fact,
their main aim is to fight against Vibe and the plutocratic class he
represents. Certainly, the Traverses behave in more honorable terms
than their enemies do and even share some of the qualities typically
attributed to traditional heroes: they are brave, frequently generous,
and (sometimes) honest. Together with the genre conventions that
define the Traverses—the righteous lone cowboy, the spy fighting for
democracy, the modernist quester—passages such as Vibe’s speech
initially support the ideological dichotomy of a story divided into
good and bad characters.
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 339

However, after many pages of events that tell of the workers’

suffering and even assassination at the hands of corporate power, an
unnerving question may reverberate from the reader’s present tense:
Does terrorism offer an ethical way to fight for the defense of human
rights? So far, such questions seems to have been avoided by many
reviewers of Against the Day despite the fact that terrorism in this
novel plays a more explicit and important role than it ever has in
Pynchon’s fiction. Certainly, episodes like Vibe’s speech may also
imply that one of the political issues at stake in the book is to question
who is the real terrorist, whether the marginalized anarchist or the
immoral, conspiratorial plutocrat. In addition, historians have raised
serious doubts about the authorship of actual notorious terrorist
attacks, including the first well-known American case, the never-
resolved bombing at the Chicago Haymarket in 1886, which took
place only a few years before the date that marks the beginning of
Pynchon’s novel in Chicago.12 The issue is no small matter because it
raises ethical implications enhanced by Pynchon’s metaphorical use of
light aiming at the present reader’s reflection or illumination on
aspects of our present situation. When Al-Qaida terrorists attacked the
United States of America on September 11, 2001, they claimed to be
doing so as part of their international fight against the American
oppression of the dispossessed. In other words, the terrorists
considered the United States to be their particular Scarsdale Vibe or
“Plutocrat.” On the other hand, to understand that Against the Day is a
book that simply sympathizes with terrorists in their fight to bring
about an anarchist republic in the United States is to miss not only the
representation of terrorism as an abrupt entropic phenomenon that
produces disorder and chaos; such interpretation also forgets the many
times in which the novel questions ideological dichotomies and
categorical representations of reality, as some final examples about
the Traverses’ moral stance will elucidate.
As considered in Vibe’s speech to L.A.H.D.I.D.A., Against the
Day also returns to the old Pynchonian motif of the binary
conspiracy/counter-conspiracy. The plutocrats’ conspiracy against the
American workers to control their labor force at the turn of the
twentieth century had a historical response in a number of anarchist
bombs that sent an apparently clear message to the owners: give us
our rights or we will bomb your property and kill you. However,
following Pynchon’s favorite metaphor in The Crying of Lot 49—
340 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

entropy in the flow of information (McConnell 159-97)—it can be

argued that such a clear political message also went through a
historical process of informational “noise”: terror was followed by
counter-terror. Corporations not only sent the police forces or the
militia against the strikers as best suited them but they also paid for
the commission of actual terrorist acts that were then blamed on the
workers (see Clymer 33-68). In the novel, Webb Traverse—allegedly
a famous anarchist bomber—also has another terrorist double in the
figure of a gas bomber in London who dresses in white and appears to
be on the plutocrats’ payroll (AtD 240). The gas bomber’s perverse
actions do not seem to be different, though, from those carried out by
Webb Traverse himself. In their terrorist undertakings both men have
to rely on the component of invisibility (so frequently associated by
Pynchon with evil conspiracies) to perform their acts of destruction
and murder. Webb’s image, then, does not correspond to what one
might expect from the conventional hero in a Western or from the
common assumption—at both the turn of the twentieth century and
now—that terrorists are always foreigners.
The erosion of ethical limits concerning the use of violence
continues in the actions of Webb’s three sons and in their transgressed
generic roles. Frank, a true believer in freedom and also a
conventional Western gunman ready to avenge his father’s death (AtD
381), decides to go down to Mexico to support the rebels who fight
against their government. Once at the service of the rebels, he puts his
remarkable ability to handle explosives to use. He is ready to
intervene in a foreign country and demonstrate the superiority of his
weaponry: reverberations from recent American military interventions
abroad as part of President Bush’s War on Terror campaign might
seem inescapable. In one of the battles fought against the federal
troops, Frank decides to drive a train charged with dynamite against
the enemy. Soon before impact, he experiences a trance that merges
his attraction for the destructive power he is handling with the mystic,
religious, and post-Newtonian notions that Pynchon has been mixing
all along the novel:

Was this the path [the Indian shaman] El Espinero had had in mind, this
specific half mile of track, where suddenly the day had become
extradimensional, the country shifted, was no longer the desert abstraction of
a map but was speed, air rushing, the smell of smoke and steam, time whose
substance grew more condensed as each tick came faster and faster, all
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 341

perfectly inseparable from Frank’s certainty that jumping or not jumping was
no longer the point, he belonged to what was happening […]. (AtD 985, my
emphasis)

From an intertextual perspective, Frank’s trance could be defined as

the parody of a modernist epiphany. However, filtered by the
Pynchonian game of metaphorical reflection, the results of his deed
are presented by the narrator in terms that also seem to evoke some
witnessing reports of the 9/11 tragedy:

The explosion was terrific, shrapnel and parts of men and animals flew
everywhere, superheated steam blasting through a million irregular flueways
among the moving fragments, a huge ragged hemisphere of gray dust, gone
pink with blood, rose and spread, and survivors staggered around in it blinded
and coughing miserably. (AtD 985)

Does Frank feel better after a revelation of such bloody

consequences? As for his older brother Reef, also a mine engineer, in
his journey across the Balkans—which obviously also reverberates
with the present political situation there—he engages in the activity of
collecting as many new automatic guns as he can. Together with his
little daughter, he still loves the sound of a good explosion by the end
of the narrative (AtD 981). Reef is still very fond of weapons and
dynamite even though coincidentally he has physically suffered the
effects of a terrorist attack precisely in the middle of a conversation
with his friend Flaco about the ethics of anarchist bombing (AtD 850-
54). Only seconds before the explosion, Reef questioned the morality
of indiscriminate bombing: “‘One thing to try and keep to an
honorable deal with your dead,’ it seemed to Reef, ‘another to just go
spreading death any way you can […]’” (AtD 850). Significantly, later
his political friend Ewball also revises the ethics of violent anarchism
(AtD 922). Moreover, along the path of sex, fighting, and gambling
that takes them from Venice and the Balkans to several European
casinos—in a parody of the modernist hero quest—Reef, Yashmeen,
and their daughter eventually find a little non-violent anarchist retreat
in the Pyrenees. There, their friend Ratty offers a very credible
interpretation of the effects that the First World War would have in
ending international anarchism: its violence will be eradicated by a
much bigger one (AtD 938). Within the violent atmosphere of the
protagonists’ different quests, Kit, the youngest of the Traverse
brothers, somehow confirms Ratty’s apocalyptic prediction by
342 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

following a more complex ethical path that takes him from his early
commitment to Vibe’s plans to his later agreement to participate in the
tycoon’s assassination. Despite the early pacifist views that kept him
away from anarchist terrorism, the time he serves with Vibe and his
own experiences as a parodic modernist quester eventually lead him to
take a job with the Italian Air Force to improve their airplanes. As a
pilot, he will also go gun-crazy like his brothers and fly as many
combat missions as he can, jeopardizing his wife’s love by doing so
(AtD 1068-74).
Thus, by the end of the novel the entropic attraction to war and
terror has totally engulfed all the male members in the Traverse
family. Webb, Reef, and Frank Traverse had always believed in the
efficiency of dynamite to solve their problems but Kit—short for
Christopher, “the one who carries Christ within”—also becomes
finally subdued by the entropic forces of martial violence. Even
Reef’s son Jesse—the would-be Traverse patriarch in Vineland—is
already an expert gunman when still a boy (AtD 1008). How can
contemporary readers consider the Traverses to be the goodies in the
story unless they are again trapped in a traditional and categorical
understanding of life that sees violence as the only valid answer to
violence? In this sense, I can only conclude that what also seems new
in Against the Day as opposed to Pynchon’s earlier perspective in V. is
that now he is ready to challenge some of the one-sided assumptions
in which his first novel itself was still trapped. More specifically, he
has revised the assumption that people can still be divided in distinct
terms of “good” or “bad” and be ruled by old conventional ways to
understand life. For young people in the 1960s it was love against
war. Despite their anti-categorical family name, the Traverses can be
always on the move or “bouncing,” but they are not ethically equal
either to Stencil or to Profane. The protagonists in V. never wanted to
use explicit violence on anybody even if each of them responded to
life in apparently very different terms. In their persistent violent
reaction to life, the Traverses are anchored in the pioneering and
jingoist American past: they prefer war to love. But the problem is
that, following Pynchon’s astute game with light, the Traverses
qualify as the realistic reflection of our own violent present and its
reevaluation of old pioneering and imperialistic myths. The hopes of
the 1960s for a better, more peaceful future have regrettably failed.
For Thomas Pynchon in 2006, V. also stands for Violence.
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 343

Within the parodied modernist character and the transgressing

genre background of Against the Day, terrorism sends messages that
are necessarily mediated by entropic noise. There is no final exclusive
meaning to understand such messages; sometimes it is not even
possible to understand who sends the message or for what purpose. By
contrast, in real life the one-sided interpretations of the violent
messages of terror and the apparently well-known identity of their
senders are issues on which many political decisions depend,
decisions that affect the welfare of whole nations. Let us imagine that
there was a conspiracy behind the 9/11 attacks orchestrated by the
CIA or by any other government agency for obscure aims related to
financial and political interests. If the American people had
understood the terror message like that, would the President have been
allowed to take measures to restrict legal rights? Could he have
involved the country and its allies in two wars while proclaiming the
War on Terror in such clear-cut terms as he did? Along the pages of
his encyclopedic literary construction, Pynchon again plays the role of
the anti-categorical experimental writer: he mixes time and space,
merges literary genres, devalues conventions, and warns his readers
against easy one-sided interpretations of life that may bring forth only
more wars and destruction.
In the last metaphorical manifestation of energy in the book, the
reader is called back to the realm of fantasy literature, with the Chums
of Chance happily married, surrounded by their children, and giving
shelter to a number of animals in their aerial ship, turned now into a
new Noah’s Ark. There are implications that they might be already in
our present time, like their biblical predecessor ready to escape from
the possible disaster that may soon befall the people down below.
Finally, the narrator leaves them in a stage that may allow the Chums
to “fly toward grace” (AtD 1085). Like them, Pynchon’s readers can
choose simply to look down at the story from our encompassing
perspective as inane witnesses and “see the light, perhaps see the
dancing” (AtD 1083). However, we might as well grasp one among
the many disturbing and reverberating messages of Against the Day
and consider that if all the heroes left at the turn of the 21st century
show the same ethical concerns as the Traverses do, our violent flight
“towards grace” is almost granted.

Francisco Collado-Rodríguez, University of Zaragoza

344 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

Notes
1
The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the
Spanish Ministry of Education and the European Commission/FEDER (Research
project HUM2007-61035/FILO).
2
See, for instance, Tanner, Hide, Conte, and Schroeder.
3
In Part V of his Categories, Aristotle stresses that “while remaining numerically one
and the same,” substance is the only principle “capable of admitting contrary
qualities.” Things other than substance, then, do not possess this mark, which leads
the philosopher to proclaim: “one and the same color cannot be white and black. Nor
can the same one action be good and bad: this law holds good with everything that is
not substance” (The Basic Works 13). For a more detailed analysis of the role of
contemporary science in questioning the validity of categorical thinking, see Nadeau.
For a study of Pynchon’s rejection of Aristotle’s Law in his earlier fiction, see
Collado-Rodríguez, “Trespassing Limits.”
4
This formula, incidentally, also backs up Henry Adams’s understanding of force or
energy as the main key in the formation of historical processes. See especially
chapters XXV, XXXIII, and XXXIV of his Education.
5
“Since mass and energy are, according to the theory of relativity, essentially the
same concepts, we may say that all elementary particles consist of energy” (Werner
Heisenberg, quoted in Nadeau 18).
6
The theories of Max Born and Werner Heisenberg led to the latter’s famous
Indeterminacy or Uncertainty Principle (1927), which “states that pairs of quantities
(e.g. the position and momentum of a particle) are incompatible, and cannot have
precise values simultaneously. The physicist can choose to measure either quantity,
and obtain a result to any desired degree of precision, but the more precisely one
quantity is measured, the less precise the other quantity becomes” (Davies 166).
7
The Principle of Complementarity states that both wave and particle should be held
in the scientist’s mind as complementary views of one and the same reality. Bohr’s
principle was an invitation to the scientific world to reject traditional either-or
dichotomies.
8
I must stress here that there are influential scientists who also defend a position
similar to that of some modernist and poststructuralist critics—from Jung to
Derrida—concerning human cognitive capacities. As Prigogine and Stengers put it:
“We have emphasized the importance of operators because they demonstrate that the
reality studied by physics is also a mental construct; it is not merely given [...]. One of
the reasons for the opposition between the ‘two cultures’ may have been the belief
that literature corresponds to a conceptualization of reality, to ‘fiction,’ while science
seems to express objective ‘reality.’ Quantum mechanics teaches us that the situation
is not so simple. On all levels reality implies an essential element of
conceptualization” (225-26). Compare Solomon’s contrasting opinion (75).
9
For a definition of the steampunk genre, see Girardot and Méreste.
10
The novel’s reiterative notion of bilocation, which affects both scientific and
religious beliefs, takes us back to Pynchon’s well-trodden territory of Christian
symbolism while also stressing his anti-categorical stance: “The question whether the
same finite being (especially a body) can be at once in two (bilocation) or more
The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day 345

(replication, multilocation) totally different places grew out of the Catholic doctrine
on the Eucharist. According to this Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in
every consecrated Host wheresoever located.” See the complete definition of
“Bilocation” provided by Francis Siegfried in The Catholic Encyclopedia.
11
That might be also interpreted as an ironic game on the cultural relevance that
chance had for non-scientific believers in chaos theory, especially in the 1980s and
1990s (see Hayles).
12
Not surprisingly, anarchism and the Chicago Fair are also dealt with by Henry
Adams in Chapter XXII of his Education, where he reports on his own visit to the
1893 Chicago Exposition: “The instability was greater than he calculated; the speed of
acceleration passed bounds. Among other general rules [his brother Brooks] laid
down the paradox that, in the social disequilibrium between capital and labor, the
logical outcome was not collectivism, but anarchism; and Henry made note of it for
study” (340, my emphasis).

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 “Vectors and [Eigen]Values”:
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day

Hanjo Berressem

Abstract: The essay traces one of Pynchon’s many mathematical references in Against
the Day. The mathematical contexts are linear algebra and vector geometry, the
specific reference is the term eigenvalue, an alloy of the German ‘eigen’ and the
English ‘value.’ Pynchon uses it in V. in reference to ‘psychodontist’ Dudley
Eigenvalue and his feeling of the loss of the continuity of history. In Against the Day,
the reference is much more extended. In fact, it incorporates a fictional conversation
about eigenvalues between Yashmeen Harcourt and David Hilbert, the German
mathematician who originally coined the term in 1904. In that conversation,
eigenvalues are said to function as the “spine of reality.” Along the term eigenvalue,
as well as a number of other ‘eigen’concepts, such as eigenvector, eigenfrequency and
eigenorganization, the essay delineates Pynchon’s notion of a subject that is defined
as a bundle of habits and frequencies—or, in Pynchon’s terms, of ‘vibes’—that moves
in a world defined as an infinitely complex and dynamic vector-space.

The century’s been pointing guns at anything that moves

(Conor Oberst, Don’t You Weep)

The self does not undergo modifications, it is itself a modification.

(Gilles Deleuze)

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.

(Wernher von Braun)

Introduction: Dudley

This essay is about a ‘vectorial subjectivity’ and a ‘vectorial poetics,’

two concepts that are operative throughout Thomas Pynchon’s work
but that become especially visible in Against the Day, which
thematizes, directly and in detail, the mathematical reference from
which both of them are developed. The mathematical reference is
350 Hanjo Berressem

‘eigenvalue,’ a curious alloy of the German ‘eigen,’ (which translates

into English as ‘proper,’ ‘inherent,’ ‘intrinsic,’ ‘own,’ ‘characteristic’
or ‘self’) and the English ‘value.’ Before it became a leitmotif in
Against the Day Pynchon had used the term in V., in which
“psychodontist” Dudley Eigenvalue ponders the loss of Stencil’s
generation’s sense of historical “continuity” (V. 155, my emphasis),
which is caused by the fact that on the crumpled surface of history,
Stencil’s generation is caught in the “bottom of a fold” (V. 155). From
this epistemological isolation, other historical moments are
experienced as “compartmented off into sinuous cycles” (V. 155, my
emphasis) and thus as radically separated from the present. As they
cannot be integrated into a meaningful sequence, historical details
such as “funny looking automobiles of the ‘30’s, the curious fashions
of the ‘20’s, [or] the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents” (V.
155-56, my emphasis) remain, at best, strangely charming. In the
following, I will comment on Pynchon’s alignment of ‘eigenvalues,’
‘sinuous cycles’ and ‘habits.’

Eigenvalues

The term ‘eigenvalue’ was coined, together with that of

‘eigenfunction,’ by the German mathematician David Hilbert, in 1904.
The source is Hilbert’s article “Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Theorie
der linearen Integralgleichungen.” [One can easily imagine the young
Pynchon being intrigued when he learned about ‘eigenvalues’: for an
American engineering student with a strong interest in language, the
term must have sounded more than a bit surreal.] The field into which
the term was introduced was linear algebra, and the context was the
modeling of mathematical transformations by way of the
identification of those vectors within the transformation that remain
invariant and the measurement of the scalar changes of these vectors,
such as those brought about by operations of stretching or
compression. In such transformations, Hilbert called a preserved
direction an ‘eigenvector.’ In short, the notion of eigenvalues concerns
the orientation and the scale of vectors within a mathematical
transformation. The eigenvectors of a linear operator are non-zero
vectors which, when operated on, result in a scalar multiple of
themselves, and the associated amount by which it has been scaled is
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day 351

its eigenvalue (if there is a vector [object x] that has been preserved by
H apart from submitting it to a scalar multiplier k, x is called an
eigenvector of H with the eigenvalue k). Hilbert called a
transformation that does not affect the direction of a vector an
eigenvalue equation [Eigenwertgleichung].
The term could become more than a throwaway reference for
Pynchon because it is possible to generalize from vectorial
transformation|change to systemic transformation|change. As
eigenvalues and eigenvectors can define invariants not only within
mathematical, but also within physical and biological systems while
these undergo changes, they can be used to model these systems in
relation to the changes they undergo. Or, to stress the processual
rather than the systemic side, as eigenvalues|eigenvectors define
invariants within transformations, they can be used to isolate systems
within larger sets of continuous transformation|metamorphosis. If
eigenvectors define a system x, such as a plant, a river or a character
in a novel by Thomas Pynchon, as ‘the invariance x within the
transformational process y,’ a system is nothing but ‘the cluster of
invariant characteristics within a process of continuous
change|modulation’ and as such a modification; what Gregory
Bateson calls a “pattern through time” (Mind and Nature 14).
‘Eigenfaces,’ as instances of ‘eigenimages,’ for example, are sets of
facial eigenvectors. They are used, especially after 9/11, for
computerized face recognition. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon relates
such eigenfaciality to genetic invariants that can be traced across long
temporal intervals within evolution’s overall drift: Because of “[t]he
high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, […] living genetic
chains prove […] labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face
down ten or twenty generations” (GR 10, my emphasis). I will return
to the ‘molecular’ at a later point.

Sinuous Cycles

The shift from eigenvalues to sinuous cycles concerns the fact that in
physics, eigenvalues are used to model systems in terms of wave
functions, resonances, and their invariant ‘eigenfrequencies,’ which
were important fields of research for an important real-life character
in Against the Day, Nicola Tesla, who used them especially, it seems,
352 Hanjo Berressem

in the context of bringing about ‘resonance catastrophes,’ which

happen when “Schwingungen innerhalb eines Systems sich so sehr
synchronisieren […] daß ihre Amplitueden sich gegenseitig
hochschaukeln und so stark werden, daß sie das ganze System zum
Zerplatzen bringen” [“vibrations in a system synchronize to such an
extent that their amplitudes intensify themselves and grow so strong
that they bring the whole system down”] (Cramer 80). Invariably,
such resonance catastrophes happen, as with the infamous example of
the Tacoma Bridge, “unerwartet, ploetzlich, unvorhersagbar”
[“unexpectedly, suddenly, unpredictably”] (Cramer 84).
Symptomatically, Hilbert might have taken his inspiration for the
term eigenvalue from Hermann von Helmholtz, who, in 1863 coined
the word “eigentones” [Eigentöne] (75) to designate “tones of highest
resonance” [Töne stärkster Resonanz] (150). Early on, Pynchon had
aligned his interest in the differentiation between the continuous and
the discrete with a theory of musical resonances and ‘vibes’ in his
numerous musical references, as when he, in Vineland, advocates a
‘premodal’—analog rather than digital—poetics of the fretless bass;
or when, in The Crying of Lot 49, Mucho Maas not only performs
Fourier analyses, but actually breaks up complex resonance
architectures into their component eigenfrequencies, aligning all of the
single iterations of a string of words—considered as assemblages of
frequencies—across time to create perfect synchronicity.

“Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the
same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary.
You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each
person’s time line sideways till they all coincide. Then you’d have this big,
God, maybe a couple of hundred million chorus […] and it would all be the
same voice.” (CoL 142)

If Mucho’s psychedelic experiments about a planetary “vision of

consensus” (CoL 106) concern the eigenfrequencies of sound waves,
Mondaugen’s electro-mysticism in Gravity’s Rainbow extends the
notion of eigenfrequencies to human lives in general. “We live lives
that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now
negative” (GR 404), he notes.
I would maintain that the frequency with which Pynchon
thematizes resonance phenomena in Against the Day, which is full of
“[w]ave-modulation[s]” (AtD 453), “wave interference[s]” (AtD 500)
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day 353

and “frequency-shifting device[s]” (AtD 444), has to do with his

developing the motif of musical vibes into an overall theory of
vibes—in a folding of the countercultural onto the scientific—in
which individual vibes, for instance, can be related directly to specific
sociocultural sites, such as ‘the Wilshire Vibe,’ the ‘Fleetwood Vibe’
or ‘the Scarsdale Vibe;’ the former an affluent part of Los Angeles,
the latter two affluent suburbs of New York. [‘Vibe’ must be counted
as maybe the worst, but also maybe the best, low puns, up there with
‘Weed Atman’].
Another important topic not only in Against the Day that has to do
with this setting up of a theory of vibes is ‘media,’ because every
theory of vibes rests on material|natural media that function as the
carriers of vibratory and resonant processes. Importantly, these media
do not concern technological media such as the TV, the movies, or the
computer, which were central in Vineland, but media in the sense of
material carriers of forms; media that Niklas Luhmann defines
structurally as any set of “loosely coupled elements […] susceptible to
form” (31). In Pynchon, the most important of these media are: sand,
water, air|aether|fog, electricity, and light. Although all of these media
differ in their ratio of density, or, as Pynchon says, their “graininess”
(AtD 440), they are all defined, in terms of this mediality, by a
form|medium refraction that might be read, in the overall context of
Against the Day, as a variation of the logic that underlies the
particle|wave refraction that forms one of the structural spines of the
novel.
In a conversation between Roswell Bounce, the inventor of the
“Hypopsammotic Survival Apparatus” (AtD 426), and Professor
Vanderjuice, these material media are directly related to shifts in
frequency. As Bounce explains to the Chums of Chance shortly before
they journey subsand: in order to “‘submerge oneself […] and still be
able to breathe, walk around, so forth’” what one needs to do is to
“‘control your molecular resonance frequencies, ‘s basically all it is’”
(AtD 426, my emphasis), to which Professor Vanderjuice adds: “‘If
we may move about these days beneath the sea wheresoever we will
[…] the next obvious step is to proceed to that medium which is
wavelike as the sea, yet also particulate.’ ‘He means sand […] but it
almost sounds like light, don’t it’” (AtD 426, my emphasis), Roswell
explains.
354 Hanjo Berressem

The conversation illustrates the common characteristic of all of

these media: 1) They are made up of loosely coupled elements that
can be formed and that have an arbitrary relationship to these forms;
2) These forms can, in turn, become the loosely coupled elements for
other form[ation]s. As the painter Tancredi in Against the Day notes
about divisionismo, a term through which the notion of
‘differentiation’ reverberates, and in which images are constructed
from ‘loosely coupled,’ differentiated dots—or ‘atoms|molecules’—of
color, “‘[t]he energies of motion, the grammatical tyrannies of
becoming, in divisionismo we discover how to break them apart into
their component frequencies…we define a smallest picture element, a
dot of color which becomes the basic unity of reality…’” (AtD 587).
In this form of painting, which might be described as an accelerated
pointillism or a visual atomism, as Hunter comments, “‘somehow
you’ve got these dots behaving dynamically, violent ensembles of
energy-states, Brownian movement’” (AtD 587); and, indeed, Dally
sees a “contra-Venezia” in the painting’s “glowing field of particles”
(AtD 587). As every medium both looks and feels continuous from the
level on which it is formed—in the sense that despite the “graininess
of the medium” (AtD 440), sand is to all intents and purposes
‘continuous’ from the level on which it is formed into a sand-castle—
while every form is a discrete unit (remember, however, that it can
become itself a ‘continuous’ medium for an even higher assembly!),
the medium|form alignment invariably oscillates between the
analog|continuous and the digital|discrete.
The medium|form organization, then, recapitulates both the radical
oscillation between wave|particle as well as that between the
analog|continuous and the digital|discrete. Although Pynchon treats
the two spaces as radically complementary in terms of logic, his prose
is defined by a tendency|inclination towards analog “intensity” (CoL
10) and “energies” (CoL 77), such as the “Tellurick Energies” (MD
218) in Mason & Dixon, or the realm of the “predigital” in Vineland
(VL 38); what he calls, in a critique of the digitalization of especially
popular music, “the highest state of the analog arts all too soon
eclipsed by digital technology” (VL 308).
With the aetherists, in fact, Pynchon shares “a propensity of
character toward the continuous as against the discrete” (AtD 58),
despite the fact that Christiaan Huygens’s theory of the Luminiferous
Aether was, as he recounts in Against the Day, cast into strong doubt
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day 355

in the late nineteenth century by the Michelson-Morley experiment. In

Against the Day, the point-at-infinity of this propensity is the vision of
the earth as one giant, free-floating “resonant circuit” (AtD 33), as in
Tesla’s vision of global, free energy, which is what makes Kit
Traverse understand “for a moment that forms of life were a
connected set” (AtD 782). In Gravity’s Rainbow, Kurt Mondaugen
had similarly discovered “that everything is connected, everything in
the Creation […]—not yet blindingly One, but at least connected”
(GR 703). To define this complicated state, Pynchon uses such terms
as “Complexity” (MD 252), “Perplexity” (MD 433), or “Multiplexity”
(MD 523).
In such a planetary circuit, every instant is made up of an infinity
of both perceptible and imperceptible|subtle resonances. Material
reservoirs of such resonances are not only living beings, but also
inanimate objects, such as mattresses in The Crying of Lot 49, which
“keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing
bladder, vicious, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory
bank to a computer of the lost” (CoL 126), or “[t]ransient beds” in
Against the Day, which “for some reason are able to catch and hold
these subtle vibrational impulses of the soul” (AtD 578). The
ghostlike, subtle presence of these souls and their residual resonances
cause pockets of ‘turbulence,’ which is why “in hotels […] your
dreams are often, alarmingly, not your own” (AtD 578). In his
‘spectral poetics’—ghosts have become increasingly important in
Pynchon’s work—Pynchon tends to define the physical|psychic
refraction by a ratio of density and subtlety. In The Crying of Lot 49,
Oedipa Maas cannot communicate with the ghost of Maxwell
because, not being a “sensitive” (CoL 106) she cannot find the same
‘bandwidth,’ and in Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop begins not only to
“scatter,” also his “bandwidth” begins to “thin” (GR 509).
While ghostlike presences are by definition extremely tenuous and
fine—which is why ghosts can walk through walls, somewhat like
sound waves can—the ‘state of subjectivity’ is defined by a high
value|ratio of “[p]ersonal density” (GR 509). [It might be interesting
that Francisco Varela, who developed, together with Humberto
Maturana, the theory of autopoiesis, has discussed, in Gentle Bridges:
Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind, the
notion of a ‘subtle consciousness;’ an anonymous, material
consciousness that is involved in the process of reincarnation.] The
356 Hanjo Berressem

poetological propensity for thinning and scattering figures the desire

to escape the specific modulations that make up the subject and to
reach a subjectless ‘state of singularity.’ This loss of ‘eigenheit’
entails escaping the ‘density of the self’ in a ‘becoming anonymous’
and ‘becoming medium|imperceptible.’ This is why Mondaugen notes
that “[o]nly at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure,
the informationless state of signal zero” (GR 404). Similarly, if in
Gravity’s Rainbow “[p]ersonal density” was, as I noted above, defined
as being “directly proportional to temporal bandwidth,” which is “the
width of your present, your now. […] The more you dwell in the past
and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your
persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you
are” (GR 509), Pynchon’s work is constantly punctured by the desire
for and moments of zero frequency; of “the informationless state of
signal zero” (GR 404) or the “entire loss of Self, union with All” (MD
10): whether it is Slothrop “just feeling natural” (GR 626), Pirate
Prentice “without a thought in his head” (GR 6), Takeshi looking for a
state of “literally mindless joy” (VL 180), or Prairie lying on the glass
of the pinball machine (VL 314). Ultimately, one of the most
important ‘German’ contexts in Pynchon is that the German Zone in
Gravity’s Rainbow functions in its entirety as the figure of a
“vectorless” (AtD 473), ‘signal zero’ geography, a desire to become
pure process.

Habits

In the overall project of this essay—the alignment of ‘eigenvalues,’

‘sinuous cycles’ and ‘habits’—the shift from sinuous cycles and the
related field of frequencies to habits concerns the fact that although all
material systems have eigenfrequencies, only living, animated systems
are what cybernetics and systems theory call eigenorganizations,
which are cybernetically defined as ‘strange attractors,’ and
biologically as ‘self-organizing’ or ‘autopoietic’ systems. Such
eigenorganizations, which show both physical ‘eigencharacteristics’
[Eigenschaften] and psychic ‘eigenbehaviors’ [Eigenverhalten] within
their specific ‘eigenspaces’ [Eigenräume], are the result of
computational habits; recursive functional (both in the operational and
the mathematical sense) operations that reproduce the same value
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day 357

upon every re-entry into the system’s underlying formalism(s);

functional iterations. In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon narrates the genesis
of such ‘eigenpoietic’ systems, which are informationally|
operationally closed off from the world, but, simultaneously,
energetically open to that world, in the tale of Vaucanson’s Duck, in
whose genesis, it was Vaucanson’s “Attention to Detail, whose
Fineness, passing some Critickal Value, enabl’d in the Duck that
strange Metamorphosis” and sent it “out the Gates of the Inanimate,
and off upon its present Journey into the given World” (MD 372).
I would read the fact that eigenorganizations are
informationally|operationally closed off from the world, but,
simultaneously, energetically open to that world, as the conceptual
bilocation that underlies even the refraction of light in Against the
Day. As every eigenorganization—every ‘living critter’—lives in
these two spaces we call the body and the mind simultaneously, our
existence is by definition ‘Iceland-sparred’ into a matter-of-factual
and a fictional realm, which are radically separated—if only by an
“eye-twitch” (GR 100) or a “dt” (CoL 129)—although they define the
operation of the system to a similar degree. At some point, an
inanimate system becomes a living eigenorganization ‘simply’ by
passing “some Threshold of self-Intricacy, setting off this Explosion
of Change, from Inertia toward Independence, and Power” (MD 373);
hardware and software evolve into ‘wetware.’ The minute it becomes
alive, however, the system falls under the shadow of the Second Law
of Thermodynamics, which is another characteristic that relates
eigenorganizations to Pynchon’s poetics from his story “Entropy”
onwards. Although eigenorganizations are structurally negentropic,
they travel down an entropic slope, an irreversible movement that is
related to the fact that time is a “one-way vector” (AtD 457). Mason &
Dixon variously describes this vector as “identical Seconds, each
proceeding in but one Direction, irreclaimable” (MD 27), “Time
unredeemable” (MD 45) or simply “the cruel flow of Time” (MD
605).
The process of eigenorganization is intimately tied to habits and
habit formation, which is why, as eigenvalues are literally sets of
physical and psychic habits, one can develop from them an overall
theory of habits that comes to supplement the theory of vibes. As
William James—out of whose The Varieties of Religious Experience
Jess quotes Emerson in Vineland (VL 369)—noted, because “the law
358 Hanjo Berressem

of habit […] is a material law” (126), “the philosophy of habit is [...],

in the first instance, a chapter in physics rather than in physiology or
psychology” (105). In fact, even ‘natural laws’ are, as Charles Sanders
Peirce notes, in actual fact nothing but natural habits: “habit is by no
means exclusively a mental fact. Empirically, we find that some plants
take habits. The stream of water that wears a bed for itself is forming a
habit” (“Survey” 342). Pynchon acknowledges these natural habits
when he notes in Against the Day for instance the “scalenohedral habit
[a solid body whose faces are all scaline triangles]” (AtD 391). In fact,
even the propensity of light to show either wave-like or ‘particular’
behavior might be seen as a ‘habitual’ behavior.
When Gilles Deleuze, who is present in Pynchon’s work through
the infamous “Italian Wedding Fake Book, by Deleuze & Guattari”
(VL 97), refers to habit formation as the operation according to which
“the subject is constituted within the given” (Empiricism 104), this
resonates directly with Pynchon’s vectorial poetics:

We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air—not merely prior to the
recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being sensed. Every
organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a
sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations. […] [B]y combining with
the perceptual syntheses built upon them, these organic syntheses are
redeployed in the active syntheses of a psycho-organic memory and
intelligence. (Difference 73)

In fact, if “[i]n essence, habit is contraction” (Deleuze, Difference 73),

every organism may be said to be contracted from specific physical
and biochemical habits, from an ‘intelligent matter’ that is defined by
perceptual and cognitive operations, which is why Deleuze can talk of
‘contemplated and contracted water,’ as when he asks: “What
organism is not made of elements and cases of repetition, of
contemplated and contracted water, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides and
sulphates, thereby intertwining all the habits of which it is
composed?” (Difference 75) While passive, unconscious syntheses
constitute our “habit of living” (Difference 74), even during these
passive processes of contraction, an emergent self feedbacks with
these forces of contraction through subindividual processes of psychic
contemplation which are responsible for the constitution of a ‘passive
self’ that is nothing but the body of resonance of specific habits. It
“contemplates and contracts the individuating factors of such fields
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day 359

[the ‘pre-existing fields of individuation’] and constitutes itself at the

points of resonance of their series” (Difference 276). It is
“simultaneously through contraction that we are habits,” therefore,
and “through contemplation that we contract” (Difference 74). Even
operations that seem to be ‘natural’ are, in actual fact, what Peirce
calls “inattentive habit[s]” (“Survey” 328) that operate on the same
unconscious level as ‘perceptual judgments.’
According to these habitual logics, the psychic realm extends
deeply into subindividual levels and it shades into the unconscious
physical and biochemical contemplations and modifications: “our
thousands of component habits” (Deleuze, Difference 75). “[B]elow
the level of active [conscious] syntheses,“ therefore, lies “the domain
of passive syntheses which constitutes us, the domain of
modifications, tropisms and little peculiarities” (79, my brackets);
“[b]eneath the general operation of laws, […] there always remains
the play of singularities” (Difference 25); and beneath the realm of
psychic reality lies “the lived reality of a sub-representative domain”
(Difference 69). In more general and positive terms, psychic reality
emerges from lived reality. As Stencil senior had noted in V. already,
“[a]ny Situation takes shape from events much lower than the merely
human” (V. 455).
If the subject is, as Deleuze|Guattari note, “a habitus, a habit,
nothing but the habit in a field of immanence, the habit of saying I”
(48), this ultimately implies a view of subjectivity that originates in
the creation of a living system from within a plane of multiplicity that
can be defined, according to the frame of reference, as ‘photonic,’
‘electronic,’ ‘atomic,’ ‘molecular’ or as any other ‘medium.’ In
Deleuzian terms, it can be defined as any other ‘plane of immanence’
to which the system remains immanent and coupled, although its
operation is radically separated from that plane. As Deleuze notes,

[w]e start with atomic parts, but these atomic parts have transitions, passages,
‘tendencies,’ which circulate from one to another. These tendencies give rise
to habits. Isn’t this the answer to the question ‘what are we?’ We are habits,
nothing but habits—the habit of saying ‘I.’ Perhaps there is no more striking
answer to the problem of the Self. (Empiricism x)

Habit formation as the basis of the construction of subjectivity

promises—within a set of systemic constraints, of course—the
possibility of unconditional change; an evolutionary freedom that
360 Hanjo Berressem

allows the system to escape, at every single instant, its current habitual
envelope.
In order to realize this potential, however, the system must operate
at a ‘far-from-equilibrium’ state, which allows it to change from one
habitual attractor to another one. In fact, the less habits have hardened
into strict routines and protocols (a process Deleuze|Guattari call
‘territorialization’), the more plasticity, potential for movement, and
‘speed’ there is in the system (‘deterritorialization’); a plasticity and
speed Pynchon addresses in his introduction to Slow Learner when he
notes that “[w]hat is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the
changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie,
the soul in flux” (SL 23). Unfortunately, however, in the ‘practice of
the subject’ habits tend to harden and decelerate precisely into
routines (these two processes are ‘in actual fact’ identical) according
to processes of a creeping routinization or ‘crystallization’; processes
of the deceleration of ‘becoming’ into ‘being,’ if one considers being
as a becoming that has been decelerated to zero. Although habits form
the genetic ground of systems and are necessary for any systemic
maintenance, habits can become addictive (too much of a habit, that
is) such as, in Against the Day, amongst others, the “Cyclomite habit”
(AtD 184). As Bateson notes,

in the ongoing life of the organism there is a process of sorting, which in some
of its forms is called ‘habit formation.’ In this process, certain items, which
have been learned at ‘soft’ levels, gradually become ‘hard’ […]. The converse
of ‘habit formation’ […] is a form of learning which is always likely to be
difficult and painful and which, when it fails, may be pathogenic. (Sacred
Unity 138)

From the beginning of his work, Pynchon has treated this creeping
routinization of habits as the shift from individual “virtù” (V. 461, AtD
529) to generalized processes of the “rationalization” (GR 81), and as
the bureaucratization of the “terrible disease […] charisma” (GR 81);
a—once more deeply ambiguous—“routinization of charisma” (GR
325) that spans from the Machiavelli and Max Weber references in V.
to what is called, in Gravity’s Rainbow, the “Führer-principle” (GR
81), to Brock Vond in Vineland, and further to Scarsdale Vibe in
Against the Day. Some habits, in fact, such as the habit of
colonization, the habitual desire for fascisms, masochisms, and
oedipalizations in general seem so deeply engrained into the system’s
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day 361

psychic and physical operations that they seem almost impossible to

break: while Vineland’s Frenesi feels “a fatality, a helpless turn
toward images of authority […] as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced
in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into
the dark joys of social control” (VL 83), Lake falls tragically in lust
with her father’s killers in Against the Day.
As human beings are nothing but “walking bundles of habits”
(James 127), a theory of habits is spanned out between the freedom to
move and to accelerate oneself, and the fact that habit is, as James
notes, also “the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious
conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of
ordinance” (121). Even while habits are less strict than immutable
laws, too often subjects cannot ‘kick the habits’ that they in actual fact
consist of: thus, the tragic addiction to (the habit of) selfhood.

To Conclude: The Spine of Reality

Against the Day, which is a novel about the fight between routinized
state operators and anarchists—a fight in which anarchism might, in
fact, be defined as a ‘state without habits’—is an extended meditation
on the nature of wavelike, communal vibes, whether electrical, optical
or historical, and ‘particular’ human beings and their eigenvectorial
movements through the medium we call ‘America.’ At this point, it
echoes Deleuze’s differentiation between physical and psychic
mechanisms; between matters-of-fact and fiction; the first of which
are always communal, while the second are ‘individual.’ In fact,
Deleuze’s description gains an even stronger political resonance in the
light of Pynchon’s prose:

Physical mechanisms are infinitely tiny fluvia that form displacements,

crisscrossings, and accumulations of waves, or ‘conspiracies’ of molecular
movements […]. Physical mechanisms do not work by differentials, which are
always differentials of consciousness, but by communication and propagation
of movement […]. Thus there exists a great difference between an always
extrinsic physical causality […] and an always intrinsic psychic causality.
[…] To these two causalities correspond two calculations […] that, even if
they are inseparable, must be distinguished: one relates to the psycho-
metaphysical mechanism of perception, and the other to the physico-organic
mechanism of excitation or impulsion. And these are like two halves of each
other. […] A quality perceived by consciousness resembles the vibrations
362 Hanjo Berressem

contracted through the organism. Differential mechanisms on the inside of the

monad resemble mechanisms of communication and propagation of extrinsic
movement, although they are not the same and must not be confused. (Fold
97, my emphasis)

In Pynchon’s vectorial poetics, characters are treated as

eigenorganizations, as sets of temporary and local invariants within a
complex field of vectorial transformations and processes. In this field,
their ‘personal lives’ are the systemic histories created by their
eigenvectorial movements. Symptomatically, the narrator can wish for
a group of dancers to find a vector through the troubled times lying
ahead: “[m]ay we imagine for them a vector,” he notes, “passing
through the invisible, the ‘imaginary,’ the ‘unimaginable,’ carrying
them safely […]. A vector through the night into a morning of hosed
pavements, birds heard everywhere but unseen, bakery smells, filtered
green light, a courtyard still in shade…” (AtD 1082-83). Pynchon
would not be Pynchon, however, if he were not also to develop,
simultaneously, darker forms of vectorism, mostly related to rational
vectors that move straight and in right angles and that demarcate what
Deleuze|Guattari call ‘striated space’ (America’s cultural order and
gridding) as opposed to ‘smooth space’ (the landscape of America),
and that cause the overdetermination of the latter by former. Although
in Mason & Dixon there is “A Vector of Desire” (MD 96), the main
vector is the Visto itself, which is, in its straightness, comparable to
the vector created by a bullet. As the narrator notes, “these Lancaster
County Rifles, with their amazing Fidelity, create their own Vistoes of
moving Lead, straight as a Ray of Light for a Mile or more” (MD
613).
While some vectors are straight lines and vistoes of demarcation,
then, there are also lines of flight, as when Fleetwood Vibe tells Kit
that “‘all I’m looking for now is movement, just for its own sake, what
you fellows call the vector, I guess’” (AtD 165). Still others are part of
complex topological|mathematical concettos, like the vector that
involves a rotation through the fourth spatial dimension, like the one
proposed by Dr. V. Ganeshi Rao, who, in fact, proposes to define
humans quite literally as vectors and yoga as a vectorial practice:

“If you were a vector, mademoiselle, you would begin in the ‘real’ world,
change your length, enter an ‘imaginary’ reference system, rotate up to three
different ways, and return to ‘reality’ a new person. Or vector.”
“Fascinating. But…human beings aren’t vectors. Are they?”
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day 363

“Arguably, young lady. As a matter of fact, in India, the Quaternions are

now the basis of a modern school of Yoga […] The ‘Quadrantal Versor
Asana’ […].” (AtD 539)

At one point in Against the Day, Pynchon returns the discussion of

eigenvalues to the moment of their conception. “Might they [the
nontrivial zeroes of the ζ-function] be correlated with eigenvalues of
some Hermitian operator yet to be determined?” (AtD 604),
Yashmeen Halfcourt asks David Hilbert in Göttingen. In the ensuing
conversation, she interrupts a sentence begun by Hilbert, providing a
term that relates mathematical eigenvalues directly both to the
physical invariants that make up ‘processual people’ [people with a
“fluid Identity” (MD 469)] and the psychic invariants that make up
what these people construct as their reality, before Hilbert concludes
the sentence by going back to talking pure mathematics:

“Apart from eigenvalues, by their nature, being zeroes of some equation,” he

prompted gently.
“There is also this…spine of reality.” Afterward she would remember she
actually said “Rückgrat von Wirklichkeit.” “Though the members of a
Hermitian may be complex, the eigenvalues are real. The entries on the main
diagonal are real. The ζ-function zeroes which lie along Real part = 1/2, are
symmetrical about the real axis, and so…” She hesitated. She had seen it, for
the moment, so clearly. (AtD 604)

As the invariant vector that turns a process into a ‘process undergone

by a system x,’ this ‘spine of reality’ is what holds eigenorganizations
together both physically and psychically. As eigenorganizations,
humans have a physical, energetic spine as well as a psychic,
informational|operational, and, in the case of humans, observational
spine [as Kit understands at some point, “this zigzagging around
through four-dimensional space-time might be expressed as a vector
in five dimensions. Whatever the number of n dimensions it inhabited,
an observer would need one extra, n + 1, to see it and connect the end
points to make a single resultant” (AtD 675)] that is radically different
from the physical one, although it remains ‘attributed’ to the physical
coherence of the system and emerges from it.
It is, in fact, another instance of what Pynchon calls, in The Crying
of Lot 49, the “high magic to low puns” (CoL 129) when in Against
the Day he mentions Hilbert’s ‘Spectral Theory’; an inclusive term for
theories extending the eigenvector and eigenvalue theory of a single
364 Hanjo Berressem

square matrix, which “requires a vector space of infinite dimensions.

His co-adjutor Minkowski thinks that dimensions will eventually all
just fade away into a Kontinuum of space and time” (AtD 324). The
pun lies in that this ‘spectral theory’ might be read in analogy to
Pynchon’s ‘spectral poetics’ both in its sensitivity to the ghostly realm
as well as in its conceptualization of history as an infinitely complex
vector-space in which the movements of individuals are defined as
‘eigenmovements’ within a complex spatiohistorical matrix.
The radical irony about the ‘spine of reality’ is not only that it can
be fractured, or that it can be put into a routinized corset, but it is also,
as I noted above, that the eigenorganizations’ psychic,
informational|operational spine is radically different from its physical
spine, although the psychic spine remains ‘attributed’ to the physical
spine and emerges from it. In this context, the discussion of
eigenvectors ties into the overall metaphorics of light that permeate
the novel. If the rays that are doubly refracted into a real and an
imaginary ray|vector, one might read the psychic spine as the
imaginary ray and the physical one as the real ray. If one of the main
topics of the novel is the refraction of the world into a real and an
imaginary field, the theory of eigenvalues and of eigenorganizations
provides a mathematical model of this refraction, and at the same time
provides a model for an ultimate bilocation into the physical and the
psychic. Symptomatically, the grace that the Chums of Chance fly
toward in the novel’s concluding sentence can be read as both a
physical as well as a transcendental grace.
Pynchon’s mathematical conceptualization of history portrays
history as an infinitely complex, dynamic vectorspace in which the
movements of individuals are defined as ‘eigenmovements.’ Already
the names of some of the protagonists point to them being
spatiotemporal modulations, such as Traverse, Rideout or Wheeler.
Pynchon embeds the conceit of vectorial mobility vs. stationary
nobility into a larger historical and cultural realm when he has Prof.
Vanderjuice mention “Hilbert’s recent work on Eigenheit theory”
(AtD 324). As far as I can make out this is fictional mathematics, but
it ties the theory of eigenvalues to the political philosophy of what
might be called Max Stirner’s ‘eigenanarchy,’ which Pynchon
references in a conversation of the Belgian nihilists Policarpe and
Denis. “‘Don’t mind Denis, he’s a Stirnerite,’” Policarpe says, to
which Denis replies, “‘Anarcho-individualiste, though you are too
The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day 365

much of an imbecile to appreciate this distinction’” (AtD 528). The

tie-in is that the first part of part two of Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own
[Der Einzige und sein Eigentum] in which he promotes any number of
‘eigen’ compounds such as Eigentum [property], Eigenheit [individual
characteristic: ‘ownness’] and der Eigene [the individual: ‘the
owner’], is called ‘Die Eigenheit.’
Eigenvalues, however, do not only define Pynchon’s fictional
universes. Pynchon includes himself as an author into the logic of
eigenvalues when he notes in his ‘eigenbiographical’ introduction to
Slow Learner that “[s]omewhere I had come up with the notion that
one’s personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as
everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite” (SL 21), which explains
his life-long fascination with autobiographies, such as Henry Adams’s
The Education of Henry Adams or the autobiographical Journal of
Mason and Dixon in Mason & Dixon. Even if writing is not directly
autobiographical—symptomatically, an autobiography is defined by
the identity of the author’s proper name, or ‘Eigenname’ as that of the
narrator—it is eminently ‘eigenbiographical’ if by that one means that
it is a direct ‘attribute’ of the author’s life. As Wilhelm Dilthey noted
in his theory of the autobiography—which he called the
‘selfbiography’—only a couple of years after Hilbert had introduced
the term eigenvalue into mathematics: “each life has its own sense. It
consists in a meaning-context in which every remembered present
possesses an intrinsic value [Eigenwert], and yet, through the nexus of
memory, it is also related to the sense of the whole” (221). In terms of
the situation of writing, the integration of singular, dissonant moments
into an overall coherence organizes and reduces the multiplicity of
unrelated psychic values into an overall harmonics of psychic
eigenvalues.
Eigenvectors operate in a vectorfield, which can be defined
mathematically as a milieu that contains an infinite number of
virtual|potential vectors out of which specific vectors are actualized
(or: in which they have always already been actualized). Within such
a vectorfield, geometrical or systemic movements can be described as
sets of simultaneous changes within which a specific vector remains
invariant. On this background, eigenvectors may be said to ‘extract’ a
vectorial territory from a vectorial milieu. In other words, they create
an ‘eigenspace.’ In Pynchon’s work, which makes use of the theory of
eigenvalues and eigenvectors to describe human lives, such individual
366 Hanjo Berressem

‘eigenspaces’ are invariably tied to and part of the larger milieu of the
vectorfield we call America; a milieu that is made up of a multiplicity
of singular ‘eigenspaces,’ but that is in constant danger of being
relentlessly territorialized and overcoded by forces that aim at
implementing an overall, hegemonic (or even fascist!) ‘eigenspace.’
Pynchon is such an important writer because he is one of the most
radical and politically incorrect chroniclers of these projects of
complete territorialization. Who else would publish, after 9/11, a
novel in which explosives are some of the most important
‘protagonists.’ At the same time, he is one of the both most poetic and
hilarious inventors of and advocates for strategies of
deterritorialization. Throughout his work, which by now shows a
panorama of almost all of American history, he refracts the matter-of-
fact vector of ‘real history’ (what is and what was) into fictional
vectors (what could be and what could have been) that function as
counternarratives to an official historical narrative that is, in actual
fact, equally fictional but that—much like ideology as theorized by
Althusser—presents itself as ‘natural.’
In What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari note that

[i]t seems to us that the theory of multiplicities does not support the
hypothesis of any multiplicity whatever [...]. There must be at least two
multiplicities, two types, from the outset. This is not because dualism is better
than unity but because the multiplicity is precisely what happens between the
two. (152)

If one sees the matter-of-factual and the fictional as two such

multiplicities, Pynchon’s work indeed measures out, in all their
complication and complicity (from the co-option of the counterforce
in Gravity’s Rainbow to the failed revolution in Vineland), the spaces
between these two radically different fields.

Hanjo Berressem, University of Cologne

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 CONTRIBUTORS

HANJO BERRESSEM is a professor of American studies at the

University of Köln. The author of Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing
Theory and Text (1992) as well as numerous essays and reviews on
Pynchon, he has also written Lines of Desire: Reading Gombrowicz’s
Fiction with Lacan (1998) and co-edited, with Philipp Hofmann,
Chaos/Control: Complexity—Chaos Theory and the Human Sciences
(2002).

ALI CHETWYND graduated with a B.A. from Balliol College, Oxford

in 2004, and worked for 2 years as a teacher of high-school English
Literature in Sofia, Bulgaria, during which time he researched the
present paper. He has previously published work on Ben Jonson’s
Sejanus and in the Autumn of 2008 began a Ph.D. in English
Literature at the University of Michigan.

WILLIAM D. CLARKE is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative

Literature at the University of Warwick.

FRANCISCO COLLADO-RODRÍGUEZ is Professor of English at the

Department of English and German of the University of Zaragoza,
where he teaches twentieth-century American Literature. He is the
current President of the Spanish Association for American Studies
(SAAS) and has written extensively on the influence of fantasy, myth,
and scientific discourse on modernist and postmodernist American
fiction. He has published books and articles on Thomas Pynchon,
Bharati Mukherjee, Kurt Vonnegut, E. L. Doctorow, Russell Banks,
Eric Kraft, and Jeffrey Eugenides, among others, as well as on poets
T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In 2004 he published a book on the works
of Thomas Pynchon: El orden del caos: literatura, política y
posthumanidad en la narrativa de Thomas Pynchon (Valencia:
Prensas Universitarias) that was awarded the National Research Prize
370 Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives

by the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN).

He has co-edited Masculinities, Femininities and the Power of the
Hybrid in U.S. Narratives: Essays on Gender Borders
(Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007) and is also the co-editor of a special
issue of Pynchon Notes.

INGER H. DALSGAARD holds an associate professorship in American

Studies at the University of Aarhus where she teaches and researches
topics within literary history, technology and popular culture. She
received a doctorate from King’s College, London and M.I.T. for a
thesis analyzing fiction by Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon and
American attitudes to technology in 2000. She has since published a
number of articles specifically on Thomas Pynchon and is a co-editor
of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon with
Luc Herman and Brian McHale.

SIMON DE BOURCIER was educated in London and Cambridge and is

currently a Ph.D. student and teacher at the University of East Anglia.
He was first arrested in 1992, and is a member of Argyle Street
Housing Co-operative.

LOVORKA GRUIû GRMUŠA studied English and Italian language and

literature at the University of Zagreb, Croatia where she obtained her
B.A. and her M.A. in comparative literature. Being awarded with a
Fulbright Scholarship in 2005-06 at the University of California, Los
Angeles where her mentor was N. Katherine Hayles, she wrote her
Ph.D. dissertation on “Temporality in American Postmodern
Literature: Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover.” She is currently
Assistant Professor at the English Department of the Faculty of
Philosophy, University of Rijeka, Croatia, where she teaches
American Literature, Postmodern Literature, Science Fiction and The
Interpretation of the Novel.

Born in Istanbul, Turkey, where she attended Istanbul American

Robert College and Istanbul Technical University, LEYLA
HAFERKAMP received her M.A. in English and Philosophy from the
University of Aachen with the thesis “Towards a New
Anthropo(morpho)logy: Transformations of ‘Artificial Man’ in
American SF” (summa cum laude). Besides teaching American
Contributors 371

Literature|Culture at the University of Cologne, she is currently

working on her PhD thesis on “The Poetics of Immanence: Deleuzian
Perspectives on Contemporary American Econarratives (Dillard,
Snyder, Hiaasen).” While her fields of interest include American
literature (esp. nineteenth and twentieth century), critical theory and
process philosophy, her research focuses on the intersections of
literature, philosophy and science.

MICHAEL HARRIS, Professor of English at Central College (Pella,

Iowa), is the author of Outsiders and Insiders: Perspectives of Third
World Culture in British and Post-Colonial Fiction, named a
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book in 1994. Harris has published
two essays on Thomas Pynchon: “Pynchon’s Postcoloniality” (in
Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins edited by Niran Abbas),
and “To Historicize is to Colonize: Colonialism in V. and Gravity’s
Rainbow” (in Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot
49 and Other Works edited by Thomas H. Schaub). Harris has also
published essays on Joseph Conrad, Patrick White, Salman Rushdie,
Edna O’Brien, Peter Abrahams, and Australian Aboriginal poetry. In
1998-1999 he served as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University
of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

HEINZ ICKSTADT is professor emeritus of American Literature at the

Kennedy Institute of North American Studies, Free University Berlin.
He is the author of a history of the American novel in the twentieth
century (Der amerikanische Roman im 20. Jahrhundert:
Transformation des Mimetischen, 1998) and essays on late nineteenth-
century American literature and culture, on the fiction and poetry of
American modernism and postmodernism, on American fiction and
poetry of the city as well as on the history and theory of American
Studies. (Some of these were collected in Faces of Fiction: Essays on
American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Age to
Postmodernity, 2001). He also edited and co-edited several books on
American literature and culture, among them Ordnung und Entropie:
Zum Romanwerk Thomas Pynchons and a bi-lingual anthology of
American poetry. He was president of the German Association of
American Studies from 1990 until 1993, and president of the
European Association of American Studies from 1996-2000.
372 Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives

JESSICA LAWSON is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of

Iowa. Her scholarship in twentieth-century experimental literatures
covers a range of topics including subjectivity, feminist/queer theory,
and critical examinations of the body. Her writings engage texts by
Kathy Acker, Mina Loy, Sarah Kane, William Gibson, Harryette
Mullen, and others.

CLÉMENT LÉVY is a junior teacher and researcher at Jean Monnet

University in St-Etienne. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation in
comparative literature on the representation of space in postmodernist
fiction: the crisis of territory. He published papers (mostly in French)
on geocritics, Greek mythology, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Pynchon.

GEORGIOS MARAGOS is currently a doctoral candidate at Panteion

University, Athens. His undergraduate degree in media studies
allowed him to work in Greek newspapers, as well as the radio. His
journalistic pursuits were interrupted by his admission to the
University of Edinburgh where he attained an M.Sc. in Comparative
and General Literature. He has published book reviews both in the
printed and online press.

MANLIO DELLA MARCA graduated summa cum laude from the

“Sapienza” University of Rome with a degree in American literature.
He is currently completing a Ph.D. on a fellowship at the Department
of Foreign Literatures, Cultures, and Languages of the same
university. His research focuses on the interplay of mass culture and
American literature as well as on the role of spectrality in twentieth-
century American culture. He also graduated from the “Circo a
Vapore Theater School” and is the co-director of “Catapult Theater
and School,” based in Rome (www.infocatapult.com). From January
to May 2010, he was a visiting scholar at IFUSS (International Forum
for U.S. Studies) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

KEITH O’NEILL is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY-

Dutchess in Poughkeepsie, NY. His areas of interest include Melville,
Pynchon, and Hardboiled Fiction of the 1950s and ‘60s.

SASCHA PÖHLMANN is a lecturer in American Literary History at the

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. He received
Contributors 373

his M.A. degree from Bayreuth University in 2004 with a thesis on

identity and self in Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow. His studies also
took him to Trinity College Dublin and the University of Illinois at
Chicago; he taught a term at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah,
and visited the Centers for American Studies in Warsaw and Odense
as a guest lecturer. His essay “Silences and Worlds: Wittgenstein and
Pynchon” is forthcoming in Pynchon Notes; his book Pynchon’s
Postnational Imagination is forthcoming with Universitätsverlag
Winter. He organized International Pynchon Week 2008.

TOON STAES graduated summa cum laude at the University of

Antwerp in 2008, with an M.A. thesis on “‘The Continuous Against
the Discrete’: The Scientific Worldview in Thomas Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day.” As part of the American
Studies research group at the University of Antwerp, Staes is currently
writing a Ph.D. on the post-ironic tendency in contemporary American
fiction, in which he focuses on the representation of knowledge and
information in the novels of Richard Powers and David Foster
Wallace.

RODNEY TAVEIRA teaches and researches film, literature, and art

history at the University of Sydney.

CELIA WALLHEAD SALWAY is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of

English and German Philology at the University of Granada, Spain.
She previously taught at the University of Auckland, New Zealand,
and the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. She also worked for the
British Council. At present, she teaches courses in English, American
and post-colonial literature. She has written books and articles on her
specialty: postmodern and post-colonial narrative, covering such
living writers as A.S. Byatt, Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo
Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Patricia Grace and Paule Marshall, and
deceased authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Iris Murdoch and John
Fowles. Her research group focuses on Utopian narratives, which is a
thread that unites her work on all these writers.
 INDEX

Bloom, Harold 176

A Boccioni, Umberto 141-42, 149
Bohr, Niels 89-90, 327, 344
Abbott, Edwin Abbott 67 Borges, Jorge Luis 333
Adams, Henry 323-24, 336, 344-45, Born, Max 344
365 Bové, Paul 206
Albright, Daniel 126, 128 Bracewell, Catherine Wendy 265,
Alighieri, Dante 65, 263-64, 335 271, 278, 280
Allen, Charles 303 Bragaglia, Anton 137
Anderson, Benedict 257 Bragaglia, Arturo G. 137
Antliff, Mark 58, 61 Braque, Georges 138
Aquinas, Thomas 83-85 Braudel, Fernand 199
Aristotle 324, 344 Braun, Wernher von 349
Armstrong, Karen 226 Brenner, Robert 188, 205
Arnold, Matthew 24 Brod, Max 180
Aso, Takashi 18 Brown, Barclay 154
Burne-Jones, Edward 304
B Burroughs, Edgar Rice 53
Bush, George W. 337, 340
Baackmann, Susanne 61
Babington-Smith, Constance 161
Barthelme, Donald 44 C
Barthes, Roland 147-48, 164, 231- Caesar, Terry 18
33, 236, 242-43 Caillois, Roger 142
Bateson, Gregory 351, 360 Campbell, Joseph 190, 332
Baudelaire, Charles 158, 335 ýapek, Miliþ 77-78
Baudrillard, Jean 165 Carra, Carlo 149
Bauman, Zygmunt 15, 251-53, 255, Cartier-Bresson, Henri 159
259-60 Cather, Willa 315
Begiü, Vanesa 283 Chandler, Raymond 46
Benjamin, Walter 136, 152, 176, 252 Chessa, Luciano 154
Bercovitch, Sacvan 259 Clarke, Arthur C. 175
Berger, James 186, 200, 206 Claro, Christophe 152
Bergson, Henri 13, 64, 66, 73-77, 86 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne [Mark
Berman, Marshall 251, 253, 260 Twain] 319
Bernhardt, Sarah 159 Clute, John 133-34
Berra, Yogi 107 Clymer, Jeffory 338, 340
Berressem, Hanjo 46, 143 Collado-Rodríguez, Francisco 324,
Bersani, Leo 181 344
376 Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives

Conte, Joseph 344 Foucault, Michel 10

Cooper, James Fenimore 315, 319 Franklin, Benjamin 82, 87
Coppola, Francis Ford 154 Frazer, James George 325, 332
Courbet, Gustave 158 Freud, Sigmund 91, 95, 287
Cowart, David 33, 220, 222
Cramer, Friedrich 352 G
Craven, David 61
Cronon, William 311, 321 Galilei, Galileo 187
Cubitt, Sean 143-44 Gass, William 163
Curtin, Maureen F. 249 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy 121
Giles, Paul 17
D Ginzburg, Carlo 70-71, 78
Girardot, Jean-Jacques 344
d’Alembert, Jean le Rond 69 Glenny, Misha 276, 284, 287
Dalsgaard, Inger H. 99-100, 153 Goffman, Daniel 279
Davies, Paul 344 Goldberg, Victor C. 207
de Man, Paul 140, 144 Gray, Zane 46
de Nerval, Gèrard 158 Gribbin, John 90
Debord, Guy 171-72, 183 Griffin, Roger 61
Deleuze, Gilles 16, 309, 313-17, Grünfelder, Annemarie 278
320-21, 349, 358-62, 366 Guattari, Félix 16, 309, 313-17, 320-
DeLillo, Don 10 21, 358-60, 362, 366
Delingpole, James 303 Gutman, Herbert G. 86
Derrida, Jacques 130, 344
Descartes, Réné 187 H
Diebold, John 207
Dillinger, John 160 Hamilton, William Rowan 25, 27
Dilthey, Wilhelm 365 Hamilton-Gordon, E.A. 69
Dimock, Wai Chee 18 Harris, Michael 125-26, 130, 267,
Duyfhuizen, Bernard 260 305
Harvey, David 206
E Hayles, N. Katherine 105-06, 256,
260, 345
Edel, Leon 54-56 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 103
Edison, Thomas 89, 328 Heisenberg, Werner 327, 344
Einstein, Albert 64, 75, 77, 79, 86, Helmholtz, Hermann von 352
89, 325-27, 332, 334, 336 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple 69, 71
Eley, Geoff 17 Henwood, Doug 200-01, 203, 207-09
Eliot, Thomas Stearns 10, 53, 57, Hesse, Herrmann 214, 222
330, 333-35 Hilbert, David 39, 317-18, 350-52,
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 259, 357 363-65
Engels, Friedrich 15, 251, 259-60 Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall 260
Hinton, Charles Howard 13, 64, 67-
F 70, 72, 77, 79
Hite, Molly 78, 115, 125, 129, 130
Feynmann, Richard P. 319 Hollander, Charles 186, 305
Fliess, Wilhelm 91 Hopkins, Thomas J. 216-17
Flint, R.W. 153 Horvat, Karlo 271, 283
Fogu, Claudio 61
Index 377

Howard, Gerald 215 Lightman, Alan 332

Hugo, Victor 158 Lista, Giovanni 136
Huxley, Aldous 173 Ljubiü, Šime 278
Huygens, Christiaan 354 Locke, John 186
Lopašiü, Radoslav 283
I Lucas, George 207
Luhmann, Niklas 353
Ickstadt, Heinz 47 Lumière, Louis 95
Luxon, Norval Neil 86
J Lyotard, Jean-François 172-73, 178,
182
James, Henry 13, 35, 50-51, 54-58,
60-61, 206
James, William 357, 361 M
Jameson, Fredric 134, 146, 168, 174, Macfarlane, Alan 206
186, 199, 260 Machiavelli, Niccolò 360
Jencks, Charles 199 Magritte, Réne 137, 138, 141
Johnson, Mark 271 Malcolm X 244-45
Johnston, John 121, 179, 257 Mandelbrot, Benoit 317-18, 321
Jossa, Bruno 206 Manet, Édouard 158
Joyce, James 10-11 Marcuse, Herbert 13, 97-110
Jung, Carl G. 326-27, 344 Marey, Étienne-Jules 136
Marinetti, Filippo T. 149, 152-54
K Marquez, Antonio 171
Marx, Karl 15, 190, 193-94, 200,
Kafka, Franz 180, 183
206, 251-55, 259-60
Kakutani, Michiko 46, 53-54
Matthiessen, Peter 227
Kant, Immanuel 66-67, 73
Maturana, Humberto 355
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 20
McClure, John A. 260
Kenner, Hugh 61
McConnell, Frank D. 340
Kerns, Stephen 91-92, 95
McHale, Brian 10, 11, 24
Kerouac, Jack 216
McLuhan, Marshall 168-72, 179, 258
Ketzan, Erik 158
McNally, David 206
Kierkegaard, Søren 90
Méliès, George 92
Kipling, Rudyard 15, 222, 292, 295-
Melley, Timothy 234, 248
300, 303-05
Melman, Bili 61
Kirsch, Adam 26
Melville, Herman 82, 87, 213, 253
Kittler, Friedrich 167, 170, 172, 175,
Menand, Louis 36, 326
177, 182
Mendelson, Edward 17, 114, 121,
Kohn, Robert 213-15
126, 219, 260, 324
Kumar, Krishan 177
Méreste, Fabrice 344
Kupsch, Kenneth 324
Milken, Michael 201, 208-09
Miller, J. Hillis 130
L Minkowksi, Hermann 74
Laplace, Pierre-Simon 77-78 Minkowski, Hermann 13, 38, 64, 74-
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 318 77, 79, 364
Leonard, John 266-67 Minucci, Minuccio 279
Levine, George 37 Mishra, Pankaj 215
378 Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives

Möbius, August Ferdinand 70 “The Road to 1984” 13, 46, 106,

Monk, Thelonious 43, 307 108
Moore, Thomas 129, 267 “The Small Rain” 334
Morgan, Robert P. 136, 149 Against the Day 9-33, 35-46, 50-
Muybridge, Eadweard 136 55, 57-65, 67, 69-76, 78, 82-
85, 87-94, 98-99, 101-10, 133-
N 52, 157-64, 168, 171, 174-76,
178, 181, 183, 205, 214, 216,
Nadeau, Robert 326, 344 219-20, 222-28, 263-86, 291-
Nadel, Alan 215 96, 298-305, 307-16, 318-21,
Naumann, Michael 159 324-43, 349-58, 360-65
Nozick, Robert 186 Gravity’s Rainbow 10, 13, 15, 17,
25, 29, 37, 44-45, 50, 53-54,
O 78, 86-87, 98-101, 105-06,
109, 113-31, 150, 160-64, 168-
O’Donnell, Patrick 252
71, 173-74, 179-81, 206, 214-
Oberst, Conor 349
21, 224, 227, 232-49, 266, 327,
Orwell, George 13, 45-46, 106
329, 351-52, 355-57, 360, 366
Oumoff, N.A. 74
Inherent Vice 18, 61
Ouspensky, Peter Demianovich 13,
Mason & Dixon 10, 15, 17, 25,
64, 71-74, 77-79
27, 35, 44-45, 54, 57, 133, 142,
146, 149, 151, 168, 175-76,
P 181, 214, 220-21, 223, 266-68,
Pais, Abraham 309 299, 302, 310-12, 314, 320-21,
Peirce, Charles Sanders 257, 358-59 324, 354-57, 362-63, 365
Philmus, Robert 65 Slow Learner 173, 216, 252, 360,
Picasso, Pablo 138 365
Plotnitsky, Arkady 309, 320 The Crying of Lot 49 10, 15, 18,
Poe, Edgar Allan 46 35, 37, 44, 58, 91, 168, 173,
Poincaré, Henri 313, 321 180, 213-14, 220, 252-60, 266,
Popariü, Bare 271, 280 298, 327, 331, 339, 352, 354-
Portelli, Alessandro 260 55, 357, 363
Porush, David 183 V. 10, 12, 16, 18, 37, 44-45, 54,
Pound, Ezra 57, 61 88, 105, 159, 163, 260, 266-67,
Powers, Richard 215 292, 324, 329, 334-35, 337-38,
Poynter, Edward 304 342, 350, 359-60
Pratchett, Terry 73 Vineland 10, 14, 18, 35, 44, 91,
Pratella, Francesco B. 150 153, 160, 162, 164-65, 168,
Prigogine, Ilya 344 170-72, 174, 177-79, 181, 186-
Proust, Marcel 55, 134, 146 87, 189-207, 266-67, 296, 310,
Punday, Daniel 260 320, 342, 352-54, 356-58, 360-
Pynchon, Thomas 61, 366
“Entropy” 357
“Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” 13, R
52-53, 106
Ray, Gordon N. 54-56, 362
“Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” 13,
Reagan, Ronald 186, 205
82-84, 86-88, 91-94, 213
Ricardo, David 208
Index
Riemann, Bernhard 29, 37, 39, 41,
90, 313-14
Robinson, Richard H. 225
Rothenberg, Gunther 280
Russell, Bertrand 103
Russolo, Antonio 154
Russolo, Luigi 136-37, 142-43, 145-
46, 148-52, 154
S Trachtenberg, Alan 86
Said, Edward 273
Sandison, Alan 293, 295, 297-98,
300, 304
Sarpi, Paolo 271, 282
Saunders, George 215
Savitt, Steven 76-77
Schachterle, Lance 183
Schiller, Herbert 174
Schroeder, Randy 344
Sears, Julie Christine 223, 249
Sebald, Winfried Georg 163
Seed, David 129, 130
Seifer, Marc J. 327
Seltzer, Mark 139-41, 153
Seurat, Georges 143, 149
Shannon, Claude 168, 182
Siegfried, Francis 345
Signac, Paul 149
Simmel, Georg 139
Simon, Ruth 282-83
Simonetti, Paolo 260
Simpson, Homer 19
Slade, Joseph W. 98-99, 125, 183
Smith, Anthony 17
Solberg, Sara 10
Solomon, J. Fisher 344
Stavrianos, Leften Stavros 283
Steiner, Wendy 260
Stengers, Isabelle 344
Stephens, Carlene 86
Stirner, Max 364-65
Stone, Isidor Feinstein 207
Stover, Leon 69
Suþiü, Nikola 269, 287
Sue, Eugène 35
Suny, Ronald 17
Susman, Gary 208
379
T
Tanner, Tony 260, 344
Teresi, Dick 158
Tesla, Nicola 40, 46-47, 138, 175,
205, 280-81, 291, 295-96, 327-28,
330, 351, 355
Thoreen, David 205
Todorova, Maria 272-73, 275
Tournachon, Félix 158
Trungpa, Chögyam 222-24
Turner, Frederic Jackson 312
Turner, William 304
V
Vanderbeke, Dirk 206
Varela, Francisco J. 355
Verne, Jules 46, 331
Vernon, Peter 305
Virilio, Paul 161-62
Vogel, Harold Leslie 208
Vollmann, William T. 163
Vonnegut, Kurt 73
W
Waddel, Helen 216
Wallhead, Celia 305
Weber, Max 205, 360
Weinrich, Harald 254, 260
Wells, Herbert George 13, 46, 50-61,
64-73, 78-79, 300, 332
Whitman, Walt 105, 107, 218, 333
Wiener, Norbert 168, 172-73, 179
Wilde, Oscar 69, 70
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 104-05, 239,
248
Wood, Allen 193
Wood, Ellen Meiksins 186-89, 194
Wood, Michael 219, 220
Woolf, Virginia 54, 59
Wordsworth, William 140
Z
Zangwill, Israel 13, 64, 66, 71, 73
Žižek, Slavoj 153