Orwell and Pynchon V. Bazooka Joe

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Orwell and Pynchon v. Bazooka Joe

Vladimir Tasi´c

Here is a strange idea. Thomas Pynchon writes historical novels; political novels, in a sense. His oeuvre is a literary inquiry of the longitudinal kind, lasting almost four decades and spanning thematically two or three centuries. There is certainly a strong ludic element in his writing: dazzling linguistic virtuosity, florid plot lines, scenes reminiscent of the inane bravado of the dudes who conceived the cinematic masterpiece known as Jackass. But Pynchon’s choice of material indicates that the unabashed literary hedonism, for which he is known and admired, functions also as a cloaking device that permits him to explore the attitudes of Alternative America toward History and Power. Evidence of this is fairly clear in Vineland, where Pynchon treats the dissipation and state-assisted demise of the countercultural movement. The lost ideal assumes the unsur- prising name of the People’s Republic of Rock’n’Roll, with Sex & Drugs present in large quantities as a matter of course. But the countercultural trinity is only the stage-setting of a larger political drama involving everyone from ‘rogue’ G-men to union activists of yore: at stake in Vineland are the very principles of the American republic. Not coincidentally, the main narrative thread unfolds in the year 1984, which in fictional history has obvious ‘Orwellian’ connotations and in real time bears the mark of Ronald Reagan’s second coming. In the following novel, Mason & Dixon, Pynchon delved deeper into the past in search of the founding principles of the republic, and envisioned the era of the American Enlightenment. The project continues in Against the Day, which takes on several sensitive decades, approximately from the 1890s to the late 1910s. The period may reasonably be regarded as the beginning of the ‘American Century’—the time when the republic became intrigued by the role of Empire. Abroad, there were the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, the military intervention in China, eventually World War One and migration of global financial power from London to New York; at home, the industrialization of the Western frontier, ‘pacification’ of labor, the trading boom on the New York Stock Exchange, the rise of William Randolph Hearst and growing influence of yellow journalism on the public opinion. Writers sympathetic to conventions of the historical genre—Gore Vidal comes to mind as a sort of literary Gibbon—would perhaps have chosen to create an imperial epic marbled by celebrity scoops on the lives of politicians, generals, industrialists, media moguls, and other stock characters populating the corridors of power. Other authors, for instance Jayne Anne Phillips, might have written a hard-boiled realistic narrative from the perspective of small-town folk, the homegrown fodder of Empire’s incomprehensible machine. Pynchon chooses a more complex strategy, politically ambitious and aesthetically risky. Against the Day relies heavily on the correlation of political history and the history of popular and mass culture. It is almost as though Pynchon wishes to repeat the grand gesture of Joyce’s Ulysses, but in a framework more American and hence more global. Like in the U.S. itself, the

1 Greek and the Irish elements of Ulysses, represented in Against the Day by Pythagorean mysticism and Hamilton’s quaternions, are to be taken in along with a host of worldwide contributions; whether European or borderline European, such as Tesla, or more exotic, like the Shambala, they are all to be transformed, infused with a new spirit—a sense of untarnished idealism, of boyish dreaminess and the proverbial innocence of America— and recast in a more popular and exciting form. The daunting accumulation of cultural references is therefore not just an arbitrary obsession of the author: it plays an important role in the novel’s literary strategy. It is widely appreciated (perhaps only too widely) that political history can be read in comic books, movies, cartoons and other imagery intended for mass consumption. The character of Fu Manchu, a suitably exaggerated image of the enemy of the international law and order, appears in dime novels not long after the Boxer Rebellion in China and the subsequent military intervention of a ‘coalition of the willing,’ the Eight Nation Alliance. Mass culture of roughly the same era also gave rise to the term ‘yellow journalism’, named after the Yellow Kid, a racially profiled character in a comic published during the late 1890s in one of Hearst’s jingoistic newspapers. Pynchon, however, takes only a passing interest in the microscopic level of the correlation between world and image. Unlike, say, Vidal, he could not care less whether Teddy and The Rough Riders actually took a Cuban hill or did so only in a politically motivated piece of tabloid writing. For Pynchon, yellow journalism is too obvious an example of how fictional worlds create and reflect political realities. The novel does contain a scene in which a protagonist barely avoids drowning in mayonnaise, which could be construed as a color-coded message even though the offending condiment is Belgian-made. But in a text containing nearly half a million words, chosen and arranged by a writer who has ‘appeared’ on The Simpsons sporting a paper bag on his head, one expects difficulties with sorting out the signal from the noise. Against the Day has 1085 pages of relatively small print, and a long roster of meticu- lously named characters of whom a dozen or so might be regarded as principal. Its plot defies all known compression algorithms but may be described as asymptotically nuts. At first it appears that the book could well have been accompanied by Mark Twain’s famous disclaimer: ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.’ Yet there seems to be more to Against the Day than the sort of pop-culture hipsterism that finds ironic glee in endless recombinations of genre chlichés, in the man- ner of DJs who ‘mash’ Blondie with The Doors simply because it can be done. There is as always that element in Pynchon, the original master of the obscure and sublimely ridicu- lous reference. But beneath all the flouting of the expectations of high literature—‘high’ as understood by Michiko Kakutani, not by Cheech or Chong—there appears to be a system and a serious intention; even a political program of sorts. The first axiom states that the images of a certain period available in popular literature, including some forms of fantasy writing, act as historical reality. The characters inhabit the space-time of genre representations of America and the world at the turn of the century; that is reality. Consequently, it is a given that American boys might suddenly produce a blimp and set out on a thrilling adventure on the global-historical stage. Also present are time machines, along with the usual logical problems they pose. The second axiom attempts to limit their effects on the narrative: we are supposed to remain anchored, or somehow tethered, to an era when America has not yet lost its innocence (though it is

2 curious). The notion of the innocence of America-in-the-World, its self-perception as a morally immaculate agent, is part of the puritan heritage and was an important trope of both the popular imagination and high literature of the period that Against the Day is delimiting. The title of Mark Twain’s travelogue, Innocents Abroad, cleverly plays with this stereotype, but it would not be out place as the title of a Henry James novel. Pynchon is interested in the popular imagination, and Twain is thus a more appropriate guide than James. Indeed, James appears in Against the Day only in a cameo role, as the author of a book read by a fairly sophisticated canine. Twain’s writing, unlike that of the doggedly highbrow James, reflects a certain shift in the ‘horizon of expectations’. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, Tom and friends are exploring Missouri; in the sequel published in 1894, Tom Sawyer Abroad, the boys embark on a Verne-style extraordinary voyage in a futuristic balloon and go as far as Africa, where they encounter lions and fleas. At the close of the nineteenth century, Tom and Huckleberry can fly off in search of an intercontinental adventure because the reception of their experiences is now underpinned by an awareness of America’s economic might and its growing significance in world affairs. Empire is infiltrating the realm of imagination. It whispers: ‘The world is your playground.’ But the conquest of imagination is only beginning. We are still far, for example, from Fitzgerald’s world-weary hero, to whom the caterers of vice in Montmartre appear childish and Parisian Left Bank hopelessly provincial; who evokes the bygone glamour of the Sec- ond Empire—ironically, of course—while reminiscing on the swell decade following World War One, when a modest amount of dollars could buy royal treatment at The Ritz. That day has not arrived. In the popular imagination that is the reality of Pynchon’s characters, the world is within reach of ‘every’ boy from Missouri, Minnesota, or Colorado, but it is still mysterious, exotic, full of electrifying possibilities and packed with spine-tingling ac- tion, like the setting of a dime novel. It is a place where one can encounter brilliant thugs, princesses at once telepathic and hot, ingenious scientists and their evil twins, monsters and ray-guns galore, wizards good and bad, masked avengers and hilarious savages of a more or less noble kind. Against the Day is among other things a vertiginous tour of the alternative universes of adventure novels, Westerns, detective and espionage thrillers, and science-romance stories. Its ontology is the sum of boys’ weeklies from a pre-Xbox era, a golden age when young males, apparently, took some interest in printed matter. Anything seems possible in such a world. Time travel is possible and, in Pynchon’s axiomatic system, is not only possible but necessary. There are past representations of the future and, conversely, future representations of the past; all of them are ‘real’ and exist simultaneously within the book. A temporal confusion results, and Pynchon is forced to capitalize Time here and there. But the chronological mayhem is precisely what enables the author, or rather his creatures, to intervene retroactively in the history of genre representations. That is the mission of his proxies: to sabotage Empire before it conquers the domain of popular imagination and turns it into a province of the entertainment industry. One way of accomplishing the task is to undermine the system of genre stereotypes and the politics implicit in it. The heroes are much interested in dynamite and other destructive devices, yet they cannot simply blow up the system. In the world they inhabit, ludicrous clichés are as gravity is to us. They must respect the rules to a certain extent; the laws can only be subverted, subtly, by careful tinkering, as in the practice of culture jamming. The

3 resulting bricolage, as is the case with culture jamming in general, is rather limited in its power to effect the radical change it seeks. Some rules can never be broken. A genre law formulated by the SF writer Zoran Zivkoviˇ ć states that advanced civiliza- tions, capable of intergalactic travel, do not land in the obscure Serbian town of Lajkovac. The rule of course applies more generally. Palestinian kids never get to fly around the globe in their own airship, Iraqi schoolgirls do not get to stroll on the surface of the Moon—not even in a Pynchon novel, where giant fleas can and do speak, ‘usually in a dialect of an- cient Uyghur.’ It is for just this reason that Mitar Miloˇsević, the indefatigable author of Serbian pulp novelettes, gave his characters English names and published under the pen- name ‘Frederic Ashton’. Genre and Empire are intertwined. Pynchon’s heroes must be American or at least British (useful for comic relief), or somehow tied to the Anglophone world (students at Oxford, for example). Such is the politics of genre. Pynchon is aware of this. He is not trying to undermine the system where it is most rigid, in the field of international relations. True, there is an ethnically diverse support cast that provides assistance, diversion and entertainment. These protagonists, however, are stifled by the gaping banality of characterization, which is perhaps best seen as a satirical catalog of national stereotypes that occasionally functions as a McGuffin-type device for advancing the plot. Some are developed in a minimal way because they are required at a convenient moment, hundreds of pages later; they are then ruthlessly sent offstage, to Pynchon’s equivalent of the dustbin of history. It is a consequence of the axioms: popular representations are real in this novel, and they are particularly robust where the foreign is concerned. The profile of an American hero is more flexible due to the ubiquity of imagery fash- ioned in the vein of libertarian individualism: lone rangers and pale riders, freedom- fighters and dignified outcasts, people who do things in their own way, as they see fit, despite the rules and against all odds. They are, or can be, mavericks; that is always already in the script. This cultural fact provides Pynchon with the necessary maneuvering space. His heroes can try to subvert the domestic—or perhaps Anglophone—politics of genre. That is the most interesting feature of his book. A relevant text, here, is George Orwell’s essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, published in 1940. Orwell analyzes the ideological framework of boys’ fiction—mainly adventure stories—and discovers a number of biases. Foreigners are funny, sex is taboo, aristocracy is decadent but patriotic at heart; there is no depiction of work, no mention of trade-unionism, no poverty, no unemployment; ‘Yank mags’ in particular encourage the notion of a strong leader who solves problems, and there is not a trace of the idea that there is something wrong with the system as such. It is worth quoting a longer excerpt:

To what extent people draw up their ideas from fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that most people are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth, and that from this point of view the worst books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life. [...] Here is the stuff that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with it they are absorbing a set of beliefs that would be regarded as hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party. All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are unimportant comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern

4 that will last forever. Considering who owns these papers, it is difﬁcult to believe that this is unintentional. Of the twelve papers I have been discussing [...] seven are the property of the Amalgamated Press, which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more than a hundred different papers. The Gem and Magnet, therefore, are closely linked up with the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times. This in itself would be enough to rouse certain suspicions, even if it were not obvious that the stories in boys’ weeklies were politically vetted. So it appears that if you need a fantasy-life in which you travel to Mars and ﬁght lions bare-handed (and what boy doesn’t?), you can only have it by delivering yourself, mentally, to people like Lord Camrose.

Orwell proceeds to raise an interesting question: Why is there no such thing as a boys’ paper with a lefty spin? After recalling the contents of a pamphlet handed to him by an ‘optimistic person,’ he continues:

Inevitably, such a paper would either consist of dreary up-lift or it would be under Communist inﬂuence and given over to adulation of Soviet Russia; in either case no normal boy would ever look at it. [...] At this moment, therefore, a paper with a ‘left’ slant and at the same time likely have an appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something beyond hoping for. But it does not follow that it is impossible. [...] In the last year of the Spanish monarchy there was a large output of left-wing novelettes, some of them evidently of anarchist origin. [...] In get-up and style they were very similar to the English four-penny novelette, except that their inspiration was ‘left’. If, for instance, a story described police pursuing anarchists through the mountains, it would be from the point of the anarchists and not the police.

It is not difﬁcult to guess (as Pynchon himself says about Orwell) that Pynchon has read Orwell’s essay. If not before, he would have done so while preparing his introduction to the new edition of 1984. Pynchon’s introduction, published in 2003, ends with this passage about a photograph of Eric Blair with his adopted son, Richard:

Winston Smith “believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945 [...]”. Richard Blair was born May 14, 1944. 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. 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.

Against the Day is an attempt ‘to do whatever must be done’, in the domain of ﬁction and along the lines suggested by Orwell in the essay on boys’ weeklies. Pynchon means to intervene, politically, in the history of popular imagination, to provide it with some of the suppressed details. Instead of encouraging the leadership principle, he has a brigade of fairly autonomous characters. Instead of sheriffs and deputies, he has an entire family of anarcho-syndicalist miners and describes the event in which many in their community are massacred by hired men and the National Guard. There are very smart and independent women, there are politically active nerds, there is food, drink, drugs, and no shortage of sex in various positions and combinations.

5 In this regard, Pynchon’s intervention is successful. Into the world of genre stereotypes he has introduced ‘dirty-realistic’ details that illustrate the bleak social background of the heroes. They are still planetary swashbucklers, detectives, students at Oxford and Yale, poker players and gun slingers, Tom and Huckleberry in a futuristic balloon—as the rules of the adventure story seem to require—but at the same time at least some of them are the children of murdered union organizers, the offspring of that other, ‘invisible’ America, in which poverty is law. They have a sense of class solidarity and will not forget the violence done to workers and miners. They are aware of the anarchist tradition (Victor Serge makes an appearance in the novel, more as a signal to the reader than as an element of the story proper). They are slowly discovering that it is very difficult, most likely impossible, to run an empire abroad and have a genuine republic at home. I think this is truly admirable, and should not be overlooked. But there is a literary price to pay and one must also consider the question of whether Pynchon’s approach is even close to being worth it. He is certainly not the only author who has toyed with genre clichés. Since popular representations are real in his novel, Pynchon must take into account a hundred or so years of incessant contributions to this bizarre archive. That is one of the difficulties into which he got himself when he adopted a strategy based on the logic of Back to the Future 3. The temporal confusion required to intervene retroactively in the history of genre representations forces him to open the door to an unruly bunch of previous and ongoing interventions. And there is a real mess out there. Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan have in the meantime made guest appearances on Star Trek. The popularity of the Edisonade, a kind of science-fiction story of the young inventor Electric Bob and an unusual trip to (say) another planet, depended crucially on the status Edison, who has now been replaced by Tesla; Edisonades have been replaced by stories in the vein of With Tesla on Mars; there is even a comic book entitled The Five Fists of Science, in which Twain and Tesla fight against Edison. The subgenre known as steam- punk specializes in a fictional history of the Victorian era, where there are flying steam engines, hydraulic computers and (it has probably been done) coal-powered cyborgs. This is sometimes combined with other popular genres, e.g. Western, resulting in stuff like Wild Wild West. In order to accommodate all these variations and timeframes, Pynchon reaches for yet another genre-writing tool: the concept of the multiverse, which has been popularized and employed to similar ends in the numerous books of Michael Moorcock, one of the founders of steam-punk and the author of stories about a ‘metatemporal’ detective. Scientific merit of the notion of the multiverse is of no consequence here. It functions as a convenient ‘scientific’ excuse for the doubling of characters entailed by a general spatiotemporal jum- ble. But Moorcock himself is of some interest, not only because his literary strategies are comparable to those of Against the Day. Like Pynchon, though in a decidedly public way, Moorcock straddles the gap between the alternative and the mainstream. He is rooted in an alternative culture from which he draws credentials while receiving praise from the highest institutions of the literary system. Two of Moorcock’s novels have been shortlisted for the most prestigious literary awards in the UK, and rumor has it that he did not get the Booker simply because it had to go to The Satanic Verses that year, for obvious reasons. His c.v. otherwise illustrates the mainstream’s idea of an outcast: a rock and blues musician, author of epic romances and of espionage, historical and fantasy novels (sometimes within a single book). As a young man he wrote episodes of the Tarzan comic and earned a living writing serials about the

6 detective Sexton Blake (mentioned by Orwell in his essay). He was also an editor of the British magazine New Worlds, which published some of Pynchon’s stories. Moorcock has written in the fantasy genre, but he is an unsparing critic of it too. From an ‘Orwellian’ standpoint, fantasy writing is guilty of colonizing the imagination by prof- fering the figures of heroes who never work for a living and forever demonstrate to the reader that resistance is possible only in an unspecified future, in a mystical past, in a par- allel universe, or in the depths of outer space, but not in the here and now. Indeed, a dime novel based on Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed, in which a courageous saleswoman is trying to organize her Walmart coworkers, is not likely to appear: every schoolboy knows that it is just too fantastic. Moorcock’s objection is not so different from Orwell’s, though his judgments and his style are somewhat less restrained. This is evident already from the title of his essay ‘Epic Pooh’, in which he undertakes a sharp stylistic and political analysis popular fantasy literature, both for children and for adults. The straw men are Tolkien, Lewis and a longish array of other conservative writers. The Lord of the Rings is basically Winnie the Pooh elevated to the status of an epic, an infantile and stupid book that mythologizes the English pastorale, celebrates bourgeois moderation, and propagates Tory values. The popularity of this book is for Moorcock one of the symptoms of Thatcherism and of the demise of the British middle class, which would rather withdraw into a dreamy and romanticized form of false consciousness. Orwell was concerned primarily with adventure stories; he thought it possible, in principle, to give them a lefty spin. Moorcock, similarly, believes that fantasy writing need not be a conservatively biased escapism. Imagination should not be jettisoned on ideological grounds, Zhdanov-style, but the fantastic element must somehow be framed by the carnival of urban reality. Moorcock ends his essay on an alarming note: ‘I grew up in the world where Joyce was regarded as the best writer in the English language. [...] Is it a symptom of our dumbed-down times that The Lord of the Rings threatens to displace Ulysses as the exemplary book of the century?’ The point of bringing up Joyce is that he (like Moorcock?) mercilessly mocks bourgeois moderation and mythologizes urban experience in all of its forms. One might wonder whether it is somehow incongruous to celebrate the urbanity of Joyce by invoking nostalgic tropes—golden age of the past versus our dumbed-down times—that would be appreciated by T. S. Eliot and the agrarians. But we must concentrate on Joyce: a brilliant writer who (like Moorcock?) was too much for the Anglophone mainstream of his day. Joyce (unlike Moorcock) could not quite cash in on that, but it only increases his ‘street cred’. Ulysses was tried for obscenity in the US, and even Virginia Woolf is supposed to have remarked on the book’s indecency. Equally important, Joyce was a lefty but not a Soviet puppet: over there he was regarded as a decadent and, oddly enough, formalist author. So Moorcock sees in Joyce, Ulysses in particular, a way out of the conservative rut of genre writing. That is the theory. It sounds pretty good. Indeed, Moorcock has launched an entire space program in order to perform this theory-laden operation. In practice, the results are uneven. Here is an example. The hero of one of Moorcock’s multiply connected serials, Colonel Pyatnitsky (‘Colonel Pyat’), a genius inventor and an ultraconservative bigot unhealthily obsessed with his Ukrainian Cossack ancestry, already as a boy constructs his first flying machine, at the age of fifteen knocks up a servant, at sixteen is addicted to cocaine and completes a doctorate in something, and at seventeen befriends Russian princes (whom he admires) and Russian

7 revolutionaries (whom he despises). For a while he flirts with Pan-Slavism but secretely takes the side of the chauvinist Cossacks. He successfully plays the role of a double or triple agent, but the communists arrest him. Fortunately, an old acquaintance, the mother of a character in another serial written by Moorcock, gets him out of trouble: she happens to be dating Trotsky at the moment. Yet the adventurous Pyat does not leave it well alone, and constructs a laser cannon that he intends to sell to the French. He therefore travels to Italy, where he befriends some fascists and naturally gets to meet the highest functionaries who send him to Germany as Mussolini’s personal emissary. In Germany he lives in the villa of Ernst Rohm,¨ who in turn sends Pyat to see Hitler, because, as it turns out, the Fuhrer¨ wishes to engage in some scheise porn. Pyat obliges, puts on a fetching dress and a pair of Manolo Blahniks, and with this we finally come to the climax of Pyat’s four-volume romp across Europe, written in first person singular: ‘I piss in Hitler’s mouth [...] I shit on his forehead.’ That’s okay. But what about urban experience? What became of Ulysses and of Joyce as the model of the best writer in the English language? Well, Pyat lived in Odessa, Saint Petersburg, Rome, Paris, and ultimately settled in London, where he related the story of his life to Moorcock. That’s it. And I am really digging here. As for the antifascist moments, we might as well go back to Orwell. His essay on boys’ weeklies includes relevant and interesting comments on the political activism of American ‘mags’ (Moorcock lives in the US, possibly in Texas):

When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion in America, it was interesting to see how promptly ‘anti-Fascism’ was adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank Mags. One magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete story, ‘When Hell Came to America’, in which the agents of a ‘blood-maddened European dictator’ are trying to conquer the U.S.A. with death-rays and invisible aeroplanes. There is the frankest appeal to sadism, scenes in which the Nazis tie bombs to women’s backs and ﬂing them off heights to watch them blown to pieces in mid-air, others in which they tie naked girls together by their hair and prod them with knives to make them dance, etc., etc. The editor comments solemnly on all this, and uses it as a plea for tightening up restrictions against immigrants.

And here are some ads that Orwell ﬁnds on another page of the same paper:

‘LIVES OF THE HOTCHA CHORUS GIRLS. Reveals all the intimate secrets and fascinating pas- times of the famous Broadway Hotcha girls. NOTHING IS OMITTED. Price 10 c.’ ‘HOW TO LOVE. 10 c.’ ‘FRENCH PHOTO RING. 25c.’ ‘NAUGHTY NUDIES TRANSFERS.’ From the outside of the glass you see a beautiful girl, innocently dressed. Turn it around and look through the glass and oh! what a difference! Set of 3 transfers 25c.’

Against the Day has similar difﬁculties. The theory—the idea of an intervention in the system of genre representations, along the lines discussed by Orwell—is ﬁne. In practice, just like we saw with Moorcock, the author’s love of the carnivalesque and his program- matic emulation of ‘Yank mags’ simply cancel out the intended subversion. Should Orwell’s ghost get a chance to review Pynchon’s latest novel, he would have little reason to retract the comment made in 1940 about boys’ magazines: ‘occasionally one may come across a realistic description of, say, work in a coal-mine, but in all probability it will only be there as the background of some lurid adventure.’

8 Pynchon clearly does not write only to please the ghost of the old man. According to Harold Bloom’s theory of ‘the anxiety of influence’, for what it’s worth, authors in fact (sub- consciously?) strive for the exact opposite of pleasing some mighty predecessor. On the other hand, their Oedipal urges are not directed at the figure of an admired but somehow lesser contemporary. Perhaps for this reason—or who knows why, really—Against the Day ends up infelicitously close to Moorcock’s literary sensibility. Let me try to give you a basic idea. World Fair, Chicago, 1893. The festival of national pride, global progress and nineteenth- century technophilia is seen from the Google Earth perspective, through the eyes of a gang of scientifically inclined boys. In the name of science, technology, and a mysterious boy- scout-like organization called the Chums of Chance, the young airmen perform various measurements and reconnaissance jobs, test the Hollow Earth Hypothesis and carry out research on the refractory properties of Iceland spar. Down on the planet’s surface, the somber carnival of History is in the making. A Chicago detective is assigned to the security detail of Franz Ferdinand, or rather of his caricature, who is visiting the World Fair. F 2 soon gets bored and heads back to Vienna, and the detective is reassigned to watch union organizers and anarchists, first in Chicago, then in Colorado. Although many of them are new immigrants and can barely speak English, they nevertheless work hard, live in misery, and are helping to build America. The detective therefore develops a guarded sympathy for them and, to his surprise, realizes that class solidarity can transgress ethnic differences. Hence he becomes the target of Pinkerton’s men, who throw a stick or two of dynamite in his direction. The explosion somehow transports him to London, where he joins a secret society which several hundred pages later disappoints him; he returns to the US, moves to Hollywood, and discovers magical properties of photography and film. Meanwhile, the youngest son of a Colorado miner chats with Nikola Tesla about elec- tromagnetic fields, and Tesla is impressed. The boy is on his way to Yale, and then on to Gottingen,¨ where he is to study mathematics on a scholarship provided by the com- pany whose owner ordered the murder of the boy’s father. It is not entirely clear whether the lad graduated from high school, which might explain why he does not quite excel in the German university system. But being in principle interested, as boys often are, in both weaponry and quaternions, he soon stumbles upon a secret and powerful quaternion weapon actively sought after by all the intelligence services of the world and any number of shady organizations. His life is in danger. He relocates to Belgium, where he befriends Victor Serge and survives an unusual assassination attempt in a mayo factory. Continually on the run from the Afrikaner mercenaries employed by an insane American industrialist, our hero gives the weapon to an attractive Japanese mathematics student and sets off toward Mongolia and Tibet. His older brothers (meanwhile) are in pursuit of their father’s murderer. (To be continued.) In an intercontinental and metatemporal chase that ranges from the Wild West to the Exotic East—the properly exotic begins in the Balkans, somewhere between Anthony Hope’s Ruritania and Shakespeare’s Illyria—the reader is exposed to a fascinating array of alchemists, mathematicians, engineers, inventors, magicians, professors, shamans, char- latans, actresses, saleswomen, savvy little girls, tailors who make silent dresses, dwarves, telepathic lizards, guys who use the New York subway as a time machine, poker players, gun slingers, bomb throwers, wealthy men and their enforcers, whores with hearts of gold, lustful society women, Mexican and other revolutionaries, depressed Scandina- vians, diggers of Alpine tunnels (assorted nationalities), Venetian glass-cutters, seekers of

9 the Shambala, theorists of the Tunguska Event, doppelgangers,¨ conspirators of all kinds, princes, princesses, Oxford seductresses more fatal than Zuleika Dobson herself, psychic painters, traders in coffee and guns, visitors from the future, ukulele masters (a Pynchon favorite), Pythagorean mystics, Bulgarian priests, Belgian and Italian anarchists, Albanian highway thugs, Macedonian nationalists, German barons, barmen of Ulan-Bator, Viennese sadists, Balkan pirates, a well-endowed uskok who announces his ejaculation by shouting Svr ˇsavam! (two words?), British spies with polyvalent sexual orientations, and a coal- miner’s daughter intent on urgently experiencing the beauty of double penetration. Here and there one also encounters talking fleas and a cool pooch that reads Henry James but does not speak. (To be continued.) And so it goes on for a thousand pages of densely set text. It feels like being in an arthouse cinema that is simultaneously projecting its entire collection of midnight movies and cult classics—For a Fistful of Dynamite, El Topo, Freaks, Orgazmo, Amazon Women on the Moon, all the early works of John Waters—but when you try to run out of the room, you realize that the exists are fake and that you have been sentenced to a very long time in a postmodern sort of inferno. There is Mata Hari, busily explaining the Riemann Hypothesis to Lawrence of Arabia in an Ugro-Finnish language. There are Rosenkratz and Guildenstern, on the run from Shakespeare and Stoppard, hiding with Gilbert and Sullivan. Sexton Blake is proving to everyone in sight that Jack The Ripper and Franz Ferdinand’s top security guy are one and the same person. Sam Spade is steadfastly attempting to fart out The Divine Comedy in Morse code. Wild Bill Hickok is taking a dump on the forehead of the giggling Kaiser Wilhelm, Batman is bonking Bambi, Spiderman is going medieval on Batman, and Sailor Moon is inserting a rotating set of four linearly independent dildos into Jessica Rabbit’s impressive decolletage. Meanwhile, the crew of the space-train Enterprise, commanded by Captain Quentin Tarantino and supported by Twain, Tesla, and Tarzan, is continuously reciting the first forty-seven volumes of the collected works of Michael Moorcock... Did I go too far? Well indeed. There is some subversive potential in popular culture: that, I gather, is what Orwell was trying to say. However, it is very difficult to imagine that infinite lampoonery is the best way to actualize such potential. The ‘postmodern’ ironic consciousness, so called, recommends itself as a kind of healthy populism, a natural remedy for literary snobbery among other things. It can be that, perhaps. Unfortunately, it often functions as a special kind of elitism and engenders its own form of snobbery and class distinction. The picture of Frederic Jameson trying to rouse the masses comes to mind. Had Pynchon been more serious about his subversive plans, he would have produced a different novel. I cannot say what it would have looked like. Maybe it would not read like a Pynchon novel at all. So what. Authors are not brands. Or maybe they are, now? At any rate, I am certain that what Pynchon seems to have imagined—or Moorcock, for that matter—can be done, because it has been done. Pynchon himself came quite close to doing that in Vineland. If that novel is too short to count as an ‘American epic’, then take, for instance, Don DeLillo’s Underworld. It is also an ‘historical’ novel: a half-century panorama of the US in the Cold War era. DeLillo also relies on a correlation between history and popular culture, though in a subtler and (I have to say it) more literary way: the narrative is framed by a micro-history of a baseball obtained during a game played on the day of the first Soviet nuclear test, and the monologs of the countercultural icon Lenny Bruce have an important role in the book. One cannot say that

10 this digressive novel of 800+ pages, heavy not only in the physical sense, ingratiates itself to some bourgeois idea of moderation. Yet it does not leave the reader with the impression that the nuclear bomb is something akin to a piano falling from a tall building in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Pynchon, on the other hand, chose to side with Moorcock, to produce another unbridled carnival of the fantastic and the referential, a parody of genre. The result, inevitably, is a parody of a parody. But parody squared is still a parody; nothing more. At the end of the novel, the airship boys meet their female counterparts who are equipped with mechanical wings, and together they fly off in the direction of a heavenly kingdom. The earth-bound reader is left with a few unpleasant questions. For whom is meant a glorified dime novel, published by a major conglomerate and costing close to fifty Canadian dollars? Does the existence of such a book demonstrate that Bazooka Joe, the paradigmatic stooge of the chewing-gum industry, has won the day after all? The best I can say is that one never knows with Pynchon.