Burget, Jasper 2018 English Thesis

Title: "When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It": Political Ontology and Ontological Narrative in Pynchon's Against the Day Advisor: Christian Thorne Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No

“WHEN YOU COME TO A FORK IN THE ROAD, TAKE IT”: POLITICAL ONTOLOGY AND ONTOLOGICAL NARRATIVE IN PYNCHON’S AGAINST THE DAY

by

JASPER BURGET

Christian Thorne, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

APRIL 16, 2018

Acknowledgements

Above all I would like to thank my advisor, Christian Thorne, for his invaluable assistance with this project. I could not have asked for a better adviser, and I gained more from our meetings than I can possibly say with words. I would also like to thank: my readers, Anita

Sokolsky and Stephen Tifft, for approaching my excessively convoluted arguments with such enthusiasm; Gage McWeeny, for his guidance in all things honors over the past year; Stephen

Fix, for sharing with me his contagious excitement about Pynchon’s fiction; Andrew Cornell, for pointing me towards helpful sources in field of anarchist literary theory; my fellow honors students, for their helpful criticisms and examples; and all of the incredible professors and teachers whose have influenced this project in ways both obvious and obscure. Of this last category, a few deserve special mention: Chris Pye, Anjuli Raza Kolb, Walter Johnston, Bojana

Mladenovic, Paul Scott, and Andy Spear. I especially want to thank Professor Sokolsky for all of her guidance in matters intellectual and otherwise. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to my family and friends for all of their support—especially to Eric Muscosky for asking such challenging questions, to my father for all of his encouragement, to my mother for being the only person I know who read my entire thesis for fun, and to the lovely Lily Sorrentino for putting up with me while this project took over my life for almost an entire year.

Air, and ye elements the eldest birth Of nature’s womb, that in quaternion run Perpetual circle, multiform; and mix And nourish all things, let your ceaseless change Vary to our great maker still new praise.

— Milton, Paradise Lost, V.180-184

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: What was he thinking? ………….…… 1

Pynchon’s Politics .…………………...……………. 4

Pynchon’s Ontology …....………………………… 25

Pynchon’s Narrative ……………………………… 47

Bibliography ……....……………………………… 67

INTRODUCTION: WHAT WAS HE THINKING?

Since the publication of Vineland in 1990, scholars and critics have increasingly turned their attention from Thomas Pynchon’s stylistic bravado to his serious engagement with history and politics. In 1988, Steven Weisenburger published A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion, in which he provides page-by-page annotations to Gravity’s Rainbow, explaining its elaborate puns and obscure references. To read Pynchon’s novel alongside Weisenburger’s Companion is to enter into a playful postmodern daydream in which the reader becomes lost in the author’s giddy erudition. In 2013, the same Steven Weisenburger, with Herman Luc, published a book titled

Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom, in which the authors locate Gravity’s Rainbow firmly within the radical political tradition of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Between 1988 and 2013, in other words, Weisenburger’s Pynchon metamorphosed from postmodern trickster to political theorist.

This is not an isolated phenomenon, as a brief perusal of other major works of Pynchon criticism post-Vineland will attest.1 This is not to say that there were no scholarly treatments of Pynchon’s politics prior to 1990, nor that more recent Pynchon criticism is single-mindedly political; even so, there has been a pronounced shift in the scholarly discourse on Pynchon in the last two and a half decades.

Lacking in this new scholarly engagement with Pynchon’s politics has been a satisfactory account of the relationship between his politics and his distinctive literary style. Many scholarly accounts of the politics of Pynchon’s fiction have essentially treated Pynchon as a political philosopher who has almost inexplicably chosen the postmodern novel as the medium for communicating his ideas. Martin Paul Eve’s otherwise excellent book Pynchon and Philosophy:

Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno is in this respect representative. While Eve offers a

1 See, for example, Samuel Thomas’s Pynchon and the Political (2007) and Sean Carswell’s Occupy Pynchon: Politics after Gravity’s Rainbow (2017).

1 compelling account of Pynchon’s political thought in relation to the titular philosophers, he engages primarily with the political content of Pynchon’s novels, largely indifferent to the ways in which form, too, carries a politics. Of course, the many overtly political asides and parables in

Pynchon’s fiction are important; indeed, they are central to my own interpretations of his work.

What I want to suggest, however, is that Pynchon scholarship ought to offer not only an analysis of Pynchon’s political commitments and stylistic hallmarks, but also of their interrelationship.

An excellent opportunity for testing this approach presents itself in Against the Day,

Pynchon’s enormous and under-appreciated 2006 novel. Unlike Pynchon’s other long and ambitious novels, 1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow and 1997’s Mason & Dixon, Against the Day was not met with widespread critical acclaim. The common theme in early reviews of the novel is confusion. One reviewer writes, “Pynchon must have set out to make his readers dizzy and, in the process, become a little dizzy himself” (Menand). Another is far harsher, writing 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. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex” (Kakutani). Even critics who recommend Against the Day often admit to being baffled by it; one otherwise favorable review describes the novel’s prose as an “overwhelming, unstable” form of “disconnected pointillism” that “induces memory loss”

(Cape). The general critical response to Against the Day, whether positive or negative, is perhaps best summed up in one reviewer’s incredulous question: “What was he thinking?” (Menand).

My aim in the pages that follow will be to provide an answer to that difficult question.

The first chapter charts the evolution of Pynchon’s political thinking, from the critique of empire in V. and the abstract anarchism of Gravity’s Rainbow to the more concrete social criticism and

2 anarchist politics of his later fiction. I argue that Against the Day is the novel in which Pynchon again takes up the positive political project he began in Gravity’s Rainbow, this time giving more serious attention to historical methods of resistance and to the ethics of political violence. The second chapter attempts to construct a bridge between Pynchon’s explicit political concerns and his narrative style by examining the radical political ontology that he develops in his fiction. I identify two key tenets of this ontology: a rejection of the distinction between the actual and the potential, and a rejection of the boundary between subject and object. The third chapter traces the evolution of Pynchon’s approach to narrative before arguing that the method many critics find so off-putting in Against the Day is the result of Pynchon’s remarkably ambitious attempt to give literary form to his political and ontological commitments.

3 PYNCHON’S POLITICS

1. The Kingdom of Death

Too often ignored in discussions of Pynchon’s politics is one of the most persistent preoccupations of his fiction: empire. This may be the result of the (often justified) stereotype of

(white, male) American literature as essentially insular in its concerns. In a 2014 review of a

Denis Johnson novel, Olufemi Terry writes, “I’ve got nothing against Roth and Pynchon, but, for all these authors’ playing with form and style, they’ve scarcely ever strayed in their work from western milieus.” As a claim about Pynchon, this is simply wrong. In V., Mason & Dixon,

Gravity’s Rainbow, and Against the Day, Pynchon makes lengthy visits to Southern Africa, the

Middle East, Latin America, and Central Asia. One can certainly ask whether Pynchon is writing in a neo-colonial mode, but to accuse his fiction of insularity is almost absurd. It is odd, then, that the perception of Pynchon as a parochial writer, which is hardly limited to Terry, has been so little altered by the growing scholarly interest in his politics. It is not that no one has noticed

Pynchon’s obsession with empire.2 Instead, what seems to be missing is an account of Pynchon’s politics that centers his persistent critique of imperialism. Without such an account, Pynchon’s fiction is in danger of appearing to reproduce a certain imperialist perspective in which empire, when viewed from it metropolitan center, appears to be a peripheral concern.

Despite the (in)famous opacity of Pynchon’s texts, it is certainly possible to extract from them a coherent critique of imperialism. While the particular argument I am going to outline is most legible in V., Pynchon’s first and most explicitly anti-imperialist novel, is also comes across

2 Particularly compelling critical treatments of Pynchon’s engagement with empire have come in chapters from John McClure’s Late Imperialist Romance (1994) and Keith Booker’s Literature and Domination (1993) as well as in articles by Ronald Cooley (1993) and Douglas Ivison (1997).

4 fairly clearly in Gravity’s Rainbow and remains very much alive in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. I will summarize it in the form of four closely related theses:

1. For Pynchon, imperialist violence is not simply an economic or political expedient; it also provides a space for the release of everything that is repressed in the bourgeois metropolis.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon writes:

Wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. . . Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. (GR 317)

In Pynchon’s view, colonies serve the needs not only of European capital, but also of the

“European soul.” Lawrence Wolfley provides a helpful framework for understanding this analysis of imperialism in an article tracing Norman O. Brown’s influence on Gravity’s

Rainbow. In the view Wolfley attributes to Brown and to Pynchon, modern society is founded on the repression of natural human desires, and this repression results in a subconscious societal death wish (875). Colonies allow this repressed desire for self-annihilation to be redirected at colonized peoples, at a safe distance from the metropolitan center at which it is ultimately but unknowingly aimed. In V., Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon, the colony is where one goes to play at being a spy, to experiment with transgressive sexual practices, to engage in acts of brutal violence, and even to seek spiritual transcendence. In Pynchon’s fiction, empire is

“Europe’s escape from itself” (Harris 209).

2. As a result, projects of personal emancipation tend to reproduce imperialist violence.

One chapter in V. deals with the German genocide of the Herero in what is now Namibia between 1904-1907. Pynchon describes the feeling of transcendence experienced by the German soldier Foppl when he murders a black captive:

5 It finally meant something different: […] different from the sense of function and the delightful, powerless languor that are both part of following a military order that’s filtered like spring water down countless levels before reaching you […] It had only to do with the destroyer and the destroyed, and the act that united them, and it had never been that way before. (V. 286-287)

Foppl only escapes bureaucratic imperialism by personifying and purifying its central principle.

The “delightful, powerless languor” experienced in submission to the imperialist death machine and the almost spiritual pleasure experienced in the unmediated act of mastery appear entirely different to Foppl, but the only thing that has changed is his position vis-à-vis imperialism’s dehumanizing violence. This is an extreme case, but it should make us suspicious of any attempt to escape the administered society by venturing into its periphery. John McClure argues that what sets Pynchon apart from authors like Conrad is his refusal to separate the “political romances” such authors criticize from the “individual spiritual romances” they celebrate (153).

In V., Pynchon not only condemns proto-fascist violence, but also British spy fiction, “Baedeker” tourism, Jesuit proselytizing, and Orientalist art. V. is a survey of imperialism at its Edwardian apogee; Pynchon catalogues apparent departures from the administered society of the metropolis and shows how these departures merely displace that society’s foundational dehumanization onto colonized peoples.

3. For Pynchon, this displacement of the death drive is unsustainable. Imperialist violence eventually returns to the metropolis and the perpetrators of imperialism become its unsuspecting victims. This is perhaps most evident in the fate of V.’s enigmatic title character. In 1899, V. looks on as the Italian army suppresses a Venezuelan riot in Florence: “Inviolate and calm, she watched the spasms of wounded bodies, the fair of violent death, framed and staged, it seemed, for her alone” (V. 224). By 1922, she is joining Foppl in his reenactments of the Herero genocide, which include torturing and murdering his black servants. Throughout the novel she is

6 clearly a symbol and agent of imperialist violence. But at the same time, V. steadily loses her own humanity, literally replacing many of her body parts with objects. After she becomes trapped in the wreckage of a bombed-out building on Malta during World War II, a group of children kill her by tearing away these objects—Pynchon describes her death as a “disassembly”

(V. 381). Imperialist Europe ultimately dehumanizes itself, leading to its self-destruction in the

World Wars. In Gravity’s Rainbow, we learn that Lieutenant Weissmann, who appears in

Namibia engaged in a sadomasochistic relationship with V., has become Captain Blicero, a death-obsessed SS officer. According to Enzian, a Herero who was involved in a sexual relationship with Weissmann in Namibia, “The Blicero I loved was a very young man, in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance” (GR 660). By 1945, Blicero has entered “his final madness” and there is “no humanity left in his eyes” (GR 486). The repressed death wish can no longer be deferred; imperialist violence returns to annihilate the metropolis.

4. Empire cannot be contained; it is, for Pynchon, the defining feature of modernity, both before and after the Second World War. In V., Pynchon makes this point indirectly by developing two narrative threads side by side. So far, we have dealt exclusively with the

“historical” chapters, which follow V. through Alexandria, Florence, Namibia, Paris, and Malta between 1898 and 1942, and in which Pynchon analyzes and condemns the pathology of empire.

The other chapters in V. follow a group of sailors and beatniks in New York City in the 1950s, dealing primarily with alienation in capitalist society, and particularly with the objectification of women. By interspersing these chapters with the chapters in which he develops his explicit critique of imperialism, Pynchon calls attention both to the echoes of imperialist dehumanization in the postwar culture of commodification, and to the erasure of the imperialist violence on which the postwar world system was founded. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon is more explicit.

7 Near the end of the novel, he provides a prophecy for the postwar world in the form of a reading of Blicero’s tarot: “If you're wondering where he's gone, look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost certainly there. Look high, not low.” (GR 749). Some critics have read this simply as a reference to former Nazi scientists who worked for the United States during the Cold War, but Pynchon’s point is far more general. Blicero is not a historical relic; instead, he represents the foundational ideology of the postwar global order: “His future card, the card of what will come, is The World”

(GR 749). Blicero’s inhuman empire—what Pynchon repeatedly calls “the Kingdom of Death”— emerged from the Second World War unscathed, or even strengthened (V. 456, GR 722).

Fascism and imperialism live on in modern science and global capitalism. As one character puts it to the caged rats in a behaviorist research facility: “I would set you free if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all” (GR 230). The dehumanizing violence of imperialism—“that special Death the West had invented”—has become the general principle of the postwar social order (GR 722).

Pynchon’s early critique of imperialism remains largely intact in Against the Day. Early in the novel, one of the characters describes an arctic expedition that uncovers a mysterious meteorite. When they return with it to an unnamed metropolis that is clearly New York City, it turns out to be a malignant entity that unleashes enormous destruction in a scene obviously meant to recall the September 11 terrorist attacks. Prior to joining the arctic expedition,

Fleetwood spends time in South Africa where he kills a black African in a scene remarkably reminiscent of V. While he feels a “queer euphoria” at the time, Fleetwood is later haunted by his

8 act, and seeks to escape into a landscape where there would be “no gold, no diamonds, no women, no dream-inducing smoke, no coolies, no blacks, though possibly the odd Eskimo. And the purity, the geometry, the cold” (AtD 169-170). The expedition is yet another imperialist attempt to empty the world, and its violence ultimately backfires on the metropolis.

2. The Zone

V., as a political text, is essentially a work of social criticism; Gravity’s Rainbow is more ambitious. While reiterating (and expanding upon) the critique of modernity developed in its predecessor, Gravity’s Rainbow also offers its readers something like a positive political project.

At the heart of its politics is the concept of “the Zone,” which refers specifically to occupied

Germany (the setting for the majority of the novel), but also more generally to any space opened by a radical rupture in the status quo.

The status of the Zone in Gravity’s Rainbow is a point of contention among critics. For some, the Zone is essentially dystopian. Drawing on Arendt’s account of statelessness in The

Origins of Totalitarianism, Weisenburger finds “the camp-space and its modes of violence haunting the novel’s foreground in zones or spaces where invisible sovereign agencies have suspended law, where war’s demands have been used to invoke a profound anomie whose instrumental purpose is the increased production of bare life” (“In the Zone” 103-104). The crucial moment in the text for Weisenburger is the lengthy and highly detailed passage in which

Pynchon describes the massive migrations that took place in the aftermath of the war:

The nationalities are on the move. It is a great frontierless streaming out here […] Numb, indifferent to all momenta but the deepest, the instability too far below their itchy feet to give a shape to, white wrists and ankles incredibly wasted poking from their striped prison-camp pajamas, footsteps light as waterfowl’s in this inland dust, caravans of Gypsies, axles or linchpins failing, horses dying, families leaving their vehicles beside the roads for others to come live in a night, a day, over the white hot Autobahns, trains full of their own hanging off the cars that lumber overhead […] So the populations move,

9 across the open meadow, limping, marching, shuffling, carried, hauling along the detritus of an order, a European and bourgeois order they don’t yet know is destroyed forever. (GR 550-551).

This is clearly a portrait of humanity reduced to its minimal conditions of existence, or what

Weisenburger, drawing on Agamben, calls “bare life.” The fate of the novel’s main character,

Tyrone Slothrop, can be read along these lines. By the time he makes his way into the Zone,

Slothrop is stateless in the most conventional sense: abandoned by the United States and its allies, he has no legal identity, and belongs to none of the emerging factions that populate the

Zone. As he wanders (and is pursued) through occupied Germany, Slothrop seems to become more and more lost, until he disappears from the novel’s narrative and is “Scattered all over the

Zone” (GR 712). In Weisenburger’s view, Slothrop is “just another instance of naked life to be

‘broken down […] and scattered’” (“In the Zone” 107). Other critics agree: when he “leaves behind his national identity” Slothrop “is disconnected from social relations and […] disintegrates” (Best and Kellner 45). For these critics, Slothrop disappears because he finds himself in a place where everything that makes life more than a matter of bare existence has been stripped away. The Zone into which Slothrop disintegrates is reimagined as a “camp-space” defined by extreme atomization and precarity. The primary difference between Arendt and

Pynchon according to this interpretation is that while the former sees statelessness primarily as a precursor to fascism, the latter identifies it as an essential element of the post-war order. In this revision of Arendt, Pynchon echoes Benjamin’s famous claim, “The condition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (257).

Expanding on this idea, Agamben writes, “Political power as we know it […] always founds itself—in the last instance—on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of the forms of life” (Means Without End 4). The state establishes the condition of statelessness and

10 reincorporates it as its own founding principle. The Zone, in Weisenburger’s Agambenian reading of Gravity’s Rainbow, is defined less by the absence of the state than by the reduction of the state to its essential, unconditional violence.

Other critics are far more optimistic about the political possibilities offered by the Zone.

McClure suggests that Gravity’s Rainbow traces an “escape from the rationalized power structures of the West into the temporarily unmapped spaces of the Zone” where “transgressive practices are the order of the day” (169). Another critic echoes these sentiments in writing of the

“magic and openness that the anarchy of the Zone offers” (Dewey 166). There is certainly ample textual evidence for this more cheerful interpretation of the novel. Early in the novel, we encounter a rousing panegyric for the “unmapped” and “open” Zone:

In ordinary times, the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can’t be reversed, not by ordinary means. Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times . . . this War—this incredible War—just for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that’s prevailed in Germany for a thousand years. Wiped it clean. Opened It […] In the openness of the German Zone, our hope is limitless” (GR 265).

Here the “frontierless streaming” of the Zone becomes the condition of a sort of anarchist paradise, or at least as an “opening” in the fight against “the center.” This vision resonates throughout Gravity’s Rainbow: another character will later wonder whether “maybe for a little while, all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up” (GR 556). In a passage that offers something of a counterpoint to Weisenburger’s reading of statelessness in the novel, Pynchon carefully describes the varied national origins of the refugees engaged in a wild orgy. Here, the breakdown of the nation state seems emancipatory. Rather than an absence of limitations on the exercise of sovereign power, this Zone is defined by the absence of any

11 sovereign power to limit the exercise of human freedom. Benjamin writes that once we recognize

“that the ‘state of emergency’ […] is not the exception but the rule,” it becomes “our task to bring about a real state of emergency” (257, my italics). For optimistic interpreters of Gravity’s

Rainbow, the Zone represents a “real state of emergency.” It nurtures what Agamben, drawing on Wittgenstein, calls “form-of-life,” by which he means “a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life” (Means

Without End 2-3). For Agamben, form-of-life is at the heart of a “coming politics” of statelessness: “emancipation” from the “division” between bare life and the forms that life takes would involve an “irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty” (Means Without End 8). If the

Zone offers a “real state of emergency” it is because statelessness in the Zone is not a matter of bare life subject to sovereign power, but rather involves an integrated form-of-life that resists sovereignty. Many critics have read Slothrop’s scattering as achieving the latter sort of statelessness. For McClure, Slothrop has found in a particular form of statelessness “a way of living in this world that would constitute redemption” (174). Another critic suggests that

Slothrop’s disappearance represents “the enactment of the anarchic visionary ideal” (Levine 75).

In this reading of the novel, Slothrop disintegrates because he has made statelessness into a way of life. Through his disappearing act, Slothrop achieves a degree of genuine freedom—a freedom made possible by the miraculous “openness” of the Zone.

Gravity’s Rainbow is a remarkably multivalent text, and it would be a mistake to read the

Zone only as a massive death camp or only as an anarchist utopia; the Zone is both of these things, and many others besides. With that said, it is imperative to recognize that any analysis of the Zone that fails to address Pynchon’s critique of imperialism will be woefully incomplete. If we look beyond the German Zone to Namibia, Central Asia, and the American frontier, we will

12 quickly find that “Zonal” openness is always preceded by imperialist violence. An Argentinian anarchist wistfully recalls how, “In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper. The pampas stretched as far as men could imagine, inexhaustible, fenceless” (GR 264).

Later, Pynchon undermines this romantic image when he describes “General Roca’s campaign to open the pampas by exterminating the people who lived there: turning the villages into labor camps, bringing more of the country under the control of Buenos Aires” (GR 387). In the

Argentinian pampas, the American West, the frontiers of Southern Africa, and the steppes and deserts of Central Asia, freedom from “the center” is made possible only through the violent clearing of space; a necessary condition for “openness” in Pynchon’s fiction is empire.

Of course, the German Zone is somewhat unique in that it opens up in the metropolitan heart of Europe rather than at the colonial periphery. Near the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, however, Pynchon makes it clear that, no less than its colonial counterparts, the German Zone is the product of imperialist violence. In a speech near the novel’s end, Blicero argues that the

German Zone represents a new stage in the imperialist project and explicitly associates the Zone with the Kingdom of Death: “In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death […] In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis” (GR 722). The Zone’s promise of freedom is an empty one; from the moment it is opened, it is already being colonized by the “order of Analysis and Death.” In one of the novel’s most ominous passages, Pynchon writes, “A State begins to take form in the stateless

German night, a State that spans oceans and surface politics, sovereign as the International or the

Church of Rome, and the Rocket is its soul […] He will never get further than the edge of this

13 meta-cartel which has made itself known tonight, this Rocket-state whose border he cannot cross. . . .” (GR 566). From the wreckage European nation state, the “meta-cartel” or “Rocket- state” emerges—“American Death” comes to occupy Europe, and the imperialist project continues under another name. The fatal flaw with a positive politics of the Zone is that it cannot prevent this re-colonization. The “open” space of the Zone is defenseless against the Kingdom of

Death. For Pynchon, a rupture that is originally opened through imperialist violence can only be sustained through further violence.

Pynchon’s later fiction reinforces this idea. In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon picks up where

Blicero’s speech left off, tracing the origins of the “American Death” that returns to occupy the

German Zone in Gravity’s Rainbow. The novel follows Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon as they survey the boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland, extending the reach of the

“order of Analysis and Death” westward. The most famous passage in Mason & Dixon is essentially a description of the opening and subsequent colonization of the American Zone:

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?— in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,— serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true […] Safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,— winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair. (M&D 345)

In this one passage, we have almost all of the key elements of Pynchon’s analysis of empire.

America is a Zonal space in which everything that is repressed under the “metropolitan

Wakefulness” of London or Paris can be safely relocated to the colonial frontier. But even as this frontier is pried open, it is being “seen and recorded, measur’d and tied in.” The Zone appears

14 and disappears as a result of imperialist violence; its assimilation back into “the Net-Work of

Points already known” is inevitable. What Britannia unmaps by night, she remaps by day.

For all of its emphasis on class conflict in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pynchon’s critique of imperialism remains intact and central in Against the

Day. Early in the novel, one character narrates an arctic expedition that uncovers a mysterious meteorite. When brought to an unnamed metropolis that is clearly New York City, the meteorite turns out to house a malignant entity that unleashes enormous destruction in a scene obviously meant to recall the September 11 terrorist attacks. Prior to joining the arctic expedition, its narrator spends time in South Africa where he kills a black African in a scene remarkably reminiscent of V. While he feels a “queer euphoria” at the time, he is later haunted by his act, and seeks to escape into a landscape where there would be “no gold, no diamonds, no women, no dream-inducing smoke, no coolies, no blacks […] And the purity, the geometry, the cold” (AtD

169-170). His is yet another imperialist attempt to empty the world: even as he flees from the colony, he is extending the domain of the “order of Analysis and Death.” At the heart of monopoly capitalism lies the original sin of empire.

3. Against the Day

Assessing Against the Day means understanding its place in Pynchon’s corpus. It is possible to divide up this corpus in a number of ways. We can draw a distinction between the lengthy, ambitious novels (V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day) and the shorter, less serious “California” novels (The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice) or

“detective” novels (The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge). Narrowing in on the “big” novels, we might think of Against the Day as an attempt to rewrite V.’s historical sections: the former begins in 1893 and ends around 1921, while the latter, with the exception of

15 one chapter set during World War II, take place between 1898 and 1922. Alternatively, we could agree with the critics of Against the Day who see it as little more than a rehashing of Mason &

Dixon.3 These are not bad ways of thinking about Against the Day, but they fail to illuminate its relationship to Pynchon’s political project, and can therefore only lead to an incomplete assessment of the novel. In order to make sense of Against the Day, we need to recognize two things about Pynchon’s fiction: (1) There is an “early” Pynchon and a “late” Pynchon. Over the seventeen years separating the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow and the publication of Vineland,

Pynchon’s politics underwent serious revision. To simplify things greatly, we can say that between 1973 and 1990, Pynchon’s politics became noticeably less abstract. Instead of the

“Kingdom of Death” and “the Zone,” Pynchon’s later fiction gives us the Drug Enforcement

Administration and Industrial Workers of the World.4 (2) There is a “critical” Pynchon and a

“constructive” Pynchon. Among the “big” novels, V. and Mason & Dixon are primarily “critical” while Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day are primarily “constructive.” Of course, all of

Pynchon’s novels engage in both social criticism and utopian speculation, often at the same time; my claim here is just that Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day are the novels in which

Pynchon is most serious about imagining alternatives to the status quo. Consequently, as a political text, Against the Day is first and foremost the successor neither or V. nor of Mason &

Dixon, but of Gravity’s Rainbow. Combining these two observations, we can recognize Against the Day as Gravity’s Rainbow rewritten in Pynchon’s later mode. The argument of this section is that Against the Day represents Pynchon’s attempt to develop a concrete positive politics in his fiction, and that, in this respect, it is easily his most ambitious novel.

3 See Louis Menand’s review of the novel in The New York Times and James Wood’s review in The New Republic. 4 Vineland’s main villain is federal prosecutor working with the DEA; many of Against the Day’s heroes are involved in the radical labor movements that anticipated the IWW.

16 First, the distinction between Pynchon’s early fiction and his later work requires some elaboration. Consider this passage from Gravity’s Rainbow: “The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace” (GR 645). The “real War,” like the “rocket-state” and the “Kingdom of Death,” is a vague term that seems to refer to the ongoing projects of global capitalism and modern science, both of which for Pynchon are continuations of fascist and imperialist violence. But whatever it is, the “real War” is almost impossible to understand: it is “too complicated […] to trace.” In contrast, consider the following passage from Mason & Dixon, in which Mason explains the particular arrangements of power and capital that influence the Royal Society’s decision making:

“Overtures must be made by way of the East India Company, whose Westernmost station is

Bagdad. Thence, up the Valley of the Euphrates, by way of Mosul, to Aleppo, which is the

Turkey Company’s eastern-most Factory, runs a private communication […] having long connected, to a great reach of Intimacy, the two Companies” (M&D 252). Then recall the moment in Vineland in which Pynchon gives a “collection of names” to the enemy: “Hitler,

Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger” (Vineland 372). In V., this enemy’s name was either “V.” or “the inanimate.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, they were known as

“the Elect,” or, more often, simply as “Them.” In Mason & Dixon, meanwhile, real historical figures actually appear in the text as servants of the Kingdom of Death, including George

Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Clive of India, Nevil Maskelyne, and, of course, Mason and

Dixon themselves. In Pynchon’s later fiction the world system is certainly complicated, but to a far greater degree than in his earlier work, it is also concrete and possible to comprehend.

17 Along with this more concrete representation of political reality comes a more concrete ethics. Near the end of Mason & Dixon, a conversation between the two protagonists gives us a clear and concise articulation of the novel’s theme:

“Ev’rywhere they’ve sent us,—the Cape, St. Helena, America,— what’s the Element common to all? […] Slaves. Ev’ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our faces,— more of it at St. Helena,— and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn them a Line between their Slave-Keepers and their Wage-Payers, as if doom’d to re-encounter thro’ the World this Public Secret, this shameful Core…. Pretending it to be ever somewhere else, with the Turks, the Russians, the Companies […] But oh, never in Holland, nor in England, that Garden of Fools…? Christ, Mason.” “Christ, what? What did I do?” “Huz. Didn’t we take the King’s money, as here we’re taking it again? Whilst Slaves waited upon us, and we neither one objected, as little as we have here, in certain houses south of the Line,— Where does it end? […]” “Yet we’re not slaves, after all,— we’re Hirelings.” (M&D 692-693)

Mason’s observation that “we’re not slaves, after all,— we’re Hirelings” is both comically naïve and all too accurate. In many ways, Mason and Dixon are helpless pawns whose lives are dictated by the opaque interests of empire and global capital. But the novel never lets us (or them) forget that they are also faithful servants of the Kingdom of Death, on a mission to assimilate the Zone into an order founded on slavery and subjugation. Early in Against the Day,

Pynchon makes his message even more explicit:

When you reach a point in your life where you understand who is fucking who […] that’s when you have to decide how much you’ll go along with. If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day, from those absolute terms. (AtD 87)

The result of a less abstract critique of modernity is a more concrete ethical demand for resistance. In Pynchon’s early fiction, everyone is in some sense a victim of the Kingdom of

Death; to borrow Agamben’s phrase, “we are all virtually homines sacri” (Homo Sacer 115). In

Pynchon’s later fiction, the situation is far less ambiguous—there are no innocent bourgeoisie.

Of course, it is one thing to say it, and another thing to act upon it. The imperative to resist must

18 be “negotiated with the day” —that is, considered alongside the various quotidian demands that are being made of us all the time. Against the Day, as its title suggests, attempts to free us from the chains of the mundane. It is, above all, a novel about resistance.

Here we need to clarify the difference between Pynchon’s “critical” and “constructive” modes. It is fairly obvious that, as a political text, V. is principally interested in developing parallel critiques of European imperialism and postwar American society. Mason & Dixon also operates in this “critical” mode. While it resembles both Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day in its imaginative portrayal of a history that is almost but not quite our own, Mason & Dixon uses this alternative history primarily in service of its critical project. The novel imagines a mysterious and magical version of the eighteenth century in order to emphasize the ways in which capital, empire, and enlightenment shaped the modern world by closing off other possible worlds. With some alterations, this is the Kingdom of Death narrative all over again. In Gravity’s

Rainbow, on the other hand, the critical perspective developed in V. serves as the foundation for

Pynchon’s engagement with radical politics. The third and longest section of Gravity’s Rainbow,

“In the Zone,” offers something like a catalogue of imagined political communities that appear in the space opened by the Second World War. In the fourth and final section of the novel, tellingly titled “The Counterforce,” many of these communities come together to resist the encroaching

Kingdom of Death. Of course, Pynchon is extremely critical of the radical political projects he portrays in his the novel. The worst of these new communities clearly perpetuate patterns of dehumanizing violence, and the best tend to fall apart almost as soon as they emerge. But for all its pessimism, Gravity’s Rainbow makes a serious effort to represent and evaluate methods of resistance. It is this search for a new political community that is evoked in the novel’s famous final words, spoken defiantly as death approaches from above: “Now everybody—”(GR 760).

19 Against the Day continues this “constructive” political project. The beginning of the novel deals extensively with the confrontation between labor and capital in the American West at the end of the nineteenth century. The novel’s main villain, at least for the first few hundred pages, is Scarsdale Vibe, a Gilded Age robber baron in the model of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and

J.P. Morgan. Its hero in the early going is Webb Traverse, a true believer in a sort of utopian unionism who carries out a campaign of bombings targeting mining companies and railroads in

Colorado. Never before has Pynchon rendered class conflict in such stark terms. If Mason &

Dixon turns to the origins of global capitalism in order to make modernity more legible, Against the Day seizes on the era of monopoly capitalism as a chance to think concretely about how we might build a new politics. As a result of this renewed attention to the practical possibility of radical political projects, Against the Day also represents by far Pynchon’s most serious attempt to deal with violence as a method of resistance: Against the Day is packed with anarchists willing to fight governments and corporations by any means necessary. Some critics have suggested that the novel’s treatment of political violence is simplistic and even silly.5 They are perhaps thinking of moments like the one in which, in response to the question, “How can anyone set off a bomb that will take innocent lives?” one character replies, “Long fuse” (AtD 87). If we look past jokes like this, however, we will see that Against the Day’s constructive political project and its engagement with the ethics of political violence involve much more than a celebration of the political potential of dynamite.

Against the Day is an exceptionally long and complicated novel, but it is not entirely without structure. There are three major groups of characters and plotlines in the novel, and each charts a course (or a number of courses) towards something like a positive politics. The first of

5 See Adam Kirsch’s review of the novel in The New York Sun.

20 these revolves around Webb’s children. After Scarsdale has Webb murdered, the novel follows his three sons as they wrestle with his legacy and seek (or refuse to seek) revenge. Webb’s eldest son Reef continues his father’s anarchist activities in the United States before fleeing to Europe where he has a lot of increasingly experimental sex. Frank, the second eldest, flees to Mexico, where he kills one of Webb’s murderers, has a spiritual experience on peyote, and fights in the

Mexican Revolution. Webb’s youngest son, Kit, is the most interesting: he studies math at Yale and in Germany under Scarsdale’s patronage before fleeing into Central Asia on a quest to find the mythical city of Shambhala. All the while, Pynchon writes, “Webb’s ghost […] went bustling to and fro doing what he could to keep things hopping” (AtD 218). If these chapters of Against the Day made up a novel of their own, Webb’s Ghost would be a fitting title. Through the structure of the family saga, Pynchon explores the legacy of radical American anarchism, suggesting that it is too complicated to fit neatly into a simple revenge narrative.6 At two different points in the novel, the Traverse brothers plot unsuccessfully to assassinate Scarsdale, and both times their plan are foiled. When Scarsdale does die, it is at the hands of his bodyguard and right-hand man, and his death does nothing to prevent the infamous Ludlow Massacre a few pages later. Pynchon’s point seems to be that resistance is not the same as revenge. When

Webb’s ghost appears during a séance later in the novel, he reflects, “I sold my anger too cheap, didn’t understand how precious it was, how I was wasting it, letting it leak away” (AtD 672).

Through the saga of Webb’s children, Pynchon suggests that radical political action first requires some form of personal transformation, and that this transformation can come from a variety of sources, including sex, spirituality, and even math. Whether we interpret Slothrop’s scattering as

6 This family saga actually continues into Vineland, in which Webb’s great-great-granddaughter Frenesi Gates and her daughter Prairie Wheeler are central characters. A brief family history recounted in the novel indicates that every generation of Webb’s descendants has carried on his legacy of political radicalism in one way or another.

21 a matter of martyrdom or emancipation, none of the Traverse brothers share his fate. Instead, they fight an ongoing battle with “the day,” winning some small victories and suffering more small defeats. In Against the Day, this continuous battle with oneself is the site of the real revolutionary struggle.

The second major collection of narratives in the novel follows a similar trajectory. It deals with young men and women who study at Oxford and then become involved in the spy games being played by the great powers in the Balkans in the years leading up to the war. Most of these characters end up abandoning their missions to pursue wild sexual adventures. In

Gravity’s Rainbow, transgressive sex is only another wrong turn for the forces of resistance: it promises emancipation from social norms, but ends up reinforcing violent power structures. In

Against, sex is not such an all-or-nothing affair. Student-turned-spy Cyprian Latewood, one of the novel’s (many) main characters, becomes involved in a number of extreme and abusive sexual relationships, including with his direct superior in the British intelligence services. But after arranging for this superior’s death, Cyprian becomes involved in other equally transgressive but far more liberating sexual relationships as he flees across Europe with two kinky companions. One of these companions is Reef Traverse. The other is Yashmeen Halfcourt, who spends much of the novel seeking transcendence in math before finally finding it in love. After becoming pregnant with Reef’s child, she finds herself “borne in some nearly vertical angle of ascent into realms of eternal wind” (AtD 891). Some critics have expressed frustration with what they see as the novel’s essentially conservative impulse to pair off its characters in happy couples, but the actual relationships portrayed in the novel are far more complicated.7 Yashmeen discovers she is pregnant around the time that she sees “Reef and Cyprian formally in each

7 See Ludovic Hunter-Tilney’s review of the novel in Financial Times.

22 other’s arms, stepping in rhythm to the music. Reef was teaching Cyprian how to dance” (AtD

891). Her child is described as both Reef’s and Cyprian’s. This is hardly the traditional image of a nuclear family. Instead, Pynchon is imagining what alternative communities might look like. If

Against the Day rehashes the scenes of European espionage and violent sexuality from

Pynchon’s earlier fiction, it is only so that it can put these paradigms to rest and begin to consider how else we might think about things like sex, love, and family.

The final major group of narratives in Against the Day follows the Chums of Chance, a crew of young men who travel around the world on the airship Inconvenience, and whose imperialist exploits are chronicled in a series of books with titles like The Chums of Chance in

Old Mexico and The Chums of Chance and the Caged Women of Yokohama (AtD 7, 411). The

Chums begin the novel as servants of the system: their first mission is to provide airborne surveillance of anarchists in Chicago during the World’s Fair. Midway through Against the Day, something changes. In an extremely strange sequence, the Chums enroll in the pseudo-fascist marching band academy, and while the “real” Chums” fly away, the Chums we are following seem to become “readers of the Chums of Chance Series of boys’ books” who are filling in for the real Chums in their absence (AtD 423). Somehow these replacement Chums then assume the place of the real Chums, and from that point on they are far more skeptical of the orders being handed down from above. By the end of the novel, the Chums actually work alongside their

Russian rivals to save lives during the First World War, and in the final pages join the French anarchist aeronauts known as the “Garçons de ’71” in seeking “literally to transcend the old political space” (AtD 1083). The Chums of Chance and their fellow radical aeronauts appropriate the technologies of empire in order to escape its grasp. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the vacuum of the

Zone gives rise to political projects that are either ephemeral or evil, with little space in between.

23 In Against the Day, Pynchon seeks to construct a concrete anarchist politics from the materials at hand, in the face of the complexities of everyday life. He draws on historical anarchism, transgressive sex, boys’ adventure fiction, and countless other sources—but perhaps more than anything else, he draws on his own radical ontology.

24 PYNCHON’S ONTOLOGY

1. Single up all lines

“Now single up all lines!” one character declares, as a “hydrogen skyship” prepares to cast off for the Chicago World’s Fair (AtD 3). This command is the first sentence in Against the

Day, and it sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Over eight hundred pages later, Pynchon returns to those opening words:

If there is an inevitability to arrival by water, […] as we watch the possibilities of shore being progressively narrowed at last to the destined quay or slip, there is no doubt a mirror-symmetry about departure, a denial of inevitability, an opening out from the point of embarkation, beginning the moment all lines are singled up, an unloosening of fate as the unknown and perhaps the uncreated begins to make its appearance ahead and astern, port and starboard, everywhere an expanding of possibility” (AtD 821).

Against the Day quite literally begins “the moment all lines are singled up.” If Pynchon’s fiction often seems to be most interested in “arrival,” he lets us know right from the beginning that

Against the Day is a book about “departure.” In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon wrote melancholically of the reduction of “Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments.” In Against the Day, he pursues a very different project: “a denial of inevitability,” “an unloosening of fate,”

“an expanding of possibility.” At the heart of the novel is a genuinely radical metaphysics, and at the heart of this metaphysics is the multiplication of possibilities. To understand Against the

Day’s contribution to Pynchon’s literary project, we have to have a sense of the novel’s relationship to Pynchon’s political ontology.

Brian McHale argues that while V. and The Crying of Lot 49 emphasize epistemological issues, the central concerns of Pynchon’s later fiction are ontological. For McHale, Gravity’s

Rainbow is the novel in which Pynchon shifts “from Oedipa’s anguished cry, ‘Shall I project a world?,’ to the unconstrained projection of worlds in the plural” (Postmodernist Fiction 25).

Pynchon’s novels have always dealt in this sort of plural ontology: in The Crying of Lot 49 a

25 Mexican anarchist defines an “anarchist miracle” as “another world’s intrusion into this one”

(Lot 49 119). Still, McHale is right to identify a preference for plurality and potentiality as one of

Pynchon’s most overt and consistent ontological commitments. This ontology of multiplicity manifests itself most obviously in Pynchon’s distinctive approach to history. In his fiction,

Pynchon places “real” and “alternative” history on equal footing. Of course, all historical fiction offers something like an “alternative history”; what differentiates Pynchon, even from other imaginative writers of historical fiction, is his insistence on the indeterminacy of the alternative histories he conjures. Pynchon does not simply give us another history like our own; instead, he actually devises ways to leave the content of history uncertain. McHale’s insight is that this indeterminacy is not epistemological, but ontological. It is not that we cannot have knowledge of reality in Pynchon’s fiction, but that there is no single, determinate reality for us to know. Rather than the reader, it is the text itself that is in “a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt” (GR

672). If we want a precise formulation of his ontology, we might say that, for Pynchon, other possible worlds are every bit as real as the world that actually exists. Pynchon does not pretend that one world is not dominant, but he seeks to resist this dominant world by contesting its ontological hegemony, and it is in this sense that we can talk about “political ontology” in

Pynchon’s fiction.

McHale is also right to identify Gravity’s Rainbow as the novel in which ontological multiplicity becomes one of Pynchon’s central concerns. In the novel’s portrait of postwar

Germany, a brigade of Herero rocket scientists is every bit as “real” as the Potsdam Conference.

Perhaps the best way to think about “the Zone” is not as a traditional political space (imperial, anarchic, or otherwise), but as an ontological condition in which multiple possible worlds coincide. At one point, Slothrop finds himself searching for a young boy’s lost lemming: “Is he

26 drifting, or being led? The only control in the picture right now is the damned lemming. If she exists" (GR 556). Elsewhere, one character takes a hostage from a board meeting, and “emerges dragging the livid executive by his necktie or cock” (GR 637). When it comes to statements like these in Gravity’s Rainbow, there is no “fact of the matter.” The lemming exists and does not exist; the executive’s ontological state is that of being dragged by his tie or his penis. Even beyond these specific moments of indeterminacy, Gravity’s Rainbow resists being read as a single, definitive text. Just prior to his scattering, “Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural. . . .” (GR 626). Later, at the moment when he seems to finally disappear, Slothrop sees an image of the bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, described as “a wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush” (GR 693). Contrasting images like these are everywhere in Gravity’s Rainbow, frustrating attempts to develop a conclusive interpretation of the novel. In general, Gravity’s Rainbow rejects an epistemological outlook to which contradiction is anathema in favor of an ontological outlook in which contradiction is embraced.

In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon similarly asks readers to accept a world in which the

“subjunctive” is at least as real as the “declarative.” At times the novel reads almost like an encyclopedia of the fantastic: at one point, Mason finds himself living in the eleven days that were “lost” when Britain moved from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and later in the novel,

Dixon visits a civilization located in Earth’s hollow interior (an adventure repeated by the Chums in Against the Day). Episodes like these become more and more frequent as Mason and Dixon make their way further into the “subjunctive” space of the American frontier. In the words of one critic, “Subjunctive America, the antithesis of the declarative empire, is that unmapped,

27 atemporal locus where plural realities and possibilities exist side by side” (Lifshey 125). The novel is filled with celebrations of this ontological plurality. In one of his “undeliver’d” sermons, the radical Reverend Cherrycoke says, “Doubt is the essence of Christ […] The final pure Christ is pure uncertainty. He is become the central subjunctive fact of a Faith” (M&D 511). Elsewhere, a traveling magician is described as “Trouping on, cheerfully rendering subjunctive, or contrary to fact, familiar laws of nature of common sense” (M&D 365). As Mason and Dixon march west,

“changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities,” Cherrycoke and Pynchon follow along, reenchanting the world at every step along the way. Even the creation of the line opens up spaces of indeterminacy, such as “the Wedge,” a small region “not so much claim’d by any one Province, as priz’d for Ambiguity,— occupied by all whose Wish, hardly uncommon in this Era of fluid Identity, is not to reside anywhere […] There remains to the

Wedge an Unseen World, beyond Resolution, of transactions never recorded,— […] Anyone may be in there” (M&D 469-470). Alongside its portrait of America as a death-colony, Mason &

Dixon also offers us a vision of America as the Wedge writ large. Pynchon reimagines America as a fragile “Zone” of ontological multiplicity and possibility in which the difference between history and fantasy is not easily discerned.

Nowhere is Pynchon’s commitment to ontological plurality more pronounced than in

Against the Day. Again and again, the novel affirms the existence of multiple worlds. One character in the novel imagines a “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). Another character describes a device he calls a “paramorphoscope” that “reveals worlds which are set to the side of the one we have taken, until now, to be the only world given to us” (AtD 249). The terms “paramorphoscope” is a play on “anamorphoscope,” or a device that

28 uses a warped mirror or lens to restore a distorted image to legibility. While the prefix “ana-” in this case means something like “again” (as in “anagram” or “analogy”) the prefix “para-” means something like “alongside” (as in “parallel” or “paraphrase”). If an anamorphoscope restores singularity, a paramorphoscope restores multiplicity. Pynchon writes, “If one accepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that these paramorphoscopes of Iceland spar […] reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude” (AtD 250). Critics have often assumed that Pynchon is opposed to all projects of mapping, but it would be more accurate to say that he resists the ontological assumption on which mapping rests—that is, the assumption that there is a single, determinate world to be mapped. In Against the Day, Pynchon attempts to craft a different sort of map, one in which the world of “latitude and longitude” does not take precedence over the “dream” worlds that hide in its shadow.

The dominant motif in Against the Day is that of the double. “Iceland spar,” the material from which the paramorphoscopes are made, is also the title of the second of Against the Day’s five sections. It refers to a type of crystal that will split a ray of light passing through it into two rays that emerge from the crystal at different angles, so that an observer looking through the crystal will see two offset images of whatever is on the other side, a phenomenon known as

“double refraction.” In a dream, one character encounters “a map to a hidden space” in which

“double refraction appears again and again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety. . . . (AtD 566). In Against the Day, double refraction has enormous ontological significance. This becomes clear in Pynchon’s discussion of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which sought to detect the “aether” in which

29 light was thought to move by splitting a light beam in two and then recombining the two new beams and measuring differences between them. The actual experiment found no such differences, representing a major blow against “aetherism,” but Pynchon playfully suggests that

“under slightly different conditions, alternative axioms, there could be another pair that don’t match up, see, in fact millions of pairs, that sometimes you could blame it on the Æther, sure, but maybe other cases the light goes someplace else, takes a detour and that’s why it shows up late and out of phase” (AtD 62). Against the quotidian light of “the Day,” Pynchon sets the split light of “the double,” which reveals a world “set just to the side” of this one.

Along with double refraction, Pynchon’s discussion of the Michelson-Morley experiment also plays with the idea of “bilocation,” or the phenomenon of a single person existing in two different places at the same time (the title of the novel’s third section is “Bilocations”). One of

Pynchon’s characters becomes convinced that Morley and the fugitive gangster Blinky Morgan

“were one and the same person! Separated by a couple-three letters in name as if alphabetically double-refracted” (AtD 62). Against the Day features a number of similarly “bilocated” characters, including the British troublemakers Nigel and Neville, the Russian spies Misha and

Grisha, and the Italian anarchists Rocco and Pino. Midway through the novel, one character realizes that two rival professors, Renfrew and Werfner, “were one and the same person, had been all along, that this person somehow had the paranormal power to be in at least two places at the same time, maintaining day-to-day lives at two different universities” (AtD 685). Scarsdale

Vibe has a double of his own in his bodyguard and financial adviser Foley Walker. Originally hired by Vibe to serve in his place during the Civil War, Foley becomes inseparable from his employer: “You could make the case,” he says, “for me being more Scarsdale Vibe than

Scarsdale Vibe himself” (AtD 102).

30 The bilocated characters in Against the Day make the political implications of ontological multiplicity more apparent. On the one hand, there seems to be something sinister about the double in Against the Day. Renfrew/Werfner exercises enormous influence over the imperialist foreign policies of Britain and Germany in the years before World War I, suggesting that doubling can easily serve as an instrument of the Kingdom of Death. At the same time, the novel seems to see the double as a potentially revolutionary force. Foley kills Scarsdale near the end of the novel, hinting that the double always threatens to turn against the hegemonic power that employs it. In his 2003 introduction to 1984, Pynchon discusses Orwell’s concept of

“doublethink,” or the ability to fully believe two contradictory things at the same time. Pynchon writes, “The idea seems to have presented Orwell with his own dilemma, a kind of meta- doublethink—repelling him with its limitless potential for harm, while at the same time fascinating him with its promise of a way to transcend opposites.” If Orwell adopts the former reaction, Pynchon leans towards the latter. For him, the double is a sort of ontological opening in which utopian possibilities come into view.

One of the principle ways in which Against the Day opens up paths to alternative worlds is by drawing on heterodox math and science. The same character who suggests that Morley and

Blinky Morgan are “the same person” also comes to believe “that if Blinky were ever caught, there would also turn out to be no Æther” (AtD 61). In his discussion of the Michelson-Morley experiment and the Blinky Morgan manhunt, Pynchon associates heterodox science with anti- establishment criminality and an ontology of possibility. In another early scene, Pynchon draws attention to the radical political potential of alchemy: “gold, silver, these shinin and wonderful metals, basis of all the world’s economies, you go in a laboratory, fool with em a little, acid and so on, and you get a high explosive” (AtD 77-78). He also makes a connection between alchemy

31 and photography, which are “just two ways of getting at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals” (AtD 80). Photographs, after all, represent a sort of crystalized double refraction—another reality that Pynchon describes as “more real” than our own (AtD 73).

It is photography (and film) that allows one character to bring time “a little closer to his face, squint at it from different angles, maybe try to see if it could be taken apart” (AtD 454). This sort of ontological experimentation is positioned in opposition to hegemonic “Day”: “The nights, the flights and journeys proper to night would be dedicated to the Mysteries of Time” (AtD 454).

One character suggests that heterodox sciences like alchemy were “replaced” because

“capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore […] Why bother? Had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people’s sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save the lead for enforcement purposes” (AtD 79). In his confrontation with modernity, Pynchon explores alternative routes in the history of math and science in order to reclaim the political possibilities they represent. Confronted with the “new magic” of capitalism, Pynchon turns to “old magic” as his weapon of choice.

Much of the “old magic” in Against the Day comes from an obscure source: a set of numbers known as “quaternions” that were originally developed in order to aid with calculations in three dimensions. While complex numbers have the form a + bi where a and b are real numbers and i2 = -1, quaternions have the form w + ix + jy + z where w, x, y, and z are real numbers and i2 = j2 = k2 = -1. So while a complex number has one “real” term and one

“imaginary” term, a quaternion has one real, or “scalar,” term and three imaginary, or “vector,” terms. In Against the Day, Pynchon recounts how quaternions were eventually supplanted by vector analysis as the preferred method of dealing with calculations in more than two dimensions. While quaternions combined a scalar and vector component, vector analysis defined

32 two separate multiplicative operations: the “dot” product of two vectors gives a scalar quantity while the “cross” product gives a vector perpendicular to the multiplied vectors. Pynchon’s clear preference for quaternions is not easy to explain. Nineteenth century proponents of quaternions often appealed to what they saw as their natural beauty; one mathematician described quaternions as “transcendentally expressive” and argued that they possessed “perfect inartificiality” (Crowe 183, 186). Vector analysis, in contrast, was a “monster” that was

“artificial in the highest degree” (Crowe 185-186). J. Willard Gibbs, the leading “vectorist” at the time and Kit’s mentor at Yale in Against the Day, replied by emphasizing that the dot and cross products of vectors were far more useful for calculations in physics and engineering than any operations that could be done with quaternions. For all their “natural” perfection, quaternions had no clear counterpart in the “real” world. Gibbs wrote:

Whatever is special, accidental, and individual, will die, as it should; but that which is universal and essential should remain […] In Italy, they say, all roads lead to Rome. In mechanics, kinetics, astronomy, physics, all study leads to the consideration of certain relations and operations. These are the capital notions; these should have the leading parts in any analysis suited to the subject. (170)

We might think of Gibbs’s vectors as analogous to the Line of Mason & Dixon; they represent the triumph of an instrumental rationality that leaves no room for alternatives or mysteries.

Quaternions, then, are their utopian double—mystical, multiple, not quite of this world.

Perhaps most importantly, vector analysis and quaternions encourage fundamentally different relationships to time. Vector analysis, which can be expanded to account for any number of dimensions, allows the “order of Analysis and Death” to expand its reach: “And what of colonizing additional dimensions beyond the third?” asks one imperialist scientist, “Colonize

Time. Why not?” (AtD 131). Along the “imaginary” axes of the quaternions, however, time becomes something quite different:

33 In the Quaternions a ninety-degree direction would correspond to an additional axis whose unit is √-1. A turn through any other angle would require for its unit a complex number [...] Mappings in which a linear axis becomes curvilinear […] do suggest the possibility of linear time becoming circular, and so achieving eternal return as simply, or should I say complexly, as that. (AtD 132)

Alternative science decolonizes space and time. Against the Day also even features a mysterious

“Quaternion Weapon,” which Pynchon describes as “a means to unloose upon the world energies hitherto unimagined—hidden […] inside the w term” (AtD 542). Since the w, or scalar, term is used to represent time, the “Q-weapon” is really a sort of time weapon. In Against the Day, time itself becomes a field for political struggle, and political violence has ontological aftershocks.

One character asks, “Political space has its neutral ground. But does Time? is there such a thing as the neutral hour? one that goes neither forward nor back? is that too much to hope?” (AtD

577). It turns out that, yes, that is too much to hope—but we need not cede control over time to the hegemony of “the Day.” If Gravity’s Rainbow seeks to open up, in the Zone, a space of political possibility, Against the Day seeks to open up an analogous time of political possibility.

Benjamin contrasts the “homogenous, empty time” of bourgeois history with the “Messianic time” of revolutionary history, in which “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (262-264). In Against the Day, we can perhaps think of an “anarchist time,” in which every second is a “gate” into other times, and other possible worlds.

Near the end of Against the Day, Pynchon writes: “This is our own age of exploration

[…] into the unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers of and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we’ve seen. What are any of the ‘utopian dreams’ of ours but defective forms of time-travel?” (AtD 942). Time travel is not just a form of escape; instead, it offers a message to bring back to the world of the Day. One of the oddest plot elements of

34 Against the Day involves the “Trespassers,” mysterious beings who “have been crossing over, between the worlds, for generations” (AtD 134). The Trespassers seem to have sinister plans for our world—more than time travelers, they are time manipulators.8 In one of the novel’s central thematic statements, Pynchon writes: “I believe in incursion from elsewhere. They’ve swept upon us along a broad front, we don’t know ‘when’ they first came, Time itself was disrupted, a thoroughgoing and merciless forswearing of Time as we had known it, as it had gone safely ticking for us moment into moment, with an innocence they knew how to circumvent” (AtD

148). Against the Day turns the pessimistic historical narrative that defined Pynchon’s earlier fiction on its head: the Zone is no longer a brief interruption of the status quo. Instead it is a sort of reopening of the world as it was prior to the “incursion.” In Against the Day, Pynchon seems to actually be imagining a world in which heterodox science is orthodox; that is, a world in which quaternions are practical as well as beautiful. Pynchon gives his alternative world ontological priority by imagining that it was the original. He reconciles himself with actuality by returning otherwise vanished possibilities to the realm of the real.

2. A Soul in ev’ry stone

If Pynchon’s first ontological priority is the redemption of the possible, his second priority is the redemption of the object world. This is not necessarily obvious. In his article “Is It

O.K. To Be A Luddite?” Pynchon writes, “To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent doings.” As this statement suggests, Pynchon often seems more interested saving humans from objects than

8 Bleeding Edge similarly features government-backed time travellers tasked with defending the status quo.

35 the other way around. In V., Pynchon’s social criticism revolves around that the idea that the violent forces of empire and capital are transforming animate subjects into inanimate objects.

The lesson one takes from V. is not only that modernity is fundamentally violent, but also that its violence has always had an ontological dimension. At the conclusion of the South-West Africa chapter in V., Lieutenant Weissmann (who will become Captain Blicero in Gravity’s Rainbow) claims to have decoded a message hidden in atmospheric radio disturbances. The message is the famous opening line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which translates to: “The world is all that the case is” (V. 302). Pynchon’s abhorrence for an ontology in which the world is nothing other than the totality of things that are the case is obvious. Through the figure of Weissmann, Pynchon associates Wittgenstein’s positivism with the violence of imperialism and fascism. Immediately after Weissmann decodes the message, the German engineer Kurt Mondaugen finally decides to leave the estate where Weissmann, Foppl, and a host of other revelers have been holding a sadistic and deadly party for months on end. As he leaves the estate, the others gather on the roof to see him off: “The morning’s light bleached their faces a Fasching-white he remembered seeing in another place. They gazed across the ravine, dehumanized and aloof, as if they were the last gods on Earth” (V. 304). While much of V. suggests that modernity has made us all into victims of inanimate objects, or “schlemihls,” this section of the novel makes it clear that mastery of the inanimate is no antidote to “schlemihlhood.” Domination is not the solution to alienation—it only turns the master into another object, reigning “dehumanized and aloof” over a lifeless realm.

Rather than elevating subjectivity to a position of mastery over the object world, Pynchon seeks to free us from relations of ontological domination altogether. After fleeing Foppl’s estate,

Mondaugen hitches a ride from a black Namibian on a donkey. Pynchon writes, “They seemed

36 the only three animate objects on the yellow road […] Mondaugen felt little and lost in the dun- colored waste. Soon as they trotted along the Bondel began to sing, in a small voice which was lost before it reached the nearest Ganna bush. The song was in Hottentot dialect, and Mondaugen couldn’t understand it” (V. 304, my italics). The juxtaposition of the imperialist “gods” of the inanimate with the small “animate objects” wandering along the yellow road is striking. Reading

V., one might easily think that Pynchon is absolutely opposed to everything that makes people more like things; this position seems to be the driving force behind the novel’s critiques of everything from plastic surgery and sexual fetishes to consumerism and imperialism. Here, however, at the ethical heart of the novel, Pynchon suggests that a certain sort of synthesis of person and thing (an “animate object”) might actually represent a form of resistance to the

Kingdom of Death. If our mastery of the object world is already dehumanizing, an emancipatory ontology would require that objects have a reality that is not exhausted by what we can say about them. In other words, it would require objects that live. The song that Mondaugen cannot understand is an example of a thing in the world that it makes no sense to say is or is not “the case.” Contra Wittgenstein, Pynchon’s motto could well be, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must not be silent.” Pynchon insists that the world can never be reduced to a finite set of analyzable phenomena or facts. In the “animate object,” Pynchon seeks a utopian category that could be genuinely disalienating. He pins his hopes on a living object world that is forever defying our attempts to master it.

If in V., Pynchon tentatively hints at the political potential of the “animate object,” in

Gravity’s Rainbow, it is absolutely central to his ontological project. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the best way to escape a system that reduces people to inanimate things is to become a sort of living object. Slothrop’s scattering is once again illustrative. A few pages before the scene in which

37 Slothrop finds himself without “a thing in his head, just feeling natural,” Pynchon quotes the final lines of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus: “To the stilled Earth say: I flow./ To the rushing water speak: I am” (GR 622). This citation suggest that we can emulate Orpheus’s resistance to the

Kingdom of Death by dissolving into a world of living objects. A few pages after the quote from

Rilke, Pynchon describes show Slothrop, “lying one afternoon spread-eagled at his ease in the sun […] becomes a cross himself, a crossroads, a living intersection” (GR 625). This new

Slothrop seems to be in communion with the object world: “Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to him? He’s sat in Säure Bummer’s kitchen, the air streaming with kif moirés, reading soup recipes and finding in every bone and cabbage leaf paraphrases of himself”

(GR 625). This sense of communion indicates that Slothrop’s self-erasure is not an erasure of the historical and material world. Instead, Slothrop seems to blend into objects that are filled with political meaning: “Rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears” (GR 626). Near the end of the novel, we are told, if we are seeking

Slothrop, “to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea. . . .” (GR 742). Slothrop does not stop at

“plucking the albatross of self” (GR 623). He also scatters the feathers in the breeze.

In one reading of Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop’s disappearance signals his liberation from the limits of subjectivity—it opens a “radical exteriority into which the subject disperses or becomes multiple” (Mattesich 9). McClure seems to be saying something along these lines when he claims that Slothrop embodies an “ethic of nomadic deterritorialization” (169). In this

Deleuzian interpretation of the novel, only a radical freedom that transcends the boundaries of the rational, discrete subject can escape the all-encompassing violence of modernity.

Alternatively, we might think that Slothrop’s scattering achieves something like a radical

38 interiority. Leo Bersani sees the transformation of subjectivity that occurs in Gravity’s Rainbow not as a dispersal, but as a flattening that produces “a kind of shallow subjectivity” (115). For

Bersani, “the loss of personal presence” represented by Slothrop is a loss that “must be sustained if we are also to disappear as targets, and therefore as conditions of possibility, of rockets and cartels” (112). In his “Notes on Kafka,” Adorno writes:

The only chance, in Kafka’s eyes, however feeble and minute, of preventing the world from being all-triumphant, was to concede it the victory from the beginning. Like the youngest boy in the fairy tale, one must make oneself completely unobtrusive, small, a defenseless victim, instead of insisting on one’s rights according to the mores of the world, that of exchange, which unremittingly reproduced injustice. (269-270)

Replace “Kafka” with “Pynchon” and you get something like Bersani’s view. Confronted with a subjectivity that has already become an object, the Kingdom of Death at last comes face to face with itself. In Bersani’s Adornian reading of Pynchon, the indeterminacy of the Zone does not represent a life-affirming celebration of multiplicity and possibility, but rather a sort of opacity that resists analysis only by playing dead. The important thing to recognize is that, for all their differences, both of these readings of the novel suggest that Slothrop resists the Kingdom of

Death by becoming more like an object. Whether he merges with his surroundings or retreats into his own thingness, Slothrop finds refuge in an annihilation of self that opens the gate to the safe haven of the object world.

If the human beings become object-like in order to resist hegemonic power, objects come alive for the same reason. Of all the counter-cultural figures in Gravity’s Rainbow, it may be an animate light bulb named Byron who poses the most concrete threat to systems of power.

Byron’s revolutionary leanings are fairly explicit:

Byron has had a vision against the rafters of his ward, of 20 million Bulbs, all over Europe, at a given synchronizing pulse arranged by one of his many agents in the Grid, all these Bulbs beginning to strobe together, humans thrashing around the 20 million

39 rooms like fish on the beaches of Perfect Energy— Attention humans, this has been a warning to you. Next time, a few of us will explode. (GR 648-649).

Where Slothrop seeks to escape the Kingdom of Death, Byron, at least in theory, threatens to overthrow it. Through Byron, Pynchon imagines a sort of syndicalism of things that would spell the end of cartels. Animate objects like Byron are a staple of Pynchon’s fiction. In Mason &

Dixon alone, we encounter a talking dog, a pair of conversational clocks, a golem, several ghosts, a sentient watch, and a mechanical duck infatuated with a French chef. The duck, based on a real automaton crafted by an eighteenth-century inventor, is particularly interesting. Like a small, flying Frankenstein, the duck turns on her creator and demands that he make her a mate. When he refuses, she becomes a something of a menace. The Enlightenment effort to master the world unintentionally brings the world to life in an ontological revolt against the empire of the inanimate.

Admittedly, many of the “animate objects” in Pynchon’s fiction seem to be instruments of the Kingdom of Death. The mysterious rocket constructed by Blicero seems to be as alive as

Byron and as inaccessible to analysis as Slothrop: at one point Pynchon even refers to it as “the womb” (GR 750). The rocket’s counterpart in Mason & Dixon is the Line. In one scene, Mason refers to the line as “a living creature” with “a Will to proceed Westward” (M&D 678). Dixon calls it “A tree-slaughtering Animal […] Its teeth of Steel,— its Jaws, Axmen,— its Life’s

Blood, Disbursement” (M&D 678). Similarly, one character in Against the Day calls the railroad network “a living organism, growing by the hour, answering some invisible command” (AtD

177). Pynchon describes how this character “found himself out lying in suburban tracksides in the deep nighttime hours, between trains, with his ear to the rails, listening for stirrings, quickening, like some anxious father-to-be with his ear to the abdomen of a beloved wife” (AtD

177). Or as another character says of the Trans-Siberian Railroad: “That great project appears

40 almost like a living organism, one dares to say a conscious one, with needs and plans of its own”

(AtD 259). Elsewhere in Against the Day Pynchon writes, “Ape evolves to man, well, what’s the next step—human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood—a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself” (AtD 147-148). These animate objects are hardly harbingers of revolution; if they have rebelled against their creators, it is only because they have taken the project of analysis to its logical and deadly conclusion.

Even in these cases, however, Pynchon’s object-oriented ontology opens up a space in which hegemonic power can be contested. Blicero’s deathly rocket has a double, built under

Enzian’s direction. Enzian says of his new rocket, “Time will wither away inside this new one.

The Erdschweinhöhle will not be bound, like the Rocket, to time. The people will find the Center again, the Center without time, the journey without hysteresis, where every departure is a return to the same place, the only place” (GR 318-319). If Blicero’s rocket is a death machine with a will of its own, Enzian’s rocket can be read as a sort of animate life machine. The “order of

Analysis and Death” produces an object that exceeds its grasp. Mason & Dixon features a number of counterparts to the Line that contest its emerging hegemony. There are the magical

“ley lines” that Dixon uses to fly over Durham, the principles of Feng Shui espoused by Captain

Zhou, and the mysterious “Tellurick” forces that the astronomers encounter repeatedly as they make their way West. When the astronomers come across a strange prehistoric “mound” that renders their compasses useless, Dixon “feels himself begin to drift somewhere else, off at an angle to the serial curve of his Life….” (M&D 599). The Line’s most obvious double is the

Indian “Great Warrior Path,” which runs north-to-south and beyond which the Line is forbidden from preceding. Cherrycoke writes of the Warpath, “We all feel it Looming, even when we’re

41 awake, out there ahead someplace […] Perhaps ’tis the sub-audible Hum of its Traffic that we feel with an equally undiscover’d part of the Sensorium” (M&D 650). As they approach the

Warpath, Mason and Dixon are advised, “Distance is not the same here, nor is Time” (M&D

647). The Warpath, like Enzian’s rocket, alters the metaphysical landscape. By representing

Blicero’s rocket and the Line as animate, Pynchon is able to establish Enzian’s rocket and the

Warpath as nodes of ontological resistance. The hymn with which Pynchon ends Gravity’s

Rainbow tells of a coming day of redemption when there will be “a face on ev’ry mountainside,/

And a Soul in ev’ry stone” (GR 760). When Pynchon “insists on the miraculous,” he is insisting on the possibility of a world in which inanimate things come alive and living things reconnect with the object world. In Pynchon, the primacy of the subject and the primacy of the object are, in some sense, one and the same thing.

3. When you come to a fork in the road

At the heart of Pynchon’s ontological project in Against the Day is the legendary city of

Shambhala. The novel describes two different expeditions to Central Asia undertaken in search of the hidden kingdom. The first of these involves the Chums of Chance attempting to follow an obscure Venetian “Itinerary” aboard a submarine that travels beneath the sands of the

Taklamakan desert. The second and more successful expedition involves only Kit Traverse, a local guide, and a British officer. This pair of quest narratives makes two things clear: first, that the journey to Shambhala is a metaphor for the novel’s larger ontological project, and second, that this project is always under threat from capital and empire. Journeying to Shambhala means journeying into other worlds, and especially into other times. We are told that the author of the

Itinerary “imagined the world not only as a three-dimensional sphere, but, beyond that, as an imaginary surface” (AtD 249). The Chums soon find that a “fourth coordinate axis is needed” in

42 order to follow the Itinerary, because its landmarks are “made of some variety of Iceland spar that can polarize light not only in space but in time as well” (AtD 437). Later, Pynchon writes:

Directions for journeying to Shambhala are addressed by the author to a Yogi, who is a sort of fictional character, though at the same time real—a figure in a vision, and also Rinpungpa himself […] ‘Even if you forget everything else,’ Rinpungpa instructs the Yogi, ‘remember one thing—when you come to a fork in the road, take it.’ Easy for him to say, of course, being two people at once. (AtD 766)9

Shambhala, then, is a utopian world hidden alongside our own and accessed through double refraction, bilocation, heterodox science, and something like time travel. It is also what I have been calling an “animate object.” Pynchon writes of the path to Shambhala, “The journey itself is a kind of conscious Being, a living deity who does not wish to engage with the foolish or the weak, and hence will try to dissuade you” (AtD 765). When Kit passes through a stone arch at the beginning of the journey, he has a vision, “like a brief interruption of darkness in the daytime,” of “a city whose name, though at the moment denied him, was known the world over”

(AtD 770). As he travels across the Central Asia, Kit begins to understand “that this space the

Gate had opened to them was less geographic than to be measured along lines of sorrow and loss” (AtD 771). Finally, staring into Lake Baikal at the end of the journey, Kit feels as though he is “looking into the heart of the Earth itself as it was before there were eyes of any kind to look at it” (AtD 768-769). Shambhala represents a possibility that is more real than reality precisely because it refuses to be an object of our knowledge: “For me,” another character tell us,

“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 I was” (AtD 975).

9 Since Rinpungpa’s advice is actually a Yogi Berra quote, the character really is “two people at once”: a historical Tibetan prince and an American baseball player, both of whom are part of Pynchon’s anarchist counter-canon.

43 In spite—or perhaps because—of its unique ontological status, Shambhala is perpetually in danger from the Kingdom of Death. The Chums’ quest for the sacred city is clearly part of an imperialist power struggle: “We must therefore not exclude from this search for Shambhala an unavoidable military element,” one character advises, “All the Powers have a lively interest. The stakes are too high” (AtD 437). Shortly thereafter, Pynchon even suggests that the Chums’ search for Shambhala is a “pretext” for oil prospecting (AtD 441). Kit’s journey to Shambhala also begins as an imperialist venture, but it soon seems to take a different course. Kit’s journey does not bring him any closer “finding” the hidden city—by its end, he seems to have realized that he arrived long ago, and that Shambhala is already behind him. At one point along the journey,

Kit’s traveling companion suggests, “There may not be a ‘mission’ anymore” (AtD 787). The imperialist quest is transformed into an anti-imperial pilgrimage. Shambhala serves as a sort of symbol for the double nature of the unmapped world: “As for what lies beneath those sands, you’ve your choice—either Shambhala, as close to the Heavenly City as Earth has known, or

Baku and Johannesburg all over again, unexplored reserves of gold, oil, Plutonian wealth, and the prospect of creating yet another subhuman class of workers to exploit it” (AtD 631). If quests for anti-imperial alternatives are never far from expeditions in service of empire, the reverse is also true: there are resources for resistance everywhere, even in the spaces usually reserved for colonization by the Kingdom of Death.

Pynchon concludes the Shambhala section of Against the Day with an account of the mysterious 1908 explosion in Tunguska. “The Event,” as Pynchon refers to it, seems to pierce through the veil surrounding Shambhala: “For centuries the sacred City had lain invisible, cloaked in everyday light, sun-, star-, and moonlight, the campfires and electric torches of desert explorers, until the Event over Stony Tunguska, as if those precise light frequencies which would

44 allow human eyes to see the City had finally been released” (AtD 793). Shambhala finds its

“protection lost” along with its “invisibility before the earthbound day” (AtD 793). Pynchon suggests that the Event may have been connected to the Trespassers or the Quaternion Weapon.

He also implies that it has something to do with the First World War: “Was it,” he asks,

“something which had not quite happened yet, so overflowing the tidy frames of reference available to Europe that it had only seemed to occur in the present, though really originating in the future? Was it, to be blunt, the general war which Europe this summer and autumn would stand at the threshold of, collapsed into a single event? “ (AtD 797). Here the Event seems to be a sort of ontological incursion in which “the Day” annihilates Shambhala and sets history on its path of imperialist self-destruction. Elsewhere, however, the Event is portrayed as an incursion of a different kind. Discussing the orange skies that appeared over Europe in the month after the explosion, Pynchon writes, “As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed 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 against the day” (AtD 805). This temporary “sense of overture and possibility” brought about by the Event is clearly situated in opposition to the day. The moment Shambhala comes into contact with the world is the moment of greatest danger and also that of greatest hope.

In the aftermath of the Event, the Chums travel aboard the Inconvenience to a place called “Counter-Earth” where they find themselves “on it and of it, and yet at the same time also on the Earth they had never, it seemed, left” (AtD 1021). On Counter-Earth, “As if all maps and charts had suddenly become unreadable, the little company came to understand that in some way not exhausted by the geographical, they were lost” (AtD 1021). The Chums follow Slothrop’s

45 lead in losing themselves in the Zone, but they also remain bilocated, simultaneously occupying the realms of the potential and the actual, the subject and the object. At the end of the novel, the

Inconvenience “has grown as large as a small city […] It is so big that when people on the ground see it in the sky, they are struck with selective hysterical blindness and end up not seeing it at all” (AtD 1084). The ship has become a sort of flying Shambhala. While the rocket of

Gravity’s Rainbow abides by the principle that what goes up must come down, the

Inconvenience heeds no such law. The final lines of the novel read:

Inconvenience, once a vehicle of sky pilgrimage, has transformed into its own destination, where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted. For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard Inconvenience has yet observed any sign of this. They know […] it is there, like an approaching rainstorm. 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)

The Inconvenience, much like Shambhala, is both an enormous animate object and another world offset from our own. Against the Day finally gives us a unified version of Pynchon’s ontology. The alternative worlds Pynchon is interested in are worlds in which people become thinglike and things come to life. Parallel universes hide in the impenetrable depths of the realm of animate objects.

46 PYNCHON’S NARRATIVE

1. To map or not to map

In Against the Day, anarchism is not only a political philosophy, or even an ontological outlook—it is also a representational practice. In an essay on anarchist literary theory, Jesse

Cohn argues that “false consciousness” involves “obscuring one of the two aspects of the real— either collapsing the potential into the actual (reifying the status quo into an unchanging order or an inescapable necessity) or dispersing the actual into mere potentialities (the denial of every concrete limitation or determination in favour of an abstractly limitless possibility)” (126). In response, Cohn argues that anarchist art and theory should reject “falsely polarized aesthetic realism or idealism” in favor of “an art which would combine ‘observation’ with ‘inspiration,’ revealing the possible within the actual” (127). This “prefigurative art” would not simply advance “an abstract ideal without relation to an actual topos” but would instead involve “a

‘utopian extrapolation’ of the potential from the actual” (Cohn 127). If Against the Day is a flawed novel, it is because it represents Pynchon’s most serious and ambitious attempt to develop this sort of “prefigurative art.”

The tension Cohn describes between the potential and the actual helps to explain

Pynchon’s deep ambivalence towards narrative. We have already seen that in many ways, V. articulates a sort of historical master-narrative (what I have been calling the “Kingdom of Death” narrative) about imperialism, fascism, and modernity. At the same time, however, Pynchon suggests that this master-narrative threatens to reinforce rather than remedy the pathologies it diagnoses. Pynchon tells us that even if V. were made aware of her trajectory towards self- destruction (that is, even if V. read V.), her fate would only become more inescapable:

47 What would have been her reaction, had she known? […] It would have meant, ultimately, V.’s death: in a sudden establishment here, of the inanimate Kingdom, despite all efforts to prevent it. The smallest realization […] that she fitted into a larger scheme leading eventually to her personal destruction and she might have shied off, come to establish eventually so many controls over herself that she became […] a purely determined organism, an automaton, constructed, only quaintly, of human flesh. (V. 456- 457)

What becomes clear here is that Pynchon’s anxiety about narrative stems from his critique of empire. Because he sees the violence of imperialism as intimately connected with analysis, all forms of analysis, including social criticism, become suspect. One Pynchon critic identifies the existential challenge faced by the anti-imperialist novel as that of developing “a sustained and relatively coherent critique of the historical fact of empire” while also avoiding “a re- establishment of order that is always in some sense political” (Cooley 307-308). The worry for

Pynchon is that any “coherent critique” already threatens “a re-establishment of order.” If we respond to our pathological desire to impose order on the world by adopting a puritanical regime of rules for resistance, he fears that we have already granted victory to the inanimate. But without some such structure, how is resistance possible?

If we think of Pynchon’s fiction as an attempt to answer this question, then V. is perhaps his least successful novel. Pynchon seems determined to undermine the authority of his own historical narrative. The scenes involving the genocide of the Herero are clearly at the heart of novel’s politics, but Pynchon is careful not to represent the genocide itself with any sort of immediacy. Instead, he portrays it in fever dreams that occur fifteen years later to a German engineer who never witnessed the original events. The engineer ostensibly shares these dreams with the amateur historian Herbert Stencil, and by the time Stencil retells the story in 1956, we are told that “the yarn had undergone considerable change: had become […] Stencilized” (V.

246). Because Stencil’s obsessive and potentially delusional quest for V. provides the frame

48 narrative for all of the novel’s “historical” chapters, Pynchon’s entire historical project in V. becomes similarly “Stencilized.” Pynchon even titles the first of these chapters, “In which

Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations.” The problem is that V. is much more than a meditation on the distortion of history by narrative: as we have already seen, the novel’s political theorizing represents a serious attempt on Pynchon’s part to outline the imperialist pathologies at the core of European modernity. In V., Pynchon tries to have it both ways: he undermines narrative at the same time that he employs it as a critical tool. The result is that “the narrative strategies employed to evade the dangers of the novel's potentially totalitarian form also diminish the force and coherence of its critique of Imperialism” (Cooley 320). Wary of complicity in the “grim rationalizing of the World,” Pynchon relinquishes the tools that might be used to resist it (GR 588).

In the two works that follow V., Pynchon remains trapped at this impasse. In both The

Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon adopts a highly paranoid approach in which he constantly hints at the existence of hidden structures of power but refrains from narrativizing a critique of those structures.10 In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon confines his concrete political theories to the margins of his thrillingly chaotic storytelling. The totalizing historical analysis that characterized V. is now distilled into a handful of paragraph-length asides like this one:

The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. (GR 105)

10 This paranoid approach has also made something of a comeback in Pynchon’s most recent fiction, particularly in Inherent Vice.

49 A far larger portion of the novel is concerned with the critiquing the desire to render the world more legible of which V. was a symptom. He writes, “If there is something comforting— religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long” (GR 434). Structure and narrative are the reified products of our need to make sense of the world, and as we have already seen, for Pynchon this need is essentially an impulse of empire. Unable (or unwilling) to abandon meaning altogether, Pynchon turns towards a paranoid representational practice that is pessimistic about our political condition and even more pessimistic about the prospects of mapping that condition.

This perspective informs the distinctive narrative approach of Gravity’s Rainbow. Once again, Slothrop’s scattering is exemplary: it represents not only the ontological, but also the narrative keystone of the text. Long before the novel’s conclusion, Pynchon does away with the closest thing it has to a main character. More than anything else, perhaps, Slothrop’s scattering is representative of a scattering of narrative threads. Apparently important plotlines from the beginning of the novel (Mexico and Jessica’s romance, for example) fade into irrelevance, while other crucial threads (particularly those involving Enzian and Tchitcherine) suddenly materialize in the second half of the text. I have suggested previously that Gravity’s Rainbow is oriented around an anarchist politics of “statelessness” and an anarchist ontology of “openness,” so it is not surprising that on a formal level, the novel enacts a similarly radical subversion of a narrative structure. The “plucked albatrosses” of Gravity’s Rainbow include not only the state and the self, but also character and plot. This approach also plays out on a smaller scale throughout the text.

Pynchon describes the orgy among the stateless refugees in a long and exuberant sentence that begins and ends with the same characters. Pynchon’s high-flying prose continuously brings us

50 back to where we began; the feeling of reading the novel is a feeling of being joyfully, exhilaratingly lost. If V. is torn between Pynchon’s desire to map and his anxiety around mapping, Gravity’s Rainbow embraces an aesthetic of “unmapping” that seeks to liberate fiction from the deadly clutches of empire and analysis.

For Fredric Jameson, this incapacity (or unwillingness) to create a legible picture of social reality is the defining characteristic of postmodernism. Postmodernism, in Jameson’s view, is symptomatic of “a new and historically original dilemma, one that involves our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose frames range from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life all the way to the unimaginable decentering of global capital itself” (351). This process “makes itself felt by the so-called death of the subject, or, more exactly, the fragmented and schizophrenic decentering and dispersion of this last” (351, my italics). For Jameson, then, Slothrop’s scattering would be representative of the distinctively decentered postmodern experience of space, which is really an experience of empire in its late-capitalist form. The problem with this sort of experience is that it leaves us without any “map” of our world, and therefore renders us politically impotent. For

Jameson, the world under late capitalism has come to resemble an unfamiliar and homogenous city in which there are no landmarks by which we might find our way: “The incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience” (353). The paranoid narrative approach of Gravity’s Rainbow seeks to create networks of meaning in this postmodern space, but as they proliferate, these networks become

“fragmented and schizophrenic,” resulting in the dispersal of subjectivity and the foreclosure of any political project founded on the mapping of social reality. This does not mean that mapping

51 as such is defeated—only that the Zone is “opened” to imperialist projects of mapping, i.e. to unopposed colonization by the “order of Analysis and Death.”

In his later fiction, Pynchon adopts a different approach to representation that seeks to reintroduce a degree of legibility to our world. One critic has suggested that, beginning with

Vineland, Pynchon moves beyond “the confines of sixties radicalism” and “creates a model for viewing contemporary power systems and the forces that oppose them” (Carswell 7). This new model does not represent an outright rejection of postmodernism, but rather something like what

Jameson calls an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping” (353). In Jameson’s view, realism and modernism, at least in their traditional forms, are no longer adequate methods of mapping in the era of multinational capital. Jameson suggests that rather than returning to these earlier modes of representation, we might look within postmodernism for ways to locate ourselves within an increasingly complicated world. It is important to recognize that the sort of mapping Jameson is calling for is not necessarily a perfectly accurate depiction of our reality in all its particular detail. Instead, a cognitive map is a representation of our world that can serve as a helpful guide for political action. Jameson draws an analogy between cognitive mapping and Althusser’s description of ideology as “the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her

Real conditions of existence” (353). The cognitive map is an ideology that undoes ideology.

Administered in small doses, reification becomes a sort of antidote (or vaccine) for a social reality whose very incomprehensibility has been reified.

Mason & Dixon is, unsurprisingly, the novel in which Pynchon is most explicitly interested in issues of mapping. While the novel certainly offers a critique of imperialist cartography, it is also engaged in its own project of mapping (a mapping of mapping).

Fascinatingly, Pynchon efforts to render the world system legible in Mason & Dixon coincide

52 with a turn towards more traditional narrative structures. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon may be the two most well developed characters in all of Pynchon’s fiction. The novel goes into great detail in showing us the ways in which their backgrounds have shaped their personalities and their politics. The brooding and conservative Mason is the product of a poor relationship with his father, the cutthroat politicking of the Royal Society, and the traumatic death of his wife, while the exuberant and sometimes radical Dixon has been influenced both by his Quaker upbringing and by his education under the mystical mathematician William Emerson. Beyond these general outlines, the novel is filled with countless small details and slight inconsistencies that bring the characters to life as full-fledged human beings. For all of its postmodern playfulness, Mason & Dixon is in many ways unique among Pynchon’s novels in its reliance on such old-fashioned literary staples as character and plot. Pynchon turns towards a more traditional narrative structure precisely because he has moved beyond the project of unmapping that characterizes Gravity’s Rainbow in order to embark on a serious attempt to map the imperialist world system.

Mason & Dixon succeeds where V. fails because it managed to integrate the narrative strategies it uses to map with those it uses to call mapping into question. First and foremost among the latter is the novel’s frame narrative. The eccentric Reverend Cherrycoke narrates almost the entire story for a group of curious children, in exchange for which his brother-in-law lets him stay at his house during the holidays. Cherrycoke is a comically unreliable narrator: he often inserts his own digressions into the tale, and his listeners are constantly calling him out for fabricating details and contradicting himself. When one of his relatives accuses him of distorting the historical truth, this is Cherrycoke’s response:

History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power […] She needs rather to be

53 tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government. (M&D 350)

Cherrycoke, like Pynchon, seems to be something of a political radical, and by telling a story that

“maps” the imperialist world system, he presumably seeks to quietly radicalize the next generation. While Stencil obsessively pursues an imagined historical truth, Cherrycoke self- consciously crafts a “counterfeit” narrative that can serve as a tool for resistance. Even as Mason

& Dixon reifies a certain account of history, it does not erase the signs of that account’s construction. Instead, extravagantly fabricated storytelling becomes the proper form for an aesthetic of cognitive mapping.

2. Pynchon’s realism

It is possible to read Against the Day as engaged in a project of mapping similar to that of

Mason & Dixon. Brian McHale understands Against the Day as a novel that maps a certain historical period—the era of American monopoly capitalism and the late stage of European empire—by drawing on that period’s popular literary forms. The most prevalent of these in

Against the Day are boys’ adventure fiction, the dime-novel Western, and the British spy novel or “shocker,” but McHale also calls our attention to Pynchon’s appropriation of Wellsian scientific romance, African and polar adventure stories, American and British collegiate novels, and both Edwardian and hardboiled detective fiction (“Genre as History” 18-19). For McHale, this is essentially a new method of mapping; Pynchon repurposes postmodern parody and pastiche in order to pierce the epistemological veil that separates us from a given historical moment. McHale is well aware that this argument radically resituates Pynchon with respect to projects of historical mapping. He writes:

54 It is as though Pynchon were aiming to map the era’s entire system of popular genres within the covers of a single novel […] This appears to be Pynchon’s wager: that multiplied and juxtaposed, an era’s genres might compensate for each others’ distortions and, taken all together, might jointly yield a complete and faithful […] representation of the historical whole. The map of the era’s genres can also serve as a cognitive map of the era itself (in Jameson’s sense)—or so Pynchon hopes. (“Genre as History” 25)

While this is a compelling reading of Against the Day, it is also incomplete. McHale recognizes that Pynchon does not only appropriate popular genres in order to map an era through its self- representations. Pynchon’s version of boys’ adventure fiction is highly parodic, his westerns counteract the mythology of the American West, and his spy fiction transforms intense homosociality into outright homosexuality (“Genre as History” 22-24). In McHale’s words,

“Against the Day is a library of entertainment fiction, but entertainment fiction passed through the looking glass, rendered differently, altered: parodied, revised and demystified, queered”

(“Genre as History” 24). But after arriving at the insight that Pynchon’s alters the genres he appropriates, McHale concludes that this, too, is a method of mapping: by adding a contemporary twist to a period’s genres, Pynchon shows us “where we stand with respect to this distant era” (“Genre as History” 26).

McHale’s analysis is perceptive, but he does not grasp the real scope of Pynchon’s project. It should be clear by now that Pynchon’s ambitions in Against the Day far exceed the mapping of social reality. Where Mason & Dixon charts the establishment of the American empire, Against the Day explores possibilities for combating it. In its more explicitly political moments, the novel is interested in the legacy of anarchism and the legitimacy of political violence. On an ontological level, the novel favors possibilities over actualities and alternative realities over our own. Pynchon celebrates heterodox science, parallel universes, and a mysterious, autonomous object world. All of this is just to say: Against the Day is not (or at least not primarily) an attempt to render cognizable the world as it is. Since Pynchon’s radical

55 political and ontological ambitions have a profound influence on his literary method, any attempt to make sense of Against the Day’s distinctive approach to narrative should provide an account of the relationship between this approach and the novel’s political ontology. My aim in the remaining pages will be to offer such an account.

In his study of nineteenth-century authors writing in a broadly realist mode, Lukács draws a distinction between narration and description that will be important for us moving forward. Lukács argues that in the hands of some realist authors, narrative becomes a tool for what Jameson would call cognitive mapping. He says of Balzac, “The drama of his protagonists is simultaneously the drama of the institution in which they work, of the things with which they live, of the setting in which they fight their battles, of the objects through which they express themselves and through which their interrelationships are determined” (114). For Lukács, a novel’s political potency depends on the degree to which its characters, its setting, and its plot are successfully integrated. He writes, “Without the revelation of important traits and without an interaction of the characters with world events, objects, the forces of nature and social institutions, even the most extraordinary adventures would be empty and meaningless” (124).

Through narrative, “Typical characters with a richly developed inner life are tested in practice”

(124). Narrative maps our world and our position in it by playing out the confrontation of its characters with objective social reality; through narrative, we can represent the limits society places on the life of the individual. Description, in this view, simply offers a “base” for the development of the really important element: action (118).

For Lukács, literature is corrupted when plot and character become untethered from one another. The main targets of his criticism are Flaubert and Zola, in whose work “the characters are merely spectators, more or less interested in the events. As a result, the events themselves

56 become only a tableaux for the reader, or, at best, a series of tableaux. We are merely observers”

(116). The severing of character from plot occurs when description takes the place of narration.

Lukács writes:

Description […] transforms people into conditions, into components of still lives. In description, men’s qualities exist side by side and are so represented; they do not interpenetrate or reciprocally effect each other so as to reveal the vital unity of personality within varied manifestations and amidst contradictory actions. Corresponding to the false breadth assigned the external world is a schematic narrowness in characterization […] The profound social truth emerging from the interaction of social factors with psychological and physiological qualities is lost. (139)

Lukács’s key claim here is that a literature that is more interested in objects than people is a literature that turns people into objects. If they are not brought to life by narrative, the worlds depicted in a work of fiction and the characters that inhabit those worlds become inanimate.

Without narrative, literature can never map our position with respect to social reality. Instead, it ends up reifying the self-representations of the dominant social order. While narrative reveals the contingency of the status quo by representing the encounter between inner life and social structure, description, in reducing the participant to a mere observer, solidifies contingent facts into necessary truths.

Understanding this argument will allow us to return with due surprise to Pynchon, since

Lukács’s criticisms of Flaubert and Zola are remarkably similar to those leveled by critics of

Against the Day. One extremely negative review of the novel in the New York Times argues that while Pynchon portrayed Mason and Dixon as “full-fledged human beings,” the characters in

Against the Day are “little more than stick figure cartoons […] drawn in such a desultory manner that they might as well be plastic chess pieces, moved hither and yon by the author’s impervious, godlike hand” (Kakutani). The novel’s central narrative, meanwhile, is “a tiny skeleton of a story” that fails to provide “a firm enough scaffold for the manifold digressions […] that are

57 piled on top of it” (Kakutani). A more positive review in The New Yorker also emphasizes the novel’s lack of narrative cohesion: “the novel is shapeless, just yards and yards of Pynchonian wallpaper […] The whole thing sloshes along […] with threads left dangling everywhere, sometimes for hundreds of pages, ultimately forever” (Menand). These critiques of Against the

Day follow the Lukácsian formula: an overabundance of description and a dearth of coherent narration give us cartoonish characters and an irrelevant plot, undermining the novel’s ability to reveal social truths. Nor is it obvious that criticism of Against the Day along these lines is misdirected. While many of the novel’s characters are more than “stick figure cartoons,” none possess the sort of “full-fledged” humanity Pynchon bestows on Mason and Dixon. The characters of Against the Day may not be “plastic chess pieces,” but they do resemble elaborate marionettes, whisked about at the author’s whim. At each stop along the way, we are treated to digressive descriptions of their surroundings, often in the form of a lengthy list of every object in the immediate vicinity. Along with the popular genres of the period identified by McHale,

Against the Day seems to draw heavily from the very strain of late nineteenth century realism that Lukács warns us against—realism in which narrative impulses are blunted in favor of extraneous description. But as with the other literary forms it appropriates, Against the Day gives descriptive realism a subversive twist. Rather than carefully depicting the actual day-to-day life of the bourgeoisie, Pynchon exhaustively describes a world that is not quite our own. Consider the following description of a time machine:

A once-unblemished exterior had become long pitted and stained with electrolytic wastes. What numerals were visible on the dust-covered dial faces owed much to the design preferences of an earlier generation, as did the Breguet-style openwork of the indicator arrows. More alarmingly, even the casual eye could detect everywhere emergency weld- lines, careless shimming, unmatched fasteners, blotches of primer coat never painted over, and other evidences of makeshift. (AtD 402)

58 Here and at countless other moments in Against the Day, Pynchon halts the narrative to describe his characters’ material surroundings with lavish detail. But what state of affairs can a description of a time machine possibly reify? The obvious answer is: a state of affairs that does not actually exist. Pynchon’s realism is more than descriptive: it is speculative.11

Of course, this account of Pynchon’s approach to narrative in Against the Day may sound like a description of speculative fiction in general. One could be forgiven for wondering what exactly the difference is between Against the Day and any other story that portrays an invented world with a certain degree of realism. The author and critic Samuel Delany sees Science Fiction as doing something very similar to what I have argued Pynchon attempts in Against the Day:

Most of our specific SF expectations will be organized around the question: […] how does the condition of possibility in the world of the story differ from ours? […] For the last hundred years, the interpretative conventions of all the literary reading codes have been organized, tyrannized even, by what, in philosophical jargon, you could call "the priority of the subject […] SF is a representation of, among other things, a complex codic system by which the codic system we call the "object" (which, in those cultures that have SF, SF must ditto) can be richly criticized—unto its overlap with the subject. (31-32)

Delany’s point seems to be that where literary fiction tends to offer an epistemological critique of the subject that entrenches its boundaries, science fiction is able to offer an ontological critique of the object that breaks down the categories of subject and object, and that as a result, science fiction is uniquely able (and required) to impart a certain degree of reality to the worlds it constructs. It is true, I think, that Against the Day shares much of its ontological project with science fiction in general. The important distinction to draw here is between speculative fiction that serves as an escape from our world, and speculative fiction that functions, if not as a perfect

11 In contemporary philosophy, “speculative realism” refers to a loose set of positions associated principally with Quentin Meillasoux, Graham Harmon, Ian Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier. While there are strong resonances between Pynchon and these philosophers, here I use the term “speculative realism” simply to emphasize how Pynchon transforms descriptive realism into the literary vehicle for his radical ontology.

59 mirror for our world, then perhaps as a piece of Iceland spar. When it comes to flights of description, Against the Day does not discriminate between the real and the fanciful. Here is

Pynchon describing in great detail the historically attested industry surrounding Telluride,

Colorado:

The smell had come drifting by here and there since he’d arrived in town, but nowhere near as intense as this. He heard metal groaning overhead and looked up to see buckets loaded with ore heading down to the Pandora works at the edge of town for processing, the owners having found it too steep up here to put in expensive luxuries like stamp mills. He passed the junction house of the Telluride Power Company, a vivid red against the pale mountainslopes logged off long ago, scarred with trail and bristling all over with stumps gone white as grave-markers, the hum of the voltage louder than the cicadas. (AtD 297)

Unlike much speculative fiction, Against the Day’s metaphysical effect is twofold: it gives ontological priority to the possible at the same time that it brings the possible back down to earth.

Pynchon borrows the descriptive decadence despised by Lukács in order to put the potential and the actual on a level playing field. If the appropriation of historical genres helps Pynchon to map a historical era, and the imitation of speculative genres helps him map an alternative universe, the transformation of these genres in Against the Day enabled Pynchon to build bridges between our world and the other possible world just beyond our reach.

3. Narrative at a standstill

What I have been trying to suggest in my discussion of Pynchon’s transformation of realism is that Against the Day’s distinctive approach to narrative represents an ambitious attempt to realize its ontological commitments on a formal level. All that remains is to provide some specificity to this claim. The novel’s most striking stylistic quirk may be its liberal use of lengthy descriptive lists, a feature that draw James Wood’s particular ire in his review: “The list is a stylistic amphetamine; it speeds up verisimilitude, makes it frantic. It is Janus-faced: on the

60 one hand, it insists that one pay attention to its sleepless abundance; on the other, its very length tacitly acknowledges that distinctions are less important than the overall effect of abundance, and thus that one will not really pay notice at all” (“All Rainbow, No Gravity”). Against the Day is a particularly appalling example what Wood calls “hysterical realism,” an epithet whose accusatory sting is again basically Lukácsian: in another essay he rails against “novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very ‘brilliant’ books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being” (“Tell me how does it feel”). Wood’s “hysterical realism” is descriptive realism taken up a notch or two—its fatal flaw remains its lack of coherent, compelling, and persuasively personalized drama. In reiterating

Lukács’s argument, Wood downplays the differences between hysterical and descriptive realism.

With impressive dexterity, he first conflates the two narrative approaches and then declares that anything new or different in hysterical realism is only so much window dressing, meant to disguise the inherent vacuity of description. As a result, Wood hardly engages with what may be the most interesting narratological question posed by Against the Day: what is the difference between excessive description and an excess of excessive description? Or in other words, what happens when the merely unnecessary becomes the hyperbolically unnecessary?

In his critique of Pynchon’s supposedly dull lists, Wood is already exposing their vibrant instability. The Pynchonian list is simultaneously material and immaterial (real and imaginary): material because it exhaustively describes the material world, immaterial because the real effect of this description is one of sublime abundance exceeding any particular cognizable object. The list is too excessive to become a solidified representation of our reality; instead it establishes a new sort of literary relationship to the object world. In Pynchon’s lists, the material world

61 exceeds encyclopedic description. A visit to a film lab near the end of the novel offers an excellent example:

It was the lab of every boy’s dreams! Why, the place even smelled scientific—that long- familiar blend of ozone, gutta-percha, solvent chemicals, heated insulation. The shelves and bench-tops were crowded with volt-ammeters, rheostats, transformers, arc lamps whole and in pieces, half-used carbons, calcium burners, Oxone tablets, high-tension magnetos, alternators store-bought and home-made, vibrator coils, cut-outs and interruptors, worm drives, Nicol prisms, generating valves, glassblowing torches, Navy surplus Thalofide cells, brand-new Aeolight tubes freshly fallen from the delivery truck, British Blattnerphone components and tons of other stuff Chick had never recalled seeing before. (AtD 1036)

While all of the obscure items Pynchon names would not have been out of place in a film lab of the period, Pynchon’s lengthy list of them almost resembles a nonsense poem. By the end, after

Pynchon has rapidly rattled off words like “Thaloide,” “Aeolight,” and “Blattnerphone” in quick succession, we are left with the suggestion of numerous other objects that cannot even be identified. The ontological relevance of this narrative strategy is made fairly explicit soon afterwards, when Pynchon writes, “If shooting a photo is like taking a first derivative, then maybe we could find some way to do the reverse of that, start with the still photo and integrate it, recover its complete primitive and release it back into action . . . even back to life . . .” (AtD

1036). If the descriptive list is a photograph, the “hysterical” list is a film (or moving picture); where the former reifies a dead object world, the latter restores the object world to life.

Another salient stylistic feature of Against the Day is formal repetition. Wood complains that Pynchon’s manic descriptions of London, New York, New Orleans, and other more remote locales are remarkably similar, so that “each place on Pynchon’s far-flung map resembles the other, because each is a circus” (“All Rainbow, No Gravity”). Wood is not wrong to point out a certain slippage between Pynchon’s descriptions of places; when Kit visits Irkutsk, or the “Paris of Siberia,” he finds that it is “more like Saturday in the San Juans all over again” (AtD 773).

62 According to Wood, Pynchon’s (banal) point is that the reality of any place or time “is not accessible to novelistic inquiry” (“All Rainbow, No Gravity”). Alternatively, Pynchon’s point could be that the emerging cities, mining towns, and carnivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century really were remarkably similar, but here we are already offering answers to the wrong question. The important thing to keep in mind is that Pynchon’s approach to narrative in

Against the Day is informed primarily by ontological, rather than epistemic, concerns. Richard

Hardack agrees with Wood that repetition in Against the Day “tends to enforce not difference, but identity,” before going on to suggest that this “collapse of differentiation” is the result of

Pynchon narrativizing his ontology (91, 118). Repetition, in this reading, breaks down the barrier between the subject and the object world and opens up avenues of departure into parallel worlds.

Hardack argues that “repetitions among characters, texts, times, and taxonomies” give rise to “a fragmented, yet connected consciousness” (102). This sort of narrative doubling affirms that everything is connected while enacting a sort of lateral leap into a world set just to the side of our own: “Repetition confirms identity, but identity slightly altered” (Hardack 105). Just as he crafted an alternative universe out of “real” history and science, Pynchon transforms “real” narrative into an alternative anarchist poetics that is cyclical, multiple, and open.

Along with excessive description, Against the Day also borrows some realist strategies traditionally associated with mapping, namely a multitude of intersecting characters and narrative. The novel’s encyclopedic scope is undeniable. It features hundreds of personages, among which I count ten main characters.12 Many of the characters travel across the globe, playing a variety of roles in multiple separate plotlines: Cyprian is a fop at Oxford and a spy in

12 Webb, Reef, Frank, Kit, Lake, Merle, Dally, Lew, Cyprian and Yashmeen. This list excludes the Chums of Chance, who together are a sort of eleventh main character, as well as countless prominent minor characters.

63 the Balkans, Reef is an anarchist in America and a playboy in the spa towns of Europe, and Lew is at least three different kinds of detective in Chicago, Denver, London, and Los Angeles. Kit alone is at various times a student at Yale, an associate of anarchists in Belgium, a student again in Germany, a would-be assassin in Venice, and an explorer/pilgrim in Central Asia. Other chapters primarily focus on minor characters, including Fleetwood Vibe’s adventures in the arctic, Hunter Penhallow’s departure from Iceland, and Foley Walker’s relationship to Scarsdale

Vibe. Unlike the prototypical realist novel, Against the Day refuses to unite its many parallel narratives in an overarching master narrative: “Pynchon’s text realizes in practice the democratic and potentially anarchic premises of the realist novel, because Against the Day does not winnow its pool of potential heroes down to one” (Kevorkian et al. 56). While encyclopedic realist novels do not necessarily end up with a single hero, they do tend to move from multiplicity to order: many separate plotlines converge into a single, central narrative and the most important characters are either married to one another, killed off, or decisively marginalized. The numerous characters of Against the Day, on the other hand, tend to run into each other, have sex, and then go their separate ways, usually to repeat the process with another character. At the novel’s end they are mostly still alive, and if many of them have found a sense of community, it is just as likely to be in non-traditional relationships and families than not. There is no sense at the end of the novel that any character’s happiness is secured, or than any narrative arc has come to a proper end. In the words of one critic, “The novel doesn’t conclude; it just, more or less arbitrarily, stops” (Menand).

It has been suggested that in the realist novel, as in Renaissance painting, knowledge of the whole derives from the sequential, empirical representation of its parts, so that “the identity of things […] becomes abstract, removed from direct apprehension to a hidden dimension of

64 depth” (Ermarth 500). We might think of Against the Day as doing the same thing to the novel that the Pre-Raphaelites did to painting—it flattens our perspective while maintaining compositional complexity. Against the Day is a realist novel without a “vanishing point”—that is, without a clear narrative center or trajectory. One critic has compared the effect of Against the

Day to that of a panorama, in which a combination of real objects and a painted backdrop creates an illusion of three-dimensional space. The same critic suggests that “rather than generating depth by creating so-called round characters […] Pynchon generates depth by juxtaposing ‘flat’ characters in pairs” (St. Clair 75). In Against the Day, flatness and depth go hand in hand. If the realist novel is a vector, in which multiple terms are combined into a single magnitude and direction, then Pynchon’s novel is its flattened quaternion counterpart, in which multiple terms are suspended side by side. Through its excessive description, its (ab)use of repetition, and its disregard for narrative cohesion, Against the Day achieves a unique aesthetic that we could perhaps call “narrative at a standstill”—a poetics in which meaning arises suddenly and fades away just a quickly. In this baroque, broken novel, Pynchon has crafted something like an animate object that manages to articulate his politics precisely insofar as the utopian world it promises continues to escape our grasp.

~

In Against the Day, Pynchon attempts to develop new ways of seeing and being in our world, seeking to reveal hidden political possibilities not only in our history, but also in our metaphysics. Against the Day reclaims anarchism from the past, the potential from the actual, and the object world from the hegemony of the subject. The challenge faced by the novel becomes one of realizing this new sort of seeing in language. The result is a distinctive narrative style that has mystified and occasionally infuriated readers. Against the Day’s title is usually

65 interpreted as something like an abbreviation of “against the everyday”—that is, against the mundane distractions and demands that stand in the way of a radical politics. The title can also, however, be taken to mean something like “silhouetted,” and in many ways, reading Against the

Day is indeed a bit like staring at the sun. The novel offers us a reified “silhouette” of social reality, levels metaphysical hierarchies, and adopts a “flattened” narrative style. Like the sun,

Against the Day is brilliant—and it is also difficult to look at for very long. We can only hope that when we close our eyes after setting down this remarkable book, some trace of its light remains in the darkness—a faint promise of a new art, another world, a coming community.

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