REMAINS OF AGAINST THE DAY

We're pleased to have Jim Ruland return to offer his parting Pynchon perspective.  And if you want to express your thanks to Jim directly, you can stop by Sunday night's Vermin on the Mount (of which more anon).  We're also pleased to announce that Stephen Elliott will be stopping by here on Thursday to take the reins as we head off to NYC, and he's got a very interesting announcement to make.  Stay tuned.

GUEST ESSAY BY JIM RULAND

Against the Day is a book of terrorists.

Bomb huckers, outlaws and anarchists lurk everywhere and—surprise, surprise—nearly all of them are likable. Against the Day is like a Louis L’Amour novel in reverse but instead of the saga of the Sackett family moving westward, endlessly crossing the frontier, Pynchon’s Traverse’s travel from West to East, hurling themselves against the tide of history and humanity and into the teeth of American enterprise during the time when her fortunes were being made.

These are not basement anarchists building bombs with English dynamite but mavericks employing the very tools used to extract wealth from countless mines with little or no thought to the human cost. Yet in recent reviews by Kirsch and Kakutani, we’re led to believe that the Traverse family’s relationship to violence makes them morally inferior, as if the gears of Capitalism weren’t leaving a trail of corpses in its wake, as if violence was an instrument to be used only as a last resort, as if bombs don’t make sense, as if life wasn’t cheap and getting cheaper by the minute.

This is why some people hate Pynchon: because his history of the world reads like an English explorer’s lifeboat story—A terrible end is a foregone conclusion so let’s get on with the atrocities shall we?—but he’ll make you labor over the most groaningly awful puns and then break into song, usually featuring a ukulele or a kazoo.

After reading Kirsch’s asinine assessment and Kakutani’s predictable dismissal, I have reached the conclusion that neither is equipped to consider the counterfactual reality at work in Against the Day. One thing is clear from Kirsch’s review is that they don’t know how to read Pynchon. So many of Kirsch’s proclamations about Against the Day could easily apply to any of Pynchon’s novels, which makes one wonder what Kirsch is doing reviewing this book in the first place.

For example, he has no appreciation of Pynchon’s scope. When we open a novel we expect to be presented with a narrative. Even if the subject matter is long or short, familiar or foreign, compact or unruly, the expectation is that the writer will manage the material in a way that allows a story to be expressed. Pynchon does not follow these rules. If most novels are like nature narratives on the Discovery channel, Pynchon’s are like long shots of ants scurrying about in an ant farm; at first their antics seem utterly random, but the more one watches, the deeper the suspicion that the participants in the drama are communicating with one another in meaningful ways. To put it another way, the organizing principle of the modern novel is the family; Pynchon is interested in systems.

Pynchon challenges the reader to think about the novel is different ways. That should be a given. It was, at least for a while, but not anymore. This is puzzling because hasn’t it always been the hallmark of great writers to change the form? One could even say their greatness is measured by the extent to which they succeed. Melville was a washed up travel writer before he shattered the boundaries of classification with Moby Dick. Joyce seemed doomed to repeat the story of his adolescence until Leopold Bloom emerged in the fourth chapter of Ulysses. Their struggle/progress is immaterial because they not only wrote great novels, but they changed the way we think about and respond to them.

Strangely, Kirsch and Kakutani don’t cut Pynchon any slack even though Pynchon has always written like Pynchon. His novels have been dizzyingly dazzling from the get-go. His first novel V. has all the earmarks of his mature work. His early stories, his self-proclaimed juvenilia, were celebrated for his astonishing maturity to the same degree that his most recent work is being castigated for its outrageous silliness. Embedded in Kirsch’s and Kakutani’s criticisms are their disappointment at Pynchon’s refusal to come around to the fluorescent side of the moon and commit to hyper-realism; Pynchon cultivates such extreme fandom because his readers understand that they have to come him.

Take this line from Kirsch’s review: “The gaudy names Mr. Pynchon gives his characters are like pink slips, announcing their dismissal from the realm of human sympathy and concern.” This is the equivalent of saying One Hundred Years of Solitude is trite and banal because so many of the characters have the same name. Still, one can’t help but wonder where Mr. Kirsch has been all these years. This has been Pynchon’s shtick since before 1962 when he opened his O. Henry prize-winning story “Entropy” with the appearance of one Meatball Mulligan. When a certain stoker by the name of “O.I.C. Bodine” appeared five hundred and seventeen pages into Against the Day, I all but stood up and cheered. (O.I.C. stands for Officer in Charge, interpolate the “n” and O.I.C. becomes “oink.”)

Kirsch is also at a loss for how to make sense of Pynchon’s now-you-see-‘em, now-you-don’t cast of thousands, which tells me the man has never waded through the Slothrop-less sections of Gravity’s Rainbow or the Zoyd Wheelerless patches of Vineland. It’s a penchant of Pynchon’s that makes experienced readers wary of latching onto characters because their time in the novel is bound to be short-lived. I think this is something Pynchon picked up from his travels in the U.S. Navy. Most war movies would have you believe that when you enlist in the armed services you bond with your buddies in boot camp, you serve together, fight together and die in each other’s arms as the credits roll. In reality, the average soldier/sailor/airman/marine comes into contact with more people in their first three months of duty then in the sum of all of their previous experience on the planet. People are constantly coming and going, signing on, shipping out, moving along on orders to the next duty station—to say nothing of disappearing, deserting, going AWOL or getting killed. It’s a cyclone of human activity that is so puzzling that there are people in the Pentagon whose jobs are to predict how many people they need to enlist today to meet the needs of the armed services tomorrow. In other words, an impossible system to base a narrative around; but that’s precisely how Pynchon operates.

Veterans of the military enjoy Pynchon on an entirely other level than ordinary civilians. There’s an entire plateau of understanding that veterans, particularly naval veterans, intuitively inhabit. For example, when I first picked up V. and encountered the barmaid with the propeller’s tattooed on her buttocks I felt like someone was speaking directly to me through the novel, someone who’d walked in my boondockers, for embedded in this mundane reference is an even more profane pun: the propeller, as any sailor will tell you is also known as the ship’s screw. This knowledge is not essential to understanding Pynchon’s work any more than one needs to be Irish Catholic to read Joyce, but it’s the place where Pynchon revels in revealing himself. Perhaps gleefully so.

Nowhere in all of Pynchon’s work is this more true than in the Chums of Chance sequences that open Against the Day and stitch many of the disparate episodes together. The Chums of Chance are simultaneously characters within the novel and characters in a series of boy’s adventure books called The Chums of Chance (the first of literally dozens of doubles at work in the novel). Both appear to be modeled after the Frank Merriwell series—an early precursor to the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys narratives that were used for intellectual entertainment and moral instruction.

The Chums fly around onboard airships filled with an assortment of impossible gadgetry. Each of the five Chums is defined by their role on the ship and Pynchon seems to delight in applying every idiomatic expression of his two-year stint in the Navy. From singling up all lines to the brightwork that always needs polishing, the Chums are proof that not even Pynchon can refrain from romanticizing his time at sea. Like a modern-day Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Pynchon abandoned his studies at college for “two years before the mast.”

But as the years wear on and the Chums become salty old vets in their own right they come to question where their orders are coming from, and why they should carry them out the way they’ve always carried them out when their work seems not to make a bit of difference on the ball of confusion below. Like the Flying Dutchman, they become the stuff of storybook fantasy while the world erupts in total war.

Perhaps in some way Kirsch and Kakutani see their own situation here: assigned a tiresome chore, they carry it out without relish or zeal because the results fail to register an impact on the landscape.

Critics: abandon ship; Pynchon fans: full speed ahead.

Comments

[PaulSweeney]

Nice overview. Like the systems and ants analogy. I've only read 49 and Rainbow, and 49 was a strange little book that stayed with me.

[rmck1]

*Nice* essay. As a longtime Pynchoneer, I wholeheartedly concur.

I'll only add that Pynchon's been moving toward concerns of the family since Vineland (as, doubtless, he began his own), and I completely welcome this, and the new level of character attatchment it brings to these three novels. I don't think he lost anything of the old Pynchon in the process of becoming a tad more "conventional" in this regard.

Bob

[Scott]

You don't have to be Irish Catholic to read Joyce?

[Erik]

I dunno, I'm a huge Pynchon fan but I think Kirsch has a valid point about the names.

>This is the equivalent of saying One Hundred Years of Solitude is >trite and banal because so many of the characters have the same >name.

Not so-- he doesn't dismiss the whole novel b/c of Pynchon's names, just points out they can sometimes be so jarring on the page that it gets in the way of the characters. Pynchon names up until GR were strange but often coolly so: Kevin Spectro, Clive Mossmoon, Katje Borgesius... Compare with the Chums of Chance, Van Meter, Zoyd Wheeler, Hector Zuniga, Merle Rideout, Lew Basnight... You can find plenty of less- and more-normal Pynchon names in all his novels, but I would say in general that the names have gotten weirder and sadly less inspired in Vineland and ATD.

[rmck1]

Erik:

Aww, c'mon. Jim's right; this has been in the P-man's bag his whole career. Nathan "Lardass" Levine? Harold "Slow" Lerner? Meatball Mulligan, Callisto, Benny Profane, Governeur "Roony" and *Mafia* Winsome? Dudley Eigenvalue -- eigenvalue *can't* be a name, since it's a math term that consists of the German word "eigen-" with "-value" stuck on the end. Herbert *Stencil* (talk about transparent allegory ... ) ? Oedipa and Wendell "Mucho" Maas? Stanley Kotecks and Mike Fallopian? And shit, shouldn't Valerie Plame *be* a Pynchonian name?

Or three of my favorites: Zoyd's friends Moonpie, Thapsia and Elvissa? C'mon -- for baby boomers of a certain age? And what's with *Zoyd* ?

This is Pynchonian Stupid Humor(tm). DEAL WITH IT :) It is every bit as characteristic as Rocket Limericks, campy musical numbers or laboriously set-up atrocious puns ("Becuase they have I CHING FEET!")

I happen to adore this eccentricity -- though in fairness it took me a bit to get used to it. I think my favorite onion fart moment in AtD so far (pp. 757-58) is the noted Uyghur troublemaker Al Mar-Fouad:

"I love Gweat Bwitain! Lord Salisbuwy is my *wole model*!"

I'm sorry ... this kind of unapologetic blithering idiocy makes me snicker my butt off. And I s'poze it's kinda sad, because it could very well turn out to be what keeps Pynchon from ever winning the Nobel Prize for Literature :(

I agree, though, that he's pushing the envelope with names here. And as I'm attempting to argue in a different thread, this may be because Pynchon has decided to take up the mantle of postmodernism and is relaxing the illusion of verismilitude -- which is, truthfully, part of what astounded so much in Gravity's Rainbow (so much of it seemed woven directly out of the fabric of history) and this new laxness in the plausibility dept. (evident especially in the three post-GR novels) might indeed be giving certain critics a hard time. Pynchon's magic realism is a stylistic evolution, and I'd argue we should take it on its own terms.

I mean, why *shouldn't* Edwarda Vibe have a maid named Vaseline? :)

Bob

[Jim]

I think one could make the argument that one of Pynchon's complaints is that people's name are, by and large, meaningless. How many parents name their children "Thomas" because it means "seeker of the truth?" Again, I think this goes back to the service where one's rate and rank are attached to the surname. He also uses names to conjure up the past. I mean doesn't Lindsay Noseworth sound like the name of a headmaster at a boy's school? On the Inconvenience he serves as the Executive Officer and Master at Arms, i.e. Chief Disciplinarian. What's in a name? For Pynchon, everything.

[Drew]

If what you say is true Jim - that is, "names are, by and large, meaningless" in Pynchon's view, then he does have that in common with Saramago who does not bother to give characters proper names at all.

Against the Day will be my first foray into Pynchon (hoping to start next week after I get out of my DeLillo tangle), and I appreciate your insight over the last week.
Best of luck to you..

Drew

[rmck1]

Jim:

Well, but never discount two other motives aside from the allegorically instructive:

1) Pure whimsy, and ...

2) Convoluted private jokes that it often takes years to unravel. Took me until my third reading of GR to realize that the law firm Salieri, Poore, Nash, DeBrutus and Short was a rip on one of Thomas Hobbes' famous aphorisms (Life, for those outside of the Social Contract, being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.")

Has anybody else noticed that at the last lines of a chapter on p. 907, Dally quotes the refrain of a particularly silly song by The Residents: "Here I come, Constantinople."

Lindsay Noseworth suggests (no, veritably trumpets) Anglophiliac snobbery (nose = snoot, as in snooty; nose in the air) and attention to class deference that's doubtless in all those Morally Instructive Boy's Stories that Pynchon is playing around with. That there's rather a sharp dissonance between it and what Americans are supposed to believe about about class is part of the point; these books were written, like the Horatio Alger stories, during the Gilded Age, where class anxieties were magnified and people with the education and leisure time to be able to read these stories rather frantically aspired to upward mobility. The American economic elite have always been rather sickeningly Anglophilic, and I think Pynchon is poking fun here -- and I suspect that much of the Chums sections can be understood in meta-narrational terms, about what this sort of *popular text* is saying about shifting attitudes as the world slouches to Armageddon.

If any characters in this book are serving the more typically Pynchonian functions of metonymy and allegory, I think it's pretty clearly the Chums.

On p. 555, Pynchon might reveal a little of this game with a tirade from a Trespasser from the future, Ryder Thorn:

""I wish I were not here," cried Ryder Thorn. "I wish I had never seen these Halls of Night, that I were not cursed to return, and return. You have been so easy to fool -- most of you anyway -- you are such simpletons at the fair, gawking at your Wonders of Science, expecting as your entitlement all the Blessings of Progress, it is your faith, your pathetic, balloon-boy faith.""

Anyway, I'll try to develop this idea further when I finish the book, which should be by tomorrow.

Bob

[Jim]

Sorry, Drew, I should have been a little clearer. I meant that in life names have been stripped of meaning. (Interesting that avatars, in which names, symbols, signs, etc. are rife with meaning are so popular) Pynchon combats this vacuity by making names loaded with references. Please don't let my clumsy thinking put you off from reading the book!

I definitely think you're on to something. The most Horatio Alger like character onboard the Inconvenience is Chick Counterfly, the son of a carper bagger, he arrives one step ahead of the law. As the FNG (Fucking New Guy) I thought he serve as the lens through which the reader views the officers and crew, as is so often the case with military books and movies (new guy arrives and the situation/mission and all the attendent equipment is explained for the benefit of the reader. But Chick quickly ascends to a position of authority and becomes something of a voice of reason. Darby Suckling reminds of Benny Profane for obvious reasons.

As for riffs on the way the Boy's Adventure book has evolved and been assimilated into pop culture, I'm particularly fond of the quote on page 178 of AtD from Tansy Wagwheel:

"It's in this wonderful book I keep close to me all the time, A Modern Christian's Guide to Moral Perplexities. Right here on page eighty-six, is your answer. Do you have your pencil? Good, write this down--'Dynamite Them All, and Let Jesus Sort Them Out.'"

Pynchon isn't usually this on the nose, but it's still hilarious. It's anarchy in the U.S.A. and Pynchon is the antichrist.

[rmck1]

Jim:

Tansy Wagwheel, LOL! What cracked me up is the unresolvable conflict there between "moral perplexities" and the Soldier Of Fortune Magazine T-shirt sentiment it reduces to. Pynchon here seems to be simultaneously mocking the 19th century's idea of pulp-lit Moral Instruction, while taking a swipe at our own day's hard right wing.

Pynchon's whole point seems to be that the only moral instruction worth a damn is lived experience. Ironically enough, it's Lindsay Noseworth whose character portrayal seems to remain the most resistant to growth and change through the novel, remaining the same bickering prig (and his passive-aggressively circumlocuted vulgar insults to Darby are always a scream) who hung Darby over the side by his ankles, Michael Jackson-like, we met on the book's first page.

Towards the end of the book, when the Chums' world seems to have entered the purely fantastical (while duly conforming to pulp-fic convention; note the five Aetherial Brides who descend out of literally nowhere to fulfull romantic expectations), there's another truly wonderful/awful Pynchonian moment of Onion Fart Anachronism:

Chick tours Merle Rideout's and Roswell Bounce's whiz-bang mad inventor's laboratory, and Merle cranks up what seems like an early, pre-Philo T. Farnsworth electromechanical version of television -- only this contraption evidently picks up signals from the future:

"Chick gazed with great scientific curiosity at the shimmering image which appeared on a screen across the room from the spinning disk, as what looked like a tall monkey in a sailor hat with the brim turned down fell out of a palm tree onto a very surprised older man -- the skipper of some nautical vessel, to judge by the hat he was wearing" (1034)

It's a friggin' GILLIGAN'S ISLAND :)

Bob

[Sheila]

I am 300 pages into my second reading of Against the Day and have full confidence that this master work of art will continue to yield new insights with each successive reading. Mr. Pynchon writes with the energy, passion and wonder of a young man, combined with the vast knowledge and experience of a fully-formed consciousness. The novel's surface is iridescent, an uneven terrain of hills and valleys reflecting from all directions rainbows of light back to the reader, and beneath its surface is an abyssal benthos which has ample space to accommodate the individual imaginations of an infinite audience, which is why the book, like all great art, will continue to yield up new truths over the passing years with no chance of ever becoming irrelevant and will present a different face to each person who reads it. Only two artists come to mind who exhibit the same sort of fluidity and scope: the inimitable Bruno Schulz, whose written ouevre is limited to two slender novels, and the magnificent David Wilson, whose magnum opus is the ever-changing Museum of Jurassic Technology. And I doubt if anything has yet been written about 9/11 to rival the multidimensional metaphor of the Vormance Expedition. As for the critics, well, who should one trust: Mr. Pynchon with his encyclopedic erudition and all-encompassing imagination, or the critics who need to pump out reviews one after another? We may no longer be a thoughtful culture (if, indeed, we ever were), but with novels like these to light the way, there is hope for a more luminous future.