(9:23 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Pynchon Reviews

Against the Day's view of the late 19th century and early 20th evokes the vision of historian Eric Hobsbawm -- an irreversible slide from civilization into barbarism as capitalists duke it out with anarchists, culminating though hardly ending in the apocalypse of World War I. "All history after that will belong properly to the history of hell," one character predicts -- or remembers. One reason this book is so difficult is that we can't always distinguish between memory and prediction, between history and science fiction.

We hear a lot about the fourth dimension in Against the Day, as well as double refraction, bilocation, perfect mirrors, imaginary numbers and lateral world-sets. We hear equally about US labor history, including Haymarket, Homestead, Coeur d'Alene, Cripple Creek, Ludlow and Mother Jones; and the Mexican Un-Revolution, that strut-and-fret of Diaz, Madero, Huerta, Carranza, Obregón, Villa and Zapata; and ethnic seething in the Balkans, before Rebecca West, Marshal Tito or Richard Holbrooke got a chance to do their fiddles; and turn-of-the-century parapsychology, with its mountain-misted tommyknockers and dreamworld Tenochtitlans. But because Against the Day is a full-blown and full-fledged Pynchon novel--and thus not only an occasion of joy in every nook of American culture except The New Republic but also a phantasmagoria whose only conceivable analogue is another Pynchon novel, Gravity's Rainbow--we hear almost as much about mayonnaise, Futurism, landmines, poison gas and the ancient Albanian honor code of Kanuni Lekë Dukagjinit.

Pynchon thinks on a different scale from most novelists, to the point where you'd almost want to find another word for the sort of thing he does, since his books differ from most other novels the way a novel differs from a short story, in exponential rather than simply linear fashion. Pynchon's work has absorbed modernism and what has come after, but in its alternating cycles of jokes and doom, learning and carnality, slapstick and arcana, direct speech and poetic allusiveness, high language and low, it taps into something that goes back to the Elizabethans, who potentially addressed the entire world, made up of individuals with differing interests and capacities. He also thinks big because he is extremely American (like many of his fellow citizens, he is never so American as when traveling abroad). In this way he is reminiscent of the "millionaire ascetic" in Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," who "declared that in America it was absurd to invent a country, and proposed the invention of a whole planet." Here, in Against the Day, by his own admission, he has made what "with a minor adjustment or two [is] what the world might be."

In fact, there is no one in this book, not a spy or rebel or killer, not a mathematician or cowboy or dippy aristocrat, who doesn't have some intimation of a world beyond the familiar world. Sometimes it's a matter of remembering the dead, or what might have been; often it's a sense of a second life being lived even now, some form of bilocation; more often sstill it's an attempt to get beyond time. 'Watches and clocks are fine,' one character says, 'don't mistake my meaning, but they are a sort of acknowledgement of failure, they're there to glorify and celebrate one particular sort of time in one direction only and no going back.' And finally there is the remote possibility of an accommodation with time, what Pynchon calls 'agreement, even occasions of intimacy, with Time'. This would not free us from tickwise time, but it would allow us some movement among the other sorts, even if the promise is only 'a propaganda of memory and redemption'. Some people will never reach this agreement: 'salesmen, tourists, the resolutely idle, the uncleansably rich, and other practitioners of forgetfulness'. But some troubled and negatively privileged people will see faces, hear voices in the dark, travel to past and future. Who are these people? Who could they be except the permanent residents of Pynchon's novels, those who can't speak, at least not about what matters to them, those who are not saved, and those whose business is never finished: 'fugitives, exiles, mourners and spies'. Against the Day adds adds another term, both early on and as its last word: 'grace'. But this would have to be a grace that only the graceless can find, or even look for.

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