Against the Title

[pynchonoid]

Maybe Pynchon chose the title for this novel a long
time ago - say, back when he was writing letters to
his agent talking about how he was going to rock the
literary world with the set of novels he was writing -
before the appearance of the other novel with the same
title, and decided to stick with it for artistic
reasons.

I doubt that Pynchon's worried that somebody will
think his title somehow unoriginal - given the number
of times "against the day" appears in significant
contexts over the years, it's not going to be a
terribly "original" title anyway, even if there were
no other out-of-print paperbacks by the same name. 

> Somehow the existence of the identical title of the
> Cronin book is still 
> nagging me. All the previous titles of Pynchon's
> oeuvre have been original, 
> and now there is this mix-up. Of course, I realise
> that Pynchon most 
> probably knew nothing about Cronin's novel, and that
> time permitting nobody 
> will remember that there is a namesake of Pynchon's
> novel, but still I would 
> be happier if they changed the title to something
> more original. Don't know 
> if such last minute changes are possible.
> 
> 

http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"

http://OnlineJournalist.org

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