Inside the Time Machine III

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 1 · January 11, 2007

Inside the Time Machine
By Luc Sante
Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon

Penguin, 1,085 pp., $35.00


CONT'D ...

What gives the era immediately preceding 1914 its
particular poignancy is the sense shared by many
people at the time that the world was on the verge of
changing for the better, that modern society and its
technological innovations would bring about a new
harmony, with redress of injustices and redistribution
of wealth. Many were the lost causes that flourished
then, and were meant to assist in creating this new
world or furnish its arts and sciences, and they are
evoked here: the Quaternionists, the Esperantists—and
the anarchists. This coming dawn is notional, of
course, hazy even to its believers. The political
climate is in many ways strikingly familiar. "What you
always have to be listen-ing for is the opposite of
what they say," says Webb Traverse. "'Freedom,' then's
the time to watch your back in particular....
'Compassion' means the population of starving,
homeless, and dead is about to take another jump."
Another character notes a recent legal refinement:

    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.

The anarchists are as beleaguered as they are
numerous—jailed, tortured, shot. Some of them work on
the railroad tunnels through the Alps, where they find
"'neutral ground,' exempt not only from political
jurisdictions but from Time itself." But doom
inexorably approaches. "In a general war among
nations," a character says,

    every small victory Anarchism has struggled to win
so far would simply turn to dust. Today even the
dimmest of capitalists can see that the centralized
nation-state, so promising an idea a generation ago,
has lost all credibility with the population.
Anarchism now is the idea that has seized hearts
everywhere.... A general European war, with every
striking worker a traitor, flags threatened,...would
be just the ticket to wipe Anarchism off the political
map. The national idea would be reborn. One trembles
at the pestilent forms that would rise up afterward,
from the swamp of the ruined Europe.

Or, as the arch-capitalist Scarsdale Vibe succinctly
puts it, "Anarchism will pass, its race will
degenerate into silence, but money will beget money,
grow like bluebells in the meadow, spread and brighten
and gather force, and bring low all before it. It is
simple. It is inevitable. It has begun." Even so,
hope—or will, or at least imagination —is a strict
daily necessity. Yashmeen, while enjoying a brief
respite at an "anarchist spa" in the Pyrenees,
delivers what may be the closest thing to a thesis
statement in the novel:

    "This is our own age of exploration," she
declared, "into that unmapped country waiting beyond
the frontiers 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 these
'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of
time-travel?"

It is quite possible to read Against the Day as the
fruit of a protracted effort not to lapse into
despair, by recalling among other things that other
times have looked nearly as bleak.

And it is crucial to keep in mind the things that make
life worth living. Pynchon is, as usual, very good on
food and mind-altering substances and sex —hilarious
on the former two and vivid on the latter, as well as
extraordinarily wide-ranging. Few sexual inclinations
go unmentioned, and all are entered into
wholeheartedly. The equable polysexual relationship
among Yashmeen, Reef Traverse, and Cyprian Latewood is
exemplary, a truly revolutionary state of affairs
(although, as such, it can't last). Model utopias are
thin on the ground, of course, since would-be utopians
are too busy trying to stay alive and out of jail. At
most there are transitory breathers here and there—and
in New Orleans, an object lesson:

    "Your own Benjamin Tucker wrote of the Land
League," a young man was saying in an unmistakably
Irish voice, "in such glowing terms—the closest the
world has ever come to perfect Anarchist
organization."

    "Were the phrase not self-contradictory,"
commented "Dope" Breedlove.

    "Yet I've noticed the same thing when your band
plays—the most amazing social coherence, as if you all
shared the same brain."

    "Sure," agreed "Dope," "but you can't call that
organization."

    "What do you call it?"

    "Jass."

At the anarchist spa of Yz-les-Bains, where refugees
from all struggles find shelter while awaiting the
doom everyone can feel in the air, the recreation is
Anarchists' Golf, "in which there was no fixed
sequence—in fact, no fixed number—of holes, with
distances flexible as well, some holes being only
putter-distance apart, others uncounted hundreds of
yards and requiring a map and compass to locate."

The fact that doom and hijinks can nestle side by side
gives a fair indication of Pynchon's method. His jokes
are as funny as any to be found in High Lit, now or
ever, with a lunatic free-associative glee that links
him to the Marx Brothers (a very young Groucho appears
fleetingly), the L.A. comedy troupe called The
Firesign Theater, and the creators of the children's
cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle. You can just about hear
the narra-tor's rapid-fire voice from that series
reading:

    It was the current fashion to disrespect the
painting skills of the famed Paduan collector and
impresario himself, so any actual Squarciones kicking
around... would be going for a song. In fact,
Scarsdale had already picked up a minor angel just by
singing "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away" to a
sacristan who might have been insane.

At one point Pynchon inserts Kit Traverse into a
Göttingen insane asylum apparently just so he can set
up the story of a patient there who "has come to
believe that he is a certain well-known pastry of
Berlin—similar to your own American, as you would say,
Jelly-doughnut." The patient, who enjoys being
powdered with Puderzucker and placed on a shelf,
declares, naturally, "ICH BIN EIN BERLINER!"

The book does have its longueurs, but for a
dictionary-size slab it has rather few. My own eyelids
drooped when the subject was mathematics, for example,
but that is something I am profoundly ignorant about.
(Previous acquaintance with matters that come up, on
the other hand, tends to reveal flurries of tiny,
well-aimed inside jokes that may pass right by anyone
unfamiliar with the relevant literature —to no great
loss.) The sheer mass of the book will probably
frighten many readers away, who might perhaps
appreciate it if they were fed it in serial
installments. More of a problem is the fact that
length invariably becomes the primary subject of
criticism; a number of early reviews seemed to focus
on little else and it didn't help, either, that the
publication schedule only gave critics about two weeks
to digest the thing. But Pynchon's work is dense as
well as huge—like a linebacker, it has an
exceptionally low percentage of flab—and his best
books have been his longest ones.

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."

Which is not what the world oughtto be, mind you.
Thinking big is not necessarily megalomania, and
fiction-writing is not exactly voodoo. Against the Day
is a flawed time machine, trying without much luck to
find a version of history where iniquity failed to
triumph, but in the process coming up with many
reasons why it should continue to be resisted.

END

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19771

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