Thomas Pynchon vs. the World

[Dave Monroe]

Thomas Pynchon vs. the World
Against the Day is exhausting, twisted, and paranoid.
But that doesn’t mean Pynchon can’t also be fun.

* By Keith Gessen


There is a striking moment in Thomas Pynchon’s
enormous new novel that threatens to get lost, like
many of the striking moments in his novels, in all the
other moments: of overly wrought prose, of names so
memorable that you can’t remember them, and of
quasi-historical accounts of science and politics that
the diligent book reviewer and his fact checker would
like to substantiate but that are mainly
unsubstantiable. One would need to sit Pynchon down
and demand to know what he’s been reading, but we
don’t even know what he looks like. In any case, in
Against the Day, the time is the late-nineteenth
century, in the American Wild West, and anarchist
bomber Webb Traverse has been murdered by a pair of
hired guns. His son, Frank, has set off to avenge him.
The trouble is, while the murderers know approximately
what Frank looks like, having observed his father
while they tortured him, Frank doesn’t know the same
of them. But sitting in a bar, he is spotted by an old
dear friend of his father’s, who does him a great
favor: Rather than a gun or money or even information,
he slips Frank a pair of photos that show the
murderers en face.

Photography, for Pynchon, is a metaphor for the power
of modernity. His refusal to participate in it has led
with the publication of this new book to some
grotesqueries. The New York Times published with its
daily review a photo from his high-school yearbook.
Another paper printed an artist’s projection, based on
the same yearbook photo, of what Pynchon might look
like now, at age 69. On The Simpsons, of course, he
occasionally appears with a paper bag over his head,
and every decade or so someone claims to have met him
in a bar on the Upper West Side. But Pynchon knows
what he knows: Photographs are what they take so
they’ll know what you look like when they want to kill
you.

Against the Day describes other ways as well. There
are hot-air balloons, and sub-Pinkerton detectives who
keep large files, and even telepathy. Surveillance has
always been on Pynchon’s mind, but these days even
more so. A decade ago, he wrote an essay in which he
described seeing a New York cop use his megaphone to
tell a car to move over, “all the while addressing the
driver of the car personally, by name.” The italics
are Pynchon’s. In the essay, he notes the indifference
he met with on the part of his friends when he
described the event to them. They merely explained how
it was done. Naturally, they added, the cops had the
driver’s photo, too. Pynchon was very disturbed—and
this was before the Pentagon armed its Predator drones
with Hellfire missiles after September 11.

The fun of Pynchon’s books—and they are in fact more
fun than not, and this is for better and worse one of
the key differences between Pynchon and the major
novelists who preceded him—has always been to read
them into the present. Gravity’s Rainbow, while
ostensibly about World War II, was actually about
American Cold War hegemony and Vietnam; Against the
Day likewise works with what feels like contemporary
material, though its subject is ostensibly the turn of
the twentieth century. The route of railroad tracks
determined political arrangements then, just as oil
pipelines do now; anarchists (or terrorists) blew them
up; and all of this was watched from above by
capitalists and air-balloon enthusiasts. The great
invention of the mid-nineteenth century was dynamite,
used by miners to blow railroad tunnels through
mountains, then by anarchists to blow the railroad
tracks into the sky. By the end of the century, the
latest invention was wireless, and everyone was in a
race to use it, for profit and for glory.

Part of the reason Pynchon is a more important writer
than his successors William Vollmann and Richard
Powers is that he’s politically more radical and more
committed (he can also construct sentences, and
sometimes even edit them)—and his view of power is
tirelessly grim, if also cartoonish. Against the Day
is very much against the present day. At the same
time, it holds out a kind of hope, in the very
technologies it knows are being used to destroy human
freedom. Frank, for example, finds something
bewitching in the photograph of the two killers,
something in the eyes, which are “rendered with that
same curious crazed radiance which once was an
artifact of having to blink a couple of hundred times
during the exposure, but in this more modern form due
to something authentically ghostly, for which these
emulsions were acting as agents, revealing what no
other record up till then could’ve.”

Photography actually catches the human ghost, and
traps it. But also reveals it—that’s the word he uses.
Maybe Pynchon will sit for one. Maybe he won’t. It
doesn’t actually matter anymore. Thomas Pynchon has
always been paranoid, but now, finally, the world has
caught up.

--- the Robot Vegetable <veg at dvandva.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, Lary Wallace wrote:
> 
> > Alchemy and dagguerotype photography compared.
> Wonderful: 
> 
> "Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling
> that 'photography' and 'alchemy' were just two ways
> of getting at the same thing--redeeming light from
> the inertia of precious metals."
>
> [...]
>
> 	Once upon a time on the p-list, this book was
> mentioned:
> 
> 	_The Haunting of L._ by Howard Norman 
> 
> 	It is set later than AtD, 1927, and involves
> spirit-photography....



 
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