The Gathering Storm

[Dave Monroe]

>From the local rag ...

The gathering storm 
Pynchon cuts a wide swath in masterful WWI-era epic
By MIKE FISCHER
Special to the Journal Sentinel
Posted: Nov. 24, 2006

In "V.," his first novel, Thomas Pynchon imagined
history as a rippled fabric, "such that if we are
situated at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to
determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else."

"We are accordingly lost," he continued, "to any sense
of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a
crest, things would be different. We could at least
see." 

Ever since "V." rocked the literary world in 1963,
Pynchon has sought this crest with a single-minded
intensity unmatched by any American writer since
Melville. "Against the Day," his brilliant new novel,
gets him there. 

Set in the 30-year period between 1893 and the
immediate aftermath of World War I, "Against the Day"
is a sprawling narrative of more than 1,000 pages and
250 characters, including anarchists, spies,
scientists, quacks, robber barons, spiritualists, a
talking dog that reads Henry James and a talking
parrot that can swear a blue streak. 

Characters disappear for hundreds of pages or
altogether; one of the main characters plays almost no
role in the first 700 pages. 

Meanwhile, the scene shifts from the 1893 Chicago
World's Fair to Colorado and then to New York, Europe,
Asia and Mexico, with brief stops in the Arctic, the
South Pacific, West Africa and California. 

The most compelling of the many storylines jostling
for attention is the tale of anarchist Webb Traverse
and his offspring during the brutal war between
capital and labor that culminated with 1914's Ludlow
massacre in Colorado's coal fields. 

After Webb is murdered by one of the owners' hired
guns, Webb's daughter marries the killer, while his
three sons struggle to reconcile allegiance to their
father's ideals with the temptations of the fallen
world in which they must make their way. 

Leaving to the side for the moment what all this
means, "Against the Day" is extremely entertaining on
a page-by-page level. Part of a unique literary
tradition stretching backward from Melville and
Dickens to Sterne, Smollett and Cervantes, Pynchon has
never met a joke, tall tale or eccentric character
that he didn't like.

"Against the Day" is stuffed with them, including a
send-up of the blockbuster "Titanic" featuring an
Austrian love boat morphing into a battleship; a tree
filled with flickering fireflies, each representing
the soul of someone who has passed through the
viewer's life; and a spiritual underground journey in
central Asia that degenerates into a mindless search
for oil. 

Along the way, Pynchon serves up characteristically
informed discussions of such topics as
turn-of-the-century politics, culture, dress,
mathematics, physics, architecture and religion.
Despite the passage of four decades and the appearance
of numerous imitators since "V.," the breadth of
Pynchon's knowledge remains unique and astonishing;
Robert Burton, in "The Anatomy of Melancholy," is the
only writer I know who demonstrates comparable range. 

"Against the Day" also treats us to the most lyrical
writing that Pynchon has ever done. Scores of passages
measure all that we have lost or stand to lose:
innocence, childhood, loved ones, American Indian
cultures, the untamed beauty of the American West,
ghosts from our past that have no home and all of our
dreams that didn't come true. 

As with rocket technology in "Gravity's Rainbow" and
astronomy in "Mason and Dixon," Pynchon holds all of
these elements together through an elaborate conceit
involving scientific and technological advances,
themselves neutral, that can accomplish great good or
unimaginable harm, depending on how they are used.

In "Against the Day," the glue is the story of light
and electricity. 

On the one hand, the ability to split a light ray in
two when passed through certain types of material
holds forth the possibility of simultaneously being in
different places. And because Pynchon and his
characters can therefore see the world from multiple
perspectives and points in time, they can conjure up
lateral worlds, "set only infinitesimally to the side
of the one we think we know." 

Imagining themselves moving at the speed of light,
characters in "Against the Day" repeatedly embark on
journeys through time, revisiting younger and
occasionally better selves or catapulting forward into
futures that run the gamut from nuclear winter to
heavenly utopia. 

Conversely, light can be harnessed for weapons of mass
destruction, and electric light can extend the working
day with what "Against the Day" refers to as an
"unmerciful whiteness," which, by imposing a single
way of seeing, reduces shadow and colonizes night,
eliminating its magic and power. 

Pynchon draws the battle lines early and never lets
up. The untapped potential he always sees in "unshaped
freedom" and the "irregular seethe of history" squares
off against "a hundred forms of bourgeois literalism"
and their "progressive reduction of choices, until the
final turn through the final gate that led to the
killing-floor."

More than in any prior Pynchon novel, the characters
in "Against the Day" rebel against their would-be
jailers and choose instead to believe, as one
character puts it, "that History could be helped to
keep its promises" to all those it has forgotten. 

Those characters may or may not reach the New
Jerusalem that one of them rapturously envisions. But
for Pynchon to even imagine them doing so, despite his
unflinching portrait of the dusk gathering around us,
speaks eloquently to his fervent faith in the power of
fiction to redeem those with the courage to dream. 

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=534435

Perhaps I should have been a bit more insistent ...


 
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