Dream Maps

[Dave Monroe]

Alternate realities in Pynchon's dream-draped world
By Liesl Schillinger
The New York Times

Against the Day. By Thomas Pynchon. 1,085 pages. $35.
Penguin Press.

In "Against the Day," his sixth, his funniest and
arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon
doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for more
than 40 years. But this time his fevered reveries and
brilliant streams of words, his fantastical plots and
encrypted references, are bound together by a clear
message that others can unscramble without mental
meltdown. Its import emerges only gradually,
camouflaged by the sprawling absurdist jumble of
themes that can only be described as Pynchonesque,
over the only time frame Pynchon recognizes as real:
the hours (that stretch into days) it takes to relay
one of his sweeping narratives.

Where to begin? Where to end? It's both moot and
preposterous to fix on a starting point when
considering a 1,085- page novel whose setting is a
"limitless terrain of queerness" and whose scores of
characters include the doomed Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, a dog who reads Henry James, the restless
progeny of the Kieselguhr Kid and a time-traveling
bisexual mathematician, not to mention giant
carnivorous burrowing sand lice that attack passengers
of desert submarines. In any case, Pynchon (speaking,
one presumes, through his characters) dismisses the
existence of time as "really too ridiculous to
consider, regardless of its status as a believed-in
phenomenon," asserting that civilization has been dead
since World War I and "all history after that will
belong properly to the history of hell."

He also rejects a fixed notion of place. To him,
delineations of the known world are merely maps that
"begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the
world, and resume as dreams again."

Let us sample a portion of the plot: During the run-up
to World War I, Kit Traverse, the math-whiz son of a
Colorado anarchist dynamiter known as the Kieselguhr
Kid, en route to grad school in Göttingen, finds
himself in Belgium, pursued by hirelings of the evil
capitalist magnate Scarsdale Vibe. Escaping from a
sinister Flanders mayonnaise factory, Kit is propelled
through a window and lands in a canal, where he is
scooped up by his Italian friends, Rocco and Pino, who
happen to be passing in their dirigible torpedo.

Kit ends up in Siberia on June 30, 1908, where he
witnesses the eerie devastation of the Tunguska Event.
Like many of the historical and mathematical phenomena
touched upon in this book, the Tunguska Event was an
actual occurrence, an explosion that toppled more than
800 square miles of trees. In its aftermath Kit begins
to question the purpose of his incredible journey.
"There may not be a 'mission' anymore," a fellow
traveler tells him. "As to our purpose now - no one
has the wisdom or the authority to tell us anything."

In "Against the Day," Pynchon's voice seems
uncharacteristically earnest. He interrupts his
narrative from time to time to lay down pronouncements
that, taken together, probably constitute the fullest
elaboration of his philosophy yet seen in print. One
of the novel's idées fixes is that mysterious agents
are trying to send messages to individuals and to
humanity at large in surprising ways, such as through
bloody detonations of shells or dynamite I.E.D.'s or
massive explosions on the level of the Tunguska Event
or Hiroshima, which may be the footprints of angels,
communicating through murder on a cataclysmic scale.
In a singularly disturbing imaginative leap, he seems
to make a ghoulish association with the gas chambers
of the Holocaust. "Suppose the Gentleman B.," one
character observes, "is not a simple terrorist but an
angel, in the early sense of 'messenger,' and in the
fateful cloud he brings, despite the insupportable
smell, the corrosive suffocation, lies a message?" By
this logic, mass death could be one of the agents that
increasingly seek to communicate with the world. What
does mass death want to tell us? That "acute suicidal
mania" is justified.

Despite all this, Pynchon's novel is also buoyant,
more mirthful than any of his previous books, with the
qualified exception of his second, "The Crying of Lot
49." In "Against the Day," Pynchon actually seems to
be having fun with his characters. Admittedly, it's
often rough play. He hauls his creatures from shadowy
amusement parks to a surreal university for
time-travel theorists - Candlebrow U., where a merry
band of youthful sky pilots called the Chums of Chance
alight in their hydrogen airship Inconvenience - to
the Volks-Prater in Vienna. Later Kit Traverse
reappears, joyriding with an Italian pilot named
Renzo. The ultimate destination of some of the fellow
travelers is the most enchanted funhouse of all: the
utopian paradise called Shambhala, which, practically
speaking, does not exist.

"The fascination of what's difficult," to steal from
Yeats, is what first drew readers to Pynchon's novels:
"V," published in 1963; "The Crying of Lot 49 in 1966;
and "Gravity's Rainbow," which appeared in 1973 and
won the National Book Award, and has been rated
supreme among Pynchon's creations.

Back in 1973, it would have been reasonable to ask
Pynchon, "Can you fake crazy?" There could be no doubt
about his idiosyncratic genius, his brilliant
pictorial scene-setting or the daring of the
unanswerable questions and accusations he hurled onto
the page. Pynchon was much preoccupied with the
inhumanity that had been unleashed by the 20th
century's wars. And his writing showed startling
amorality - no pity or grief, just a great perplexity
and confoundedness.

After the publication of "Gravity's Rainbow," Pynchon
disappeared for more than a decade, publishing nothing
but the occasional essay or book review and, in 1984,
an introduction to a collection of his early short
stories, "Slow Learner." He didn't publish another
book until 1990, the novel "Vineland." Also in that
year, the famously solitary Pynchon married his
literary agent, Melanie Jackson; and in 1991, they had
a son. Six years later, Pynchon produced a
masterpiece, "Mason & Dixon," dedicated to his wife
and child.

In "Against the Day," Pynchon takes to the sky, as if
to gain a better vantage on what lies beneath.
However, setting his narrative (notionally) around the
turn of the last century, he soon decides he would
rather not look down after all. Far better to ponder
alternative realities. Beating a retreat from the
injustices of capitalism and the looming atrocity of
World War I, he builds a refuge of a dream-draped
world by overlaying bloody late-19th-century labor
disputes and 20th-century catastrophes with the
raiment of escapist popular literature.

Throughout, Pynchon embraces the conventions of
classic children's fiction, not only using variants of
their props and window-dressing but also annexing the
concept of an entire juvenile series, the Tom Swift
scientific adventure books, for his Chums of Chance.
The chums, mysteriously ageless boys sail among the
clouds in their high-tech hydrogen airship, fulfilling
assignments of unclear origin or purpose. They float
in the heavens, oblivious to the various forms of
historic hell unscrolling on the landscape beneath
their gondola. But Pynchon assigns them real-world
doubles: the dead of World War I, "juvenile heroes of
a World-Narrative - unreflective and free," whose
idealism flung them by the thousands into the muddy
fields and trenches of Europe.

Pynchon's Swiftian crew of Chums open the book,
lifting off in their flying machine to head for the
1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Their vessel may be
hydrogen-fueled, but its real source of power is the
blind optimism and self- assurance (also known as
denial) of its passengers. And yet, none of these
diversionary tactics hides the author's intent. Even
Miles Blundell, the jocular cook aboard the skyship
Inconvenience, picks up hints of it. "When all the
masks have been removed, it is really an inquiry into
our own duty, our fate," he brightly informs his
crewmates.

Officially, the Chums seek the same mythical Shambhala
as earthbound men and women, but their real
destination is their skyship. And even on the ground
below, Pynchon's characters begin to doubt the sense
of their own questing. After a life of roving, Auberon
Halfcourt gives up his own quest, explaining, "For me,
Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an
absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of
leaving the futureless place where I was." The
futureless place, Pynchon means, that is the present.

When H.G. Wells, the father of modern science fiction,
published his first novel, "The Time Machine," in
1895, he sent his time traveler to the year 802,701,
to a post-apocalyptic terrain in which the upper
classes had evolved into beautiful, helpless
surface-dwelling innocents who served as food for a
foul underground horde. Returning briefly to the
modern world to share this dismaying vision, the time
traveler strapped himself back into his chrono- booth
and disappeared for good. His abandoned contemporaries
were left with the haunting question of why their
friend had chosen not to stay with them. What was left
for those who remained behind? Sharing Wells's
optimism and hopeful view of "futurity," they
concluded that "it remains for us to live as though it
were not so."

Pynchon disagrees. "It doesn't make much sense," one
of his characters observes, "this pretending to carry
on with the day." What remains, his new book suggests,
is to write as if it were not so, to "construct a
self-consistent world to live inside."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/books/review/Schillinger.t.html

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/24/features/IDLEDE25.php



 
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