AtD - Anarchy vs Terror

[John BAILEY]

Been a long time gone, but with AtD causing serious spinal damage as I
lug it everywhere of a working day, I thought I'd turn back to the list
for respite (boom TISH!). I'm about 200 odd pages in after three days
with the thing and thoroughly enjoying it - I'll echo those who suggest
it's up there with his best.

Some small thoughts: I'm stunned at the way Against the Day seems to be
consciously bridging all of P's other novels (perhaps excepting COL49),
making explicit reference to characters and situations which have come
before and after and sometimes extending these. I'd always thought one
particular episode near the end of M&D felt out of joint, not fully
worked through, but it's given a satisfying recap not too far into AtD
which allows it (and much of M&D) to be resituated in vaguely the same
cosmology of GR and the rest. Same with all the ideas surrounding
electricity, wind, light etc. And the Traverse clan - well, I can
definitely believe that P had already been working on AtD while Vineland
(and certainly M&D and even GR) were being written.

Also, his command of dia- and ideolect seems to have improved
dramatically. Coming from a non-American (or British) English-speaking
background, some of the more subtle changes in phrasing, word choice etc
are a delight to me; for once, every character seems to have a really
unique voice, and the shifts in generic voice (esp Lew Basnight's
hardboiled adventures) are just great.

Anyway, to finish off, I've been thinking about the various suggestions
surrounding the novel's portrayal of anarchists vis-a-vis contemporary
terrorism (and suicide bombers as discussed), and one thing that seems
to me to trouble this correspondence is the way Pynchon's anarchists
aren't (so far) aligned with a common cause or fundamentalism, but are
motivated by a very individualistic ideal of freedom, in that very
idealistic US/Western way. Sure, one on level the bomb-throwing miners
might share with, say, an Al Qaeda operative a common hatred of US
corporate colonialism, but the anarchist's actions seem to stem from a
desire to return to the kind of prelapsarian freedom of the individual
which came before the rise of the capitalist state.