Aubade, Poor Dad

[Dave Monroe]

Aubade, Poor Dad

By John Clute 		

The day that ends the dream of Thomas Pynchon is the same old day of
V. It is also the screaming across the sky in Gravity's Rainbow, and
the future it would be death to enter after leaving Vineland, and the
blistering echolalia from within the Hollow Earth, the drum roll of
the Disappeared which tells the penetrant heroes of Mason & Dixon that
what stains the world you rape stains you. There is nothing newer than
this in the hundreds of thousands of words that make up the latest and
most Pynchonesque novel yet by America's greatest Fool writer, except
for the fact that it is all over now.

Against the Day—which begins intoxicatedly at the Chicago World's Fair
in 1893 and terminates in the "terrible cloudlessness" of the
aftermath years begat upon us by World War I—is an aubade against the
coming of the 20th century. Like any aubade, it is written in the
knowledge that, in the end, Time wins (Pynchon capitalizes Time a
lot). When the novel stops, leaving a few survivors in alternate
worlds to cultivate their gardens in peace as long as they do not come
back, our bridges have all been burnt, and there is nothing more to
tell.

It is an immense book, and it is full of noise. Every single page
counts for something, though hundreds of pages introduce narrative
schticks which expire almost instantly when lit, so that the reader
cannot know which insight, which brilliant phrase or tour-de-force
riff, will entail the kind of story consequence—and then? and
then?—that we as readers and critics are properly trained to attempt
to trust and trace. But whether or not it is entirely tolerable—I know
that I for one missed whole tranches of import in the unforgivingly
incessant half-drowned packrat rataplan of the whole—what is clear is
that the occluded waves of unfolding of story and implication in the
book are intended.

The innumerable pages of Against the Day mulch together like a great
tidal cud, and its dozens—actually hundreds—of named characters appear
and disappear according to what one might call peristaltic
imperatives: not waving though but drowning. For an instant we see
them, and then they are engulfed again, before their act is completed,
not to reappear (if at all) for hundreds of pages maybe.

Over and above a growing awareness that these waves of story are
indeed heading somewhere, what saves one's readerly sanity in the
middle of these 450,000 words may be the fact that every figure in the
book is immediately familiar; I think that without exception every
single one can be initially identified in terms of some genre or other
of popular fiction as it was written before the end of World War I:
the western, from Edward S. Ellis to Bret Harte to Jack London; boys'
adventure fiction, from the Airship Boys tale to Horatio Alger; the
Dime Novel in general; the British school story in general; the
Zuleika Dobson subgenre of the femme fatale tale in particular; the
future war novel; the Lost Race novel; the Symmesian Hollow Earth
tale; the Tibetan Llama or Shangri-La thriller; the Vernean
Extraordinary Journey; the Wellsian scientific romance; the Invention
tale and its close cousin the Edisonade; the European spy romance
thriller a la E. Phillips Oppenheim; the World Island spy thriller a
la John Buchan; the mildly sadomasochistic soft porn tale as published
by the likes of Charles Carrington in Paris around the turn of the
century. Not to mention the large number of utopias influenced by
Edward Bellamy and William Morris, both of whom ghost the book.

Pynchon's pure science-fiction novel

Due to Pynchon's fully earned iconic status as great American writer
and Zeitgeist voice, Against the Day has already been widely reviewed
in the general press, and various versions of the list of popular
genres given above have appeared in some of these notices. There's a
problem, though. Nongenre critics seem generally to presume that
Pynchon accessed this material more or less raw, that Against the Day
represents a direct and unfiltered mining of prelapsarian ore, and
that therefore the tonality of the book—its doom-haunted desiderium—is
in itself uniquely or even particularly Pynchonesque. Given the depth
and range of his conversation with a vast range of previous writers
and genres, however, as well as the fact that over the past 45 years
his own works have become an integral part of that conversation, I
suspect Pynchon himself would disavow any sense that his grasp of
previous genres was anything like that simpleminded.

The intervening filter is, of course, the literatures of the fantastic
as they actually exist. We needn't rehearse the obvious at length
here—that for the last 50 years or so, SF and fantasy has increasingly
focused on our pre-World War I past; witness steampunk and the
gaslight romance, witness the huge proliferation of pastiches of
earlier genres, witness the alternate history inhabited by escapees,
witness the boom in time-travel tales back to a past that needs
preserving and witness Michael Moorcock's creation of the literary
device of the multiverse in order to give lebensraum to various
otherwise incompatible genres and tales within the pages of one
book—but we should say that Against the Day honourably adds to that
conversation. It is a pure science fiction novel of these latter days
of sorting.

Moorcock—or some ghostly afflatus of Moorcock now so widely
disseminated through the field that his name can easily be
forgotten—is perhaps the main figure here. We're thinking of his
Airship Boys tales; of his recursive desiderium-drenched
proto-steampunk Edwardian SF novels which posit routes into futures
less dreadful than the one we got; of the Europe Between the Wars
tales, full of iconic figures whose intertwining discourses on the
states of the worlds allow the inference that each history of the
world is a failed experiment in avoiding the inevitable War just like
the last one; of the multiverse itself, a topology best articulated in
the long Cornelius and Von Bek series, through characters who
"bilocate" into incompossible self-haunting versions of themselves,
and occupy worlds whose storylines nest inside one other like babushka
dolls, and meet in restaurants on lamplight promenades which may exist
in more than one Venice at a time, from which escapes to utopia may be
conceived; of the recurring figures who occupy the multiverse: the
Temporal Adventuress, the plucky hero and the flaneur, the louche spy,
the bewildered army officer, the magi and the bandits out of Asia; and
of the Colonel Pyat novels—in reality one vast novel longer than
Against the Day and sometimes almost as walkabout—whose appalling
anti-hero traverses Russia and the rest of Europe, Asia and Asia
Minor, Africa and 1920s Hollywood, then France and Mussolini's Italy
and Nazi Germany, just as though the world were a stage upon which he
was destined to encounter and re-encounter a vast array of exemplary
figures who step into view from behind the arras of the world whenever
needed—as though life were a kind of pantomime—and whom he constantly
betrays while constantly speculating wrongly about his relationship to
the fate of the planet.

Moorcock's multiverse writ even larger

All of this, which makes up almost the whole range of Moorcock's
oeuvre with the exception of his heroic fantasies, stands athwart any
attempts of writers of the literatures of the fantastic to come to
terms with the stories that gave us all sustenance before receiving
their fatal wound so long ago—around the time of World War I.
Moorcock's work, and the work of his cohorts, is a kind of
multidimensional map to the past of genre, inscribed in tongues on
vellum, with eyekicks galore. Against the Day gazes through this
vellum.

There is more of course to Pynchon's range of reference than these
recursions. His grasp of the sciences and pseudo-sciences of the late
19th century is far more extensive than Moorcock's, or maybe anyone's;
he is deeply attuned to both the myth and realities of the American
West; he conveys sense of place with such astonishing intensity that
his Chicago and New York and London and Venice and places east seem
too dense for one world to hold them, for his descriptions of cities
read like descriptions of their absolute "eternal" substance, and his
whole oeuvre could be understood as a chronicle of the war between
anarchism and history—between slaves and owners, between enclaves that
hold our heart's desire and the corporate world that makes offers we
can't refuse, between science that tells us how to escape and Technos,
between eros and aporia—with the famous Pynchon conspiracies weaving
webs of Maya between these opposing poles.

All of which may sound more like the diagnosis of a disease burden
than of the underpinnings of a novel, and there are times when it
costs like sickness to continue to read Against the Day. Finishing the
book is like getting well. Every trope and turn out of the literature
of an entire century that I've instanced above is imagined and
reimagined in its pages; nor is that all. The book (see unseemly,
heartfelt reference to peristalsis above) moves in slow ruminative
waves exactly like a gut at work, and its cast appears and disappears
like dazed fish in a tidal rip. Except for the fact that many of these
figures do reappear in the end, one could almost describe Against the
Day as a prose version of Luis Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty [1974],
a film which claims (among other things) that human beings understand
the genres that tie them about as well as an ostrich understands
Auschwitz. But the book is huger and more disorganized than that.
Maybe one should say The Phantom of Liberty as written by Eugene Sue.

All the same, at least four story clusters might be sketched in. They
flow together, separate, knot and vanish into thin air, but they can
be followed.

Reuniting the chums of genre

1) The Airship Boys cluster, which is told in a boys' adventure idiom.
We first meet the Chums of Chance, a team of five plucky lads who man
the airship Inconvenience, at the Chicago World's Fair. Under the
orders of an unseen directorate which gradually becomes less
substantial as the years pass and history darkens, the Chums perform
feats of rescue and surveillance and exploration typical of their
breed. The world ages, but they do not seem to, though their ship
grows steadily around them; by the end of the novel, it seems huge
enough—like the ship in Gene Wolfe's The Urth of the New Sun [1987]—to
cause a partial eclipse when they pass between sun and earth. As with
most Airship Boys, their vector is utopian: through clean living and
industry and learning they will create a better world, a pax
aeronautica: through the force of their own example.

In Against the Day, as they become increasingly counterfactual to the
world below, the intensity of their vector becomes transcendental:
they begin to leave us, though they visit once in a while to help. En
route, they are privy to the discovery that the crystalline substance
known as Iceland spar has a quality of doubling the "sub-structure of
reality", creating a palimpsest of worlds, along the verges of one of
which the Chums watch as a "guardian spirit"—or maybe the primordial
god Buri—or maybe something nuclear brought to fusion by a convergence
of worlds—is brought south to New York, more or less exactly one
century before Sept. 11, 2001, and destroys that city in a world not
quite ours. The Chums then begin their search for Shambhala, or
Shangri-La, undergoing various sf adventures (including travel in a
ship which sails beneath the Sahara) until finally, in the final pages
of the book, they find a group of girls with artificial wings whom
they marry en masse, as in any Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Boys and
girls, now connubially linked, escape at last on the very final page.

2) Western Revenge cluster, which is told through an array of western
narrative voices; sometimes I heard echoes of Larry McMurtry, a fellow
spelunker out of Pynchon's world. A union organizer (who is an
anarchist at heart) named Webb Traverse spends his spare time as "the
Kieselguhr Kid" blowing up railway lines. Suspected of this, he is
brutally murdered by two thugs in the employ of the stage-villain
plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Webb's four children are expected to revenge
their father. The three sons (a flim-flam man, a mathematician and a
reluctant revolutionary who spends much of the novel in Mexico) appear
and disappear dozens of times throughout Against the Day, testing the
world for us according to their lights, and mostly falling in and out
of love.

(The sexual activity level of the book is extremely high, and often
anomalously explicit; much of the sex is casual, in the sense that the
perps soon separate, but almost all of it is meant. It is even more
anomalous that women are both more sophisticated about sex than their
men, and perfectly frank about this. In the end, however, even the
most "promiscuous" of the women have found secure niches with men of
their choice, more or less. The end result is a sense of a loosening
of the stays of the world, a sense that the lives of these women and
their men are being played.)

Webb's daughter goes off with one of the murderers, which
anecdotalizes the plotting of this cluster for a few hundred pages or
more; but in the end, more or less inadvertently or at the hands of
others, justice is done, sotto voce. But any solace or repose the
Traverse family gains is essentially melodramatic: at a flick of the
conjuror's wrist: as the youngest son says, "We're all just
night-riders here miles up a posted trail." They could be potted any
time. The free life their father dreamed of so unrealistically has
been shut down.

3) The Geek Eccentric Scientist cluster, which is told in an amalgam
of styles. Pynchon knows too much science, and is clearly too
indifferent to the costs of mixing good and bad scientific
speculations into one narrative mix, for readers easily to appreciate
what may be a remarkable flow of nuanced BigThink and subcutaneously
hilarious jape. It was enough for me to understand that—somewhere deep
in every paragraph of unquotably weirdish speculation—someone was
trying to understand the physics and mathematics of the refraction of
reality into multiple alternates. (And other stuff.) The Chums (as
we've seen) get a gander at a lot of this, and are duly bilocated into
Paradise. But the world-reality that will close down these festivals
with the onset of World War I is increasingly hard to relocate out of.

Although the cast of Against the Day are haunted by mirrors and ghosts
and doubles and castles in the sky (sometimes these are just the
Chums) and maps which show the Way if gazed at through Iceland spar,
there is an increasing sense that the game is up, that "the invasion
of Time into a timeless world" is a "Transgression" which cannot be
stanched. Though it is clear the great (historical) Tunguska Event in
Siberia that "jolted the axes of Creation" should be explained as some
shudder in the loins of another world birthing, there is no Conceptual
Breakthrough available. Nothing that the mad crew of Scientists comes
up with can save the "World-Island" for the game of story. They all
shrivel into babble, two feet short of the well.

4) The Flaneur Spy Adventuress cluster, told in any style that comes
to hand, from the shilling shocker to Huysmans. This cluster gradually
takes over from the western cluster, which dominates the first half of
Against the Day; correspondingly, the second half of the book takes
place mostly in Europe and Asia. Most of the troupe in this part of
the show—the gay spy flaneur down from Oxford, the Adventuress from
the mysterious East with a taste in sadism, their lovers and owners
and torturers—escape into enclaves as the overarching aubade of the
big book they are nodules of, the big book whose ultimate task is to
dry up, continues to sharpen its claws. But every enclave is moist
with sex. Without quite seeming to admit it, Pynchon gives this
cluster of his troupe—who seem as close to his heart as anarchists—a
few small solaces.

Hundreds of characters, but hardly one you'd recognize in your dreams
of reading Against the Day for ever. They flicker in and out of view
as though lit from behind. The set pieces drown them out. The movement
of the book as a whole drowns them in incessant perturbation. They
drown each other in talk, which may go on for pages until a spasm of
peristalsis washes them away for a hundred thousand words, but often
they cannot stretch to fill the gap: by the time they return, we have
lost them. And they drown in all the genres they take their sustenance
from, because—except for the flood of sex that falleth from their
Author like manna from heaven—they are ultimately obedient.

But of course that is the point of this great grotesque swaybacked
desiccating book about the victory of Time against our single sad
Earth. The hundreds of figures who jam into Against the Day are not in
fact characters at all, because Pynchon has evacuated his book of that
degree of hope. They are utterands: people-shaped utterances who
illuminate the stories of the old world that their Author has placed
before us in funeral array; they are codes to spell his book with.
That is why Pynchon has them break again and again into songs about
the roles they play in the book: because they are being sung through.
And because that book is about the death of the stories we used to
tell, its utterands are bound to the stake of that telling. They are
like lovers in the radium glare of dawn, singing the terminal verse of
the aubade. Before we shut the last page, the day has blown them out.

http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/column/sfw14197.html