TAP review

[Dave Monroe]

Drawing the Line
Thomas Pynchon’s latest tome is an adventure serial
that plots a history of Protestantism.

By Eric Rauchway
Web Exclusive: 01.05.07

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon (The Penguin Press,
1120 pages)

Thomas Pynchon's characters in Against the Day worry
about America's "capitalist Christer Republicans" as
only the inhabitants of a thoroughly Protestant
universe can. It's easy to mistake Pynchon's jittery,
inventive monologues and his resentment of social
order for the ramblings of a stoner hippie. But if
Pynchon is a hippie he also drank his Protestantism
deeply, and his sense of ineffable divinity sits
uneasily alongside the certainty Christianity
Americans often profess.

>From his Puritan ancestors Pynchon learned that grace
comes to some of us and not others according to God's
inscrutable wishes. What we do does not affect our
salvation. We who believe in a gospel of success
cannot easily imagine a people convinced of its
irrelevance. But suppose corruption had thoroughly
rotted a society: a God indifferent to worldly opinion
might grow in popularity. If officially virtuous
people were really villains, maybe publicly despised
people were really saints. If everything you heard was
a lie, perhaps only God could winnow truth.

Early in Against the Day Pynchon reminds us of this
idea and expresses it graphically: "Many people
believe that there is a mathematical correlation
between sin, penance, and redemption. More sin, more
penance, and so forth... [But t]here is no
connection.... You are redeemed not through doing
penance but because it happens. Or doesn't happen."
The salvation story we might like -- we do good and we
get rewarded -- implies a line whose equation we could
plot. But the arbitrary Puritan God robs us of
plottable lines. Grace comes when He pleases and at no
predictable moment.

And if the story of salvation resists such plotting,
so do Pynchon's own stories, which often seek to
escape plottable trajectories. V and its sequel, V2 --
er, Gravity's Rainbow -- borrowed the idea of a
mathematically predictable arc of history from Henry
Adams. The plottable curves do murder: the V2's fly
from Germany up to the stratosphere and down to bomb
London, just as humanity races up from barbarism to
civilization and then, all force (vis) spent, hurtles
down at increasing speed to decadence and destruction.
If the imposition of order, the reduction of
experience to Cartesian coordinates and determined
paths, leads to this certain Hell, wouldn't you prefer
uncertainty -- even at the cost of forsaking the
conventional plot curve of Freitag's triangle?
Pynchon's characters do, yo-yo-ing back and forth or
even apparently dissolving, they avoid any ending.

Or, as in Against the Day, they abide by a different
narrative convention: that of the adventure serial.
Pynchon tells his "dear readers" on the first page we
are in the company of serial characters, the "Chums of
Chance," who fly their airship from one adventure to
the next (previous installments include "The Chums of
Chance and the Big Kahuna" and "The Chums of Chance
and the Evil Halfwit"). Adventure heroes need not
succumb to Freitag's triangle -- they can last beyond
the end of the book, essentially unchanged and ready
for the next. So with the ageless Chums, who float
above the sinister system of nineteenth-century
civilization:

    during the Sieges of Paris [in 1871].... it became
clear to certain of these balloonists, observing from
above... how much the modern State depended for its
survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege
-- through the systematic encirclement of populations,
the starvation of bodies and spirits, the relentless
degradation of civility until citizen was turned
against citizen, even to the point of committing
atrocities.... When the Sieges ended, these
balloonists chose to fly on, free now of the political
delusions that reigned more than ever on the ground,
pledged solemnly only to one another....

The Chums' ship is named Inconvenience (as in "we
apologize for the," another whimsical author's idea of
God's last message to his creation) in contrast to
their Russian counterparts aboard the better
organized, but less trustworthy, Great Game. The
Europeans stand for empire, for drawing lines and
taking possession; the all-American boys resist all
that.

Or at least, they think they're being all-American by
resisting that line-drawing. But the line-drawers are
taking over what it means to be American, running
railroads through the West:

    the railroad.... penetrated, it broke apart cities
and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic
panics and armies of jobless men and women, and
generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers with no
principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took
away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be
slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love.

The bulk of the book plots a terrestrial narrative of
conflict between the line-drawers and those who resist
them, personified in two families: the plutocrat Vibes
and the miner-anarchist Traverses. For this part of
the tale, Pynchon controls his language and keeps it
conventional, almost subdued: because the line-drawers
must win, even against love. In Pynchon's history you
can plot a vector from the accumulation of capital and
colonies to the Great War and the clash with Islam. It
is inexorable: as in the Puritan drama, the larger
part of humanity is Hellbound, and even the Chums
can't save them.

In a universe of such sure damnation, what hope
abides? Perhaps an effort to resist the vector of
inevitability, to cooperate instead with the ineffable
logic of salvation (maybe allied to a Quaternion
mathematics defined against "the traditional
triangle") can save -- not humanity, but a few
individual people, and can even maybe save a country.
If only the U.S. could recall its stand for freedom!
But for now the country exists uneasily with its
alternate self: "the boys could almost believe some
days that they were safely back home.... on others
they found an American Republic whose welfare they
believed they were sworn to advance passed so
irrevocably into the control of they evil and moronic
that it seemed the could not, after all, have
escaped....." Meanwhile they fly, chaotically, toward
grace.

--- Robert Mahnke <robert_mahnke at earthlink.net> wrote:

> This review just posted by The American Prospect:
> 
> http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12356

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