TAP review

[B C Johnson]

To me, Pynchon is too much the scientist to ignore the laws of probability, 
as in James Clerk Maxwell's understanding of what is possible and what is 
probable.  The hope abiding all the novels is that for once the Preterite or 
the Counterforce or Stencil could prevail, Clerk Maxwell be damned. 
Defeating this hope is the Force of Probabilty, which is acknowledged in the 
Roadrunner cartoons, of which I am told the author has a fondness for.  The 
last episode of GR might be like the boulder running over the Coyote; the 
missile never lands, the Coyote runs back to his drawing board, but there is 
that damned hymn, implying that the result is enivitable.  "But there is a 
hand to turn the time" is not indentified with any hymm I know, and there is 
no screaming, no evacuation -- this is the thje bittersweet ending -- death 
is a chance, but time dilutes its likelihood (I don't see any LA theatre 
bursting into a hymm nor do I see the supersonic projectile landing 
directlty atop Pirate Prentice's head  --  these are events which defy 
probablity).  The reality of Schlubb, a potential  "master of reality '" 
reduced to a Volkswagon and his responsibilty to the highly 
probabledirectivesof ihs unseen masters rather of improbabity, is one of the 
most striking Vonnegutian concessions to human hope
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Monroe" <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
To: "Robert Mahnke" <robert_mahnke at earthlink.net>; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 4:07 PM
Subject: Re: TAP review


> 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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