Big French Review of AtD

[Henry]

A quick, electronic, i.e. mechanical translation starts with:

I had thrown myself on Against the Day as of his exit. I had spent three
long months to finish it, three months when I feverishly waited the thirty
minutes which remained me at the end of my days to read a chapter while
always requiring of me where it was going to carry out me. Useless to
reconsider the extent of the intrigues, the multitude of characters, the
explosion of the references; all that was said and repeated. What fascinated
me in this novel, it is less the digressive dexterity of Pynchon than its
capacity to create an alternative reality in which the elements than we know
History - the novel proceeds “between the World Fair of Chicago of 1893 and
the years which precede the First World War immediately” - not form a kind
of layer of coherence a higher which makes Beautiful Time a civilization in
oneself, geographical civilization, but a temporal civilization. Claro
bibliquement translates by “Until the day” the title of the novel; i.e.
until the day of the bursting of this historical interlude enters the end of
XIXe and the beginning of the XXe century. The problem of all these
characters who struggle with their lives, unconscious of the war to come, it
is that of the form: how to organize all new knowledge - on themselves, the
gasoline of time, the universe, on the mathematical theories - in a
harmonious unit? A world collapses, that of the old beliefs, pre-Einsteinian
science; but before our chaotic company does not germinate of ashes of the
war, all the possible worlds reviewed by the mystics and the scientists of
the end-of-century. In about fifteen years which the novel covers, the
alternate versions of our world coexist, just like the theories describing
them. It would seem that for Pynchon, humanity had the choice, at this time,
of the universe in which it could continue to evolve/move; science does not
discover reality, it creates it. What would be our Ground if the theories of
luminous ether had prevailed? Against the Day gives an outline of it. We are
very close to the pseudo-schopenhauerien idealism which flowered at the end
of XIXe in the literary circles of Europe, according to which we produce the
world which surrounds us by our ideas. Teodor de Wyzewa wrote thus in 1895:
“Only it saw Me; and only is its eternal task: to create. But creation
results from the current ideas. We project with nothing external the image
of our intimate gasoline; then, believing it true, we continue to create it
similar; and we suffer then from its inconsistencies, while they are work of
our pleasure. Connected in the cave, the prisoner deplores and is
frightened, because terrible phantoms run up on the wall, in front of his
eyes. “(Teodor de Wyzewa, Our Masters, studies and portraits literary,
Perrin and Co, 1895, p. 6). Humanity embourbée itself in a given version of
the universe - it chose a way in the multitude of possible quantum, way
filled with difficulties in the form of massacres mechanical; “Against the
Day”, it is also the attempt to find the lost potentiality of the era which
precedes ours, of going to wrong way of the entropy. With wrong way, it
would be besides a beautiful title for the French version, if it were not
already taken. The world of Against the Day is organized around a central
element, base of the world, whose physical demonstrations hide a coherence
of a higher order: the light. The most important passage of the novel is
perhaps at the neighborhoods of pages 77 and following, at the time of the
meeting of Webb Traverse, the minor trade unionist amateur of dynamite, and
Rideout Blackbird, photographer of its state. The photographic material of
Blackbird attracts the curiosity of Webb, who awkwardly tries to tear off
receipts of explosives to him. Because the elements necessary to the
transposition of the light on paper are the same ones as those which are
used for the clothes industry of a bomb. The quicksilver (“quicksilver”) of
the alchemists