Towards the day

[Dave Monroe]

Towards the day
May 2007

Prospect's Thomas Pynchon correspondent is battling his way through
"Against the Day"—and recording the experience
Kamran Nazeer

Kamran Nazeer is a contributing editor to Prospect and a trainee balloonist

If you'd like to discuss any of the ideas in this Pynchon diary, email
Kamran Nazeer

Introduction

Before anything else, there are the facts. No book since 1997. 1,085
pages, now it's here. But the facts run out quickly. The dust jacket
provides no photograph or biographical information about the author—it
simply lists his previous titles. There is a synopsis, written by
Pynchon, that situates the novel in time ("spanning the period between
the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War
I") and identifies some of its personalities (anarchists, balloonists,
innocents and decadents, Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx).
It says nothing about the plot.

I put the book on my bathroom scale. It weighs 1.6kg. I drop it on the
bed and other padded surfaces. I hold it above my head for as long as
I can, which is 1 minute 12 seconds.

But then that's it: I have to begin reading. So I calculate. 40 pages
an hour—I can manage that. 80 pages a day—which is an ask, but at a
level of ambition that allows job, food, sleep, the maintenance of
social relations, to more or less continue. On these assumptions, the
book represents 13 days of reading, or 12 with an added heave on the
last night. These are hostile calculations, treating the book as an
intrusion, something that must be got through.

As I seek a comfortable way in which to hold the book, I wonder what
will happen if my reading rate begins to slip, let's say as a function
of feeling, "I'm into it, I've cracked it," or, more shamefully,
"There is something I want to watch on television." How long then? 26
days? 52? And so, as I contemplate this more extended period of
co-habitation, a little more trenchantly, I ask myself: why?

One reason is that the novel is the most extendable form of art.
Memory, stamina and cost constrain the length of plays, opera, dance
and music. Film directors struggle to gain much more than 100 minutes
from their producers. You can walk from one end of the largest
painting to the other in a few seconds. Of course, art lingers. Even
the experience of watching video art on YouTube lingers. But what
actually happens when the artist has 1,085 pages, with an average of
425 words per page? Why? Why write like this, and why read?

This reading history comprises a response to that question and to the
novel itself; includes an account of the paranoid six hours during
which I thought the author was sitting opposite me on an aeroplane;
and argues, against the day's orthodoxy, that Pynchon is not a
postmodern sage, a propagandist for the hyperreal or an artist of the
floating world—but that he is instead a naturalist in extremis, the
hardest-working day-jobber of a novelist that we have.


Part 1: The Light Over the Ranges (pp 1-118)

The book begins at the Chicago World's fair of 1893. Though not
exactly. It approaches the fair from above, inside the cabin of a
"hydrogen skyship" called the Inconvenience. The balloon is manned by
members of the "Chums of Chance," including, in descending order of
seniority, Randolph St Cosmo, the commander Lindsay Noseworth, Miles
Blundell and Darby Suckling, though not to forget Pugnax, who is
reading Henry James, and who is a dog, usually more interested "in
sentimental tales about his own species than those exhibiting extremes
of human behaviour, which he appeared to find a bit lurid." Pynchon
suggests that we may have read about the Chums before, in "The Chums
of Chance and the Evil Halfwit," or "The Chums of Chance at Krakatoa."

This is an odd, though very funny, opening, and some of the humour
derives from our expectations of a Pynchon book. He won the National
Book award; he captures something ineffably important about
contemporary culture, right? So why does this book start in the mode
of the recent "Pirates!" books by Gideon Defoe? Some of the jokes
about Pugnax might as well have been inspired by the diaries of Buster
(as dictated to Roy Hattersley). What's more, even as you read this
seemingly inappropriate opening, you can't consult the back cover to
be reassured by a black-and-white image of the author gazing back at
you. There's no half-smile, no rummaging stare into the distance; just
the book and you. This is the loneliness of the long-distance reader.

But Pynchon doesn't stick with the Chums of Chance for long (25
pages). Not that he leaps into the World's fair. I wonder if there's
any other novelist who would behave like this. With the fair at his
disposal, rich with fin-de-siècle resonance, a meeting place of
cultures, ideas and personalities from around the globe, Pynchon
either keeps us above it, somewhat to its west, or in the bushes close
by (where two of his characters are observed in what, according to the
prevailing farcical mood, must be called "cavorting").

Of course, it isn't that Pynchon is uninterested in the fair—and the
themes that don't so much lurk there as are advertised with
exclamation marks on banners. Rather, these opening sections belie an
interest in life over Life. Where a more impetuous or less confident
novelist would nail down every shred of significance, aiming to make
sure that we "get" the fair (and appreciate the cleverness of the
setting), Pynchon wants to tell us a broad, funny, vivacious story,
and he wants rid of the readers who are only along because they think
it's literature. The joy of this opening section—short, at a mere 118
pages—is that Pynchon is daring me to keep reading. Though soon, given
how it really is impossible to find a comfortable way in which to hold
the book, he's going to have to do much more.


Part 2: Iceland Spar (pp 119-428)

I get into the heart of Part 2 in Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. I am
sitting opposite three Dutch women who are applying three different
shades of lipstick, and I am nervous about what they will do when
they're finished. On my right, there is a Frenchman in a torn
fisherman's jumper, who is whispering to his wife that the title of
the book I am reading must itself be a translation for it is so
awkward to translate into French. On my left, there is an empty seat
and I wouldn't be too surprised if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand
(briefly a character in this part of the book) came over to claim it.

This is one effect of reading Pynchon—it engenders a certain paranoia.
His characters appear and disappear, without prologue or epilogue.
Events you think ought to be significant are skipped over quickly.
There are few of the obvious signs of what counts and what does not
count, what is just texture and what will prove crucial to the story.
And so you have to remain constantly alert or you might miss a secret
or a shooting or a revolution.

This could be seen as a polemical resistance to conventional
storytelling, where no character or event is more or less central to
the novel, so that the climax might as well be the consummation of a
long-unrequited love affair in Seattle as the flapping of a
butterfly's wings in Shanghai. But equally, we can praise Pynchon for
capturing our mood. Perhaps putting on lipstick ought to be imbued
with more dramatic significance than anything else that happens in an
airport. My restless scanning of the departure lounge and Pynchon's
freewheeling storytelling style are provoked and legitimated by one
another. This is plausible, but the real payoff of Pynchon's technique
is, I think, different.

It took me until page 395 to understand it. There I read of "a dark
slash of blood that trailed in the air and feathered in a crescent
slap, unheard in the noise of the shots, across the ancient soiling of
the pulqueria floor. Fin." This sentence is crucial, I think. But
first, some plot.

The discharge just quoted originates from the body of Sloat Fresno,
co-murderer of the father of Kit, Reef, Lake and Frank Traverse.
Traverse Snr was suspected of anarchism in industrial settings
belonging to Scarsdale Vibe. Vibe ordered in Fresno and his
accomplice, Deuce Kindred, who fulfilled their contract but not
without a certain leakage of information to the family of the
deceased. The vengeful son, on this occasion, is Frank. And the
remainder of the score-settling is yet to be told.

Now consider the many forms that Pynchon eschews for a story that
occupies several hundred pages of his book. It is not a mystery, for
we know who did it. It is not a thriller that leads us like clockwork
to an unexpected denouement. The book neither begins nor ends with
elements of this drama—they are scattered amid several other stories,
featuring several other characters that the Traverse siblings meet,
significantly or, as often, not.

And so back to the slash of blood. What made me pause on this line was
the vivid language, the "dark slash of blood" that describes a "trail"
in the air which ends in a "crescent" and pretty much audible "slap."
The sentence is designed to be read slowly, and it ends with a
deliberate, even forced, pause: " Fin." This suggests that the passage
from which it is taken may be portentous, but it is actually
astonishingly light—there is no preceding description of Frank's
feelings on discovering his father's murderer, on what courses through
his mind as he pulls the trigger of his gun, and there is no
succeeding description of how he feels after having downed Sloat
Fresno or of Fresno's final thoughts as he lies dying. This is
critical, because it suggests that Pynchon claims no special privilege
to be able to describe their feelings. Yet by placing this wonderful,
slow-motion sentence in the midst of the action, he forces us to join
him in thinking about them.

This, I conclude, at 8am in Schiphol, is critical to understanding
Pynchon. Just as his mash-up narrative style heightens my awareness of
what might be about to happen in the airport departure lounge, his
astonishing description of the post-climactic moment, together with
his refusal to stamp his view on to the page, heightens my motivation
to think about his characters, to the extent of putting the book aside
for a few minutes while I make up my mind.

To put this another way, Pynchon has written a massive book whose
deepest achievement may be to focus our attention on what isn't there,
not even amid its 1,085 pages.

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=8657