Against the Day, re-examined

[Ya Sam]

http://pynchonblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/against-day-re-examined.html


"I would like to extend this theory beyond subject matter to embrace style. 
I believe that Pynchon is a stylistic chameleon who alters his prose style 
and literary construction techniques based on the popular literary styles of 
the times he writes about, so that any reader could pick up the most 
acclaimed and popular books of these eras and slip easily into a Pynchon 
novel ... perhaps someday in the deep future blissfully unaware that his 
universe is radically skewed from those of the contemporaneous authors." ...

"Finally we arrive at "Against The Day." And here, Pynchon is playing on the 
grandest stage of his career. Think for a moment of what it might have been 
like in turn-of-the-century America to conceive of writing the great 
American novel. On the global stage, roughly 3/4 of the novels considered 
the best of all time had been written in the last 50 years -- all of 
Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, George Eliot. Here in America, your 
competitors would be Henry James, Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Theodore 
Drieser. And now, as you set off on your grand novel that will conclude with 
World War One, think of the great European WW1 era masterpieces -- The Magic 
Mountain, In Search of Lost Time, Good Soldier Svejk, The Man Without 
Qualities -- not to mention Ulysses. And one American writer -- John Dos 
Passos in his USA Trilogy -- has already covered much the same ground.

This is the Great American Novel pre-Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner, 
focused on that most quintessentially European era. And this is Thomas 
Pynchon taking them all on, right on their home turf. Line up the canonical 
works of the era and Pynchon will have his riff on them all. From Dickens' 
"Bleak House", Pynchon crafts a sprawling story with so many characters that 
he's still introducing new ones 900 pages in. To answer "War and Peace", 
Pynchon is offering his own theory of history, one that accepts Tolstoy's 
argument that great man theory is bunk and that the great tides of history 
are beyond individual control, but one that dares to answer Tolstoy's 
dilemma about individual free will, arguing that our lives are double 
refracted and that by living with your own personal anarchy, you can partly 
escape the tidal destiny.

Pynchon dares to invade Drieser's Chicago and Mann's Vienna. He throws in 
raw sexuality that would make D.H. Lawrence cry. He has women in the prairie 
to borrow from Cather and mathematical anarchists straight out of Broch. 
It's an awful lot to digest in one reading -- it's even more overwhelming 
when you consider the audacity of taking on an era so familiar to the 
literati." ...

"The greater failing of "Against The Day" is its style. I imagine that 
Pynchon decided that any great anarchic novel necessarily had to assume an 
anarchic form. The result is a complete mess -- far too many characters to 
keep up with, narrative threads that drop off for hundreds of pages at a 
time, at least one too many Webb children. Honestly, couldn't the Frank and 
Reef characters have been merged? Or are Frank and Reef double-refractions 
of the same person, same as Kit and Lake (I'm guessing that no one has ever 
named a child after a Pynchon character)? If they are double-refractions, 
Pynchon only knows what that means. And why did we need the Dally character?

I can forgive Pynchon for being sloppy and not reaching his high ambitions, 
but I can't forgive him for being so arrogant about the era. Pynchon would 
have us believe that the pre-war era was defined by Tesla's experiments and 
the studies that disproved the existence of aether. In reality, that era was 
influenced far more by Sigmond Freud's theories about the psyche and 
Einstein's theory of relativity. "Against The Day" exists in an America 
without Teddy Roosevelt urging us to fight neurasthenia with the vigorous 
cure. After having so much fun with figures like Ben Franklin in "Mason & 
Dixon", here he decides to poke fun only at the easiest target of all -- 
Archduke Ferdinand (or should that be Archdude Ferdinand?)

I always enjoy Pynchon's flights of philosophical fancy and this time 
around, his extension of Tolstoy's theory of history is quite interesting 
and worth a 1000 page novel to examine. Too bad this novel never quite 
arrives there. Pynchon loves literary cryptography too much to ever propose 
and defend a theory out in the open like Tolstoy.

At the end of "Against The Day", I feel fortunate to have another Pynchon 
work to chew on and am left with enough amusing set pieces to revisit that 
I'm glad to have it in my library. However, I can't help but hope that, like 
Vineland, this book was merely a diversion -- a grandly ambitious diversion, 
but a diversion no less -- and that he still has a great work, his crowning 
achievement, being worked out longhand on scientific paper that will reach 
us sometime before his days run out."

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