Against the Day, re-examined

[Monte Davis]

I like Dally, too -- very much. She is as essential to Pynchon's reworking
of two literary standbys -- the wisecracking Annie Get Your Gun frontier
girl come to town, and the Jamesian "heiress to all the ages" American girl
in Europe -- as Lew is to the detective thread.

The use of "co-conscious" (a real coinage of the time, one of many before
"unconscious" and "subconscious" gained the field) and the elision of Freud
seem to me as deliberate and significant as the elision of relativity and
Einstein. We know very well the shape of the missing pieces, just as we did
listening to Ensign Morituri's plans for going home.