Against the Day, Mathematics, etc.

[Carvill John]

Couple of worthwhile links...

'Mind-Bending Science in Thomas Pynchon's Mind-Bending Novel Against The Day'


Pynchon takes the science of this period and incorporates it deeply into the language and structure of Against The Day, more so perhaps than in any of his other novels. Against The Day is suffused with meditations on light, space, and time, and often plays with the tension between different perspectives in math and physics - classical physics versus relativity, Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism described with the imaginary numbers of quaternions versus the real numbers of vector analysis. This material is not just filler - it's critical to the core of Against The Day, a fact which has been underappreciated in early reviews of the novel. 


One reviewer claimed that a new generation of writers has a "grasp of the systems that fascinate Pynchon -- science, capitalism, religion, politics, technology -- [that] is surer, more nuanced, more adult and inevitably yields more insight into how those systems work than Pynchon offers here." When it comes to science at least, this claim is not true - Pynchon's achievement in Against the Day proves that he is peerless as a poet who can mine science for gems of insight and set them into the context of the humanity that is the ultimate concern of his novels.


http://www.scientificblogging.com/adaptive_complexity/mindbending_science_thomas_pynchons_mindbending_novel_against_day_part_i



An what looks like a recent blog read of ATD:


http://steampunkscholar.blogspot.com/2009/07/against-day-by-thomas-pynchon-part-3.html


By the time a reader reaches the third part of Pynchon's epic, they're feeling much the same way a marathon runner does when they catch their first wind, that rush where you muse, "this is no big deal, I don't see why people think this is so difficult." Two hours later, your breath coming in ragged gasps and your legs on fire, you wonder what the hell you were thinking getting into this. At the end of Part Three of Against the Day, I was feeling a readerly equivalent.






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