Re: Against the Day and William Vollmann’s Brutal Book About Climate Change

[Mark Kohut]

I have just entered the second part of the novel again where the
Trespassers enter.......more to come
But a remark by someone about a certain kind of novel came across my bow....

The novel which is about a group of friends/people who were around when a
Certain Bad Thing Happened
that No One Talks About Anymore so the rest of the novel is we readers
finding out what it was...

TRP kinsa obverts that, right?

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 27, 2019, at 6:55 PM, gary webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:

"Understanding that he would not be allowed to learn any more from Mr. Ace
than whatever story the sinister traveler chose to tell, Chick arrived at
their next meeting with Miles, who alone among the crew possessed the
clairvoyance the situation required. At his first sight of Mr. Ace, Miles
began to cry, heedless and desolate, the tears of a high professional
cleric after receiving a direct message from God... Chick looked on in
astonishment, for tears among this Unit were virtually unknown.
"I recognized him Chick," said Miles forthrightly, when they had returned
from the ship. "From somewhere else. I know he was real and couldn't be
wished away. He is not who he says he is. Assuredly he does not have our
best interests in mind." ... (pg.417)"

Who and What the Trespassers are would make a great thread.

Or in their own words:

"We have no choice," fiercely, having abandoned the measured delivery Miles
had come to associate with Trespassers. "No more than ghosts may choose
what places they must haunt...you children drift in a dream, all is smooth,
no interruptions, no discontinuities, but imagine the fabric of Time torn
open, and yourselves swept through, with no way back, orphans and exiles
who find you will do what you must, however shameful, to get from end to
end of each corroded day (pg.517)"

This is after an interesting bit over the coming conflict (WWI) which the
Trespasser seems quite emphatic to Miles. Reading this novel again and
again over the years I always walk away with differing interpretations
about them, and the time travel bits in the book. I'd be interested in
P-Listers thoughts and opinions on the matter....





On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 9:30 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Reading this review, and reading the first few pages of Vollman's work,
> reminds me of the Trespassers in *Against the Day.*
>
> From the future-- "a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies,
> terminal poverty— the end ..." They are presented as out of an unspecified
> apocalyptic future in the book, a tautological explication, I know, and
> which I vaguely associated with a nuclear holocaust, an On the Beach future
> or whatever, Pynchon's great ambiguity of various possibilities all
> applying but, now, more fully full of the great presentation of the natural
> world in AtD, I see it as the climate changed end times future per Vollman.
>
>
> Your milage may vary even with a fuel shortage.
>
> For me, taking a writer like Vollman seriously, as we do, deflates my
> "balloon-boy faith", my congenital optimism, my belief in art-of-the
> possible pragmatic just-in-time change as so often in history, that climate
> change apocalypse will be averted as nukes were in the Cuban Missile Crisis
> that something will be done to change it all.
>
> But all this post can point to is Pynchon's genius in encompassing it all
> up to and including "balloon-boy faith".
>
> https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/568309/?__twitter_impression=true
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>