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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
Weekend
Edition
November 18 / 19, 2006
Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day
Back
in the Aether Again
By RON JACOBS
Thomas Pynchon's Against
the Day is the story of a quest. Perhaps for reason; perhaps
for reasons beyond reason. Perhaps for an understanding of the
human experience. The story of a family named Traverse, which
must be more than a mere family name. The father, Webb Traverse,
ostensibly an itinerant miner in North America's West a couple
decades after the US civil war, he is also a bomber whose sympathies
lie with those opposed to the robber baron capitalists that populate
the estates and boardrooms of the United States. The men whose
general perception of the men from whose sweat and blood they
make their millions is a perception that sees those workers as
unworthy of life. Pynchon doesn't exactly condemn capitalism
as much as he describes the inevitable progression of that system
of economics to its ultimate expression in war and bloodshed.
Which is condemnation enough. To the robber baron Scarsdale Vibe,
Webb Traverse is somehow different. He is considered not just
an opponent, but an opponent that must be sought out and killed.
Once dead, he is brought to a place that is beyond boot hill,
beyond Tombstone--a place where vultures of the human and avian
type rule. Reading this particular section, I was reminded of
William Burroughs' grotesque visions of the western lands. As
it turns out, the youngest Traverse is provided an education
by the same robber baron that ordered Webb's death. The daughter,
meanwhile, marries the trigger man. Of course, the desire for
justice cum revenge reveals its head along the plot line. Indeed,
two of the brothers begin their travels with exactly such a thought.
The Traverse family finds itself part of every facet in the tale.
Mathematics and monopoly capitalists. Anarchy and anal sex. Airships
and manned submarines built by Italian anarchists. Meteors that
change the earth and murders accompanied by grotesque tortures
that defy belief. It is not a pretty world provided here, but
it is an interesting one that is full of adventure and surprise.
In the distance of time, a
foreboding of human catastrophe lurks. Sometimes it is spoken
of by travelers from the future. These are travelers who bend
time and live in their own as well as the past. Other times,
the coming catastrophe is spoken of by clairvoyants and con men.
Above and beneath it all is the search for an ancient place,
a holy grail, known as Shambhala. There resides a secret of life.
Meanwhile, a weapon that destroys everything is for sale. It
appears to be entropic in nature from the clues Pynchon provides.
The Chums of Chance--a Tom-Swiftian group of adventurers that
fly above the earth in a cloaked airship, call these travelers
The Trespassers. The Chums, who introduce the entire work, believe at first that it is
The Trespassers who are bringing on the coming apocalyptic event:
an event that we readers has the luxury of history to tell us
is World War I. The Chums fly on, taking orders from men they
do not know and meeting many of the other characters in the novel.
Eventually, they become aware that they are being used by forces
they resent. Indeed, this is the case for most of the folks in
the story. The sexually unusual Cyprian, the youngest Traverse,
Kit. Even the gunmen and the women. As the reader, we of course
have the advantage of seeing this, although even we are being
manipulated. Isn't that the nature of art?
Ah yes, the women, not femme
fatales but often very femme--the major ones being the sensuous
and sexually adventurous mathematician and enchantress of unknown
origin, Yashmeen; the strikingly attractive American girl Dahlia
(or Dally), equally at home with street urchins and princesses,
who grows into a woman over the course of the novel; and the
Traverse women: Mayva the matriarch, Lake, her father's silent
storm who marries his killer, and Stray, lover of both Frank
and Reef Traverse and the mother of Reef's first child. She then
reinvents herself as an adventurer, trader and friend of the
Mexican anarchists. Women that are intellectually stimulating
and physically desirous, they inspire all sorts of intrigue and
shenanigans of a every nature. Like other Pynchon tales, one
could state that the novel itself radiates out from the few women
who appear throughout the story.
Light is another radiant character
here. Light bifurcated by pieces of crystal spar and light bent
by mirrors that create likenesses as real as the thing or creature
reflected. The abnormal bluish light and eerie glow that covered
the planet in the wake of the Tunguska event of June 30, 1908
and the light of love, especially that of the unusual threesome
of Reef Traverse, Cyprian and Yashmeen. Light that can destroy
anything if manipulated in that way. Light that is the fundamental
element of the mysterious Q-weapon and the Interdikt line
that anarchists hope to destroy in order to prevent the war that
is on its way. Light of mystery and mystical light.
Mathematics plays a starring
role, much as it did in Gravity's Rainbow. It's a mathematics
beyond the accountants books and the ledgers of the rich. Mathematics
full of symbols and a language of its own. A language whose meaning
provides clues to the meaning of existence and how the world
exists. Mathematics whose various approaches creates devotees
in the same way as religious cults. It's a math that always somehow
leads to suffering and death. Yet we pursue it anyhow for the
power it might provide us. Or for the pure beauty it provides--a
symmetry of description that puts the world that is chaos in
an order we believe we crave. It's a math where the sum of the
angles of a triangle are greater than 180 degrees because the
earth is curved not flat. Non-Euclidean and the gateway to Einsteins
Theory of Relativity. Mathematics that strives to include the
fourth dimension--time. Once included in the formula, time as
we know it ceases to exist. We are here there and elsewhere all
at once. Then again, so is everyone else. Mathematical poetry
and magic, not to mention the tarot.
The ancient Greek concept of
the Aether is the firmament on which much of this story resides.
The stuff of alchemists and their creations, it is the Aether
that transfers light and energy. Beyond that, it holds all matter
together. Firmament that is not solid. This aether was believed
to be the substance which filled the region of the universe above
the terrestrial sphere. Aristotle included it as a fifth element
distinct from the other four, Earth, Water, Air, and Fire and
its Platonic solid, according to Plato, was the Dodecahedron.
Humanity that likewise refuses to maintain its former shape and
concepts. The age of invention. Tesla discovers an energy source
in the ground capable of providing free electricity once it is
properly harnessed. Of course, the robber barons do not want
Tesla to succeed These capitalists have discovered the incredible
profits to be made when they allow the profit to accumulate through
acquisition and murder, thereby allowing them to accumulate even
more. Anarchists and Bolsheviks understand the same process and
hope to destroy it.
The situation described in
these pages is one of present and future danger. It is a danger
descended from technology and its (mis)uses. It is also a danger
precipitated by the worship of and desire for profit and more
profit. Individuals live their lives as if they are theirs to
live but all the time wondering if they are merely puppets controlled
by forces greater than even those who pay their bills. At times
almost primitivist in nature, the opposition to this world one
finds in these pages stems from a belief that science is wrought
with danger. This belief doesn't come from the lack of scientific
knowledge that is often the basis for religious fears of science,
but from an overwhelming knowledge of science's potential. Indeed,
it is the place where find ourselves today.
In Riemann geometry, there
are no parallel lines and x is infinite when it's a negative
number, but finite when it's a positive one. In Against the
Day, only the number of pages is finite. The possibilities
considered are without end. It is an adult Tom Swift series of
adventures; a piece of historical fiction that is also an adventure
with the requisite subplots of love and intrigue. This book is
a marvel of lyrical descriptions of everything from various appearances
of the sun to sexual practices frowned upon by "normal"
society and the machinations of the parallel world of espionage,
revolution and counterrevolution. The writing is what we have
come to expect from Pynchon: sentences that loop toward a conclusion
one can hardly wait to arrive at. Despite this desire, one finds
oneself lingering--sometimes because the loop reads like one
of the mathematical formulas trying to explain the unpredictability
of human or geologic events. Other times one lingers on a sentence
or phrase because the words assembled are structurally so complete
they stand alone like a Taoist epigram. There must be a meaning
behind the symbols on the page. Despite Pynchon's imploration
to the contrary in his pre-publication blurb (found on Amazon
and elsewhere), one can not help but think of the present day,
with conflicts breaking out around the world and corruption and
greed a way of life among certain classes.
Some critics will gripe that
the novel is incomplete; that it leads nowhere, but this is not
the case. This novel leads to the beginning of the human catastrophe
we now call history-the Twentieth Century. Just as Gravity's
Rainbow provided a uniquely subversive and anarchistically
creative perspective on the world created in the destruction
of World War Two, Against the Day provides us with a similarly
subversive perspective on the opening act to the drama in which
that war was Act Two. Despite the bleakness of the times that
these tales are told, an indomitable beauty resides within them,
thanks in large part to the characters Mr. Pynchon creates, the
stories that they live, and the approach to the telling by the
author.
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