6 Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day: Sociopolitical Suspicion and Double Spaces of Espionage
ABSTRACT
In the atmosphere of heightened diffidence and political rivalry among European nations that started around 1890 and eventually led to the Great War, espionage began to emerge as an extremely sophisticated pursuit. Simultaneously, scientific development, seemingly promoted for the sake of human progress, was harnessed in the service of war interests and technologies of destruction, and knowledge became in this way intimately associated with the exercise of power, a conjunction – power-knowledge – that has been regarded as a linchpin of contemporary societies. This chapter shows how Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day depicts this complex historical conjuncture of pervasive deception and conflicted motives in the early decades of the twentieth century. In Pynchon’s work the ‘Eastern Question’ and the Balkan Wars show that imperial forces, often separated from centralized governments or states, promote genocidal violence and ethnic struggle in order to maintain their power over populations. Pynchon conjures up a hypothetical convergence between the Eastern Question in Europe and the United States’ consolidation of capital and state power in its western territories.
This chapter explores the relationship between travelling and the politics of space in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006), which describes a pilgrimage around the globe and delves into the shifting of spatiotemporal realities and the idea of the fourth dimension. By using fantasy, Pynchon criticizes the ideology of capitalism and imperialism, which delimit spaces ← 139 | 140 → and arrange surfaces to exert power and control over the least favoured social classes.1
Against the Day is an apparently chaotic novel that plays with concepts of space and time covering the historical period from the 1890s to just after the First World War. Political issues such as the ‘Eastern Question’ and the subsequent Balkan Wars seem to demonstrate how imperial forces, often separated from centralized governments or nation states, control humans by promoting genocidal racial and ethnic struggles in order to maintain their power.
Pynchon imagines a fascinating historical convergence between the Eastern Question (in Europe) and the United States’ consolidation of capital and state power in its western territories in a novel that criticizes a society in crisis where, as critic Amy J. Elias points out, ‘the potential to reimagine social processes and ethical values is being replaced by a myopic, antiutopian, and soulless materialism’ (2006: 31). By means of references to history and geography, the author challenges the reader’s conventional perceptions of realities and geometries that become war scenarios depicted as if they were a game of chess, something that serves as a metaphor for war.
Taking into account that Pynchon is not a historian, we can observe how he depicts history as not limited by national space and time; he demonstrates the possibility of several imaginary worlds, and multiple subjectivities and temporalities, in order to challenge historical concepts of nation and state as delimited territories with a shared time and coherent national histories. Moreover, characters throughout this novel are doubled and mirrored to disturb further this national space-time. Also, by means of his use of the concept of bilocation, which consists in being in two places at the same time, and perpetually crossing the realms of past, present, and future, he criticizes the territorial and temporal fixing of the nation-state, and at the same time, of literary genre.
Pynchon highlights antagonistic forces monopolizing or influencing a regional or national space through a sense of perpetual threat. The situation he depicts resembles a permanent siege that functions as an important ← 140 | 141 → element in the creation of a society corresponding to what Michel Foucault (1990: 140 ff.) calls biopower, consisting of a set of flexible techniques which attempt to standardize ways of life associated with modernity. According to Foucault, the way in which war creates society is explained by a regulatory process that dictates how human life should be conducted or lived as well.2
Pynchon, like Foucault, critically analyses how exercising power entails the creation and surveillance of the population by allowing certain forms of life to live and letting others die. J. Paul Narkunas’s essay on Pynchon’s Against the Day, a late Foucauldian reading of the novel, gives a very interesting account of the way in which the forces of corporate capitalism and government instigate racism and war. As a result of these processes, the institutional powers of the state (in spaces like in schools) are just one part of a changeable network of economic, social, and political power relations marking and policing the limits of the population, a web of relations Foucault calls ‘govern-mentality’, a mentality to govern (1978). In Against the Day, the character Scardsdale Vibe (who hired two gunmen that killed Webb Traverse, the father of the protagonists) gives a monologue addressing the Las Animas-Huerfano Delegation of the Industrial Defense Alliance (L. A. H. D. I. D. A.):
We use them, […] we harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture of the race? We take what we can while we may. […] We will buy it all up, […] all this country. Monkey speaks, the land listens. (2006: 1000–1)
Foucault calls ‘govern-mentality’ the mentality which Vibe’s social Darwinism seems to endorse here, reminiscent of the social Darwinist hierarchy put forward in Andrew Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of Wealth’ (1900), which discusses the financial giants of his era. Carnegie claimed that the ← 141 | 142 → accumulation of wealth was beneficial to society and the government should take no action in order to avoid it.
The novel, which opens at the Chicago World Fair of 1893, and brings into play a number of historical references through which Pynchon manages to create a sense of documentary realism. So, it might be observed how the Chicago World Fair could represent the place of pilgrimage of American laissez-faire capitalism and ideologies of white racial superiority. In the novel, the process is carried out by depicting the Chicago World Fair through a reverse iconography of class and values, so that labour camps assume holy auras, becoming places of martyrdom and sanctuaries that can be considered as sacred spaces. In Against the Day, The City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels, Santa Barbara or Santa Monica are just some examples. Amy J. Elias highlights how, by defamiliarizing these city names, Pynchon ‘draws our attention to the already sacralized geography in which his postmodern pilgrims travel’ (Elias 2006: 33).
In the Pynchon novel under discussion, anarchist groups and pilgrims (Frank Traverse travelling through the United States to avenge his father, Reef, Cyprian and Yashmeen travelling through Siberia to the Balkans, or Kit and his Tibetan pilgrimage site in Siberia) turn on the aggressive individualism that is central to capitalism, in the same way as the life of movement and migration upsets the political stability of nation-states. Pilgrimage reconfigures both time and space. It introduces the possibility of overlapping historical time as future time into the present, introducing the possibility of parallel worlds. Moreover, Against the Day is full of examples of alternative realities and future times, coinciding with different time dimensions, along with mirrored and fractured pasts and presents, with multiple spatial regimes.
Scardsdale Vibe, the multinational thief tycoon in the novel, a character opposing anarchists and pilgrims, in fact sums up the new materialism of the twentieth century precisely as selfishness and motionlessness or inertia:
Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us. […] Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into ← 142 | 143 → silence, but money will […] bring all low before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has begun. (2006: 1123)
In contrast to Vibe’s vision of a false community of vacation bungalows, Pynchon’s anarchism, according to Amy Elias, is associated with an ethics of reciprocity and is thus similar to Paul Goodman’s social anarchism, affirming ‘that the only sort of freedom that is really worth having, or even really free, is a social freedom, freedom lived in community with others’.3 In Pynchon’s novel, both the anarchist and the pilgrims distrust earthly hierarchy, promote popular movements outside parliamentary politics, and understand life as transition and movement. In his evolutionary judgment, human development towards a just society is dependent not on the conquest achievement of material necessity but on a series of largely contingent events and possibilities opened for a time but then they are closed again, possibilities such as roads not taken, or catastrophes that could have been avoided. Such a society is in fact formed through the lives of the pilgrim anarchists in Pynchon’s texts. According to Yashmeen, one of the main characters in the novel, ‘the only rule is that there are no rules’ (2006: 943). Pilgrimage embodies the idea of ‘underground men’, and here he shows his underclass sympathy by altering the conception of stable spaces of social organization, and by going back to orphism, a doctrine nearer the mysteries of orientalism and opposed to rationalism, materialism and positivism. There are some scenes that emphasize the holiness and power of nature and the Earth against the artificial death power of war technology associated with capitalism. Shambala, for example, becomes a central textual symbol, as the mythical city in the desert (793) which the capitalists are searching for as a space of infinite energy that will eventually trigger the war.
Surveillance also has a central role in the exercise of spatial power. This has to do with the process of creating spaces for war, and resembles the days of the Cold War (the concept of the Great Game having been taken originally by the Russians from chess, but also signifying the English game of cricket). In fact, Pynchon had already explored a similar terrain in ← 143 | 144 → Gravity’s Rainbow when referring to chess as a metaphor for war. A number of Pynchon’s novels (V., Gravity’s Rainbow), particularly those in which chess allusions inform the relationship between geometry and hegemony, as well as the question of complicity, can also be related to treatises on chess such as Marcel Duchamp and Vitaly Halberstadt’s L’Opposition et les cases conjuguées sont réconciliées (1932), where the players agree to superimpose mirror symmetry onto the sixty-four squares of the chessboard so as to recalculate the precise ‘opposition’ or ‘equilibrium’ between the Kings after each and every move. In this way, the space-time geometry of the game corresponds with the discursive and repressive formations of the state at war in the most general sense.
In Against the Day, ‘Surveying’ is a code for surveillance or spying, and both are ‘great games’, like cricket and chess. So, among its numerous subjects and styles, Against the Day contains a postmodern reworking of the spy-adventure story with specific reference to Kipling. Almost every important character in Pynchon’s Against the Day is a spy, and when the narrator refers to the subject of espionage, he says that it was ‘styled by Mr. Kipling, in a simpler day, “The Great Game”’ (Pynchon 2006: 226–7). There are weapons sales representatives in Ostend, who come ‘as to some international chess tournament’ (558), and in one of the few more-or-less explicit references to the First World War, the war is seen as a game of chess (594).
Pynchon depicts decentralizing state forces early in Against the Day when the Chums of Chance travel to the White City, the 1893 Chicago Exposition. The Chums of Chance appear as double characters because while they take part in the ‘real world’ as balloonists frequently subcontracted by sovereign governments for spying, they are also self-consciously fictional beings. They are sent by a mysterious Home Office to the World Fair to enter into a contract to spy on labour movements with White City Investigations, a private detective agency, militia, and rival to the Pinkerton detective agency. The White City appears as a republican symbol of the imperial subjugation of others. It is important to note that at the 1893 World Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his frontier thesis to the American Historical Association, where he pointed to expansion as the most important factor in American history. He claimed that the existence ← 144 | 145 → of an area of free land and the advance of American settlement towards the west explains American development. In 1890, however, the Census Bureau stated that all the land within the United States was claimed, and there was no longer a frontier. Turner claimed that the frontier was gone roughly a hundred years after the Constitution was approved, and that meant for him the closing of the first period of American History. Turner questioned how American culture and history would develop and whether Americans would keep their typical dominant individualism (through encounters with a wild and cruel natural environment) after the frontier was closed. But, but, according to Narkunas (247), Turner proposed this thesis when the West had already been fully colonized and the subjugation of native peoples through confinement and genocide had taken place.
Moreover, the privatization of public land in the western frontier by the Homestead Act of 18624 would result in a greater concentration of wealth and the rise of large corporate farms and ranches. White City Investigations also comments on the Pinkertons and the rise of private detective agencies and militias in the place of organs of centralized state governments. After the Homestead Strike of 1886, the Pinkertons became famous for prompting violence from strikers in order to legitimate their repressive responses to riots and their atrocities against them.
Pynchon takes readers all over the world, through spaces of conflict such as Central Asia and the Mexican Revolution (1919/20), to show more and more of the world being managed by states or corporations, and guided by the railroads. At the same time, the spectre of the First World War haunts the entire text because it is the irrational outcome of all this rationalization by means of the railroad: in the end, it was the Austro-Hungarian ← 145 | 146 → aspirations to monopolize trade in the Balkan region by means of the railroad that set in motion the events leading to the war.
In Against the Day, a first description of the Great West is presented from the bird’s eye perspective of the Chums of Chance: while they are approaching the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 by air, they also float above Chicago, whose urban lay-out is characterized by the clear-cut coordinate system of the Cartesian grid:
Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid […]. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate led to the killing floor. (Pynchon 2006: 10)
The passage refers to the crucial shifts brought about by industrialization: on the one hand, the subordination of the unstable dynamics of life to the teleological geometry of systematized killing routines; on the other, the partitioning of the lands, the spatial transition from prairie (a term that coincides with the name of one of the characters in Vineland and Against the Day) to pasture and from pasture to feedlot (Cronon 223); in other words, the transformation of an open space into fenced parcels of property. The reference to the Cartesian grid, which is the strictest tessellation (tiling of a plane by using one or more geometrical shapes) of any Euclidean plane by unit squares, marks the achievement of the colonization process.
At a first glance, the more or less chaotic horizontal directionality that can be associated with the ‘sweeping stretch of prairie’ (Pynchon 2006: 10) in Against the Day counters the strictly organized vertical dimensionality of urban Chicago two decades after the Great Fire that took place in 1871: ‘Out the window in the distance, contradicting the Prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from mighty immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum […]’ (Pynchon 2006: 41). However, this apparently clear dichotomy becomes, like Chicago itself, blurry at the conceptual limits, with urban space shifting around the outskirts from the Cartesian grid into what Pynchon calls ← 146 | 147 → ‘the urban unmappable’ (Pynchon 2006: 131). When Lew Basnight is confronted with the arbitrariness and ‘unmapped wilderness’ appearing within the limits of urbanity (Pynchon 2006: 38), puzzled by this unexpected interpenetration of ‘White City’ and ‘Dark City’, he asks himself: ‘Was it still Chicago? […] the first thing he noticed was how few of the streets here followed the familiar grid pattern of the rest of town […] increasing chances for traffic collisions’ (38). The same obscurity and fuzziness around the edges is observed within the organization of the Columbian Exposition: ‘how civilized […] and […] white exhibits located closer to the centre of the ‘White City’ seemed to be, whereas the farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery’ (Pynchon 2006: 22).
In Against the Day, the geometrical metaphor introduced by means of the Cartesian grid is mentioned again when Dr Vormace, at a meeting of ‘The Transnoctial Discussion Group’ with the topic ‘The Nature of Expeditions’, summarizes the colonists’ journey into what is called ‘unmapped wilderness’:
We learned once how to break horses and ride them long distances, with oceangoing ships we left flat surfaces and went into Riemann space, we crossed solid land and deep seas, and colonized what we found […]. (Pynchon 2006: 131)
In this passage, Pynchon treats the ‘explorative’ and thus colonizing shift from flat space to spherical space – the shift from a flat to a round world – in terms of the transition from Euclidean to Riemannian geometry. In fact, the spatial shift suggested in this passage is the same example given by Henri Poincaré in Science and Hypothesis (1902), to illustrate the ‘entrance’ into Riemannian space.
In Against the Day, the space covered by the railroad has a fundamental role in the events leading to the First World War. The railroad ‘penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers […] who ruled with unchecked power’ (930).
However, it is not only real travelling which the novel presents, but also the fantastic idea of time travel. And time travel can also take place under the sand when The Chums of Chance are in the ‘subdesertine frigate ← 147 | 148 → Saksaul’ (Pynchon 2006: 435), in search of the holy City Shambhala, a holy space of power. To travel underground, without dynamite and tunnelling, the sand has to be converted, through manipulating time, into something transparent, like glass.5 One of the characters, the Professor, explains how: by means of redistributing energy using the same process as changing the displaced sand into something transparent like quartz or glass; as no-one would want to be in the middle of the great heat that is produced by this process, ‘one must arrange to translate oneself in Time, compensating for the speed of light’. Here the character explains the way in which sand is deposited by wind, without any obstruction, assuming the mechanics of water-waves. This imaginative process makes it possible to move even deeper, like in an under-sand vessel where new elements analogous to vortex-formation would enter the wave-history, expressed by some sets of wave functions. Here, time travel is suggested as a way of coming back to the past: ‘So if you were looking for some way to reverse or invert those curves – wouldn’t that imply some form of passage backward in Time?’ (Pynchon 2006: 426).
The espionage of the Chums of Chance is related to these Time Travellers. They are people who had fled the future, back into the past, and witnessed situations of poverty, famine and the end of the capitalist system. One of the characters wonders about his mission assignments: preventing others from entering their time-regime (Pynchon 2006: 415). In the novel, attractive rewards such as eternal youth are offered in what would become a Faustian situation; and in addition to Faust, Pynchon makes constant references to Dante’s Inferno as well, as I explain below.
In this way, the Fourth Dimension appears in the novel as a ‘journey into the realm of the dead’ (242), but not only as a one-way trip; what enables the return journey, with its reversal, or spatialization, of time, is turning death into a place. Against the Day suggests the possibility of multiple nows in a relativistic space-time continuum and offers another scientific option for time travel. That is why vector and quaternion theories dominate the text; especially the latter seem to promise the option of reversing directions ← 148 | 149 → along vectors and to open up the realm of the imaginary. Mathematics and physics are not just scientific expressions of what is often seen as a clockwork realm. They also provide a space for creativity and daydreaming. At Candlebrow, Merle Rideut and Roswell Bounce pick up the idea of Minkowskian space-time and think of ways to rearrange space to alter the ‘one-way vector “time”’ (Pynchon 2006: 457). They ponder the effect gravity has on time – as did Einstein in 1916 – but also the effect time has on gravity, and these speculations eventually lead them to develop the Integroscope. Theorists who paved the way for general relativity, such as Riemann, appear along with the fathers of quantum mechanics. The uncertainty principle is demonstrated just like the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat, which is accidentally practised by Luca Zombini, a magician in the novel.
Giving his novel a veneer of realism by mentioning real facts, names and scientific discoveries, Pynchon also playfully includes the space of the dead and the ghost worlds parallel to (and intruding into) the real world. There is also the translation of the ‘architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude’ (250), provided by the paramorphoscope and its makers, which, as suggested before, has the capacity to reveal other worlds beside the one we know, the one we have chosen, which is the only world granted to us (Pynchon 2006: 249). This type of reference, together with more direct mentioning of multiple worlds and space time as ‘tracks of departure to all manner of alternate Histories’ (682) indicates, according to Inger H. Dalsgaard, that quantum mechanics plays an important role in understanding bilocation in the text (90). Quantum mechanics is not limited to the Copenhagen Interpretation, which Bohr presented in 1927, and has come to include theories of uncertainty, complementarity, and the theory of the observer effect. Bohr’s Quantum Theory appears at the very beginning in the book, which is set in the 1890s; Pynchon is then introducing an anachronism in relation to the repercussion of subatomic physics in his text.
Pynchon’s novel features another important theory about time as the fourth dimension by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, who inherited an interest in the mathematics of higher dimensions from his father and additionally discovered the literature of Theosophy, combining both in ← 149 | 150 → his theories of the fourth dimension. Pynchon has Russian refugees arriving in Göttingen in 1906 anachronistically clutching copies of this book, which was not actually published until November 1909 (Henderson, 1993: 246–7). In Tertium Organum (published in 1911) Ouspensky offers the reader a glimpse of four-dimensional reality, compared to which the three-dimensional world is unreal if we imagine a consciousness not limited by the conditions of sense perception. This consciousness could go beyond the plane on which we move so that we will be able to see the past and the future lying side by side and existing simultaneously (Ouspensky 1981: 28). Ouspensky here uses the word ‘simultaneously’ in a kind of extra-temporal or hyper-temporal sense, so that his language re-introduces the concept of time as linked to space even as he tries to banish the latter. That way, the extra-temporal point of view is revealed as existing in hyper-time, and he highlights how in all attempts made before to link the idea of the fourth dimension with the idea of time there has always been implied the idea that there should be space in time as well as some sort of motion in that space. He insists: ‘It is evident that those who built these theories did not understand that, by retaining the possibility of motion, they put forward demands for a new time, for no motion can take place without time. As a result time moves in front of us, like our own shadow, receding as we approach’ (31).
Ouspensky counters this abyss of never-ending regress by introducing, in place of ever-higher orders of hyper-time, one higher order of stasis, embodied in the word ‘eternity’: ‘[W]e shall not be able to understand the fourth dimension so long as we do not understand the fifth dimension. […] [I]n reality eternity is not an infinite extension of time but a line perpendicular to time; for if eternity exists, each moment is eternal’ (32). This vision of the ‘Eternal Now’ is for Ouspensky inseparable from his understanding of the Fourth Dimension. The conception of time as the Fourth Dimension tends to lead to the conclusion that time is illusory. Ouspensky, in the same way as Zangwill, uses the term ‘simultaneously’ in an extra-temporal sense. His language introduces the idea of time but he tries to make it vanish at the same time. In this way, the extra-temporal point of view appears as a concept that also needs the idea of ‘hyper-time’. Ouspensky understands this conceptual difficulty very well, and Pynchon refers to it in his novel. ← 150 | 151 → Against the Day explores the pre-relativistic universe of fourth dimensions in the late Victorian age by means of Dr Zoot’s machine and also by means of the Minkowskian space-time continuum. In the novel, the latter is represented through the lecture given by Minkowski at Candlebrow, which is obviously a version of an earlier documented lecture delivered in September of 1908. With this historical data introduced in his fiction, Pynchon seems to suggest that Minkowski’s lecture inspired the fictional Merle to build the Integroscope, which allows people see the future of those appearing in the photos.
These things are developed by Yashmeen and Kit who are two characters in the novel who agree that to believe one can see ‘future, past, and present […] all together’, is ‘to interpret the fourth dimension as Time’ (Pynchon 2006: 617). The concepts of simultaneity and dynamism by Henri Bergson, according to Gourley (2013), help Pynchon to develop his complex interpretation of temporality. Ouspensky’s point of view of eternity has some points of contact with Henri Bergson’s notion of a ‘position outside of time which flows and endures’ (Bergson 1999:112); but for Bergson, as Gourley asserts, such a position means detachment from the real nature of time, rather than a privileged point of view from which to apprehend it.
According to Ouspenski, from the point of view of eternity time doesn’t differ from other lines and extensions of space such as length, breadth, and height. This means that just as space contains things we do not see, so in time ‘events’ exist before our consciousness comes into contact with them, and they still exist after our consciousness dies out. So if we consider extension in time along the line of an extension in a space we do not know, time becomes the fourth dimension of space.
Pynchon also introduces other theories into the novel such as the Hermitian Operator or the Hilbert-Pólyá Conjecture, which both agree that the fourth dimension in mathematics is a way of solving different hypotheses such as Riemann’s (1826–66), whose spectral theory has been regarded an antecedent of relativity. Such contemporaneous interest in the fourth dimension of space is the actual historical context to the relationships between science, spirit and imagination sketched out in Against the Day.
These are elements that allow the creation of an innovative type of literature that combines science fiction with historical reality and also, a ← 151 | 152 → narrative typical of the noir novel, with detectives, prosecutions, spies and other things like multilayered intrigues. But all these elements also serve to criticize social and historical processes taking place in the Western world today. Due to the concern of mathematicians, artists, philosophers and writers, the fourth dimension opens the possibility of relativizing the accuracy of science and human knowledge, because beyond the paranormal beliefs or illusions of science fiction, this concept inspired people to question their position in the universe, motivating them to see and understand the world in a radically new fashion. To understand the true nature of human beings and their environment means exploring, through the dense tangle of history, the interactions of science, philosophy and religion. Pynchon through quantum physics, suggests that reality, as it is observed, is not divided or predictable. For Pynchon the universe seen from the perspective of subatomic physics has no borders, it cannot be measured exactly, and its behaviour is unpredictable. We discover that in the behaviour of a system formed from the construction of spatial demarcations there are only probabilities and conjectures. With the enunciation of his uncertainty principle, Heisenberg ended the rigid structures and old boundaries of classical physics. In admitting the uncertainty principle, Pynchon emphasizes the possibility of change and contingency.
Against the Day suggests, in the end, that in literature, as in life, everything is organized through what seems to be a fourth element symbolizing the double sense of life and death in the novel.
Pynchon is attacking the construction of subjects created by consensus and ruled by speculative values, and unable to act in the world. With this functional vision, the subject seems to be trapped by the laws of the system and swallowed by a huge black hole of no life. This critique affects subjects from all social backgrounds; the system is seen as a kind of grotesque abstraction: the citizen is a soulless type; a puppet with no will, driven by the winds of speculation and profiteering, governed by empty political speeches that echo permanently, multiplying their effects. Subjects have no spirit, no will, no feelings, they are vacuous robots manipulated by remote control and lack responsibility for their actions.
Pynchon’s Against the Day, insisting on trips through the fourth dimension, criticizes all this. Using quantum theory, it is seen as based on humans ← 152 | 153 → suffering from severe myopia in an effort to see how far (and in how many multiple directions) the world can go. His literature, based on history and fiction at the same time, presents reality as a perpetual creation offering new insights into the past, which plays a very important role in our universe. Literature opens the door to conceiving humanity and history not as simple forms of existence or lists of facts taking place at a particular point but instead as forms of resistance against corporations and forms of power that try to manipulate or destroy human beings.
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1 Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, according to Amy J. Elias ‘is a novel thematically obsessed with the symbolism of travel and the politics of space’ (29).
2 In Society Must be Defended, Foucault also diagnoses how biopower normalizes a state of struggle or war (2003).
3 George Levine, ‘Risking the Moment’, p. 61. Goodman is quoted in Cohn (2006), Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation, p. 62.
4 The Act proved not to be the solution to poverty as very few labourers and farmers could afford to build their own farm or to buy the necessary tools, seed or other items. That resulted in the end in that most of those who purchased land under the act were coming from areas quite close to their new homesteads. For instance, people from Iowa moved to Nebraska, those from Minnesota to South Dakota and so on. Under these circumstances the act was considered to invite fraud given how ambiguously it was framed. Early modifications by Congress only compounded the problem. (For the Homestead Act see Shanks, 2005).
5 ‘Randolph wondered, “how can you travel underneath the sand and even see where you’re going?”’ (Pynchon, 2006: 426).