Against the Day...page 148
Sunday, November 26, 2006
I'm just past the first part of Against the Day. I've set aside most of my other reading (though I can't set aside my recent habit of reading John Clare at 3am, before bed) to tackle this thousand-plus page baby hippopotamus. I'm an appreciative, but not a great, reader of Pynchon. At his worst he's sort of weaponized Richard Farina, a well-off senescent hippie who steps out of his hilltop retreat every so often to blow our minds. At his best, as with Mason and Dixon, he has burned with the expansiveness that fuels any American literature worth reading, and has attached it to the (again, specifically American) political meaning of that word. As in, the spirit that makes us big and worth knowing is the one that makes others small. This is what makes him important, I guess: these two conflicting notions of expansiveness (bullying generosity, paranoid trust of all) are what many ambitious writers have been trying, and failing, to reconcile, and here he's mastered it in his goofball-hippie-but-with-knowledge-of-ballistics sort of way. It's just that I can take or leave important literature. There is nothing important that shouldn't make a right-thinking person want to yawn.
Against the Day attracts me in a different way: it is an exuberantly-written science fiction novel, a genre that definitely needs more exuberance and less doom and citation. Yet more specifically, it is a turn-of-the-(last)-century science fiction novel, my favorite. It's as if an author of the stature of H.G. Wells had picked up his pen again. (Pynchon is our Wells, incidentally: he's an irresponsible writer you find yourself referencing more often than writers of a more responsible, canonical status.) And more specifically still, the book is about one-quarter Edisonade, a genre I have been struggling and failing to write for years now. So my interest is personal. Pynchon does this stuff well, better, obviously, than I could myself. So I was hooked from the first page, whether the book was of great import to the nation or not.
Against the Day opens with a terrific vision of The Chums of Chance (our Edisonade characters) flying a great, ship-length flying machine of the Frank Reade variety into the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, passing the Stockyards on their way:
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 the straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor.
This is comic-book gravity, fun to read. The Exposition itself is portrayed as a great cesspool of every vice and ingenuity known to man, where the Chums are propositioned by exotic prostitutes. They decline, but find it great fun to take a policeman into the air to spy on anarchists from above, and act no less immoral than the other.
I won't pretend to put in an especially close reading, so I'll just point to the high notes: I love the name Scarsdale Vibe, which belongs to a character so sinister he stops just short of twirling his moustaches. The wonderful argument among a group of "aetherists" gathered in Cleveland when they come to discover that the existence of the Aether has been disproved. "We've all had a lot of faith invested. Now it looks like the Aether, whether it's moving or standing still, just doesn't exist. What do we do now?" The great Lovecraftian turn narrated by Scarsdale's right hand, Fleetwood Vibe, in which some sort of statuette is spirited away by a group of scientists and capitalists--"not a dreamer in the lot of us, to be honest, much less any dreamer of nightmares"--from an imposing Arctic island. "All the while the thing regarded us with what, later, when we had begun to appreciate the range of its emotions, we might too easily have recognized as contempt."
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:40 PM,
