Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon - Part 1

I’m in a book group these days with Heinz and Ernesto. The latter, a big fan of David Foster Wallace’s doorstop Infinite Jest, has been pressuring his brother to read that. I intervened – having already read it with Ernesto some years ago, I thought it was not worth a re-read even once, let alone Ernesto’s intended third time. So I suggested that instead we dive into a masterwork by the novelist Wallace wished he’d been: Thomas Pynchon. 

I’d lent my copy of Against the Day to Ernesto a couple years ago, and he didn’t get very far. Clearly, a cooperative enterprise was needed to get the guys through the book, which I wanted to re-read anyway. I gave a copy to Heinz and bought one for myself, and we agreed early this year on an amount to read per meeting. We’re reading approx. 110-page tranches, meeting every few weeks as time allows. 

Ernesto is captivated by the presence of dynamite in the lives of numerous characters: Webb Traverse, anarchist dynamiter who works the mines of late 19th century Colorado, private eye Lew Basnight who becomes addicted to cyclomite, a hallucinogenic chemical sweated off by sticks of dynamite. Basnight has been riding around the mountains of southwest Colorado trying not to get blown up by the Kieselguhr Kid, notorious dynamiter of the San Juans. Webb Traverse and his Finnish compadre Veikko blow up a railroad bridge, observing that “The railroad had always been the enemy… sooner or later you had some bad history with the railroad.” 

We have been introduced to Iceland spar, a form of doubly-refracting calcite which causes ordinary light, passing through, to divide into two separate rays, termed “ordinary” and “extraordinary.” “The Etienne-Louis Malus was named for the Napoleonic army engineer and physicist who, in late 1808, looking through a piece of Iceland spar at the sunset reflected from a window of the Luxembourg Palace, discovered polarized light.” And under the lagoons of Venice lie the submerged islands still occupied by artisans who craft mirrors from Iceland spar. Either they go mad and are committed to institutions, or they go mad and continue their work. 

By page 317 of the 1085 page novel, we have seen some threads which will recur: malign influence of the railroads; capitalist Scarsdale Vibe with his long and corrupt reach; centrality of dynamite, introduction of Iceland Spar, hints of the adversarial time-travel groups the Quaternions and the Vectorists (of which much more is to come); places of significance: Telluride, Colorado; Venice, Italy; Chicago; London; the Chums of Chance (dime novel adolescent balloonists who travel through the earth as well as above it, for hire by various terrestrial entities); and dabbling in chemicals – not only dynamite and its components but photograph-developing, and alchemy. We've seen a vile murder and disposal of the corpse in an evil place where such acts are commonplace; we've watched an unholy love story rise out of what should be enmity. And we've watched the existential clash of capitalism with anarchism. 

It's a densely packed book - one dare not skim. Any slippery turn of phrase may take a character to another part of life or perception. My copy is studded with small sticky notes, and I have a notebook as well where I record significant characters and the page numbers where we meet them. So much to learn! One of the best things about this novel is how much of what seems made-up, is true.

The Lost Time Accidents, by John Wray

This 2016 novel is a mashup of ideas from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse Five), Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow), and P.D. Ouspensky (A New Model of the Universe). Wray probes Time, and the possibilities of time travel and what that might mean to the power-hungry, through the lives of a singular family.

The Lost Time Accidents are the grail pursued by the offspring of Ottokar Gottfried Toula, a Czech gherkin-maker with a hobbyist's interest in time. In 1903 he discovers something about its nature, writes a few cryptic sentences, and is hit by a car and dies before he can explain further. His sons, Kaspar and Waldemar, move to Vienna and study physics. Their work coincides with publication of the Theory of General Relativity; the family feels Einstein has trespassed on their understanding of time, and ever after, they refer to him only as the Patent Clerk. Contempt for him feeds Waldemar's anti-Semitism.

Kaspar and Waldemar part on chilly terms as students: Kaspar marries the daughter of his Jewish professor, and Waldemar decamps to Czechoslovakia where privation begins his transformation into the monster he will become, the Nazis' Black Timekeeper of Czas, performing unspeakable experiments on Jewish subjects in a camp where he has complete autonomy. Kaspar and Sonja and their twin daughters leave Vienna as Nazism descends. Sonja dies en route to America, and Kaspar takes the girls to Buffalo where he joins a watchmaking company. He marries again eventually, and his son Orson, raised primarily by the twins, becomes a prolific author of pornographic sci-fi, his output reminiscent of Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout. These twins, Enzian and Gentian, function as an isolated dyad, Enzian the theorist and Gentian the practical one; they decamp to a building in Harlem where they can pursue their experiments, Enzian thinking and studying and working on time travel devices while Gentian becomes a local character, enjoying city life on her shopping expeditions.

Orson finally writes a real novel, a thinly-disguised account of his eccentric family and their preoccupation with time, which because it is published in 1969, becomes a runaway bestseller. The Revelations-like final section spurs formation of a cult, the U.S. Church of Synchronology (UCS), derisively dubbed the Fuzzy Fruits by Orson. He marries a student boarding at his house, and they have a son, named Waldemar by Enzian and Gentian. This young man is the narrator of this tale, and it falls to him to find the solution to his great-grandfather's Lost Time Accidents, and to discover how his namesake disappeared when the prison camp he ran was liberated by the Soviets. The story is told, in alternating sections, as a family history and a series of letters - confessions might be a better word - to his clandestine lover, the wife of the founder of the UCS.

If all that sounds convoluted, it is. To Wray's credit, he dodges the main pitfall of time travel stories: altering the past which alters the present. And he's a witty and vivid writer:
"The Xanthia T. Lasdun Memorial Ocean-View Manor & Garden was a thirty-six-chambered assisted-living facility in Bensonhurst, with that bleary, nicotine-stained shabbiness every neo-Tudor building in the world seems to exude. Its garden, as far as I could determine, was the condom-festooned median of lower Bay Parkway, and its ocean was the droning, alluvial parkway itself."
But Wray does enough name-dropping (Sonja models for Gustav Klimt, and Kaspar sits in on a discussion between Wittgenstein and another luminary) to remind me of people who've done past-life regressions and concluded they were Cleopatra, Napoleon, Michelangelo - never anyone ordinary.

In a mystery, which this story is in essence, it's important that the resolution be worth the effort it takes to get there. Well, not for me. Maybe Mr. Wray should read some more Ouspensky, or study Vonnegut's storytelling art. Vonnegut, you see, doesn't do suspense. He'll tell you in the moment of introducing someone, how and when that character dies, or accomplishes something or fails to. This frees him from the burden of coming up with a blockbuster climax, and allows the reader to focus on other aspects of the story. Not a bad strategy, when you don't have a breakthrough vision.

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon © 2006

Reviewed by NC Weil

In the nearly-1100-page steppes of this novel, Pynchon starts at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, carrying us through the tumult, political and scientific, that lay the tracks to World War I. We cross continents and oceans to linger in the mining boom-towns of Colorado; observe competing strains of obsessed mathematicians who gather in Illinois, at Yale, in London, Gottingen and Ostend to disagree about the shape of time; fly with a crew of perpetually adolescent extra-dimensional balloonists - The Chums of Chance - materialized from the pages of dime novels to ply the skies, unseen by the earthbound as they undertake missions-for-hire; loathe an evil plutocrat who perceives that money is the next ruler of the world; and most especially, follow the family of Webb Traverse, Anarchist dynamiter of mines whose murder scatters his wife Mayva, sons Frank, Reef and Kit, and daughter Lake to lives seasoned by explosion, whose travels suggest the scattering of bomb shrapnel: revolts in Mexico, mines and railway tunnels of the Alps, uprising in the Balkans, a journey in Siberia during the Tunguska Event of 1908. And to Venice, where they don't have purpose so much as compulsion to spend time.

Secret organizations advance their chess-games of strategic mayhem, at times in opposition but perhaps always in cahoots, their purpose the domination of masses of people by means of exhausting work, controlled information, and the lure and necessity of money, using nationalism and war to stamp out the anarchist dream of humanity in cooperation.

The students of time gather annually at Candlebrow University in Grossdale, Illinois, where one might find patrons, professors, lunatics, and a time machine junkyard:

"Up and down the steeply-pitched sides of a ravine lay the picked-over hulks of failed time machines - Chronoclipses, Asimov Transeculars, Tempomorph Q-98s - broken, defective, scorched by catastrophic flares of misrouted energy, corroded often beyond recognition by unintended immersion in the terrible Flow over which they had been designed and built, so hopefully, to prevail... A strewn field of conjecture, superstition, blind faith, and bad engineering, expressed in sheet-aluminum, vulcanite, Heusler's alloy, bonzoline, electrum, lignum vitae, platinoid, magnalium, and packfong silver, much of it stripped away by scavengers over the years. Where was  the safe harbor in Time their pilots might have found, so allowing their craft to avoid such ignominious fates?"  The time machines' names are made up, and some of those materials would seem to be too (packfong silver? bonzoline?), but Pynchon didn't invent them - he's just very skilled at finding obscure terms and ideas, then making them both exotic and necessary.

Meanwhile, gaps open between dimensions, and the alert and perceptive can use them to inhabit paired worlds. And it wouldn't be a Pynchon novel without hefty doses of kinky sex.

As a lover of words, Pynchon gives us indelible names: Scarsdale Vibe, the American financier/archvillain.  We also have Yashmeen Halfcourt, a beautiful mathematical genius of Russian descent; her inamorata spy-bait Cyprian Latewood; Merle Rideout, an itinerant American photographer and his daughter Dahlia (Dally), abandoned by wife/mother when Dally was little; Lew Basnight, a private detective hired by Vibe and his henchman Foley Walker to break up Anarchist gangs in the Colorado mines; the Quaternions (a mathematical cult who believe in four-space) vs. the Vector Analysts who dispute their conclusions. And there is Shambhala, an other-dimensional paradise to which only the pure of purpose have access.

There are mystical instruments: the paramorphoscope, which allows the viewer to see "...Earth not only as a three-dimensional sphere but, beyond that, as an imaginary surface, the optical arrangements for whose eventual projection onto the two-dimensional page proved to be very queer indeed." And the Hypopsammotic Survival Apparatus, or Hypops, "revolutionizing desert travel by providing a practical way to submerge oneself beneath the sands and still be able to breathe, walk around, so forth."

He gives us Iceland Spar, a calcite crystal through which one may see a pair of refractions - the same image in different space/time. Mined in Iceland and Mexico, it was used by mirror-makers in a sunken portion of Venice where the craftsmen were held prisoner and eventually went mad thanks to the clarity of their creations.

Okay, so what happens? Plot, please! Thematically, we have the hegemony of money and nationalism against unions and anarchists; war against cooperation; light against darkness, but with light the villain; we have the dominance of materialism over mystic options and dimensions; we have the importance and the futility of family ties - though the murderers of Webb Traverse are soon known, and two of his sons agree to go after Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno, years go by and the brothers keep getting sidetracked. Revenge tugs at them like ill-fitting clothes, not quite annoying enough to do something about.

Pynchon draws some parallels between that era a century gone, and our own: the acceleration of travel and communications forming a web that entraps and constrains us as surely as the network of train tracks bound the earth; military uses of light in the 1900's evolving to today's lasers; sophistication of weapons enabling less human-to-human combat, tending instead toward large-scale deployment and slaughter; Muscle, whether in the guise of private enforcers like Pinkertons and thugs or well-funded armies, does the unquestioned bidding of Authority; and surely, the more factually-"understood" our world, the more we crave the lighter touch of mysticism: Tarot, travel through dimensions and time, the hidden relationships between things, places, people which our logical minds deny, but whose connections govern us.

He frames the Tunguska Event in Siberia as a rupture in the fabric of space-time. We think of it now as a large meteorite impact, but in this novel, people all over the world are affected by it in varying ways, depending on their sensitivity to extra-rational activity. It represents a great pause in the onrush of mechanization, war and the pitting of groups against one another by nationality, belief and class. As memory of it fades, accessibility to a higher plane of existence is lost.

When a novelist creates and populates a world, the details have to ring true. Recognizing inaccuracy ejects a reader from the story, damaging our faith in our guide through a place we do not know. My travels and interests have intersected Pynchon's at many points, and not once did I catch him in error. In an era of sloppy off-the-cuff "information" I find it refreshing to read a well-researched book. He so skillfully interweaves what we only believe with what we have proven, that his most outlandish-sounding ideas make more sense than much of what we take for "reality" these days.