http://counterpunch.org/jacobs11182006.html
homas 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 *** 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 ***. Air****ps 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 air****p, 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 have 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 ***ually 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 ***ually 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 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 ac***ulate through acquisition and murder, thereby allowing them to
ac***ulate 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 wor****p 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 ***ual 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 cl*****.
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.
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather
Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big
Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's new collection on music, art
and ***, Serpents in the Garden. He can be reached at:
rjacobs3625@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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