Thomas Pynchon and the myth of invisibility

Thomas Pynchon
AGAINST THE DAY
1,085pp. Cape. £20.
0 224 08095 4
US: Penguin. $35. 1 59420 120 X

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel begins in midair. A company of semi-military overgrown schoolboys, known collectively as “The Chums of Chance”, are making a landing in their hydrogen ship. The Chums are “bound this day for the city of Chicago and the World’s Columbian Exposition recently opened there” and all seems well aboard their craft. While it is a bit offbeat, there seems at first to be nothing particularly revolutionary about the novelistic world Pynchon is creating in his first book for ten years. The pastiche of Henry James’s style is reassuringly counterpointed by a dog who is reading a copy of The Princess Casamassima. Some metafictional in-jokes offer the odd red herring, suggesting that we may have encountered the Chums before, in Pynchon’s earlier works. There is no screaming across this sky, just a little light toe-stubbing:

From the far end of the gondola now came a prolonged crash, followed by an intemperate muttering that caused Randolph, as always, to frown and reach for his stomach. “I have only tripped over one of these picnic baskets,” called out Handyman Apprentice Miles Blundell, “the one all the crockery was in, ’s what it looks like . . . . I guess I did not see it, Professor.” “Perhaps its familiarity,” Randolph suggested plaintively, “rendered it temporarily invisible to you.”

Beginning in 1893, and set over a thirty-year period, Against the Day has a large and varied cast. Mathematicians, inventors and psychic cultists debate the presence of fourth or fifth dimensions, the existence of “Aether” and the possibilities for universal peace. Anarchists join up with Mexican Revolutionaries, wicked capitalists plot to keep the oppressive American regime in place, and everyone nearly succeeds in blowing up the world. A tenuous revenge plot, involving a dead dynamiter called Webb Traverse and his four children, doesn’t quite hold it all together. The Chums hover over all this, picking up passengers, traversing the Poles, and in a prefiguring of the Twin Towers, accidentally witnessing the collapse of the Campanile of the Basilica San Marco,

seeing the ancient structure separate cleanly into a multitude of four-brick groupings, each surrounded by a luminous contour, and hang an instant in space, as time slowed and each permutation of shapes appeared, to begin their gentle, undeadly descent, rotating and trans-lating in all available modes, as if endeavouring to satisfy some demented group theoretical analysis, until the rising dust-cloud they collapsed into obscured all such considerations in a great raw-umber smudge of uncertainty.

Familiarly enough, uncertainty is the centre of the novel. Pynchon’s mixture of fictional styles ranges from Rider Haggard to P. G. Wodehouse, and his historical characters (including Groucho Marx, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the inventor Nikolai Tesla) seem to have no clue what they are doing. Back on the ground, Estrella, or “Stray”, finds herself wrestling with such matters of direction, especially in relation to her feelings about her lover, Ewball:

By the time they agreed to part, Stray and Ewball had forgotten why they ran off together in the first place. Stray recalled it had something to do with her early notions of the Anarchist life and its promise of a greater invisibility, extending for all she knew clear around the world . . . . Stray had been accustomed to search out the real interests that lay behind the spoken ones, and think of ways to reconcile them. Though the interests at war in the coal country were clear enough, she had some trouble deciphering Ewball’s own in wanting to head down there . . . it was invisible, whatever that was, his Anarchist remit. It never occurred to her that he might just love getting into trouble.

Stray’s predicament resembles the reader’s task of determining the “real interests” of this novel. Against the Day courts the desire for something to exist which cannot be seen, something beneath the surface. The let-down implicit in this paragraph – that there is nothing but surface – is the familiar Pynchonian answer.

He has specialized in conjuring novels around the particular sort of hollowness or “waning of affect” considered symptomatic of the postmodern. But from V. to Gravity’s Rainbow, his books have either clung to a nostalgic presence – to an invisible something beneath that sadness – or become used to its absence. Oedipa Maas, in The Crying of Lot 49, manages both, when she visits an art gallery hiding behind a pair of “dark green bubble shades”:

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed . . . . For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around the sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on to fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of that moment around with her forever, see the world refracted through those tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

One might wonder in what way Oedipa is “perverse”. The word hints at ontological uncertainties, but by wearing her shades in an art gallery, Oedipa is in keeping with the definitive Beatnik image. (Pynchon has recalled that his “glancing acquaintance with the Beat movement” involved, among other posturings, the wearing of “hornrimmed sunglasses at night”.) However, such a feeling response to a work of art seems less cool, almost deliberately out of tune with the curious lack of emotional engagement within and about Pynchon’s work. Oedipa’s perversity, in this sense, is not the fact that she is wearing sunglasses in an art gallery. It lies in the notion that she is crying at a work of art. The Pynchonian world of 1966 had no room for such almost invisible displays of emotion. There was no space for feeling, and no one noticed its absence anyway.

One still comes to Pynchon’s work expecting this. Like crying with shades on, the experience of the sadness or emptiness is kept tightly sealed by the quality of his prose. Tears, usually a sign of something’s absence, become a lens through which we look at the world. Like crying with shades on, the sadness or emptiness in Pynchon’s work is calmed or chastened by the lyricism of his prose. In fact, we have become so used to this element in his writing that this vacuum has become paradoxically concrete. We don’t feel the gaps any more.
The question is whether Against the Day varies in an “important way” this handling of hollowness, and the answer is mixed. Sometimes Pynchon leans on a hardboiled reticence. The photographer Merle Rideout endures a parting from his adoptive daughter, Dahlia: “Merle, who had a sense of the bets on the table here, knew he better not spook her now. Neither of them had ever had much interest in breaking each other’s heart. In theory they both knew she had to move on, though all he wanted right now was to wait, even just another day. But he knew that feeling, and he guessed it would pass”. Elsewhere, the novel describes moments of sadness with a deliberate beauty. The detective, Lew Basnight, remembers leaving his wife, Troth, after committing a crime he cannot recall. “He could not bear her woundedness – the tears, through some desperate magic, kept gelid at her lower lids, because she would not let them fall, not till he had left her sight.” The sentence swells and quivers at each pause, like a teardrop that can hardly bear its own weight. But the prose is so poised that it almost stills the pain.

What is different in Against the Day is the way absence becomes clearer to us at a structural level. Indeed, one criticism that has already been levelled at the book is that it is impossible to hold on to its many characters. This is partly because of the sheer mass of the narrative, but also because so many of them simply drop out of the plot. These are not Dickensian “moments of uncompensated kindness”, when a character absent for 400 pages is brought back on stage. Pynchon is playing out, on a textual level, the very experience of being obliterated that he is writing about. For this loss is representative of what the novel protests against – loss of life, loss of plot, but, in particular, the loss of the individual in a mass of capitalist greed.

Oddly, disappearance seems a desirable fate for many of Pynchon’s figures. Given the unrest of the period, let alone the sheer nastiness of his world, this is unsurprising. But Pynchon’s women seem to take on vanishing as a career path (many are magician’s assistants), or way out of it all. Lake Traverse, who marries her father’s killer, sounds like something out of Henry Miller crossed with Simone Weil. “At the moment of surrendering, she found herself wishing only to become the wind. To feel herself refined to an edge, an invisible edge of unknown length, to enter the realm of air forever in motion over the broken land. Child of the storm.” What Pynchon allows us to feel is that there is a difference between self-effacement and being shafted. Most of the time, in his world, an ending will involve the latter. Lake finds this out at ground level when she gets taken on a day trip for an interstate gang-bang:

They took [Lake] down to the Four Corners and put her so one of her knees was in Utah, one in Colorado, one elbow in Arizona and the other in New Mexico . . . . Then rotated her all four different ways. Her small features pressed into the dirt, the blood-red dirt.

There is, in the end, something confrontational about Pynchon’s approach to questions of what we should pass up, or pass on. His antagonism is present from the first, in the book’s prepositional title. The villain, Scarsdale Vibe, seems to stand for all Pynchon writes against:

Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten acre mesh, levelled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where alien mockers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams . . . we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos . . . when all is festival and wholesome sport and eugenically chosen stock, who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum?

This is not to say Pynchon suggests any solution. What he does is highlight how invisible our claims for salvation are, thus disturbing all the familiar comforts they might offer, including the comforts of the novel’s structure. This gets its clearest exposition in his handling of the relentlessly optimistic airborne crew at the novel’s end. The Chums are the most important characters for Pynchon, for two reasons. First, they have ultimate faith in invisibility – their own existence in the narrative depends on their state of perceived, altruistic absence from the world. The second reason becomes evident in the closing pages of the novel, when the Inconvenience, “once a vehicle of sky-pilgrimage”, is transformed into its own destination. It is a place “where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted”:

For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard Inconvenience has yet observed any sign of this. They know . . . it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace.

This sounds like classic Pynchon, but there is something newly visible. The cadences are so lulling that it would be easy to see this as, if not celebration, an endearing closing sentimentality. But on a closer look, the final scene has disturbing resonances, as if a crew of Boy’s Own suicide bombers were setting out on a self-effacing mission to destruct. Of all the attempted explosions in the book, this is the biggest. It is Thomas Pynchon’s attempt to explode the myth of invisibility. It speaks of now, as well as then.
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Sophie Ratcliffe is a British Academy Post Doctoral Research Fellow in English, at Keble College, Oxford. She is writing a book about sympathy.