Late in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, the intrepid young adventurers known as the “Chums of Chance” travel from post-World War I Europe to Los Angeles (or at least to a Los Angeles) and discover there that they might have traveled into an alternate universe, one in which a mysterious television-like device seems to be picking up transmissions from still another alternate reality. In one of these transmissions, “what looked like a tall monkey in a sailor hat with the brim turned down fell out of a palm tree onto a very surprised older man—the skipper of some nautical vessel, to judge by the hat he was wearing” (1034). This scene, of course, is from the 1960s television comedy Gilligan’s Island—which is also featured prominently in Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) and Inherent Vice (2009). It’s a tossed-in moment, not really connected with anything else in the novel, and, on the evidence of this one moment, Against the Day would seem to be quintessential Pynchon, filled with his familiar postmodern tomfoolery. However, there are many reasons why this massive novel, nearly 1100 pages in length, represents both a qualitative and a quantitative extension of Pynchon’s vision into the new territory that we are calling a political form of postmodernism.
We would emphasize, however, that we view Against the Day as an incremental extension beyond Pynchon’s other work, rather than as a genuine repudiation of, or even departure from, his other work. Against the Day is probably Pynchon’s most political novel—and his most radical political novel—but he has been a political novelist all along. His career as a whole, then, suggests that there was always a certain political energy in postmodern fiction, even if the declarations by early boosters, driven by the heady momentum of the 1960s counterculture, of the radical subversive potential of postmodern fiction turned out to be significantly exaggerated. Decades of criticism have established that Pynchon’s political vision grows largely out of this counterculture as well, but there are ways in which Against the Day announces the culmination of a gradual movement beyond his 1960s roots into a more mature political vision. This movement is a step in the direction suggested by Jameson in his description of a potential political form of postmodernism, even if it still lacks the final element of endorsing socialism as an alternative to capitalism.
It hardly seems necessary to establish that Against the Day (or any other Pynchon novel) is a work of postmodern fiction. Shawn Smith concurs with many other critics in declaring Pynchon “the pre-eminent American postmodernist writer,” and it is certainly the case that few authors can match Pynchon’s credentials as a postmodernist (17). Pynchon’s work not only displays most of the characteristics typically associated with postmodernism, but also made substantial constitutive contributions to our understanding of just what those characteristics are in the first place. Gravity’s Rainbow comes as close as anything to serving as the paradigmatic postmodern novel, while Pynchon’s much shorter and more accessible The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) remains one of the most widely taught and read postmodern novels more than half a century since its original publication. Pynchon’s unusual historical epic Mason & Dixon (1997) also has some claim to be being among the central works of postmodernism, and the same can now be said for Against the Day.
If Pynchon’s earlier novels help to define the characteristics that we associate with postmodern fiction, then Against the Day—which seems to be a significant step beyond Pynchon’s earlier work—can help to define the characteristics that can now be associated with an emerging political form of postmodern fiction. First, Against the Day displays virtually all of the formal characteristics that are typically associated with postmodern fiction, including the fact that it was constructed largely via a technique of pastiche, combining materials from a variety of different texts and genres. However, rather than the “blank” form of parody that Jameson associates with postmodern pastiche, Against the Day engages with its sources in an active, critical way. Importantly, these sources include inherently political genres such as proletarian fiction, while also engaging in dialogues with genres (such as science fiction and the Western) that often have a special political charge. Meanwhile, Pynchon’s engagement with politics includes an intense engagement with real-world history, with a special emphasis on interrogating the phenomenon of capitalist modernization and the routinization of experience in the modern capitalist world. Finally, as envisioned by Jameson, Against the Day undertakes the task of constructing a cognitive map of the workings of global capitalism during the period in which it is set, while identifying the capitalism of that period as the historical forerunner of the capitalism of our own day.
The Function of Parody in Against the Day
It would be hard to imagine a novel that better epitomizes the pluralism and fragmentation of postmodern fiction than does Against the Day. This long, complex novel employs a large cast of characters who participate in a variety of different narratives in different genres, most of which were prominent during the time of the novel’s events, from 1893 to the 1920s. Even more, the action of Against the Day appears to take place in a variety of alternate universes, or timelines, reflecting the “ontological pluralism” that Brian McHale sees as perhaps the most central characteristic of postmodern fiction (Constructing 125)[1].
In addition to the extremely fragmented narrative, Against the Day is most obviously postmodern in the way it draws upon so many different genres in terms of both style and content. It begins by introducing those Chums of Chance, who seem to have been borrowed (with the addition of a significant dash of irony) directly out of popular American boy’s adventure stories from around the end of the nineteenth century—the “chronicles of disorder” famously read by the boys of “An Encounter” in James Joyce’s Dubliners (9)[2]. Traveling about in an airship named the Inconvenience, the Chums have a number of different adventures that seem derived from the non-realist world of adventure stories, told in a style that is essentially a slightly twisted pastiche of the typical adventure-story style.
Meanwhile, the Chums also sometimes interact with the large cast of characters, many ofwhom seem to inhabit a more realistic world, but many of whom also participate in a variety of recognizable narrative genres, both literary and popular. One major narrative strand takes place across Russia and “Inner Asia,” involving adventures that often recall British spy narratives surrounding the “Great Game” of competition between the British and Russian Empires for influence in the region at the end of the nineteenth century, a competition that is most memorably recorded in literature in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), but that is also featured in numerous popular “colonial adventure” and espionage narratives of the time[3].
Pynchon’s Great Game
Critics have tended to focus on the dialogue with popular genres in Against the Day, and it is certainly the case that such prominent use of popular culture is a hallmark of Pynchon’s fiction and of postmodern fiction as a whole. The significance of this general usage, though, has been seen differently by different critics, ranging from those (like Andreas Huyssen) who see it as a democratic gesture in opposition to the elitism of modernism, to those (like Jameson) who see it as a sign that literature has now become just as thoroughly commodified as popular culture, leaving no meaningful distinction between the two, both of which are now just part of the late capitalist system of production.
We would argue, however, that the use of popular culture in Against the Day occupies neither of these extremes. It is certainly the case that, by drawing so extensively upon popular culture (and by adopting a self-parodic tone throughout), Pynchon openly acknowledges that his novel is part of the capitalist system of production—after all, it did make the New York Times bestseller list (though just barely). He also frequently references the commercial nature of the published accounts of the adventures of the Chums of Chance. However, Pynchon critically interrogates the commercial status of his novel, partly by drawing upon other genres and other narratives (both literary and historical) that are inherently criticalof capitalism. However, even in its engagement with popular genres that are not inherently anticapitalist, Against the Day operates in a mode that is consistently different from the typical postmodern pastiche described by Jameson.
It is clearly the case that Pynchon imitates various genres within Against the Day in a way that might be described as pastiche. Again, though, Pynchon does not simply imitate these genres in the “blank” mode that Jameson associates with postmodern pastiche as lacking in any significant critical engagement with the texts being imitated. Instead, Pynchon employs an active mode of parody that, while often quite funny, also performs a serious interrogation of the imported genres, which he treats as specimens of ideological forces in the society at large, engaging in dialogues with those genres and those forces very much in the mode that Mikhail Bakhtin associates with the dialogism of the novel as a genre. For Bakhtin, showing the influence of the Russian Formalists on his thinking, parody is a crucial technique through which the novel evolves as a genre. Importantly, however, parody for Bakhtin is not merely mockery and need not imply derision or contempt. For him, “Every parody is an intentional dialogized hybrid. Within it, languages and styles actively and mutually illuminate one another” (76).
Many critics have noted the importance of parody as a technique in Against the Day, including Jared Smith, who argues that Pynchon’s parodies serve an important political function. For example, he argues that the effective use of parody allows Pynchon to “debunk the historical myths founded by the Western institutions of imperialism and capitalism that were perpetuated by the popular literary genres of the time” (2). In particular, Smith notes the way in which Kit’s travels in Europe and Central Asia engage in a dialogue with the genre that John McClure has called “late imperial romance,” which extends as a literary mode from writers such as Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, and Joseph Conrad, writing at the height of empire, through more recent works such as V. and Gravity’s Rainbow.
McClure notes that writers such as Kipling, Forster, and Conrad tended to romanticize empire partly as an attempt to “forestall, in very different ways, what Max Weber was calling the disenchantment of the world” (2). However, McClure argues thatnovels such as V. and Gravity’s Rainbow stand apart from these earlier writers in the way they “celebrate an anarchistic tradition to gives political expression to the late imperial appetite for unmapping by seeking to open spaces for adventure and enchantment within the zones of metropolitan control” (153). At the same time, though, McClure insists that Pynchon conducts a “relentless critique of the most fundamental elements of Western romance,” instead seeking to create “counter-stories that will sponsor political resistance without promoting disaster” (153).
Against the Day had not been published when McClure was writing, but surely his comments apply even better to that novel than to V. or Gravity’s Rainbow. Indeed, Smith applies McClure’s analysis to Against the Day, noting at the same time some critical disagreement over the political effectiveness of Pynchon’s play with late imperial romance, which Smith sees as an aspect of the use of parody in the novel. However, Smith concludes that “Pynchon’s parody and revision of late imperial romance fiction in Against the Day employs a whole host of narrative techniques to safeguard itself against becoming another mouthpiece for the totalizing narratives it seeks to subvert—Western rationalization and Orientalism” (3). Smith does not mention Bakhtin, but he does see Pynchon’s parody of imperial romance as “doubly-voiced” in a way that recalls Bakhtin. Further, he sees Pynchon’s use of parody in Against the Day as an “articulation of subversion and a tool for historical revision throughout all of the text’s movement” (4).
Smith’s reading of Kit’s travels in the context of imperial romance is highly useful. But, to see how an actively dialogic form of parody works in Against the Day, it might be even more useful to examine the role played by the Chums of Chance in the novel. It is highly significant, for example, that they are introduced as they are headed in their airship to Chicago to participate in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The Columbian Exposition served as a key signpost along the road to capitalist modernization in America. This entire Exposition was essentially an extended, confident celebration of capitalist modernity, as well as an announcement that modernity, having largely been achieved in the Western world, was in the process of transforming life there as never before—a prediction that would be fulfilled in spades with the explosive growth of consumer capitalism in the ensuring decades. The global reach of the Exposition also suggested that American capitalist modernization was now ready to spread to the rest of the world, another phenomenon that would come to pass (and that is also reflected in the global reach of the action of Against the Day). Thus, the Exposition featured many international exhibits, though some of these—such as the “Street in Cairo” exhibit—converted other cultures into exotic, Orientalist spectacles that “trumpeted American cultural superiority” (Edwards 37).
Placing so much of the early action of Against the Day amid this early World’s Fair immediately puts the topic of modernization at the center of the novel, which thus begins amid an overt announcement that the United States was ready to move enthusiastically beyond its early image as the home of buckskin-clad explorers and pioneers and into a new era of emergent capitalism and top-hat-clad capitalist moguls. Indeed, this shift might be seen in the relationship between the Exposition and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a circus-like touring celebration of the Wild West founded and headlined by impresario Buffalo Bill Cody. Always with an eye toward publicity, Cody had hoped to have his show included in the Columbian Exposition but was rejected by the organizers as inappropriate for a fair designed to celebrate the modern. However, Cody was perhaps more modern than the organizers realized. He responded by setting up a rival show adjacent to the exposition, with considerable success. By this time, though, the show had been rebranded as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World and included elaborate performances not only by cowboys, cavalry, and Indians, but also by a variety of exotic figures, including Arabs and Turks. Cody’s Wild West was an entirely commodified version of the Old West, packaged for marketing in ways that would have made P. T. Barnum proud[4].
Cody’s show, then, was already a dialogic combination of the memories of the frontier past and excitement over the consumerist future, a combination that also applies to Pynchon’s Chums of Chance, who reside in a world of frontier-style adventures but who are also the protagonists of an apparently lucrative series of dime novels within Pynchon’s novel. In addition, at least in the beginning, the Chums are employed by a global corporate enterprise that assigns them their adventures in the interest of generating profits (presumably from the sale of published accounts of their adventures). Their eventual movement into becoming independent operators, meanwhile, represents a step beyond corporate control, though it also sends them, in the end, floating off into a world of pure fantasy and romance in the book’s idealized ending.
The depiction of the Chums, while sometimes quite comical, takes their lowly genre quite seriously. Their trajectory in the novel clearly interrogates the colonialist ideology behind their particular adventures, in which the entire world becomes simply a setting for white Western heroes to engage in commercially lucrative adventures for the entertainment of Western audiences. But the novel also interrogates the corporate structure within which the Chums work, their final escape into a realm of pure fantasy indicating the ultimate contradiction between the romantic nature of their adventures and the onward march of capitalism toward the building of a modern, rationalized world in which adventures like theirs no longer have a place, except in fiction. Indeed, this process of rationalization, famously described by Weber back during the time of the action of Against the Day, is a key focus of the political commentary in the novel, though it contains many other political energies, as well.
Pynchon as Political Novelist
Political energies have circulated through Pynchon’s novels from the very beginning, even if his novels have not always made clear and unequivocal political statements. A number of political motifs run through V. (1963), for example, but it is difficult to summarize in a succinct way the novel’s political vision, other than to note vaguely anti-authoritarian tendencies and an unusual (for the time) amount of attention to colonialism as an important root of the ills of the twentieth century. The politics of The Crying of Lot 49 are similarly amorphous, with the most important strain involving a somewhat sympathetic, but nebulous, gesture toward the California roots of the 1960s counterculture. On the other hand, Lot 49 seems to show a certain political ambivalence and also draws energy from the beginnings of the Reaganite New Right in California during the same early 1960s time period. Indeed, one might see this novel as epitomizing Jameson’s comments about the inability of postmodernism to mount an effective critique of capitalism, with Pynchon’s seeming desire to conduct a critique of capitalism being largely thwarted by the fact that he is working within an artistic form that is fundamentally pro-capitalist and thus leaves him with very little critical leverage. Or, as Blyn puts it, Lot 49 “recognizes and is insistently troubled by its politically regressive and anachronistic implications” (583). Put more concretely, Shoop sees the doubleness of Lot 49 as a sign of the complex situation in which postmodernism itself arose in the 1960s in conjunction with, not just the counterculture, but also New Right Reaganism.
Gravity’s Rainbow was a genuine breakthrough in Pynchon’s development as a political novelist—as well as a major watershed in the history of American literature. In many ways, the politics of Gravity’s Rainbow read like an extension and intensification of those that were central to V., with the major obvious change being the focus on World War II. In this sense, the most important message delivered by Gravity’s Rainbow is that World War II introduced a massive disruption in the flow of Western history, which might therefore have been sent in some genuinely new directions, except that this opportunity was quickly lost with the restoration of the status quo after the war. The V-2 rocket that comes screaming across the sky in Gravity’s Rainbow is seen as an almost mystical force, as something that possesses enough power to change the course of history, as something with a “Max Weber charisma . . . some joyful—and deeply irrational—force the State bureaucracy could never routinize, against which it could not prevail” (464). This reference to the “routinization of charisma” (as another character in Gravity’s Rainbow puts it and as initially described by the pioneering German sociologist Weber) will be crucial to our reading of Against the Day, but for now we would simply suggest that the motif has clearly been important to Pynchon through much of his career but that it is much less well developed in Gravity’s Rainbow than it would eventually be in Against the Day.
Gravity’s Rainbow also shows a major interest in ecological issues of a kind that were quite prominent in American culture in the early-to-mid 1970s, including in such films as Silent Running (1972) and Soylent Green (1973), as well as in such novels as Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1976). As Tyrone Slothrop (as close as Gravity’s Rainbow comes to having a central protagonist) moves through the latter portion of the novel, “feeling natural” and gradually being absorbed by the environment, he becomes increasingly attuned to the terrible things that humans, including his own family, have done to nature in the course of capitalist modernization, beginning to understand that
each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop’s family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper.
Sorry for this history, Slothrop seeks advice from a pine tree about what he might do to rectify the situation. The tree advises him to pursue a course that many today would describe as a small act of eco-terrorism: “Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn’t being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That’s what you can do” (552).
This interest in climate and environment would continue in Pynchon’s subsequent novels, though often as a background issue. For example, environmentalism does not receive major emphasis in Vineland (1990), but the northern California setting of much of the novel (and of the fictional town of “Vineland” itself) would, fairly soon after the 1984 events of the novel, become a main focal point of struggle between environmentalists seeking to protect California’s magnificent redwood forests and logging companies seeking to cut down those forests for financial gain. Pynchon subtly sprinkles dozens of references to the redwoods and to logging into Vineland without commentary[5]. Meanwhile, attempts to save the redwoods would become a key focus of political activism beginning in the 1990s, suggesting that the energies of the 1960s counterculture had not completely dissipated.
Battles over the redwood forests of the Western U.S. would subsequently become central to such environmentalist novels as T. Coraghessan Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2005) and Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018). Vineland, though, is primarily a post-mortem for the 1990s counterculture, which thus arises as still another missed opportunity—tied, in fact, directly to World War II at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow when that would-be charismatic rocket seems somehow to have traveled through time and is about to strike a movie theater audience in Nixonian America. The central villain in Vineland, though, is not the Nixon administration, but the Reagan administration, which comes off as even more sinister. However, the 1960s counterculture comes in for substantial criticism as well, partly for sometimes being more interested in enjoying sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll than in genuine political action. In addition, Vineland suggests that the student radicals of the 1960s knew they were opposed to the current power structure in America but weren’t sure why or what they would prefer to have instead. Thus, the student insurgents who attempt to establish Vineland’s People’s Republic of Rock and Roll—and by extension, a large percentage of 1960s “radicals”—are described as politically naïve and confused. “None of these kids,” Pynchon’s narrator tells us, “had been doing any analysis” (205). It is almost as if the 1960s radicals of the book are partly inspired by an anarchist strain that they don’t really understand in a sophisticated way, contributing to the incoherent nature of their activities.
It is tempting, of course, to think of Pynchon’s critique here as being partly auto-critique, referring back to the unformed political philosophy of his first novels and suggesting a step forward in his political sophistication. That step would then be affirmed in Mason & Dixon (1997), which joins Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day among Pynchon’s “big” novels. Here, the European settlers who colonized America, sweeping across the continent, are depicted as driven by rapacious urges that did considerable damage to the natural environment of America. Meanwhile, Pynchon depicts the culture of these colonizers as already infused, even before the American Revolution with sinister energies that have bubbled along just beneath the surface of American history, erupting with full force in the Trump years. The American colonists of Mason & Dixon are depicted as greedy, Bible-thumping, gun-loving white supremacists, the worst of them given to joining dangerous right-wing militias willing to resort to violence to achieve their economic and political objectives. And, of course, the surveying project undertaken by the title characters is a classic case of capitalist routinization in the interest of taming a once-magical wilderness[6].
If Mason & Dixon is still set in the Eastern U.S., by the time of Against the Day, the American assault on the natural environment reaches the Pacific; the logging operations conducted by the early Slothrops and the tree-clearing undertaken by Mason and Dixon’s crew have now extended to brute-force mining and railroad building. Meanwhile, Against the Day alsocontinues Pynchon’s march toward a more coherent radical politics in his fiction. Indeed, numerous critics have noted that Against the Day seems to be a move toward more overt and more coherent political content relative to Pynchon’s earlier novels, generally agreeing that the reigning political vision of Against the Day is primarily anarchist. It is certainly the case that the novel’s central political operatives tend to be anarchists engaged in all-out war against the growing power of capitalism in America at the beginning of the twentieth century. Throughout her book-length study of Pynchon’s fiction, Joanna Freer argues for reading Pynchon as a political novelist—and one whose politics are specifically aligned with those of the 1960s counterculture, including the psychedelics movement, which Freer argues has goals that are very much in line with those of anarchism. But she argues that Against the Day epitomizes this alignment, especially in the way its more politically aware characters “move towards involvement with anarchism, a political theory prized by Pynchon for its resistance to centralised leadership and for its manner of balancing structure and anti-structure in a vision of the spontaneous synchronicity of ad hoc communities” (Freer 11)[7].
Kathryn Hume argues that Pynchon’s earlier novels embrace multiple points of view so enthusiastically that they present no single coherent religious or political viewpoint. For her, though, Against the Day is a genuine departure in that so many characters and motifs support similar viewpoints that a coherent vision does emerge, including support for political violence and religious penance: “Its political program appears to favor attacking industrial infrastructures as the way to slow or derail capitalism, and he intertwines this program with a Christian and often specifically Catholic set of doctrines” (168). Hume grants that Pynchon had long demonstrated vaguely leftist sympathies, but argues that, prior to Against the Day, he mostly limited himself to exposing inequities rather than recommending direct action” (169). She summarizes the vision of Against the Day as: “the workers are good; the owners are bad. The more advanced the technology, the greater the oppression it imposes on the working class and the more damage it does to Earth. America is hopelessly enslaved to and complicit with the evil and moronic” (170).
Many other critics have enthusiastically declared Against the Day to be an effective political novel, as well, and in ways that make it distinctively new. Sue Kim, for example, argues that Against the Day “uses multiple mediated histories and genres in the service of what Ramón Saldívar calls a ‘postrace aesthetic’” (110). In particular, she argues that Against the Day treats issues related to race in a much more sophisticated way than do Pynchon’s earlier novels, demonstrating not simple racial dichotomies but the fact that race is “deeply ingrained into every aspect of our lives” (121)[8].
More generally, Jared Smith enthusiastically declares that Against the Day is “clearly, but certainly not simply, a novel about subversion. From its suggestive title to its revolutionary rhetoric to its bomb-throwing characters, the novel is deeply concerned with the great historic battle between elect and preterite, center and periphery, recorded history and metafictional historiography” (1). Similarly, Christian P. Haines has argued that Against the Day is bursting with radical political energies, many of them derived from radical movements of the past. The novel, he argues, is “a lesson in recovering the powers of social change that have been submerged by political reaction. Against the neoliberal view of America as a gigantic corporation, Pynchon suggests that America bursts with a political militance at odds with entrepreneurship” (158). Haines suggests that “there is in Pynchon’s fiction an irrepressible, underground America—a counter-nation that not only plots revolution but also dreams up new institutions for a world to come” (160).
Of course, the seeming sympathy of Against the Day with anarchists who might resort to violence in opposing the capitalist system does not quite amount to the proposition of a comprehensive alternative to capitalism. Indeed, in some ways, Against the Day is more clearly aligned against capitalism than it is with anarchism, though these two alignments are typically part of the same motif. Thus, in Against the Day, capitalism is strongly associated with direct assaults on labor activism, especially anarchist activism, even though the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the principal labor union associated with anarchism in American history, plays a relatively small role in this novel (in comparison, say, with their role in John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy).
Anarchist activism in Against the Day is conveyed perhaps most compellingly in the story of Webb Traverse[9], a young Colorado man who becomes radicalized by his experiences working as a miner, with an assist from his association with the Finnish miner and labor radical Veikko, who serves as a sort of mentor figure to him[10]. For example, at one point, Veikko discourses on his disappointment in America, which doesn’t seem much different from the Russian-ruled Finland he had fled, at least in terms of the abuse of the poor by the rich. He came to America after hearing that it was the
“land of the free.” Thinking he’d escaped something, only to find life out here just as mean and cold, same wealth without conscience, same poor people in misery, army and police free as wolves to commit cruelties on behalf of the bosses, bosses ready to do anything to protect what they had stolen” (83).
Veikko and Webb, using the dynamiting skills they learned as miners, become virtual embodiments of the stereotype of the bomb-throwing anarchist, a vision that is set up early in the novel via several references to the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago, a key moment in the history of radical labor activism in America. Pynchon weaves other such moments into his novel as well, especially in the way his extensive coverage of growing labor unrest in the Colorado mines tracks the historical events that ultimately led to the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, in which striking miners in Ludlow, Colorado, were attacked by an armed militia made up of National Guardsmen and private armed guards hired by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (partly owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.)[11].
In Against the Day,the vile mogul Scarsdale Vibe—a composite figure for whom Rockefeller was clearly one of the models—is indicative of the way the operations of capitalists in this novel (as in the real world) often extend far beyond the simple quest for profits and into an unquenchable thirst for power and a malicious desire to crush one’s enemies, including the very workers whose labor made them so rich in the first place. Capitalists in this novel are not just greedy and ruthless: they are downright evil. Vibe thus speaks of “this strange fury I feel in my heart, this desire to kill off every damned socialist and so on leftward, without any more mercy than I’d show a deadly microbe” (332). Vibe’s violent, white supremacist tendencies disturb even Foley Walker, his righthand man, who wonders how he can prevent Vibe “from escaping into the freedom of bloodletting unrestrained, the dark promise revealed to Americans during the Civil War, obeying since then its own terrible inertia, as the Republican victors kept after Plains Indians, strikers, Red immigrants, any who were not likely docile material for the mills of the newly empowered order” (334). And Walker is right to worry. After all, perhaps the most horrifying sequence in all of Against the Day is the one in which Vibe’s hired minions brutally torture and kill Webb in a heart-rending sequence the violence of which might have been lifted straight out of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), perhaps the American novel most known for its graphic dramatization the violence with which the American West was “tamed” and made safe for capitalist development.
Walker eventually stops Vibe by killing him, interrupting a plan by Webb’s son Frank and his associate Ewball Oust to do the same. If the killing of Vibe is thus made somewhat anticlimactic, the killing of Webb on Vibe’s orders is so horrifying as to take on apocalyptic dimensions, partly because of the extreme violence with which it occurs and partly because his killers, Sloat Fresno and Deuce Kindred, drag him into the hellishly surreal town of Jeshimon that seems to have been lifted straight out of horror fiction. Just across the Utah border from Colorado, Jeshimon serves as a stark reminder of the abject violence that underlies capitalism. Webb is still alive (barely) when they arrive but dies soon afterward. His son Reef then travels to Jeshimon to retrieve the body and perhaps confront the killers. What he finds there is a nightmarish setting that feels like it was team-written by Stephen King and Jim Thompson, with editorial tips from Joseph Conrad and a dose of extra brutality from McCarthy. It also anticipates the obscene display of hanged black bodies along the “Freedom Trail” in the alternative North Carolina of The Underground Railroad, where the hanged bodies serve as a stark reminder that such things have, in fact, happened in American history.Reef is shocked at the scene he finds in Jeshimon:
What was wrong with these people? For miles along the trail, coming and going, every telegraph pole had a corpse hanging from it, each body in a different stage of pickover and decay, all the way back to a number of sun-beaten skeletons of some considerable age. By local custom and usage, as the town clerk would presently explain, these strung-up wrongdoers had been denied any sort of decent burial, it being cheaper anyway just to leave them for the turkey vultures” (209).
To make the scene seem even more macabre, some of the hanged men are hanging from one foot, like the Hanged Man in a Tarot deck.
Pynchon as Historical Novelist
Despite the overt emphasis on anarchism, the principal political narratives within Against the Day quite often resonate with the more socialist-inspired tradition of proletarian literature in America, even if socialism is not prominently featured in the novel as an alternative to capitalism. There are two principal historical narratives that help to establish the political stance of Against the Day, though the two of them are interrelated through their mutual involvement in the larger phenomenon of capitalist modernization precisely during the period in which the mutation of capitalism into a new consumerist form allowed it to achieve an unprecedented power and flexibility that has enabled it to thrive and grow ever since. One of these historical narratives deals very specifically with (failed) radical resistance to the onward march of capitalism, including the concerted efforts of the capitalist powers-that-be to crush the resistance offered by radical labor unions like the I.W.W. Against the Day thus joins at least two major predecessors that deal with the same historical phenomenon, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy (1930–1936) and E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975) as the great literary examinations of that phenomenon.
The other historical narrative in Against the Day deals with the buildup to World War I, though this second narrative is closely related to the first, given that, as does Dos Passos’s trilogy, Against the Day clearly suggests that World War I was at least partly designed to curb the growing power of radical labor activism by creating a tide of nationalist fervor that disrupted international working-class solidarity and turned the workers of warring countries against one another. As Colin Hutchinson notes, “Against the Day and USA are both set in the period between the final years of the nineteenth century and the years that followed World War I, and both are written from a determinedly left-wing perspective in which the Great War features not only as a definitively traumatic cultural event, but also as a marker and agent of American leftist defeat and disillusionment” (174)[12].
Many aspects of Against the Day point in this direction, but British government-official-turned-anarchist Ratty McHugh states the idea quite overtly in the novel:
The national idea depends on war. A general European war, with every striking worker a traitor, flags threatened, the sacred soils of homelands defiled, would be just the ticket to wipe Anarchism off the political map. The national idea would be reborn. One trembles at the pestilent forms that would rise up afterward, from the swamp of the ruined Europe. (938)
Those “pestilent forms,” of course, would lead directly to World War II and the world of Gravity’s Rainbow. Thus, while to some extent the apocalyptic tone that pervades so much of Against the Day is ultimately realized in World War I, the novel also makes it clear that the war was just a step toward an ongoing process of crushing all opposition to capitalist modernization.
That the labor-oriented narratives of Against the Day are both related to important historical transformations points toward the fact that this novel is perhaps an effective political novel more for its historical vision than for its specific depictions of evil capitalists and virtuous workers or anarchists. Against the Day thus displays its greatest strength at precisely the point Jameson locates as postmodernism’s greatest weakness, though perhaps this situation is no real surprise. Ever since Tony Tanner declared Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) to be “one of the great historical novels of our time” it has become quite common for critics to regard Pynchon as a writer of historical fiction (75). More recently, for example, David Cowart has declared of Pynchon that “what makes his fictions so compelling—more, perhaps, than any other quality—is the variety and complexity of historical thinking they invite and perform” (159). Meanwhile, Shawn Smith, reading Pynchon’s novels up to and including Mason & Dixon specifically as historical fiction, draws directly upon Georg Lukács’s magisterial Marxist study of the historical novel to argue that, while Pynchon’s quintessentially postmodern work differs radically in style and tone from the realist historical novels discussed by Lukács, Pynchon is “first and foremost a historical novelist,” and that his work performs very much the same function that Lukács associates with those novels. Smith thus concludes thatthe central thematic focus of Pynchon’s work, even before Against the Day,is already the “great social transformations of modern times” (1)[13]. In a similar mode, Tiina Käkelä-Puumala suggests that Pynchon’s fiction, as a whole, is intensely concerned with “the era of modernization we have been living in since the 17th century,” involving such phenomena as “Puritanism, the Enlightenment, industrialism, scientific revolutions, global economy, information explosion, simulation—throughout his fiction Pynchon is very much a writer of modernization, of its historical preconditions, aims, and limits” (12).
This emphasis on modernity and on transformation seems particularly appropriate for Against the Day, which situates its central narratives concerning the defeat of the American Left firmly amid the dramatic transformations in the capitalist system and in the world political order that occurred between the early 1890s and the early 1920s. Much of this transformation centered on World War I, which destroyed the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, wiping those fundamentally medieval forces off the European map and opening the way for dramatic advances in capitalist modernization. Among other things, capitalism itself was transformed during this period, emerging from a crisis in overproduction in the late nineteenth century as a new, consumerist form that was far more vibrant and versatile. As outlined by William Leach, the rise of consumer capitalism transformed virtually every aspect of American life, leading, not just to the rise of institutions such as department stores and to the proliferation of consumer products, but also to an emphasis on newness and innovation that was a major advance in the all-that-is-solid-melts-into-air vision with which Marx and Engels described capitalism a half century before consumerism began to gain a solid footing in America. Meanwhile, the emphasis on marketing led to an outburst of pageants, circuses, parades, and other spectacles all over America, constituting a major step toward the consumerist society of the spectacle that would be described by Guy Debord half a century later.
The rise of consumerism is not foregrounded in Against the Day, but it does form an important part of the background to the historical transformations on which it does concentrate. The Chums of Chance, for example, are not merely adventurers; they are participants in a commodified form, their adventures packaged and marketed for popular audiences. Meanwhile, when Dally Rideout travels to New York, she becomes involved in a street theater company that performs precisely the sort of spectacle discussed by Leach, her performances drawing the attention of impresario R. Wilshire Vibe (brother of Scarsdale), who is heavily involved in trying to monetize the new American interest in spectacle and pageantry (340). Dally also visits one of the large department stories that have sprung up there, gawking like a yokel at the spectacular array of commodities on display there (346).
Pynchon’s most overt (and hilarious) engagement in Against the Day with the new consumerism occurs when the Chums decide to travel to Candlebrow University, a world center of time travel research (in what appears to be 1904, given a reference to the “St. Louis Fair,” which occurred in that year (410). The university is largely funded by the wealthy Gideon Candlebrow, who initially made his fortune in the Great Lard Scandal of the 1880s, involving the importation of “adulterated comestibles” from Great Britain. In the aftermath, Candlebrow’s laboratories developed his most lucrative product, the wildly popular “Smegmo,” a sort of margarine substitute that seems highly disgusting but is heavily marketed as a miracle product. In Ragtime, Doctorow notes how the rise of consumerism in America led to the development of such questionable items as advanced weapons, on the one hand, and cheap novelty trinkets, on the other. Pynchon here gets even more to the heart of the matter, suggesting that sufficient marketing can make any product a success, no matter how repellent. The Chums find that Smegmo dominates the university’s dining facilities, where the students seem to have been infected with the discourse of advertising in their enthusiastic endorsement of the product: “‘Goes with everything!’ advised a student at a nearby table. ‘Stir it in your soup, spread it on your bread, mash it into your turnips! My dorm-mates comb their hair with it! There’s a million uses for Smegmo!’” (408).
It is, of course, no accident that Pynchon chose to locate the main action of Against the Day during precisely the same period in which the sweeping changes described by Leach were occurring. In general, though, Pynchon’s historical vision is much longer. Just as his coverage of the aftermath of World War II in Gravity’s Rainbow reaches all the way back to the initial colonization of Massachusetts by the British ancestors of Tyrone Slothrop, so too does his coverage of capitalist modernization reach all the way back to the beginnings of capitalism, while pointing forward to our own day as well. So, more than the rise of consumer capitalism (which was an important part of this larger process), the real historical background to Against the Day is the larger transformation of the bourgeois cultural revolution.
Elsewhere, Jameson notes that this process might simply be termed “Modernization,” which he calls “the only true Event of history,” by which he surely means that it is the only fundamental overriding historical process to have occurred since we developed a genuine sense of history as a process (Signatures 227). Thus, the focus on modernization in Against the Day is tantamount to a focus on history itself. Meanwhile, especially relevant to Against the Day is Jameson’s acknowledgement that this bourgeois cultural revolution has included “such phenomena as those described by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—a work that can now in its turn be read as a contribution to the study of the bourgeois cultural revolution”(Political Unconscious 96). Weber’s work, in fact, is quite central to Against the Day and has apparently been important to Pynchon for quite some time, as in the mention of Weber in Gravity’s Rainbow noted above. Against the Day, though, contains by far Pynchon’s clearest and most extensive critique of the process of capitalist routinization/rationalization as described by Weber.
Against the Day as Protest Against Capitalist Routinization
Weber’s well-known discussion of the removal of magic from modern life from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century as a result of the advance of capitalism—variously described as “routinization,” “rationalization,” “desacralization,” or “disenchantment”—provides a crucial context within which to understand the anticapitalist politics of Against the Day. In his key work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (first published in German in 1904 and 1905 and first translated into English in 1930), Weber argues that the parallel advances of capitalism and Protestantism have resulted in the gradual enlistment of all of the resources of the world in the interest of the generation of wealth, thus converting all aspects of life in the world into economic assets. The elimination of the genuinely supernatural from this project, for Weber, contributes to a long historical process of “elimination of magic from the world which had begun with the Hebrew prophets, and in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, had repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin” (105). Thus, for Weber, the parallel evolution of capitalism and Protestantism (especially the Calvinist form of Puritanism) brought about a fundamental change in the texture of Western reality. Whereas medieval and early modern Europeans lived in a world suffused with magic, a world in which God and Satan were palpable presences, the modern world has been stripped of the magical. Indeed, probably the best-known aspect of Weber’s analysis involves this elimination of magic from everyday experience, leading to the rationalization, routinization, and regimentation of every aspect of life and experience in the service of capitalist efficiency[14].
The desacralization of experience under capitalism has come with tremendous advantages in terms of advances in scientific and medical knowledge that have led to vast improvements in material living conditions. As Marx and Engels grant in The Communist Manifesto, the capitalist administration of experience has led to unprecedented material wealth. The problem, of course, is that this wealth has been so unevenly distributed, often (as Pynchon vividly describes in Against the Day) in ways that have involved considerable amounts of cruelty and violence. Indeed, much of the political content of Against the Day, as we noted above, involves critiques of this aspect of capitalism.
At an even more fundamental level, though, Against the Day mounts a concerted attack on the even deeper and more subtle damage that has been done to individual psyches as a result of the forward march ofcapitalist modernization. On the other hand, capitalism has had positive effects in this sense, as well. In A Secular Age,his important study of this process, Charles Taylor has noted that premodern societies existed in a world in which the boundary between the physical world and the magical world of supernatural forces (some of which were “malign”) was extremely porous, leaving humans feeling vulnerable to attack by those malign forces. In our modern world, on the other hand, that boundary has essentially been closed, leading to “a new sense of the self and its place in the cosmos: not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers, but what I want to call ‘buffered’” (27).
However, this protection from supernatural threat also means that modern individuals are closed off from certain potentially positive realms of experience. Pynchon has long exhibited a suspicion that the sealing off of our world from other realities comes at the expense of a certain impoverishment of experience. The parallel worlds motif in Against the Day shows a fascination with alternate realities that runs through much of Pynchon’s writing, as when anarchist Jesús Arrabal declares in The Crying of Lot 49 that a “miracle” is defined as “another world’s intrusion into this one,” suggesting that a successful revolution requires an “anarchist miracle” involving an intrusion from an ideal anarchist alternate reality “where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul’s talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself” (115).
In Weber’s terms, the conscription of all resources in the interest of capitalist productivity includes the conscription of human beings as economic resources. Thus, in the process perhaps best labeled via the Weberian term “routinization,” an enormous amount of potential individual freedom has had to be sacrificed in order for the capitalist system to operate efficiently, creating the “time is money” ethic with which we are all so familiar. The classic elaboration of the new attitudes toward time as an economic resource due to the rise of industrial capitalism occurs in E. P. Thompson’s 1967 essay “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” which details how the rise of capitalism revolutionized ways of thinking about time as an economic resource. Meanwhile, Taylor, drawing upon Weber, couches these new attitudes toward time specifically in terms of desacralization:
Time has become a precious resource, not to be “wasted”. The result has been the creation of a tight, ordered time environment. This has enveloped us, until it comes to seem like nature. We have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done. This “time frame” deserves, perhaps more than any other facet of modernity, Weber’s famous description of a “stahlhartes Gehäuse” (iron cage). It occludes all higher times, makes them even hard to conceive. (59)
Haines has identified the protest against capitalist conscription of time as a central project of Against the Day. Haines notes that the sheer length and meandering plot of the novel resist rapid reading in a way that serves as a cry of resistance to the American drive to wring every last penny of profit out of every second of time: “In its form and its content, Against the Day protests against the temporal demands of capitalism; it preaches against the imperative to extract as much profit from every moment as possible” (158).
The resistance to efficient organization of time that inheres in the formal complexity and unruliness of Against the Day can also be taken as a protest against the conscription of time by capitalist routine that we noted above. Indeed, Haines goes on to call the book “a paean to sloth, a defense of the pleasure in doing nothing,” which I take to mean that it enacts a protest against the colonization time by a capitalist system bent on converting the time of workers into profits for their bosses (159)[15]. Haines locates Against the Day within the genre of literature Ross Chambers has called “loiterature,” built on the principles of “inefficiency and indolence and whose central narrative devices include digression, dilation, and circumlocution” (158). For Haines, Pynchon, in Against the Day,supports an “investment in sloth” that “situates his work in a tradition of Marxist critical theory for which the refusal of labor implies a militant political ethos. In particular, Pynchon’s fiction elaborates the thinking of the autonomist Marxists—including Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno—for whom the refusal of labor not only entails the negation of capitalist command but also the self-valorization of workers” (159).
Here, of course, one recalls characters such as the schlemihl Benny Profaneof V. or even Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow, whose name is surely no accident. To this list one might add the ubiquitous seaman Pig Bodine, various incarnations of whom appear in any number of Pynchon novels (including V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day, and even Mason & Dixon). These various versions of Bodine tend not only to be indolent but also to have very little real function in driving the plot, suggesting that he functions as still another marker of the refusal of Pynchon’s fiction to be conscripted by the capitalist drive for efficiency and productivity. At the same time, characters such as Profane and Bodine are surely not held up to readers as role models, and it seems clear that a lazy, indolent reader would be unlikely to make it very far into Against the Day in the first place, so the emphasis here should probably be placed, not on avoiding work, but on insisting that this work should be pursued for its own rewards rather than for the production of immediate economic results.
This opposition between a vision of reading as efficiently focused work and a vision of reading as rewarding and illuminating recreation can be seen as a version of the clash between Scarsdale Vibe’s capitalism and Webb Traverse’s anarchism, which provides the central political dynamic within Against the Day. Meanwhile, this dynamic can be restated in more general terms as an opposition between repression and liberation, or (as Bakhtin might put it) between monologism and dialogism. Indeed, it is probably best to see anarchism in Against the Day not as a literal proposed alternative to capitalism, but as a figurative alternative that stands in direct opposition to what, by contrast, is for Pynchon one of the most deleterious effects of capitalism, its tendency to appropriate and routinize every aspect of life for use by the capitalist system.
Viewed in this way, the retreat of the Chums of Chance into fantasy at the end of the novel (seemingly the opposite of the apocalyptic ending of Gravity’s Rainbow)can be viewed not simply as a parody of such endings in the adventure genre, but also as a moment of utopian compensation for the ongoing routinization of American life under the pressure of the advance of consumer capitalism into its later, neoliberal forms. And this compensation is not merely escapist. As Jameson points out in his chapter on “Magical Narratives” in The Political Unconscious, the ongoing popularity of nonrealist forms of narrative in a thoroughly routinized modern capitalist world can be explained precisely because such texts restore to their readers some of the energies that have been lost as a result of this routinization, a quest that can also be interrogated by skillful readers to reveal what has been lost by the advance of capitalism. In this situation, Jameson argues,
The older generic categories do not, for all that, die out, but persist in the half-life of the subliterary genres of mass culture, transformed into the drugstore and airport paperback lines of gothics, mysteries, romances, bestsellers, and popular biographies, where they await the resurrection of their immemorial, archetypal resonance at the hands of a Frye or a Bloch. (107)
Against the Day, while suspicious of certain kinds of romance, is insistent in its critique of the Weberian “disenchantment” of the world by capitalism, setting it more thoroughly in opposition to empire and to the advance of global capitalism.Here, it is clear that empire leads to fulfilling romantic adventures only in fiction, not in reality. In addition to the romance-like adventures of the Chums, Against the Day incorporates other adventure-like genres, such as the espionage narratives that run through the text’s European segments. Perhaps the most striking of these romantic genres, though, is the Western narrative in which Webb’s (decidedly unromantic) story (like the narrative of Blood Meridian) takes place. This generic choice is highly appropriate, not only because Western narratives often deviate from realism, but also because the story of the West is intricately interlinked with both the building of the national identity of the United States[16] and the story of capitalist routinization. Indeed, Pynchon links the theme of the taming of the West with the theme of capitalist routinization through direct reference to Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” first presented at a conference of the American Historical Association, appropriately held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Here, Turner puts forth his extremely influential “Frontier Hypothesis,” which argued that the existence of a vast frontier, waiting to be explored and conquered, had been crucial to the national identity of the United States from the very beginning. However, Turner argues, by 1893 this frontier had been largely conquered, leaving the U.S. in search of a new way to define itself, a way that would lead directly into consumer capitalism. Meanwhile, by delivering this essay at the Columbian Exposition, Turner effectively aligned the beginnings of the modern era of consumer capitalism with the closing of the American frontier.
Early in Against the Day, detective Lew Basnight (whose profession introduces still another generic context) prepares for a transfer from Chicago to Denver, imagining that he might be about to encounter the Wild West. However, Yale’s Professor Heino Vanderjuice, who provides occasional intellectual commentary to supplement the narrative components of the novel, suggests to him that it might not be so wild, after all. “‘It may not be quite the West you’re expecting,’ Professor Vanderjuice put in. ‘Back in July my colleague Freddie Turner came out here from Harvard and gave a speech before a bunch of anthro people who were all in town for their convention and of course the Fair. To the effect that the Western frontier we all thought we knew from song and story was no longer on the map but gone, absorbed—a dead duck’” (52)[17].
In addition to the ultimate escape of the Chums of Chance from corporate control and into a world of unrestrained adventure at the end of the novel, there are also numerous gestures toward the kind of spiritualism that capitalist routine has removed from modern experience. Indeed, we believe that Hume’s straightforward association of the viewpoint of Against the Day with Catholicism and against technology should be read figuratively in this context, with Catholicism serving not so much as a literal alternative to capitalism and technology but as a reminder of a form of Christianity that arose before Weberian desacralization. In this sense, Catholicism provides a critical perspective on Protestantism (always problematic for Pynchon, especially in the Calvinist form that creates an elect/preterite divide between the haves and have nots).
Here, it is highly significant that Pynchon repeatedly associates “Christers” (by which he presumably means Protestant Christers) with capitalist routinization in Against the Day. For example,the would-be revolutionary Ewball Oust feels it is too late for revolution in the U.S., because the “capitalists and Christers” have established such a stranglehold on power (643). Later, in the Chandleresque Los Angeles private eye sequence, set in the early 1920s, we discover that L.A. has become pretty much a nest of vipers[18]. Trying to track down a woman named Jardine Maraca, Basnight runs into her father Virgil, who tells him, “I like to lose myself in reveries of when the land was free, before it got hijacked by capitalist Christer Republicans for their long-term evil purposes” (1058). And, finally, Reef returns to America with his wife and daughter after adventures in Europe, hoping to find some uncontaminated place not yet reached by capitalist routinization, “some deep penultimate town the capitalist/Christer gridwork hadn’t got to quite yet (1075).
From this point of view, Pynchon’s figurative use of Catholicism in Against the Day is very much of a piece with his use of shamanism, another example of pre-modern spirituality that still involves an important element of magic. The forces of modernity in the novel are determined to stamp out shamanism wherever they can, given that it stands in stark opposition to the desacralizing and routinizing forces of capitalism. Noting the novel’s treatment of shamanism, Jared Smith suggests that “Shamanism is a wild, unknowable force, and is thus a threat to state and imperial control” (16). For Smith, shamanism thus becomes an example of Pynchon’s use of spiritualism as a counter to Western rationalism and disenchantment and as a fundamentally anticolonial force.
Put another way, shamanism stands as still another figurative alternative to desacralization/routinization. Pynchon does not literally advise us to turn to shamanism as a way of understanding the world and organizing our lives. He just uses it as an image to help highlight what we have lost in our surrender to capitalist routine. The moment in the text referred to here by Smith in his discussion of shamanism involves a conversation between the British Lt. Dwight Prance and Kit Traverse, Webb’s youngest son. The conversation takes a crucial political turn when Prance explains to Kit that modern state religions everywhere have attempted to squelch shamanism (which can be taken as an effort to extend the power of capitalist routinization). Kit then proudly proclaims that this model doesn’t apply to the U.S. because the U.S. has no state religion. Prance then scoffs and argues that the extermination of Native Americans was all about “the fear of medicine men and strange practices, dancing and drug-taking.” Further, Prance declares that the enslavement of Africans was all about suppressing their shamanistic religions in favor of a desacralized Protestantism:
“Your whole history in America has been one long religious war, secret crusades, disguised under false names. You tried to exterminate African shamanism by kidnapping half the continent into slavery, giving them Christian names, and shoving your peculiar versions of the Bible down their throats, and look what happened.” (777)
He then suggests that the carnage of the Civil War might have been payback for the American assault on the spiritual.
Prance is just one voice among many, of course, but enough elements of Against the Day roughly align with his position that it can be taken as largely endorsed by the text. But Pynchon conducts a multi-pronged assault on capitalist routinization. One of these prongs involves the sheer rambunctious postmodern refusal of the text to behave according to accepted principles of fiction. The postmodern textual and narrative shenanigans of Against the Day create an anarchic textual fabric that mimics an opposition to capitalist routinization by creating a complex, disorderly reading experience that resists any sort of final and definitive interpretation. Some critics and reviewers have complained about this aspect of the novel, as when Louis Menand, in an early reaction in the New Yorker, complained that the novel was “shapeless” and essentially plotless—or perhaps that it has too many unresolved plots of too many different types: “There is too much going on among too many characters in too many places. There are also too many tonal shifts, as though Pynchon set out to mimic all the styles of popular fiction—boys’ adventure stories, science fiction, Westerns, comic books, hardboiled crime fiction, spy novels, soft-core porn.”
Menand grants that one might see all this as “a simulation of the disorienting overload of modern culture,” though he concludes that it ultimately just makes the reader “dizzy,” suggesting that Pynchon might be a bit dizzy himself. We, having not been made dizzy, would argue that this textual unruliness serves a very positive function, operating somewhat in the mode described by Jameson as “dereification” in reference to Joyce’s Ulysses as
a process whereby the text itself is unsettled and undermined, a process whereby the universal tendency of its terms, narrative tokens, representations, to solidify into an achieved and codified symbolic order as well as a massive narrative surface, is perpetually suspended. I will call this process dereification. (“Ulysses” 132–33)
Meanwhile, Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, has suggested that Georg Lukàcs’s crucial discussion of reification in History and Class Consciousness is largely an effort to “strategically retranslate” Weber’s notion of “rationalization” (62–63). It seems sensible, then, similarly to strategically retranslate Jameson’s notion of dereification in complex, difficult literary texts as a refusal to succumb to rationalization/routinization, a notion that would seem to apply to Against the Day even more than to Ulysses.
The Cognitive Mapping of Capitalism in Against the Day
At first glance, the disorder of Against the Day (and, indeed, most of Pynchon’s work), while possibly contributing to a critique of capitalism, might appear to be diametrically opposed to the kind of cognitive mapping identified by Jameson as crucial to any possible political form of postmodernism. After all, the process of attempting to establish connections among events and to develop an orderly understanding of the world is identified by Pynchon in both Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow as a form of paranoia, and his texts as a whole seem constructed to defeat totalizing and comprehensive reading and understanding. In addition, one entire massive novel, Mason & Dixon, is essentially devoted to the process of literal mapping that was the survey of the Mason-Dixon Line, but it presents this survey as an act of violence against nature as the surveyors and their crew cut a swath through pristine forest in order to do their work, a process that is clearly conveyed in the text as a forerunner of the violent attempt to subjugate the natural world that has been central to American history ever since. This kind of mapping, of course, is also a form of subjugation, a key part of the colonialist project all over the world.
In Against the Day, maps also function negatively as a key part of the process of capitalist routinization—as an attempt to impose figurative order on an otherwise unruly, anarchic world. In other cases, this function becomes quite literal and physical, as in the example of the railroads that were so crucial to building the capitalist order through the nineteenth century. As the scientist Renfrew puts it, trying to understand the complex political situation in the Balkans leading into World War I,
“The railroads seem to be the key. If one keeps looking at the map while walking slowly backward across the room, at a certain precise distance the structural principle leaps into visibility—how the different lines connect, how they do not, where varying interests may want them to connect, all of this defining patterns of flow, … and beyond that the teleology at work, as the rail system grows toward a certain shape, a destiny—” (689)
This vision clearly identifies the railroads as a routinizing force in the world. Elsewhere in Against the Day, the railroads are depicted as even more directly sinister and damaging. Indeed,much of the anticapitalist activity of Webb Traverse and Veikko is focused on railroads, as they attempt to bomb tracks and bridges in an effort to strike blows against the capitalist bosses. Later, Frank Traverse explains this battle, describing the destructive impact of the railroad in Mexico, as in the American West:
“It 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 with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love.” (930)
This violent image of the impact of the Western railroads is not without precedent in American literature. Probably the most direct predecessor would be Frank Norris’s 1901 novel The Octopus, which pictures the railroads as sinister versions of the tentacled creature of the title, growing out of the 1880 Mussel Slough Tragedy, in which a violent land dispute between the Southern Pacific Railroad and local wheat farmers led to seven deaths. The railroad’s victory generated considerable anti-railroad sentiment nationwide; yet it also sealed the victory of the railroad over any forces that would halt its progress. The description of the railroad by Presley, Norris’s writer-protagonist, meanwhile, is very much in keeping with the depiction of the railroad by Pynchon. Presley sees the railroad as
the galloping monster, the terror of steam and steel, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon … symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus. (51)
Pynchon does not mention the Mussel Slough Tragedy specifically, though he does refer to other heady events of the 1880s, as when one character notes that the Supreme Court has recently ruled in favor of corporate personhood (148). The reference is clearly to an 1886 case involving that same railroad, Santa Clara Country v. Southern Pacific Railroad (the great forerunner of the notorious 2010 Citizens’ United case).
Meanwhile, Pynchon’s choice of the railroad as villain is an excellent one for more general figurative reasons, as well. The railroads, of course, were absolutely key to the taming of the American West and to connecting the once-wild West to the rest of the United States. Moreover, as emphasized by Malcolm Harris in his recent study of the key role played by California and the West in the rise of modern global capitalism beginning in the late nineteenth century, the railroads were not only central to connecting California to the rest of the U.S but also key to the rise of particularly rapacious (and racist) capitalist practices that brought capitalist modernization to dramatic new levels. Among other things, the new railroads required an unprecedented amount of capital investment, but they also opened up unprecedented levels of potential profit, creating a path for a once-backward U.S. to charge to the forefront of capitalism as it moved into its new consumerist phase. As Baran and Sweezy note in their 1966 survey of the history of American capitalism, the railroads absorbed “close to half of all private investment during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and opened up outlets for a great deal more.” At the same time, these investments proved to be lucrative: the new territories opened to development offered “the greatest external stimulus in capitalist history” (226–27).
Of course, the railroads didn’t simply transform the West: they made an important contribution to the growth of modern transportation systems that enabled the rise of global capitalism. As Harris notes, “with the advent of the integrated world system, in which the transcontinental line was, along with the Suez Canal, a decisive link, investment flows determined the shape of what was to come” (62). The global scope of Against the Day shows an awareness of this same phenomenon, though it also reaches beyond railroads and canals to point toward the coming of air travel and even to suggest possible new, as yet unimagined, transportation systems.
One city that was particularly affected by the new availability of rail transport was Chicago, where Against the Day fittingly begins. Rail connections were crucial, for example, for getting livestock to Chicago and meat back out to the rest of America, making the city of Chicago, as Carl Sandburg would famously put it, “Hog Butcher for the World … Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler.” Of course, the Chicago slaughterhouses stand as a key example of the abuse of animals and the natural world by human beings, but they were nightmarish settings, not just for the animals being slaughtered, but also for the human workers doing the slaughtering, leading to the dramatization of these horrors in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), one of the first prominent literary protests against the mistreatment of workers by American capitalism.
These slaughterhouse workers feature in Against the Day as well, but mostly in a seriocomic sequence in which the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria (whose appearance is already ominous given that we know his eventual assassination in Sarajevo will be a key trigger for World War I) visits the Columbian Exposition. Always on the lookout for adventure, Ferdinand suggests that it might be fun to go the stockyards and hunt the immigrant workers there (many having fled from the empire ruled by his family) as human prey. The buffoonish Ferdinand serves as an indicator of the decadence of the Old World Order that was about to be swept away by capitalist modernization via World War I, reminding us (as do Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto) that, whatever its evils, capitalism was still an overall improvement over the feudal system that it replaced.
Those improvements, though, have come with a heavy cost, especially for those at the lower end of the capitalist economic scale, such as Chicago’s immigrant slaughterhouse workers. Piekarski, et al., have suggested that Pynchon depicts the Chicago stockyards as a form of capitalist routinization that can be seen as an example of “menacing mapping, the operation of systematized violence” (10). In particular, they note the segment early in Against the Day in which the Chums of Chance arrive at Chicago and observe the stockyards from the air, recalling their earlier sightings of vast herds of cattle roaming freely about America’s great, untamed plains, whereas now they “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 that led to the killing-floor” (10).
Despite such visions of the capitalist/colonialist imposition of order as a form of forced mapping, there are also ways in which Against the Day specifically thematizes the inability of this mapping process to exert complete control over the unruliness of the world, just as readers with a rage for order will find it difficult to encompass certain aspects of the novel within whatever totalizing models they might try to force upon the text. Thus, Jared Smith notes the dysfunctional maps in the novel, suggesting that “maps are ideologically motivated and limited in their ability to represent layered planes of existence” (12). Similarly, Piekarski, Kevorkian, and McKetta argue that, in the stories of the Chums of Chance, Cyprian Lakewood, and many of the novel’s anarchists, “a tension between mapping and the unmappable reveals itself, on a formal level, through a contrast between a tragic and an anarchic poetics” (53).
The deep dialogism of Against the Day, then, would seem to extend to conflicts between the orderliness of mapping and the disorderliness of the natural world, even if Pynchon’s preference clearly seems to be for the latter. However, there are also ways in which a kind of mapping, much like the cognitive mapping envisioned by Jameson, is presented positively in Against the Day. For example, Pynchon’s description of the railroads, the stockyards, the machinations of Vibe, and so on, present a picture of the workings of capitalism at a crucial historical juncture. And, while this picture might not quite reach the level of comprehensiveness and coherence envisioned by Jameson, it is certainly a start. Moreover, there are actually multiple forms of positive mapping that occur in the novel.
McHale, for example, has seen the sophistication of Pynchon’s use of various genres in constructing Against the Day as a form of mapping, arguing that “there is little or no precedent for Pynchon’s method of sampling from the whole range of a particular era’s popular genres and piecing them together in a single text to produce, if not genuinely exhaustive coverage, then at least a compelling illusion of exhaustiveness. It is as though Pynchon were aiming to map the era’s entire peripatetic system of popular genres within the covers of a single novel” (“Genre” 25, McHale’s emphases). McHale even specifically cites Jameson in arguing that “the map of the era’s genre system can also serve as a cognitive mapping of the era itself (in Jameson’s sense)” (“Genre” 25, McHale’s emphasis). However, for McHale, Pynchon also goes beyond the main historical setting of the novel by adding his (and our) historical position to the cognitive map: “Pynchon historicizes doubly, on the one hand, by refracting the era’s historical realities through the genres of its own self-representation; on the other, by indicating where we stand with respect to this distant era and its characteristic genres” (“Genre” 26, McHale’s emphasis).
In short, Against the Day doesn’t simply present a sketch of the workings of the global capitalist system and the global culture industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. It also invests these sketches with a dynamic historical energy that connects the early twentieth century with later periods. Part of this latter connection simply inheres in the time travel/parallel worlds motifs that are woven into the text, much as Gravity’s Rainbow connects the world of postwar Europe to the world of Nixon’s America via the seeming time jump that follows that crucial 00000 rocket as it is launched in Europe just after the end of the war but then seems about to land on an American movie theater in the early 1970s. Thus, the dime novels of the Chums become the forerunners of popular television fare such as Gilligan’s Island, while Vibe and his network of railroads presage the coming of the computer networks that are so crucial to the workings of our own world.
Of course, any cognitive maps that might be constructed within Against the Day are partial and come with considerable assembly required on the part of readers. More than overcoming the ideological dilemmas associated by Jameson with postmodernism, Against the Day (with its sheer size and complexity) serves as a sort of verification of Jameson’s vision of the size and complexity of the international capitalist system, while at the same time making it clear that the system is a conspiratorial one that does not live up to its own free market rhetoric. The novel also serves as a demonstration of the fact that a text displaying almost all of the formal characteristics that are typically associated with postmodern fiction can at least begin to take on the task of mapping the damage that the capitalist system has done to human beings and to the natural world since the latter part of the nineteenth century. This task, even in partial form, is a huge one, and perhaps no text could be expected to emerge fully formed to perform the task in toto. We argue, however, that Against the Day joins with the other novels we discuss in this study to produce a cumulative impact that approaches the production of a cognitive map of the economic and political system of today’s neoliberal capitalism. To continue this argument, we next turn to China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), which was actually moving toward a political form of postmodernism several years before the publication of Against the Day. Perdido Street Station is also a large and complex novel, but it is much shorter and less complex than is Pynchon’s novel. Moreover, it takes place in an entirely fictional world that, while it clearly links allegorically to our world, can be much simpler and easier to map, serving as a sort of experimental laboratory in which issues such as those explored by Pynchon can be pursued on a simplified scale. Finally, it has the advantage of having been written by an author whose political vision is much more fully and coherently formed than is Pynchon’s.
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Notes
[1] Gazi discusses the actual mechanics of the “multiverse” within Against the Day but does not explore in depth the implications of this motif.
[2] See Parry for a detailed examination of the relationship between the Chums of Chance and boy’s fiction of the early twentieth century.
[3] On the Great Game, see Hopkirk.
[4] Robert Altman’s 1976 film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson dramatizes this aspect of Cody’s show nicely, clearly depicting Cody’s self-marketing as a forerunner of modern celebrity culture.
[5] Note that some editions of the novel showed a California forest being ravaged by a mass logging operation.
[6] These militias might seem an unlikely motif, except for the fact that the groups mentioned, such as the Paxton Boys and the Black Boys (the latter of whom donned blackface to conduct murderous attacks on Native Americans), were not invented by Pynchon but were, in fact, historical.
[7] Freer, incidentally, finds that, even in Against the Day, Pynchon seems to have trouble developing a genuinely feminist way of representing gender. However, focusing especially on the character of Dally Rideout (the only character in the novel who is traced from early childhood well into adulthood), Jeffrey Severs sees Against the Day as a genuine step forward for Pynchon with regard to his representation of women.
[8] We will address Saldívar’s notion of “postrace aesthetics” more extensively in Chapters 3, where we discuss Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), one of the key texts that Saldívar used to develop his model, as well as in Chapter 6 on The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, another of Saldívar’s exemplary authors.
[9] Webb Traverse also plays a role in the larger universe of Pynchon’s fiction. In particular, a sequence of his descendants plays a key role in Vineland. Webb is the great grandfather of Vineland’s1930s Hollywood labor activist Sasha Traverse Gates, the great-great grandfather of 1960s radical Frenesi Gates, and the great-great-great grandfather of key character Prairie Wheeler.
[10] See Foley for a discussion of the ways in which the American proletarian novels of the 1930s often featured such mentor figures, who helped their protagonists gain political awareness.
[11] The Ludlow Massacre still stands as a powerful reminder of the abuses to which the working class has often been victim in American history. It was largely the inspiration for Upton Sinclair’s novel King Coal (1917), though Sinclair places his novel in a generalized fictional setting in order to suggest a broader relevance to the coal industry as a whole.
[12] Indeed, for Hutchinson, Dos Passos’s novel is even more important as a forerunner to Against the Day than might be immediately obvious. He thus contends that Against the Day is “built upon the foundations of John Dos Passos’s equally voluminous USA trilogy” (173). He suggests, however, that Pynchon differs from Dos Passos in some ways, as when, due to the influence of the 1960s counterculture, Pynchon “treats hedonistic pleasure (especially drinking) much more indulgently, in ways that amount to not only a critique of Dos Passos and the context in which he wrote U.S.A., but also to an assessment of Pynchon’s own place in a tradition of American literary dissent” (174). In particular, for Hutchinson, Pynchon critiques a tendency within the American Left to be suspicious of pleasure and sensuality in general.
[13] Mark Young argues that the parallel worlds motif within Against the Day is also related to visions of history, characterizing the book as an alternate history novel, particularly noting its many oblique gestures toward the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center.
[14] For a classic and more detailed account of this process within the specific context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, see Keith Thomas.
[15] Pynchon’s own essay in praise of sloth, “Nearer My Couch to Thee” appeared in the New York Times Book Review in 1993.
[16] The finest discussion of the ways in which Western narratives (especially in film) have contributed to the building of the American national identity can be found in Slotkin.
[17] This information appears to be slightly inaccurate, given that Turner was teaching at the University of Wisconsin in 1893 and would not move to Harvard until 1910. However, the action of Against the Day seems to take place in a number of different alternate timelines, so Vanderjuice here might simply be occupying a different timeline than our own. The boundaries between timelines are not clearly indicated in the novel.
[18] This sequence also introduces additional elements from U.S. labor history, making reference in particular to the deadly 1910 dynamite bombing of the headquarters of the L.A. Times (known for its anti-union editorial policies) by a union member involved in a strike by the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. There were widespread rumors that the bombing was a setup meant to discredit the union.