by Thomas Pynchon (2006)
2025 reads, 17/25:
“Electricity! the force of the future—for everything, you know, including the élan vital itself, will soon be proven electrical in nature.”
When I started writing down my thoughts for this review, earlier this year, Against the Day was the final novel in Pynchon's oeuvre I had left to read. It was bittersweet, honestly. But, in a few days, I will be picking up my copy of Shadow Ticket, the newly published ninth novel from Thomas Pynchon. So while Against the Day does feel like a culmination of all of his work so far, just knowing that I have one more book to pick up afterwards makes this all the more better. It also feels somewhat of an accomplishment to finish a book over 1000 pages, something I never thought I would be able to do just a few years ago, when I barely completed my very tough reading goal of finishing five books in one year.
A novel of this size refuses summary, so I will only write towards the overall feeling, themes, and bits & pieces that I loved, using its five sections as a guide. This is less of a review and more of an analysis (or it's a reaction? a jumble of thoughts??) – Against the Day is a mammoth of a book, and the character list alone exceeds one hundred. As I read, I kept track of the different plotlines, characters, and quotes, and I've identified what I think are the major themes (duality, reduction of possibilities, lateral movement) and motifs (light, math, electricity, geology) that will be prevalent throughout this review. I hope that I am able to convey my (spoiler-free) thoughts such that you can decide if it's worth your time. Maybe I'm biased, but I hope you decide to do what's in Tullio Crali's painting (the one on the cover) and "take the plunge" with this one.
Now Single Up All Lines!
Section I, “The Light Over The Ranges,” puts us in the late nineteenth century, as the aeronautical group known as the “Chums of Chance” start their journey towards the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. They will marvel at all the technological progress of the coming years, so they literally “single up all lines” in their large steampunk airship and set sail. When they arrive, they find the marvels they expected: "...there were steamers, Maxim whirling machines, ships powered by guncotton reciprocators and naphtha engines, and electrical lifting-screws of strange hyperboloidal design for drilling upward through the air, and winged aerostats, of streamlined shape, and wing-flapping miracles of ornithurgy." A new technological age is coming, and the Chums are excited to be a part of it.
But like the rise of the internet in the 1990s, was this progress all good? Against the Day is not so sure. The late nineteenth century was a tumultuous time for labor rights. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was over a decade away from being published, but the transition from the western frontier to the second industrial revolution was mostly complete. This first section in particular highlights the juxtaposition of the promise of technological progress, the good it can create, the possibilities it represents, with the actual horrors it is used to commit. A friend of the Chums, Merle Rideout (father of Dally Rideout, another main character), bounces between odd jobs eventually ends up in metallurgy, and from there, the cutting edge study of atomic science. And we all know what atomic science accomplished about 40 years later.
“Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. “The Great Bovine City of the World,” breathed Lindsay in wonder. Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor.”
This imagery, presented to us in the first ten pages, captures one of the major themes very well: the reduction of choice. I see these meat packing plants as not just a representation of the labor market in general, but also as an illusion of free will, of the regression from the open frontier to the killing floors of the slaughterhouse. The choices for these cows literally reduce to zero, as there is no escape, allegorically describing our own illusion of choice. The first line of the book, and the title of this section, is also a physical representation of this reduction: “now single up all lines.”
Hidden Pictures
Section II, titled “Iceland Spar,” uses the double refraction property of this stone (also known as optical calcite) to touch on two other major themes of Against the Day: lateral movement and duality. Let's leave duality to the next section; it'll make more sense there. Lateral movement I find really interesting, because the motif of mathematics (specifically imaginary numbers) are used to touch upon this in a more metaphorical sense.
But what is lateral movement? I think of it almost as parallel timelines, moving at the same rate; alternate dimensions progressing in time next to one another. But, these timelines do not have to be completely parallel. In fact, in order to get to a parallel timeline, one must move perpendicular first (or at an angle at least). You see how we are already getting into the math of it?
Lew Basnight is a private eye who moves from one investigation company to another. After some terrible stain on his life that he cannot remember, but which causes his wife to leave him, he searches for forgiveness and falls into private detective work, which promises some sort of karmic adjustment. But what did Lew do that was so bad, and why can't he remember it? Was it really him, or did some cosmic event push him, laterally, into this new timeline? We don't know, but throughout the rest of the book, Lew is able to use this "ability" to stay hidden while he investigates, a great skill for a private eye.
"Many people believe that there is a mathematical correlation between sin, penance, and redemption. More sin, more penance, and so forth. Our own point has always been that there is no connection. All the variables are independent. You do penance not because you have sinned but because it is your destiny. You are redeemed not through doing penance but because it happens. Or doesn't happen."
So why do I keep saying lateral movement, instead of parallel universe or alternative dimensions? Again, it leads us back to math. Another name for imaginary numbers are lateral numbers, due to their perpendicular graphical representation on the number line. See below, or skip to the next section.
In order to "move" out of the real number line (which, let's assume has a dimension of time), one must use these imaginary numbers (via Euler's formula) to rotate away from the real number line. Once that bifurcation has taken place, at some constant imaginary number, one can move "laterally", parallel to the real number line. But can lateral movement lead us to our fate? Must it? I mentioned free will above – do we actually have it? (And, I think by now you may have noticed that this book poses more questions that it answers, and that's okay. It's a recurring phenomenon in Pynchon's work.)
Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just about to explode into open flames.
Bifurcate Your Fate
The third section, aptly named “Bilocations” (the phenomenon of being in two places at once), directly connects to the Iceland spar crystal and it's double refraction property. Light hits the stone and is split into two paths, much like a mathematical bifurcation (think differential equations) - but let's put away the math for now. There are many examples of duality in Against the Day: light and dark, above and below (characters on Earth vs. the Chums of Chance in the sky), east and west, humanity and machines, open frontiers and closed gates. Even Renfrew and Werfner, two professors that share a bitter personal rivalry:
The professors' maneuverings had at least the grace to avoid the mirrorlike—if symmetries arose now and then, it was written off to accident, “some predisposition to the echoic,” as Werfner put it, “perhaps built into the nature of Time,” added Renfrew. Howsoever, over their cloistering walls and into the map of the megacosm, the two professors continued to launch their cadres of spellbound familiars and enslaved disciples.
I used the word bifurcate a lot in the math discussion of the previous section, with the talk of lateral movement. At the same time, this duality can be misleading. What may appear as a bifurcation in one's life path could just be an illusion, which brings us back to the first major theme: a reduction of possibilities. So, in Against the Day, Pynchon is alluding to two themes that are opposite one another: convergence and divergence. More duality. But what can it mean?
Leaving the Südbahn, she gazed backward at iron convergences and receding signal-lamps. Outward and visible metaphor, she thought, for the complete ensemble of “free choices” that define the course of a human life. A new switching point every few seconds, sometimes seen, sometimes traveled over invisibly and irrevocably. From on board the train one can stand and look back, and watch it all flowing away, shining, as if always meant to be.
I think I'll connect these themes to the railroad. The railroad was a titan of industry that ultimately reduced the “friction of distance” of people and goods. But it also connects between the themes of bifurcations, duality and reduction of possibilities to one another. Like Yashmeen Halfcourt, who is riding the train in the quote above, I can't help but think of train track switches, a physical representation of mathematical bifurcations. But, if we are on the train, who is controlling the switches? Who decides the track that the train takes? Certainly not the passengers. Just as the illusion of choice tricks us at the supermarket, does the railroad represent the illusion of our choices in life? If we take this one step further, we can ask if are our choices in life are predetermined or if we truly have free will. You could also simply ask yourself, "did I get on the right train?" I don't have an answer, but again, this is the kind of loaded philosophical question that Against the Day poses. There are many many tangents one can take with their mind while reading this.
As the Franciscans developed the Stations of the Cross to allow any parishioner to journey to Jerusalem without leaving his churchgrounds, so have we been brought up and down the paths and aisles of what we take to be the all-but-boundless world, but which in reality are only a circuit of humble images reflecting a glory greater than we can imagine—to save us from the blinding terror of having to make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day of Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem.
By the way, let's take these three themes together: reduction of possibilities, lateral movement, and duality (or bifurcation). They can all be related to one another through this shape (in which I use railroads instead of lines on a number graph):
Pretty cool, huh?
Shine Bright Like a Diamond
Let's talk titles. With Gravity's Rainbow a close second, I think that Against the Day is my favorite Pynchon novel title. It kind of encompasses his work as a whole, as many characters have no control over their own lives (either through some internalized paranoia or external autocratic force). And Section Four, eponymously named “Against the Day” plays into this. Stakes get higher. Families grow (the Traverse family, for example, who literally traverse the entire world), and characters grow up. Friends get close, and enemies get closer. And reading this in modern day, the allusions to World War I just kept popping up.
On learning that they might be no more exempt than any of the human supernumeraries they had been so carelessly aviating above all these years, some Chums of Chance turned in panic to the corrupt embrace of the Trespassers, ready to deal with Hell itself, to betray anything and anyone if only they could be sent back to when they were young, be allowed to regain the early boys'-book innocence they were so willing now to turn right around and violate on behalf of their insidious benefactors.
There is another motif that I haven't really touched upon yet, but is arguably the most prevalent, throughout Against the Day: light. If light is synonymous to day, then moving against the day, to me, draws up pictures of moving towards the night, towards darkness. In the beginning of the book, every time we see the Chums of Chance, they are flying in light. As with their trip to the World's Fair, this represents the promise of new technology and innovation. But they also represent the heroes and adventurers of early 20th-century genre fiction, a kind of childhood comic-book innocence that for many of these characters was about to be ruined by the incoming War.
“Remember, God didn't say, 'I'm gonna make light now,' he said, 'Let there be light.' His first act was to allow light in to what had been Nothing. Like God, you also have to always work with the light, make it do only what you want it to do.”
On Va Se Voir…
These themes and motifs I picked up on during my read all tie together nicely – and they're not mutually exclusive either, right? Light exists in a dual state, as a wave and a particle. The reduction of choices in our lives is a consequence of the negative effects of technological progress (think Web 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0). The fifth and last section of Against the Day, “Rue du Depart,” is the shortest section at a length of only 22 pages, acts more as an epilogue. Where are these characters now? How far have they come, now that it is 10 years after the Great War, since we met most of them in the late 1800s?
There are a multitude of connections to make here; I can safely say I've never read an author that not only made me think so much about what I was reading, but would then make me think about the world long after the book was finished. Whether the theme is well-hidden or blatantly obvious, whether I join a reading group or just keep personal notes, it's always enriching. And hey, it's a great story too. The Chums of Chance, the Traverse family drama, Merle and Dally, and the Vibes are all amazingly written characters with their own arcs. You can't just read this book, it becomes part of your life. And at its length, its volume, you can't go into it thinking of it as just a goal to get through; it stays with you.
In our busy lives, a world constantly bombarding us with signals and symbols from all ends, begging for our attention, usually with nefarious intentions, Pynchon reminds me that there is art and beauty; something to distract us, but never shelter us. Don't be ignorant – keep cool, but care. And whatever you surround yourself with, whatever hobbies bring you joy, whether it be reading, painting, gaming, acting, photography, rocketry, baking, hiking; never take shame in it, because these are our own ways of pushing back against the day.
It was said that great tunnels like the Simplon or St.-Gotthard were haunted, that when the train entered and the light of the world, day or night, had to be abandoned for the time of passage however brief, and the mineral roar made conversation impossible, then certain spirits who once had chosen to surrender into the fierce intestinal darkness of the mountain would reappear among the paying passengers, take empty seats, drink negligibly from the engraved glassware in the dining cars, assume themselves into the rising shapes of tobacco smoke, whisper a propaganda of memory and redemption to salesmen, tourists, the resolutely idle, the uncleansably rich, and other practitioners of forgetfulness, who could not sense the visitors with anything like the clarity of fugitives, exiles, mourners, and spies —all those, that is, who had reached agreement, even occasions of intimacy, with Time.