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Article Excerpt
Since V. appeared in 1963, Thomas Pynchon has exemplified American postmodernism, and Against the Day carries on the process of undercutting our ontological assumptions and denying us the stability that would support claims of truth or authenticity. Its 1085 pages, its several hundred characters, and its settings--stretching from Colorado to New Haven to Venice to Siberia--combine to deny us the comfort of mastering this textual mini-world. In its religion and politics, however, this book differs from Pynchon's earlier novels. From V. (1963) through Mason &E Dixon (1997), many characters express their own ideologies or moral values, but Pynchon as author rarely pushes his own views. His political sympathies are Leftist and pro-Labor, and his spiritual concerns are attuned to non-material realities, but they remain backgrounded, if only because his characters project so many different kinds of belief--Buddhist, Jewish, Orphic, and Gnostic, as well as Christian. Critics have constructed political stances from Gravity's Rainbow, but its ideology is not immediately evident, and neither is a religious program of action, beyond that of encouraging a sense of wonder. Vineland's values are more obvious in that it decries totalitarianism and encourages us to think well of Labor, but mostly through individual characters' voices. Mason & Dixon trumpets a disapproval of slavery so persistently that we presume this to be authorial sentiment, but the argument that the Enlightenment scientific enterprise has done more harm than good had to be extracted by experts. (1)
I argue that Against the Day represents a new departure for Pynchon. Not only is this his least paranoid novel, (2) but in it he also articulates a stance on both politics and religion. He does so often enough and with sufficient prominence that the statements do not disappear into the background, even though he overwhelms us with an untidy tangle of plots and a grotesque number of characters. If one approaches Against the Day expecting just another Pynchon blockbuster, one can read right over the politics of violence and the religion of penance. Of the thirty-some major reviews electronically available, only six get beyond plot summary when dealing with the anarchist dynamiting, and even those reviewers basically brush aside the book's apparent commendation of industrial terrorism as practiced during the book's time period, 1893 through 1922. (3) I too failed to register the seriousness with which Pynchon appears to support political violence because of my hostility to terrorism, but second and third readings persuade me that Pynchon is more aggressive here than in earlier novels, if only out of despair over lack of effective peaceful alternatives. (4) When D. L. and Frenesi engaged in acts of violence in Vineland, they were incompetent and ridiculous, or undercut with slapstick; Against the Day's Webb Traverse is not thus compromised. Pynchon's support--at least within the novel--for violence has been ignored, perhaps because those politics and the religious views do not mesh well with postmodern relativism, possibly because they contradict our previous understanding of Pynchon novels as essentially ambiguous and infinitely complex, and probably because the reviewers do not wish to contemplate either a serious call to violence or a life of penance. His changed sense of what should (and should not) be explicit and unambiguous appears to reflect intensified personal convictions or increased desperation over the direction America is taking. (5)
I would like to try to disentangle Pynchon's presentation of religious and political positions in Against the Day, and articulate the vision I understand him to be offering in this novel. 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. (6) If I am correct, for this novel we are no longer dealing with the infinitely scriptible Pynchon, whose many luscious phrases can be arranged to harmonize with most of his readers' ideologies. Certainly this anarchist and Catholic Pynchon would not be my choice were I constructing a Pynchon congenial to my reading of his earlier works, and that very discrepancy makes me think that something new has developed. Catholic anarchism bears some kinship to Marxist-inflected liberation theology from Latin America, which combines social revolution (sometimes with violence) and Catholic doctrine. Catholic anarchism also has a history in the U.S. that includes the non-violent 1930s communities of Dorothy Day and the anti-Vietnam-war protest of the Berrigan brothers. Pynchon's combination of anarchist-Luddite dynamite and a penitential vision of life is his own extension of that tradition--more individual-oriented than is usual in Marxist ideology, and more industrial and technological in its targets than was the case in the American anti-war activism. Amid the many forms of spirituality present in Against the Day, Pynchon foregrounds three modes of religiously inspired engagement with this world. His via media has been a fugitive but relatively stable element of his vision since V., but his two contrasted extremes in this novel are newly explicit for him--entering a convent and becoming a dynamiter. (7)
THE POLITICS OF AGAINST THE DAY
Because Pynchon's religious leanings operate in tandem with his politics in this novel, let me outline the politics as background to his religious message. The political positions that critics extracted from his earlier novels were Leftist, but Pynchon mostly limited himself to exposing inequities rather than recommending direct action. V. shows the modern process of the living becoming machine-like. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas exposes dark capitalist forces and many marginalized people, but she is more worried about her own sanity than about what she might do to change the political landscape. In Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop's dropping out seems the only alternative to becoming a minion of the corrupt and all-encompassing empires of plastics, drugs, and arms that have taken over the World-War-II world. Zoyd Wheeler definitely gives Vineland a hippy-Left slant, though Pynchon treats the IWW members of the previous generation more respectfully than he does the political activists of the 1960s generation, the founders of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll. Brock Vond, the novel's villain, embodies totalitarian stereotypes that gain luster from the Orwellian 1984 setting. Mason &Dixon decries slavery, and sees nothing beneficial about the line cut by the surveyors through the colonial American wilderness. How, though, should we respond to these negative representations of government, capitalism, industry, and empire? The texts do not show very effective oppositional responses, especially given that his most fully articulated alternative, The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, is not presented as politically admirable, let alone practical.
In Against the Day, values emerge from a chorus of characters and from the narrative voice. (8) One character announces that anyone not insulated by wealth is obliged to be a socialist by the injustices of the world (32). Capitalism is hostile to and destructive of magic (79). Capitalism produces "wealth without conscience" (83). The bourgeois cannot be innocent: "If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself?" (87). "The secret backlands of wealth" eventually depend "on some act of murder, seldom limited to once" (170). Yale, as a bastion of capitalism, reveals "toxic layers beneath" and concerns itself little with learning, "much less finding a transcendent world" (318). "All mathematics leads, doesn't it, sooner or later, to some kind of human suffering" (541). Kit Traverse hears of a central Asian city that lives and operates although covered with sand, and it might be "Shambhala, as close to the Heavenly City as Earth has known, or Baku and Johannesburg ... unexplored reserves of gold, oil, Plutonian wealth, and the prospect of creating yet another subhuman class of workers to extract it. One vision, if you like, spiritual, and the other capitalist. Incommensurable, of course" (631). Frank Traverse is the focalizing consciousness through which the railroad is decried for dividing landscapes and nature (930). A member of the Foreign Service deserts the British government, having found that he was only "the servant of greed and force" (974). When the Chums of Chance ascend to the counter-Earth in their airship, they find "an American Republic ... irrevocably into the control of the evil and moronic" (1021)--a phrase sounding like Leftist Iraq War rhetoric. Furthermore, one character laments the rime "when the land was free, before it got hijacked by capitalist Christer Republicans for their long-term evil purposes" (1058). Reef Traverse heads westward, hoping to find some distant town not governed by "the capitalist/ Christer gridwork" (1075). A schoolboy sums up being American as meaning "do what they tell you and take what they give you and don't go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down" (1076).
Simply put, the workers are good, the owners are bad. (9) The higher 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. Finally, in spite of the novel's investment in Christianity, which will be discussed later, the narrative disparages the spirituality of Christer/Republicans. Some of these phrases sound shrill, but I detect no irony in these pronouncements, and sense no suggestion that we are to resist such judgments.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PENANCE AND ATONEMENT
Pynchon's novels have always presented multiple spiritualities--Christian, Orphic, Shamanistic, Buddhist, and Kabbalistic, to mention some that have been analyzed. I argue that in this novel, Pynchon foregrounds the Christian without eliminating any of the others, partly by being more doctrinally explicit. The characters most responsible for making Christian issues visible in...
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