Pynchon Pins Shadows Against the Day

Against the Day (Thomas Pynchon, 2006, Penguin Press) justifies the invention of impossibly dangerous scrapes and escapes, fabulous machines, mystical encounters, and other fictive hardware because the impossible is predictable in dimestore adventures and the stories of Jules Verne. To fulfill its mission, any novel can dismiss credibility to a point, and certain subgenres of fiction are less bound than others by the real. The narrative of the “Vorance Expedition” in Against the Day produces the mad delirium of H.P. Lovecraft’s "The Mountains of Madness." Both stories are about arctic explorers who discover objects hidden in the ice, existing in no known geometry and firsthand evidence of the Others who live beyond the veil of reality and share our planet.

Pynchon’s Captain Vorance guides an icebreaker through seas above the Arctic Circle and finds an Icelandic spar, a huge, optically perfect calcite crystal–with a sentient organism embedded in it. Although the entity intrudes on ordinary reality, it isn’t a part of it. Loading the mineral formation on their ship, the crewmen realize they cannot manage its movement since at least one of the object’s dimensions exists outside our usual three; every measurement of the length and breadth of the entity gives a different result. Despite ominous signs, a disastrous rupture in the fabric of reality cannot be prevented. As smoking seams in the Earth split Main Street in half, the townspeople seem to recognize the evil coming to claim them. They have always known it. “It loves us. We are its only food.”

Against the Day is a sprawling tale of anarchists, misfits, and theoretical mathematicians who stumble into every situation where the human dimension is laid sideways against a mode of existence plotted along other vectors from those we use to triangulate our own. Beginning with the Chicago Exposition of 1893 and ending in the period immediately following World War I, the novel presents the conflagration of Europe and the disappearance of a million lives into the bloody trenches as a horror contrary to humanity and reason, analogous to the eldritch horror of the burning pit and raving madness that engulfs the village where Vorance and his crew loose their alien cargo. Across decades, the extinguishing of hope and devaluation of human life that is coming in the Great War haunts the book’s many characters in omens, mystical encounters, and theoretical calculations. That such a human catastrophe waiting in the future would not cast a shadow against the light of the present day is unthinkable.

Light is the energy of the universe, interchangeable with life itself. Against the Day uses the refraction, reflection or projection of light as proof that the present moment of human history contains the shadows of the past while also projecting a knowable future. Calcite crystals break light into its components; on the other hand, an Icelandic spar creates twins of the same ray of light, identical, side by side versions of its source. Since light is the conveyance of all knowledge and understanding, a pair of identical beams caught in a structure of hexagonal and tetrahedral forms are not merely analogous to each other but literally the same. Applying rules set out by Einstein or Zeno--take your pick--space/time itself is an illusion, and every point contains every other.

The doubling of a beam of photons passing through a crystal is a kind of bilocation, the ability to be in two places at once, a power attributed to an Evenki shaman who warns Vorance the crystal he has unearthed is a herald of the coming enslavement of mankind by extra dimensional beings. The horror Magyakan predicts on the Vorance timeline he simultaneously experiences in the present of another day and place. Informed by the nature of light, the dark failure of hope and humanity in the coming war is detectable in the fin de siecle optimism of the White City of the Chicago Exhibition. The survivors' enslavement in a global plutocracy will be backed by the full faith and credit of an entity existing nowhere in physical space.

The free will of man lives side by side with his ultimate doom. From a balloonist's view above the Chicago fairgrounds, the temporary, alabaster buildings recede, replaced by endless rail cars filled with cattle for the slaughter. Pynchon mocks the autonomy we avow for ourselves even as we are clearly part of the herd, “[u]nshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and right angles and a progressive reduction of choices until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor” (p. 10) .

Lew Basnight is an exception to fate, having gone off the rails of his own destiny. Lew’s memories begin recently; of the past, all he knows is he committed some heinous act, an unforgivable…whatever, and he was cast out by family, friends, everyone. When he says he can’t remember what evil he committed, townspeople get especially upset. Kafka wrote continually about the unknown judgment hanging over every man. Pynchon proposes that since Basnight lacks an awareness of self in the present day, he can't have willfully earned the mysterious condemnation haunting him. That doesn't change his sentence. Basnight's memory of who he is and what he has done is gone, suggesting a bilocation: Lew Basnight’s purpose is in one place and the rest of him is in another. He was once part of a Basnight continuum from which he is now an exile.

Basnight becomes a detective, cashing in on his own undetectability. One time, having encountered a whole floor of disguises--false mustaches, wigs, and spearmint gum-- Lew realized he didn't need a disguise. Although he wears the role of a detective, he is like an empty coat hanger, exiled from its purpose. At first, it’s regular money, working on the anarchist bomber folders the Pinkertons are too busy crushing skulls to run down themselves. Detectives and spies, of which the novel has plenty, both reduce men to their dossiers and twin the pursued with their pursuants. A tall file cabinet is the Tardis through which Lew twins himself with famed bomber "The Kieselghur Kid," whose name comes from a chemical vital to detonation. Eventually, Lew learns the existence of his other self is generated by bombs the Pinkertons themselves are detonating and blaming on its rumor to inflate the price of a private goon army. Lew Basnight wonders what someone is doing with his old life.

Compared to the enormous energy required to form a crystal from silicon that can bilocate a beam of light, the energy required to split in two a physical human being is a mere gesture. The tycoon Scarsdale Vibe spent practically nothing to have Foley Walker replace him for duty in the Union Army. After the Civil War, Foley appears in Vibe’s penthouse to inform him the deal is irrevocable, due to the Indian custom which says, if someone saves a life, they are responsible for it. Foley becomes Vibe’s second self, entrusted with equal power to run his enterprises and sign his checks. Shows how little it takes to get a man to cash in his own life, so he can wave around the credentials of a more powerful stranger.

As the appearance of autonomy coexists with our destiny, which is to be bought and sold, so the past and present are also twinned in our experience. Against the Day uses light traveling through a refracting agent to suggest how this is possible: the light energy of a photon, passing through this day and recorded with lenses and emulsions, can be traced by its own mechanics backwards to the first zeptosecond of Creation. Merle Rideout is an early tinkerer with the chemicals and light-sensitive plates of late 19th century photography, an alchemist redeeming the spiritual from base chemical elements. During a visit with Frank Traverse, Merle produces a photograph of the two hired killers that took out Frank’s old man, Webb, before they done the deed. Making a portrait in Traverse's era required the subjects to remain perfectly still during a long exposure. Slight movements, like the blink of the eye, show as a sort of ethereal haze in the final print, which Frank reads as the slow accumulation of the pure evil aura of his daddy’s murderers, embedded inside their physical bodies and requiring Rideout’s special equipment to reveal.

The future narrows to a single holocaust, unlike Merle’s open-ended tinkering. He is the sort his daughter Dally describes to a confused artist in Venice who can’t figure out how he got from a war-torn Europe to one where the cataclysm has yet to happen, another victim of the Lew Basnight effect, exiled from his own life. Dally, who spent her girlhood with a crackpot inventor explains. “Easy. Somebody in the future invents a time machine, O.K.? Every crazy promoter both sides of the Atlantic’s been working on that, one of ‘ems bound to succeed” (p. 577) .

After starting in straight photography, Merle will end up in Hollywood after the war. Motion picture projectors use time to slice light into pieces, but Merle invents a device that works the other way around, using light to slice up time. Exploiting how the origins of light are contained in the present, Merle’s process takes any old photograph and calculates from the light’s position then what the subject looks like now. In the novel’s last chapter, the horse-and-wagon tinkerer who peddled his way across the Rockies extrapolates the present-time, moving image of his daughter’s Paris apartment, using a photograph taken in Dally’s chapter one girlhood, a whole novel ago.

Its title having a literal as well as figurative connotation, Against the Day naturally considers the light doubling and light distorting properties of mirrors. Based on the historic center of the fabled Venetian glassmaking industry, Isola degli Specchi, which may or may not be an island that sometimes appears in the Venice lagoon, cultivates alchemical processes that exceed human understanding, contriving distortions of light so refined as to make their makers go mad. The history of mirror craft there goes back to when Venice was the hub of the spice trade, Marco Polo lived on High Street, and routes to Asia were coveted secrets. While the ordinary use of mathematical projections to represent topography on a sheet of paper results in crummy maps, these fantastical mirrors assist in the visualization of a passage to the spice kingdoms that is not only invisible on conventional maps, it isn’t visible to ordinary travelers in regular space. Through secret lenses, the map reveals the invisible passage to Shambala, the mythical Buddhist paradise of perfect peace and harmony, a real, made-up place as opposed to some place Pynchon made up. Go down the same road without having the map, or having it but not knowing how to read it, and you’ll end up in Tuva like Feynman.

Through the wonders of epic storytelling, the sons of Webb Traverse, along with millions of other WWI refugees, endure displacement across the borders of ruined kingdoms, Balkan nations that were dismantled by a single pen stroke, and states that were invented in ministries a continent away by ministers who would never visit them. They encounter guerillas who come from places that no longer exist. “We are all exiles.” They disappear in the background of an essential, mountainous crossroad between East and West that will someday be named with a political fancy even less credible than Shambala. What will its borders describe that is neither Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, or Herzegovina? Plainly, human life doesn’t exist entirely in a physical dimension. Lines of succession, lines on a map, imaginary curtains of iron, or a brand new algebra found huddling under four makeshift walls are non-spatial geometries with life and death relevance to millions. We live in a natural world twinned alongside an unseen parallel dimension that poorly contains an unnamable horror. We know it. It loves us. We are its food.

Essential medium of existence, light cannot appear to be anything other than what it is; therefore, illusion is impossible. Zombini, the renowned magician, complains to the businesslike current manager of the Venice mirror shop that the custom piece of glassmaking brilliance he has purchased is faulty. After his classic cutting-a-body-in-half routine, the different halves of the volunteer from the audience reenter their life at differenty points on their timeline. A customer rep explains to the magician that the mirror he ordered doesn’t just reflect the opposite velvet wall of a disappearing cabinet. “For the analogous trick in four-space, we had to go from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional mirror…We pass from a system of three purely spatial axes to one with four–space plus time” ( 571) . Luca Zombini’s stagecraft displaces the same life to different parts of its story. Is it worth noting, even if such transpositions were literally possible, the only way we would know about them would be from Jules Verne-type fictions?

Yashmeen Halfcourt is one of our story’s tetrahedron of drop-dead, femme fatales (often distinguished by the colorful plumes in their millinery extravagances). At Chunxton Crescent near London, she is under the protection of the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys (TWIT), a neo-Pythagorean cult reminiscent of the Theosophical Society of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley that flourished in the last century's 'oughts and Teens. Her guardians juggle numbers and tarot cards; they use Kabbalistic gematria to wrestle arcane passcodes from holy scripture; they name living London embodiments of the Major Arcana, all in an attempt to divine a spiritual presence behind the veil of experience. Yashmeen, however, is more interested in the imaginary numbers of pure mathematics and especially the quaternion system for plotting space, an abstract device that extends the complex numbers and can make shimmering calculations about objects that, like Venus and Mars, are rotating in space.

Since possible math exists like a dark continent, we say William Rowan Hamilton "discovered" quarterions in a flash of insight in 1840. They had their day, but quaternions were supplanted in the late 1880s by more easily manipulated vector analysis. Against the Day presents Hamilton’s adherents, quaternionists, as fanatical believers in an entirely separate system of reality with its own algebra and multiplication tables resembling a Kether-to-Malkuth map of Kabbalah’s Tree of Knowledge. Their rivalry with vectorists on the battlefield of pure mathematics is a reminder that our expressions of the universe are neither remotely empirical or mystical, subject as they are to fads and charlatans. Framing another historical oddity that gives scientific progress a Georges Méliès, green cheesiness, Pynchon fictionalizes the stunned reaction to the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 that disproved the existence of aether, thus removing every inhabitant of this world to a different heaven entirely. Whether the frothy confections of language or pure math, whatever signs and symbols human intelligence uses are incapable of accounting for human experience except in comical, baggy pants routines straight out of burlesque.

Other than the extensive expertise of Webb Traverse and his kids in metallurgy, electricity, and blowing shit up, the technology in Against the Day depends on the conventions of science fiction not science. Spanning different continents and dimensions in their airship Inconvenience, the Chums of Chance are the stars of a dime novel series in which the latest imaginary technology creates new storytelling possibilities at the touch of a button. They are fictional characters in a work of fiction, which only shows that storytelling can produce similar doubling effects to those of mirrors and quartz. Devices that enable the Chums to navigate the tunnel connecting the Earth’s poles, cruise beneath desert sands, and contact denizens of other times and dimensions are feasible only insofar as the syntax describing them is logical, like the word coinages in “Jabberwocky.” The Hypopsammotic Survival Apparatus (Hypops) “provides a practical way to submerge oneself beneath the sands and still be able to breathe, walk around, so forth.”

Much of the Chums gadgetry is the work of Professor Heino Vanderjuice of New Haven. (Too bad for Pynchon "Professor Nutty Nut-Meg" was already taken.) The ship’s power source is “an ingenious turbine engine whose boiler was heated by burning surplus hydrogen gas” taken from the airship’s envelope. Jealous rivals dismissed the professor’s invention as nothing more than a perpetual motion device (6) .

The boys manning Inconvenience belong to a fraternity of balloonists formed during the Seige of Paris in 1880. Deciding the whole world was in a perpetual state of siege, the lads took to the skies, maintaining their neutrality, innocence, and youth, floating high above the mire and muck of human affairs. The novel no sooner explains all of this than it reveals the corruption of the Chum’s charter. Their mentor, Professor Vanderjuice, takes money from energy capitalist Stanford Vibe to spy on Tesla and send a report if the Balkan maverick gets close to inventing unlimited free electricity. The captain of Inconvenience, Randolph St. Cosmo, attends a shady Chicago meeting and contracts the balloon to spy on various groundworks from cloud level. Before the text of the current adventure has even begun, the airship was in the hire of Porfirio Diaz, the Mexican dictator. That they have no idea how they are being used and by whom is the only sense in which this five-man, Boys’ Life band is innocent. The banter between Chick Counterfly, his coarse vernacular, and Lindsay Noseworth, officer in charge of enforcing standard English, becomes less amusing, more strained and obscene. The boys aren’t aging so much as they are getting stale. In fact, during the Vorance Expedition catastrophe, the Chums appear to Fleetwood Vibe, Stanford’s heir, not as scrubbed lads but as a visitation of somber and graying men minding their capital investments. Nothing erodes trust in people like their not aging in a straight line.

The Chums of Chance are even less fully realized beings than Lew Basnight. They are a construction of the dimestore science fiction genre, invented only to deliver adventure fantasies to the proletariat, using segments of the timeline of technology that haven’t happened yet. Operating from a similar premise was DC’s Blackhawk comic book, featuring tales of a fighter plane stocked with seven predictable characters with names like Stanislaus, Olaf and Chop Chop. Debuting in the patriotic 40s as regular GIs, by the 70s the Blackhawks had become mercenaries-for-hire. Like them, the Chums lofty overlook is for sale and their missions have an invisible purpose not likely for the betterment of all mankind.

The Chums are nothing but a mode of dress and expression, giving the appearance of Eagle scouts on a mission of goodwill, which their actual deeds contradict. The ingenious inventions enabling their adventures exist only as commercial and military assets. (Similarly, on a trans-Atlantic cruise, a luxury liner transporting Kit Traverse suddenly turns into a battleship equipped with cannons ready to defend Empire, a transformation that priveleged passengers do not endure on the same ship at the same time.) The Chums have an all-female counterpart which, we guess, flies a pink airship. These Chiclets of Chance remark that new time traveling machines and interdimensional gadgets should be helpful in finding the fraternity’s paradise, removed from the political landscape. Captain St. Cosmo suggests, “There is unfortunately another school of thought that a third dimension is useful for transporting explosives” (1083) .

In Against the Day, the crew of the Inconvenience experience time travel and encounters with beings from another world. Other units of the Chums of Chance betray their cause to the Trespassers for the sake of eternal youth, choosing "lateral solutions, sidestepping the crisis by passing into metaphorical identities, as law enforcement squads, strolling theatrical companies, governments-in-exile of imaginary countries" (418) . None of that exotic stuff leads to enlightenment or disrupts business. Ingenuity is instantly co-opted by a mysterious bureaucracy in cahoots with the same bankers and monarchs who control the movement of armies down below. Randolph St. Cosmo and Padzhitnoff, his counterpart on a Russian airship, receive competing orders from the same mysterious command. It's the same lesson Lew Basnight learned from employment by the Pinkertons: all sides are the same side, no matter how faceted the crystal. If the aeronauts demand answers from higher ups, why, they'll be shot out of the sky.

The only enlightenment available to ordinary earthlings is the understanding that all of our ambitions and labor ends up enriching the powers that be. Webb Traverse gets murderously angry at the theft of his work, how the plutes set things up in the mines so a man can’t decently raise his own children. The language they use subverts up and down, right and wrong. “Why you could write a whole foreign phrase book just on what Republicans have to say” (93) . As the Kieselguhr Kid (perhaps it’s an identity not Webb’s own, but worn by every anarchist) he destroys railroad bridges because they belong to the railroads, an industry whose appearance on the frontier guarantees the transfer of everything worth owning from the people to the greedy few. The only thing Webb has left to give his family besides useful dynamiting skills is the understanding that the company owns everything and everyone, and we’re all complicit. Asked if he doesn’t worry about blowing up innocent people, Webb says, no, because none of us are truly innocent. We all sell out some time, betraying those who aren’t able to.

The crucial bilocation in Against the Day that other tricks of the light represent is the twinning of the fiction of our free will with our actual forced labor. Elevated in their airship above the millions who were thrown in Europe’s mass grave for the sake of profit are the Chumps of Chance, mascots of the promise of freewheeling movement along any axes, a whole story of humanity that is nothing but an inconvenience to the deterministic realities of the corporate state. Our amnesia about where we came from exists side by side with our consoling fictions, the stories we tell against the day when myths are all that remain of what mankind may have been or dreamed it could be.
--Drew Zimmerman (2024)