I’m on my third attempt at Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. I have never ventured much past page 100, but I blame my dissertatin on that. Free of such bonds, I am making a new effort, and I am struck by the role that history and science plays in the novel. I found this blog post, which goes much deeper into the book than I have, but it seems to be thinking the same sort of thoughts. Critics accuse Pynchon’s characters of being flat, and his books to full of trivial references that make his writing more a game than a novel… I think that so far, Against the Day is a fine answer to such complaints.
History IS a character for Pynchon, and his novels are about people who live in worlds that are so clearly larger than they can possibly understand. Antigone is about “being human amongst humans” and zooms into these very personal tragic stories. Pynchon never really zooms in. The omnipresence of light, history, culture, the vast, spectacular, incomprehensible universe pervade his stories. In The Crying of Lot 49, it is the dulling of our awareness of these things that generates the great anxiety of the novel. In as much as I have read in Against the Day, the chracters inhabit that which is missing from Lot 49. Pynchon — in his numerous referneces to real life works of art, scientific discoveries, historical figures, the world’s fair, random storytelling genres — is his own Tristero in this novel. I really enjoyed this passage on Aether from an early part of the novel (page 58 in hardcover).
the Aether has always been a religious question. Some don’t believe in it, some do, neither will convince the other, it’s all faith at the moment. Lord Salisbury said it was only a noun for the verb ‘to undulate.’ Sir Oliver Lodge defined it as ‘one continuous substance filling all space, which can vibrate light… be sheared into positive and negative electricity,’ and so on in a lengthy list, almost like the Apostle’s Creed…
…Mr. Rideout, we wander at the present moment through a sort of vorticalist twighlight, holding up the lantern of the Maxwell Field Equations and squinting to find our way.
All of this in the response to whether all the arguing over Aether was in any way important. But it also made me think of Steve Kroft’s questions on 60 Minutes as to whether the Large Hadron Collider is worth the money and attention.
A follow up query, if I may. My beloved Nashville, is it in “real America” or “fake America?” Think about it. The city votes Democratic, it has an outstanding symphony, Vanderbilt the best Starbucks I’ve ever been to (on 21st Avenue next to Mellow Mushroom) and a nice Opera season. It also has the hony-tonks, the UNDEFEATED TITANS, pro hockey, Music Row, elite golf and raquet clubs, and Cheekwood. I say, we let Mindy Smith begin the healing and call the whole thing off:
Can we please stop doing this urban/rural divide? For those too lazy to link to Yglesias, I have the Youtube clip below:
You know why I hate to hear stuff like that? Because I’m an elitist, which is to say that I worked hard in school (apparently the only place Protestants aren’t supposed to work hard). In the course of actually cracking open books, I noticed that such divides were significant factors in things like the Balkan Wars of the 1990’s. Such realizations cause me not to endorse such tactics like the one above due to my own stubborn ignorance. You see, I convinced myself in college that shelling children in cities in the name of family values was barbarous, and that I could not imagine how a society with such a wondrous pageantry of history and accomplishment as all of the people of the Balkans could inflict such deeds on itself. I foolishly thought America was beyond such things as Nationalism and populism, and so I comforted myself with that thought. To this day, I refuse to support leaders that do not live up to my vain, fictitious view of America as a country with values that are real enough that they can withstand serious intellectual and historical scrutiny. Luckily, I m one voter out of millions, so my arrogant desire to cling to such a ridiculous dream is not enough to determine the outcome of any substantial political decision in my society. More to the point, my worry that our politicians are increasingly playing with major currents in history that they do not understand and cannot control is no doubt symptomatic of my attachment to “fake America” – because in “real America” one makes history and lets the “pointy-heads” write about it later.
Posted by stevenmaloney 
Posted by stevenmaloney 
Posted by stevenmaloney 
