Against the Day

In mid-July 2006, a plot-synopsis signed by Pynchon himself appeared on Amazon.com's page for the novel, only to vanish a few days later. Readers who had noticed the synopsis re-posted it.[4] This disappearance provoked speculation on blogs and the PYNCHON-L mailing list about publicity stunts and viral marketing schemes. Shortly thereafter, Slate published a brief article revealing that the blurb's early appearance was a mistake on the part of the publisher, Penguin Press.[5] Associated Press indicated the title of the previously anonymous novel.[6]

1893 Chicago World's Fair

Pynchon's synopsis states that the novel's action takes place "between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the years just after World War I". "With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred." Pynchon promises "cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx", as well as "stupid songs" and "strange sexual practices".

The novel's setting

"moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York City, to London and Göttingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all."

Like several of Pynchon's earlier works, Against the Day includes both mathematicians and drug users. "As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them."

The synopsis concludes:

If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

The published jacket-flap of the book featured an edited-down version of this text, omitting the last three sentences, references to specific authorship (as well as misspelling Nikola Tesla's first name as "Nikolai"; Pynchon had previously spelled it correctly).[7]

• Lew Basnight, a "Psychical Detective" from Chicago
• Estrella Briggs, a young pregnant woman found in Nochecita (ATD, p. 200)
• The Chums of Chance (the crew of the skyship Inconvenience):
  • Miles Blundell, the handyman apprentice and jocular cook, who is gifted with mysterious visions and seemingly extrasensory perception
  • Chick Counterfly, scientific officer and newest member of the crew
  • Lindsay Noseworth, second-in-command, "Master-At-Arms, in charge of discipline aboard the ship" (ATD, p. 4)
  • Pugnax, a dog rescued from a fight in Washington, D.C. by the Chums of Chance, he reads and can communicate with humans via "Rff-rff" sounds.
  • Randolph St. Cosmo, ship commander (ATD, p. 3)
  • Darby Suckling, "baby" of the crew, (ATD, p. 3) and later legal-officer of the ship.
• Ruperta Chirpingden-Groin, aristocratic English traveler
• Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who appears as a troublemaking young man attending the Chicago World's Fair
• Sloat Fresno, one of the murderers of Webb Traverse, along with Deuce Kindred
• Rao V. Ganeshi, academic from India
• Stilton Gaspereaux, "a scholarly adventurer in the Inner Asian tradition of Sven Hedin."
• Yashmeen Halfcourt, "the stunningly beautiful ward of a British diplomat in Central Asia",[9] and "polymorphous mathematical prodigy",[10] ward of the T.W.I.T., entrusted to the group by her adopted father, Colonel Halfcourt
• Kieselguhr Kid, freedom-fighter/terrorist. A gun fighter who uses dynamite instead of guns in direct action against the mine owners (the original recipe for dynamite involved mixing nitroglycerin with Kieselguhr — porous dirt containing silica)
• Deuce Kindred, one of the murderers of Webb Traverse, along with Sloat Fresno
• Cyprian Latewood, "a homosexual twit possibly modeled on Evelyn Waugh's Sebastian Flyte"[11]
• Al Mar-Faud, a minor character who mispronounces his Rs as Ws (rhotacism) (homonym for Elmer Fudd of Bugs Bunny fame)
• Mouffette, the name of a papillon lap-dog (mouffette in French = "skunk")
• Igor Padzhitnoff, Russian captain of the airship Bol'shaia Igra and member of the Tovarishchi Slutchainyi (the Russian counterpart to the Chums of Chance)
• Hunter Penhallow, son of Constance Penhallow who goes to the U.S. with the Vormance expedition
• Professor Renfrew, British professor with a bitter personal rivalry with one Professor Werfner ("Renfrew" spelled backwards)
• The Rideouts:
  • Dahlia (or "Dally") Rideout, Merle Rideout's (adoptive) daughter
  • Erlys Rideout, Merle Rideout's ex-wife, who has run off with Luca Zombini, a magician
  • Merle Rideout, an itinerant photographer and scientific inventor
• Captain Sands, inspector in London
• Lionel Swome, T.W.I.T. (see below)
• Nikola Tesla, the celebrated Serbian inventor and investigator of electrical phenomena, rival of Thomas Edison
• The (traversing) Traverses:
  • Frank Traverse, an engineer; son of Webb and brother of Reef, Kit and Lake
  • Kit Traverse, youngest son of Webb and brother of Frank, Reef and Lake; he studies mathematics at Yale (and studies with the physicist Willard Gibbs, whose work is preparing the way for 20th-century thermodynamics) and at Göttingen
  • Lake Traverse, daughter of Webb and sister of Frank, Reef, and Kit. Became Lake Kindred after marrying Deuce Kindred.
  • Mayva Traverse, wife of Webb and mother of his children
  • Reef Traverse, a cardsharp; son of Webb and brother of Frank, Kit and Lake
  • Webb Traverse, "a turn-of-the-century ... miner"[11] and "an anarchist familiar with dynamite, and he might or might not be the elusive mad bomber who destroys railroad bridges and other mine property";[9] father of Frank, Reef, Kit and Lake; killed by Sloat Fresno and Deuce Kindred
• Trespassers, "who appear to be dead people from the future"[9]
• Miss Umeki Tsurigane, a Quaternion theorist who was educated at the Imperial University of Japan (ATD, p. 531)
• Professor Heino Vanderjuice of Yale University, associate of the Chums of Chance,
• The (bad) Vibes:
  • Colfax Vibe
  • Cragmont Vibe
  • Dittany Vibe
  • Edwarda Vibe, née Beef,
  • Fleetwood Vibe
  • Scarsdale Vibe, "the most ruthless of the mine owners"[9]
  • R. Wilshire Vibe, a theater producer and Scarsdale's brother
• Foley Walker, Scarsdale Vibe's special assistant, who took Scarsdale's place in the army during the American Civil War
• Professor Werfner, German professor with a bitter personal rivalry with one Professor Renfrew ("Werfner" spelled backwards)
• Luca Zombini, a travelling magician.
  • Erlys Rideout, his wife, Merle Rideout's ex-wife, and Dahlia's mother.
  • Cici, Dominic, Nunzio, his sons.
  • Bria, Concetta, Lucia, his daughters.

• Chums of Chance, Five "cheerful young balloonists who drop into the story at critical moments and who seem capable of time travel",[9] all aboard the skyship Inconvenience
• T.W.I.T., True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys (T.W.I.T.), "a covert London group fighting the powers of darkness".[12]

"Pynchon makes much of a variety of calcite called Iceland spar, valued for its optical quality of double refraction; in Pynchonland, a magician can use it to split one person into two, who then wander off to lead their own lives", Seligman writes.[11]

The doubling effect of Iceland spar. Compare with the book's cover image above.

Sam Leith identifies the same theme:

"The book is shot through with doubling, or surrogacy. There are the palindromic rival scientists Renfrew and Werfner. [...] Events on one side of the world have an occult influence on those on the other. 'Double refraction' through a particular sort of crystal allows you to turn silver into gold. Mirrors are to be regarded with, at least, suspicion. It gets more complicated, and sillier. We're introduced to the notion of 'bilocation' — where characters appear in two places at once; much like particles in quantum physics — and, later, to that of 'co-consciousness', where someone's own mind somehow bifurcates. 'He wondered if he could be his own ghost,' Pynchon writes of one character."[14]

Although the novel directly portrays the First Balkan War (1912–1913) and the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), it dispatches World War I after a few pages. But during most of the book the Great War "looms as an approaching catastrophe", according to Seligman.[11] This theme might form part of what Menand describes above as the struggle between power-pursuers and power-transcenders.

Light becomes a "preoccupation [...] to which everything, finally, returns", according to reviewer Sam Leith.[14]

Light appears as a religious symbol or element and as a scientific phenomenon, as Peter Keouge, in his Boston Phoenix review[12] points out:

Here is where some familiarity with pre-Einsteinian theories of light (the discredited concept of Æther is vindicated) and mathematical controversies around the turn of the last century pays off. Kit, for example is a Vectorist. He will later get cozy with Yashmeen, herself an exotic orphan. She's a Quarternionist (cf. William Rowan Hamilton's formula i² = j² = k² = ijk = -1, which somehow, I suspect, relates to the structure of the book, each term in the equation applicable to each of the novel's five sections) obsessed with the Zeta function of G.F.B. Riemann. In addition, she has ties to the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys (T.W.I.T.), a covert London group fighting the powers of darkness through Pythagorean beliefs and the tarot.

In his Bloomberg News review, Craig Seligman portrays the book as "overstuffed with wonders" often related to light, including a luminous Mexican beetle and the Tunguska Event of 1908 that leaves the native reindeer soaring and "stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area" (reminiscent of the luminescence of a certain fictional reindeer). "[T]he novel is full of images of light, like those beetles and those noses (and the title)", Seligman reports.[11]

Reviewer Tom Leclair notes light in various flashy appearances:

God said, 'Let there be light'; Against the Day collects ways our ancestors attempted to track light back to its source and replaced religion with alternative lights. There is the light of relativity, the odd light of electromagnetic storms, the light of the mysterious Tunguska event of 1908, when a meteorite struck Siberia or God announced a coming apocalypse. [...] the dynamite flash, the diffracted light of Iceland spar, the reflected light of magicians' mirrors, the 'light writing' of photography and movies, the cities' new electric lighting that makes the heavens invisible at night.[1]

Scott McLemee sees connections between light, space-time and politics:[15]

The "mythology" governing Pynchon's novel (enriching it, complicating it, and giving the untutored reader a headache) involves the relationship between the nature of light and the structure of space-time. It's an effort, perhaps, to imagine something beyond our familiar world, in which "progress" has meant a growing capacity to dominate and to kill.

"Political space has its neutral ground," says another character in what may be the definitive passage of the novel. "But does Time? is there such a thing as the neutral hour? one that goes neither forward nor back? is that too much to hope?" (Or as Joyce has Stephen Dedalus say in "Ulysses": "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.")

It remains unclear whether Pynchon himself regards such escape or transcendence as really possible.

Some reviewers complain that Pynchon's characters have little emotional depth and therefore don't excite the sympathy of the reader. For example, Laura Miller in Salon.com:

Time doesn't exist, but it crushes us anyway; everyone could see World War I coming, but no one could stop it — those are two weighty paradoxes that hover over the action in "Against the Day" without truly engaging with it. This is the stuff of tragedy, but since the people it sort of happens to are flimsy constructions, we don't experience it as tragic. We just watch Pynchon point to it like bystanders watching the Chums of Chance's airship float by overhead.[17]

New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani writes of the characterizations: "[B]ecause these people are so flimsily delineated, their efforts to connect feel merely sentimental and contrived."[18]

In some of the reviews to his previous works, Pynchon had been called a cold, lapidary writer. Poet L. E. Sissman, from The New Yorker, instead praised and defended him, saying

I do not find him to be one. Though his characters are not developed along conventional lines, they do, in their recalcitrant human oddity, live, and they do eventually touch the reader more than he at first thinks they will.[19]

As a complement to Miller's criticism about tragedy, Adam Kirsch sees comedy as undercut as well, although parody remains:

The gaudy names Mr. Pynchon gives his characters are like pink slips, announcing their dismissal from the realm of human sympathy and concern. This contraction of the novel's scope makes impossible any genuine comedy, which depends on the observation of real human beings and their insurmountable, forgivable weaknesses. What replaces it is parody, whose target is language itself, and which operates by short-circuiting the discourses we usually take for granted. And it is as parody — in fact, a whole album of parodies — that Against the Day is most enjoyable.[20]