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ALIENS DON'T SUCK!
edizione straordinaria - novembre 2008 |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press |
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Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, 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.
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.
The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.
As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an 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.
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. 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.
--Thomas Pynchon |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press |
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Knotty, paunchy, nutty, raunchy, Pynchon’s first novel since Mason & Dixon (1997) reads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader’s, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again. Yet just when his recurring themes threaten to become tics, this perennial Nobel bridesmaid engineers another never-before-seen phrase, or effect, and all but the most churlish resistance collapses.
It all begins in 1893, with an intrepid crew of young balloonists whose storybook adventures will bookend, interrupt and sometimes even be read by, scores of at least somewhat more realistic characters over the next 30 years. Chief among these figures are Colorado anarchist Webb Traverse and his children: Kit, a Yale- and Göttingen-educated mathematician; Frank, an engineer who joins the Mexican revolution; Reef, a cardsharp turned outlaw bomber who lands in a perversely tender ménage à trois; and daughter Lake, another Pynchon heroine with a weakness for the absolute wrong man.
Psychological truth keeps pace with phantasmagorical invention throughout. In a Belgian interlude recalling Pynchon’s incomparable Gravity’s Rainbow, a refugee from the future conjures a horrific vision of the trench warfare to come: “League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted thousands.” This, scant pages after Kit nearly drowns in mayonnaise at the Regional Mayonnaise Works in West Flanders. Behind it all, linking these tonally divergent subplots and the book’s cavalcade of characters, is a shared premonition of the blood-drenched doomsday just about to break above their heads.
Ever sympathetic to the weak over the strong, the comradely over the combine (and ever wary of false dichotomies), Pynchon’s own aesthetic sometimes works against him. Despite himself, he’ll reach for the portentous dream sequence, the exquisitely stage-managed weather, some perhaps not entirely digested historical research, the “invisible,” the “unmappable”—when just as often it’s the overlooked detail, the “scrawl of scarlet creeper on a bone-white wall,” a bed partner’s “full rangy nakedness and glow” that leaves a reader gutshot with wonder.
Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book’s jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding.
Publishers Weekly -- Oct/24/2006 |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press |
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History and its discontents figure as prominently in Thomas Pynchon’s formidably brainy novels as do most of the sciences and pseudo-sciences. He entered our consciousness as a learned hipster almost immediately, in the early story “Entropy,” a phlegmatic consideration of the heat death of the universe, and in the ironic epic V (1963), a tale of parallel searches for a mysterious woman whose despairing momentum is mitigated by the stoical mantra “Keep cool, but care.”
The combination of a rationalist’s fatalism with a romantic’s reverence for human creativity and resilience took brilliant form in a trim fable of conspiracy and disinformation linked to an “underground” postal system (The Crying of Lot 49, 1965); the massive Melvillean Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), in which the science of modern warfare walks arm in arm with Armageddon; and the fetching fictional contrast between two legendary surveyors’ efforts to map a new world and the redirection of scientific and technical innovations to serve agendas of conquest and exploitation (Mason & Dixon, 1997).
Pynchon now blends the yeasty period style of his most recent novel with the encyclopedic chutzpah of Gravity’s Rainbow as he reaches back to the late-19th century and the origins of the first global götter-dämmerung to be designated a World War. Its array of parallel plots begins in the air, aboard a “hydrogen skyship” carrying an aeronautics club, the Chums of Chance (whose adventures inspire a series of dime novels), toward Chicago and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The image of adventurous progress thus created is then systematically dismantled by a series of ventures into increasingly dangerous territories. Colorado miner Weeb Traverse opposes perceived injustice with acts of anarchy (which soon looms as the very Spirit of the Age), initiating a pattern of exile and antagonism that will engulf all his loved ones. Weeb’s son Kit, Yale-educated and severed from his roots, travels compulsively, moving across continents and through successive zones of conflict, into the heart of his deepest longings and fears.
Dozens of other characters—adventurers, spies, research scientists, disoriented celebrities and dedicated agents of the 20th century’s culture of death—meet, recombine and redefine themselves. Revolutions break out in Russia and Mexico; ultimate weapons are built and deployed; and natural disasters (such as the 1908 explosion of a comet above the Siberian wasteland) eerily increase and multiply.
Pynchon is both wordsmith and world-smith. He’s Dickens with degrees in chemistry and mathematics, Dostoevsky with a fondness for dumb jokes and awful puns, Faulkner with an even more pronounced apocalyptic imagination. Master of the knowledge he has acquired and the worlds he surveys, he challenges us to envision with him an opaque and threatening future, while mourning perversions of humanity’s accomplishments and aspirations, fearing the worst, and laughing all the way.
—Bruce Allen
Kirkus Reviews, Nov.3, 2006 |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press |
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Ordinary novelists have readers. Thomas Pynchon has decoders. Anyone who has ventured into the manic densities of Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon knows the drill. You comb through his superabundance of historical data and scientific arcana. You adjust your nerve endings to operate at his mad frequencies. Day after day you resume the steep ascent of his achievement and just hope to make camp before nightfall.
In the late 1960s I encountered Pynchon's first novel, V. Duly enchanted, I swore that eventually I would decipher every one of his enigmas. That Pynchon himself was one of them, that he never gave interviews or permitted his photograph to be published, only made him more irresistible. To this day his only public "appearances" have been two guest spots on The Simpsons. Both times he was wearing a bag over his head.
Nearly four decades and many rereadings later, I know better than to suppose that anyone fully penetrates Pynchon's intentions, not in V., not in his short masterpiece The Crying of Lot 49 and certainly not in his mammoth new book, Against the Day (Penguin; 1,085 pages). Of course this makes me not just a Pynchon reader but practically a Pynchon character, another of his comically put-upon quest figures who journey into mysteries that engulf them. Even that is part of Pynchon's grand scheme, which is to make the experience of reading his work a demonstration of his most forceful intuition, or one of them: that history is a monstrously deceptive puzzle and the world is a shower of clues, most of them false.
At 3 lbs. 6 oz., Against the Day weighs just 3 oz. less than my toaster. But my toaster doesn't offer the tantalizing music of Pynchon's voice, with its shifts from comic shtick to heartbroken threnody, its mordant Faulkneresque interludes, its gusts of lyric melancholy blown in by way of F. Scott Fitzgerald, its ecstatic perorations from Jack Kerouac. And my toaster will never lay before me a vision of a world in which technology is stripping away all the ancient, vital magic while shepherding mankind to the brink of destruction. On the other hand, my toaster makes toast, and nothing quite so graspable ever pops out of this predictably bewitching, predictably bewildering book.
Characters? Oh, there are lots of characters. Easily more than 100 flit in and out of the madly proliferating plotlines. And those plots? In a novel that begins at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and concludes in the aftermath of World War I, one that passes through Colorado, Venice, London, Vienna, Mexico, central Asia, the upper atmosphere and the fourth dimension, there are frequent stretches where a new plot seems to start every paragraph or two. The book opens with the Chums of Chance, a quarrelsome brotherhood of operatives that pops up throughout the novel, circumnavigating the globe in a giant dirigible, on missions ordered by mysterious higher authorities. But soon enough, Pynchon pursues new story lines involving Webb Traverse, an anarchist bomber in Colorado; his three sons Reef, Frank and Kit; and the various women in their lives. When Webb dies at the hands of gunslingers in the pay of Scarsdale Vibe, a ruthless mogul, his sons pledge to avenge his murder, but the project gets complicated. For one thing, their sister Lake ends up married to one of the killers. For another, brother Kit becomes the beneficiary of Vibe's calculating generosity, studying higher mathematics at the old man's expense in Göttingen, Germany, a hotbed of mathematical theorizing--assuming hotbed and mathematical can be used in the same sentence.
This is a Pynchon novel, so of course they can. In Göttingen, Kit will be dazzled by Yashmeen Halfcourt, a beautiful mathematician with mystical leanings. Yashmeen, meanwhile, is caught up in the theoretical wars between vector analysts and the champions of Quaternions, each with their visions of which was more real--time or space. This last controversy is somehow central to Pynchon's preoccupations with time travel, alternate realities and a whole spectrum of options for escaping a world headed into the calamities of World War I and beyond. Lacking a degree in advanced math, I'm still hard pressed to say just how.
More than in any of Pynchon's previous books, just what it all means is a problem in Against the Day, where plots and ideas and fantastic developments pile up in exhausting profusion. You've been vouchsafed once again his vision of a bright, beleaguered world, this one with more than its share of resemblances to our realities post--Sept. 11. With another few decades of reading and decoding, you may even get the work's largest intentions to snap into focus. Or maybe not. For all its brilliant passages, this is the book that makes you wonder whether even Pynchon knows what lies behind all those veils he's always urging us to part. But wouldn't you know it? Even when he jumps the shark, he does it with an agility that can take your breath away.
-- Richard Lacayo
TIME, Nov. 12, 2006 |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press |
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Thomas Pynchon is known as the most seductively difficult of living novelists. He has the kind of following that only a bearer of esoteric knowledge can attract — not just readers, but disciples, who find in books such as "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973) a cranky, erudite scripture for our time. Such fans love to apply their homemade hermeneutics to the mysteries with which Mr. Pynchon's novels are carefully seeded. Who or what is V., the multivalent object of desire in "V." (1963)? Who is behind the Tristero, the ancient conspiracy that ensnares Oedipa Maas in "The Crying of Lot 49" (1966)? Precisely because there are no final answers to these questions, they admit endless interpretation. For Mr. Pynchon, indeed, our world is nothing but a theater of frustrated interpretations, of meanings deferred and clues undeciphered. Yet he always holds out the hope that somehow, to a chosen few in an indefinite future, the mystery will be revealed.
After reading "Against the Day" (Penguin Press, 1,085 pages, $35), however, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Mr. Pynchon's difficulty is really just the costume worn by his simplicity. The complexity of his novels, and of this eagerly awaited sixth novel in particular, is really a matter of simple multiplicity: They are stuffed to bursting with oddities, so that the reader moves through them at the halting pace of a rubbernecker. In "Against the Day," which spans the quarter-century between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the end of World War I, Mr. Pynchon dispenses his oddities in double fistfuls. We get a hot-air balloon crewed by boy adventurers, a dynamite-toting anarchist, a mysterious fourth dimension, a crystal lens that splits time, a ship that can sail through sand, the legendary Tibetan kingdom of Shambhala — and that doesn't even begin to exhaust the list.
The list — there is the glory, and the downfall, of Mr. Pynchon's fiction. The author himself, in the gnomic blurb he wrote for "Against the Day," advertised it with a giant list: "The sizable cast of characters," he promised like a sideshow barker, "includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents," and on and on. And the novel keeps that promise, to a fault. It reads like a list, at times like a list of lists — for Mr. Pynchon is never unwilling to interrupt the plot, such as it is, with a bravura catalog. Here is an example taken almost at random, a description of a jury-rigged laboratory:
The shelves and bench-tops were crowded with volt-ammeters, rheostats, transformers, arc lamps whole and in pieces, half-used carbons, calcium burners, Oxone tablets, high-tension magnetos, alternators store-bought and home-made, vibrator coils, cut-outs and interruptors, worm drives, Nicol prisms, generating valves, glassblowing torches, Navy surplus Thalofide cells, brand-new Aeolight tubes freshly fallen from the delivery truck, British Blattnerphone components and tons of other stuff Chick had never recalled seeing before.
How you feel about a passage like this is a good indicator of how you will feel about "Against the Day," and about Mr. Pynchon's fiction in general. If you are dazzled by the sheer number of odd items Mr. Pynchon accumulates here, by the range of his knowledge and curiosity, you will be still more dazzled by the unstoppable proliferation of the novel, which adds new characters, new plots, and new settings until the very last of its 1,100 pages. Mr. Pynchon writes as if his pleasure in trundling the hoop of the novel from place to place were unlimited, and as if the reader could not help but share it.
As a result, trying to summarize the plot of "Against the Day" is pointless, and gives no real sense of what the book is like to read. Reduced to its absolute skeleton, one might call it the tale of the four children of Webb Traverse, a bomb-throwing Western anarchist, who is assassinated by outlaws in the pay of the evil plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Whether and how to avenge Webb's death is the question that propels his children through the novel: Frank, a gunslinger who joins the Mexican Revolution; Reef, who ends up in decadent, spy-riddled Eastern Europe; Lake, the only daughter, who perversely marries her father's murderer; and above all Kit, who goes to Yale and enters the world of advanced mathematics, from which much of the novel's dippy mysticism is drawn. And that is not to mention the Chums of Chance, as the balloon-riding juvenile heroes call themselves; or Yashmeen Halfcourt, the math genius pursued by a Tarot-card-obsessed organization named T.W.I.T.; or the hundreds of other characters and historical events that "Against the Day" assimilates as it grows omnidirectionally, like an amoeba.
If, on the other hand, you find that Mr. Pynchon's catalog of lab instruments adds up to less than the sum of its parts; if the sheer feat of touching on every major historical event from 1893 to 1918 seems sterile in its virtuosity; if the kind of ingenuity manifested in Mr. Pynchon's famously weird character names (in the new book we meet Professor Vanderjuice, Alonzo Meatman, Ewball Oust, Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin) strikes you as childish, and eventually sets your teeth on edge — then you will experience "Against the Day" as a neon-lit desert, full of distractions but devoid of sustenance.
For the writer who lives by the list must die by the list, and Mr. Pynchon, in pushing the form to its limits and beyond, demonstrates what a list-like novel cannot do. Multiplicity, it turns out, is not the same thing as complexity: Complexity requires syntax, and syntax is just what the maker of lists must forswear. Human meanings — psychological, social, spiritual — require other kinds of structure than the infinitely repeated "and" of the shaggy-dog story. That is why Mr. Pynchon's meanings, in "Against the Day" as in his better books, are finally inhuman, Manichean, utopian, and dystopian. He believes in conspiracies, not histories, including the individual histories that the novel was invented to tell.
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. Mr. Pynchon takes on some of the distinctive genres of his chosen period and reduces them to absurdity: the Oxford novel (Yashmeen Halfcourt is a version of Zuleika Dobson), the science-fiction epics of Jules Verne, the boys' adventure serial, the cowboy dime-novel.
Yet "Against the Day," of course, has higher ambitions than parody. It is also a novel about political violence, set during a period when Anarchist terrorism filled the headlines the way Islamist terrorism does today. The story takes place during the run-up to World War I, and all the characters are haunted by omens of the catastrophe to come. Those hauntings are themselves clearly haunted by Mr. Pynchon's memory of the attacks of September 11, 2001, which appear in the novel in a powerfully distorted, dream-like form:
Just at the peak of the evening rushhour, electric power failed everywhere throughout the city, and as the gas-mains began to ignite and the thousand local winds, distinct at every street-corner, to confound prediction, cobblestones erupted skyward, to descend blocks away in seldom observed yet beautiful patterns ...The noise would be horrific and unrelenting, as it grew clear even to the willfully careless that there was no refuge.
"Against the Day," then, will inevitably be read as Mr. Pynchon's contribution to the genre of post-September 11 fiction. Yet by comparison with the other major novelists who have addressed this theme, he displays a surpassingly crude moral imagination. This is a novel, after all, in which most of the heroes are proud terrorists, committed on principle to murdering plutocrats like Scarsdale Vibe. Writing about such characters in our own age of terror, one might expect Mr. Pynchon to have given some thought to the rights and wrongs of political violence.
In fact, however, his attitude towards violence is childishly sentimental, and ruthless in a way only possible to a writer whose imagination has never dwelt among actual human beings. Mr. Pynchon's heroes (the poor, the workers, Anarchists) assassinate and blow up his villains (mine owners, Pinkerton thugs, the bourgeoisie) with no more qualms than the Road Runner has about dropping an anvil on the Coyote. In the novel as in the cartoon, good and evil are unproblematic, death is unreal, and sheer activity takes the place of human motive. The silliness of "Against the Day" about the very subjects where we are most urgently in quest of wisdom proves that, whatever he once was, Thomas Pynchon is no longer the novelist we need.
THE SUN, New York
November 15, 2006 |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press |
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Writing in the early 1920s about a new book by James Joyce called "Ulysses," T.S. Eliot zeroed in on the structure beneath its sprawl: the sustained parallel between an ancient myth (the wanderings of Odysseus) and a contemporary story (a day in the life of an advertising salesman). This was a narrative experiment, certainly. But Eliot considered it a lot more than that.
"It has," the poet wrote, "the importance of a scientific discovery." It was decisive for the future of literature, just as Einstein's work was for physics. The world had changed, and so many established structures had collapsed that sophisticated readers now felt, as Eliot put it, "the need for something stricter" than anything available from the old-fashioned novel. Returning to myth, then, was "simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."
"Against the Day," the new novel by Thomas Pynchon, opens during the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 - and it closes, not so coincidentally, at just about the time Eliot was penning those words. Few contemporary American authors are following up on the hint that myth provides an expressway to deep structure and meaning. Pynchon's great and perplexing innovation as a novelist has been to go one step beyond that technique.
In lieu of parallels between the daylit realms of everyday life and the timeless, invisible world of gods and heroes, Pynchon's novels constantly point toward another kind of higher-order reality: the domains of information theory, mathematical physics, cosmology. It isn't that his characters recite introductory lectures. (That, too, sometimes; but not very often.)
Instead, his fiction is shaped at its deepest levels by the basic concepts of these fields, which are, for Pynchon, absolutely essential to understanding the history and inner logic of the way we live now. All of this places considerable demands upon the attention of a reader - but even more, perhaps, on the lives of his characters, who constantly threaten to turn into allegorical emblems or algebraic cyphers.
To anyone familiar with "Gravity's Rainbow" or "The Crying of Lot 49," the foregoing may seem like a statement of the obvious. But a responsible reviewer needs to spell it out, on the odd chance that some reader will make a first venture into the world of Pynchon via "Against the Day" - a novel as exhilarating, tiresome, unnerving and exhausting as all the others put together.
It is brilliant. It is oblique, and in some ways obtuse. Very few people will finish it. I read the whole thing in a few days, which is not an experience to be recommended. (Sometime around page 800, it felt as if my brain were trying to claw its way out of my skull.) You should expect to do some homework. It certainly helps to keep E.T. Bell's classic "Men of Mathematics" close at hand, in case references to William Hamilton's quaternions or Georg Riemann's zeta function do not produce an immediate glimmer of recognition.
Trying to summarize any Pynchon plot is a fool's errand. It would be fair to describe "Against the Day" as a cross between: 1. a revisionist Western containing bomb-throwing anarchists and pre-Einsteinian physics; and 2. an Edwardian science-fiction novel involving Balkan politics and bisexual romance.
At the simplest level, it is a family saga - a story about the killing of Webb Traverse, a Colorado miner who engages in class struggle against Gilded Age capitalism by blowing up railroads with dynamite. The plutocracy strikes back, sending out a pair of gunslingers to torture and execute him.
Webb's four children pursue various and intersecting courses across the globe - following a complicated pattern that yields both revenge against their father's killers and accommodation with the capitalist system he fought. Their itineraries place them within grids of communication and transportation that are expanding throughout the final decade of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th. The networks enabling connection and exchange among people also function as part of a system of domination that is moving steadily toward the First World War.
Meanwhile (in a nod to H.G. Wells) there are signs that time-travelers are arriving as refugees from a future in which all the resources have run out. And then there are the Chums of Chance: a crew orbiting the world as part of an international movement of philanthropic balloonists. The Chums are sort of like the anarchists, except they don't blow anything up.
All of this unfolds (or, more accurately, folds in upon itself) as part of a collage of shaggy-dog stories involving British occult societies, the "God-building" faction of the Bolsheviks, and the Michelson-Morley experiment (which disproved the idea that there is a cosmic "aether" in which light moves as a wave).
If this thumbnail sketch makes "Against the Day" sound like an edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica undergoing a manic episode - well, that is perhaps understandable. What drives a committed reader of Pynchon is the hope (frequently renewed, constantly frustrated) that the parts must somehow lock, so as to form a whole.
But that yearning is also something his fiction tries to question. It is a desire for control. And Pynchon is on the side of the anarchists. "Central governments," one of them says in a scene occurring shortly before Europe plunges into hell in 1914, "were never designed for peace. Their structure is line and staff, the same as an army. The national idea depends on war." And vice versa, of course.
What is the alternative? In a way, there is none: "The world came to an end in 1914," as another character says in the final few pages. "Like the mindless dead, who don't know they're dead, we are as little aware of having been in Hell ever since that terrible August." One of the strangest things about "Against the Day" as a historical novel is that it scarcely tries to represent the First World War itself. (It's as if that were a traumatic reality that the book is constantly approaching and avoiding - in part, through its loquacity on a hundred other matters.) By the end, it feels as if we were doomed to repeat the experience ad infinitum.
But that is not the only possible reading. 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 is not at all clear whether Pynchon himself thinks such escape or transcendence is really possible. Instead of an answer, we have the novel itself, serving as a kind of time machine - one covered with intricate circuits, emitting peculiar noises and a vaguely hypnotic glow.
--SCOTT McLEMEE
Newsday. November 19, 2006 |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press |
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Nearly 50 years into the Thomas Pynchon era, it's our failing if we don't understand the author's manner and method, which are inseparable from the artifacts he has produced. Despite the legendary slowness of his process, and his even more legendary "reclusiveness," Pynchon has delivered seven books, including four massive novels. Yet is there another contemporary "master" whose career is more routinely subjected to reassessment with each new work?
Pynchon, of course, has brought a lot of this upon himself. Though his fiction helped to define the very idea of literary postmodernism, the best and most concise adjective to define it is still the tautological "Pynchonesque"; his books remain leading examples of the sort of novel Henry James referred to, half a century before postmodernism, as a "loose, baggy monster." Though his work both recalls and anticipates that of his contemporaries playing in the same ballpark — William Gaddis, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joseph McElroy, Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace, for example — there is no team to which he belongs. His careful (or haphazard, if you like) mix of confidently asserted scientific flimflam, stunningly serene description, madcap situational farce, peculiarly compelling but disconcertingly intermittent plotting, polymorphic sexual perversity, rat-a-tat dialogue, witheringly pessimistic analyses of power, extended parodic forms and metafictional winks has never centered on any particular idea about how a novel ought to work. Rather, it has accommodated all the things a novel can contain. One is reminded of Fibber McGee's overstuffed closet on the old radio program, which disgorged the entire contents of NBC's sound effects library when opened. A Pynchon work, then, automatically becomes the focus of those who lament excess, cleverness, self-indulgence, difficulty and other apparent literary sins, whose ideal novel is lean, well-plotted, linear and related from a single point of view.
"Against the Day," Pynchon's first novel in nearly a decade, will give such critics plenty to complain about. "[N]ews travels at queer velocities and not usually even in straight lines," one character observes, and that seems a fitting rubric for the Byzantine workings of this book. Opening in 1893 at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition — organized to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' expedition to the New World — it is, at just under 1,100 pages, Pynchon's longest effort yet.
With its displays of new technology, its audacious assertion of America's preeminence as an urban society and its ratification of the emerging consumer culture and the capitalist lords who would supply it, the Columbian Exposition took place a little more than 20 years before the beginning of World War I, at which time all of the marvelous ideas on exhibit were utilized for the making of war to an unprecedented degree. This eventuality looms like a gigantic thundercloud throughout most of "Against the Day," and although Pynchon doesn't suggest that the world of 1893 was a more innocent one, he rather ingeniously channels its optimism by kick-starting the novel with a sustained, and hilariously absurd, parody of "boy's-book" writing that introduces the Chums of Chance, a cheerily ingenuous group of youthful balloonists and adventurers that seems to exist simultaneously in the realm of popular literature and in the world at large. They act out the codes of a waning era, although as gentlemanly and clean cut as they are, they're charged at the fair, in a bit of dark foreshadowing, with counterterrorist duties. Indeed, fear of anarchists and trade unionists — often the same thing here — is as rampantly indiscriminate in this world as fear of terrorists is in ours.
The book proceeds in a pass-the-baton manner, with one character or plot line depositing the narrative in the lap of the next, advancing in leaps and bounds that cumulatively span 30-odd years. Many of these episodes are linked by MacGuffins — a favorite Pynchon strategy — including, in this instance, decades-long searches for an unbelievably powerful weapon, possibly of extraterrestrial origin; the key to time travel; the secret of "bilocation," or the ability to be in two locations at once; and the lost city of Shambhala. Typical of Pynchon, the main players unwittingly stumble across or experience each of these things while searching for something else.
If world disaster hangs over the book's horizon, at its center is the story of Webb Traverse. A Colorado silver mine worker and anarchist saboteur, his skills in the second category have marked him for elimination by Scarsdale Vibe, the oligarch for whom the mine is but one aspect of the hydra-headed group of interests he controls. When Webb is murdered, his family convulses — especially his children, who spin off on diverse meandering courses either to avenge the death or reconcile themselves as best they can to their complicity in it. One son, Kit, is a gifted mathematician who accepts a deal with the devil by allowing Vibe to finance his education at Yale; another, Reef, is a gunfighter and gambler who takes up his father's subversive work. Frank, an engineer, becomes involved in various revolutionary spasms in Mexico as a guerrilla and a war profiteer, while Webb's daughter, Lake, ultimately falls in love with and marries the man who killed her father.
The siblings' wanderings take us from the American West to Mexico, London, the European continent, Asia and beyond. They cross paths with outlaws, revolutionaries, mysterious women, detectives, mathematical cultists, supercilious government functionaries, suave secret agents and the malignant rogues who betray them, debauched nobility and even the Chums of Chance. (In one instance, Reef entertains himself by reading one of the novels in which they appear.) Occasionally, they run into each other. All of this enables Pynchon to scrutinize the various intellectual and technological changes that mark the start of the modern era, including genuine and imaginary advances in aviation, mass communication, electricity, explosives, metallurgy, mathematics and photography. As one might expect, he weighs in on some of the charlatanry and faddish thinking, religious and otherwise, that took hold as well.
There's much here that we've come to expect of Pynchon: silly songs; infantile jokes; Tourette's-like repetitions (the term "gutta-percha" is mentioned at least a dozen times); a sexually depraved set piece in which Reef is falsely seduced by an acquaintance's dog ("Reader," Pynchon demurs, "she bit him."); farcical disquisitions, including a formal speech on the history and social implications of mayonnaise; and a riff on JFK's idiomatic gaffe "Ich bin ein Berliner." The level of antic inventiveness can astonish, as can the breathtaking moments when Pynchon nails something as plainly beautiful as "[t]he unmistakable church-supper smell of American home cooking."
All the same, at times, the length and complexity of the book simply get the better of Pynchon. "Against the Day" isn't really a large, populous novel operating according to a homogeneous system but three or four novels yoked to a set of overarching themes. As startling and revelatory as Pynchon continues to be at his best, there are long stretches where his best doesn't make an appearance. It's hard to shake the occasional feeling that Pynchon is sifting among his dozens of players, searching for those who interest him or trying on situations until something clicks. (Throughout, he acts like the dutiful host, introducing you to every guest at the party, providing lengthy back stories for characters you suspect you will never encounter again.)
Certainly, some of the plots he stokes generate more light and heat than others, and when he changes direction abruptly, you begin to sense that Pynchon may be growing bored. The problem is that a book like this, with its hundreds of intersections, coincidences, correlations and parallels, has at least as big a turning radius as the Queen Mary 2. Because of that, a shift in direction requires either awkwardly gathering up all the characters and situations or offering a narrative ellipsis that leaves the reader baffled, at least until the spell is resumed.
But these are quibbles. Here's the point at which the book reviewer is supposed to say that the novel could have used the ministrations of a careful editor; that if only Pynchon had focused on one or two truly compelling story lines, then, ah, we might have a novel the reviewer could praise without reservation. Wrong reviewer. Although clearly this book was written without the forced-march pace of its reviewers in mind — probably the most satisfying interpretations of "Against the Day's" labyrinthine workings, its frequently glorious excesses, will come from its more leisurely critics or from percipient readers willing to devote a couple of months to its slow uncoiling — I'm willing to grant Pynchon the benefit of the doubt. A book this long that amazes even 50% of the time is amazing, and I suspect Pynchon would be the first to suggest we skip the boring parts.
Whatever the problems with sheer mechanical execution, Pynchon here offers his most successful and cogent articulation of the concerns that have haunted his work from the start. Throughout his career, he has described an arc that portrays the bloody origins and dubious consequences of modernity, reaching back to the 18th century with "Mason & Dixon," taking on the 1940s in "Gravity's Rainbow," the 1950s and 1960s in "V" and "The Crying of Lot 49" and the 1970s and 1980s in "Vineland." With "Against the Day," he comes full circle.
Above all, the book is concerned with the grasping fears that cause power to mobilize its forces: fears of change, fears of new mores and ideas, especially fears of new macroeconomic and social arrangements. It is concerned with the absolute ruthlessness with which power will act first to buy, then to compromise and finally to crush what threatens it. Since Pynchon focuses mostly on those who act in defiance of such power, the sense of dread and loathing that pursues them takes on a gloomy cast that shadows the book at even its most giddily coruscant.
Never before have the lineaments of the famous Pynchonesque "paranoia," in full effect, been more apparent. Pynchon makes mournfully clear his view that all of life, at least that which takes place within some sort of organized context, is rigged, that "brave men go down, treacherous ones do their work in the night, take their earthly rewards, and then ... live forever." His characters remain trapped, "incarcerated within the game," in the classic Pynchonian formulation, whether the action he depicts takes place in western Europe as World War I draws ever nearer or at the dwindling edge of the American frontier.
And yet, Pynchon discerns a kind of hope in that frontier — the geographic variety, the scientific variety and the kind that exists at the boundaries of propriety and behavior — positing it as the only psychic locale for resistance, for self-determination, for self-awareness itself. "The frontier ends and disconnection begins," one character observes, suggesting that to live so remotely from the consequences and origins of our lifestyle, from choice, robs us of the ability to recognize the forces that manipulate our lives. Even those who are on top of the game — the "owners," in the book's parlance — are braced by such self-awareness, as when Fleetwood Vibe, one of Scarsdale's sons, becomes "bedazzled at having been shown the secret backlands of wealth, and how sooner or later it depended on some act of murder." This hope enables Pynchon to end the book on a perhaps surprisingly upbeat chord — though not without a note of premonitory angst. As one character says prophetically of World War I's effect: "The national idea would be reborn. One trembles at the pestilent forms that would rise up afterward, from the swamp of the ruined Europe."
And so onward, to "Gravity's Rainbow."
--Christopher Sorrentino
Los Angeles Times , November 19, 2006 |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press |
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News of an upcoming Pynchon novel has the same effect on the literati that an unscheduled return of Halley's comet would have on astronomers. The Internet started humming with rumors last June, and, after five months of anticipation, the mammoth volume has arrived and is everything a Pynchon fan could hope for. Against the Day is his longest novel, his most international in scope -- from the mountains of Colorado to the deserts of Inner Asia -- and is perhaps his funniest.
All of Pynchon's signature moves are here: As early as page 15, someone picks up a ukulele and sings a silly song; documentary realism morphs into hallucination without warning; loud, tasteless clothing is worn with aplomb; a wide variety of drugs and stimulants is consumed, matched by a wide variety of sex acts, including bestiality (which results in the most hilarious scene in the novel); and Pynchon's old leftist, countercultural ideals shine on. Vast erudition and technical savvy are on display, mostly to do with math. The novel is spooked by the occult, enchanted with fairy tales and myth. And the writing is orchestral, in registers ranging from magniloquent set-pieces to sass and puns.
The wonderfully complex plot occupies about 30 years from 1893 to the 1920s, and chiefly concerns the adventures of three brothers (a stock fairy-tale motif) and their efforts to avenge the death of their father, a pro-union engineer named Webb Traverse who was killed by agents of the plutocracy that hijacked the United States after the Civil War. (A good warm-up exercise for reading this is the "Robber Barons and Rebels" chapter in Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States; Pynchon shares Zinn's populist viewpoint.) A related story line involves a photographer/inventor and his red-haired daughter, Dahlia, who, like the brothers, spends a lot of time in Europe during the tumultuous days before World War I. And hovering above them all are "The Chums of Chance," the plucky crew of the airship Inconvenience and the heroes of a series of boys' adventure novels.
The spirits presiding over this novel are the Marx brothers -- humorless Karl as well as Groucho and the boys. Traverse teaches his sons that "Labor produces all wealth. Wealth belongs to the producer thereof" (quoting from his union card), and parts of the novel dramatize the strikes and acts of "anarchy" of Colorado mineworkers in reaction to the inhuman treatment they received at the hands of greedy tycoons. But Pynchon doesn't let this become a dour proletarian tract because of his anarchist bent for doing in fiction what the Marx Brothers did on film. ("Duck Soup" is alluded to early on, and a young Groucho makes a cameo appearance under his real name.) Hence the silly songs, surrealistic pratfalls and Pynchon's tendency to undercut ominous pronouncements with wisecracks.
Though he covers the major events of this period in well-researched detail -- world politics, technological advances, sociological shifts, artistic experiments -- Pynchon is mostly concerned with how decent people of any era cope under repressive regimes, be they political, economic or religious. After drifting through Europe, the Traverse brothers and many other characters develop alternative families, communities, sexual arrangements and envision "the replacement of governments by other, more practical arrangements . . . when possible working across national boundaries." A countercultural, even utopian alternative is imagined, and the novel ends hopefully on that note, though whether such an alternative could exist outside the pages of a book is doubtful. "Fine idea while the opium supply lasts," a female character notes near the end, "but sooner or later plain personal old meanness gets in the way." That's what radical novels like his are for, Pynchon implies: to provide the kind of world our leaders would never allow, if only to inhabit for the week or two it takes to read this endlessly inventive work.
Pynchon fans will accept this gift from the author with gratitude, but I'm not so sure about mainstream readers. While Against the Day isn't as difficult as some of Pynchon's other novels, its multiple story lines test the memory, and some folks may be scared off by the heady discussions of vectors, Brownian movements, zeta functions and so forth, not to mention words and phrases from a dozen languages scattered throughout. Politically, this is blue-state fiction: It will not play well in Bush country. "Capitalist Christer Republicans" are a recurring target of contempt, and bourgeois values are portrayed as essentially totalitarian. As in his last historical novel, Mason & Dixon, Pynchon draws parallels between the past and present -- there's a brilliant evocation of the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan, where Pynchon lives -- and it's clear that the worldly author doesn't see much difference between the corruption of the late Gilded Age and that of our own era.
Not for everybody, perhaps, but those who climb aboard Pynchon's airship will have the ride of their lives. History lesson, mystical quest, utopian dream, experimental metafiction, Marxist melodrama, Marxian comedy -- Against the Day is all of these things and more.
Steven Moore
The Washington Post, November 19, 2006 |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press |
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Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.
The novel plays with themes that have animated the whole of Mr. Pynchon’s oeuvre: order versus chaos, fate versus freedom, paranoia versus nihilism. It boasts a sprawling, Dickensian cast with distinctly Pynchonian names: Fleetwood Vibe, Lindsay Noseworth, Clive Crouchmas. And it’s littered with puns, ditties, vaudevillesque turns and allusions to everything from old sci-fi movies to Kafka to Harry Potter. These authorial trademarks, however, are orchestrated in a weary and decidedly mechanical fashion, as the narrative bounces back and forth from America to Europe to Mexico, from Cripple Creek to Constantinople to Chihuahua.
There are some dazzling set pieces evoking the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a convocation of airship aficionados, but these passages are sandwiched between reams and reams of pointless, self-indulgent vamping that read like Exhibit A in what can only be called a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Dozens of characters are sent on mysterious (often half-baked) quests that intersect mysteriously with the mysterious quests of people they knew in another context, and dozens of portentous plot lines are portentously twined around even more portentous events: the appearance of a strange figure in the Arctic, a startling “heavenwide blast of light”, the hunt for something called a “Time-weapon” that might affect the fate of the globe.
Whereas Mr. Pynchon’s last novel, the stunning “Mason & Dixon,” demonstrated a new psychological depth, depicting its two heroes as full-fledged human beings, not merely as pawns in the author’s philosophical chess game, the people in “Against the Day” are little more than stick figure cartoons.
The narrative supposedly focuses around a miner turned anarchist bomber named Webb, who is killed by hit men hired by a fat cat capitalist, and the efforts of Webb’s children to avenge or come to terms with his death. But this tiny skeleton of a story (treated in the sketchiest, most perfunctory manner) does not provide a firm enough scaffold for the manifold digressions, asides and secondary, tertiary, quaternary, even quinary story lines that are piled on top of it, story lines involving everything from an aeronautics club featured in a series of boys’ adventure tales to an anarchist hunter with possibly paranormal powers to a femme fatale’s ménage a trois to the “Ragtime”-esque antics of the real-life scientist Nikola Tesla, who pioneered wireless communication.
To make matters worse, there are hordes of subsidiary characters, many of them no more than bit players with walk-on parts, who are memorable only for their whimsical names or peculiar professions. “Against the Day” seems to want to provide an encyclopedic look at a rainbow-wide spectrum of people going about their business in the years before World War I. In the course of more than 1,000 pages we meet anarchists and arms dealers and alchemists, capitalists and con men, as well as miners, magicians, mathematicians, motorcycle pilgrims and a mayonnaise expert. In addition there are inventors, spies, hit men, ukulele players, time travelers, reindeer herders, Siberian convicts, Yale undergrads, Cambridge scholars, Belgian nihilists, a psychic detective and at least one transvestite belly dancer.
No doubt the point of all these snapshots is to give the reader a sense of the myriad individuals who either played a part in the lead-up to the war or who will see their lives irrevocably altered by the fallout of that conflict. In seeing how these characters’ paths cross — through large, deliberately implausible heapings of coincidence — we are presumably meant to contemplate the roles that destiny and random chance play in people’s lives, to see how little control ordinary human beings have over their lives, how subject they are to the machinations of the world’s movers and shakers, to the larger workings of history, to the haphazard dice rolls of Lady Luck.
The problem is these characters are drawn in such a desultory manner that they might as well be plastic chess pieces, moved hither and yon by the author’s impervious, godlike hand. Sad to say, we really don’t give a damn what happens to them or their kith and kin. Especially when we are treated to pages and pages of them blathering on about things like “the four states associated with one of the four ‘dimensions’ of Minkowskian space-time” or their desire to “reach inside light and find its heart, touch its soul.”
Like “V.” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” this novel aspires to give us a sort of alternative history of the modern world, to probe the multiple layers of reality people can inhabit. And while its narrative is centered on events leading up to World War I, it reverberates with echoes of the world today. Terrorism (in the form of anarchist bombings) is perceived as a pervasive threat, and surveillance — whether by private detectives or unseen eyes in the sky — has become a constant of day to day life.
A deadly board game is being played out around the globe, as the great powers jockey for position, and arms dealers, madmen and mercenaries scheme to outmaneuver one another. There is much yearning after genuine spiritual wisdom, but there is an equal amount of yearning after false gods, bogus knowledge and hokey, New Age mumbo-jumbo.
Technology promises quick fixes and quicker destruction, and the up-ending of life as everyone knows it. Con men abound, and so do philistines and double agents. America, it seems to some of Mr. Pynchon’s characters, has passed “irrevocably into the control of the evil and moronic.”
For all its razzle-dazzle brilliance, Mr. Pynchon’s earlier work tended to be cold, hard and despairing: devoid of any real sense of human connection, soulfulness or redemption. That began to change with his 1990 novel “Vineland,” which evinced a new interest in an individual’s relationship to family, and with “Mason & Dixon,” which made its heroes’ longings and dreams as palpable as their comic high jinks.
Although this impulse can be discerned in “Against the Day,” it’s blunted and stillborn. The loss of innocence — both individual and collective — runs like a dark melody throughout this novel; many of its central characters are looking for salvation; and the vague search for progenitors that lurked in the earlier books has turned, in the case of the Webb clan, into a full-blown preoccupation with familial duty. But because these people are so flimsily delineated, their efforts to connect feel merely sentimental and contrived. And that, in the end, is one of the more telling problems of this labored production, which lacks both the ferocious energy and bravura literary gamesmanship of “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and the heartfelt emotion of “Mason & Dixon.”
--MICHIKO KAKUTANI
The New York Times, November 20, 2006 |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press |
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Against the Day is the story of a quest. Perhaps for reason, perhaps for reasons beyond reason. Perhaps for an understanding of the human experience. The story of a family named Traverse, which must be more than a mere family name. The father, Webb Traverse, ostensibly an itinerant miner in North America's West a couple decades after the US civil war, he is also a bomber whose sympathies lie with those opposed to the robber baron capitalists that populate the estates and boardrooms of the United States. The men whose general perception of the men from whose sweat and blood they make their millions is a perception that sees those workers as unworthy of life. Pynchon doesn't exactly condemn capitalism as much as he describes the inevitable progression of that system of economics to its ultimate expression in war and bloodshed. Which is condemnation enough. To the robber baron Scarsdale Vibe, Webb Traverse is somehow different. He is considered not just an opponent, but an opponent that must be sought out and killed. Once dead, he is brought to a place that is beyond boot hill, beyond Tombstone -- a place where vultures of the human and avian type rule. Reading this particular section, I was reminded of William Burroughs' grotesque visions of the western lands. As it turns out, the youngest Traverse is provided an education by the same robber baron that ordered Webb's death. The daughter, meanwhile, marries the triggerman. Of course, the desire for justice cum revenge reveals its head along the plot line. Indeed, two of the brothers begin their travels with exactly such a thought. The Traverse family finds itself part of every facet in the tale. Mathematics and monopoly capitalists. Anarchy and anal sex. Airships and manned submarines built by Italian anarchists. Meteors that change the earth and murders accompanied by grotesque tortures that defy belief. It is not a pretty world provided here, but it is an interesting one that is full of adventure and surprise.
In the distance of time, a foreboding of human catastrophe lurks. Sometimes, it is spoken of by travelers from the future. These are travelers who bend time and live in their own as well as the past. Other times, clairvoyants and con men speak of the coming catastrophe. Above and beneath it all is the search for an ancient place, a holy grail, known as Shambhala. There resides a secret of life. Meanwhile, a weapon that destroys everything is for sale. It appears to be entropic in nature from the clues Pynchon provides. The Chums of Chance -- a Tom-Swiftian group of adventurers that fly above the earth in a cloaked airship, call these travelers The Trespassers. The Chums, who introduce the entire work, believe at first that it is The Trespassers who are bringing on the coming apocalyptic event: an event that we readers have the luxury of history to tell us is World War I. The Chums fly on, taking orders from men they do not know and meeting many of the other characters in the novel. Eventually, they become aware that they are being used by forces they resent. Indeed, this is the case for most of the folks in the story. The sexually unusual Cyprian, the youngest Traverse, Kit. Even the gunmen and the women. As the reader, we of course have the advantage of seeing this, although even we are being manipulated. Isn't that the nature of art?
Ah yes, the women, not femme fatales but often very femme -- the major ones being the sensuous and sexually adventurous mathematician and enchantress of unknown origin, Yashmeen; the strikingly attractive American girl Dahlia (or Dally), equally at home with street urchins and princesses, who grows into a woman over the course of the novel; and the Traverse women: Mayva the matriarch, Lake, her father's silent storm who marries his killer, and Stray, lover of both Frank and Reef Traverse and the mother of Reef's first child. She then reinvents herself as an adventurer, trader and friend of the Mexican anarchists. Women that are intellectually stimulating and physically desirous, they inspire all sorts of intrigue and shenanigans of every nature. Like other Pynchon tales, one could state that the novel itself radiates out from the few women who appear throughout the story.
Light is another radiant character here. Light bifurcated by pieces of crystal spar and light bent by mirrors that create likenesses as real as the thing or creature reflected. The abnormal bluish light and eerie glow that covered the planet in the wake of the Tunguska event of June 30, 1908 and the light of love, especially that of the unusual threesome of Reef Traverse, Cyprian and Yashmeen. Light that can destroy anything if manipulated in that way. Light that is the fundamental element of the mysterious Q-weapon and the Interdikt line that anarchists hope to destroy in order to prevent the war that is on its way. Light of mystery and mystical light.
Mathematics plays a starring role, much as it did in Gravity's Rainbow. It's a mathematics beyond the accountants books and the ledgers of the rich. Mathematics full of symbols and a language of its own. A language whose meaning provides clues to the meaning of existence and how the world exists. Mathematics whose various approaches creates devotees in the same way as religious cults. It's a math that always somehow leads to suffering and death. Yet we pursue it anyhow for the power it might provide us. Or for the pure beauty it provides -- a symmetry of description that puts the world that is chaos in an order we believe we crave. It's a math where the sum of the angles of a triangle are greater than 180 degrees because the earth is curved not flat. Non-Euclidean and the gateway to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Mathematics that strives to include the fourth dimension: time. Once included in the formula, time as we know it ceases to exist. We are here there and elsewhere all at once. Then again, so is everyone else. Mathematical poetry and magic, not to mention the tarot.
The ancient Greek concept of the Aether is the firmament on which much of this story resides. The stuff of alchemists and their creations, it is the Aether that transfers light and energy. Beyond that, it holds all matter together. Firmament that is not solid. This aether was believed to be the substance which filled the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere. Aristotle included it as a fifth element distinct from the other four, Earth, Water, Air, and Fire and its Platonic solid, according to Plato, was the Dodecahedron. Humanity that likewise refuses to maintain its former shape and concepts. The age of invention. Tesla discovers an energy source in the ground capable of providing free electricity once it is properly harnessed. Of course, the robber barons do not want Tesla to succeed. These capitalists have discovered the incredible profits to be made when they allow the profit to accumulate through acquisition and murder, thereby allowing them to accumulate even more. Anarchists and Bolsheviks understand the same process and hope to destroy it.
The situation described in these pages is one of present and future danger. It is a danger descended from technology and its (mis)uses. It is also a danger precipitated by the worship of and desire for profit and more profit. Individuals live their lives as if they are theirs to live but all the time wondering if they are merely puppets controlled by forces greater than even those who pay their bills. At times almost primitivist in nature, the opposition to this world one finds in these pages stems from a belief that science is wrought with danger. This belief doesn't come from the lack of scientific knowledge that is often the basis for religious fears of science, but from an overwhelming knowledge of science's potential. Indeed, it is the place where we find ourselves today.
In Riemann geometry, there are no parallel lines and x is infinite when it's a negative number, but finite when it's a positive one. In Against the Day, only the number of pages is finite. The possibilities considered are without end. It is an adult Tom Swift series of adventures, a piece of historical fiction that is also an adventure with the requisite subplots of love and intrigue. This book is a marvel of lyrical descriptions of everything from various appearances of the sun to sexual practices frowned upon by "normal" society and the machinations of the parallel world of espionage, revolution and counterrevolution. The writing is what we have come to expect from Pynchon: sentences that loop toward a conclusion one can hardly wait to arrive at. Despite this desire, one finds oneself lingering -- sometimes because the loop reads like one of the mathematical formulas trying to explain the unpredictability of human or geologic events. Other times one lingers on a sentence or phrase because the words assembled are structurally so complete they stand alone like a Taoist epigram. There must be a meaning behind the symbols on the page. Despite Pynchon's imploration to the contrary in his pre-publication blurb (found on Amazon and elsewhere), one can not help but think of the present day, with conflicts breaking out around the world and corruption and greed as a way of life among certain classes.
Some critics will complain that the novel is incomplete -- that it leads nowhere, but this is not the case. This novel leads to the beginning of the human catastrophe we now call history: the Twentieth Century. Just as Gravity's Rainbow provided a uniquely subversive and anarchistically creative perspective on the world created in the destruction of World War Two, Against the Day provides us with a similarly subversive perspective on the opening act to the drama in which that war was Act Two. Despite the bleakness of the times that these tales are told, an indomitable beauty resides within them, thanks in large part to the characters Mr. Pynchon creates, the stories that they live, and the approach to the telling by the author.
--Ron Jacobs
Dissident Voice, November 20, 2006 |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press |
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The announcement in June of a new book by Thomas Pynchon, the Leviathan of contemporary literature, caused a splash in the literary world whose ripples continue to spread. Actually, announcement is very much not the word for how we first learned of Against the Day. Fittingly for the enigmatic author, the details weren’t officially announced until they’d already begun to trickle out via backchannels, in fits and starts, without any apparent coordinated fanfare. You could liken it to opening a bottle of champagne and having the cork come twisting off in your hand with a subdued pffftt rather than the traditional pop and the cork’s ricochet around the room. Whether by design, accident, or simply because of today’s Internet-attenuated media, the first signs of the book were rumors percolating out of Penguin Press, followed by the appearance on Amazon.com of “Untitled by Thomas Pynchon”, due in December and boasting an encouragingly hearty 992 pages. As if that weren’t exciting enough, the Amazon listing also contained a description of the novel, purportedly by Pynchon himself, written in a lighthearted and self-deprecating style:
The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns… Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur.
That the blurb soon disappeared from the Amazon page, with Pynchon’s publishers seeming to deny all knowledge of it, did nothing to dim the fires of anticipation set alight among Pynchon’s ardent fan base. The story of the disappearing blurb provoked intense speculation, some claiming it was an obvious hoax, others that it was clearly a marketing stunt. In the end, Penguin Press merely denied knowledge of how the blurb had come to appear prematurely on Amazon but did not repudiate the blurb itself, which we were assured was genuine. Since then the blurb has been reinstated, the release date has been brought forward to November 21, and the page count has been revised twice—upwards—to 1,120 pages, a record even for Pynchon. And we still haven’t mentioned the short excerpt from the book, which appeared on the William Gaddis mailing list, made its way onto the Pynchon list, and provoked just as much controversy as the blurb before being confirmed as authentic.
So why does all this matter? With a new novel due, only his sixth in more than 40 years, it seems as good a time as any to have a look at what makes Pynchon such a powerful cult figure. There are other great writers among his post-war American peers, but only Pynchon is Pynchon. His spirit seems magical, fusing so many ideas and elements together in wholly new ways, like some sort of benign rocket shaped like the Chrysler Building, blown corkscrewing at lightning speed out of the golden bowl of Charlie Parker’s alto sax, screaming across our skies, trailing spores of radiant genius, each as unique and beautiful as a snowflake.
Unfortunately, Pynchon profiles in the mainstream media often rehash the same clichés, half-truths and misconceptions centered around the long-established myth of his being a recluse: never been photographed, no one knows where he lives, and he never opens his mouth in public because he’s obsessed with his bad teeth. Pynchon himself has theorized that recluse is “a code word generated by journalists… meaning, ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters’”. Nevertheless, the alleged reclusion seems to hold journalists spellbound, as if that were the author’s most intriguing aspect: “My God, if he doesn’t want to talk to us, well, what does he want?” The famous story about Pynchon jumping out a window and hopping a bus for a ride 200 miles away to avoid an early journalistic pursuer down in Mexico City may or may not be apocryphal, but there’s no denying that Pynchon’s insistence on letting his books speak for themselves has served only to highlight just how special they are.
You could spend a lifetime getting lost in Pynchon’s works, but what’s also interesting about him is the strength of his cult following. This goes way beyond an admiration for a man who’s given the world such dense works of literary fiction as Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. Pynchon’s following doesn’t just border on unreason; in many cases it crosses over, goes native and takes up permanent residence in outright fanaticism.
Though cult icon can be a mercurial term, certain authors are unmistakably bound for quintessential cult status. Traditionally, subject matter has played a huge role; any author whose material (and/or behavior) is oddball, outré, or taboo enough to work the self-appointed guardians of a nation’s morals into a lather will acquire cachet. Think Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin for sex, Anthony Burgess for violence, Joseph Heller for anti-authoritarianism, Herman Hesse for spirituality, Irvine Welsh for drugs, Norman Mailer for politics, and William Burroughs for sex, drugs, a dash of politics, and a side order of violence. But if an author needs certain facets to garner a cult following, Pynchon attracts like an electromagnet. He not only ticks all the boxes, he runs out of boxes and has to draw new ones in until he eventually falls off the bottom of the page altogether.
The right combination of sex, drugs and rock and roll might have earned a writer cult status in the olden days; today something extra is required. The real outsider writers are the analogues of Robin Hood or Bonnie and Clyde, figures we hold to our hearts despite (and often because of) their unpopularity with the authorities. As Pynchon himself has said, “We always end up loving these folks, we cheer for Rob Roy, Jesse James, John Dillinger, at a level of passion usually reserved for sports affiliation.” Which writers are outlaws? Put it this way: If a totalitarian regime was coming to power, whose books would be the first to be squeezed out of circulation as the boot came down?
Like fellow literary outlaw William S. Burroughs, Pynchon has a predilection for drugs, scatology, and unconventional sexual goings-on. But Pynchon is a much more politically engaged writer, whose sociopolitical outlook can be classed as broadly left-leaning and antiauthoritarian. Pynchon’s sympathies are firmly with the underdog, the oppressed, the underrepresented. His fiction is laced with dualities—the privileged versus the passed over; the animate versus the inanimate; order versus chaos—many of which are manifest in his first novel, V. From that book’s opening scenes of sailors drinking and fighting in the bars and streets of Norfolk, Virginia, we follow archetypal schlemiel Benny Profane to New York, where his fate becomes intertwined with that of Herbert Stencil, a man struggling to impose order on the past by searching for the novel’s mysterious eponym, who may or may not be manifest in any number of characters, places or entities beginning with the letter V. Also present is Pynchon’s overarching preoccupation with the forces driving history, often invoked in striking metaphors:
Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the 1930s, the curious fashions of the 1920s, the particular moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.
Pynchon also establishes an association between sex and death, with the story of German army Lieutenant Weissmann, “a professional Aryan even in name”, stationed in southwest Africa and participating in orgies while his host reminisces enthusiastically about the genocide of the Herero people. Weissmann later returns to Germany to work with rockets, another Pynchon concern, as evinced by one of the most famous openings in literature: “A Screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
So begins Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s majestic, forbidding masterpiece, a work which defies all attempts at summary or coherent exegesis. Multilayered and multifaceted, it has crouched on the cultural landscape since 1973, brooding implacably, and nothing to compare it to has yet emerged. The book reads like a long lamentation for a world gone awry, leavened by the darkest humor and laden with hallucinatory and phantasmagoric imagery, like Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast re-imagined by Robert Crumb. Pulling out one narrative strand from Gravity’s Rainbow is like trying to fill a wine glass from a fire hose, but if we follow what’s going on at the start of the book it’ll provide a useful illustration of how Pynchon weaves themes, motifs and plot lines together, piling layer upon layer, connection upon connection, building up themes and characters by a subtle process of accretion.
In London, during the dying days of WWII, we follow American GI Tyrone Slothrop, who has a troubling tendency to suddenly and unaccountably find himself with a raging erection, which he usually makes useful, thanks to a series of obliging local girls. For reasons possibly not known to himself, Slothrop maps these amorous encounters in his cubicle, each conquest a star on his map of London.
Slothrop’s map is regularly photographed, and the photos passed to Roger Mexico, a statistician working at the White Visitation, a former mental hospital which now houses Psi Section, a unit dedicated to psychological warfare. Mexico works either with or for (he’s never really sure) Pavlovian psychologist Ned Pointsman, who uses stray dogs and Grigori, a giant octopus, for his experiments.
Another episode follows Captain Geoffrey ‘Pirate’ Prentice and his friend Osbie Feel, who’re involved with Katje Borgieus, a glamorous Dutch double agent who’s been sending messages out to England from German-occupied Holland, from where the V2 rockets pounding London are launched. While Osbie amuses himself by expertly oven-drying and preparing Amanita Muscaria mushrooms, Katje is being filmed:
“In silence, hidden from her, the camera follows as she moves deliberately nowhere longlegged about the rooms, an adolescent wideness and hunching to the shoulders.”
When Katje glimpses Osbie’s oven, the narrative follows her gaze inside and into a flashback involving another oven, one around which she, fellow captive Gottfried, and their captor, an SS Captain commanding a rocket battalion, played a bizarre S&M role-playing game based on the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. We learn what happens when rockets malfunction after launching: “Often the rockets, crazed, turn at random, whinnying terribly in the sky, turn about and fall according each to its madness so unreachable and, it is feared, incurable.”
That “whinnying” is a typical Pynchonian touch, suggesting a distressed horse and exemplifying the animate-inanimate theme. When Katje escapes, the narrative slides back to the present, where Osbie, smoking some mushroom fragments and “lost in a mooning doper’s smile”, listens to Prentice describe why he carries an old-fashioned, heavy Mendoza pistol rather than the standard-issue Sten. Pirate says it’s his “crotchet,” a word with many etymological resonances, another Pynchon trademark. Crotchet in this context means eccentricity, and is the root of the more familiar ‘crotchety’, but it also means hook, and it seems to set Katje off thinking about her ancestor, Frans Van Der Groov, who exterminated dodoes in Dutch Mauritius in the 17th century using his heavy haakbus, i.e. hook-gun, an old-fashioned weapon, but Frans said he didn’t mind “the extra weight, it was his crotchet”. The slaughter of the dodoes has obvious genocidal resonances and, as well as the Holocaust, reminds us of the earlier genocide of the Hereros. In due course, we will also learn that the rocket-battalion commander is actually Weissmann, who has adopted the SS code name ‘Blicero’, meaning White Death.
Next, we fade back out to Osbie chatting with Pirate, who says he doesn’t know what the filming is all about, but it’s “something that involves a giant octopus.” Then we cut to ‘The White Visitation’ where Grigori floats in a tank, watching a projector screen:
“In silence, hidden from her, the camera follows as she moves deliberately nowhere longlegged about the rooms, an adolescent wideness and hunching to the shoulders...”
So the episode ends with the same words used to describe the film being watched as were used to describe it being made, giving the episode a circular structure and highlighting the numerous correspondences, resonances, doublings and synchronicities: The episode also connects the two ends of a rocket’s journey, the firing site in Holland and the target location of London, at both ends of which we have a captain, and so on. This multi-layered meshing of connections, presented in a fragmented, nonlinear narrative, is typical of Pynchon’s dizzyingly complex technique.
Gravity’s Rainbow is often very funny, but it’s also deeply subversive and political, presenting a dense tangle of interconnections which form a sort of hidden history of World War II and beyond. Pynchon relegates the obvious villains—the Nazis themselves—to the sidelines and instead concentrates on a number of entities lurking behind the scenes, in particular those multinational corporations who had a “good war,” who were well-placed to profit no matter which side won, companies such as Shell Oil, whose Dutch subsidiary’s headquarters had a transmitter on the roof which helped guide the rockets, built with slave labor, to London. Pynchon casts a cold eye on the connections between commerce and death:
Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.
Most sinister of all was the vast, cephalopodic IG Farben cartel, which exerted immense economic and political power, produced Zyklon B poison for the gas chambers, and had close contacts with the Standard Oil Company in the U.S. In the book, IG Farben is responsible for Imipolex G, a type of plastic used as a protective sheath around rockets, a material which plays a crucial role in connecting many of the book’s central elements. Its chemical structure, formed by manipulating polymers and aromatic rings, resembles the structure of Gravity’s Rainbow itself. The book is full of circles, rings and mandalas, and many episodes have a circular structure. It has been compared to a mosaic, or a kind of 3-D jigsaw, with no guiding picture or assurance that all the pieces are in the box.
Pynchon is often perceived as difficult, but he never appears to be saying, “Look at all this clever, complicated business which I, the Great Oz, have figured out for you.” Instead, he seems to say, “This is a bunch of highly intriguing stuff I’ve been mulling over; here, you have a go.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, They and Them are always capitalized. They are organized, in control, omniscient, pulling the levers of power behind the scenes. We are powerless, confused, out in the open, running around with our pants around our ankles and suffering from the condition that is perhaps most associated with Pynchon, paranoia. Pynchon outlines a number of Proverbs for Paranoids: “If They can get you asking the wrong questions, They don’t have to worry about the answers”.
Pynchon is famously erudite; after studying both engineering and English literature at Cornell University, he worked as a technical author for Boeing on projects such as the BOMARC missile. Boeing, which he reportedly dubbed “the kite factory,” may have provided Pynchon with the engineer’s quadrille paper on which he hand-wrote Gravity’s Rainbow and certainly provided the model for Yoyodyne, the defense contractor featured in Pynchon’s earlier novel, The Crying of Lot 49, in which he explored the concept of entropy and information theory, in a lysergic melding of technology, conspiracy, paranoia, and the quest for patterns and meaning. Lot 49 reads like a morose meditation on how the 1960s, having escaped the monochrome world of the 1950s, bloomed into full Technicolor flower, driven by pop music, sexual liberation, and psychedelia, only to turn into a bad trip in the wake of the JFK assassination. Both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby could easily have been Pynchon characters come to life, embodying that shadowy nexus of government, organized crime, espionage, and political assassination.
After Gravity’s Rainbow came a long wait, during which rumors swirled and anticipation built to fever pitch. Pynchon broke the silence in 1990 with Vineland, possibly his most accessible yet most underrated work, its exuberant narrative taking the reader on an white-water raft ride through the cultural detritus of the 1980s, cramming in rock music, Godzilla, unsuccessful kamikaze pilots, mall culture, machine-gun toting female ninjas crashing Mafia weddings, and a thousand fast-food variations, including the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple and the Galaxy of Ribs.
The book begins in California in 1984, with affable aging hippy Zoyd Wheeler, a man whose ideals and sensibilities are firmly rooted in the 1960s, waking up to morning in Ronald Reagan’s America. Vineland follows the ‘Nixonian Reaction’ against the 1960s through to the 1980s when campus protesters have been supplanted by business-minded proto-yuppies, aspiring only to designer suits and stock options and perfectly happy with “the whole Reagan program”: “dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past”. But in assessing the ultimate failure of the various revolutions of the 1960s to consolidate the forward progress they had made, Pynchon directs a lot of anger and frustration at weaknesses within the 1960s movement itself. He alternately satirizes and sentimentalizes the decade, sometimes simultaneously, as when he notes how TV was used as a tool to ridicule, undermine and ultimately negate the 1960s.
“Whole problem ‘th you folks’s generation,” Isaiah opined, “nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it—but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars—it was way too cheap....”
Vineland soon developed a reputation as an aberration amongst Pynhcon’s works, a sort of runt of the literary litter, and came to be regarded as Pynchon-lite. Some critics echoed Greil Marcus’s famous reaction to Dylan’s Self Portrait album: “What is this shit?” Pynchon’s more academic and intellectual readers may not have cared for all the low-brow pop-cultural references. What had happened to the sprawling epic Pynchon had been rumored to be working on, they wondered, based on the story the British surveyor and astronomer team who’d given their names to the line separating the American North from South? That book, Mason & Dixon was eventually published in 1997 and contained Pynchon’s latest curveball: The entire novel was written in 18th century syntax and grammar, with heavy sprinklings of odd punctuation. Many impatient reviewers didn’t take the trouble to acclimate to it and wrote it off as a gimmick. But the novel possibly rivals Gravity’s Rainbow in scope and complexity, and displays the classic Pynchon prose—rhythmic as jazz, smooth as a rhapsody. In a sense, it restored Pynchon’s critical reputation after what Harold Bloom had called the “disaster” of Vineland and also reinvigorated the sense of excitement and expectation attending a new Pynchon novel.
Pynchon doesn’t have a serious rival for the title of ultimate cult writer. His material, methods, style, and unique narrative voice, combined with his poetic prose, dark sense of humor and unbridled sense of fun, have given him an undentable aura. Grappling with Pynchon’s work can be daunting, its convoluted complexity making any attempt to impose a coherent meaning on it seem like wrestling a huge Russian Doll which wandered into one of those telepods from The Fly only to be merged with a Rubik’s Cube someone had left lying in the corner. But time and again, Pynchon warns against getting hung up on meaning, and he does it with such verve and elegance that it leaves you reeling. Here’s Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, just beginning to succumb to paranoid panic, driven by the accelerating sense that he is the target of some sort of conspiracy, that They are out to get him:
He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn’t about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day’s end. He just runs.
Pynchon is full of passages like that: you read them and realize that in the little cloakroom of your heart, where you hang all the things that make life worthwhile, unique and enjoyable, another hook has just been occupied. In this celebrity-obsessed age, fixated on superficiality, we need him more than ever. Cast aside synthetic substitutes, junk food for the soul, and take a bite of the pungent, organic mushroom offered up by the man from Oyster Bay, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.
--John Carvill
PopMatters, November 11, 2006 |
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Per buona parte della comunità letteraria statunitense Mason & Dixon, l'ultimo romanzo di Thomas Pynchon, era già mito molto tempo prima di essere dato alle stampe. Non avrebbe potuto essere diversamente, considerando che da più di vent'anni circolava la voce di un libro del grande recluso sulla Mason-Dixon Line, la linea di confine - tracciata nella seconda metà del Settecento tra la colonia del Maryland e quella della Pennsylvania - che durante la Guerra di Secessione marcò la separazione fra il Nord abolizionista e il Sud schiavista.
Di un romanzo in cui la verità storica sembra mostrarsi quale semplice apparenza e i paradossi dell'immaginazione quali verità morali, ciò che sarebbe più interessante discutere è la sua relazione con la Storia. Apparentemente Mason & Dixon ha tutte le caratteristiche di una ricostruzione storica: narra di eventi realmente accaduti e mima l'ortografia e il lessico dell'epoca. Ma fin dalle prime pagine Pynchon lascia intendere che il romanzo non è la Storia bensì un racconto, il racconto di Natale con cui un certo Reverendo Cherrycoke intrattiene i bambini della casa che lo ospita e, a poco a poco, anche gli adulti. Ecco allora che la vicenda narrata si affolla di figure storicamente improbabili, di cani che parlano e di papere meccaniche. Ecco che lo svolgersi degli eventi si perde nelle più disparate digressioni. Se questa è Storia, è comunque una Storia dove le domande rimangono senza risposta, dove il sogno regola la memoria e dove i messaggi non giungono a destinazione.
Perché Thomas Pynchon ce l'abbia tanto con la Storia lo spiega per bocca del Reverendo Cherrycoke a metà del romanzo: "I Fatti non son che i balocchi dell'Azzeccagarbugli (...) Trottole e Cerchi, sempre in rotazione". Meglio, molto meglio per il bene della gente, sarebbe che la Storia fosse "accudita riguardosamente e amorosamente da fabulatori e contraffattori, Cantastorie ed Eccentrici d'ogni latitudine, Maestri del Travestimento che la provvedano di Costume, Toletta e Portamento e Scilinguagnolo abbastanza sciolto da tenerla al di là dai Desideri, o anche dalla Curiosità del Governo".
Detto più chiaramente il problema è quello di evitare che la conservazione del passato diventi lo strumento con cui il potere si industria a organizzare la vita per addomesticarla al sistema e, laddove si mostri troppo recalcitrante, a indirizzarla anticipatamente all'altro mondo - perché è noto che quello della morte è il sistema più ordinato dell'universo, il sistema dove nulla si crea e tutto è stato già distrutto.
Pynchon cerca dunque di evitare che, una volta tanto, la Storia non serva a spiegare le ragioni della morte ma a raccontare quelle della vita. Per far questo, con toni spesso toccanti e malinconici, ripercorre meticolosamente l'esistenza di due uomini che, malgrado loro e senza comprenderlo fino in fondo, contribuirono ad abbozzare uno dei tanti disegni della Storia. I due uomini in questione sono gli scienziati inglesi da cui la famigerata linea prende il nome, Charles Mason e Jeremiah Dixon. Si tratta di due persone agli antipodi, per temperamento e per formazione culturale. Mason è un astronomo, il suo sguardo è volto al cielo e la mente alle questioni spirituali. È un anglicano, e l'aver prestato servizio nell'ambito di un sistema aristocratico lo ha tenuto lontano dai problemi mondani ma lo ha trascinato verso cupe meditazioni dominate dal pessimismo e dall'ossessione della morte. Dixon è l'esatto contrario. È un quacchero dotato di una sensibilità prettamente terrena, vista anche la sua professione di topografo. È un uomo concreto e abituato a guadagnarsi da vivere giorno per giorno, si compiace dei propri motti di spirito e ostenta una particolare attrazione per il lato materiale della vita, in primo luogo il sesso. Due uomini che, malgrado le loro differenze, riescono a collaborare fino a diventare grandi amici. Si conoscono nel corso di una fallita spedizione a Sumatra per osservare il raro fenomeno astronomico del Transito di Venere e vengono poi incaricati dalla Corona Britannica di mettere un po' d'ordine in quella terra piena di belle speranze ma ancora troppo selvaggia che era l'America del XVIII secolo. I due partono, riescono in qualche modo nell'impresa e tornano a casa. Qui, ormai vecchi come il Mondo che avevano lasciato e a cui sono tornati, continuano occasionalmente a incontrarsi, e da quei buoni amici che sono ormai diventati se ne vanno talvolta a pescare parlando dei tempi andati, commentando il bizzarro corso circolare delle loro esistenze.
Il senso della Storia, dell'unica storia che veramente conti, è tutto qui. Si lascia la propria casa, si viaggia per il mondo, ci si affanna con scarso successo dietro ai misteri insondabili dell'universo, si lavora per fini di cui non si afferra pienamente il senso e infine si torna a casa, esattamente al punto da cui si era partiti.
Sembrerebbe non sia accaduto nulla. Due uomini hanno diviso in due una terra, disegnando inconsapevolmente la mappa di una delle tante tragedie della Storia, e adesso eccoli qui, con una canna da pesca in mano a parlare dei vecchi tempi. Non fosse per il fatto che sono diventati amici, che due persone tanto diverse hanno passato insieme buona parte della vita, forse si potrebbe anche dire che sarebbe meglio non fosse successo niente. Ma sono diventati amici, e questo cambia un po' le cose. Questi due signori alla fine del loro viaggio ci lasciano così con qualche malinconia ma anche con un po' di speranza. È essenzialmente questo che fa di Mason & Dixon un romanzo meraviglioso e struggente.
--Tommaso Pincio |
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So, he's back, and the question that occurs to you on finishing ''Vineland'' is, what took him so long? Because this doesn't feel like a book written to break a block; it isn't congested or stop-start or stiff; matter of fact, it's free-flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily accessible piece of writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with. It is also not the book we thought Thomas Pynchon was writing.
We heard he was doing something about Lewis and Clark? Mason and Dixon? A Japanese science-fiction novel? And one spring in London a magazine announced the publication of a 900-page Pynchon megabook about the American Civil War, published in true Pynchonian style by a small press nobody ever heard of, and I was halfway to the door before I remembered what date it was, April 1, ho ho ho. What happened to those spectral books? Did they never exist? Are we about to get a great rush of Pynchon novels? The answer is blowin' in the wind.
Because one thing that has not changed about Mr. P. is his love of mystification. The secrecy surrounding the publication of this book - his first novel since ''Gravity's Rainbow'' in 1973 - has been, let's face it, ridiculous. I mean, rilly. So he wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to know his home address. I can dig it, I can relate to that (but, like, he should try it when it's compulsory instead of a free-choice option). But for his publisher to withhold reviewers' copies and give critics maybe a week to deal with what took him almost two decades, now that's truly weird, bad craziness, give it up.
Other things, too, have remained constant in the Pynchonian universe, where these are days of miracle and wonder, like ''Doonesbury'' written by Duke instead of Garry Trudeau, and the paranoia runs high because behind the heavy scenes and bad trips and Karmic Adjustments move the shadowy invisible forces, the true Masters of the Universe, ''the unrelenting forces that leaned ever after . . . into Time's wind, impassive in pursuit, usually gaining, the faceless predators . . . [who] had simply persisted, stone-humorless, beyond cause and effect, rejecting all attempts to bargain or accommodate, following through pools of night where nothing else moved wrongs forgotten by all but the direly possessed, continuing as a body to refuse to be bought off for any but the full price, which they had never named.''
That's what we're up against, folks, and what Mr. Pynchon used to set against it in the old days was entropy, seen as a slow, debauched, never-ending party, a perpetual coming-down, shapeless and meaningless and therefore unshaped and uncontrolled: freedom is chaos, he told us, but so is destruction, and that's the high wire, walk it if you can. And now here we are in ''Vineland,'' and the entropy's still flowing, but there's something new to report, some faint possibility of redemption, some fleeting hints of happiness and grace. Thomas Pynchon, like Paul Simon's girl in New York City, who calls herself the Human Trampoline, is bouncing into Graceland.
It's 1984 in Vineland County, in northern California. Dates really matter in this book. Even the movies come with dates attached: ''Return of the Jedi (1983),'' ''Friday the 13th (1980)'' (''Everybody was Jason that year''), ''Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961),'' ''Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956).'' We're talking mass culture here, and mall culture, too, because this is a 1984 flowing with designer seltzer ''by Alaia and Blass and Yves,'' and the malls have names like Noir Center (as in film noir) and the mall rats have names like Che. And, in this 1984 that Orwell could never have imagined, the skies contain marauders who can remove people from commercial airliners in midair, and a research lab belonging to a ''shadowy world conglomerate'' named Chipco can be stomped into Totality, flattened beneath a gigantic and inexplicable animal footprint, size 20,000 or thereabouts. This 1984 is also Ronald Reagan's re-election year, and that, for all the leftover hippies and 60's activists and survivors and casualties, could mean it's time for the ''last roundup.''
Listen closely now: Zoyd Wheeler, father of beautiful teen-age Prairie, whose mother, Frenesi Gates, went off with the arch-baddie Brock Vond, Federal prosecutor and psychopath, collects mental disability checks from the state by jumping through plate-glass windows once a year. The novel begins with such a jump, and thereafter fragments into myriad different narrative shards (but, at the end, the pieces all leap off the floor and fit miraculously together, as if a film were being run backward). Prairie is obsessed with her vanished mother, and so is everyone else in the novel: so is Zoyd, so is Brock Vond, who was her lover and who turned her from a radical film maker, the child of a blacklisted and Wobbly family, into an F.B.I. sting specialist, and turned her toward her own dark side. Frenesi, meanwhile, is out of sight, having been axed by Reaganomics from the slashed F.B.I. budget, so that at the center of this novel by the master of vanishing acts is a largely invisible woman, whom we learn about through the eyes of others.
Now then: Vond appears to be after Prairie, maybe to use her against Frenesi, so Zoyd, as he dives for cover, sends her into hiding as well. Prairie's odyssey takes her closer and closer to Frenesi, by way of a band called Billy Barf and the Vomitones, whom she follows to a mob wedding where she meets her mother's old friend, the Ninjette Darryl Louise (DL) Chastain, who was once obliged, by the mob boss Ralph Wayvone, to try to assassinate Brock Vond by using, during the sexual act, the Ninja Death Touch, also known as the Vibrating Palm, which the victim never feels and which kills him a year later, while you're having lunch with the police chief - except that Vond, skilled in eluding death (''He's the Roadrunner,'' says Wayvone, admiringly), manages to send along in his place the Japanese private eye Takeshi Fumimota, who gets the Vibrating Palm by mistake; and, as if that weren't enough trouble for Takeshi, he's also being chased by the same malign forces that arranged for the Chipco stomping, which he investigated.
And anyhow, through DL and Takeshi, Prairie gets to find the doors to her mother's past, on computer records and in film archives and in the memory of Frenesi's old friends, and we reach the story's dark heart, namely the events that took place in the 1960's at Trasero County's College of the Surf, which renamed itself, after the fashion of those loon-panted days, the People's Republic of Rock and Roll. And we hear, as Prairie hears it, how her mother betrayed the leader of this little revolution, who rejoiced in the name of Weed Atman, and who now, after death, still roams the forests of northern California as a Thanatoid, a member of the undead, unable to find peace. And eventually Prairie's search for Frenesi, and Brock's search for Prairie and Frenesi (which takes him, along with a huge strike force, to Vineland) come to a climax, complete with helicopters and Thanatoids and family reunions and an old woman and an old man who can remove your bones and leave the rest of you alive. You get the picture.
It either grabs you or it doesn't, I guess. It grabbed me. I laughed, many times, out loud, often at Mr. Pynchon's absurdly brilliant way with names (a manufacturer of microchip musical gimmickry is called Tokkata & Fuji, which to my mind is as funny as the German town in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' named Bad Karma) and at the little songs with which I'm happy to report he's still littering his texts, high points of this particular set being the Desi Arnaz-style croon, ''Es posible,'' and Billy Barf's ''three-note blues'' called ''I'm a Cop,'' with lyrics that are, unfortunately, unprintable here.
There is enough in ''Vineland'' to obsess the true, mainlining Pynchomane for a goodly time. One could consider, for example, the significance of the letter V in Mr. Pynchon's oeuvre. His novel ''V.'' was actually V-shaped, two narratives zeroing in on a point, and ''Gravity's Rainbow'' was the flight path of a V-2 rocket, a deadly parabola that could also be described as an inverted V. And here's the letter again - what does it mean? - with all the death imagery in this novel, with its use of old Amerindian death myths. Are we being told that America in 1984 is in fact the land of the dead, V-land, the universe beyond the zero? One could do a number of further riffs on the more allegorical of the names: Weed - marijuana, and Atman - soul; and, hey, Frenesi turns out to be an anagram of ''free'' and ''sin,'' the two sides of her nature, light and dark, just as the hero of ''Gravity's Rainbow,'' Tyrone Slothrop, could be made to reveal his essence anagrammatically, turning into ''sloth or entropy.'' Sure, it's still working, that ole anagrammar.
But what is perhaps most interesting, finally, about Mr. Pynchon's new novel is what is different about it. What is interesting is the willingness with which he addresses, directly, the political development of the United States, and the slow (but not total) steamrollering of a radical tradition many generations and decades older than flower power. There is a marvelously telling moment when Brock Vond's brainchild, his school for subversion in which lefties are re-educated and turned into tools of the state, is closed down because in Reagan's America the young think like that to begin with, they don't need re-education.
What is interesting is to have before us, at the end of the Greed Decade, that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years. And as Thomas Pynchon turns his attention to the nightmares of the present rather than the past, his touch becomes lighter, funnier, more deadly. And most interesting of all this is that aforementioned hint of redemption, because this time entropy is not the only counterweight to power; community, it is suggested, might be another, and individuality, and family. These are the values the Nixon-Reagan era stole from the 60's and warped, aiming them back at America as weapons of control. They are values that ''Vineland'' seeks to recapture, by remembering what they meant before the dirt got thrown all over them, by recalling the beauty of Frenesi Gates before she turned.
Thomas Pynchon is no sentimentalist, however, and the balance between light and dark is expertly held throughout this novel, so that we remain uncertain until the final pages as to which will prevail, hippie heaven or Federal nemesis. And we are left, at the last, with an image of such shockingly apt moral ambiguity that it would be quite wrong to reveal it here.
Vineland, Mr. Pynchon's mythical piece of northern California, is, of course, also ''Vinland,'' the country discovered by the Viking Leif Ericsson long before Columbus. It is ''Vineland the Good''; that is to say, this crazed patch of California stands for America itself. And it is here, to Vineland, that one of America's great writers has, after long wanderings down his uncharted roads, come triumphantly home.
INCHES FROM THE EDGE
Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge represents a transition, in the metaphysics of the region, there to be felt even by travelers unwary as Zoyd. When the busful of northbound hippies first caught sight of it, just at sundown as the fog was pouring in, the towers and cables ascending into pale gold otherworldly billows, you heard a lot of ''Wow,'' and ''Beautiful,'' though Zoyd only found it beautiful the way a firearm is, because of the bad dream unreleased inside it, in this case the brute simplicity of height, the finality of what swept below relentlessly out to sea. They rose into the strange gold smothering, visibility down to half a car length. . . .
Trees. Zoyd must have dozed off. He woke to rain coming down in sheets, the smell of redwood trees in the rain through the open bus windows, tunnels of unbelievably tall straight red trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in to either side. . . . The storm lashed the night, dead trees on slow log trucks reared up in the high-beams shaggy and glistening, the highway was interrupted by flooding creeks and minor slides that often obliged the bus to creep around inches from the edge of Totality. Aislemates struck up conversations, joints appeared and were lit, guitars came down from overhead racks and harmonicas out of fringe bags, and soon there was a concert that went on all night, a retrospective of the times they'd come through more or less as a generation, the singing of rock and roll, folk, Motown, fifties oldies, and at last, for about an hour just before the watery green sunrise, one guitar and one harmonica, playing the blues.
--Salman Rushdie
The New York Times, 14 Juanuary 1990 |
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| l'arcobaleno della gravità |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Rizzoli |
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UN NATALE POSTMODERNO
Radio che «ronzano canti di Natale», personaggi con una «barba da Babbo Natale imbiancata anzitempo», blatte di Natale che si aggirano «brulicanti nella profondità della grotta di Betlemme», feste di Natale in strani istituti dove sinistri scienziati vedono le proprie assistenti prendere loro l’uccello per cacciarselo in gola più profondamente che possono. E poi i V-2, le micidiali bombe razzo che i tedeschi lanciavano su Londra nell’ultima fase del secondo conflitto mondiale, bombe razzo che qui attraversano il cielo alla maniera di una malefica e «nuova stella, o qualcosa di altrettanto percettibile» alla stella di Natale. Questo è altro ancora lo si trova in uno dei romanzi più complessi del secolo scorso, per non dire della letteratura in assoluto: L'arcobaleno della gravità.
Che il suo autore — lo statunitense Thomas Pynchon — abbia un conto aperto con il Natale sembra alquanto innegabile, visto che altre sue opere si aprono come fossero racconti di Natale. Per farsene un'idea è sufficiente leggere l'incipit di V. (1963) suo romanzo d’esordio: «1955, la vigilia di Natale. Benny Profane, jeans neri, giubotto di pelle scamosciata, scarpe da ginnastica e cappellone da cow-boy, si trovava a passare dalle parti di Norfolk, in Virginia». Ma qualcosa di simile avviene anche nel più recente Mason & Dixon (1997), perché è durante la «Temperie Natalizia del 1786» che il reverendo Cherrycoke intrattiene i nipotini raccontando le peripezie di un astronomo e un agronomo inglesi diventati famosi per una linea di confine destinata a dividere in due il nuovo — e allora molto selvaggio — mondo americano.
La storia di questa particolare ossessione per il Natale parte da lontano, da una delle tanti voci che circolano in merito al più schivo e misterioso scrittore vivente. Poco o nulla si sa della vita di Thomas Pynchon, e in questo poco o nulla rientra la certezza che egli si è laureato alla Cornell University di New York negli anni in cui vi insegnava Vladimir Nabokov, l’esule russo creatore di Lolita. Pynchon non risulta registrato tra i suoi allievi e non c’è alcun modo per poter affermare con certezza che egli abbia davvero assistito a qualcuna delle lezioni tenute da Nabokov. L’unico indizio certo — se certo si può definire — è il fatto che alcune delle tecniche narrative usate da Pynchon sembrano dovere qualcosa alle lezioni di questo insegnante d’eccezione; si tratta di tecniche che privilegiano i giochi di parole, le allusioni, l’elusività, un gusto spiccato per la parodia e il grottesco nonché una passione speciale per la ricostruzione storica.
Proprio in merito a quest’ultimo punto, Nabokov amava ricordare come James Joyce scrisse il suo Ulisse tenendo sul proprio tavolo due testi fondamentali: una guida di Dublino e una copia del quotidiano Evening Telegraph di giovedì 16 giugno 1904. Secondo Nabokov tutto quello che c’è da sapere in fatto di spazio e tempo sul romanzo di Joyce lo si trova in questi due testi, il resto è letteratura. La stessa cosa la si potrebbe essere dire anche de L’arcobaleno della gravità di Pynchon. Per orientarsi nel labirinto monumentale di questo romanzo che si aggira intorno alle quattrocentomila parole e i quattrocento personaggi è infatti consigliabile procurarsi una mappa di Londra antecedente alla seconda guerra mondiale e le copie del Times dei giorni compresi tra il 18 e il 26 dicembre 1944.
Nonostante l’apparente caos che molti hanno interpretato quale prova dello stato di alterazione in cui l’autore scrisse l’opera, le varie trame e sottotrame della prima parte del libro sono meticolosamente intrecciate a un tessuto storico ricostruito fin nei dettagli più minimi. I film in programma nelle sale cinematografiche, le condizioni atmosferiche, le fasi lunari, le trasmissioni radiofoniche e molte altre cose consentono di verificare, pagina dopo pagina, non soltanto in quale giorno e luogo di Londra si svolge una determinata scena ma anche in quale ora. Nemmeno Joyce si era spinto tanto lontano.
Vi sono però almeno due differenze che mostrano quale abisso epocale separi l’età dell’oro avanguardista dalla condizione postmoderna. Joyce ricostruiva un mondo che ben conosceva. Il 16 giugno 1904, a Dublino lui c’era. Eccome se c’era — fu lì e allora che si avviò al suo primo appuntamento con l’amata Nora Bernacle — e se ricorse a una mappa e un quotidiano, fu perché in quello stesso anno dovette lasciare l’Irlanda per non tornarvi mai più. Pynchon racconta invece di un mondo a lui estraneo. Stiamo parliamo infatti di un americano nato nel 1937; tra lui e la Londra del 1944 c’erano un oceano di mezzo, senza contare poi che all’epoca in cui è ambientato il suo romanzo, egli era un bambino di sette anni.
Ciò potrebbe forse spiegare gli esagerati sforzi di documentazione, ma come si è detto c’è una seconda differenza. Joyce ci descrive un giorno come tanti altri. Un giorno pieno di cose estremamente verosimili. Perfino troppo, nella loro prosaicità. Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom e sua moglie Molly sono personaggi inventati, ma non fanno cose fuori dell’ordinario; non si trovano presi nei gangli eccezionali di una Storia più grande di loro. Pynchon si serve invece di coordinate precise e reali per raccontarci vicende che trascendono la norma e alle quale è difficile credere. Questa seconda differenza più che spiegare la maniacale ossessione dell’autore per i dettagli solleva un quesito. Perché mai un’opera scritta all’insegna di un surrealismo sfrenato e allucinato dovrebbe essere supportata da una ricostruzione tanto precisa della realtà?
Per quanto incongruo possa apparire, il quesito può essere inteso come un modo di ritornare alla domanda iniziale: Perché il Natale? I conti aperti che Pynchon ha con la Storia e il Natale rientrano infatti in una stessa partita, una partita in cui è di importanza nient'affatto secondaria il fatto che la famiglia dello scrittore appartenga all’aristocrazia americana dei Padri Pellegrini. I Pynchon — così si racconta — furono tra coloro che arrivarono nel Nuovo Mondo a bordo del Mayflower. Se ciò risponda al vero non è dato sapere, ma la Storia ci parla di un antenato, tale William Pynchon, tesoriere della colonia di Massachusetts Bay e fondatore di Roxbury e Springfield. Questo stesso William fu inoltre autore di un trattato teologico, The Meritorious Pride of Our Redemption (1650), nel quale affermava che Cristo non morì sulla croce per liberarci dalle pene dell’Inferno. Era una visione antitetica al Calvinismo imperante di allora e un rifiuto di quella concezione puritana della religione — e conseguentemente della Storia — per cui soltanto gli eletti sarebbero destinati alla salvezza.
Thomas Pynchon ha ereditato questa visione di un’umanità divisa in due categorie: da una parte coloro che sono degni, dall’altra parte le pecore di seconda classe, la folla ben più estesa di esclusi e sottomessi, l’umanità anonima della cui sorte la Storia non tiene conto. Ed è proprio in questo che Pynchon individua il male della civiltà cristiana occidentale: un mondo dove il potere e il controllo del sistema si sono sostituiti tanto all’umano che al divino, la creazione di un’economia così perversa da essere in grado di «creare se stessa» e «fare a meno di Dio».
Il Natale, proprio in quanto festa fondante di una cristianità che in linea teorica promette salvezza senza distinzioni, diventa così il momento in cui questa civiltà si mostra in tutta la sua iniquità, il momento in cui gli esclusi avvertono in modo più netto la loro condizione: «Le persone che avrebbero dovuto essere a dormire in quelle case vuote (…) adesso staranno forse sognando città splendenti di luci, la sera, un Natale vissuto di nuovo come bambini e non come tante pecore vulnerabili».
Se Pynchon è interessato a una ricostruzione ordinata dei fatti così come la Storia e i suoi documenti li ricordano è solo per opporgli la versione umana delle vittime dimenticate; una versione che è surreale, allucinata e disordinata perché si cala nel buco nero di vite condannate all’oblio e che è possibile raccontare solo attraverso l’immaginazione. In modo analogo in cui, all’inizio del XIX secolo i luddisti tentarono di ribellarsi all’oppressione industriale distruggendo le macchine tessili, Pynchon si oppone al sistema razionale del capitalismo con una finzione narrativa che si beffe della Storia e del suo ordine disumano che porta inevitabilmente alla guerra e alla morte. La trama convenzionalmente intesa viene così elusa in quanto è proprio per mezzo di essa che il romanzo scimmiotta la Storia nella pretesa assurda di trovare un senso dominante nel flusso indistinto della vita.
Pur offrendo un centro apparente attorno al quale ruotare, L’arcobaleno della gravità si disperse in un dedalo di temi e vicende che vengono deliberatamente lasciati in sospeso. Nessuna delle tante trame del romanzo giunge a una vera soluzione: l’identità di colui che dovrebbe essere il protagonista, o quantomeno il suo surrogato, si dissolve prima delle pagine finali; i personaggi non trovano ciò che cercano, mancano di riconoscersi nei momenti topici e il loro bisogno di amore viene puntualmente mortificato. Nonostante il romanzo sia ambientato alla fine di un grande conflitto, ciò che ha la meglio su tutto è la guerra. Non c’è alcuna vera salvezza: lo spirito della guerra prosegue anche lontano dai campi di battaglia perché la sua vera natura è quel sistema per cui noi esseri umani «siamo fatti per il lavoro, il governo, l’austerità», il sistema per cui «queste cose hanno la precedenza sull’amore, sui sogni, sullo spirito, sui sensi e su tutte le altre banalità secondarie, tipiche delle ore oziose e spensierate».
È una visione del mondo non certo ottimistica. Il cupo paesaggio della Londra devastata da bombe che piovono dal cielo come stelle comete sembra uno schiaffo al Natale e alla possibilità di speranza e salvezza che questa festa annuncia. Ma il punto per Pynchon non è l’ottimismo e nemmeno la speranza; e che non sia prevista alcuna salvezza, egli lo chiarisce già in apertura di romanzo: «di qua non si va da nessuna parte, non ci si libera, anzi ci si aggroviglia sempre più». Il punto è la dignità dell’umanità vittima della Storia, di tutte quelle persone che tentano, di quegli individui senza nome che, seppur destinati a soccombere, si ribellano all’ordine della morte ritagliandosi tane di amore e libertà.
L’arcobaleno della gravità è disseminato di piccole storie, momenti toccanti che illuminano d’improvviso le pagine del romanzo. Sono effimere stelle cadenti che vengono invariabilmente dal flusso spietato di eventi che si accavallano e si annullano uno con l’altro. Al lettore danno la sensazione di incontri fortuiti; sono attimi di tenerezza che spesso durano lo spazio di poche pagine, a volte perfino di righe, ma proprio per questo appaiono più strazianti e fanno di Pynchon uno scrittore profondamente umano, tutto teso a rispondere all’entropia del mondo con l’empatia.
Uno di questi momenti è la storia d’amore tra Roger Mexico e Jessica Swanlake nei giorni dell’avvento del 1944. Il loro incontro viene descritto come un «cute meet» in stile hollywoodiano: Roger è alla guida di una Jaguar d’epoca avuta in prestito, Jessica è sul ciglio della strada alle prese con la sua bicicletta, una bomba razzo tedesca esplode in lontananza proprio mentre i due cominciano a flirtare. Il boato convince la ragazza a salire in macchina e arrendersi al suo corteggiatore. «Adesso sono in tuo potere» gli dice. Ma non è così che stanno le stanno cose, perché nella vita di Jessica c’è un altro, uno di quegli uomini che contano, uno di quelli in combutta con il potere. Quando la guerra sarà finita Jessica sceglierà lui, «prenderà gli ordini dal marito, diventerà una burocrate domestica, una socia giovane della loro società, e quando penserà a Roger, sempre che pensi ancora a lui, le sembrerà un errore, un errore che grazie al cielo non ha commesso».
In quel Natale di guerra, Roger e Jessica hanno però trovato una casa in una zona evacuata a sud di Londra. È un alloggio che i due innamorati hanno occupato illegalmente; è la loro tana d’amore nell’inferno della guerra e «tutte le volte che si incontrano lì, uno dei due si ricorda sempre di portare qualche fiore fresco». Roger sa bene che presto sarà dimenticato, che non ci sarà posto per lui nella pace futura, quando verranno restaurati «i riti razionalizzati del potere». La stessa cosa la sa Jessica, perché anche se fuori è notte e soffia il vento e lei muore dal freddo, quando talvolta lui le prende le mani per scaldarla, Jessica «continua a starsene lontana, tremante».
Questo succede perché «quando non sono a letto, quando parlano, quando camminano, l’amarezza, la cupezza di Roger scorrono più profonde, più intense della Guerra e dell’inverno.» La colpa di Roger è quella odiare l’Inghilterra e il «Sistema», di lamentarsi in continuazione e di ripetere che a guerra finita emigrerà. Jessica appartiene a un mondo che aspira alla normalità e Roger è un tipo troppo lunatico e ansioso per diventare uno di quei mariti che si accontentano di «una domenica sonnolenta da passare tra le foglie morte del giardinetto inaridito».
Nonostante ciò e malgrado la loro storia abbia i giorni contati e i loro incontri siano destinati a cessare il giorno stesso della vittoria alleata, perfino Jessica non riesce a rinunciare a quei momenti di amore, e nella follia delle loro notti clandestine «tutto quello che le riesce di fare è ripetere Roger, Roger, amore mio, con un esile filo di voce». Forse è perché si avvicina il Natale e anche se la guerra continua, «credere non costa nulla». Lui può diventare il Bambino appena nato e «nella notte magica della sua nascita gli animali parleranno e il cielo sarà di latte». O più semplicemente forse è solo perché «l’amore è una cosa sorprendente» e a volte bastano poche ore e ancor meno parole affinché il tempo si fermi e due persone si stringano nei loro corpi «quanto lo consentano i muscoli e le ossa».
Così, per quanto sia chiaro fin dall’inizio che la magia di questo amore non può che spezzarsi, i momenti rubati alla guerra e all’inverno rimangono comunque una sfida a sistema cinico e razionale che persegue la morte in nome di un ordine astratto. E se è vero che la tana del provvisorio amore tra Roger e Jessica ci viene descritta come «un posto marginale, misero, gelido», c’è un’altra cosa altrettanto vera. Una cosa che Pynchon spiega senza troppi giri di parole: «Sono innamorati. Vaffanculo alla guerra.»
pubblicato su «il manifesto» del 22 dicembre 2002 con il titolo Tra Thomas Pynchon e il Natale i conti non tornano.
--Tommaso Pincio |
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| di Thomas Pynchon, Einaudi Stile Libero |
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«Queste ali sono V-eliziose. Le metterò nel ricettario dell'Arcobaleno della gravità accanto alla frittura del latke 49» ha detto Thomas Pynchon in una puntata dei Simpson assaggiando un manicaretto di Marge, ali di pollo al wasabi. Lo scrittore è ormai di casa nel mondo ideato da Matt Groening, e in molti si domandano per quale ragione, dopo decenni trascorsi fuggendo dai fotografi e rifiutando interviste, Pynchon abbia finalmente deciso di apparire in pubblico - in televisione, per giunta - prestando la propria voce a un cartone animato dove egli appare con il volto nascosto da una busta di carta. La versione ufficiale è che lo abbia fatto per suo figlio, grande fan dei gialli abitanti di Springfield. Non c'è motivo di dubitare che sia davvero così. Tuttavia è difficile pensare che non ci sia anche dell'altro. Del resto, Pynchon non ha mai nascosto la sua passione per i cartoni animati. «Il mio atteggiamento è il seguente: voglia il cielo che i cartoni animati di Bip Bip non svaniscano mai dagli schermi» ha scritto una volta.
Animazione a misura di adulti
Ma I Simpson non è Bip Bip e neanche un cartone animato come tanti altri; il tipico cartone animato per bambini, cioè. Si dice spesso che I Simpson è un programma concepito per un pubblico adulto. Ma se così è, deve comunque trattarsi di un pubblico alquanto elitario, visto che non sono molti gli adulti ad avere un'idea di chi sia Thomas Pynchon e ancora meno quelli che hanno letto un suo romanzo. Eppure, nonostante I Simpson abbondi di citazioni colte e affronti spesso temi seri quali la sicurezza del nucleare, la tutela dell'ambiente e i diritti degli omosessuali, il suo enorme successo dura ormai da più di un decennio. Dobbiamo forse dedurne che gli americani sono un popolo di intellettuali? Evidentemente no. Alla resa dei conti, l'America rappresentata nei Simpson è tutt'altro che edificante. Prendiamo Homer, per esempio. È un pessimo padre di famiglia. È stupido, ignorante, smidollato e privo di alcun principio morale, uno che sfoga rabbia e frustrazione cercando di strangolare suo figlio Bart, il quale è peraltro l'antitesi dello stinco di santo e, quanto a cervello, sembra avere preso molto dal padre.
A complicare ulteriormente le cose c'è poi il fatto che la piccola Lisa, la sola con un po' di sale nella zucca in casa Simpson, venga derisa dai coetanei e ignorata dagli adulti proprio per le sue inclinazioni intellettualoidi. Ebbene, fra le questioni più dibattute nei Simpson e la filosofia, un volume che raccoglie le riflessioni di alcuni illustri pensatori americani, c'è per l'appunto la strana commistione di intellettualismo e becerume tipica dei Simpson.
L'episodio Springfield utopia delle utopie offre molti spunti in proposito. Scandalizzata dai limiti culturali della città in cui vive, la piccola Lisa esprime tutto il suo sdegno scrivendo al quotidiano locale: «Oggi la nostra città ha perso ciò che restava della sua fragile civiltà. Abbiamo otto centri commerciali e nessuna orchestra sinfonica; trentadue bar e nessun teatro alternativo». Lo sfogo viene raccolto da un ristretto manipolo di cittadini con un quoziente intellettivo superiore alla media i quali propongono alla bambina di formare un «concilio dei colti» che prenda il potere e rimodelli Springfield sulla falsariga della repubblica platonica. I saggi si dimostrano ben presto gretti e litigiosi dando modo a Homer di guidare la controrivoluzione degli stupidi al grido «Forza idoti, riprendiamoci la città». Il progetto di una nuova utopia fallisce miseramente e l'episodio si chiude con Homer e il fisico Sthephen Hawking che discutono la teoria dell'universo a forma di ciambella.
Un motore di paradossi
«In definitiva, sembra che I Simpson offra una specie di difesa intellettuale dell'uomo comune contro gli intellettuali, il che contribuisce a spiegare la sua popolarità e l'ampiezza del suo appeal». Partendo da un simile assunto si può arrivare al punto di paragonare l'atteggiamento del cartone animato nei confronti della società americana al pensiero di Nietzsche in merito alla Critica della ragion pura: «Kant voleva dimostrare in maniera offensiva per "tutto il mondo", che "tutto il mondo" aveva ragione: era l'arguzia segreta di questa anima. Egli scrisse contro i dotti a favore del pregiudizio popolare, ma fu per i dotti che scrisse, non già per il popolo».
Il contorto paradosso caratterizza anche l'opera di Pynchon, per un verso tesa a opporsi al sistema e per l'altro motore propulsore di una grande macchina accademica. Si dice spesso che Pynchon è un autore sovversivo, ciò nonostante è lo scrittore vivente più studiato nelle università americane. Si dice anche che egli dia voce all'umanità invisibile degli emarginati e dei dimenticati da Dio, ma la sua opera è così erudita e complessa che sembra poter parlare soltanto agli intellettuali.
In una puntata dei Simpson, Lisa domanda a un sua compagna di scuola: «Stai leggendo L'arcobaleno della gravità?» La studentessa guarda Lisa con sufficienza e precisa: «RI-leggendo». Facile ironia, senza dubbio, ma è comunque innegabile che i romanzi di Pynchon non sono alla portata di tutti, così come non tutti possiedono gli strumenti necessari per cogliere le dotte citazioni di cui I Simpson è pieno.
Non fosse altro che per la sua mole alquanto ridotta, L'incanto del lotto 49 è unanimemente considerato il libro più accessibile di Pynchon. Si dà il caso, però, che sia anche il libro del quale lo scrittore si è dichiarato meno convinto, definendolo un racconto proposto al pubblico come romanzo dove egli darebbe «l'impressione di aver dimenticato quasi tutto quello che credevo di aver imparato in precedenza». È inoltre il solo, tra quelli citati nei Simpson, del quale Pynchon abbia storpiato il titolo facendolo diventare La frittura del latke 49. Leggenda vuole che questo breve romanzo sia stato scritto di fretta e per denaro nella prima metà degli anni Sessanta, quando il pensiero dell'autore era volto a un ben più ambizioso progetto destinato a vedere la luce nel decennio successivo, il già citato Arcobaleno della gravità. Naturalmente sono soltanto voci e quand'anche si trattasse di qualcosa di più, è pur sempre di Pynchon che stiamo parlando, vale a dire di un libro che si avvicina molto alle sfere celesti dei capolavori assoluti. Ma questa è retorica, e pure molto abusata.
Perché non provare, allora, a mettere da parte le difese d'ufficio? Perché non provare a seguire Pynchon lungo il filo della perplessità? Proviamo a dargli ragione, ipotizziamo che L'incanto del lotto 49 non sia perfettamente riuscito e cerchiamo di capire perché non lo sia. Ci sono per caso altre ragioni oltre alla fretta e al bisogno di denaro che possono averne determinato il parziale fallimento? Magari sono proprio queste ragioni che lo rendono degno di essere letto e riletto. Perché non è affatto detto che i romanzi importanti siano sempre ciambelle col buco. Non di rado i buoni libri sconfinano nell'imperfezione, prima la anelano e poi ci sguazzano a dispetto degli stessi autori. Non di rado, quel che chiamiamo «capolavoro» non è che un felice bouquet di errori.
Quantunque abbia vissuto sempre nell'ombra, Pynchon viene considerato un esponente della controcultura americana degli anni Sessanta, in particolare di quella frangia del Movimento che gravitava intorno a Berkeley. Curiosamente, però, l'unico romanzo ambientato nella California di quel periodo è proprio L'incanto del lotto 49 ed è perciò giusto considerarlo come un momento di passaggio essenziale.
Essendo nato nel 1937 a Glen Clove, nella costa orientale degli Stati Uniti, quando pubblicò V., il suo primo romanzo, Pynchon era un giovane di ventisei anni che aveva studiato alla Cornell University di New York. Ciò implica che la sua formazione culturale risale a un momento molto delicato della storia americana, la seconda metà degli anni Cinquanta, un periodo in cui le scuole erano impostate in modo da sfornare ragazzi già «inquadrati», vale a dire precoci cittadini perbene pronti a vestire completi di flanella grigia e a comportarsi come adulti di mezza età. Allo stesso tempo, fu un periodo in cui si posero le basi di uno stile di vita irrequieto se non proprio anticonformista. Le prime canzoni di Elvis Presley insieme a romanzi come Sulla strada di Kerouac e Lolita di Nabokov parlano di un'epoca che coltivava i germi dei valori che avrebbero imperversato in futuro. «Sesso, droga e rock'n'roll», tanto per essere chiari.
Dagli scritti giovanili di Pynchon emerge per l'appunto il ritratto di un tipico giovane anni Cinquanta, da un lato pieno di complessi, inibizioni e incredibilmente colto per la sua età, dall'altro voglioso di «seguire il flusso», di gettarsi nella vita viva, quella che esiste fuori dei libri. Pynchon avrebbe abbandonato infatti New York per fare esperienze «on the road», sbarcò a Berkeley e iniziò a spostarsi tra il Messico e la California frequentando gli ambienti alternativi e consumando una ragguardevole quantità di stupefacenti. Quando il Movimento toccò il suo apice, Pynchon aveva ormai superato la trentina, soglia fatidica in un'epoca che annoverava tra suoi imperativi maggiori quello di non fidarsi di nessuno sopra ai trenta anni. Non essendo più giovanissimo, Pynchon si rese ben presto conto dei rischi che serpeggiavano sottotraccia e, come tutti coloro che appartengono a una generazione di mezzo, sviluppò una sorta di nostalgia preventiva per i sogni mancati degli anni Sessanta. In un certo senso, l'angoscia per il lato oscuro della controcultura è già ravvisabile nell'Incanto del lotto 49, anche se ovviamente si tratta di un sentimento ancora lontano dal lucido bilancio di Vineland, romanzo del 1990 dove lo scrittore affronterà il problema con l'amarezza del senno di poi.
L'incanto del lotto 49 uscì nel 1966. Fu dunque scritto quando l'Lsd era ancora legale, le rockstar non morivano a grappoli per overdose, la bella Sharon Tate non era stata massacrata di pugnalate dalle ancelle di Manson, il Vietnam non si era rilevato un «pantano» di sangue e Nixon non si era insediato alla Casa Bianca per rimettere tutti in riga. Sì, avevano già ammazzato John Kennedy, ma in fondo era niente se paragonato a quanto sarebbe successo in seguito. Nella prima metà degli anni Sessanta si era ancora all'inizio di tutto e fu probabilmente il momento più bello di quella avventura, quello in cui si poteva dire «I have a dream» credendoci davvero. Il bello «vero», quello che avrebbe posto fine alla festa, doveva ancora arrivare.
Un po' per carattere e un po' per educazione - l'educazione di un bravo ragazzo degli anni Cinquanta avvezzo alla paranoia della guerra fredda e della caccia alle streghe - quello dell'Incanto del lotto 49 è il Pynchon dei brutti presentimenti. Fin dalle battute iniziali, nel romanzo si respira un'aria di apprensione e disagio. La lettura inciampa spesso in frasi come «Le cose non tardarono a prendere una piega curiosa» che sembrano scritte apposta per prepararci al peggio e alla disillusione.
Oedipa Mass, giovane californiana, si trova inaspettatamente nominata esecutrice testamentaria da un suo vecchio amante, il miliardario Pierce Inverarity ormai passato a miglior vita. Mentre cerca di sbrogliare il groviglio di beni da ridistribuire, Oedipa si imbatte nel lotto 49, una collezione di francobolli dal valore inestimabile dietro la quale si nascondono le trame di una intricatissima cospirazione che attraversa la storia dell'occidente, dalla caduta del Sacro Romano Impero al ventesimo secolo. Oedipa decide di improvvisarsi investigatrice in quanto i tentacoli del complotto si estendono dappertutto, finanche nella sua vita privata. Il libro si interrompe però proprio nel momento in cui la soluzione dell'enigma sembra a portata di mano, lasciando il lettore con il dubbio se il complotto sia reale o soltanto una farsa.
Falsi problemi
Si è molto speculato sull'ipotesi che L'incanto del lotto 49 sia una detective story mancata. Un falso problema. Da bravo postmoderno, Pynchon ha volutamente scritto un romanzo a chiave senza serratura o, per essere più precisi, con molte chiavi e nessuna serratura. Una delle chiavi possibili è per l'appunto che il complotto dei francobolli sia soltanto uno specchietto per le allodole, una grande messinscena la cui funzione è quella di distogliere la nostra attenzione dalla vera scena del delitto, il paesaggio americano e il suo stile di vita.
Oedipa rimane irretita dal mistero soprattutto perché subisce il fascino degli «oggetti inanimati», crede che le cose siano fonte di rivelazione ma questa sua convinzione la distoglie dall'affetto per i suoi simili, più precisamente l'allontana dagli uomini ai quali è legata. D'altronde, in un mondo dominato dal libero mercato le cose sono più importanti degli esseri umani. È infatti la commercializzazione degli oggetti che permette al sistema di espandersi e perpetrarsi. Se gli oggetti sembrano animarsi di significati è solo perché le merci sono confezionate per apparire desiderabili, e tali devono apparire perché il vero inganno - l'autentica messinscena - è che il mercato sia libero. Le persone si illudono di scegliere cosa comprare e talvolta arrivano addirittura a pensare di poter decidere se comprare. Ma alla fine qualcosa comprano sempre, perché alla fine tutti desiderano sempre qualcosa.
Se Oedipa si rivela una investigatrice fallita è semplicemente perché cade nella trappola degli oggetti. Li crede portatori di enigmi ma non si rende conto che il mistero è soltanto uno dei modi attraverso cui gli oggetti si rendono desiderabili. Nell'ultimo capitolo del romanzo, quando si è ormai troppo inoltrata nel labirinto, Oedipa scopre che a forza di correre dietro ai misteri degli oggetti ha finito per perdere l'amore degli uomini.
«A uno a uno mi stanno spogliando dei miei uomini» constata Oedipa tra sé. «Il mio analista, con gli israeliani alle calcagna, è impazzito; mio marito, dedito all'Lsd, brancola come un bambino in una fuga infinita di stanze e fruga negli angoli più remoti di quella casa di zucchero che è il suo io lasciandosi alle spalle, ormai senza più speranza, quello che m'illudevo fosse il nostro amore; il mio unico amante extraconiugale si è dato alla fuga con una depravata quindicenne». Non c'è dunque nessun complotto, se non la farsa attraverso cui il sistema induce le persone a preferire gli oggetti agli esseri umani, la macchina cervellotica degli enigmi al moto naturale dei sentimenti. Certo, nessuno può garantire che si tratti davvero di una farsa. Ma importa forse qualcosa? La paranoia non nasce mai da un dato di realtà bensì da un atto di fede al negativo, dalla convinzione che il reale non è quel che sembra. In fondo, lo stesso Pynchon - lui che è sempre stato dalla parte dell'umanità - si è fatto irretire dal mistero.
Un limite degno della nostra stima
Alla resa dei conti, L'incanto del lotto 49 è infatti una macchina narrativa che tratta i suoi personaggi come fossero cose. Forse è proprio questo ciò che il suo autore si rimprovera. Ma questo limite è anche ciò che consente al romanzo di essere letto come l'oscuro presagio della fine degli anni Sessanta. È questo limite che lo rende disperatamente umano e degno della nostra stima imperitura. Se poi c'è qualcuno tra noi che, diversamente da Pynchon e Oedipa, non è mai caduto nella trappola dei propri sogni, scagli pure la prima pietra. Insomma, per dirla con una famosa battuta dei Simpson, «Tu parli a vuoto, ma sei capace di parlare a pieno?»
--Tommaso Pincio |
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| di Thomas Pyncho, Rizzoli |
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Since the war a category of the American novel has been developed by a number of writers: American picaresque one might call the archetype, and its more notable practitioners would include Saul Bellow with ''The Adventures of Augie March,'' Jack Kerouac, ''On the Road,'' Joseph Heller, ''Catch-22,'' Clancy Sigal, ''Going Away,'' and Harry Matthews, who last fall produced a generally overlooked though brilliant novel entitled ''Conversions.'' The genus is distinguished by what the word ''picaresque'' implies -- the doings of a character or characters completely removed from socio-political attachments, thus on the loose, and, above all, uncommitted.
Such novels are invariably lengthy, heavily populated with eccentrics, deviates, grotesques with funny names (so they can be remembered), and are usually composed of a series of bizarre adventures or episodes in which the central character is involved, then removed and flung abruptly into another. Very often a Quest is incorporated, which keeps the central character on the move.
For the author, the form of the picaresque is convenient: he can string together the short stories he has at hand (publishers are reluctant to publish short-story collections, which would suggest the genre is perhaps a type of compensation). Moreover -- the well-made, the realistic not being his concern -- the author can afford to take chances, to be excessive, even prolix, knowing that in a work of great length stretches of doubtful value can be excused. The author can tell his favorite jokes, throw in a song, indulge in a fantasy or so, include his own verse, display an intimate knowledge of such disparate subjects as physics, astronomy, art, jazz, how a nose-job is done, the wildlife in the New York sewage system. These indeed are some of the topics which constitute a recent and remarkable example of the genre: a brilliant and turbulent first novel published this month by a young Cornell graduate, Thomas Pynchon. He calls his book ''V.''
''V.'' has two main characters. One of them is Benny Profane -- on the loose in New York City following a Navy hitch and a spell as a road-laborer. Born in 1932, Profane is Depression-formed, and his function in the novel is to perfect his state of ''schlemihlhood'' -- that is to say being the victim, buffeted by circumstance and not caring to do much about it -- resigned to being behind the 8-ball. Indeed, in one poolroom fracas the 8-ball rolls up to Profane, prostrate on the floor, and stares him in the eye. His friends are called the Whole Sick Crew, a fine collection of disaffected about whom one observer says ''there is not one you can point to and say is well.'' Typical of them is the itinerant artist Slab, who calls himself a catatonic expressionist. Beset by a curious block he can only paint cheese danishes -- Cheese Danish No. 56 is his subject at one stage of the book.
Set in contrast to Profane is a young adventurer named Stencil. He is active as opposed to passive, obsessed by a self-imposed duty which he follows, somewhat joylessly -- a Quest to discover the identity of V., a woman's initial which occurs in the journals of his father, a British Foreign Office man, drowned in a waterspout off Malta. The search for V., a puzzle slowly fitted together by a series of brilliant episodic flashbacks, provides the unifying device of the novel -- a framework encompassing a considerable panorama of history and character. V., turning up first as a young girl in Cairo at the start of the century, reappears under various names and guises, invariably at times of strife and riot, in Florence, Paris, Malta, South Africa. Finally one finds her disguised as a Manichaean priest, trapped under a beam in a World War II bombing raid on Malta and being literally disassembled by a crowd of children.
The identity of V., what her many guises are meant to suggest, will cause much speculation. What will be remembered, whether or not V. remains elusive, is Pynchon's remarkable ability -- which includes a vigorous and imaginative style, a robust humor, a tremendous reservoir of information (one suspects that he could churn out a passable almanac in a fortnight's time) and, above all, a sense of how to use and balance these talents. True, in a plan as complicated and varied as a Hieronymus Bosch triptych, sections turn up which are dull -- the author backing and filling, shuffling the pieces of his enormous puzzle to no effect -- but these stretches are far fewer than one might expect.
Pynchon is in his early twenties; he writes in Mexico City -- a recluse. It is hard to find out anything more about him. At least there is at hand a testament -- this first novel ''V.'' -- which suggests that no matter what his circumstances, or where he's doing it, there is at work a young writer of staggering promise.
-- George Plimpton
New York Times, 21 April 1963 |
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| good girls go to heaven, aliens go everywhere... |
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