Thomas Pynchon – Against the Day
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| An edited (obviously) version of a fake photo of St. Mark’s Campanile collapsing in 1902. |
ABSOLUTELY fantastic is the first thing I
have to say about this book. As I was nearing the conclusion of the novel I
realised that this is probably one of longest novels I’ve read – certainly it’s
shorter than some of the Chinese classics – but unlike Gravity’s Rainbow, I didn’t find the narrative got bogged down at
all, despite the ridiculousness that went on at various points. Perhaps Against the Day was more accessible than
Gravity’s Rainbow, the language was
easier to follow and the plot less fragmented and less interwoven with paranoia.
The novel certainly made use of “Pynchonland”
a lot more than the other novels I have read – there was free use of
alternative/discredited scientific theories to make sense of the world, ghosts
and tarot appear within the world without anybody kicking up a fuss, unreal
locations like Shambala and the inside of the world’s crust (Hollow Earth). Of
these things the Quaternion theory and the tarot cards stand out strongest.
Lew, a gumshoe who works in various places in Europe and America, is introduced
to a way of reading the tarot whereby the cards are arranged to present a
picture of his life, with the various Major Arcana, each representing a separate
real person in the text.
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“Admittedly, ours
is an odd sort of work… There is but one ‘case’ which preoccupies us. Its ‘suspects’
are exactly twenty-two in number. These are precisely the cadre of operatives
who, working in secret, cause – or at least allow – History upon this island
to happen, and they correspond to the twenty-two Major Arcana of the Tarot
deck.” Going on to explain, as he had times past counting, that the
twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana might be regarded as living agencies,
positions to be filled with real people, down the generations, each attending
to his own personally tailored portfolio of mischief cheap or trivial, as the
grim determinants appeared, assassinations, plagues, failures of fashion
sense, losses of love, as, one by one, flesh-eating sheep sailed over the
fence between dreams and the day. “There must always be a Tower. There must
always be a High Priestess, Temperance, Fortune, and so forth. Now and then,
when vacancies occur, owing to death or other misadventure, new occupants
will emerge, obliging us to locate and track them, and learn their histories
as well. That they inhabit, without exception, a silence as daunting as their
near invisibility only intensifies our challenge.”
Against the Day, Part 2 “Iceland
Spar”
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This,
the triangular layout they are arranged in seems similar to the Tetractys that
the T.W.I.T. members worship (aside from the twelve extra points, with the
Arcana that appears at the apex of the triangle being the ultimate obstacle, seems suggestive of some slightly hidden
structural rule. The 5 parts that the text is split into has been suggested to
be linked to the five terms of the Quaternion theory too. Looking at these
three ideas, the Tetractys, Tarot and Quaternions, it would seem that they are
each incompatible. However, it is implied that Vectors, which is the major
competitor to Quaternions in the text, and perhaps a more linear way of
charting movement (as I understand it), would suggest that compatibility can be
found.
With the Major Arcana, one would
be tempted to count the number of characters in the novel, however, with the
idea that some characters are “doubled”, Renfew being the counterpart of Werfner,
the Chums of Chance on the Inconvenience
being the opposite numbers of their Russian counterparts, Lewis having possibly
been doubled at some point (as well as the Earth itself at one point), as well
as the idea that perhaps certain characters do not occupy a Tarot card, this
becomes a pointless and impossible task. With the Tetractys, it would be possible
to either reduce the numbers on this shape to fit the Arcana, or perhaps,
adding other dimensions to the shape to make this work - however, once again, without knowing the what
fors and whys of this task, it also becomes difficult and impossible. The
easiest fit, is of course the five terms of the Quaternion theory fitting with
the five sections of the text.
I feel I should posit a final theory here, without actually working anything
out, or just make a suggestion. The 22 Arcana could correspond to different
characters in different sections, or different characters in the different arcs
of the story, or could correspond to different characters depending on who the
text is focussed on. The way the Arcana are arranged does suggest an expanded
Tetractys anyway, and the Quaternion theory could relate to both the sections
of the texts and be expanded to four dimensions to correspond to the various
parts of the text with -1, the last part, thus having no Arcana.
What we have here is nonsense.
Nonsense that reduces to -1 essentially. This, as a final note, corresponds to
a major theme of Gravity’s Rainbow,
which is getting beyond the zero. It also corresponds to a major Pynchonian
theme, which is that nothing is reducible to anything but nonsense and secret
schemes with are unfathomable.
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