Against The Day

The fourth dimension… The book might be “card” game, and the pursuit of the fourth dimension is getting to four of a kind. If this worked, then perhaps the characters come together when a card is played or taken from a player’s hand. A winning hand is four of a kind, by suit, sequence, etc. The game is being played and replayed? Different cards come to life as they are played? They try to get to four by a method. Japanese Four death; TWIT cult of four, etc.?

–Adrian Chan, 675 pages in

Is it a card game using one deck of cards, over time, different games and players, and the characters only come into the light when the deck is taken out, and they want to get back together but are played, discarded, put in a hand (ijk, xyz being for example a straight vs face cards).. Note numerous references to Deuce being high or low, to Ace’s role, and so many card gaming refs I can’t even begin to count them. 
The characters believe they are in their own reality (like us, they think they have freedom) but each player has a method (card counting, magic, tarot, vectorism, grid, mappings, finding where the cards have gone to (pursuit of deuce, of kit, etc). And those players’ strategies (especially when they’re nearly out of cards (approaching the zero), but have to get some cards back (beyond the zero) from another player.
Philosophically, and this is a Heideggerian reference (who is, I believe, HM in the book), the being of a character is thus “thrown” (onto the table). Which is true of all of us: we live in a place, and in time. When the book’s characters are thrown, their lives are put (back) into play. They remember each other though, as they belong to the same deck. Out of love, and a need to get home, they try to get back to each other, even as or especially as they are being played and picked up by another player (and thus sent on another expedition).
I don’t know how Riemannian sphere would fit in. But the card players want the crystal model of the sphere and our characters are building tunnels in the earth (creating out of earth a Riemannian space? The Riemannian function may also be the Wild Card, or a card that is anything; hence the idea that it is destroyer or creator depending on if you are about to lose to it or win with it?). Thus our characters can teach our players, insofar as taking them out and playing the game allows them to set in motion.

Because life is limited by its finitude, true freedom would have to mean freedom in time and space. Or, eternal return (imagine that eternal return is simply belonging to a deck of cards shuffled and played over and over: imagine your experience of life if you’re in that deck!) So perhaps the characters and players are each trying to “get out” of the thrown-ness of being, and create infinite possibilities? Virtual and actual, reconciled (the Deleuzian version). Or substance and all its modes, the Spinozist version… Indeed, the book’s huge debt to Deleuze now comes out as a sort of rhizomatic “Being and Time,” emphasis on time’s return as creating the possibility of new becomings for each living individual; Life is lived by its characters, those characters live a life thrown into a game and in each game they are picked up, pursued, traded, hidden, revealed, and so on, each game also assuming a particularity, characters having personalities and obsessions according to the various “assemblages” or patterns in which they become a winning hand (with other cards). A Bergson-Spinoza-Nietzshean Deleuze set in rhizomatic post-reterritorialized world of beings and becomings? Pynchon wants to affirm beings over Being, times over Time — and like Deleuze, he affirms A Life but revels in its particular lives.

The vessels and ballons, i haven’t a clue about, unless they all serve the characters a means of travel (either getting to another player’s hand, or going back/forward in time to reunite with their families). Characters, played in different games by different players, would come to have different names (though being the same cards). We ought to have a Traverse family (a suit), TWITs (four of a kind), a straight, full house, you name it; Character analysis ought to reveal which are actually the same families…

Electricity, wireless communication, light, all of that then is a mode of transformation, or locomotion, or getting to another place or time. Entropy increases as the game of life is played; but order is increasing at the same time (negentropy), as it is arranged in patterns (suits, straights, pairs, four of a kind). Anarchy then, on the side of entropy, is a way of shuffling the deck? Or ending a game? At p 700 in Against the Day, there is more to uncover!

–Adrian Chan

At 700 pages in I’m beginning to think the book might be a single card game, and not several, and I’m suspecting that it’s Solitaire, though I don’t play the game myself, so I’m out on a limb. But reasons to suspect this include:

–the zero function (getting to zero cards left to play)
–the arrangement of cards in suits, four dimensions, according to color (the Venice-painters-color separation chapter p 587)
–The Traverse’s strike me as all Jacks, or Aces?
–Miles knew where the card was p. 24
–house of cards 220
–Japanese “Four Death” 258
–”not in any card game he knew how to play” 272
–”longest-runnin poker game in history” 280
–538 card counting and card values
–566 wild cards
–Dally’s card tricks 574
–Deuce…
–Light and Dark, being possibly cards turned face up or down
–card references all over pages 538, 680 - 686
–Yashmeen nearly out of cards, 589

and there are many more.,…

The possibility being that Thomas Pynchon might have written out his characters, given them plot lines, and then played a game of cards, inventing the connections as required. As if to unwrite the writing of the book, to realize the “thrown-ness” of being by bringing his characters to life as he turns cards over and places them with others.

There’s a clear sense that the game played on these characters eludes them, in spite of their efforts to figure out what’s going on. The sense of eternal return would correspond to games played over and over using the same deck of cards. It would explain also the sense of deja vu that many characters have, either at having been here before or of having known other characters in the book.

I don’t have a Tarot deck handy, but descriptions of many of the characters might be covered by the appearance of cards in Tarot deck. Tesla and his tower, the serpent (a snake with paws), the Zombinis (magicians), the Vibes, Vanderjuice, etc.

The book’s theme of virtuality and actuality, too, would correspond with the card playing theme, insofar as all is possible but once played, a card’s destiny is on the table, so to speak. We must deal with the hand we are dealt!

The Renfrew/Werfner doppelganger effect might allude to the duplication of the playing card’s character up and down. Lew himself is referred to as the upside/downside man.

The fact that they are into the Tetractys might make them Diamonds. And on page 220 the numbers 1 through 10 are displayed. Aces through 10 in diamonds, perhaps?

–Adrian Chan