Against The Day

I am up around pg 290, slowly savoring as i read. and got to the bit about
electric light in the cities of Colorado. The debate over AC or DC which
was a bitter fight in real life between Tesla And Edison, pynchon has
thrown in the possibility of Magnetism as well. Its all much like the real
historical debate over weather the Aether exists or not earlier in the
book. The struggle for a concept of reality itself. as each of these
energies, and either possibility of the medium it passes through, brings us
“the light”. and that is what it is ALL about right? Go into the light… I
am wondering if we may be introduced to a infant version of Byron the Bulb
from Gravity’s Rainbow. I seem to remember Byron as having been born around
this time in an Edison factory. Byron was able to perceive the grid of
energy that moved in infinite patterns across the surface of the earth,
until reaching his point of consciousness, and isn’t that what we all want
essentially?
-Brian

I have not posted since Dec 25, and tons of new content has apeared in my blogging absence. Adrian has taken up slack, and taken it upon himself to expand and create many areas of the site. Everyone should feel free to do the same. This is an experiment, and i am curious to see just where it leads. you can be as pro-active or as passive as you like, and i hope this site does something to deepen your experience of this comunal reading game.
-Brian

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

Lewis Carroll, represented perhaps as Lew Basknight (Bas = Car, transposition)/(Knight = Through the looking glass) seems to me to have inspired the style of our first important encounter with the T.W.I.T.s., pages 220 - 227, including numerous references to strange physical laws, a pig of a baby (”scarcely a year old and already four stone, that form of gluttony known to students of the condition as gaver du visage” — 225).

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

I’ve just posted my current reading, and my guess as to what’s really going on in Against the Day. It’s under the Secrets section (to the right), in Game rules. There’s a lot yet to be fleshed out but I’m going to show my hand. Comments hereby solicited!

–Adrian Chan, 700 pages in

These series are now subcategories for posting references and findings by topic. Feel free to add. Each is a page.
These are their descriptions.

Aether, Air, Space
Aether, or air, or space. It is not known whether or not it exists. However it is a continuum and seems critical to the motion, movement, spin, travel, as well as to appearances. It is a medium with relations to travel by airship as well as relation to travel of light. It surrounds the earth. It also has associations with the spiritual dimension. Whether aether matters or not may depend on the mode in which is encountered (by light, by airship).

Art, Music, History
A number of artistic, musical and historical refences and events suggest themselves throughout the book. There is Turner painting light. References to figurative and post figurative painting. Film and photography. Performance, trickery, magic, escapism (e.g. Houdini) and a lot of card games (esp tarot, poker), battleship, and even video games suggest themselves throughout. Musical references to harmony, chords, and harmonics, as well as songs, voices, and melodies offer a soundtrack, as well as a means of explicating tone and time. Musicians appear as jazz players, uke and guitar players, and there seems a strong likelhood that the Grateful Dead and the Merry Pranksters are among our travelers.

Being, Presence
Being and life concern the existence of the Self, of Identity, of Reality. It is sometimes put in opposition to the possibility of Non-Being, which is cast into doubt by the presence of spiritual and ghostly presences. Being is not just the being alive of a subject, but is given to us as a condition, and may be as relevant to time and to event as it it is to matter.

Light
Light and its composition. Believed by some as wave particle. By some as energy and spirit. Visibility and Invisibility. Light and Dark. It is harnessed as electricity, providing the possibility of directing light by vector analysis, as in Tesla and Kit. It may illuminate spiritual dimensions. It is accompanied by shadows that may be true or false, and in cases may produce lighter shades. It can be refracted, reflected, split, absorbed, by use of minerals. Or captured using chemistry (photgraphy). Light is energy, and is understood to have different relationships to matter and to time depending on the plane it encounters. These planes, as interpretants, may produce images, reality, ghosts, spirits, energy, motion, paintings, revelations, and much more.

Literature and Cinema
A number of segments in the narrative arc use literary styles, authors, and books to afford Pynchon a variety of voices and scenes. There are Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing (Merle Rideout), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Lew Basknight, the TWIT Tarot episode), Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (Kit as Frodo or Bilbo?), William Gibson, Tom Wolfe, Proust, and comics, including Little Nemo, Tintin, V for Vendetta, and others. A similar narrative doubling occurs with his use of film. There are Monty Python’s Holy Grail and Life of Brian, Fawlty Towers, Star Wars, the Matrix, Fritz Lang, Fellini, John Woo, and numerous Terry Gilliamesque animations.

Math
Math is real, math is imaginary. The importance of math obtains from the debate between those who believed that imaginary numbers were real, and those who didn’t. Is math, as a theory, a description of reality or a system unto itself? Differential calculus is ciritical to Quaternions and Vectorists, whether as a means of measuring space and volume, or describing a curve and rate of change (time). Math gives us points on a plane, and points on a curve. These may be studied as locations, points, distances, movements, speeds, or trajectories. And again, points may be mapped in space or in time. Thus the importance of the book’s “bilocations,” which permit space and time travelers to encounter one another. Riemannian space makes a critical appearance, for which credit is probably due to Gilles Deleuze.

Matter
Matter is material, matter is immaterial, matter is memory, matter is mineral, matter is chemical. Matter matters, and matters not. It can be transformed by alchemists, used to capture images, used to split, divide, reflect, refract, double, or multiply light and energy. It has material value as silver, gold, Iceland Spar, quartz, gunpowder, and so on. Matter may be transformed, according to the rules of transformation applied to it. Whether conversion of matter into non-matter, energy, light, (or time?), results in good or bad depends on the nature of the force applied to it (creating or destroying forces).

Subject, Subjectivities, Agency
Subjectivity may be the topic of the book. It is possible that the book is one subjectivity (it is, the author’s). But the book clearly manifestes so many styles, periods, appearances, doubts, images, thoughts, ideas and concepts, events, motives, and, of course, alterations and hallucinations, that the book’s subjectivity is multiple and multiplicity. Characters follow their own subjectivating lines of flight through the narrative, motivated by an internal logic, by a memory, a loss, a problem, a pursuit or fear of pursuit, a talent, to mention a few. Some characters choose their destiny, others seem to be subjected to an invisible agency. And there are within the book many Agencies (a favorite topic of Pynchon’s).

Territories, Coordinates, Grids
The cartographic plane. Is an extensive plane or surface of matter and material. It is mother earth. It precedes the map but is always mapped. It is navigated by coordinates, locations and positions that require instrumentation, paths of travel (by airship or by rail, or by ship). It is territorialized by political forces, warring nations, business moguls, mines, and mineralists. It involves either use of a Cartesian grid or Vectorial navigation.

Time, Past, Present, Future, Memory
Time is relative. Or it is absolute. Time can be used for travel, as a mode of travel. Characters, real and present or as ghosts, are manifest because the book’s time is uncertain and unstable. Time is divisible or indivisible, depending on one’s mathematical allegiance. It’s significance to quaternions and vectorists differs in that quaternions plot in extensive planes and surfaces, vectorists in curves and trajectories. Of course, light’s relationship to time is up to debate, depending one’s perception of time and matter/space. To Bergson, there was one time, and the multiple times of subjective time and duration belonged to a single time. To Einstein, time is relative and space, subordinat to time. Time is also a vector itself, tending inevitably towards death.

Vehicles and vessels
Numerous varieties of dirigible, ship, and time travel device appear within the book. Many seem to suggest cartoons and animations. Among space ships are the yellow submarine, Jules Verne’s submarine, the Poseidon, the balloon of Around the World in 80 days, the Nebuchadnezzar of the Matrix, among others. For time travel there are at least Dr. Who’s Tardis and HG Wells’ time machine.

–Adrian Chan

Folks I’ve added a page (it’s top right in the nav) on which to break out the planes, series, lines of flight and rules of transformation I think comprise the construction of Against the Day. I’m going to start adding the concepts, characters, and references. Please pitch in when you find anything that might elucidate any of the book’s planes, lines of flight, and their intersections.

I’ve also technorati’d us
–Adrian Chan

Series: The image
This series thematizes the image, which was problematic as a challenge to art, to memory, even to reality itself for its accuracy of recording. Pynchon frequently refers to the image, photography, light, and the metals and chemicals on which images are captured.

Real/False | Reality/Image | Past/Memory | Photography/Recollection | Memory/Artifact | Sign/Signification | Sign/Referent

Signs of passage: Delillo/Barn | Delillo/Webcam | Webcam/Finland Finland|August 14

Wikipedia’s Abstruse References in Against the Day.

Series Image/Reality

From Against the Day
“At the moment, however, Webb noticed that Veikko had been sitting reading over and over to himself a whithered postcard from Finland, a troubled look on his face, a slow flush gathering around his eyes.
“Look. these aren’t real stamps here,” Veikko said. They are pictures of stamps. The Russians no longer allow Finnish stamps, we have to use Russian ones. These postmarks? They’re not real either. Pictures of postmarks. This one, August fourteen, 1900, was the last day we could use our own stamps for overseas mail.”
“So this is a postcard with a picture of what a postcard used to look like before the Russians. That’s what ‘Minneskort’ means?”
“Memory card. A memory of a memory.” It was a card from his sister back in Finland….
p. 84

Minneskort reference: you can buy one of these memory cards, easy. Google: “Sony Minneskort 8MB”

August 14, Finland, reference
August – September 1808
After the Russians were driven from Central Finland, their forces stretched along the line of Pori (Björneborg) — Tampere (Tammerfors) — Mikkeli (Sankt-Michel). Having received considerable reinforcements, their numbers increased to 55,000, as opposed to the 36,000 their opponents had. On August 14, Count Nikolay Kamensky decided to use this numerical superiority to launch a new offensive.
Source: Wikipedia

But the series is not historical, it is about the iamge, and it is a literary series referring to Don DeLillo.

DeLillo repeats the barn/postcard series in his later book, The Body Artist, this time using a webcam in Finland:

From a review of The Body Artist, by Don De Lillo
“Like an elegant piece of origami, the novel reflects and folds into itself without ever revealing its inscrutable secret. Laura spends hours watching the live web-cam broadcast of a nearly deserted two-lane highway in Kotka, Finland.”

From a review of The Body Artist of DeLillo’s book:
It is ironic that DeLillo, who eschews computer technology and writes on a manual typewriter (or “sculpts words,” as he puts it), has Lauren become obsessed with a live filming of a street in Finland, a constant webcam stream she sees on her computer…

We now pass from DeLillo’s webcam reference to DeLillo’s earlier postcard reference. The theme is consistent, and the series is image/reality.

From Don DeLillo’s White Noise
Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides–pitures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.
A long silence followed.
“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others.
“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”
Another silence ensued.
“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.
“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.”
He seemed immensely pleased by this.
Source: Everything2

–adrian

Technorati Profile

I’ve decided to read Against the Day as a multi-dimensional inter-narrative of coinciding realities in differentiated time and space. There are simply too many references to the Big Bang, to altered states of consciousness, alternate realities, to versions of history that could have been, to the inaccuracies, refractions, distortions, and bias introdcced by instruments of mediation, observation, recording, and communication. The tales told are themselves shadowed by events but in light refracted so that we can see them as multiplications and complexifications. Shadows and light, shadows of light.

There is a deep “anthropic principle” behind the cosmology of Pynchon’s Against the Day, a presence of ghosts and memories, a tracing of some kind of weak subjectivity (a post-modern position if there ever was one) whose agency is as erroneous, silly, and misguided as it is also passion-bound to defend liberty and freedom, if not also joy. There is, to cite Deleuze, “A Life” lived, as if behind the backs of our characters. A Reality realized, an Agency actualized, and a Virtual whose vectors suggest that for Pynchon, what could have or might have been are as compelling as what was. Though nothing matters in the end, there’s nothing the matter in the matter that matters to us, so what is the matter with us, since we’re all what matters and what matters to us is the matter of it all?

Constructed out of conceptual, political, social, literary, scientific, and historical plateaus, each a field of research and discovery (indeed, light, crystals, tarot, ghosts, gunpowder, flight, and the earth herself are all planes on which concepts are extended, Beings becoming), connected by lines drawn by families, as threads of a narrative, arcs of a plot, or roped together like the drum kit badly beaten by John Bonham of Led Zeppelin (himself a balloonist and ungainly Chum of Chance whose Chance was ended when he choked on his own chum), Against the Day itself blurs the line between fact and fiction. To Zeppelin’s lead balloon, it’s a Spinal Tap, a mockudocumentary of a work as much pictured in the style of color-by-numbers as written in series of connecting dots and ellipses….

There are many ways to play with surfaces, as there are ways to plumb depths. There is the conventional and proven fact that our ability to perceive reality depends on the reflection (minus absorption) of light off a surface. Without light as a medium (read: Mcluhan, for whom the lightbulb was a medium, and Pynchon, for whom Byron the bulb stole the limelight in a well-lit and lengthy but ultimately finite filmament in Gravity’s Regenbogen), we could not see anything. But if an author is to shed light on history, and if his interest involves the play of surface and depth (a theme of post modernism as well as of linguistics, semiotics, and hermeneutics), he may disassemble his own sight, may use his peripheral vision to catch things seen only when looked at from askance, might employ a prism and separate his light into its component colors. But Pynchon is an artist of the gonzo and it can be hard to tell a kaleidoscope from a prism when you’re looking at it from the other side. Clarity arrives when you set the book down.

Each of the plateaus on which Pynchon has written Against the Day has its own internal consistency. The planes intersect as the novel’s characters pass through them, across them, drift over them, break through them or become lost beneath them. It might be that our balloonists, the Chums of Chance, are like Super Mario and his pals in some strange Rube Goldberg-esque time machine video game, bouncing from level to level and gathering or chucking lives like ballast from a dirigible, their passage around the globe threading its way through the skies, but fading more like the contrails of a modern airplane marking where it has been, than projecting its destiny forward as if threading the eye of a needle whose very point could seal its fate. Pop.

Culture and art, literature, psychology, philosophy, music, and science are the perspectives from which Pynchon sees his subject as well as his craft. If one dominates, it might in fact be film, for Pynchon’s versions are much like visions. Pynchon sees, as Proust smells, and where readers might suffer his editorial style, it is an editing as montage, not as the drifting and lapsing of consciousness it might suggest. I read Against the Day sometimes with the feeling that I’m looking through a Viewmaster, each click bringing a new scene into view, and each seemingly unrelated to the next but for the round circle of time to which they all belong: a surface of infinite depths. For each is a perspective, and in each, we see what we are looking for. And I for one am looking forward to the rest of it!

–adrian chan

I have completed the second book, Icelandic Spar, which begins and ends with the COC. In between there is a relentless search by a parade of searchers. Some of these are already known to us, chiefly the vengeful search for Sloat and Deuce, and some are new. It is possible that the readers of the work who end up complaining of entropy ar starting to wander in this, the uphill approach, not yet the halfway mark. While I can see how this would happen, it is a mistake. Without trotting everybody from FJ Turner to Chaucer to support some exegesis about literatures of the journey (and btw, the latest most welcome addition to the journey genre for this boy is Eggers’ new What is the What, a connection made aptly (no racism involved here) I thought by Francine Prose to another epic journey, Huckleberry Finn), I would simply note that if one cannot accept ATR as a travelogue through the destruction wrought by white people over the past 100 years then the heck with ya, stay home. That said, the travel that is the subject of this post is time travel. I was thrilled to see the Wells reference, as weirdly enough, I had just finished a rereading of the classic (it takes an hour, go ahead, do it) a few weeks before ATR touched down. My interest in Wells’ work is not so much the science and physics of the piece (although i would argue his description of what it was like wizzing through space is so solid that it has yet to be matched, and TP’s formulation is, well, the subject of this post). As a long-time fan of the kakkatopian (Mumford’s formulation of what you may call dystopia), I find Wells’ parable of the Eloi more relevant every day (cf: 31 bullets stamped NYPD in Queens). Wells original gem is a slight jewel, and he never connects the worlds of past and future to his mutton-chewing fellow Victorians except of course for the flowers he brings back from his Eloisian Lolita. TP, in the space of less than 10 pages, recapitulates everything Wells achieved and more, including a reference to the Eloi in the form of Angela Grace, a 10-year old chanteuse picked up by the Chums in a ‘child bordello’ — the Dr Zoot that gives Chick and Darby a free ride in a ‘previously owned’ time machine (remind me, who write comic novels anymore? let alone meaningful ones?) — is a hand-off to Alonzo Meatman. But that is ahead of ourselves. Like Wells, TP provides a passage describing what the Chums see on their passage inside Zoot’s used conveyance. It is classic Pynchon, and resonates back to the Preterite convention and forward to set up a situation that will clearly haunt the rest of the book. The Chums see the kind of ghostly hordes that are presaged by the Mahdi with no faces in V; and on foot or with horses — the ’spectral calvary’ — they are a parallel set of travelers to those already proliferating on both sides of the Atlantic and the present tense. The list of entities already in motion through Book 2 would fill a page — I can’t wait to see who goes where why and yes, when.
-Miles