Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon's Graphic Impulse

CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism, N. 22: 1922/2022: Total Modernism - Vol. 1 (2023). https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/COSMO, 2023

In his novel Against the Day, Pynchon's formulation of modernism anticipates and even subsumes postmodernism, yet also is predicated on an abolition of sequential time and cause and effect, which might reflect a modernist decentering of space, time, and gravity. Pynchon's modernism dramatizes the idea that linear time no longer exists-that our time and space are no longer the center of the universe, much as conscious individual thought no longer is the center of subjectivity. Periods, literary or grammatical, also fall by the wayside. This decentering of time also is associated with modernist science and ontology, which paradoxically put modernism back at the center of an aesthetic without a center. Modernism functions as the narrative equivalent of relativity, yet also of quantum theory, because all spaces and time emerge and exist at once, in a process that Pynchon refers to as bilocation. Modernist connection then veers into concurrence. At least heuristically, Pynchon also treats the modernist project as a form of doubling and repetition. As a result, Pynchon situates modernism and World War I as precursors to their successor, postmodernism and World War II, without directly addressing them, yet somehow also as co-existing with them; both are doubled though repetitions that rewrite the originals. Pynchon situates modernism as an ethos of echoes, but a repetition without an original. A kind of quilting point, modernism becomes a contradictory master term that still explains everything, a lens through which all else is seen.

Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon

Criticism, 2010

This study explores Pynchon's mammoth novel, Against the Day, in terms of the minor practice of language as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, which opens up new possibilities for literary criticism. With his idiosyncratic, intensive, and inventive practice of language, Pynchon shatters the already existing notions of appropriate and homogenizing forms of major language. The novel demystifies the language's institutionalized system of signification and defies identifiable decipherable meaning in many ways,

The New Pynchon Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions, Edited by Joanna Freer, 2019

The essay argues that, while Pynchon long ago saw the way in which our reality was radically altered by film and media, Pynchon's digital age novels lament the "death" of celluloid film and are concerned with digitalization of life and history. Like Pynchon's novels, which attempt to preserve marginal histories, Anderson's film (which was not filmed digitally, as most films today are) attempts to preserve a certain idea of cinema and history.

2018

Disruptions of Time in ContemporaryG erman Literature Time stands still in Thomas Lehr'sn ovel 42. Ac osmic "disruption" (Lehr 2005: 35) has caused asingle moment to lingeronfor all eternity,time as an ephemeral experience has been suspended, broughttoastandstill in the interface of asingle, everlasting moment.The novel tells the story of the "chronified" (Chronifizierten), as mall group of randomlya ssembled protagonists, who, for reasons that remain unknown to them as well as the reader,c an continue to move through this frozen world, enclosed in their own small temporal spheres,i n which their ownp rivatet ime goes on ticking as usual. The "time zombies," as they call themselves, soon begin to lead an omadic existence:t hey traverse the world, which has become am ere backdrop, in which aircrafts hang motionless in the eternallycloudless sky and people remain frozen in mid-step. The visual presenceofa n-in principle-familiar reality,which is one of the major effects of the scenario, enters into as trangelyi ncongruous relationship with its "unreality," with the mystery thatthe world of the eternal present seems to harbor.For in Thomas Lehr'swork, time has stood still around midday, of all times, so thatall of Europe is lit by never-ending bright sunlight,which literallyilluminates reality right into the last nook and cranny. This maximum degree of visibility,t his visual monumentalization of the existing world, is bound up with a deep ontological doubt: everything that is so clearlyv isible here suddenly seems likeaf acade,ac opy,l ike ag igantic museum of the world, lacking the "wintery air of real reality";i ts eems more like a "sculpture garden," populated by "mummies,"" wax figures" and "shop window mannequins of ad ecorator sufferingfrom delusions of grandeur" (Lehr 2005:236,3 3-34,53&63). Leitmotifs involvingm etaphors of art,i mages, and photographya re used to describe this world, thus alludingt oacontext drawnf rom the theory of the media: the world brought to as tandstill appears as the purest "summer painting,a cross which ab rilliant photo-realist has scattered his highlights,h is intimate hues and life-likeshadows," like a "painting by Spitzweg," or rather "afilm by Spitzweg,[ … ]i nw hich in principle everything would be able to move," were it not fixed in the immobility of asingle snapshot (Lehr 2005:11, 124 &132).And elsewhere, concerning aspontaneous remark made by a "chronified" child, we read: "It seems to have been photographed,c rystallized and fixed in place by the ad-Translated from the German by GregoryS ims.

Transatlantica: American Studies Journal, 2010:1., 2010

Sound Effects: The Object Voice in Fiction

"This chapter examines an odd passage from Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. Relatively early on in the novel, a detective named Lew Basnight finds himself party to a strange séance in London. This scene does not merely involve a medium on the living side of the equation but a spirit medium as well. The multiple displacements and ghostly voices in this scene provide a way of examining the Lacanian “object voice” in relation to Giorgio Agamben’s reinvigoration of zoē and bios as differing forms of life. The voice seems to both hold together and disrupt this distinction, as well as being key in the structural conceit that makes us all homines sacri. Pynchon’s strange displacements, however, offer more than just an “example” of the object voice. They allow a link to be made between the object voice and the voice of narration, and also, more importantly perhaps, between the object voice, Agamben’s “bare life” and questions of sovereignty. The séance produces an uncanny excess of spectrality that, in this analysis, goes beyond Marx to make the commodity itself appear as a subject. "

Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, 2020

Chapter 3, pp. 109-46 Keywords: Columbian Exposition; alternative history; paramorphism; international anarchism; propaganda of the deed; anarcho-syndicalism Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) begins with the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and ends with the immediate aftereffects of World War I in 1920. Yet the novel depicts not only the history and politics of the turn-of-the-last-century as we have received them but also “the other side of the tapestry,” a darker and alternative history. The Chums of Chance surveil “the inexorably rising tide of World Anarchism,” only seven years after the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. In the historical paramorphism of the novel, what if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand met his demise while cavorting in the New World rather than by assassination in Sarajevo in 1914? A small perturbation in the course of history might have averted the cascade of events that brought the Triple Alliance to war with the Central Powers in the “General European War.” The novel is set during the heyday of international Anarchism that sought to dislodge plutocrats from power and turn the material assets of the industrial monopolies over to the workers. Attacks on European royalty and heads of state followed the principle of “propaganda of the deed,” but the repentant bomber Webb Traverse ultimately declares his loyalty to anarcho-syndicalism. The novel draws a double refraction between the Belle Époque of monopoly capitalism and the post-9/11 politics of globalization.