Pynchon - Against the Day, Frontiers, Love & Stuff Like That

 I read Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day in prison. I will repeat what I say in every post on this blog about Pynchon: his sense of humor and mine do not match; I recognize the work he has accomplished, but it leaves me cold.

Listening to the following video from Write Conscious, I had to disagree with most of what it contains. Then the presenter got onto the idea that our spiritual/social breakdown started with the loss of the frontier. The frontier gave us something spiritual to rub up against.

I have been thinking much on the division of the Northwest Territories into townships; where surveyors forced the land into grids. That was long before the frontier was gone. Even before the frontier left Indiana., surveyors were going forth to make the land fall into rationality. 

Also, my reading of the Desert Fathers was triggered. It can be said that they went out into the wilderness, the frontier in a way, to decrease the influence of the world on their spirituality. However, I take from the Desert Fathers that there is in all of us a spiritual frontier.

However, I agree with the argument about the need for spirituality in our literature. That agreement comes out of my experience with depression. That is a disease of the spirit as much as of physiology and psychology. The spirit has been neglected by the vast amount of American literature since Nathaniel Hawthorne, if not further back. I cannot think of anything in English or American literature comparable to Dostoevsky's The Brother Karamazov.

Using the Night  (n+1, Mark Iosifescu) has this to say about Pynchon, and Against the Day.

A growing comfort with sentimentality feels, too, like the primary carryover from Vineland into Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, even if much of the critical interest in those latter and longer novels was confined, at least initially, to rejoicing over the return they represented to the author’s vaunted maximalist epic mode. (T.C. Boyle re M&D in the NYTBR: “This is the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all.”) But beyond the page counts and the inducements to crowdsource a reference or cameo, the stories and styles—even Mason & Dixon’s giddy facsimile of 18th-century English—are deceptively simple, characterized by a mixture of sumptuous but irreverent historical action and naked emotion. Is there a more affecting entanglement with heartbreak in all of Pynchon than Charles Mason’s grief over his dead wife Rebekah? Is there a neater throughline across Against the Day’s multiversal infinities than the characters’ dogged, decades-spanning searches for lost loved ones?

There’s something instructive, as well, about these later books’ explicit turn toward the tropes and textures of genre fiction. If there were any remaining doubt about the insufficiency of the author’s reputation as a schematic and paranoid mystic-crank, this surge of goofy genre conventions ought to have finished the job. In addition to suggesting, gratifyingly, that Pynchon was finally allowing himself to indulge the pulpy forms he’s obviously loved since before V., his strategy of running Mason & Dixon and Against the Day’s historical and sociopolitical concerns (the Enlightenment’s colonial hypocrisies and mounting corporatocratic rule, the Gilded Age’s capitalist violence and doomed anarchist counterattacks) through the style filters of the popular fiction of their respective days (frame stories, Sternean comic novels, 19th-century boys’ adventure books, dimestore Westerns, etc. etc.) results in some rollickingly enjoyable vernacular storytelling. It also allows Pynchon to move away from the apparent omniscience of the classically maximalist voice, even to disempower it. These later novels contain no shortage of conspiratorial overtures and world-systems theorizing—but, having been unhesitatingly pastiche-ified and, as often, offloaded to characters who wear a conspicuous genre wackiness on their sleeves, those elements go down smooth, even as the plots they delineate multiply and interpenetrate beyond anything seen in the early novels.

I will put more on the difficulties of love than the loss of the frontier as the root of humankind's loss of Western civilization. Your mileage might vary.

I think I will schedule this for next month. There might be more to add, or second thoughts might come.

sch 11/19