One of the pleasures of novels that run for a dozen hundred pages, it would seem, is the luxuriant feeling of having all the time in the world to get to know every square inch of the world to which they expose us. In A la recherche du temps perdu, a tea party at the Guermantes' lasts a good five hundred pages. War and Peace always makes sure that we get to know its characters in more than one ballroom before they are finally married off—and if rapid-fire sexual interactions do occur, we can be sure that the characters will mull over their details for at least a few Napoleonic campaigns. In Ulysses, every hour of reading time is equivalent to about one hour of narrative progress, so that as we are reading it we literally live out one day with Leopold Bloom. Picking up a book of such imposing volume, a reader usually expects its author to take his time and move from one chapter to another with at least some show of dignified languor, allowing us to succumb leisurely into an increasingly familiar landscape.

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, sprawling over 1,085 pages, defies any such expectations—with a rollercoaster of a narrative, it seems to be constantly out of breath and out of room for all the mayhem it hastens to disclose and all the sites its heroes still have to tour. A sweeping, half-fantastic take on the political and ideological bustle of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, it follows the interweaving lives of about a dozen characters of various geographic and social provenances, including a globetrotting set of four American siblings and a ballooning squad called "The Chums of Chance". Thrown into meandering journeys from one end of the world to another, the characters become involved in a mind-boggling variety of activities—from spying to mathematics, from anarchism to shamanism, from time-travel to ballooning. In the meantime, they sing songs, inadvertently swear in Montenegrin, meet Nikola Tesla and get into Yale. Abruptly throwing the reader out of one in medias res and into another, and interweaving several layers of more or less conspiratorial intrigues, the plot can get so dizzying that even the characters themselves are at a loss as to were they actually are at a given moment (if only they'd taken a camera). As epic as it is packed with trivia, Against the Day forces us to share in the rush and confusion with which it shoves its heroes into the twentieth century, making this feeling of uncertainty and feverishness its most powerful narrative device.

The main and most immediately discernible structuring principle of Against the Day is the obstinacy with which it never allows the reader to settle firmly into any one fixed convention or narrative scheme. To catalyze this constant tension, Pynchon makes use of a very modern type of character: the global tourist, constantly rushing from one set of images and modes of thought into another. Defined by his wish to interact with new environments, Pynchon's globetrotter is always slightly out of touch with any place he visits and deprived of any constant influence on whatever environment he enters. What amuses him is both his own ignorance and the oddity of his surroundings; he can never be sure what he is communicating, and to whom—as each gesture or word he makes may prove laden with unexpected layers of meaning, but might also be dismissed as foreign gibberish. Constantly on the threshold of a fully social life, he is a strange permutation of individualism and conformism, hyperconsciousness and naiveté, showing those pairs of extremes to be two sides of the same coin.

Unfolded by means of such interweaving perspectives, half-social and half-individual, the novel constantly unhinges any harmonious relation that we might want to have with either its characters or any broader historical perspective they witness. On the one hand, its cast of a dozen or so relatively unimportant globetrotters is the novel's only window onto the broader history of the times—which seems to give them prominence as the main recipients of our empathy and ultimate judges of the reality they traverse. Still, as their observations diverge into indiscriminate mixtures of fact and cliché, history and anecdote, the stories they spin out become implausibly idiosyncratic, abandoning their show of objective historicism in favor of a decorum-breaking twist of phrase:

There had been forty thousand Turks at Monastir, German-trained under the legendary Liman von Sanders, whose plans included sending his murderous creatures into the Ukraine when the time arrived for war with Russia. An intimidating claim, to've been schooled in the arts of mass death by Germans. But now the Serbs knew they could beat them.

Clearly not bent on examining the broader history of their times—and, due to their constant alienation from any culture, unable to appreciate the resonance of whatever event they accidentally stumble upon—the characters leave us slightly detached both from their individual plights (since we do know that, as they are engaging in weird sexual practices, a world war is going on), and from the historical events whose fame and impact has not managed to reach them.

Further showcasing this unresolved narrative tension, the narrative world is constantly observed by a group of meta-tourists: a crew of oddball ballooners (whose adventures are, even as they speak, getting published in a series of dime-novels popular on ground level). Too focused on their own exploits to notice the broader historical movements going on below them, and too far above the ground to make the particular humans over whom they hover seem much more than a wide array of ants, they constitute a strange median ground between the historical and the idiosyncratic—a parody of the objective narrator, but also of any one of the novel's characters, stuck inconclusively between the disparate ways of thinking he wants to conjoin.

Through such a set of openly bedazzled viewpoints, the narrative exposes its readers to myriad ideologies, languages, and conventions, according to which its universe could be perceived—undermining any hopes of an overarching continuity or universality, even on a spatiotemporal level. On the one hand, the novel evokes a strong sense of chronological time and historical transformation—citing the ideas of progress and enlightenment and dropping thinly covered allusions to the world war that erupts in its last chapters. Still, this focus on cause-and-effect historicity is constantly thrown off balance by the discontinuity of the novel's global archipelago of local spaces. Presented in a flow of small episodic narratives, the constantly shifting landscapes of the novel juxtapose sets of internally harmonious but mutually exclusive environments, each with a time and history of its own.

Within one such niche, an oddball inventor comes up with a time machine that lets him gaze into the future. Still, his spectacular success is never made more widely known, if only because the mythical universe within which he functions (and which allows him to befriend a ball of lighting) can never interact with that of the mystically dogmatic academics of the novel. Not only do they function in a different social stratum -they are also described in incompatible literary conventions.

Creating an archipelago-like pattern of such mutually exclusive time zones—connected only by legendary or touristy accounts—the characters' travels are as eye-opening as they are claustrophobic; while images of the disparate spheres they visit can be partly preserved in the travelers' memories, they can never be conjoined to form one coherent universe of thought or perception.

As could naturally be expected, this constantly unresolved narrative situation becomes an ideal playground for a very broad scope of outrageously funny language games. As the characters rush from one continent to another, the reader is exposed to an overflow of accidental bits of language and ethnography, from Montenegrin obscenities to paraphrases of Jane Eyre, in an ongoing parade of verbal humor:

"That's right, now o-o-open up... good girl, good Mouffette, now let's just put this—yaahhgghh!"

Reader, she bit him.

Within the scope of a relatively serious paragraph, the narrative voice will suddenly start out in a mock-imitation of the dialect of the region he is describing; on a dozen occasions, the characters stop in their tracks to sing a song about whatever it is that they are currently doing:

Then hop-on, the very-next boat, To Ger—manee— Those craz-y, pro-fessors there, They don't ev-er cut their hair, But do they, have brains to spare— You wait and see!

Exhaustive as it seems to be in its scope, the novel continually undercuts its pretences to possessing something of an encyclopedic quality, impressing us with the broadness of its references only to reduce them into a ramshackle musical or parlor game.

By dramatizing this feeling of irresolution and insufficiency in what seems to be a narrative brimming with information, Against the Day takes to task far more than just the unconventional vision of early modernism it is describing. In a thinly veiled critique of the contemporary world, Against the Day tours the reader back to the communicative breakdown it sees as the origins of modern culture; joining in the fun of the global mayhem this transformation unleashes but also tries to expose its deeper implications. As it presents a group of societies deeply immersed in disparate traditions suddenly rushing to find a common denominator, the novel shows how their massive collision renders previous modes of perception redundant. Since the emergent maze of unexpected intercultural references disrupts previously stable symbols and hierarchies and sets them in continual motion, the book's characters become constantly foreign in an international world; their knowledge of their surroundings consequently dissolves into a superficial and increasingly nonsensical mosaic of random facts. Ironically, while we may laugh at these would-be ballooners' and mystical mathematicians' confusion at finding themselves in a postmodern narrative, our pride at deciphering Pynchon's formal games and understanding Montenegrin cusswords is the very touristy enthusiasm whose hollow-ringing crash landing he foretells.

 

Marta Figlerowicz can read really really fast.