Pynchon's Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide

305 Pages·2011·1.05 MB·English

by  Jeffrey Severs

Pynchon’s
Against the Day
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Pynchon’s
Against the Day
A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide
Edited by Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS
Newark
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CREDIT LINE: From AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pychon, copyright ©
2006 by Thomas Pynchon. Used by permission of The Penguin Press, a division
of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © 2006 by Thomas Pynchon. From Against the Day (The Penguin
Press). Reprinted with permission by Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC.
Cover image: “Dirigible Taking Mail from Top of Moving Train with Grappling
Hooks, Preparatory to Transferring the Pouch to a Ship at Sea.” Popular
Mechanics 54, no. 2 (August 1930).
Published by University of Delaware Press
Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rlpgbooks.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2011 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pynchon’s Against the day : a corrupted pilgrim’s guide / edited by Jeffrey
Severs and Christopher Leise.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-61149-064-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61149-065-7
(electronic)
1. Pynchon, Thomas. Against the day. I. Severs, Jeffrey, 1974- II. Leise,
Christopher, 1978–
PS3566.Y55A7337 2011
813'54—dc22 2010053749
™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on the Text ix
Introduction: “Exceeding the Usual Three Dimensions”:
Collective Visions of the Unsuspected 1
Christopher Leise
Part I: Narrative Strategies
1 Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching 15
Brian McHale
2 Plots, Pilgrimage, and the Politics of Genre in Against the Day 29
Amy J. Elias
3 Mapping, the Unmappable, and Pynchon’s Antitragic Vision 47
Krzysztof Piekarski, Martin Kevorkian, and Elisabeth McKetta
4 Binocular Disparity and Pynchon’s Panoramic Paradigm 67
Justin St. Clair
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vi Contents
Part II: Science, Belief, and Faith
5 Bogomilism, Orphism, Shamanism: The Spiritual and
Spatial Grounds of Pynchon’s Ecological Ethic 91
Christopher K. Coffman
6 Readers and Trespassers: Time Travel, Orthogonal Time,
and Alternative Figurations of Time in Against the Day 115
Inger H. Dalsgaard
7 Narrating Tesla in Against the Day 139
Terry Reilly
Part III: Politics and Economics
8 The Religious and Political Vision of Against the Day 167
Kathryn Hume
9 Daydreams and Dynamite: Anarchist Strategies of
Resistance and Paths for Transformation in Against the Day 191
Graham Benton
10 “The abstractions she was instructed to embody”: Women,
Capitalism, and Artistic Representation in Against the Day 215
Jeffrey Severs
11 Europe’s “Eastern Question” and the United States’
“Western Question”: Representing Ethnic Wars in
Against the Day 239
J. Paul Narkunas
Works Cited 265
Index 279
About the Editors 289
About the Contributors 291
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Acknowledgments
Collaborations of this nature inevitably represent efforts and kindnesses
from individuals beyond those listed as “contributors.” We would
especially like to thank John Krafft and Peter Schmidt for their expert rec-
ommendations, Crystal Alberts for her publication savvy, and David C.
Waddell for his commitment of time and energy at the close of a chaotic
semester. Joseph Conte, Richard Hardack, Luc Herman, and Joseph Tabbi
provided support and generated interest in this book; without them we
would not have been nearly so encouraged to proceed to this final stage.
Donald C. Mell and the members of the Editorial Board at the University
of Delaware Press were uncommonly generous in their appraisal of our
proposal and the subsequent manuscript; thanks also to Karen Druliner for
responding to innumerable e-mails. And, of course, all our friends, family,
and colleagues make our work possible and worth doing in the first place.
Christopher Leise would like to thank Thomas J. Morrissey and the
members of the Plattsburgh State University English Department for
their undeserved faith and great good humor. Thanks also to Whitman
College, particularly the Department of English, for helping him keep bal-
anced, which is far from his natural state.
Jeffrey Severs thanks the University of British Columbia for generous
research assistance, as well as his colleagues at UBC, the University of
Texas-Austin, and Wake Forest University for their support.
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Notes on the Text
The introduction and all essays refer to Thomas Pynchon’s Against the
Day (New York: Penguin, 2006). Citations are given parenthetically
with page numbers. In keeping with common practice among critics,
for Against the Day and all other works by Pynchon, we surround with
brackets ellipses that signify elisions; all other ellipses in quotations from
Pynchon appear in the original texts.
A version of Brian McHale’s essay appeared as “History as Genre:
Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching,” Genre 42, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2009): 5–20. A
version of Kathryn Hume’s essay appeared as “The Religious and Politi-
cal Vision of Pynchon’s Against the Day,” Philological Quarterly 86, no. 1–2
(Winter 2007): 163–87. We are grateful to the editors of these journals for
permission to reprint.
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