Simon de Bourcier (University of East Anglia)
This paper examines the meaning and narrative function of the light-bearing Æther in Pynchon’s Against the Day. The paper begins with a very brief history of the concept of the Æther: its transformation from the home of the gods in antiquity to the medium through which light-waves were thought by nineteenth-century physicists to travel; the failure of Michelson and Morley’s 1887 experiment to detect the Earth’s motion through the Æther; and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 which abandons the Æther altogether. In Against the Day, the paper argues, the Æther is mourned as a token of discarded possibilities and celebrated for its power as an imaginative fiction.
The paper argues that several aspects of the Æther’s history contribute to its meaning in Against the Day. The formulation of the Æther hypothesis was necessitated by the wave theory of light proposed by Thomas Young and refined by Augustin Fresnel at the beginning of the nineteenth century: an explicit analogy was made between light-waves and sound-waves, and the Æther was invoked as a medium analogous to the air through which sound-waves propagate. Historian of science Larry Laudan persuasively argues that the predictive successes of the Æther hypothesis were decisive in legitimising hypothesis-formation, as opposed to induction, as a scientific procedure. For later nineteenth-century scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin the Æther became, primarily, a heuristic fiction of extraordinary explanatory power. This status as scientific fiction and exemplar of the power of hypothesis-formation is the first aspect of the Æther’s history which the paper identifies as determining its significance in the novel. That is to say, the Æther represents the power of the imagination, illustrating what the paper argues is a strain of profound Romanticism in Pynchon’s writing.
Second, the fact that it is an hypothesis that has been abandoned by science deepens its power to stand for imaginative truth as differentiated from fact. In Against the Day the Æther is associated particularly with the fantasy world of the Chums of Chance and, towards the novel’s conclusion, the Sodality of Ætheronauts. The paper argues that Pynchon maps the chronological succession of scientific cosmologies onto the novel’s different narrative levels, and that the violation of narrative levels thus constitutes a disruption of that chronology.
Third, the Æther was exploited – along with other aspects of the nineteenth-century physics of the invisible, such as X-rays – by spiritualists and occultists to furnish pseudo-scientific explanations for their beliefs, and was represented as the dwelling of God, angels, or the dead. Religious themes run through the episode of Against the Day set in Cleveland – where Merle Rideout meets both Roswell Bounce and Erlys Mills – and which takes place against the background of the Michelson-Morley experiment. This experiment was designed to measure the velocity of the earth’s passage through the Æther – and hence through absolute space as it was understood by Newtonian physics – but failed to detect any evidence of such motion. The ‘Ætherist community’ which gathers in Cleveland is ‘maybe as close as Merle ever came to joining a church’ (AtD 60). Roswell makes explicit the connection between the existence of the Æther and the existence of God: ‘“What I worry about […] is that the Æther will turn out to be something like God. If we can explain everything we want to explain without it, then why keep it?”’ (63) This paper suggests that it is precisely because the Æther represents excess over and above reductive explanation that Pynchon’s writing accords it value.
The paper argues that by filling his fictional world with the hypothetical medium of light Pynchon is able to explore the role of the imagination in the creation of worlds by both science and fiction; that a key trope employed to this end is an elision of, or metonymic passage between, the Aether as hypothesis or belief and the Aether as physical entity, by means of which the Aether – historically understood as, variously, analogy, mathematical model, or heuristic fiction – is literalized; and that the world of the novel is in fact many worlds, some of which are pervaded by this Aether and some of which are not, worlds which we can identify as pre-relativistic and post-relativistic respectively. It concludes by suggesting that Against the Day poses a question: did the Aether in a real sense exist at the end of the nineteenth century, and might it still have existed today had science after Einstein not abandoned it?