Joanna Freer (University of Sussex)
When Walt Whitman sang of the “Open Road” in 1856 America was still a seemingly boundless continent. However the frontier was closed by 1890 and as Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw six decades earlier, once “this nomad people” reached the Pacific it “reverse[d] its steps to trouble and destroy the societies which it [had] formed behind it.” By the mid-sixties Thomas Pynchon seems to believe that all the open spaces have been closed up, that we are now living trapped within layers of corruption, surveillance and bureaucracy and amid a labyrinth of endlessly repeatable eerie suburban housing developments, strip malls, and freeways built over sacred Indian burial sites. Concurrent with this increasing over-determination of public space, is an ongoing reduction of choices and possibilities in the political and social spheres towards a single, fated endpoint of total and unchangeable uniformity.
In The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa’s initial reality is a false suburban utopia, the progeny of consumer capitalism and distinctly tending towards the emotionless monotony of the endgame Pynchon predicts. This ‘cheered land’ insulates Oedipa from alternative realities in a double sense, blinding her to the suffering of those excluded from the capitalist system, and – by presenting itself as the only possible reality – limiting her potential for imaginative engagement with alternatives. The mandate she receives to execute the will of her real estate mogul ex-lover is metaphorically a mandate to investigate the legacy of American capitalism, an investigation which begins to open her eyes. Oedipa is led to ask just what that legacy is and what still lies beyond its reach. Searching for remnants of the American wilderness in newly postmodern terrain, she seeks to ascertain whether America still retains any spaces which can be effectively escaped into, any alternative realities resisting the entropic drift towards monotony. Employing Victor Turner’s concept of “anti-structure” as a state beyond the familiar social structures and statuses of everyday life, I consider her journey as a pilgrimage made after a lost object, after the original spirit of freedom and possibility of the new continent.
This paper considers Oedipa’s estrangement from the everyday world and entrance into a domain of proliferating possibilities, as a precursor to a more in-depth interrogation of the potential for eluding the fated endgame in Against the Day. Against the Day transforms the other worlds merely hierophanically glimpsed in The Crying of Lot 49 into the everyday world of the novel. In this contemporary novel, Pynchon has constructed a patchwork of alternative realities. The proliferation of the fantastical and the variety of forms it takes in this vast work goes beyond even that found in Gravity’s Rainbow. But while Against the Day celebrates the spirit of freedom and possibility which clearly still inhabits the American imagination, it is aligned with Pynchon’s other novels in the marked pessimism of its assessment of the potential for freedom and possibility in the non-fictional world.
In Against the Day the “invisible framework” which for Tom Hayden of the SDS was “holding back chaos” in Oedipa’s ‘cheered land’ has become visible, symbolized by the “White City” of the Chicago World’s Fair – a “daylit fiction” bounded by a “separate, lampless world” characterized by “cultural darkness, and savagery.” Casting the reader adrift in a maze of fantastical alternatives to the “alabaster temples of commerce and industry,” Against the Day works carefully to prevent any identification between the ‘White City’ and ‘reality.’ If there is any ‘base reality’ in this novel it is that of those histories of suffering and violence which haunt the interstices of Pynchon’s flights of fancy. The fantastical in this novel thus has an ambiguous role in relation to Pynchon’s clear underlying political agenda. Is Against the Day finally a celebration or a denunciation of fantasy? Does fantasy tend towards ignorance-promoting escapism, or can it open up a stifled imagination to other possibilities as a necessary precursor to affirmative action? Through asking questions such as these this paper hopes to provide insight into the ways in which Pynchon’s fantastical fiction hopes to achieve the political objectives which are at the heart of his writing.