Jola Feix (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich)
In Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon goes on further exploring some of the topics vital to his earlier works: anarchism and political practice; geography, cartography, and information politics; science and mathematics; the distinction between so-called ‘reality’ and fiction; sameness and multiplicity. In this paper I will argue that the characters of the Chums of Chance serve as a channeling device for all of these themes and more. Surprisingly, given this assumption, as to now they haven’t received the attention and credit they deserve as the representatives of these central motifs in Against the Day. Many of its interpretations have been focusing on the Wild West revenge tale or the conspiratory spy tale largely ignoring the Chums of Chance or at best dismissing them as Pynchon’s fling with juvenile adventure novels popular at the time Against the Day is set.
Furthermore, I will attempt a structural analysis of the book which assigns the Chums of Chance the role of a connecting element between the different plot lines in Against the Day, which especially in early reviews has been critized as disintegrated. Not only do they appear in every of the different plot lines of Against the Day providing a kind of frame narrative but they can also be regarded as personified meta-comments on how communicational means shape our expectations thus limiting imagination and the set of possible worlds. The inconsistent descriptions of their outer appearance and behavior can be regarded as paralleling the labyrinthine structure of the book as well as pre-echoing readers’ experiences and imagination while reading it.
Their character development, which stands in stark contrast to most other characters in the book, can be read as an analogy to the development of mathematics prominently featured in Against the Day. The two-dimensional flat space of very basic Euklidian geometry finds its equivalent in the metafictional lives of the Chums of Chance as protagonists of the fictional series of boys’ books that is on paper. Still part of Euklidian geometry, three-dimensional space is matched when the Chums of Chance decide to emancipate themselves from their roles as stereotypical but probably ‘real’ people of the fictional world of Against the Day: they are part of a patriotic special force unit of aeronauts. Significantly, their turning away from their work with the American government in order to work for themselves is being described as “climbing into the third” (ATD 1083) dimension. However, this independence comes at the price of sacrificing their political influence on the ground. It is only after they decide to expand their notion of “us” to people living on the ground that they start taking action outside the microcosm of their airship Inconvenience. This step to consciously participate in history can be interpreted as the addition of the fourth dimension, the dimension of time. Yet Pynchon doesn’t stop here but goes on to cross the border of four dimensional space perceptible to us: he allows for the Chums of Chance to create their own world aboard Inconvenience pointing to a multiplicity of possibe worlds not yet developed and/or explored. This, I correlate to the declaration of potentially infinite dimensions in the so-called Hilbert-Raum.