Tiina Käkelä-Puumala (Institute for Art Research, University of Helsinki)
Economic questions have always been present in Pynchon’s works, but nowhere more explicitly than in Against the Day, which came out in 2006 —two years before the global financial crisis we are going through at the moment. The novel depicts the cultural, historical and political change that took place in late 19th and early 20th century, the era in which technological innovations abounded and global markets flourished, and yet at the same time a sense of imminent catastrophe pervaded people’s minds. The catastrophe, as we know now, was not only the First World War, but also its aftermath: the economic depression that affected much of the world, and the political fanaticism that grew from it.
In Against the Day, Pynchon describes a historical situation in which political economy had reached a new level, which changed permanently people’s everyday life. Everything expanded: finance markets, international trade, flows of capital, multinational corporations, migration, consumption, technologies of communication and transportation. As a result, economy became a more and more important cultural register—a change that Pynchon thematizes by using economic rhetoric in situations where it seems at first out of place: interpersonal relations and subjectivity.
His characters feel, for example, that a desire for someone is like a “bank interest” that grows steadily with the days. A character whose esteem changes rapidly says that his “market value seems to fluctuate”. Another character sees that her troubled life is “purchased in the worn unlucky coin” – that her poor chances in life are like bad money, which cannot make a good fortune.
In these cases, money can still be understood metaphorically, representing certain human condition or certain kinds of relationships. But there is definitely more into it. In Against the Day, economic rhetoric is closely related, firstly, to economical ideas and phenomena of the time and secondly, to questions of power and representation.
Speculation over economic value is prominent in the novel, and it culminates in the growing disbelief in the gold standard as the basis for universal monetary system. The novel aptly depicts the pre- First World War era in which the gold standard system in Europe fell into a crisis from which it could never totally recover. The gold standard, which by definition means that the value of a currency is quaranteed by its convertibility into gold, was a historical attempt to create a universal value substitute. As Jean-Joseph Goux (Symbolic Economies) and Walter Benn Michaels (The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism) have stated, the gold standard was not only a monetary system. It conveyed a certain idea of representation, characterized by credibility, convertibility and naturalness. Michaels also analyzed the close relationship between the logic of the gold standard and subjectivity in 19th century literary realism, where the characters’ articulated desire to make themselves equal to their value meant according to Michaels the desire to become gold —an instance of value per se.
In Against the Day, Pynchon thematizes the legitimation crisis of the gold standard and links it to questions of representation and authority: the disavowal of state authority by anarchists, the lack of origin or ground for signification in the monetary system itself, and the questioning of reality that pervades the novel. Recurrently the monetary system is shown to be vulnerable and subject to manipulation. The sense of sudden rupture also characterizes the characters’ experience of reality: unexpected and miraculous things happen, and the characters become aware (and this is typical of Pynchon’s prose) that beyond the immediate, physical world there is also something else, something that cannot be put into words.
In Against the Day, Pynchon is not , however, providing us a fiction of a life without or outside economy. On the contrary: what Pynchon in the novel elaborates in many ways is the fictionality of economy itself, and the necessary element of mystery and power in value formation.