Lovorka Gruic Grmusa (University of Rijeka)
According to archetypal and cross-cultural symbolism, “light” expresses the distinction of creation—the manifested and ordered universe—from the “darkness” of non-distinction or primeval chaos. Thus, light tends to convey a positive affirmation as an image of salvation and creation. Darkness carries the negative sense of chaos (as opposed to order), the mystical experience of death, gloom, night and denominations alike.
In Against the Day, Pynchon used both terms as recurring themes, playing with their well-known universal meaning as possitive/negative or active/passive principles, credled in orhodox Christianity and Neoplatonic tradition; as well as fusing the pair into a complementary entity, demonstrating that the distinction between light and darkness is the illusion of duality (in tune with double refraction, bilocation, light as wave-particle duality). The dark and infinite chaos/Substance is in certain ways unified with the light, definite and ordered Essence, for the world Pynchon depicts is nothing more than chaos illuminated.
The novel displays a variety of dark and light images that speak for themeslves. There are Lightarians that live “on nothing but light” (60) and those who try to control or “corner light” (61), a “ball lightning” named Skip that talks to Merle (73), Tesla’s induced “man-made lightning” (97), and “paramorphoscopes” that “reveal the architecture of dream” (250), with “darkness just as indelible … of some undivulged sin” (261) that Lake wished “to become the wind. To feel herself refined to an edge, an invisible ege of unknown length” (267). There are name puns as Blinky—assuming intervals of invisibility, and Chandrasekhar—associated with moonlight. The city of East Fullmoon (67) aims at the novel’s title—against the day—for full moon happens when the moon is directly opposite the sun. In the same vein, Contre-jour technique produces backlighting of subjects. The Chums view “signs of cultural darkness and savagery” that abide on the margins, in a “lampless world … beyond some obscure treshold … in the shadows,” which makes them yearn for “the safety of the lights” and visit “the more European, civilized … white exhibits located to the center” (22). There are hints to the notion of the “light of understanding” as opposed to the “darkness of ignorance” as in the scene where Tesla has a revelation within the cave during lightning.
But, darkness not neceserily signifies evil, it is often linked with a primitive metaphysical force revered by our ancestors. An aspect of this energy is visible in “a vibrant dark density” of a woman, “like a galvanic shadow, her face” (68) with inherent mystical beauty and hidden but potent feminine energy that channels its force into spiritual awareness. This feminine principle and its mother-like “security” is palpable in Icelanders’ yearning “to return each night to the ice, as to home … to enter the lockless, the unbreachable, the long-sought sleep…. Down in the other world of childhood and dreams” (136). Light on the other hand can be menacing, as in the Biblical example when it blinded Saul upon the road to Damascus, where its super-abundance constitutes the “blinding” of the discursive mind. Such is “sinister unknowability of Light” (133), “the god of Current, bearing light, promising death to the falsely observant” (98) in Against the Day.
Almost literal example of chaos illuminated is given through Merle’s experience of photography: “And Merle saw the image appear. Come from nothing. Come in out of the pale Invisible” (64). He also saw photography and alchemy as “two ways of getting at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals” (80). Similarly, but in a more symbolic vein, one night Kit had a vision, “a window opened for him into Invisible,” when he heard a voice saying: “Water falls, electricity flows—one flow becomes another, and thence into light” (99). Both examples could be conneced to the quote from the Bible (associated with the title of the novel) when the world was “overflowed by water, perished” into chaos, whereas “the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men” (2 Peter 3:1-18). Fire or light in both instances could readily be associated with knowledge and revelation. The essence of light/fire and its expansion within water/darkness/chaos marks an act of creation.
The opposite of this creation is the dissapearance of order and the appearant void—the primordial abyss—that remains when chaos takes over. An instant of this is described by Miles when he thinks of the Indian Ocean islands and realizes their names are lost and the sea “’lapsing back into anonymity, each island rising from it only another dark desert.’ As, no longer named, one by one the islets vanished from the nautical charts, and one day from the lighted world as well, to rejoin the Invisible” (108). All these are manifestations of the invisible chaos and its visible caunterpart. Mythological understanding of this phenomenon is well-expressed in this sentence: “The Eskimo believe that every object in their surroundings has its invisible ruler—in general not friendly—an enforcer of the ancient, indeed pre-human laws” (150-51). This “ruling component” within the Spar figure (151), when removed from its home territory unleashed “its pitiless gifts” (151), and the power “follow[ed] its nature, in exacting an appropriate vengeance” (151). It is interesting that instead of the retribution through its “usual sanctions—bad ice, blizzards, malevolent ghosts” (151), authentic for the polar region (“horizontal as ice” (136)); the creature expressed itslef through fire, burning “its way out of its enclosure” (152), adapting “to urban civilization … assum[ing] a character more suitable to the new surroundings” (151) (“the city more and more vertical” (151)). The later associates with the already mentioned Biblical quote and is in tune with the title of the novel: “reserved unto fire against the day of judgment.” Another example of the latent chaos of the Iceland spar is also evident in the notion that it hides the “Hidden People,” providing “that all-important ninety-degree twist to their light, so they can exist alongside our own world but not to be seen” (134).
Numerous examples of light and dark as creative principles are marked within the novel, sometimes fused but never confused, which is why I wish to elaborate on the topic, illuminating the progenitive pair in light of Against the Day.