Jesse E. Sherwood (SUNY, Fredonia)
Pynchon, in his brief review of the Western novel Warlock, by Oakley Hall stated: “Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880’s is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust.” If we take this at face value and as a genuine admonition of the author, it seems that his novel Against the Day is the first of his works that genuinely takes on the genre of the Western on an epic scale with the saga of the Traverse family. Though it is not correct to say this is the first time Pynchon has dealt with the idea of the West. In Gravity’s Rainbow we have references to Western figures, and in his novels The Crying of Lot 49 and his most recent Inherent Vice, we see a post-Manifest Destiny and industrialized West.
Yet it seems, as far as I have found, that there hasn’t been adequate research and study into Pynchon’s ideas of the American West, or, to be specific, his tackling of the Western genre and time-setting directly in Against the Day. Yet it seems, considering his works in totality, that the idea of the West (or Wild West) has been a major concern and theme of Pynchon as an American author. From actual quests westward, as in Mason & Dixon, to Against the Day’s overt Wild West settings there seems to be some fascination with the West. It seems imperative to analyze how he depicts his Western “Camelot” and how it got to the post-Wild Western world he portrays in other novels. Is the West and the Western a never-never land of fairy-tale and myth as Richard Slotkin points out in Gunfighter Nation? One that grossly misconstrues the truth of the West? Or do the Traverses and their epic quests show the opposite/truth of this “Frontier Myth”? And what is the West Pynchon is constructing, and what does it say about America? Does it show the conclusion Pynchon drew from Warlock: “For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices […] to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.” I would like to take these questions up and propose a hypothesis: Against the Day is, in large part, a novel in which Pynchon elucidates his take on a common American theme: the rape of the West by the Scarsdale Vibes of the world—the entropic accumulation of an industrial Manifest Destiny and how characters such as the Traverse’s (individualistic, tribe-like, and anarchistic—but maybe more importantly, unfit molds to the Wild West Myth) “traverse” this landscape utilizing the freedom and wildness that still thrives even while the “Plutes” strive to harness and exploit it.
This, at best, is a tentative thesis which needs more research and in-depth readings, as well as a look at the connections between the Pynchon canon (the Traverse family tree from Against the Day to Vineland being one possible line). But overall it seems important to study this Western phenomenon in Against the Day specifically because it is the only novel of Pynchon’s that we have thus far which is, in part, genuinely a “Western.”