• Pugnax, the sky dog who reads Henry James and can talk in primitive fashion (in Mason & Dixon, set more than a century before, the Learned English Dog spoke English impeccably and was even a singer of some talent);
• Snazzbury’s Silent Frock, a dress that works on the principle of noisecanceling headphones, the “act of walking being basically a periodic phenomenon, and the characteristic ‘rustling’ of an ordinary frock an easily computed complication of the underlying ambulatory frequency”;
• a philo-Semitic version of “Gaudeamus igitur”;
• the game of Anarchists’ Golf, which possesses no defined sequence or number of holes;
• an intelligent example of ball lightning, named Skip;
• the previously mentioned character who nibbles on a form of explosive called Cyclomite, just as the British eat Marmite and Vegemite (it’s a toss-up which of the three might taste the worst);
• an annual conference on time travel where the dead are resurrected (those who have visited the MLA know that this is closer to truth than satire).
These concoctions might be more amusing if they didn’t come with a note of giddy self-congratulation. Though he often sounds like a mad scientist, Pynchon has trouble harnessing his clever ideas—when he drags them into the story, he can’t always make them sound credible or, worse, make the reader care which end of the ill-delivered crate is up. In his alternative worlds, the whimsies have a strange logic (the novel at least doesn’t break down bearing such a cheerful wastage of material); but he is less successful in employing such devices for any purpose but decoration. You think he’s about to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but there are always three hundred rabbits and twelve dozen hats. Perhaps readers ought to be grateful, as his comedy is successful only in gestures—too much of Snazzbury’s Silent Frock would not be a good thing. (Science fiction is full of such bright ideas while being empty of most everything else.)
Novels in the Chums of Chance Series
The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit
The Chums of Chance at Krakatoa
The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis
The Chums of Chance in Old Mexico
The Chums of Chance and the Curse of the Great Kahuna
The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth
The Chums of Chance and the Ice Pirates
The Chums of Chance Nearly Crash into the Kremlin
The Chums of Chance at the Ends of the Earth
The Chums of Chance and the Caged Women of Yokohama
The Chums of Chance and the Wrath of the Yellow Fang
Three Corny Pop-Cult Allusions Pynchon Couldn’t Resist Making
This person greeted the Cohen by raising his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as to form the Hebrew letter shin, signifying the initial letter of one of the pre-Mosaic (that is, plural) names of God, which may never be spoken.
“Basically wishing long life and prosperity,” explained the Cohen, answering with the same gesture.
Reindeer [after the Tunguska event] discovered again their ancient powers of flight, which had lapsed over the centuries. … Some were stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area.
“The operetta, all the rage in Vienna at the moment, was called The Burgher King. ”
The Chums of Chance (Slight Return)
Over the three decades of the novel, the Inconvenience is outfitted with new technology, grotesquely increasing in size. By the end, it has grown “as large as a small city,” resembling those utopias, suspended in the air, so beloved of science fiction.
There are neighborhoods, there are parks. There are slum conditions. It is so big that when people on the ground see it in the sky, they are struck with selective hysterical blindness and end up not seeing it at all.
The crew has not changed in decades; and the Chums of Chance organization has almost collapsed, individual chapters now negotiating their own contracts and profiting accordingly. Though they show little sign of it, the boys must by this time be in high middle-age. The Inconvenience, “transformed into its own destination,” has become a metaphor for the long novel itself, one at least not inaccurately named.
The Critic Invents Fourteen Characters Who Do Not Appear in the Novel
Leavisite Snack
Duodecimo Gazebo
Tanya Polyglot Moonlight
Wang Cheyenne
Judge Portobello Grim
Clive Polonaise-Boxer
Chauncey Hiccups
Warrant Dolomite
Chili Condominium, Jr.
Jeremiah “Dell” Delaware
Brightware T. Polonian
Sir Chloral Fundamentum
Typhus Smythe
Chad Ravine
Subplots the Critic Will Not Have Time to Mention
• The intrigues of a neo-Pythagorean cult called the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys, devoted to identifying the living avatars of the twenty-two cards in the major arcana of the tarot deck;
• The appearance of the Archduke Ferdinand at the Columbian Exposition—a roisterer knowledgeable about the “pastry-depravity” of American detectives, he is discovered trying to engage angry patrons of the Boll Weevil Lounge in a primitive version of the “dozens”;
• The casebook of the detective Lew Basnight, once known as the Upstate-Downstate Beast, guilty of some horrible crime he cannot remember;
• The Sodality of Ætheronauts, a society of women “dressed like religious novices,” bearing names like Heartsease and Primula, who fly winged-and-feathered machines and in short order marry the crew of the Inconvenience;
• The travels of the subdesertine frigate Saksaul beneath sands inhabited by schools of iridescent beetles—as well as giant sand-fleas able to converse in ancient Uyghur;
• An offer of eternal youth (perhaps the promise of fiction itself) that drives the crew of the Inconvenience to the “brief aberration in their history known as the Marching Academy Harmonica Band”;
• Ukeleles.
Still Reading Pynchon/Reading Pynchon Still
Pynchon’s novels seemed crucial to the late sixties and early seventies. If there is a Zeitgeist (perhaps there are always incomplete, overlapping, competing Zeitgeister), there must be—should anything like a certainty principle operate in culture—music, and art, and literature to complement it, if they do not create it. In America, this has probably long been an adolescent or post-adolescent phenomenon. In that dead world of 1969, that world of Vietnam and Cambodia, post–Civil Rights and pre–Ronald Reagan, post-Woodstock and pre-Altamont, public life ratcheted along full of secrets; and government had a thousand closets with a skeleton in every one (no doubt we open-minded many had many secrets of our own). The signs of resistance and disorder were a code well understood: Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” psychotropic drugs, the Firesign Theatre, Barthelme’s semi-surrealist tales, Transcendental Meditation, Pynchon’s novels, and much else represented a deviant metaphysics, one perfect if irrational, like the square root of –1. Watergate, a few years later, proved that the government lived on lies; but we were too young to realize that lies were the meat of democracy.
The residual fondness of older readers for Pynchon’s work is an eternal return to their own dumb innocence, before that innocence guaranteed they deserved what they got. Indeed, Pynchon’s later fiction, tacking between modern California and the Enlightenment, has been, not merely an acknowledgment of the betrayal of values, but a recognition that the young were betrayed by themselves. If Pynchon seemed on the wavelength of some unreality that looked more promising, no doubt the hallucinogens played a part. A friend of mine, who once bombed a building or two for Weatherman, went underground and became a waitress in California named Roxy. She met Pynchon while there, but decades later she sounds like a character he made up.
When I look at my friends f
rom college—now Fortune 500 execs, Rand Corp. think-tankers, museum presidents, tech wizards, sad-sack pols, sawboneses and mouthpieces, even a few casualties—I think the sixties were over before they properly began. Pynchon seems to have boarded the bus with the Merry Pranksters and never gotten off. He’s a throwback, a hipster, a true dreamer, and a truer cynic. All the bad methods of writing he confesses to at the beginning of Slow Learner he’s using still, and just as blithely when pushing seventy as when he was wet-eared in college. Some of the flair is gone, used up or burned off since he started writing nearly half a century ago, like a chemical process that on repetition grows less efficient and the resulting solution less potent, until it doesn’t work at all. Yet he has matured in many ways, grown rueful and ramshackle. This gives Against the Day its bittersweet sadness for a fin de siecle world that had only begun to adore science and invention, a world that had not yet learned to distrust them. Those states and bodies politic knew the horrors of the Crimean and Civil Wars but not yet those of the Great War. After that heroic disaster—fought, so everyone was told, to end war—the common man might have thought things were looking up. Pynchon’s task has been to remind us that worse was to come.
Finis
The mulligan stew of Against the Day includes a boys’ dirigible novel, a spy novel (Pynchon is all too enamored of spies), a mathematician’s novel (half a sentence about the Zermelo axioms may send the reader straight to sleep), a Wild West anarchist novel, a European anarchist novel, a search-for-Shambhala novel, and probably four or five novels the reader would rather forget. Pynchon makes a halfhearted attempt to tie up a few loose ends; yet vast stretches of Against the Day point toward something but finally have nowhere to get to. The true Pynchon fanatic would never be worried by this—as people say about their lives these days, it’s all about the journey. This gives Pynchon a license for picaresque most authors would kill for—his vices have been transmuted into virtues, a better bargain than that offered by the philosopher’s stone.
Intelligence makes Against the Day bearable, though everywhere it creates its own rules, undermines its own gravitas; in this it already satisfies the first condition of a classic: a novel we appreciate because of its flaws (the second condition is longevity). As an artist of paranoia, that American state of mind occupying the space between New York and California, Pynchon is the comic opposite of Kafka, whose Weltanschauung he otherwise embraces—a world of conspiracy and liminal terror, of shadow worlds that lie beneath real ones. Paranoia is the limiting climate in fiction, as depression is the limiting climate in depressives—if everything is a conspiracy, there’s no getting to the bottom of it, because fiction is a conspiracy of conspiracies, where a wizard, or a bunco man, always stands behind the curtain. And there’s a wizard behind him.
At the heart of Against the Day lies a terrible longing to redeem and amend—the theme is taken up as vengeance but played out as nostalgia. Order is never restored in Pynchon’s universe, though things change: an old enemy dies ignominiously at the hands of his bodyguard, an assassin is taken unawares, third parties do away with a traitorous spy. No one takes much pleasure in these messy ends—death comes too quickly to afford the living any satisfaction. The final pages of the novel offer a frazzled sentimental tale of coupling and growing old, where antique outlaws are domesticated and matters come more or less right only in the way they go more or less wrong. The idea of time travel, though lugged in for laughs, suggests a hankering to go back and fix things (in science fiction, the theme usually turns into tragic farce—tragedy if you like science fiction, farce if you don’t). Yet when men arrive from some indefinite future, fleeing some unimaginable global catastrophe, they seem only to want to be left alone, the most pitiable of refugees.
Verse Chronicle
The World Is Too Much with Us
Les Murray
Les Murray is an outsized poet, big as a barge—no, broad as the outback itself. The poems in The Biplane Houses are earthy, strange, almost unclassifiable at times, delivered as if he thought real poetry too hoity-toity for a bloke with 4X in the esky (I mean, beer in the fridge). In many ways, the poet’s playfulness comes from acting like a cartoon Aussie, the Crocodile Dundee of the poetry circuit. (In a world of glossy-magazine morality, you admire a man who takes epicurean pleasure in being fat.) Back home Murray is called a diehard reactionary, one who loves too well the country that was, the country that has changed around him; but he loves the country of information more, the odd facts and snippets he works up into verse. You never know, as you turn the pages, what you’ll come across: a poem about the placement of verbs in different languages, the fate of the descendants of the Bounty mutineers, or the exhibition of ancient skeletons:
crusty little roundheads of sleep,
stick-bundles half burned to clay by water.
Their personhoods had gone, into the body
of that promise preached to them. What had stayed
in their bones were their diseases, the marks
of labour in a rope-furrowed shoulder blade,
their ages when they died, and what they′d eaten:
bread, bacon, beer, cheese, apples, greens,
no tomato atoms in them, no potatoeines,
no coffee yet, or tea, or aspirin.
This is typical Murray: overbaked metaphors, the occasional oafishness in tone or diction (perhaps that should be dictionhood), the list that becomes a longing, the long view across centuries, the deep intimacy with the past—his history has a dark physicality reminiscent of Heaney’s. Murray often seems the Diderot of contemporary verse: the world is everything that is the case, and all of it ripe for poetry. His gargantuan appetite can give a poem the look of a python that has swallowed a Volkswagen or two (for better or worse, he doesn’t possess the censoring demon that rejects outlandish ideas out of hand). Murray has never been a natural poet—he has trouble relaxing into his lines, or making them seem more inspiration than perspiration. He loves roughneck rhymes or a slapdash prose that doesn’t even pretend to be poetry. Just when your guard is down, when you think he’s matured, he’ll give a whoop and write something like “Pork hock and jellyfish. Poor cock. / King Henry had a marital block. / A dog in the manager? Don’t mock! / Denial flows past Cairo.” Get it?
Though you have to forgive Murray for a lot, if you bear with him he can transform the way you see, if what you see is a stallion’s “progeny drop in the grass / like little loose bagpipes” or a display of Japanese swords, “Merciless whitewater craft / keel-upwards in long curve. … // Why, I said to Yojimbo, this / is an exhibition of lightnings!” When the vehicle so overwhelms the tenor, you enter a world where metaphor acts less like Midas and more like the neighborhood bully; but in poetry sometimes you learn to love the bullies.
Murray’s poetry is unafraid of being local, as if truth were by nature parochial. He’s the ultimate outsider—the metaphors transform his country like a spell in Ovid, leaving it unrecognizable. I like the homebound, staggered, guilt-ridden Murray quite a bit and the gallivanting, cantankerous, punloving Murray little at all; but unfortunately it’s the latter self the poet seems to prefer. He’s weakest as a moralist, hammering his points home like a small-town editor on a manual typewriter:
Gentrifical force turned Prunty to Brontë
and shipped myriads more to colonial bounty
where some, abashed to be safe on the fringe,
still feed wars and guilts to their cultural cringe.
“Gentrifical” is Murray’s play on “centrifugal,” but the pun doesn’t make his hatred of immigrants any more appealing. He’s a genuine oddity, a man of the people who doesn’t much like people, not even his own people. I’ve been wary, not of his oddity, but of the bumptiousness that comes with it—I’m so busy resisting his vices, there’s no time to appreciate his virtues.
Some critics have applauded Murray’s clumsiness as an endearing quirk or a necessity of character; but it’s clumsiness by any other name. The new poems a
re warmer and more personable, as if the poet, though not filled with self-love, were no longer so disfigured by self-loathing. (Perhaps Murray’s near death a decade ago has softened his character.) In The Biplane Houses, Murray has done what all good poets do, remade the world in his image—like Falstaff and Henry VIII, those other outsized figures, he is magnificent despite the monsters within.
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky’s poems are so professional, you feel he dresses in a suit and tie before sitting down at his desk. Even when he goes a bit wild, as he does at times in Gulf Music, merrily discarding verbs, yodeling when he feels like it (“Mallah walla tella bella. Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la”), or simply making things up, his rashness is the soul of caution—he has all the reckless daring of Walter Mitty. Pinsky’s new poems are often political, politically political in that contemporary way, kowtowing to the golden idols of the moment, casting dung upon the correctly incorrect villains, all without a breath of crossgrained opinion.
At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto Each one Teach one.
In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as “ Profesor.”
Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I
Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.
It’s hard to know exactly what the poet is fessing up to here, unless he’s ashamed of being a professor. E. R. Dodds made the distinction between shame culture and guilt culture more than half a century ago, but isn’t it time to look more closely at the idea and not simply make flippant remarks? Shame cultures, in these days of honor killings, have a lot to answer for. And doesn’t invoking the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and the tragedy of the desaparecidos seem all too convenient, done this callow way?
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