In the opening chapters of Against the Day Pynchon hints at certain oddities in the space/time continuum of the book. Consider this:
The Chums of Chance could have been granted no more appropriate form of “ground-leave” than the Chicago Fair, as the great national celebration possessed the exact degree of fictitiousness to permit the boys access and agency. The harsh nonfictional world waited outside the White City’s limits, held off for this brief summer, making the entire commemorative season beside Lake Michigan at once dream-like and real.
As though the Chums come from some other world, some (to us) fictional world, and cam only have “access and agency” in a place as fanciful and make-believe as the White City of the World’s Columbian Exhibition.
Just a couple of pages later we are introduced to the detective Lew Basnight:
Lew looked around. Was it still Chicago? As he began again to walk, the first thing he noticed was how few of the streets here followed the familiar grid pattern of the rest of town— everything was on the skew, narrow lanes radiating starwise from small plazas, tramlines with hairpin turns that carried passengers abruptly back the way they’d been coming, increasing chances for traffic collisions, and not a name he could recognize on any of the street-signs, even those of better-traveled thoroughfares … foreign languages, it seemed. Not for the first time, he experienced a kind of waking swoon, which not so much propelled as allowed him entry into an urban setting, like the world he had left but differing in particulars which were not slow to reveal themselves.
“Like the world he had left” but somehow not that world. It is a theme which recurs throughout the novel, which seems particularly interested in thin places conceived not on the model of Celtic spirituality but arising from the creation of modern physics, from the theories of relativity to the multiverse hypothesis. And as he had done in Mason & Dixon Pynchon seems to be suggesting that the work of science does not reveal the world we live in but actually brings it into being — with somewhat different worlds being brought into being in the universes next door, into which and out of which his characters sometimes slip.
The language I’m using here — “suggest,” “seem,” “hint” — indicate that this is a riddling sort of book, and indeed Pynchon is a riddling sort of writer. I think of a verse from Auden: “When have we not preferred some going round / To going straight to where we are?” Pynchon seems always to prefer “going round” because “where we are” is also where we might not be. Perhaps more apt still would be the great conclusion of Wallace Stevens’s “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”:
A more severe,
More harassing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
Of poetry is the theory of life,
As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,
In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,
The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.
The intricate evasions of as — evasions which are also revelatory, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
And then as I was reflecting on Pynchon as the great Riddler what should turn up in my mailbox but a copy of Adam Roberts’s The Riddles of the Hobbit? I shall comment on that in my next post.