[NOTE: The discussion can also be followed at Metaxucafe. Previous installments: Part One (Max), Part Two (Carolyn) and Part Three (Megan).]

The New Chums of Chance, aided by associative penchant and a perfervid desire to ferret out reference, continued their journey, hitting beyond Part One and, with Colonel Bud Parr beginning to see references to the Bible and Eliot, settling into the firm fields of Part Two:

“But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God” (Romans 2:5)

My reading of Part 1, “The Light Over the Ranges,” and early Part 2, “Iceland Spar,” has me coming back to the idea of faith in all of its manifestations. Faith in the Old Testament sense of an apocalyptic fear; Faith in anarchism, Faith in science and technology; magic and pagan rituals and of course Faith in money and materialism, particularly as the book opens on the 1893 World’s Fair, which, as one commentator on that event said, was a dry run for America’s “consumer based society.”

Each of these manifestations appear to be represented by a major character. When the anarchist Webb Traverse shrugs and says “Sufficient unto the day” on page 96 he echoes Saint Matthew (6:34):

“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

Taken with the quote above where “against the day” is bookended by the word “wrath,” Webb stands as a polar opposite to the capitalist Scarsdale Vibe and the distinctly American optimism of the Chums of Chance who are surrounded by Christian symbols, including, on page 14, “Jacob’s ladder,” which is used literally as a ship’s ladder, but also is a well known symbol from the Bible (Genesis 28:12):

“And he [jacob] dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.”

On page 250-252 Chum Miles Blundell has a vision and says:

“‘It wanted us to know that we, too, are here on a pilgrimage….When all the masks have been removed, it is really an inquiry into our own duty, our fate…As the Franciscans developed the Stations of the Cross to allow any parishioner to journey to Jerusalem without leaving his church grounds, so have we been brought up and down the paths and aisles of what we take to be the all-but-boundless world, but which in reality are only a circuit of humble images reflecting a glory greater than we can imagine – to save us from the blinding terror of having to make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day of Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem.’”

With all the talk of alternative universes in this book and clouds of apocalypse hanging over it, the fictive Chums – who do show up alternatively on page 214 as fiction despite interfacing with other “real” characters like Lew Basnight – seem to me to be something like King Arthur’s Knights of the Roundtable with perhaps Blundell as the virginal Galahad himself.

The Chums’ airship parallels the original “Quest of the Holy Grail,” (the original, not the Mallory) which is a tale of overt Christian symbolism, with its itinerant heroes who find themselves meeting challenges on a quest that is initially unknown to them. Ships play a large role in the original Quest too.

It’s interesting that Max said reading Pynchon is like reading T.S. Eliot because it is Eliot who led me to reading “The Quest for the Holy Grail” and Jessie Weston’s “From Ritual to Romance,” which relates the quest for the holy grail to its ritualistic roots and could also be for interesting ancillary reading alongside Against the Day.

Of course, picking a theme like I have could be dangerous territory because it seems to me that once you go mining in a Pynchon novel you start finding things where they may or may not really exist. The inscriptions that pop up everywhere in Against the Day are confusing, but also seem to point toward something. The Dante quote inscribed before (I think) New York City on page 154 “I AM THE WAY INTO THE DOLEFUL CITY” — which we know ends (frustratingly not here) with “Abandon Every Hope, All You Enter Here” — seems to be a signpost. Of the city that this inscription stands before, which underwent an “all-night rape,” Pynchon says in one of his occasional flourishes of sensuous writing:

“Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would’ve expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics – instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all be developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness.”

I say it’s a signpost because the story surrounding this city seems confusing as it pops out of nowhere and recedes into the background of the novel just as quickly, yet stands in contrast to the opening scenes of Chicago’s World’s Fair and captures the connection between a wrathful apocalypse and the Christian journey that Dante had just embarked upon in Canto III of The Divine Comedy, which like “Against the Day” reaches back into pre-Christian elements along its path and challenges Dante in his judgement of others. The passage in the Bible right after the one I quoted from Webb above reads:

“Judge not, that ye be not judged. 7:2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”

[NOTE: The discussion can also be followed at Metaxucafe. Previous installments: Part One (Max) and Part Two (Carolyn).]

The New Chums of Chance rose further into the sky, wondering if Pynchon’s opus would take them into the heliosphere and whether the airy confines of the hydrogen airship Roundtable Discussion would cause many of them to become light of head. Fortunately, Major Megan Sullivan put a halt to the flames, pointing out to the loyal crew (all perusing Pynchon) that oxygen was becoming nowhere nearly as plentiful as it once had, and offering the following observations on Part One:

I’ve only read The Crying of Lot 49, so this is my first foray deeper into the Pynchon forest and it’s taking me a while to find a path. He keeps taking me off course, introducing new characters and ideas on almost every page it seems. Like Max mentioned, I feel the need to look up every reference on Google.

One interesting aspect of the first section was the tone Pynchon used with the Chums of Chance. They speak archaically, like Max said, with a quaint and antiquated speech. Yet Pynchon goes out of his way to contrast the goodness of the Chums with the reality of the time period. He paints Chicago as it truly was, not as how one might expect it to appear in a boy’s magazine. “Somewhere down there was the White City promised in the Columbian Exposition brochures, somewhere among the tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke, the effluvia of butchery unremitting, into which the buildings of the leagues of the city lying downwind retreated, like children into sleep which bringeth not reprieve from the day.”

And what are the Chums’ role in the novel? The Chums seem unreal. Like Socrates in The Clouds, they live in the sky oblivious to what’s occurring on the ground beneath them. Are they to keep the action moving throughout this long novel? It’s a relief to get back to the Chums after pages of introductions to new characters—they’re like old friends. It will be interesting to see how they develop in the next parts of AtD.

* * *

The Quite Balding Moderator interjects:

I’ll have more to say about the Chums of Chance very soon, once I’ve followed Mr. Parr’s prodigious post (forthcoming). But I put forth Megan’s question to Pynchonites of all stripes (including those reading this roundtable discussion): I like the Chums of Chance very much, but I feel that their presence is very much ancillary to the narrative. Like Michael Moorcock, I believe that Against the Day is very much using dime novel conventions to raise larger and serious questions about how wizards of science were viewed in the early days of the 20th century, particularly with the ragged pursuit of cash. But if the form is sprawling, with often tertiary connections among the characters, then are the Chums the clearest membrane between reader and writer? Are these “old friends” the very conduit which permits us to steer through the narrative?

[VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: In case it wasn’t clear, the Quite Balding Moderator wishes to note that this post came from the mordant wit of Carolyn Kellogg and not from his dunder-soaked head.]

[IMPORTANT NOTE (Not as Important as the First, But Important Nonetheless): The discussion can also be followed at Metaxucafe. Previous installments: Part One (Max) and Part Three (Megan).]

And so the New Chums of Chance continued their great rightward list (as opposed to Danielewski’s leftwrist twist) through the mammoth volume, still finding accommodations in Part One although undaunted by Messr. Pynchon’s dutiful chronicling and celeritous introduction of characters, some logged in history books and others escaping scholarly notice. Then the moment arrived in which Captain Carolyn Kellogg remarked upon Mr. Clarke’s findings — as it turns out, in many guises herself:

Big thanks to Max for parsing Part 1 so effectively. He does a great job as a reader of Pynchon. But as a currently-enrolled MFA student, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if Pynchon tried to bring this to workshop….

Tom Pynchon: OK, guys, this is Part One of my novel-in-progress. It’s called Against the Day. I’ll be quiet now and let you discuss.

Cranky MFAer: Part 1! This is 119 pages—and it’s single spaced. We’re supposed to go double-spaced. And our max is 30.

Professor: OK, I know it’s long, but let’s talk about what’s here.

Chirpy MFAer: I really liked the description! But I was … kinda confused.

Helpful MFAer: Yeah, Tom? I counted and you have, like, 60 characters in 119 pages. People can’t keep track of that many characters. How about 5? Five characters? Maybe 7? Then we could figure out who is who.

Echoey MFAer: Exactly! Like, Scarsdale Vibe is the bad guy, right? But why does he need a sidekick? And you know, everyone has a sidekick? You could really pare down if you got rid of the sidekicks.

Wrong Track MFAer: I don’t mind the sidekicks, but these Chums of Chance leading everything off made me think you were writing some meta comic book. They were funny, but if you want the book to have, you know, weight, you need to signal that up front. Instead of a dirigble, maybe they should be flying something more—threatening, like a military plane. Or maybe instead of a naked lady running around below them, it should be the scientists talking about the math that you’ve put in later.

Chirpy MFAer: About the science stuff? That left me really confused. Like, is it real or fiction? Am I supposed to Google it or something?

Cranky MFAer: Yeah, you’re asking a lot of your readers. If you want them to look stuff up. Or know stuff.

Echoey MFAer: Right? Like, Chicago World’s Fair, am I supposed to know when that was? Because I get that it’s a big fair, but I don’t know if it was back in the 1980s or 1950s or what.

Wrong Track MFAer: I looked it up—it was 1893. But how are we supposed to know this from the text? Maybe you could have a billboard or something that advertises, like, Introducing the New 1893 Coca-Cola! I mean, I don’t know if there was Coke then, but are we supposed to figure out the date by just trains and a haberdashery? Or know about World’s Fairs? Because that’s pretty arcane.

Chirpy MFAer: Can we talk about the science stuff? Because I didn’t get it at all.

Helpful MFAer: I don’t know if I needed to get all the science, and that was OK with me. But I kept looking for plot. Like, where is it? At first I thought it was the Chums of Chance’s mission, then I thought it was going to follow that little girl Dahlia, then I thought it was going to have something to do with Scarsdale Vibe and Tesla, and then there was this Webb Traverse guy blowing something up …. that’s like 5 books. It’s too much. To make this one book you need less—a lot less.

Tom: Um, can I say something?

Professor: Yes, Tom. That would be a change.

Tom: Well, this is only about the first tenth of the novel. I mean, there’s a lot more to come, not less. More characters, more plots, a lot more science, and yes, they all kind of ebb and flow, but the answers won’t be in part one ….

Tom is drowned out by cries of “How long?” “More characters?” “I don’t get the science at all!” etc. etc. And never returns to workshop—or public, for that matter—again.

I’m a new—and believe it or not, enthusiastic—MFA student, so I couldn’t help but read this thinking that a workshop would hate it. Pynchon does so many things that are verboten in writing class. He writes long. He writes complicated and dense as hell. Part 1 is comprehensible, but only in retrospect, really. Keeping track of characters and significant details as you go is near impossible: yet a careless ice cream on page 89 winds up having relevance hundreds of pages later. As Max said, the only way (that works for me) is to let the book wash over you and then go back to paddle around a bit.

And for my part, I promise more detailed paddling for Part 2. Which is when my reading-with-post-its really took hold.

[NOTE: The discussion can also be followed at Metaxucafe. Previous installments: Part Two (Carolyn) and Part Three (Megan).]

It was with great fortitude and due diligence that the New Chums of Chance, in collusion with those very active operators over at Metaxucafe, took it upon themselves to parse and digest the contents of Against the Day, a volume authored by Messr. Thomas Pynchon which thankfully concerned those unsung heroes known as the Chums of Chance during the early years of the Century Twentieth. The Chums’ Adventures, which are too manifold and legendary (some would argue apocryphal) to itemize here, are something of a footnote in the heroic ledger, occluded perhaps by the Two World Wars that came hot on the heels of their sundry journeys across several continents by way of a noble and specially equipped hydrogen airship, punctuated by plentiful barks from the loyal Pugnax. But it was with this steady spirit that the New Chums of Chance took upon the moniker, led by the Quite Balding Moderator and a not so balding gentleman by the name of Bud Parr. The first yeoman to fire the hydrogen flames and contemplate the many refractive states now long forgotten was Maximus Clarke, who as it so happens is a keen man on matters of electricity.

Mr. Clarke writes:

I had to work up some nerve to crack the spine of Against the Day, and I’ve had to do it again to get myself to commit my thoughts about it to keyboard. This is another big, raggedy Pynchon opus—the biggest and raggediest. 1085 pages, a cast of thousands (or so it seems), and a narrative spanning decades and continents… I’m still not actually sure whether it all really hangs together. Of course, Gravity’s Rainbow was massive and messy too. Still, it felt tight and contained compared to AtD. (Mason & Dixon, his other big book, was even tighter, thanks to its focus on the titular characters, and its consistent use of 18th-century language.)

A big part of reading Pynchon is decoding the allusions. I realize that the necessity of this is also a big turn-off for many people; it’s a bit like reading T.S. Eliot (although Pynchon is more fun). Of course there’s more to TP’s work than navigating the intellectual and cultural labyrinths he’s laid for us—and stopping while reading to look up every obscure reference on Google would be a drag. For the most part I prefer to let the story wash over me, and flag the stuff I don’t quite grasp for later investigation. But the references do provide landmarks of a sort for navigating the vastness of this novel.

I’m not sure how to parse the epigraph from Thelonious Monk, but I’m going to venture a guess that the ancient-looking seal on the next page is an image of Shambhala, the paradisaical hidden city of Tibetan Buddhist legend—the quest for which figures largely in AtD. As I’ve gone back over the first 119-page section of the novel, “The Light Over the Ranges”, I’ve noticed that the quasi-magical “White City” of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair contains prefigurations of things that happen later in the story (page 23: fair exhibits featuring Mexican Indians and hallucinogenic cactus, and Tungus reindeer herders from Siberia). Both of those cultural groups are noted for their shamanistic practices. Maybe the fair is also meant to be a reflection of Shambhala itself? (There’s also a prophetic and squalid simulacrum of a Colorado silver mining camp, on page 55.)

The first lines of the book, in any case, feature the aeronauts of the skyship Inconvenience, embarking for the Chicago fair. The images of ascent and descent seem to echo the opening lines of GR (“A screaming comes across the sky”) and Mason & Dixon (“Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs”). There’s other talk of arcs, flight-paths, hyperbolas, etc. throughout the book—whether it adds up to something in particular, other than allusive density, I’m not sure.

I like these ridiculously quaint, clean-living dime-novel aeronauts. TP uses them to address serious subjects—e.g., the way that, even when trying to remain detached, we can make ourselves into the willing instruments of powers greater than ourselves, with obscure and perhaps sinister motives. But the absurd, funny, and fantastic aspects of the Chums of Chance storyline help to offset the more ponderous passages of the book. Whether speaking formally or using period slang, the Chums use stilted, antiquated phrases that add to their charm. (I loved the language of M&D for this reason, but I know some people found it unreadable.) This is also true of characters like Merle Rideout, Professor Heino Vanderjuice, and others that they meet in Chicago.

The first transition away from the aeronauts’ story to the tale of the robber baron Scarsdale Vibe and those affected by his machinations happens around page 30. Vibe is never given much of a personality; his factotum, the marvelously named Foley Walker, is more dimensional. A “foley walker”, as cinephiles know, is a person who treads across floorboards, gravel beds, strewn leaves, etc., to create the sounds of footsteps used in film soundtracks. Foley Walker starts out as Vibe’s paid battlefield substitute during the Civil War. He then becomes the corporate titan’s thuggish right arm, and virtual doppelganger. There is a karmic consequence to this doubling near the end of the book… but more on that later.

On page 45, Austrian royal playboy Franz Ferdinand, inspiration of indie rockers and (more significantly for the book) the First World War, pops up. His role seems to be mostly to get us thinking early on about the powder keg of Balkan politics. He also gets to deliver a hilarious German transliteration of hip-hop slang in a Chicago bar.

And he introduces us to another point-of-view character, private detective Lew Basnight. Basnight’s story is one of the book’s threads that strikes me as peripheral and possibly redundant. But he in turn provides a transition to Colorado, where much of the book’s action will take place.

In the vicinity of Telluride, we catch up with Merle Rideout and daughter Dahlia, and meet Webb Traverse, mining engineer and explosives expert. His religious conversion to anarchism, subsequent career as a bomber, and murder by corporate goons kick off the core plot of AtD. There’s also some banter about capitalism, silver, photography, alchemy, explosives, and the Fourth of July. There’s mail with ersatz stamps and postmarks (p. 84), which seems to be a token reference to The Crying of Lot 49. (The Mason-Dixon Line gets a shout-out a few pages later.) There’s a German bartender named Adolph, who I’m guessing could be Adolph Coors (but I don’t know who his colleague “Ernst” is).

We meet Webb Traverse’s kids, and then return to the Chums of Chance storyline for one more interlude. Their flight from pole to pole through the hollow Earth, on orders of their unseen superiors, brings us to the end of Part One.

First page: epigraph from Thelonious Monk.

Flip.

Next page: Seal.

Flip.

Title page: One. The Light Over the Ranges.

Flip.

“Now single up all lines!”

“Cheerly now…handsomely…very well! Prepare to cast her off!”

“Windy City, here we come!”

“Hurrah! Up we go!”

It was amid such lively exclamation that the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, its gondola draped with patriotic bunting, carrying a five-lad crew belonging to that celebrated aeronautics club known as the Chums of Chance, ascended briskly into the morning, and soon caught the southerly wind.

1,081 pages to go.