The Ruins of Urban Modernity: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day 9781501339509, 9781501339530, 9781501339523

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Note on the Text
Chapter 1. Explorations and Mappings
Chapter 2. Learning from Venice
Chapter 3. Movements and Machines
Chapter 4. The White City
Chapter 5. The Urban Frontier
Chapter 6. The Unreal City
Chapter 7. A Tale of Three Cities
Chapter 8. The Doleful City
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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THE RUINS OF URBAN MODERNITY

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THE RUINS OF URBAN MODERNITY

Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day

Utku Mogultay

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 This paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Utku Mogultay, 2018 Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover image: Official Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition Issued by the Department of Photography, C.D. Arnold and H.D. Higinbotham, photographers. Chicago: Press Chicago Photo-Gravure Co., 1893. Courtesy Project Gutenberg. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mogultay, Utku, author. Title: The ruins of urban modernity: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the day / Utku Mogultay. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017046924 (print) | LCCN 2017056441 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501339523 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501339516 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501339509 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: City planning–History. | City and town life–History. | Urbanization–History. Classification: LCC HT166 (ebook) | LCC HT166.M583 2018 (print) | DDC 307.1/21609–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046924 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3950-9 PB: 978-1-5013-6015-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3952-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-3951-6 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS List of Figures Acknowledgments Note on the Text INTRODUCTION

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Chapter 1 EXPLORATIONS AND MAPPINGS

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Chapter 2 LEARNING FROM VENICE

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Chapter 3 MOVEMENTS AND MACHINES

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Chapter 4 THE WHITE CITY

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Chapter 5 THE URBAN FRONTIER

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Chapter 6 THE UNREAL CITY

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Chapter 7 A TALE OF THREE CITIES

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Chapter 8 THE DOLEFUL CITY

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CONCLUSION

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Bibliography Index

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FIGURES 2.1 2.2 4.1 4.2 4.3

Claude Monet, San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk, 1908 Tintoretto, The Theft of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–63 World’s Columbian Exposition, Grand Basin, Chicago, 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Midway Plaisance, Chicago, 1893 Souvenir Map of the World’s Columbian Exposition at Jackson Park and Midway Plaisance, Chicago, 1893

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book evolved out of research undertaken while I was a fellow at the Ruhr Center of American Studies in the research project “Spaces—Communities— Representations: Urban Transformations in the U.S.A.” that was funded by the Mercator Research Center Ruhr, and while I was a fellow at the main research area “Urban Systems” at the University of Duisburg-Essen. I am very grateful to all my fellow researchers and colleagues for sharing their thoughts on my work during that time. Jens Martin Gurr and Randi Gunzenhäuser have been very supportive, and I thank both of them for their assistance in the development of my project. I am particularly grateful to Barbara Buchenau, Kornelia Freitag, Jon Hegglund, Thomas Heise, Daniel Stein, Kathy-Ann Tan, and Mabel Wilson for their helpful feedback on individual chapters and aspects of my work. Finally, I wish to thank my family and friends, who have been a constant and invaluable source of inspiration and encouragement.

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NOTE ON THE TEXT All references to Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day are given parenthetically in the text. While Pynchon’s ellipses have been included in their original form, authorial omissions are indicated by an ellipsis in square brackets.

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I N T R O DU C T IO N

Halfway through Pynchon’s novel, Against the Day (2006), we encounter a small town in the early 1900s. An urban island amid the rural expanses of the American Midwest, it is not quite a town or city in the proper sense. This is, however, less because it would fail to meet certain “hard” criteria (such as size or density). It is a peculiar form of settlement because, despite being rather recently established, it resembles the afterlife of a human-made environment. Perhaps not even a decade old, it is already a site of ruins: One day, out in some haze-horizoned piece of grassland, [ . . . ] architectural details emerged from the bunchgrass and the dazzle of sky, and soon they were entering Wall o’ Death, Missouri, built around the remains of a carnival, one of many inspired by the old Chicago Fair. The carnival after a while had moved on, leaving ruins to be converted to local uses, structural members from the Ferris wheel having for miles around been long incorporated into fence, bracing, and wagon hitches, chickens sleeping in the old bunkhouse, stars wheeling unread above the roofless fortune-teller’s booth. (476)

The fictional town of Wall o’ Death only surfaces once in Against the Day, in an episode that is part of a longer section exploring the historical urbanization of the American West. Seemingly of marginal importance for the entire novel, this brief episode succinctly illustrates the way in which Pynchon’s text reassembles semantic fragments gathered from disparate spatiotemporal imaginaries. Wall o’ Death is not built on any old ruins; it is built on the ruins of the city of tomorrow. The wreckage left behind by the carnival is an outgrowth of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition), for which an ideal city—the so-called White City—was built from scratch along the Lake Michigan shoreline. The White City stands for a historically new urban paradigm, for a joint venture, as it were, between architectural, utopian, and imperialist endeavors within capitalist modernity. In Wall o’ Death, then, the ruins of the White City are virtually repurposed as construction material for a new town. Retrieving something valuable from ruins, however tainted they might be, always remains a possibility in Pynchon’s work. Moreover, Wall o’ Death is not only depicted as an architectural ensemble for which ruins have

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been constitutive, but also as a town that is constantly aware that one day it will be nothing but ruins. Structurally integrated into the town fabric, ruins have been acting here, from the town’s inception, as visible markers of transience and ephemerality. Yet, there is apparently nothing tragic about this, as suggested by the scene’s ironically picturesque tone. Wall o’ Death is nowhere near being a tragic site of ruins; it is merely a bricolage town where entropy and decay are writ large.1 Still, the potential that inheres in ruins is also contingent on the particular gaze that is directed at them. Accordingly, Wall o’ Death emerges as a reversible figure, indicating a rather contemporary imaginary of ruins. This crystallizes when we look at how the town center is depicted, namely, as a mecca for motorcycling tourists. Wall o’ Death is actually named after a popular attraction at a former carnival; it was (and still is) a common name for motordromes in which bikers ride along vertical walls and perform dangerous stunts. In Pynchon’s Midwestern town, such a motordrome is the single structure that temporarily escapes disintegration; the defunct edifice instead becomes the historic core of the new town: The only structure not fallen all to pieces yet was the Wall of Death itself, a cylindrical wood shell, looking fragile but destined to be last to go, weathered to gray, with ticket booth, stairs winding around, chicken wire that once separated the breathless tip from the spectacle inside. (476)

An emblem of the incipient motor age, this structure must have already been significant when it was still in use. Ironically, then, once falling into disrepair, it remains a powerful symbolic structure, albeit with changed polarity. While performers were once subject to a centrifugal force within the motordrome, it now exerts a centripetal force that draws bikers from all over the country to a site of ruin tourism. The withering arena in the town center, “[v]isited by motorcycling pilgrims, as if it was a sacred ruin, scene of legendary daredevilry” (476), reemerges as a place of nostalgia for a young generation of ruin-gazers. The nod toward the rise of postindustrial heritage tourism after the Second World War is clearly palpable here. This anachronistic scenario then acts as a distorting mirror, reflecting the wider transformation of the postwar American urban landscape. This is already

1.  Pynchon here seems to counter a romantic notion of ruins in which architectural remnants figure as tragic outcomes of struggle between human beings and nature. A  classic example of such a conception is reflected in Georg Simmel’s 1911 account of the ruin that depicts architecture in terms of a fundamental strife between human will and natural forces. The process in which a distinct architectural form eventually gives way to a ruin is described by Simmel as “a cosmic tragedy” (1965: 259) in which nature qua history undoes human ambition and thus parades the latter’s transience. See Simmel (1965: 259–266).

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Introduction

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implied in the trope of an empty center frequented by motor vehicle enthusiasts. Such imagery figures here as a transmuted vision of suburbanites flocking to a barren inner-city wasteland. This becomes even more distinct when the narrative continues with a shift in perspective that further complicates the image assembled so far. It is an aerial view—the eye of the cartographer—by means of which Pynchon’s text introduces yet another category of ruin-gazer. Having compared the derelict motordrome with a sacred ruin, the narrator goes on to relate that when viewed from overhead [it was] reminding widely-traveled aeronauts of ancient Roman amphitheatres strewn across the old empire, empty ellipses at the hearts of ancient fortress towns, the onset of some suburban fatality in the dwellings presently appearing at human random around it, treeless perimeters becoming shaded boulevards astream with wheelfolk and picnickers, while around the dark corners, under the new viaducts, in the passages greased with night, the gray wall, the Wall of Death, persisted in the silence and forced enigma of structures in their vanishing. (476–477)

The change in perspective yields a panoramic image in which past and present collapse into each other. As such, the image is most ambivalent. There is indeed an obvious sense of historical demise to it. For the process in which the urban core is drained by the centrifugal force of suburbanization is linked to the decline of a classical urban order. Then again, it is worth bearing in mind that the passage is rendered through a particular focalizing instance, namely, aeronauts who first of all discern a geometrical shape from afar. Their visual impression is subsequently situated within an iconographical archive of ruins. The novel thus leaves open the question of whether the sight of ruins is tragic as such, or if the sense of tragedy might also be due to the beholders’ desire to discern ruins. This historical scenario then seems to pursue a twofold strategy. It provides an oblique yet unequivocally bleak comment on the musealization of the late-twentieth-century city. In this sense, it implies that practices of postmodern place-making have eviscerated the inner city, turning it into a spectacular ruin to be gazed at. However, at the same time, the scenario provokes the question of whether such a process of musealization might have been fostered by a contemporary longing for ruins.2

2.  The recent popularity of postindustrial heritage tourism has been repeatedly linked to a contemporary form of longing or nostalgia for ruins. Huyssen, for example, suggests that today’s ruin craze might be related to the demise of utopian thinking in postmodernity, arguing that industrial ruins have become so appealing “because they still seem to hold a promise that has vanished from our own age:  the promise of an alternative future” (2006: 8).

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Against the Day abounds with such narrative miniatures in which historicity and contemporary aesthetic sensibilities bleed into each other. Almost 1,100 pages long, the novel unfolds a complex historical storyworld that is impressive in its geographical scope. Spanning about three decades, Pynchon’s narrative starts in Chicago in the year 1893 and from there takes us to the American Midwest and West, Mexico, the Arctic, South Africa, Germany, England, France, Belgium, Italy, the Balkans, Inner Asia and, as the book’s dust jacket blurb has it, “one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.” This sprawling itinerary involves not least a variety of urban spaces, however loosely defined. There are episodes that end up in retro-futuristic flying cities, drowned cities, and legendary lost cities buried under the desert. Still more often, the novel highlights what has come to enjoy widespread recognition as the ‘modern city,’ that is, the city of industrial capitalism flourishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Not unlike the case of the rural small town that resembles a postindustrial ruinscape, however, the modern city also exhibits a peculiar untimeliness here. In fact, Pynchon time and again envisions fin de siècle in such a way as to foreshadow the urban condition diagnosed about a century later. The modern city that Pynchon hurls us into thus seems as if it were not “on the map at all,” because we did not spot it on a map of a century ago. We would rather expect to find such a city on a turn-of- the-twenty-first-century map. Does this 2006 novel then primarily seek to reconsider the past, or does it negotiate the present by reappropriating the past? It seems to me that this work of fiction satisfies both ideas equally. In other words, it challenges received notions of modernity as much as it attempts to interrogate the present by rewriting the past. This nexus is of key significance to The Ruins of Urban Modernity, a study that examines Pynchon’s Against the Day as a historical vision of modernity that shines a light on our present.

Pynchon’s Urban Landscape There are several reasons why a single novel warrants a monograph-length investigation of this kind. This is, first, because Against the Day is a somewhat overlooked text, at least, considering the plethora of critical attention that Pynchon’s other novels have spawned.3 Moreover, even in those cases that have shown particular interest in Against the Day, it seems that, subject wise, Pynchon’s treatment of time and

3.  While almost all of his novels have been the subject of book-length discussion, Pynchon’s longest novel, published more than a decade ago, has so far only received two edited volumes, namely, the essay collections edited by Pöhlmann (2010) and Severs and Leise (2011).

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history ranks foremost.4 While I certainly do not mean to discount such aspects, this book, however, pursues an analytical shift, namely, toward a focus on urbanity. It builds on the premise that the city is an underrepresented subject in Pynchon scholarship. Although discussions of city-related themes (such as geography, mapping, and tourism) do exist, Pynchon’s urban imaginaries still lack sustained and in-depth consideration. Such an approach is much-needed, however, because cities are of paramount importance within this writer’s oeuvre. Early on in his career, Pynchon himself has acknowledged the significance of the urban form. In a 1969 letter, he explains: “The physical shape of a city is an infallible due to where the people who built it are at. It has to do with our deepest responses to change, death, being human.” (qtd. in Seed 1988: 241). Pynchon’s cities thus merit closer attention, not least because, as a writer whose career now spans more than half a century, he has witnessed several cycles of urban transformation in the United States. Each in different ways, his writings respond to key episodes in American urban history and grapple with the experiences of modernity and postmodernity. The first two novels, V. ([1963] 2000c) and The Crying of Lot 49 ([1966]2000a), were published at the height of the so-called postwar urban crisis. Both texts can be said to counter the notion of the inner-city slum that was widely disseminated in the wake of suburban apotheosis.5 Instead they aim at rehabilitating, especially through the renderings of New York in V. and San Francisco in Lot 49, the vision of a pedestrian city that an automobile culture had chosen to dismiss or ignore. Here a key trope emerges that Pynchon revisits in his later novels, namely, the city street. The latter is central to his writing because, as Seed argues, “the street takes on a special significance not only as an avenue for travel but as a means of exploring the shared public life of a region” (2013: 265). In this context, Pynchon also launches his persistent critique of tourism, most notably in V., where the street is flattened into a two-dimensional stage by tourists “who only want the skin of a place” ([1963] 2000c: 204). The street is, however, only one of the recurring urban tropes and themes developed in the early novels. The invisible city of underground networks and infrastructures first appears in the New York sewer system episodes of V.6 This theme is then more 4.  On time and temporality in Against the Day, see Dalsgaard (2011: 115–138), St. Clair (2011:  46–66), de Bourcier (2012:  89–122) and Gourley (2013:  105–142). For discussions of the role of history in Against the Day, see Ickstadt (2008: 216–244) and Cowart (2011: 159–188). 5.  For a history of the political construction of American inner-city slums around the controversial notion of “urban blight” that eventually gave rise to the postwar concept of “slum clearance,” see Fogelson (2001: 317–380). On the consolidation of racial geographies through cinematic constructions of postwar inner-city slums in the popular genres of film noir and science fiction, see Avila (2004: 65–105). 6. For a discussion of the underground imaginary in Pynchon’s work until the 1990s, see Jarvis (1998: 51–79).

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broadly explored in Lot 49, the first of Pynchon’s California fictions.7 Here, the narrative trajectory from suburb to city figures as a crash landing into the information age. For the protagonist Oedipa Maas, the urban experience becomes a daunting and dizzying challenge of navigating a data labyrinth. The famous scene in which Oedipa, gazing downhill upon San Narciso, compares the city to an electronic circuit board has astutely anticipated the cyberspace imaginaries of the 1980s.8 The rendering of her nocturnal odyssey through San Francisco is equally prescient, for it evokes the kind of spatial mosaic that was much lauded by advocates of postmodern urbanism since the mid-1970s.9 Still, this eclectic cityscape seems rather unsettling in Lot 49, for it signals the extent to which the American city is riven with fault lines. Its public life may appear colorful and diverse, but a disquieting lack of community is not least implied by Oedipa’s failure to knit together the fragments she gathers in “the infected city” ([1966] 2000a: 80).10 In Gravity’s Rainbow ([1973] 1975), Pynchon turns primarily not to American but to European cities.11 Moreover, he revisits an earlier trope that, as I have pointed out, remains important throughout his work, namely, urban ruins.12

7.  Several critics have noted that Pynchon’s California novels—The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland and Inherent Vice—seem to be autobiographically inspired. “As stories of Pynchon’s youth and coming of age,” Schaub writes, “the three novels identify southern California as analogous to Fitzgerald’s Long Island and New York, once wondrous places receding into the past” (2012: 41). In the introduction to their edited volume Pynchon’s California (2014), McClintock and Miller suggest that, despite its New  York setting, Pynchon’s latest novel Bleeding Edge (2013) also appears quite Californian, for it is not only equally accessible as the California novels, but also full of characters who have long relocated from California to the East Coast, presumably like Pynchon himself, who is rumored to live in New York since the 1990s. See McClintock and Miller (2014: 1–14). 8.  For a discussion of Pynchon’s rendering of the dissolve between city and circuit board in relation to the proliferation of such imagery in post-1980s cyberspace discourses, see Geyh (2009: 63–92). 9. For an overview of postmodern urbanism, see Ellin (1999). 10.  This implicitly alarming tone becomes rather explicit in one of Pynchon’s rare pieces of journalism. Published in the same year as Lot 49, the New York Times Magazine article “A Journey into the Mind of Watts”, starkly invokes the image of Los Angeles as a racially polarized city in which a mostly white “L.A. Scene” insulates itself from the “Raceriotland” of South Los Angeles. See Pynchon (1966). 11. There are of course exceptions as well, such as the Los Angeles episode that concludes Gravity’s Rainbow. Another example, which revisits the theme of urban infrastructures, is the Boston episode in which Slothrop, having dived into a toilet bowl, explores the city’s underground sewer system. 12. Urban ruins make their first appearance in the Malta chapter of V. For an astute discussion of Pynchon’s ruins in this episode, see Alworth (2016: 96–120).

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Introduction

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Set at the end of the Second World War, the ruinscapes of London during the Blitz and bombed-out Berlin feature prominently in Gravity’s Rainbow. Within this historical geography, ruins act as a doubly coded figuration. In a novel that was published when America’s war on Vietnam was ongoing and nuclear war with Russia a constant threat, they emerge as post-apocalyptic future ruins. Yet, at the same time, they act as metonymic miniatures of what Pynchon describes as “the Zone” of interregnum Germany. “Forget frontiers now. Forget subdivisions. There aren’t any” ([1973]1975:  294), as the Zone’s guiding principle is framed in Gravity’s Rainbow. Accordingly, when following its disoriented characters through Europe’s ravaged cities, the novel points to the possibilities for rehearsing alternative notions of community that might open up amid such ruins.13 Moreover, in Pynchon’s work, contingent spaces of this kind frequently serve to counteract “the cultural tendency to think about space as an abstraction ripe for dissection and order” (Bulson 2007: 97). In Gravity’s Rainbow, this tendency is tackled perhaps most explicitly in the “Rocket-City” episode, which involves a guided tour through the Mittelwerk, the vast underground factory complex where Nazi Germany produced ballistic missiles. Rendering this site as a grim futurist theme park run by technocratic cultists, Pynchon obliquely hints at the dehumanizing tendencies of an authoritarian high modernism that had also taken hold of urban planning in postwar America.14 Following a publication hiatus of seventeen years, Pynchon returns to California in Vineland ([1990] 2000d). Set in 1984, the novel takes off in the fictional town of Vineland, an idyllic community and refuge for Nixon-era dissidents. This community eventually unravels when it comes into the firing line of Reagan’s war on drugs and when Vineland is besieged by land developers who consider the place “born to be suburban” (2000d: 319). Updating the exile theme of Lot 49, this political satire then perambulates a postmodern urban landscape that is being thoroughly restructured under a rising neoliberal economic paradigm. Here, the monuments of New Deal urbanism corrode in the shadows of the sterile showpieces of a so-called urban renaissance.15 Decaying public works coexist uneasily alongside noir-themed shopping malls with private security guards and constant camera surveillance. Yet, despite

13. For a detailed discussion of how Pynchon plots Tyrone Slothrop’s peregrinations through the ruins of Berlin in Gravity’s Rainbow, see Bulson (2010: 49–72). 14.  For an exemplary account and critique of the authoritarian streak within modernist urban planning, see Scott (1998: 103–146). 15.  I use the label “urban renaissance” in a polemical sense here, not least because I agree with Porter and Shaw that it is “an expression with no real content at all, used loosely and uncritically by its usually neoliberal advocates to refer to a desired reemergence of cities as centres of general social well-being, creativity, vitality and wealth” (2009: 3). For critical discussions of this issue, see Porter and Shaw (2009: 1–7), Porter (2009: 241–252) and Davis (1985: 106–113).

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the “merciless nostalgia” (2000d: 107) that Vineland occasionally conveys, the novel does not succumb to it. There is no simple going back, as Pynchon’s flashbacks to the 1960s suggest, because the lofty utopianisms of the past might have been complicit in tying the neoliberal noose of the 1980s. To be sure, there are fleeting moments of “micro-utopia” as well, such as the intergenerational family picnic at the end of the novel. But still more Vineland seems to imply that anything on a scale larger than that should be taken with a grain of salt. This does not mean, however, that from here on the theme of utopia becomes irrelevant in Pynchon’s work; quite the contrary, it is explored in greater detail in his following two novels. While hardly qualifying as urban fiction, Mason & Dixon (1997) takes us back to prerevolutionary America and represents Pynchon’s most dedicated engagement with geography. The novel reimagines the survey of the Mason-Dixon Line in the 1760s, that is, the line which a century later came to demarcate the colonies that supported slavery from those that opposed it. Mason & Dixon provides, as many critics have noted, a narrative exploration of the utopian promise that the “New World” once held, of “the time in which the decisions were made that sent America down the wrong road” (Hume 2012: 59). Beyond that, the novel enacts a journey into the age of Enlightenment science, retelling a story of two scientific minds in the pursuit of geographical knowledge. When the eponymous protagonists eventually realize that their endeavor has been, from the very beginning, entangled with an apparatus of control and oppression, Pynchon likewise seems to suggest that the supposed “purity” of modern science might be a questionable notion.16 In its concern with geography and the spatiality of power, Mason & Dixon is then also an important companion piece to Against the Day, both of which have been subsumed under “the genre of the geographical novel” (Duyfhuizen 2012: 74). Focusing on an era in which the terrestrial surface was almost completely explored and charted, Against the Day is far more global in its narrative outlook than any other Pynchon novel. A hypermobile narrative that defies any easy summary, Against the Day has been characterized as “thematically obsessed with the symbolism of travel and the politics of space” (Elias 2011:  29). The novel reenvisions a world where cartographic maps become part of everyday life and where mobile photography, illustrated press, and cinematography yield an unprecedented proliferation of city images. Pynchon, here, reconstructs a historical landscape of American and European urban modernity in which

16. It has been repeatedly noted that Pynchon’s treatment of science challenges positivist assumptions that frame science as an autonomous realm that is uncontaminated by society and merely gives voice to the immutable laws of nature. Instead Pynchon’s rendering of science often shows an affinity to science and technology studies in which scientific practice is conceptualized as a network that always traverses other realms such as politics, law, and ethics. For detailed discussions of the role of science in Pynchon’s work, see Dalsgaard (2012: 156–167) and Engelhardt (2016: 189–205).

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Introduction

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heaven and hell are only a stone’s throw away from each other. While the crisis-ridden city of industrial capitalism in many quarters comes to resemble a dystopian nightmare, a new “City upon a Hill” is raised at the other side of town. Moreover, the way in which Pynchon navigates this scenario is rendered as a “mediated historiography,” that is, “the writing of an era’s history through the medium of its popular genres” (McHale 2011: 25; italics original).17 While revisiting a range of spatial tropes (such as the street, stage, maze, underground, or wilderness), Against the Day is more than a mere collage of Pynchon’s earlier urban imaginaries. For, this novel not only conceives urban modernity as a Euro-American cultural space of image circulation, but likewise highlights that the modern city itself is increasingly made and remade within the parameters of a visual economy of potentially global reach. In his latest two novels, both of which are modeled on hard-boiled detective fiction, Pynchon reconsiders several aspects of his earlier spatial imaginaries. Set in California during the Nixon era, Inherent Vice (2009) revisits those dissident outsiders who would later find refuge in places such as Vineland. Scrutinizing this generation’s susceptibility to the seductions of power, Pynchon throws into relief the “[l]ong, sad history of L.A. land use” (2009: 17), which had already made itself felt in Lot 49. Although utterly in the hands of a landowning aristocracy, Southern California here yet continues to stand for “the myth of American promise” (Cowart 2011: 118) that the novelist seems unwilling to give up altogether. Partly charting new ground, Bleeding Edge (2013) is Pynchon’s first novel to be set almost entirely in New York. Following a year in the life of the forensic accountant Maxine Tarnow, Bleeding Edge adds a range of nuances to the infrastructural imaginary developed in the early novels. While railing at the “labyrinthine sewers of greed that run beneath all realestate dealings in this town” (2013: 42), Pynchon, here, renders New York as a complex infrastructural realm that is not only composed of tunnels and pipes but also of legal regulations, organizational standards, and professional codes. Moreover, Bleeding Edge signals a shift in Pynchon’s handling of paranoia, for the latter acts not so much as a narrative engine here, but rather as a pervasive urban atmosphere that suffuses New York in the wake of 9/11. This brief overview does certainly not do justice to all the complexities involved in Pynchon’s urban imaginaries. Yet, it does hopefully convey that, far from being mute backgrounds, these cities are active constituents of

17.  This is indeed not the first time that Pynchon draws on such a technique. As Seed notes, Pynchon “has consistently practiced a kind of writing that evokes historical moments not only through topical events and artifacts but also through the narrative practices that were characteristic of those moments” (2013:  268). While both V. and Mason & Dixon have similarities in this regard, it seems fair to say that Pynchon has perfected this technique in Against the Day. On Pynchon’s strategy of “genre-poaching” in this novel, see McHale (2011: 15–28).

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storyworlds and open up avenues for exploring the sociopolitical and cultural landscapes of modernity and postmodernity. In this sense, Against the Day is as an exceptionally important work when it comes to Pynchon’s negotiation of cities. This is not only, however, because this novel figures as a junction of where several threads developed in Pynchon’s other writings come together. Against the Day is a significant work of fiction because its rendering of urban modernity coincides with an attempt at making sense of our present. An exploration of the historical image repertoire that serves to articulate modernity through city writing, this novel also tracks the role of such imagery in shaping processes of urban development and restructuring throughout the twentieth century. It can be grasped as a means of following the winding trajectories that lead from the fragmented, yet increasingly networked, landscape of modernity to the globally urbanized world we live in today.18 Accordingly, this study of Against the Day does not merely examine a work of fiction; it also uses a literary text as a valuable heuristic tool that may help us come to grips with our contemporary urban world.

Spatializing Modernity—Writing Urbanity The Ruins of Urban Modernity then approaches Pynchon’s Against the Day from a decidedly spatial and urban point of view. By expressly focusing on the geographical dimensions of modernity, this book builds on a theoretical realignment that, since the 1980s has operated under the label of the spatial turn.19 It is informed by postcolonial criticism and debates on globalization that challenge an exclusively historical and/or sociological notion of modernity and its claims for universality. Such a rethinking, above all, involves discerning the blind spot in widely held notions of modernity, even in ostensibly innocuous ones that simply posit the modern as the “recent” or “new” (in contradistinction to “tradition”). The problem here is that “[t]he question of space, of the place, location, society, country, nation-state or life-space to which ‘the present or recent’ refers, is taken for granted and unproblematized” (King 2004: 66). This then calls for a reconsideration of where exactly and in which different ways modernity takes place—a task that carries weight, particularly when it comes to refuting the teleological underpinnings of a historicist notion of modernity.

18. Pynchon’s most global and urban novel was tellingly published only a year before a significant demographic caesura occurred. The 2014 World Urbanization Prospects, published by the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, states that, in 2007, “the global urban population exceeded the global rural population” (2014: 7). 19.  On this theoretical realignment and the ensuing resurgence of geographical thinking in the humanities and social sciences, see Soja (1989: 10–42), Warf and Arias (2009: 1–10), and Tally (2013: 11–43).

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As a result of the entrenched disregard for the geographical embeddedness of modernity, Massey argues, “spatial difference was convened into temporal sequence” (2005: 68). In this way, modernity has been conceived as an ineluctable evolutionary framework in which space is relegated to a passive backdrop. By assuming such a monolithic perspective, “[d]ifferent ‘places’ were interpreted as different stages in a single temporal development” (2005: 68).20 Hence, the recognition of the multiple trajectories of modernity involves nothing less than the effort to redeem a future as yet unwritten, because “[t]he lack of openness of the future for those ‘behind’ in the queue is a function of the singularity of the trajectory” (2005: 70). Hence, an effective way to unsettle and to complicate the steadfast assumption of a singular trajectory of modernity is to bring the city into focus. The urban imagination, it has frequently been remarked upon, is inextricably bound up with the concept of modernity. Framed both as the nucleus and epitome of modernity, the city came to figure as a privileged site for scrutinizing the sociopolitical and cultural transformations brought about in modernity. In this sense, the modern city is typically considered as the crucial arena of progress and innovation (as opposed to the parochialism of rural life). By the same token, however, such a perspective on the modern city seems myopic insofar as it is contingent upon the biased notion of modernity just sketched. Arguably, used as a shorthand for modernity, the concept of the modern city is “not only characteristic of ‘present or recent times’ anywhere,” King writes, “but only in Western Europe and North America” (2004: 71; italics original). On a related note, King continues: “Nor, of course, did it take the same manifestation in the various countries of those two continents, or did its ‘modern’ form occupy all of the space of the city which it touched” (2004: 71). The latter aspect, in particular, is a salient reference point in The Ruins of Modernity, which regards Against the Day as a complex and nuanced vision of the spatiality of modernity. It is argued here that Pynchon’s novel—a gargantuan narrative whose urban scope extends from Renaissance Venice to twentyfirst-century New York—provides a multifaceted negotiation of modernity that calls attention to a variety of spatial figurations, ambivalences, and contradictions. This book then traces an artistic inquiry into modernity that, by interrogating a number of spatial relationships (such as city and country, center and

20.  The most virulent expression of this narrow understanding of modernity can perhaps be found in sociological theories of modernization that thrived from the 1960s on. In this functionalist conception, which originated in the cultural climate of Cold War politics, geographical difference is implicitly leveled into a hierarchy of measurable stages within a linear temporal framework of modern development. Unsurprisingly, this school of thought attracted sharp criticism for a number of reasons, not least for its underlying ethnocentrism. For an exemplary critique of this way of thinking modernity, see Massey (2005: 62–75).

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periphery, global and local), highlights the unevenness of geographical and urban development; it traces a far-flung yet open-ended literary mapping that, by stressing the coexistence of disparate vectors of urban modernity, seeks to do justice to the notion of the city as part of spatial networks reaching from the local to the global scale. The Ruins of Urban Modernity thus looks at how Against the Day, while drawing attention to the differentiating logics of specific cities (such as Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, London, and Venice), likewise spotlights what could be described as the “networkedness” of urban modernity. Since this book intends to link Pynchon’s novel to the field of urban fiction, some remarks on this genre seem advisable. One of the few things we can say with certainty here is that urban fiction is an elusive category. It serves as a vague umbrella term comprising “all kinds of fiction in which the city takes up a prominent place” (Keunen and Eeckhout 2003: 54). However, there seems to be some consensus among literary scholars that the history of urban fiction can be divided into a tripartite scheme. The emergence of the mid- to late-nineteenthcentury realist novel is often said to mark the inception of urban fiction in the proper sense. Here the large-scale portraits of metropolitan life penned by writers such as Dickens or Balzac figure as metonymic or synecdochical representations of modernity at large. This stage then, is said to be followed by the early-twentieth-century rise of modernism in which the panoramic overview of the metropolis gives way to a fragmented textual maelstrom that reflects the notion of the city as a confusing psychological state of mind. This phase is also seen as an intermediary state, paving the way for the emergence of postmodernist urban fiction from the 1960s on. Here, the city is said to shed any vestigial appearance of coherence. With the empirical city disappearing from sight, the city in postmodernist fiction manifests itself as a simulacrum, as an immaterial city of incongruent semiotic worlds that ultimately elude legibility. In short, the quintessence of this scheme is that “the city novel as a distinct category addressing the totality of life and society in the modern world has outlived itself and its increasingly sprawling and disseminating subject” (2003: 59). We should probably take this scheme for what it is, namely, an ideal-typical model generalizing for the sake of clarity. Its proposed categorization can indeed be regarded somewhat skeptically, but less because of the overt tone of nostalgia for the great urban novel. It is, rather, the contention that urban fiction once captured the whole gamut of modernity that seems to be slightly baffling. It might be “doubtful whether urban fiction today still functions as a synecdoche” (2003: 57) for modernity, yet it also seems fair to ask: Has the urban novel ever actually accomplished such a feat? This objection is by no means supposed to discount the artistic achievements of “the literary masterpieces that appeared in the heydays of urban fiction” (2003: 57). It is merely to suggest that the city novel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century should be considered, not as a universal account of modernity, but instead as a particular rendering with a limited purview. While there is reason to doubt that the classic urban novel provides an exhaustive panorama of modernity, it

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is probably safe to say that it conveys the sense of the feasibility of such an overview. Yet, this impression is not least an effect achieved by certain textual strategies that produce verisimilitude and that ultimately reassert the possibility of rendering the modern city in a holistic manner. Such strategies range from an emphasis on accurate place descriptions to the projection of literary characters supposedly capable of rendering an overview of the city, most notably perhaps, the figure of the detective.21 While its temporal setting roughly coincides with the era of the great urban novel, Against the Day is far from acting as the belated provision of a totalizing survey of modernity. Following a postmodernist poetics that foregrounds the fictionality of the literary text, this novel instead frequently points to the conventionality of those aesthetic strategies that undergird a neatly unified vision of the modern city. Here, Pynchon makes extensive use, as already mentioned, of what McHale describes as mediated historiography, as a rewriting of a historical period through its popular entertainment genres. In fact, Against the Day offers a vast compendium of turn of the twentieth-century entertainment fiction, resonating with various forms of dime-novel narratives, pulp magazines, juvenile adventure tales, detective stories, spy thrillers, science fiction and the like. Further, this technique of “genre-poaching” (McHale 2011: 18) is synchronized with the storyworld of Against the Day. Hence Pynchon regularly draws on genre material whose popularity temporally coincides with the unfolding of his storyworld. More importantly, these forms of entertainment fiction are not treated in a purely mimetic fashion, but rather “passed through the looking glass, rendered differently, altered: parodied, revised and demystified, queered” (2011: 24; italics original).

The Modernity of Ruins While concurring with McHale’s account of the deconstructive principle underlying the genre of poetics of Against the Day, I would also contend that there is more at stake here than a revisionist take on the popular self-representations of a bygone era. For, Pynchon’s text not only dismantles turn of the century entertainment fiction but also imaginatively recombines the resulting semantic fragments. This book argues that, by reassembling his narrative feedstock into unfamiliar constellations, Pynchon eventually projects a vision of modernity that points beyond the past and which extends into the present. Tracing this strategy, I put particular emphasis on how Against the Day taps into the spatial imaginaries underlying late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century popular fiction.22 There is, in other words, a poetics of ruins at work in Pynchon’s text; yet

21. On the urban origins of detective fiction, see Benjamin (2006b: 46–133). 22.  Although McHale does not address the contemporary relevance of Pynchon’s negotiation of spatiality in any explicit way, he incidentally refers to two instances of

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ruins here do not imply an unyielding leftover of the past. These ruins are better captured in terms of what Tocqueville described as “day-old ruins” (1988: 283) indicating the restless spirit of geographical expansion in the United States.23 Further, to add another important dimension, one might invoke Benjamin’s notion of the ruin as an outmoded commodity.24 Hence, this conceptual shift is about situating ruins within the process of capitalist urbanization. Embedded in the rapid cycles of demolition and rebuilding in the urban environment, the hallmark of these ruins is not so much the idea of antiquity as a peculiar sense of temporal dislocation. These ruins can be grasped as “a temporal composite that belies any simple notion of a completed past or a self-contained past” (Yablon 2009: 12). Against the Day is littered with such modern ruins that pop up overnight and appear oddly out of place and time. However, we do not only encounter them in Pynchon’s storyworld (such as those in the Wall o’ Death episode); more importantly, such ruins are deployed as a formal principle, namely, when it comes to the renegotiation of the popular narratives of times past. In this sense, the novel draws on short-lived mass commodities that were marked by their rapid obsolescence and that, while often seismographically capturing the spatiotemporal

genre rewriting in Against the Day that suggest the novel’s preoccupation with spatial imaginaries. Apart from mentioning the link between dime-novel Western and the imagination of frontier expansion, he writes that Pynchon’s subversion of hard-boiled detective fiction indicates how its readers once must have “imagined their relationship to urban modernity” (2011: 25). Both of these examples will be discussed in detail in this study. 23.  A case in point would be the frontier log cabin that its former occupants left to decay and that, in 1831, caused Tocqueville—struck into perplexity by the sight of a crumbling structure on the soil of a nation so recently founded—to repeatedly exclaim:  “What! Ruins so soon!” (1988:  284). Tocqueville’s “day-old ruin” is not least pertinent, as Yablon argues, to the swift pace that characterized the history of urban development in the United States. Such American ruins were not only “instantaneous and largely unanticipated” but likewise involved “the difficulty of situating them within received models of historical temporality” (Yablon 2009: 10–11), such as the cyclical history of empires. For an insightful discussion of such ruins in the context of nineteenthcentury urbanization in the United States, see Yablon (2009: 1–18). 24.  Benjamin developed this understanding of the ruin based on his early study of the German tragic drama, in which he discusses the baroque fascination with antique ruins. In his later works, most notably in the Arcades Project (1999a), Benjamin then posits the outmoded and decaying Parisian arcades as contemporary ruins that figure as a privileged spatiotemporal lens through which to study urban modernity. This approach rests not least on the idea that history is “itself a construction of the present age and must always be read backwards from the ruins which persist in the here and now” (Gilloch 1996: 14).

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transformations unleashed in urban modernity, also underpinned the unevenness of geographical development in various ways. This study therefore, looks at Pynchon’s novel as a discursive site of both ruination and reconstruction. On the one hand, Against the Day deliberately (and, at times, indeed pleasurably) collapses the hegemonic readings of the entertainment fictions in question. Yet, the act of demolition figures not as an end in itself here; it is enforced “not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it” (Benjamin 1978: 303). Ruination here serves to excavate the spatial imaginaries that buttress late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century entertainment fiction. On the other hand, Pynchon does not treat these semantic fragments as mere relics. Instead, the narrative detritus of popular culture serves as a means to trace the afterlife of the imaginaries in question, to scrutinize their ongoing persistence in contemporary spatial and urban discourses. The chapters of this book oscillate between conceptually and topographically informed strands of investigation, both of which overlap at times. Some chapters decidedly turn toward specific cities in Against the Day, while likewise serving as points of convergence for conceptual ideas discussed elsewhere in greater depth. The progression of chapters generally follows a transition from long shot to close-up, as it were; yet this movement is also interrupted, reduplicated and reversed in individual chapters. “Explorations and Mappings” begins with offers methodological remarks on the relationship between geography and narrative. The bulk of this chapter then deals with the theme of geographical knowledge, illustrating how Pynchon links the primacy of vision in modern geography to a detached observer’s epistemology that fosters the colonization of nature. “Learning from Venice” juxtaposes different visual tropes and ways of mapping the island-city. This is followed by a discussion of Pynchon’s Venice as a moribund city haunted by the specter of a once thriving city-republic. Responding to the idea of Venice as a postmodern city in the sense of a theme park without residents, this chapter then considers Pynchon’s interrogation of Venice’s potential as a social space vis-à-vis the historical transformation of its place-myth. “Movements and Machines” addresses the implications of mechanized mobility on modern notions of time and space. The focus is on railroad mobility as an emblematic process of geographical development in modernity, which Pynchon further throws into relief through a transatlantic perspective. Moreover, this chapter explicates how interurban railroad mobility becomes readable here as a paratext on mobility in the information age. “The White City” takes its name from the moniker of a temporary model city that was built on the occasion of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Showcasing a meticulously planned neoclassical cityscape that was promoted as an urban utopia, the White City emerges in Pynchon’s novel as a dubious signpost for urban America, as an imperialist fairyland, whose pernicious popularity came to impede efforts at urban reform for decades. Here, I also indicate how Pynchon amplifies such criticism through his portrayal of Venice—a city known for inspiring the planners of the White City. “The Urban Frontier” begins with a fun

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fact, namely, that the Chicago Fair was also where Turner presented his famous “frontier thesis.” Investigating the antiurbanism underlying the frontier myth, this chapter considers how Pynchon depicts its role in processes of economic development in the American West. The focus then shifts toward the negotiation of frontier mythology in urban contexts, particularly regarding the trope of an urban wilderness that plays into slumming narratives (slum-tourism). This chapter concludes with remarks on the afterlife of frontier imagery in recent processes of urban restructuring such as gentrification or the conversion of industrial sites into recreational spaces. Drawing on the ambivalence of urban modernity as both rational and dreamlike, “The Unreal City” examines Pynchon’s rendering of the re-enchantment of mechanized urban life by the spectacle of consumer capitalism. This chapter follows the ubiquitous stage of the metropolis into the microcosm of the department store, which figures here as a spatial consolidation of the rational and oneiric aspects of urban modernity. Eventually, this chapter turns to the relationship between the proliferation of discrepant semiotic worlds and the disintegration of experience in the metropolis. “A Tale of Three Cities” focuses on a popular outgrowth of urban modernity, namely, detective fiction. This chapter traces a detective plot in Against the Day that involves three different urban scenarios (1890s Chicago; early1900s London; 1920s Los Angeles), each of which responds to a particular subgenre of detective fiction (dime-novel detective fiction; late-Victorian detective fiction; hard-boiled detective fiction). Here, the focus is on how Pynchon contrasts the urban epistemology of detective fiction with the spatial imaginaries underlying each subgenre. “The Doleful City” examines a scenario of urban disaster, which resonates with the long-standing tradition of New  York’s imaginative destruction. This scenario is approached in terms of an exploration of the issues of urban anxiety and vulnerability, demonstrating how such anxiety figures in Pynchon’s novel as the uncanny underside of the technologically advanced metropolis. Moreover, this chapter considers how the municipal effort at making sense of the catastrophe is related to the framing of an urban memory and an urban future. The mosaic-like structure of The Ruins of Urban Modernity stems not least from the fact that Pynchon’s vision of modernity is in itself highly episodic, erratic and fragmentary. This book, after all, aims at pursuing a form of textual engagement that regards literature not only as an object, but also as a source of knowledge.25 Accordingly, the way this book proceeds is, to some degree, determined by the inner logic of the work of art itself. While individual chapters at times depart considerably from the book’s overarching 25.  When it comes to grasping literature as a source of knowledge, this book is not least informed by Rita Felski’s reflections on literature as a way of knowing and her argument that fiction “does not just represent, but make newly present, significant shapes of social meaning” (2008: 104).

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interest, the conclusion returns to the most pivotal aspects in a more pointed manner. This book, eventually, makes the case that the rendering of urban modernity in Against the Day mediates between past and present. While set around the turn of the twentieth century, Pynchon’s novel accentuates many spatial and urban issues that typically serve to distinguish a post-1970s urban condition from its modern predecessor. Although there remains debate on how to label this contemporary form of urbanism, I draw on “postmodern city” as a generic term. Implying a historical rupture but also a strong cultural dimension, postmodern city refers to phenomena such as aesthetic playfulness and eclecticism, the rise of consumer culture and service-sector economy, including most notably the tourist and leisure industries, as well as the targeted construction of place images.26 Given that all of these features are unmistakably characteristic of how urban modernity is envisioned in Against the Day, this book then examines to which extent Pynchon’s novel urges us to reconsider the assumption of a radical break between modern and postmodern city. Moreover, excavating a range of precedents of postmodern urbanism in fin de siècle modernity, Pynchon raises a related issue here. If the rigid antithesis between modern and postmodern city appears rather untenable, what do we make of the jubilant rhetoric that has accompanied the death of modernist architecture and planning in the late twentieth century? In other words: Was the proclaimed triumph of the postmodern city actually as liberating as its apologists maintained? When it comes to such questions, one aspect deserves particular attention, namely, the “near-universal proscription against utopian thought and speculation” (Martin 2010: xxi) that came along with postmodernism, especially in its architectural variety.27 Equating both modernism and utopianism with totalitarianism, postmodern urbanism could thus assert to have fortunately done away with utopia (and, en passant, to have helped architecture gain its status of an autonomous art form). But here Pynchon likewise prompts his readers to gauge received sensibilities anew. For Against the Day can as well be said to renegotiate a post-utopian present through the historical 26. While terms such as “entrepreneurial city” or “informational city” may describe similar phenomena, it seems to me that they do not as clearly signify the idea of a historical departure. On the other hand, the concept of the ‘postindustrial city’ or ‘postFordist city’ is somewhat inadequate to capture the profound cultural transformations implied in the concept of the postmodern city. 27.  This kind of anti-utopian disposition is often considered a hallmark of architectural postmodernism. Jameson, for example, in his well-known account of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, notes regarding the hotel’s spatial solipsism that “no further effects, no larger protopolitical Utopian transformation, is either expected or desired” (1991: 41–42). For a detailed discussion of the anti-utopian doctrine in postmodern architecture and urban design, see Martin (2010).

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prism of the second golden age of utopianism.28 The novel looks back at a time when the utopian imaginaries of print culture found their built equivalents in grand city designs conceived within the nascent discipline of urban planning.29 What is then perhaps most bewildering about Pynchon’s rendering of this historical period is that, in his narrated world, such utopian master-planned urbanism often comes in the guise of a playful postmodern urbanism. Is that supposed to mean that the postmodern city has never left utopia behind? Is the postmodern city a new form of utopia? Or is this merely a postmodernist writer’s ill-concealed nostalgia for a lost age of utopianism? In any case, it is best understood—as I return to in the conclusion of this book—as a literary reexploration of postmodern urbanism in terms of the spatial configuration of a post-utopian age that is somehow still haunted by yesterday’s utopian desires.

28. Considered as a successor to the founding period of utopianism that began with the publication of More’s Utopia in 1516, the turn of the twentieth century is widely regarded as second golden age of utopianism, not least because it saw a renewed interest in both literary utopias as well as utopian social theory. For overviews of this phase of utopian thinking, see Kumar (1987) and Levitas (1990). 29. Ameel has pointed to “the intriguing correlation between the appearance of urban planning as separate discipline in this period and the proliferation of literary utopias” (2016: 788). While writers of late-nineteenth-century literary utopias such as Edward Bellamy and William Morris are widely known for their interest in the debate on how to realize the good city, it seems more intriguing here that urban planners affiliated with the City Beautiful movement or the Settlement movement actually found much inspiration in literary utopias. For a detailed discussion of the role of utopian, dystopian, and apocalyptic imaginaries in the field of urban planning, see Ameel (2016: 785–800).

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Chapter 1 E X P L O R AT IO N S   A N D M A P P I N G S

“Geography is too important to be left to geographers” (1984: 7), as the British geographer David Harvey claims. It is anyone’s guess whether or not Thomas Pynchon had such an idea at the back of his mind while penning his novels. In any case, it has been noted that there is “an acute geographical awareness in Pynchon’s work from the outset” (Jarvis 1998: 53). It also seems safe to say that his writings at least show an unwitting affinity to the project of a critical geography. Because, what Harvey also wrote is that geography is “far too important to be left to generals, politicians, and corporate chiefs” (1984: 7). When it comes to Pynchon’s concern with the entanglement of geography and power, two of his texts are often mentioned in the same breath, namely, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. Here it is worthwhile, however, to look closer at the dissimilarities between each novel’s take on geography, which brings me to their different historical frameworks. Whereas the storyworld of Mason & Dixon unfolds during the end of the eighteenth century, the events in Against the Day, take place more than a century later. Accordingly, both storyworlds correspond to distinct modes and conventions of practicing geography, that is, to different geographical cultures. Drawing on an essay by Joseph Conrad called “Geography and Some Explorers,” Driver distinguishes between three stages in the production of geographical knowledge.1 The first one, “Geography Fabulous,” is characterized by “extravagant speculation which had nothing to do with the pursuit of the truth” (Driver 2001: 3). This stage is followed by “Geography Militant,” “a more worldly quest for empirical knowledge about the geography of the earth” (2001: 3), which defined the heyday of scientific exploration during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The third stage, “Geography Triumphant,” commencing around the turn of the twentieth century, refers to a historical period in which the terrestrial globe has been explored almost completely, leaving only a few tiny patches of terra incognita on the map of the world. “Geography Triumphant” thus also figures as a swansong to the glorified era of 1. See Conrad (1926: 10–17).

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scientific exploration. Idealistic scientists conducting exploration for the sake of science are replaced by ruthless adventurers, by “modern men, hell-bent on worldly gain” (2001: 4). Conrad’s tripartite sequence may strike one as somewhat simplistic, even questionable, for its nostalgic undertone. Yet, it has the advantage of highlighting the extent to which the explorer has come to be equated with the practice of geography—a point that Driver also emphasizes: While all the sciences were shaped, to some extent, by practices of exploration—the voyage, the survey, the mapping of the earth, the seas and the stars—the field of geography more than any other came to be associated with the figure of the explorer. (2001: 2)

Although disdained by professional geographers, the explorers of “Geography Triumphant” had a strong grip on the popular imagination. Following a logic of “faster, higher, further,” their spectacular and often costly expeditions engendered a widespread interest with mass audiences that probably still exists today.2 It has also been argued, however, that explorers in the so-called Mallory tradition, that is, “relatively wealthy people taking themselves to the furthest or highest place for the sake of it” (Royle 2009: 676–677), were not entirely unknown actors entering the stage of exploration; that they were to some degree cut from the same cloth as the earliest explorers.3 Of course it is tempting to denounce the explorer of “Geography Triumphant” as a mere travesty of the “image of the enlightened and disinterested explorer, pursuing science in a sober spirit of inquiry” (Driver 2001: 25). Yet, such a portrayal would make it only all too easy to obscure the fact that scientific explorers in the Humboldtian tradition were also involved in conquest and exploitation, not to mention the possibility that the desire to boost one’s reputation within a scientific community might have been more pressing than any will to truth. Hence it might be more appropriate to understand the increasing number of attempts to overcome the challenges posed by natural forces as “a reversion to type, for wanderlust, vainglory, and self-romanticization were always parts of explorers’ psychic equipment” (Fernández-Armesto 2007: 350).

2. In the late nineteenth century, it also became a common practice to conduct expeditions as a form of publicity stunt that mostly served economic purposes. A  prime example is the search for the missing explorer David Livingstone that the British journalist Henry Morton Stanley undertook in 1871 on behalf of New York Herald founder, James Gordon Bennett, Jr. For a detailed discussion of Stanley’s role in European exploration, see Driver (2001: 117–145). 3.  The name of this tradition derives from the British explorer George Mallory (1886–1924), who reportedly intended to climb the Mount Everest just “because it is there.” See Royle (2009: 676–77).

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With regard to Pynchon’s geographical novels, it seems that the image of exploration in Mason & Dixon clearly corresponds to the notion of “Geography Militant,” whereas Against the Day seems to be more in line with exploration as encapsulated by “Geography Triumphant.” This is mainly because—for all the former novel’s meta-historiographical deliberations, its intricately nested narrative layers and fabulations—at the core of Mason & Dixon, we find a fairly realistic story about two surveyors in the age of Enlightenment science. Also, the novel’s harsh criticism of exploration as an instrument of territorial expansion and conquest does not fundamentally shake the realist underpinnings of its narration. In Against the Day, however, we encounter a profoundly different narrative approach, one which basically refracts the practice of exploration through the genre conventions of turn-of-the-twentieth-century entertainment fiction, most notably those of the adventure story. When deployed in the form of genre-parody, this strategy indeed serves as a suitable device to tackle the hypocrisy behind many explorers’ conspicuous self-display as philanthropists and disinterested scientists. Yet, there is more at stake here than simply mocking a certain breed of explorers as backstabbers of a class of upright scientists.4 The generic framework of the adventure story instead functions in a twofold manner in Against the Day. For one thing, this particular form of genre borrowing allows Pynchon to examine the kind of spatial imagination that the adventure story helped to shape as an immensely popular genre among European audiences from the eighteenth century onward. As such, this genre has already received a fair amount of critical attention; Phillips, for example, has argued that [a]dventure stories constructed a concrete (rather than purely abstract) cultural space that [ . . . ] mapped a social totality in a manner that was imaginatively accessible and appealing to people. And [ . . . ] the construction of geographies of adventure was generally—but not universally—motivated by a clear political agenda:  broadly speaking, imperialism. Adventure stories constructed a cultural space in which imperial geographies and imperial masculinities were conceived. (1997: 12)

Borrowing from the genre of the adventure story, Against the Day then highlights how a seemingly innocuous and trivial category of fiction was instrumental in naturalizing a specific conception of space that ultimately served political purposes. Likewise, however, Pynchon suggests that such a conception of space

4. Accordingly, this strategy remains limited to a few minor quips in Against the Day, for example, when the narrator refers to the Arctic explorer Robert Peary—a controversial figure due to his unverifiable claim to be the first person to reach the North Pole but also owing to his despicable treatment of the Inuit—as one among “other recent heroes of science” (149).

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is closely tied to the disciplinary constitution of geography as such, not to least to the primacy of the visual in modern geographical practice. An important reason why, in the 1960s, numerous geographers developed a critical stance toward their own discipline’s theoretical foundations (and toward its “mainstream” disciplinary history) is that they were able to experience firsthand what happens when geography is left to geographers alone. What I  am referring to here is the “quantitative turn” in geography, which aligned the discipline’s foundations with the epistemology of the natural sciences and tried to turn geography into a strictly positivist science. The outlook of this impoverished “spatial science” has been deservedly challenged for a number of reasons. However, it is also important to acknowledge that the history of geography as a visual discipline actually provided a fertile breeding ground for such a development. This is because, at least since the so-called Age of Discovery, the production of geographical knowledge has relied on a “characteristically visual appropriation of the world” (Gregory 1994: 16). Especially practices of exploration, such as naval reconnaissance and surveying, came to promote a scientific mindset that posits direct observation and optical measurement as providing privileged access to material reality. As such, exploration was also instrumental in consolidating an epistemology which is founded on a privileging of vision and which relies on the construction of a detached and controlling gaze. One particular geographical instrument, namely, the map, came to represent the most emblematic embodiment of this epistemology and probably also the most sophisticated means of its concealment. Geographical maps have a long history during which they underwent a lot of changes. First, fantastic and narrative elements disappeared from the map. Then, in the wake of the Enlightenment, with cartography now a state-funded and scientific discipline, the doctrine of accuracy and verisimilitude became the new fetish of mapmakers. It was at that time that cartographic maps, probably more than other ways of representing the world by visual means, were conferred “a privileged status as [.  . .] nonindexical representations possessed of a metaphysical proximity to the world” (Edney 1999: 165). However, as a result of the critical attention that maps received as a form of discourse, cartographic representation has also been challenged as an example par excellence of what Haraway has called “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (1991: 189). Thus, while the map purports to merely describe reality in an undistorted manner, a critical look at the “propositional character” (Wood 2010: 4; italics original) of the map allows us to discern that cartographic representation often presupposes a conception of “empty space,” which it then reinscribes anew in order to pass off what is represented as a preexisting reality. Following this, one can trace how the notion of “empty space,” that cartographic reason presupposes also corresponds to the conception of space, structures the gaze of the explorer. This is, however, not to say that this kind of space is literally “empty.” Instead, this idea refers to a relationship between an active and a passive agent, one which indiscernibly sets the active one apart from the

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larger picture, while the passive one is ascribed the status of being a mere backdrop (and this way rendered invisible, so to speak). Massey, for example, has linked this power relation to an “imagination of space as a continuous surface that the coloniser, as the only active agent, crosses to find the to-be-colonised simply ‘there’ ” (2005: 63). Needless to say, this is also the conception of space one finds ensconced in the spatial imagination of the adventure story, often in conjunction with other binary oppositions (such as domestic/exotic, male/ female, civilized/savage, etc.), and even in decidedly “unrealistic” manifestations of that genre (e.g., in the science-fiction story). How, then, could a narrative strategy look like what operates within these genre conventions, but at the same time questions this spatial imagination? The following section provides an attempt at an answer.

Lost on Counter-Earth Let us begin with examining a misunderstanding. The narrative itinerary of Against the Day sets off with the young, unaging, and patriotic balloonist crew called Chums of Chance audaciously cruising the skies. During a routine ascent of their airship Inconvenience, captain Randolph St. Cosmo mentions a simple rule of thumb concerning aerial navigation. He gives the novice Chick Counterfly, who is not accustomed to the cold due to the high altitude, the following reminder: “Going up is like going north” (9). Although for the rest of the crew this remark must figure as a bit of advice as plain as can be, it leaves Chick somehow puzzled. Pondering over the formula’s broader implications, he wonders if passing over the North Pole would not bring one closer to the Southern Hemisphere again. Chick ultimately discloses the rule’s ambiguity as he replies: “So . . . if you went up high enough, you’d be going down again?” (9; italics original). Since this is obviously not what St. Cosmo implied, what then is the exact nature of their misunderstanding? On the one hand, we are obviously dealing with a semantic misunderstanding. Although the captain intends to denote an increase in altitude, it seems to escape his notice that the first part of the rule may also refer to latitudinal height. This would probably not be essentially different if he had substituted the adverb “up” with the slightly more accurate adjective “high.” On the other hand, the novel confronts us with two diverging concepts of height (or, more precisely, elevation), both of which are in turn coupled to different modes of vision. As such, this issue remotely echoes an episode in Mason & Dixon. In one of the latter novel’s phantasmagoric flashbacks, we are told how the apprentice surveyor Dixon is instructed in the art of flying above ley-lines by his mentor Emerson. In doing so, the surveyor first has to familiarize himself with the great Invariance whereby, aloft, one gains exactitude of Length and Breadth, only to lose much of the land’s Relievo, or Dimension of

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It seems, therefore, that Chick’s misconception of the formula results from the fact that he and the rest of the crew share “different realities of up and down.” Even if he physically experiences the new reality of flight (as he suffers from the cold), Chick’s mental conception of flight has apparently remained “at ground level.” As a result, he does not associate the formula with altitude as the experienced crew members probably do. This is because Chick first has to, as the narrator in Mason & Dixon tells us, “learn about Maps, for Maps are the Aidesmémoires of flight” (504). Unlike his colleagues, who are versed in the conventions of mapmaking, Chick heedlessly adopts a commonplace conception of maps, according to which the cardinal direction “north” is invariably located at the top of the map. He projects a gaze that moves upward on a map or a spherical model of the earth, as he associates the movement of “going up” with the cartographic representation of latitudinal height. The whole misunderstanding thus bespeaks the vagueness and instability of mundane geographical givens, such as cardinal directions or continental designations. The conventionality of the meta-geographical concepts that figure as “the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world” (Lewis and Wigen 1997: ix) is rendered visible here. This issue becomes even more pronounced, when we trace how the outlined geographical misunderstanding is taken up again almost at the end of Against the Day. Because, what I have not mentioned earlier is that Captain St. Cosmo actually does not correct Chick’s misconception of his formula, but, oddly enough, merely tries to silence him. Then, more than a thousand pages later, and about twenty years later in terms of narrated time, we eventually find out about the “mysteries of the profession” (9)  that the captain at first withholds. Chick’s apparently false initial conclusion has actually hit the mark. Carried by an enormous updraft in the Sahara, the airship is gaining altitude, “yet somehow it was also making its descent to a surface none could see” (1020; italics original). At this point in the novel, the narrative project of exploring “possibilities beyond secular geography” (521) seems to culminate, for the balloonists recognize that the ship had most likely come upon the Pythagorean or Counter-Earth once postulated by Philolaus of Tarentum in order to make the number of celestial bodies add up to ten, which was the perfect Pythagorean number. (1021)

In this scenario, a group of fictional characters in a work of fiction stumbles into yet another kind of fiction, namely, an ancient Greek cosmographical fiction. Hence, the narrative has effectively reached the antipode of modern geography.

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What, then, do we make of this seemingly anachronistic recourse to the ostracized domain of cosmographical speculation and myth? Two features of Pythagorean cosmography are relevant here. For one thing, the Pythagorean notion of a “Counter-Earth” challenged the then dominant idea of the earth as a flat disk by introducing “the concept of the heavens and the earth as spherical, eventually leading to cartographic representation in the form of celestial and terrestrial globes” (Aujac 1987: 136). Moreover, the Pythagoreans refuted the notion of geocentricity and instead posited the existence of a “Central-Fire” around which the universe was thought to revolve. The crucial point, however, is not only that these ideas partly anticipated later empirical findings. More importantly, the Pythagoreans developed their ideas about the nature of the cosmos on a purely theoretical and intuitive basis. Regarding the emergence of the concept of the spherical earth and heavens in the fifth century BCE, Aujac writes: It was first proposed as a simple hypothesis, not verified scientifically but justified theologically. In the eyes of the Pythagoreans, the geometric perfection of the circle and sphere was sufficient reason for adopting these ideas. (1987: 136)

The way in which the Pythagoreans envisioned the cosmos thus primarily derives from a desire for order, symmetry, and harmony. This reminds us of two important things. Although speculation was increasingly supplanted by a reliance on sensory experience during the Scientific Revolution, a concern to disclose an underlying order within the cosmos (and thereby, to worship the creator’s artistry) still continued to exist as a latent agenda of modern science. Beyond that, the recourse to cosmography indicates the decisive role that intuition and imagination have always played in processes of scientific discovery.5 Retelling the story of Counter-Earth thus challenges the hegemonic version of the history of geographical knowledge, according to which the exploration of the heavens and the earth followed a linear trajectory symbolizing “a concern to move from myth to map, to convert cosmographical theory into cartographical reality” (Livingstone 1992: 34). There is still another side to the unexpected intrusion of ancient cosmography into the narrated world of Against the Day. Throughout the novel, the

5.  The scientific endeavors of Bacon and Kepler are particularly significant in this regard, as Cosgrove (2008a: 22) points out. For another example of a literary text that takes up on this aspect of the production of scientific knowledge, see Poe’s Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe in which the narrator underscores that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion were brought forth “by mere dint of intuition” (2002: 14).

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Chums of Chance find themselves torn between two opposite poles. On the one hand, they exhibit a sense of superiority toward landsmen, which at times even manifests itself as a hubristic sense of being flying demigods who “must ever strive to minimize contamination by the secular” (113). On the other hand, the Chums also suffer from a strong sense of impotence, since they only act at the behest of an anonymous and invisible executive power. Soon after they eventually disavow the affiliation with their national headquarters, however, the Chums stumble upon Counter-Earth, which at first seems to provide a possibility for a fresh start. But the uncharted planet does not prove to be the place of refuge they longed for, as they realize that they were on the Counter-Earth, on it and of it, yet at the same time also on the Earth they had never, it seemed, left. As if all maps and charts had suddenly become unreadable, the little company came to understand that in some way not exhausted by the geographical, they were lost. (1021)

Confronted with the problem of geographical disorientation for the first time in the novel, the boyish lightheartedness of the flying aces quickly gives way to a “helplessness and depression of spirit new to them” (1021). Try as they might, the Chums, scouting Counter-Earth, cannot “find any maps to match the terrain, so far unfamiliar to any of them” (1020–1021). Yet, this unprecedented degree of disorientation opens up an immense potential for realignment, both geographically and otherwise. After a while the Chums realize that they do not necessarily have to establish a correspondence between the terrain and the maps they already have at hand. What they need, rather, is to come up with an alternative way of mapping, one which is not prescribed by the lines and grids of rationalized space. They have to devise a kind of traveler’s itinerary, a moral compass which helps them to discern the impasse they have maneuvered themselves into, out of their conviction of acting as agents of progress. Thrown amid the turmoil of the First World War, the Chums’ sojourn on Counter-Earth likewise poses an ethical challenge. Instead of taking sides in the war, however, they opt to make camp in Switzerland and, of their own accord, start providing humanitarian aid. “As if some blindness had abruptly healed itself ” (1023), the Chums refuse to give their allegiance to any central authority anymore, rather choosing self-reliance and thus, for the first time in the novel, achieving something like moral agency. Even if they were allowed some brief glimpses into the war-ravaged European landscape before they stranded on Counter-Earth, it is only with their immersion into this cosmographical fiction that a self-reflexive perspective on their home planet is triggered. This allows the Chums to critically revise their hitherto unquestioned role as “juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative” (1024). Hence, the change of heart that the Chums of Chance undergo during this episode poignantly

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touches upon one of the pivots of cosmographical thinking, which Cosgrove has summarized as follows: A principal purpose of cosmography in a pre-secular age was ethical: it concerned the place of human life in an ordered creation. It is worth recalling that the Greek word ethos referred to a “sojourn” [ . . . ].  Ethos united earth and heavens and implied the recognition that place and duration (habitation) inform and are reciprocally informed by conduct. Thus, to know the time and space that govern the earth as a human habitation is to reflect upon how to conduct ourselves within it. (2008a: 38)

The recourse to cosmography almost at the end of Against the Day thus figures as a kind of generic counter-mapping. Throughout the novel, the reader follows the Chums of Chance in their role as prototypical adventure story heroes, and witnesses how they accomplish preternatural feats such as traveling to cities buried under the deserts of Inner Asia. With this in mind, an episode that takes place in a setting such as Counter-Earth at first does not seem that outlandish. Yet, this setting also undermines the spatial imagination of the said generic framework. This is not, however, because Counter-Earth figures in the storyworld of Against the Day as a space that could potentially elude the conquering gaze of the explorer, but rather, because it works as a signifier that hints at another way of conceiving space. It does not connote the physical properties of a landscape but a change in perspective, toward a vantage point that is premised not on the observer’s physical distance but on a more fluid and less clear-cut distinction between observer and observed. As a mode of thought that reconciles environmental, aesthetic, moral, and political aspects, while equally considering the role of social being and human subjectivity within these domains, cosmography has an affinity to the concept of cognitive mapping. Jameson suggested this strategy, in order to bridge the widening chasm between the tendentially local space of everyday life and “the enormously complex new international space” (1988: 351) of global capitalism that mostly eludes lived experience. Hence cognitive mapping, according to Jameson, calls for the imaginative construction of a social totality which could provide “the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system” (1991:  54). Although Pynchon does not relate the precise contours of such a cognitive mapping, his novel indicates, among other things by giving the balloonist plot a cosmographical twist, where to look for the shortcomings and blind spots in the map of a social totality that a genre such as the adventure story has traditionally drawn. Considering that Jameson’s idea of cognitive mapping draws on Lynch’s concept of a mental map of a city, it is telling how the story of the Chums of Chance is concluded in Against the Day. As already mentioned, the constructive alienation they are confronted with on Counter-Earth prompts the balloonists to bring their unquestioned obedience to an end. Then, almost on the last page of the novel, as the narrator shifts into

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the present tense, we are told that their “ship by now has grown as large as a small city” (1084). It remains an open question if the balloonists ever manage to leave Counter-Earth again, but obviously they succeed in both devising a cognitive map of a self-determined life and turning it into a lived experience. The prerequisite, however, for doing so was to discard the maps they had been relying on so far: “All that was really needed was to let go” (1018).

Exploring the Heart of Whiteness Exploration involves, among many other things, travel as a constitutive element. Explorers leave their native soil, conduct expeditions and gain knowledge in the process. This is accomplished by means of discovery—that is, if we were to take the term literally—by removing the cover from something which was hitherto veiled in anonymity. Obscure natural phenomena and dark blotches on the map turn into lucid objects of knowledge. Mythical notions based on the authority of the ancients are relegated to the realm of lore and superstition. Everything is for the benefit of mankind. This way of telling the story of exploration at least amounts to how some explorers—be it the field-scientist or the hunter-adventurer—came to conceive of their profession. Needless to say, such convictions also lend themselves as raw material for satire. In Against the Day we are told the story of the so-called Vormance Expedition to the Arctic regions. During an early stage of the expedition, we witness a meeting of the team members, most of them scientists, for whom on the face of it, inconspicuousness is the order of the day. Hence, what the reader is given to see through the mind’s eye is just “a roomful of bearded gentleman in dark suits and matching waistcoats” (130), obviously befitting their scholarly earnestness. What follows, however, is a grandiloquent act of image cultivation, during which the geologist Alden Vormance explains nothing less than “The Nature of Expeditions” (131). He commences his talk as follows: “We learned once how to break horses and ride them for long distances, with oceangoing ships we left flat surfaces and went into Riemann space, we crossed solid land and deep seas, and colonized what we found [. . .]. Now we have taken the first few wingbeats of what will allow us to begin colonizing the Sky” (131). This masterclass should settle all questions when it comes to the subject of exploration. Anyhow, let us ask: Who is actually speaking here? The answer is, quite literally, nobody. In fact, Vormance’s address represents an object lesson in making oneself invisible. Although teleology is the operative word in this rhetorical feat, it actually conflates a number of disparate issues. Let us therefore tackle one thing after another. First, there is a suspicious emphasis on the succession of technological achievements (horse-riding, seafaring, aviation). This aspect, then, is coupled to a sequence of conquered regions (soil/planes,

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seas, skies), presented as logically ineluctable historical stages of a technological imperative. Then, as the final act in the project of exploration, the process of colonization ensues. Considering the way in which this stage is embedded into a world-historical narrative of progress, it almost seems as if colonization was something that occurs incidentally. Thus, envisioned as a minor and almost negligible act of closure, it is not only virtually purified from unpleasant connotations (such as oppression and exploitation); more importantly, this account conceals that the intent to colonize is often what sets the project of exploration in motion in the first place. In other words, the scientist tacitly suggests that explorers colonize a region simply “because it is there.” Vormance’s address thus conveys that neither the solitary researcher nor scientific community is speaking here. “The Nature of Expeditions” is instead framed as an objective and universally valid account, representing the shared experience of the whole of mankind. By obliterating any affiliation in terms of race, class, or gender, Vormance resorts to the position of the ironclad objectivist and renders the situatedness of his own gaze invisible. He thus aligns his position with the category of a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not to be seen, to represent while escaping representation. (Haraway 1991: 188)

The context in which Vormance gives his address is, moreover, a closed session among scientific experts. This makes it rather effortless for him to consolidate his objectivity and effectively turns the venue into a convenient space of knowledge production.6 The spatiality of knowledge production in the context of exploration begs another question. Usually, exploration denotes a collective enterprise. Mostly, however, expeditions are conducted by a small circle of insiders. How then do explorers produce the required trustworthiness of their accounts for domestic audiences? And what makes knowledge produced in faraway places reliable and furnished with authenticity? Visual means of representation such as paintings, drawings, illustrations, and photographs certainly fulfill an important function here. Similarly, mapping can be said to figure “as an efficient and reliable way of bringing the world home” (Livingstone 2003: 153), not to mention the plethora of travel writings that explorers have produced over the centuries, often in the form of travel journals. Taken together, this representational repertoire undoubtedly helped to construct a particular reality of exploration and 6. Tellingly, it is not the gist of “The Nature of Expedition” that plunges the meeting into controversy. Instead, it is merely Vormance’s venturing on the feasibility “of colonizing additional dimensions beyond the third” (131) that turns out to be the bone of contention.

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to convey it to domestic audiences. As such, these constructions also have been constitutive in the formation of imaginative geographies, that is, they figure as [r]epresentations of other places—of peoples and landscapes, cultures and “natures”—that articulate the desires, fantasies and fears of their authors and the grids of power between them and their “Others”. (Gregory 2009: 369–370)

Accounts of exploration, both visual and textual, then did not merely reflect how explorers saw other places, but also what kinds of preconceptions they brought with them and how these ideas shaped the way they came to see and understand the places they traveled to. The concept of imaginative geographies has spawned a considerable amount of scholarly attention, in that it allowed for “critical purchase regarding the ways in which a raft of representational devices (‘ways of seeing,’ aesthetic norms, literary conventions, and so on)” (Wylie 2002: 170), was involved in processes of exploration. Yet, such a perspective can be considered problematic to some extent, because, when it comes to the way in which landscape is conceptualized, it implicitly posits “the ‘imaginative geographies’ of explorers and colonists as the primary locus of the production of meaning and signification” (2003: 170). This perspective therefore neglects the materiality of landscape, while unduly accentuating the discursive construction of meaning. In order to compensate for this epistemological imbalance, Wylie suggests a conceptual outlook which takes into consideration that “embodied practices and material landscapes are themselves constitutive of the cultural meanings of exploration” (2003:  171). It is also important to note here, however, that certain kinds of landscape have been particularly susceptible to this one-sided way of grasping the production of cultural meaning through exploration. The polar regions are indeed a prime example in this regard since they were frequently imagined as “blank spaces” devoid of meaning, as a tabula rasa onto which the explorer can simply discharge a set of cultural predispositions. In his rendering of the Vormance expedition in Against the Day, Pynchon shrewdly harnesses this popular misconception of the Arctic. In fact, his novel entertains an artful textual play with the incongruity between two contrasting ways of imagining this landscape. The Arctic figures here as a dead, shallow, and empty space par excellence. But it also represents a deeply mythical landscape that is animated and primordial, often hallucinatory and at times extraordinarily hazardous. This kind of landscape is thrown into relief through the juxtaposition of two opposing narrative vantage points. While an aerial perspective merely offers the bleak and static sight of “colorless wastes” (125), a ground-level vision yields a highly versatile landscape, delicately infested with vegetation of “a blazing, virtually shadowless green,” moreover, in dynamic interaction with “the sea-green sea, the ice-green, glass-green sea” (134). Yet, this contrast can easily be suspended by the occurrence of atmospheric phenomena such as the aurora borealis. In this case (and even more so when the

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scenery is contemplated from an elevated vantage point), the full visual splendor of the Arctic comes to fruition. The skies emerge as a canvas for “heavenwide pulses of color, dense sheets and billows and colonnades of light and current, in transfiguration unceasing” (121–122). With depictions of this sort, Pynchon is certainly not striding through completely uncharted semantic territory. Although explorers only managed to penetrate and to cast an eye on the interior of the polar regions in the late nineteenth century, the high latitudes of the globe have been a staple of geographical writing for centuries. Imaginatively framed as the “ends of the world,” as Cosgrove notes, “[t]he poles had long prompted eschatological musings” (2001: 215). As such, these regions also figured as a battleground of clashing forces—between sublimity and profanity, rationality and insanity, purity and decay. The rendering of the Arctic landscape in Against the Day draws generously on these traditions, for example, when the text evokes the idea that behind the blank surfaces lurks arcane meaning, or that the seemingly dead ice might harbor a consciousness of its own.7 The Arctic thus functions as a rich semiotic landscape that demands attentive deciphering. Reading this landscape is, however, anything but an easy task, because at a casual glance, the Arctic might seem devoid of signifiers, but on closer inspection they abound. The Arctic in Against the Day is therefore a “country where landmarks are either too few or too many to keep straight” (126). In these sparsely populated latitudes, ancient Norse creation myths still circulate, as do heroic sagas about kings, who during their lifetime had “not yet come to be haunted by any promise of Christ’s return” (127). But the Arctic also figures as a kind of anti-pastoral realm of deceitful natural forces and unpredictable weather conditions, where “any day [ . . . ] can turn into a moment of wilderness” (126), and where even the act of walking is turned into a test of courage due to “bad ice” threatening “to take the unwary down like quicksand” (136). The latter aspect already points to the fact that the Arctic is not merely a landscape endowed with discursive profundity, whose contours often delineated a kind of “boreal exoticism” (Cosgrove 2001:  219). The Arctic is also a landscape of complex, at times even spectacular, materiality. In fact, both aspects are intimately tied to each other, so that the interpenetration of physical and symbolical aspects merits close attention. The geographical center of the Arctic—the North Pole—is a case in point here. With good reason, Cosgrove has pointed out that “[t]he poles exist only in their scientific and cartographic representations” (2001: 216). What is more, a single pole—be it North or South

7. Especially the latter idea seems to echo Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), in which the speaker describes the ice as “green as emerald,” but also states that “it cracked and growled, and roared and howled” (1970: 10; 12). Conversely, in Pynchon’s text, the narrator tells us that “the ancient ice went creaking, as if trying to express some argument of its own” (132).

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pole—does not in fact exist. There are rather several kinds of poles (geographic, magnetic, geomagnetic), all of which are mobile at that.8 In short, the notion of a single and fixed pole, which one could potentially reach, is thoroughly illusory. No human being will ever come to actually see such a pole with their own eyes. The centers of the polar regions are therefore consumed by a startling absence. Nonetheless, each of these “hearts of whiteness,” understood as “an imaginative opposite to equatorial ‘hearts of darkness’ ” (2001:  217), had (and still has) an extreme appeal with the popular imagination, let alone with explorers.9 The complex materiality of the Arctic landscape thus both invites and eludes representation; it fuels the imagination to the extent that it accommodates more than meets the eye. The romanticization of the Arctic landscape, then, also appears to be related to its elusive materiality. It seems as if the imagination has to make up for what the naked eye cannot discern, and what pure reason finds impossible to render intelligible. As a result, it is not seldom that natural phenomena are interpreted as portents of the supernatural. Together with the psychological challenge that desertedness and solitude may prove to be, the Arctic is thus often framed as a landscape of madness.10 In this sense, Pynchon’s account of the scientific exploration of this region is quite telling, especially when it comes to the concatenation of reason and madness. At first, his novel provides the impression that

8.  Whereas the geographic North Pole refers to the northernmost point on the earth (defined by a latitude of 90°), and the magnetic North Pole to the point at which the earth’s magnetic field is directed vertically upward, the geomagnetic North Pole is a theoretical construction that refers to the point of intersection between the earth’s surface and an imaginary magnetic axis running through the earth’s center. 9.  Probably the most prominent example in the context of polar expedition is the 1910 race between Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen to be the first person to reach the geographical South Pole. For a detailed account of their competition, see Wylie (2003: 169–183). Wilson has also pointed out how the popularity of fictions set in the polar regions coincides with the prevalence of apocalyptic sentiments and collective fears such as during the turn toward the third millennium. See Wilson (2003: 1–7). 10. In this regard, Pynchon’s novels mention, for example, “the ‘extra man’ of Arctic myth” (125), which refers to polar expeditions that were reportedly plagued by the illusion of an additional team member. Regardless of whether it merely represents another whimsical concoction devised by explorers so as to glorify their efforts, this phenomenon was actually seized upon by other literary writers as well, such as T. S. Eliot, who in the section entitled “What the Thunder Said” in The Waste Land (1922) writes: “Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you” (1998: 67). In his notes on The Waste Land, Eliot then explains that these “lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s)” (1998: 74).

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the Arctic merely figures as the stage for yet another chapter in the history of exploration, seemingly in accordance with Vormance’s model of “The Nature of Expeditions,” for the narrator explains: As the Era of Sail had depended upon the mapping of seas and seacoasts of the globe and winds of the wind-rose, so upon the measurement of newer variables would depend the history that was to pass up here, among reefs of magnetic anomaly, channels of least impedance, storms of rays yet unnamed lashing out of the sun. (121)

The Arctic expedition at the beginning of the twentieth century thus marks the onset of the exploration of the realm of the invisible. A landscape that was once shrouded in mystery is converted into an increasingly rationalized, that is, quantifiable space, as progress prevails. But this lofty scientific drama also seems to conceal the underlying reenactment of a much older play. Somewhat hyperbolically, the narrator then discloses the real nature of this phase of Arctic exploration. The passage is worth quoting at length: There was a “Ray-rush” in progress—light and magnetism, as well as all manner of extra-Hertzian rays, were there for the taking, and prospectors had come flooding in, many of them professional claim-jumpers aiming to get by on brute force, a very few genuinely able to dowse for rays of all frequencies, most neither gifted nor unscrupulous, simply caught up in everybody else’s single-minded flight from reason, diseased as the gold and silver seekers of earlier days. Here at the high edge of the atmosphere was the next untamed frontier, pioneers arriving in airships instead of wagons, setting in motion property disputes destined to last generations. (121)

The rendering of this scenario is not least significant because it introduces the notion of the frontier—a key trope in Against the Day (that we also repeatedly encounter in a number of urban contexts). In this sense, the quoted passage foregrounds the role of the frontier in processes of geographical expansion; it suggests how frontier imagery serves to legitimize colonization and the exploitation of nature by construing a space in terms of a primordial wilderness devoid of human presence. More specifically, however, the depiction of how the Arctic is transformed into a landscape of greed points to the idea that such a process represents the eventual implementation of yet another, much older scheme. This is in any case indicated when the narrator mentions that “the undeclared and largely imperceptible war had been under way for years” (122). This allusion calls to mind that the discursive appropriation of the Arctic landscape was in fact an invariably contested enterprise that has long involved the clashing of national and cultural interests. Hence, the increasingly thorough scientific exploration of this region, facilitated by technological innovations from the late nineteenth century on, emerges as another facet of the long-standing

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“interdependence of scientific and nationalistic concerns in Arctic exploration” (Fara 1996: 38). What was lying dormant within the focus of political attention for quite some time thus eventually becomes, with the necessary technological means at disposal, ready for harvesting. Yet, the passage relating the “Ray-rush” also lends itself to an allegorical reading, in that this scenario alludes to the increasing exigence of a peculiar commodity. Seen from this perspective, the “international race to measure and map” (121) the earth’s magnetic field figures as a slightly bizarre scenario. The Arctic is portrayed as a space that is, paradoxically, crowded and empty at the same time. It is a space populated with flocks of airborne explorers, “scouts of Earth’s Field” (122), bent on making a profit, who therefore use camouflage in order to remain invisible and to be ahead of the competition. But what these explorers are looking for is an all-pervasive, yet  all but invisible commodity, mostly to be found outside of the visible spectrum, thus only detectable by means of technological devices. In other words, the explorers are clandestinely scanning the atmosphere for an invisible commodity. Surprisingly, however, the narrator claims that these explorers do not compete for “territory or commodities” (121) like their predecessors used to. We are instead told that exploration is now about “electromagnetic information” (121), which is certainly right, if we assume that an immaterial substance does not qualify as a commodity. The phrasing thus implies that we are dealing with a kind of commodity that, as yet, eludes established classifications. Information, however, is exactly the commodity that is at stake here. In order that the commodity can yield a profit, a proper spatial division of labor is required, namely, in such a way that the processing of the raw material is taken care of in “intelligence centers on the surface” (122). Here, the gathered data is processed into information. To put it in a nutshell, the race for the invisible commodity signals the transition into the information age.

Staging Nature Let us return to the Arctic as a region that poses profound epistemological difficulties. There are myriad factors bringing forth such a landscape, including the extremes of constant daylight and night, fog, mist, storm, mirages, light effects, atmospheric phenomena, magnetic variation, and so on. Evidently, all of this makes especially scientific inquiry in the Arctic fraught with difficulties. This is not least because, as Cosgrove has aptly pointed out, these adverse circumstances entail that “[t]he certainty of vision, the authorizing basis of modern science, is profoundly compromised, so that observational claims may come to seem like deranged fantasy” (2001:  216). Notwithstanding that the idea of an obstacle to vision resonates with the portrayal of the Arctic in Against the Day, there seems to be something else at stake here. While Pynchon’s Arctic scenario touches upon several aspects related to eyesight, it deals not so much with a problem of vision

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than an issue of visuality; it has less to do with “a biologically determined structure of seeing” and more with “a culturally constructed way of seeing” (Rose 2009: 801). This issue particularly manifests itself in the episode that details the proceedings of the Vormance expedition to the Arctic. If we trace how this episode is narrated in the novel, it becomes clear that the expedition does not primarily fail because of misleading vision or malfunctioning technology, but mostly because a certain “machinery of representation” (Gregory 1994: 34) founders. The story of the Vormance expedition at first involves a change in narrative perspective. From a certain point on, the expedition is narrated through a journal entry by a character called Fleetwood Vibe. The transition into the (pseudo-) epistolary form similarly implies a change in both generic framework and narrative mood. While the Arctic scenario preceding this episode is only occasionally interspersed with sinister overtones, Fleetwood’s account of the expedition marks an outright shift into “the typically Lovecraftian first-person narration of a horrified diarist” (St. Clair 2011:  62). This realignment obviously anticipates the disastrous outcome of the expedition, but it is also linked to Fleetwood’s biography as an explorer. A  brief roundup seems appropriate here. As the spoiled son of a wealthy industrial magnate, early on Fleetwood is granted the privilege to become a man of travel. He thus partakes in an expedition to Africa where, as the narrator tells us somewhat sardonically, “he kept as clear of political games as of any real scientific inquiry, preferring to take the title of ‘Explorer’ literally, and do nothing but explore” (159). Needless to say, his attitude translates into nothing less than a thirst for adventure, a possibility for escape from and contrast to the “condition of bourgeois stultification” (169) prevailing at home. Spurred by the supposed heroism of the explorers who inhabit his imaginative geography of colonized Central Africa, “the green otherworld” (168), Fleetwood then starts parading his competitive skills and soon takes a fancy to exhibiting his potential for dominance and cruelty. Eventually, after committing a murder, he leaves the continent guilt-ridden and signs up for an Arctic expedition in joyful expectation of “the purity, the geometry, the cold” (170).11 Never having been quite the scholarly type, Fleetwood, once amid the icy wastes, tries to adopt a scientific habitus as a means of spiritual purification.12 He thus relates the proceedings of the expedition, at first in a

11.  In this admittedly broad-brush recapitulation of Fleetwood’s career as an explorer, I  gave an account of the biographical turning points in sequential order. In fact, Fleetwood’s experiences in Africa are related in the novel as a flashback after the Arctic scenario is narrated. In Fleetwood’s case, this clearly suggests, to use Freudian terminology, a return of the repressed. Therefore, examining the narration of Fleetwood’s experience from a psychoanalytical angle would certainly result in a productive reading, which, however, does not fall within the scope of the present study. 12.  Pynchon’s rendering of such academic mimicry is expectably not without parodic elements. We are told, for example, how Fleetwood shows himself willing, even

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relatively sober and detached tone, which, however, swiftly becomes stricken with horror. On a very obvious level, then, we witness how in the course of events, Fleetwood’s account of a supposedly scientific enterprise turns into a fantasy story of apocalyptic scope. The expedition inadvertently comes across an object they mistake for a meteorite, so that the team excavates and transports their discovery back home because there is money to be made with meteorites.13 Once everyone realizes that the meteorite is actually a monster with destructive powers, it is already too late to avert the disaster, and a metropolis is reduced to rubble overnight. The general structure of this kind of plot is only too well known.14 Yet, the intriguing aspects can be found mostly in miniscule details of Fleetwood’s account. Let us begin with a simple question: Why does the expedition team conceive of the monster, which the text consistently refers to as “the Figure” (141), as a meteorite in the first place? Put another way, how do the explorers know it is a meteorite? An obvious answer would be that the Figure looks like a meteorite to them. But this answer is apparently unsatisfactory, as the crucial question is not what they see but how they see. As steadfast scientists, the explorers who participate in the Vormance expedition trust their eyesight. They trust their own eyes more than technological means of visualization, and relegate novel technologies, such as X-ray vision, to the realm of science fiction. Based on such certainty, they can easily dismiss the warnings issued by dime-novel characters such as the Chums of Chance, even though they have a flying surveillance station at their disposal, “where scientific gear occupied every available cubic” (140). The explorers know that what they see is a so-called nunatak, that is, a mountain peak that serves as a landmark in the Arctic. They know, because they have already seen other specimens (or illustrations) of this kind of landmark. Hence, they know to which order of if somewhat reluctantly, to recite goofy lyrics about Arctic explorers he happens to overhear, of course “only for the sake of scientific objectivity” (138). 13. With biting sarcasm, the narrator tells us elsewhere that “[given] the long history of meteor strikes in the Northern regions, more than one reputation had been made with rented ships and deferred payrolls” (149). This is yet another allusion to the Arctic explorer Robert Peary, who, in 1897, shipped a meteorite to New York that later on was sold to the American Museum of Natural History. 14.  When it comes to the scenario of an Arctic expedition that mistakes an extraterrestrial being for a meteorite, a film such as The Thing from Another World (1951) would certainly come to mind. However, this episode in Against the Day is of course also reminiscent of a film such as King Kong (1933), in which an expedition removes a monster from its natural habitat with the result that a metropolis is destroyed. In Chapter 8, I discuss in detail how this episode of urban disaster is fleshed out in Against the Day, and how Pynchon negotiates this scenario in relation to the long-standing tradition of New York’s imaginative destruction.

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objects such a thing belongs. Therefore, they recognize a nunatak when they see one. On that score Fleetwood explains: During the last Ice Age, many of our own mountains in the U.S., familiar and even famous now, were nunataks then, rising in the same way above that frozen expanse, keeping the flames of species aglow till such time as the ice should recede and life resume its dominion. (140)

Technology may allow the explorers “to view the ‘nunatak’ in a different light,” for example, when seeing it on the “translucent screens” (141) of a camera lucida. But this situation does not imply a fundamental change in the relation between the observer and the world—that is, the object in sight. The world of phenomena that the explorer beholds is, in other words, rendered as an image. It is indispensable, however, that the frame that allows the explorer to see and to conceive of the phenomenal world as an image remains unacknowledged, that is, invisible. The frame is thus implicitly posited as a preexisting given, as if it was already in place before the gaze of the explorer came into play, and as if the frame is even there when no screen is involved. This is because otherwise the observer would not be situated outside of the image and order could not be established. What I just outlined refers to a way of seeing that has been traced back to the objectivist epistemology founded by Descartes. It does not describe a way of rendering an image of the world but a way of seeing the world as an image. The general outline of this epistemology has been formulated in Heidegger’s essay “The Age of the World Picture,” and further contours were delineated in Mitchell’s concept of the “world-as-exhibition.”15 Based on these ideas, Gregory has summarized the pivot of this epistemology as following: To think of a picture in this way implies both a setting of the world in place before oneself, as an object over and against the viewing subject, and as making of the world intelligible as a systematic order through a process of enframing. (1994: 34; italics original)

As such, this way of seeing often tends to go unnoticed, because we are so habituated to adopting it. Also, it has been described as “peculiar to European modernity” (1994:  37), in that it found very distinct expressions in latenineteenth-century urban modernity, but also because it had a bearing on the methodology of the natural sciences in general and geographical practice in particular.16 Recapitulating the scenario of the Arctic expedition in Against 15. See Heidegger (1977: 115–154) and Mitchell (1989: 217–236). 16.  Foucault, for example, has argued that the system of order that natural history relies on “is established within the apparent simplicity of a description of the visible”

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the Day, I sketched how the explorers come to know what they encounter, by relying on this accustomed way of conceiving of the world as an exhibition. The further contours of this epistemology transpires when we look at how the further proceedings, and especially the failure of the expedition, are related in the novel. The gaze through which the explorers first construct the scenery serves as a means of objectification. This gaze projects and classifies objects onto the canvas of “the Arctic emptiness” (143). It is a controlling gaze, firmly located outside the picture it projects. As such, this gaze is a distinctly male gaze, in that it genders the field of vision, thus constructing the landscape as feminine. Accordingly, the supposed meteorite is inserted into this visual matrix to the effect that “the Figure appeared to recline on its side, an odalisque of the snows” (141). The phrasing is fitting as it denotes a slave or concubine, while at the same time evoking an erotic painting of a nude woman’s reclining body. Further classification, however, proves more difficult for the expedition team because, on closer inspection, the features of the Figure cannot be brought in line with established taxonomies, especially when it comes “to its ‘facial’ features, some describing them as ‘Mongoloid,’ others as ‘serpentlike’ ” (141). In order to render the field of vision as an ordered system, it is therefore all the more crucial to maintain the distance between observer and observed. The explorer’s gaze must not be reciprocated, lest order collapses. Accordingly, Fleetwood notes in his expedition journal: “[. . .] we were bound in common terror of that moment at which it might become aware of our interest and smoothly pivot its awful head to stare us full in the face” (141; italics original). Throughout his account, Fleetwood repeatedly expresses a sense of foreboding and fear about the true nature of the Figure spreading among the expedition team. This raises the question of why the expedition is not terminated prematurely. There are plenty of indicators that, after an initial phase of apprehension, the promising prospects of transporting the Figure back home (and selling it as a meteorite) prevail. To this end, the explorers shun no danger, even less physical work. The expedition involves a “muscular approach” (141), as Fleetwood emphasizes. But in contrast to the strenuous excavation of the Figure, the explorer’s gaze remains detached and disembodied, hovering in a void, as it were. The construction of this gaze is therefore predicated on a Cartesian conception of space, that is, a space of res extensae that exist outside and independent of the observer (the cogito). This purely formal conception of space is what the explorers on board the Vormance expedition rely on, in order to measure their finding. Yet again, the Figure remains elusive. “Trying to get it (2002: 169; italics original). Elsewhere in his discussion of natural history’s epistemological framework in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault points out: “The naturalist is the man concerned with the structure of the visible world and its denomination according to characters. Not with life” (2002: 149).

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fit inside the ship, we measured, and remeasured, and each time the dimensions kept coming out different—not just slightly so but drastically” (144). From now on, basically everything goes awry, but the expedition adamantly pursues its mission, since the team has already entered “a period of uncritical buoyancy, borne along by submission to a common fate of celebrity and ease” (142). The rendering of the scenario revolving around the Vormance expedition can be grasped as a symbolic engagement with the way of seeing and knowing the world encapsulated in the notion of the world-as-exhibition. Although, historically, this epistemological framework has been linked to the project of colonialism in particular, on a more general level, it also refers to the way in which modernity stages an encounter between culture and nature. In other words, it denotes how culture sets up an image of nature, a systematic and ordered representation, which serves to dominate and to civilize the raw and excessive state of nature that culture constructs in the first place qua representation. This way of knowing therefore, depends on “the successful production of a space of constructed visibility” (Gregory 2001: 92) that helps to keep a seemingly untamed nature at bay. As such, the modern enframing of nature is inherently colonizing no matter where it takes place: coercive, invasive, appropriative in all its sites, it makes nature available for inspection, codification, calculation, and regulation. (Gregory 2001: 93)

The expedition scenario in Against the Day unmistakably points to the colonizing power inherent to this epistemology. It delineates the silhouette of this form of power, by imaginatively confronting this way of knowing the world with something that is quintessentially otherworldly. A brief episode that serves as an epilogue to Fleetwood’s account of the expedition makes a compelling case for this reading. In the aftermath of the disaster resulting from the Figure’s awakening, a board of inquiry interrogates the team members about the circumstances of the expedition. One of the explorers tries to deny all responsibility by arguing that the Figure “deceived us into classifying it as a meteorite” (149; italics original). The italicized verb already drops a hint as to the issue at stake. Then, it is also revealing that the inquiries are not conducted by the municipal administration or a court. Conversely, however, we could ask why this should be so. Because, if we assume that the Vormance expedition principally backfires due to an epistemological lapse, then there seems to be no institution that would be better qualified to handle the case than “the Museum of Museumology, dedicated to the history of institutional collecting, classifying, and exhibiting” (149).

The Map and the Itinerary Just as the explorer came to be equated with geographical practice, the map came to figure as the epitome of geographical knowledge. In this sense, the

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map is nothing less than geographical knowledge solidified into graphic form. Hence, the map also functions as a stage; it puts on display what is considered legitimate geographical knowledge, and verisimilitude is its currency to this end. At a very basic level, the map is commonly defined as a representation of a part of the earth’s surface.17 This seemingly innocuous definition is both powerful and problematic, for it implies that the maps simply mirror a preexisting reality. Indirectly, this definition also begets a line of thought according to which the map—as we know it today—has existed in all human societies throughout history, albeit in more primitive states, so to speak. The history of mapmaking is thus reduced to a purely technical affair, and the actual shape of a map becomes solely hinged on improvements in perspectival drawing, projection techniques, and so on. This way of telling the story of mapmaking, of course, perfectly ties in with the objectivist epistemology outlined in the previous section. This conception of the map involves “a controlling gaze rendering the broad swathes of worldly complexity and enormity in miniature form for a discrete purpose” (Pickles 2004: 80). It amounts to a way of thinking about maps that obscures the historical contingency of cartographic discourse and therefore “needs to be understood as a projection, as it were, of the map itself, the map as it would like to be understood” (Wood 2010: 18; italics original). Pynchon’s treatment of mapping in Against the Day undoubtedly touches on such considerations. In fact, the novel projects a storyworld that is teeming with maps, and suffice it to say that the notion of an innocent map is often met with suspicion here.18 In many ways, Against the Day thus stands in the tradition of the indictment of cartographic violence that one also finds in Mason & Dixon.19 There are, however, a number of other, no less important aspects related to mapping that Pynchon takes into account here. In general, Against the Day devotes much attention to questions such as: How do maps actually work in everyday life? And how have the ways they work changed historically? To begin with, let us turn to a scenario where the narrator portrays a character called Professor Renfrew, a rather shady academic involved in imperial machinations. We are told that every time Renfrew made somebody’s acquaintance he “duly filed a summary in the running accumulation of dossiers he kept on everyone who had ever crossed his path” (495). A few lines later, the narrator

17. See Wood (2010: 18). 18.  In terms of quantity, Duyfhuizen has spotted in Against the Day “over ninety references to maps or charts or to mapping or to unmapped regions, marking the arrogant project of Western colonialism to fill in what Joseph Conrad identified in Heart of Darkness (1899) as the blank spaces on the map” (2012: 74). 19. Here I am especially referring to a passage near the end of the novel, which seems to have acquired canonical status by now, and which relates how Mason and Dixon come to realize that their cartographical endeavor is actually part of what “a number of others have been styling it along—a Conduit for Evil” (1997: 701).

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adds that “in private he called it his ‘Map of the World.’ ” (495). Needless to say, we are not dealing with a literal map here. Instead, the novel figuratively evokes the map’s potential for social control and surveillance. Approaching the scenario from another angle, however, we could ask: Why does Renfrew refer to his collection as a map and not, say, as an archive? The choice of words could indeed be only due to a metaphorical strategy. However, it seems more likely that for Renfrew (and for many other characters in the novel) the map has already become a state of mind.20 From a twenty-first-century perspective, such an assessment almost seems like a moot point. In our everyday lives, we are surrounded by maps, we often think by means of maps, and we resort to maps as problem-solving strategies. Nonetheless, it is important to note that the ubiquity of maps we have learned to take for granted is actually of a rather recent date.21 This is a fact that Pynchon occasionally calls to mind, often in a somewhat humorous fashion, for example, when we are told that, while traveling through the Balkans, Cyprian Latewood “brought out the map,” as a result of which onlookers apprehensively “shifted their eyes away and even began to tremble” (946). Most of the maps we encounter in Against the Day, however, belong to categories other than printed maps—mental projections, symbolical or rhetorical maps, performed or enacted mappings, and so on. One could therefore say that the novel looks at the emergence of a “cartographic consciousness” (Harvey 2001: 221) that we have adopted on a global scale today. Yet, in one case, the novel relates the story of a material map that merits closer attention for it shines a light on the history of modern cartographic consciousness. This fictitious map dates back to fourteenth-century Venice and has been devised by the Venetian citizen Domenico Sfinciuno, who, in the wake of a decree barring him from political offices, decided to pursue a career as an explorer.22 Facing considerable competition, Sfinciuno had to break fresh

20. Yet, it is important to note that Pynchon invokes maps most often in the context of state power and control. At one point, for example, police inspector Aychrome, who obviously has a predilection for phrenology, claims, after examining a mug shot, that the suspect “has International Mischief written all over his map” (606). On the other hand, a significant realm that might potentially elude the sway of cartographic hegemony is the pedestrian city; or, as Pynchon frames it, “the urban unmappable” (38) to which I return in Chapter 7. 21.  Accordingly, Wood has called attention to the circumstance that “almost all the maps ever made have been made during the past 100 years, the vast majority in the past few decades” (2010: 20). 22. While the map and its author are fictitious, the decree mentioned in Against the Day, the “Serrata del Maggior Consiglio” (247), is in fact historically verified. As a political measure, the decree banned the Venetian aristocracy from contesting for seats in the Great Council, thus effectively rendering this class ineligible for Dogedom. This is

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ground and therefore explored his own trade route to Inner Asia, an “alternative to the Silk Road, to the markets of the East” (248). At some point the stations of this journey were registered on paper, and after going through more than a few hands, this artifact turns up about six hundred years later as “the fabled Sfinciuno Itinerary, a map or chart of post-Polo routes into Asia,” now more coveted than ever before, since it is “believed by many to lead to the hidden city of Shambhala itself ” (248). In Pynchon’s novel, it remains unclear what the map looks like exactly, but already the sparse details about its genesis are telling, let alone its title. Since the document is referred to as an itinerary, we can infer that it provides the account of a journey. Yet, this attribute does not imply anything about what the itinerary looks like, so it could be a sketch, a diagram, a painting, a textual account, or a combination of all of these forms. In fact, it does not even say whether or not the account was rendered on paper from the very beginning. It is therefore not utterly inconceivable that the itinerary may have existed at first only as an oral tradition. For all that, we can definitely say that the Sfinciuno Itinerary, first and foremost, constitutes a story. Certeau put the difference between a map and an itinerary (or a “tour”) in “terms of an alternative:  either seeing (the knowledge of an order of places) or going (spatializing actions)” (1988: 119; italics original). According to this distinction, the map “presents a tableau” that indicates places, “a plane projection totalizing observations,” whereas the itinerary “organizes movements” (1988: 119; italics original), that is, it guides action in space. Needless to say, this distinction is an ideal-typical one since in most cases both aspects intersect each other. It bears mentioning, however, that every so often the itinerary allowed for observations, which came to figure as the bedrock for maps, geographical and otherwise. Nonetheless, Certeau also points out that in the course of the period marked by the birth of modern scientific discourse (i.e. from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century) the map has slowly disengaged from the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility. (1988: 120)

The map thus eventually came to repudiate the spatial practices engendered by the itinerary, blotting out the latter’s narrative and symbolic indices. The dawn of scientific cartography therefore marks a watershed, to the effect that “maps cease to be generated as by-products of story-telling, and are created instead as end-products of projects of spatial representation” (Ingold 2000: 234). One

precisely the reason why the fictitious Domenico Sfinciuno in Against the Day chooses trade as an alternative to politics. This circumstance adds yet another dimension of meaning to his journey, since the author of the itinerary is not primarily traveling to Inner Asia to enrich himself, but rather as a pastime to bypass the period, until he or one of his descendants might get a chance to go back into politics again.

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could also say that, by obliterating its origins in the itinerary, the map “colonizes space” and becomes—to return to an earlier metaphor— “a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a ‘state’ of geographical knowledge” (Certeau 1988: 121). The difficulties posed by the Sfinciuno Itinerary in Against the Day are directly related to such an issue. This itinerary is not a geographical map, and it was never intended as a map at all, at least not in the modern sense as described by Certeau. The crucial point is not what it actually represents but, rather, how a cartographic mind comes to conceive of the itinerary as a cartographic map. By a devious route, the race for the Sfinciuno Itinerary that is related in Against the Day, especially the depiction of the frantic efforts to visualize the itinerary, therefore also adumbrates the price at which the map came to achieve its triumph over the itinerary. “[T]ry to forget the usual picture in two dimensions. That is not the kind of ‘map’ you are looking for” (248). This is how Professor Svegli in Against the Day explains the character of the Sfinciuno Itinerary. It is, however, neither a picture nor map that we are dealing with, but a spatial story. At its heart, we find a tale of a Venetian family clan that in the fourteenth century went out to Inner Asia in order to make a fortune. Once this enterprise was crowned with success, the itinerary unsurprisingly became a well-kept secret. Facilitated by the emergence of optical science, the itinerary (i.e., the material artifact) was then encrypted in the seventeenth century, as a result of which it became only decipherable by means of a very rare optical instrument. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the itinerary starts capturing the attention of explorers, adventurers, scientists, and prospectors, save that the whereabouts of “the fiendishly coded map” (250) are now unknown. The parties involved in the pursuit of the itinerary basically fall into two groups. One considers the document as a guide to a spiritual destination, the lost city of Shambhala, while the other group pursues the itinerary due to economic considerations, mainly on the assumption that it might lead them to undiscovered oilfields. “[T]here are two distinct versions of ‘Asia’ out there” (249), as Professor Svegli gives us to understand. However, the point is that neither destination bears any relation to the Sfinciuno Itinerary. Be it salvation seeker or oil prospector, all involved parties consider the itinerary to be a record of a geographical territory and therefore fail to recognize that it was actually intended as a “memorandum prescribing actions” (Certeau 1988:  119). The itinerary plots movements that unfold in space and over time, from place to place, across variegated regions. Indeed, the itinerary imparts knowledge, but it cannot be reduced to the category of knowledge one finds embodied in a cartographic map, that is, solely derived from visual observation and later on projected into a bird’s-eye perspective. The itinerary might as well be a record of acoustic, affective, olfactory, and tactile perceptions, since the story of the journey goes beyond the scope of mere visual stimuli and impressions. However that may be, the journey precedes the itinerary. Travel, thus, can be said to figure as a way of “ambulatory knowing” (Ingold 2000: 230), while the itinerary is merely a by-product of the journey it

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specifies. It is a material inscription of movement qua knowledge, and it stores this knowledge for posterity. The account of the journey, however, is exactly what the hunters after the Sfinciuno Itinerary in Against the Day refuse to (or are unable to) retrace. Instead, these cartographic minds delude themselves that, merely by breaking the code of its visual encryption, the itinerary could be deployed as a geographical map. The intricacy of visualizing the itinerary and harnessing the knowledge it may provide finds expression in the novel as Professor Svegli continues to explain: “The problem lies with the projection. The author of the Itinerary imagined the Earth not only as a three-dimensional sphere but, beyond that, as an imaginary surface, the optical arrangements for whose eventual projection onto the two-dimensional page proved to be very queer indeed” (249; italics original). The technical jargon employed here should not be taken too literally.23 It reflects a cartographer’s mindset and therefore needs decoding. To state that a traveler comes to conceive of the surface of the earth as an imaginary surface seems, in a way, to be almost redundant. One of the few people who will perhaps ignore (or try to suppress) this quality is a cartographer. For a traveler, the notion of a surface as such is rather meaningless. The only exception is maybe the surface quality of the environment in close proximity. But whether it is soil, sand, or sea, an actual traveler would probably not draw on the term “surface” as a descriptor. This is because the traveler moves through the world, and it goes without saying that the imagination is actively involved in doing so. Cartography, however, is concerned with the representation of the surface of the earth. For this task, the realm of lived experience is, by and large, negligible. The cartographer therefore conceives of travel as an activity that is performed on the terrestrial surface, as if it were a stage, and this is exactly what presupposes the projection of “a mind that is situated above and beyond it” (Ingold 2000: 241). This circumstance also highlights that the seemingly plain definition of a map as a representation of the earth’s surface actually involves a considerable degree of mental abstraction. Being accustomed to depictions of aerial perspectives, not to mention the actual experience of a bird’s-eye view, apparently causes this abstraction to pass more or less unnoticed, even though it is the result of a learning process. One could also pointedly rephrase the issue by saying that for the common traveler, who moves through and interacts with an environment, “the world itself has no surface” (Ingold 2000: 241;

23.  Taking the passage literally, however, likewise provides a fertile reading in that it allows us to transfer a mathematical issue into the field of geography. Analogous to the relationship between real and imaginary numbers, both of which comprise the set of complex numbers, one could say that real and imaginary surface together yield a “complex surface.” Considering Pynchon’s profound engagement with mathematics in Against the Day, it seems unlikely that the analogy is merely coincidental. For a discussion of Pynchon’s use of mathematical metaphors, see Pöhlmann (2010: 9–34).

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italics original). In this sense, only the image of the earth, that is, the world as projected by the cartographer, has a surface. The story of the Sfinciuno Itinerary in Against the Day thus functions as a kind of meta-cartographic narrative. It is a story about the story of a journey, allegorizing how the map disengaged itself from its origins in travel and, as a result, has constrained the way we have come to think of mapping. To this end, many of the narrative voices in the text virtually speak the language of modern cartographic discourse, whereas the proper character of the itinerary remains oddly indeterminate. We can further trace this strategy by turning to the encryption of the Sfinciuno Itinerary, which is compared to an anamorphic distortion, that is, to an image which requires either a specific point of view or a special optical device (such as a mirror) in order to make the image appear in its original state. The Sfinciuno Itinerary, however, is exceptional, as Professor Svegli tells us, because in order to decrypt it one needs “a paramorphoscope”, that is, a device that “reveals worlds which are set to the side of the one we have taken [ . . . ] to be the only world given us” (249; italics original).24 This implies that a vertical spatial logic (implied by the prefix “ana-”) is substituted and opposed by a horizontal or lateral logic (the prefix “para-” denotes both “beside” and “against”). If we, thus, understand the top-down image of the earth’s surface projected by the cartographer—that is, the world as a static and lifeless stage—as the only existing reality, then the paramorphoscope symbolically points to what escapes this worldview, namely, the coexistence of multiple worlds or a multitude of biographical trajectories and lived experiences. Leaving figurative implications aside for a moment, let us assume that such a device could actually break the encryption and render the itinerary legible. Perhaps, the resulting view could even provide an observer with something like an array of images depicting the stations of the journey on which the itinerary is based. Nonetheless, contemplating this sight would certainly not allow an observer to grasp the meaning of the itinerary, since its meaning is not solely located on the visual plane. This point is shrewdly underscored, as the novel eventually permits us a glimpse at the itinerary through a paramorphoscope: To look [. . .] at the strangely-distorted and only partly-visible document [. . .] was like experiencing a low-level aerial swoop—indeed engaging the proper controls on the viewing device could easily produce a long and fearful plunge straight down into the map, revealing the terrain at finer and finer scales, perhaps in some asymptotic way, as in dreams of falling, where the dreamer wakes just before impact. (437; italics original)

24.  Considering that every map actually draws on some sort of code, the frequent references to particularly coded maps in Against the Day can also be regarded as a sort of running gag.

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This passage works again in two ways. In a literal sense, it questions the certainty and accuracy of cartographic representation as it hints at a paradox according to which the result of measuring the outline of a surface structure depends on the method used for measuring.25 On a more symbolic level, however, the narrative here conveys how a steadfast cartographic gaze comes to falter, and plunge into an epistemological abyss, as it faces the conditions that make it possible in the first place. Throughout the text, the cartographic mind seeks and narratively orbits around the itinerary, but its meaning remains ultimately inscrutable. In order to emphasize this point, the visual manifestation of the Sfinciuno Itinerary likewise figures as a narrative void in Against the Day. Yet, the novel also intimates why this is necessarily so. After the failed visualization of the itinerary, it is suggested that “somehow these three coördinates [sic] have not been enough” (437). This comment very precisely encapsulates the issue in question, namely, the fact that travel not only unfolds in space but also over time. Although we are not given the details of the journey that resulted in the Sfinciuno Itinerary, Pynchon sketches yet another itinerary that seems to remotely echo the former journey, even if under different conditions. We are told how Kit Traverse, after a failed attempt at revenging his father’s murder in Venice (after also being exiled from the city, so to speak), sets out to travel, more or less aimlessly, to Inner Asia on the trail of the Silk Road. At first traveling by steamer, then by train, the narrator tells us that Kit “kept some of the ticket stubs” (751), which apparently aid him in mapping the stations of his journey. While traveling, Kit is confronted with a series of visual impressions and vistas of landscapes drifting by. What is more, his voyage is rendered in the novel as an encompassing bodily experience that involves more senses than just vision. In the course of this journey, Kit comes across places that are “invisible but felt” (753) as well as regions “where you could smell the lemon groves before you saw them” (751). Kit therefore does not travel on the surface of the earth, but the passage from one place to another involves a “crossing from world to world” (753). This is why Kit can hardly be said to travel in the role of the detached observer that the figure of the cartographer (or surveyor) embodies. Instead, this journey is inextricably linked to Kit’s past history and therefore is embedded in his way of life in the world. Consequently, Pynchon’s narrator informs us that some of the borders Kit crosses during his journey were “less geographic than to be measured along axes of sorrow and loss” (771). The way in which Kit’s journey is narrated in Against the Day once again emphasizes what the episodes revolving around the Sfinciuno Itinerary have already suggested, namely, that cartographic representation alone is inadequate in order to grasp the meaning and the significance of travel and movement. The

25. More precisely, this passage seems to invoke the so-called Steinhaus Paradox, an issue related to the measuring of coastlines. For more details, see Lam (2009: 263–270).

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idea that traveling through the world does not take place on a lifeless stage (as it would seem from a cartographic perspective) is also linked in the novel to an ecological dimension. On that score, the Doosra, a local prophet whom Kit meets in Siberia, even goes as far as asserting that “[t]he journey itself is a kind of conscious Being” (765; italics original). In a similar way, the novel brings in the notion that the earth itself might be a living entity. Contemplating Lake Baikal, for example, does not merely allow Kit to grasp “why it had been necessary to journey here” (768), but the sight even appears to him “like looking into the heart of the Earth itself as it was before there were eyes of any kind to look at it” (769). Bearing in mind how Against the Day negotiates the relationship between map and itinerary (or between gazing down on a map and traveling through the world), certain passages related to the practice of exploration also yield somewhat different implications. Consider, for example, how the Chums of Chance (long before they turn cartographic apostates) fly across and gaze down at the Indian Ocean. With a touch of melancholy, Miles tells us that in the days of the first explorers, each one of these islands, no matter how small, was given its own name, so amazing was their abundance in the sea, so grateful to God were their discoverers for any sort of landfall. (107)

The balloonists thus bemoan that the glory days of toponymy are gone, since explorers just cannot keep up with naming a countless number of miniscule islets. However, what bereaves these earthly surfaces of their cartographic existence so that they come to “rejoin the Invisible” (108) is not only their anonymity. By likening the drift of the “high and hostile sea” to a sort of extremity of the living earth, the novel yet again counters the notion of a lifeless terrestrial surface. To that effect, the narrator suggests a reversal of the process of discovery, as it were, and thus relates how the islets ultimately turn into “de-christened fragments in the sea’s reasserted emptiness” (109). In this chapter I have discussed how, by drawing on different forms of genre narratives (such as the Arctic adventure or science fiction), Against the Day offers a critique of the geographic practices of exploration and scientific mapmaking. Pynchon’s novel suggests that both these practices were instrumental in consolidating an imagination of space as a plain surface that is devoid of living presence and that passively awaits colonization, as it were. The novel particularly emphasizes that this way of imagining space relies on an epistemological framework that, by erecting an irreconcilable chasm between observer and observed, ultimately divorces culture and nature. While this mode of knowledge production remains mostly implicit, the trope of the frontier, in turn, serves not only to glorify explorers as conquerors of nature but also to discursively legitimize the project of colonization. In this sense, this chapter was also intended to set the course for a number of subsequent discussions (particularly for those in chapters  5 and 7), in which I  examine this very function of the frontier in relation to a variety of different spatial and, not least, urban contexts.

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Chapter 2 L E A R N I N G   F R OM   V E N IC E

While discussing an early draft of this chapter, one of my colleagues, a trained architect, recounted to me an experience she had once been through during an architectural workshop. The participants were asked to randomly call up an image of a city and to produce a sketch map of that city. The result could indeed be due to the professional context; in any case, it was unequivocal. The large majority had drawn a map of either New York or Venice. More precisely, the maps depicted either the borough of Manhattan or the historical center (centro storico) of Venice.1 Given that both places are densely populated urban agglomerations that are almost entirely enclosed by bodies of water (and thus, lend themselves to a simple cartographic representation), the outcome seems at first hardly surprising. But then again, how could the difference between the two cities actually be more extreme? It is not only that one city is of rather recent date, while the other one has existed for more than a thousand years. No less significant is that, whereas New York was largely built on a preexisting landmass, Venice was, for the most part, artificially erected on the sea. Moreover, in contrast to the spatial outline of New York, which was planned in advance (i.e., at least since the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811), the cityscape of Venice was barely planned at all. The list of differences could perhaps be continued ad infinitum, but it seems more worthwhile after all to consider why both New York and Venice are such popular cities of the mind. In the first case, a lengthy explanation seems superfluous. The cornucopia of representations of New  York, the so-called capital of the twentieth century, speaks for itself. No doubt, Venice likewise has been countlessly drawn, painted, and photographed as well as extolled in poetry, drama, and fiction. Let us then rephrase the contrast between both cities in more figurative terms. One could perhaps say that, while New York has been constructed, Venice has grown. Needless to say, technically speaking, each term holds true for both cities. But I am, rather, aiming at the particular temporality

1.  I am greatly indebted to my colleague Tazalika te Reh for sharing this anecdote with me.

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of each city. Considering the eternity that Venice needed to come to blossom, one is almost inclined to say that New York was built overnight. Today it might be unclear whether New York is already past its peak, but there seems to be unanimous agreement that Venice has long been on the decline. However that may be, New York obviously still shows signs of life, so its image keeps changing and actualizing itself over time. Yet, the odd thing about Venice is that its image appears frozen in time, as it were, virtually regardless of the ways of life unfolding in the city. Writing a city always also means producing an image of a city. Moreover, it involves working and struggling with already existing images of the city one is writing about. However, in the case of Venice, this task seems to entail a particular artistic challenge. Already in 1909, Henry James wrote that “Venice has been painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of the world it is the easiest to visit without going there” (1993: 287). For James, this is apparently reason enough to condemn the task of writing on Venice in its entirety. Accordingly, he can announce that “[t]here is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject” (1992: 287). To be sure, his dismissal is mostly due to an eagerness to preserve a certain image of the city, namely, one that is resistant to change. Mobile and affordable photography, which allows the average visitor to take home his or her own image of the city, is anathema to a “true Venice lover” (1992: 287) like James. Yet, writing in disregard of the steadily thickening fog of images that surrounds the city seems pointless, even ignorant, especially because the Venetians themselves were highly adept in the production of images. This implies the construction of place myths in particular, that is, images of how a political or economic class wishes others to see the city. The image of Venice thus demands close attention, especially when it comes to aspects such as perspective, scale, as well as observer’s distance and position. Writing on Venice cannot ignore such issues, least of all when such writing seeks to come to grips with the symbolical, political and socio-spatial dimensions of the city, that is, the city as a social space. I am also making these claims, for I would contend that they encapsulate the way in which Venice is related in Against the Day. The novel approaches the cityscape from afar, then slowly draws closer, so as to gradually immerse in it. Then, once on ground level, the narrative starts to write its own city-text, thus rendering its own image of the city, which is, of course, partly carved out from the stock of preexisting ones. In the course of rewriting this repository, the city-text perambulates a maze of alley- and waterways, twists and turns along nooks and corners; it plots trajectories and traces itineraries, fathoms lighting conditions and marks blind spots. At some point, however, after the fog has become so dense as to threaten the reader with losing sight of the city entirely, something odd happens. Another voice is rendered clearly audible; one which is neither concerned with Venice nor its image anymore. Instead, it makes us recognize that Venice, after all, merely figured as an amplifier for another city-discourse. It also signals that, while we may be located far off and past the horizon of the Venice that the

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novel draws on, we are, in any case, still in the thick of the city. The rendering of this voice, which echoes the production of urban space, is then the subject of this chapter. It comes as no real surprise that Pynchon has decided on Venice as one of the major settings in Against the Day. Considering the role that the Italian Adriatic plays in his work, Venice seemed overdue for such a novelistic treatment. Does Pynchon’s rendering of the island-city then make him a “true Venice lover”? One might initially be inclined to disagree, not least because it seems that he could not resist doing it again, “The old Baedeker trick” (2000b: 21), as Pynchon, in his introduction to Slow Learner: Early Stories, describes his way of looting tourist guidebooks in search of source material for his novels. Even if he has not dispensed altogether with the trick, Pynchon seems to be using it in a manner that is not as bold and indiscriminate anymore.2 This shift, which became already discernible in those episodes of Gravity’s Rainbow ([1973] 1975) that are set in European cities, above all involves that the incorporated source material becomes part of a larger project that seeks to tackle political issues.3 In Against the Day, this approach then serves, as this chapter lays out, to conceive an aesthetic rendering of Venice that raises broader questions related to the social production of urban space and to the political constitution of urban culture. In light of the novel’s close attention to urban form and visuality and its resonance with various traditions of city painting and writing, it seems safe to say that a wide range of sources has entered this literary Venice. Then the question of how much of a role the Baedeker trick played here only seems of secondary importance. For Pynchon’s novel yields a deeply vibrant city image, which signals that, even if not everyone would consider him a true Venice lover, we are dealing with a writer who definitely cares for this city.

Mapping Venice Visiting Venice is like entering a dream. Imagine the sea to be a desert; then Venice might appear as the long-desired oasis looming on the horizon. This is how an artist’s imagination often came to envision the journey to Venice. It is, however, a gradual gliding into a dream. Approach Venice by water, and, as 2.  In his introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon himself admits that his use of Baedeker guides in his early writing was “ass-backwards” (2000b: 19), since he began with geographical details culled from the Baedeker and then went on to constructing his plots around them. 3.  Regarding the use of historical maps and guides in Gravity’s Rainbow, Bulson argues that in this novel “Pynchon adapted his ‘Baedeker trick’ for more political ends to expose the violence that transpires when human beings imagine one another as objects in a two-dimensional map-grid” (2007: 93).

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you go along, the cityscape will slowly and subtly materialize, not like a foreign body inserted into a mass of water, but as its organic extension, “[r]ising like water-columns from the sea,” as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) has it.4 The dream is indeed peculiar, for it implies an observant traveler who consciously registers the passage from reality into dream. Yet, there is nothing casual about it, at least not in the traveler’s imagination. This is because the journey is nothing less than a moral obligation. Hence, the dream is bound to happen, as if it were a stroke of fate.5 A similar yet different dream is experienced by a young artist in Against the Day. This painter, called Hunter Penhallow, resides in Iceland, where he produces Arctic landscapes, but the narrator already hints at “his later ‘Venice’ and ‘London’ phases” (129) to come. One night, however, his later sojourn in Venice is anticipated by a somewhat extraordinary “dream.” Eventually, the narrator relates that Hunter is out on a boat ride, as he envisions how in the ceaseless drift of the ice, the uncountable translations and rotations, meltings and freezings, there would come a moment, maybe two, when the shapes and sizes of the masses here at this “Venice of the Arctic” would be exactly the same as those of secular Venice and its own outlying islands. Not all of these shapes would be dry land, of course, some would be ice, but, considered as multiply-connected spaces, the two would be the same, Murano, Burano, San Michele, the Grand Canal, each small waterway in painstaking detail, and for that brief instant it would be possible to move from one version to the other. (136)

The setting of this scenario is, of course, more than appropriate since the icy landscape hints at the notion of Venice as a city frozen in time. Yet, more importantly, the passage invokes a certain kind of movement. One could say that Hunter actually does not so much imagine traveling to Venice. What he imagines is being transported there, without stopovers, in the blink of an eye. Accordingly, Hunter is not looking forward to some kind of inevitable journey, to an artist’s pilgrimage, but rather to “the fateful moment” (136) that transports him to the destination of his desire in no time. This scenario therefore links the time-honored artist’s dream with the experience of travel that packaged tourism provides. Ingold has argued that “for the transported traveller [ . . . ] every destination is a terminus, every port a point

4. See Byron (1899: 342). 5. Here I am referring to the fact that, from the late seventeenth century on, Venice has been part of the standard itinerary of the aristocratic Grand Tour. Many travelers have underlined the supposedly preordained character of this journey. Goethe, for example, in his Italienische Reise (1816–17) comments on his arrival in Venice that this day was written in the “Book of Fate” (1885: 53).

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of re-entry into a world from which he has been temporarily exiled whilst in transit” (2007: 25). In Hunter’s case, however, there is virtually no transit. His movement between worlds is imagined as a shock-like experience, as a “thunderous assault on his sensorium” (136). What his vision, moreover, implies is being transported to a romanticized past of Venice. Hunter imagines the moment as an “immediate translation miles and years away from here, to the City of Silence and Queen of the Adriatic herself ” (136).6 In his vision, Hunter indeed moves from one place to another, but he cannot perceive this movement because it does not involve any lapse in time. In a way, then, this scenario exaggerates a significant detail about the modality of transport, namely, “the dissolution of the intimate bond that [. . .] couples locomotion and perception” (Ingold 2007: 25). The scenario also foreshadows another issue that recurs in Against the Day. It points to a phenomenon that is often invoked in connection with postmodern urbanism, namely, the spatial juxtaposition of disparate experiential realms within a single place, including the omission of transitional spaces. Hunter’s vision links the imaginative susceptibility of the supposedly “blank” Arctic landscape with the often remarked upon virtuality of Venice. As a result, both places become interchangeable for a brief moment. Hunter, thus, cannot tell which place actually belongs to the “dream” and which one does not, because the passage between the two places has been cancelled: He would “wake,” though it was more like having arrived after an unsensed journey, in a room in the Bauer-Grünwald with a tenor in full heartbreaking cry accompanied by a concertina just beneath the window, and the sun going down behind Mestre. (136)

This experience is related somewhat anachronistically, by giving a contemporary reader the impression that Hunter is temporarily vaulted into a scene in a nostalgic commercial set in Venice. The scenario then remotely echoes the postmodern urban experience of crossing, almost imperceptibly, from one themed environment into another. The condition sine qua non for Hunter’s vision is, of course, that he is able to call up an exact mental map of Venice. The bedrock for his map is, however, not the actual experience of walking in the city, simply because Hunter has

6.  The phrase “City of Silence” goes back to the British travel writer John Stoddard. More precisely, it can be found in the first volume of his Lectures (1897), a series of reports on his travel experiences in the 1870s and 1880s. Further evidence for Hunter’s yearning to visit the romanticized version of Venice that writers like Stoddard helped to consolidate, is that this passage refers to the city by drawing on the feminine pronoun “her,” while elsewhere in the novel Venice is consistently referred to by the genderneutral pronoun “it.”

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not been to Venice at this point in the novel. The geometrically precise image, which facilitates Hunter vision, is undoubtedly contingent upon his familiarity with a cartographic map (or at least a bird’s-eye view painting) of Venice. But it is safe to assume that such a map must have been anything but a rare sight at the end of the nineteenth century. A look into a tourist’s handbook would have sufficed.7 As a consequence of relying on a cartographic perspective, the artist’s vision of Venice also remains somewhat detached. The image of the city mostly functions as a projection surface for the aspirations of an artist.8 Hunter’s vision of Venice is not the only example of seeing the city from above that we encounter in Against the Day. When the city is eventually introduced as a setting in the novel, the abstract image of purely geometrical “shapes and sizes” is contrasted with the actual sight of the city from a bird’s-eye perspective. By way of this juxtaposition, the novel takes up another salient feature that Venice has been noted for. What the Chums of Chums recognize, as their airship descends to the Venetian lagoon, is the memorable quality of the aerial view of the city. It apparently stems from the compactness of the sight that induces one of the crew members to compare it to “some great rusted amulet [. . .] fallen from the neck of a demigod, its spell enfolding the Adriatic” (243).9 The balloonists, thus, initially come to behold the city from above in much the same manner as Certeau’s “voyeur-god” (1988: 93) would. But as the Chums draw closer to the city on the ground, the visual cues also extend into the domain of affective sensation: From their stations the fellows now beheld the island-city of Venice below them, looking like some map of itself printed in an ancient sepia, presenting at this daylit distance an impression of ruin and sorrow, though closer at hand this would resolve in a million roof-tiles of a somewhat more optimistic red. (243)

The balloonists’ observation has several implications that are important here. Most obviously, their experience of landing in Venice points to the notion of a city of contrasts or extremes. As such, Venice has often been said to conflate opposite poles such as beauty and decay, virtue and decadence, secularism

7.  As part of travel guides such as Cook’s Travellers Handbooks, relatively accurate cartographic maps of Venice were widely disseminated from the early 1870s on. 8.  Consequently, Hunter is also called a tourist at one point in the novel, because it seems almost predetermined that he will “leave someday” (582), which is also what he eventually does. 9. The metaphor that Chick employs seems indeed fitting, as it can also be linked to the city’s contemporary significance as a travel destination. Curtis and Pajaczkowska, for example, have pointed out that in the case of Venice “the jewel-like detailing of the city is a trope of current tourist representation” (2002: 156).

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and sacredness. This idea then encapsulates that there is something “essentially ambivalent” (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 2002: 154) about Venice. Yet, the scenario likewise can be said to invoke the notion of concealment. The particular response that the aerial perspective on the cityscape triggers here is dependent on the observer’s distance. Looking down on Venice from afar conveys an image of a ruined city, whereas gazing down from up close evokes a potentially animated city. At the same time, the former impression is one of compactness, while the latter is one of multiplicity. Apparently, then, in order to assemble anything like a comprehensive image, the cityscape needs to be contemplated from various angles and distances. Asserting one particular image as dominant would thrust aside another image. One could also rephrase this issue with recourse to a metaphor. It seems that the exclusive focus on a single image or perspective is misleading insofar as it masks another image. The trope of the mask is especially pertinent in our case since it alludes to a “sense of there being ‘a hidden Venice’ ” (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 2002: 154). There is still another aspect regarding the balloonists’ sight of Venice that deserves some attention. It is related to the fact that the narrator compares the aerial view with a geographical map of the city. Suggesting that the physical city and a map of this city are coextensive with each other, the comparison then seems to refer to the relationship between map and territory that numerous writers, both literary and otherwise, have been concerned with.10 The underlying idea is that a map is basically rendered useless if its size corresponds exactly to the territory it represents, since it cannot be used as a means of navigation anymore. Invoking the idea of the city as a map of itself, therefore, seems to suggest that Venice is a realm that is difficult, if not impossible, to navigate because using a map ultimately serves no purpose there. The comparison thus makes implicit reference to another popular spatial trope, namely, Venice as a labyrinth or maze. The notion of Venice as a labyrinth is repeatedly brought into play in Against the Day. It generally denotes a space that is enclosed and with distinct external borders, yet is confusing and illegible on the inside. Looking down on a labyrinth from an elevated vantage point would usually make it a simple task to map this space. The actual intricacy of a labyrinth thus stems from the challenge posed by walking through it. The map of a labyrinth is only useful if a walker is able to determine his or her exact position on the map. But this, in turn, renders a map virtually useless since a labyrinth is also characterized by a lack of striking visible features that would help to determine one’s position and to orient oneself, thereby. Navigating a pedestrian labyrinth thus requires not so much a map as an insider’s knowledge of its paths and branches. However, this

10.  The list of writers who have dealt with this issue is far too extensive to be listed here. One of the most concise examples can be found, as far as I can gather, in Borges’s 1946 short story “On Exactitude in Science”. See Borges (1975: 131).

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knowledge can only be acquired by means of walking in the city. This becomes clear in Against the Day as Hunter actually relocates to Venice. It seems that the experience of walking in the city compels him to discard the cartographic map that underlies his dream of being transported to the city. By learning to walk and navigate the urban labyrinth, he recognizes that the bird’s-eye view of Venice is indeed deceptive, regardless of the observer’s distance or position. Hunter vividly describes this insight, thus adding more than one dimension to the image of the two-dimensional labyrinth: Imagine that inside this labyrinth you see is another one, but on a smaller scale, reserved only, say, for cats, dogs, and mice—and then, inside that, one for ants and flies, then microbes and the whole invisible world—down and down the scale, for once the labyrinthine principle is allowed, don’t you see, why stop at any scale in particular? It’s self-repeating. Exactly the spot where we are now is a microcosm of all Venice. (575)

Hunter thus discerns that the outer borders of Venice do not merely harbor a single maze but a multitude of them, even a potentially infinite number, all of which are nested within each other. His account of such a fractal labyrinth adds further ambivalence to the novel’s portrayal of Venice, for it touches upon a significant aspect concerning the city’s spatial and visual logic, while subtly also introducing a rather portentous trope. On the one hand, Hunter’s labyrinth points to the idea of “a paradox of microcosm and macrocosm” (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 2002: 156) that Venice has been noted for. For, the Venetian cityscape is not only marked by the contrast between an extremely coherent and a highly fragmented appearance. This relationship is rendered paradoxical here because in Venice, even a small fraction of the city, say a piazza, might figure as a compact and self-enclosed monad with the urban fabric.11 Hunter’s account illustrates this idea most distinctly in Against the Day, but one also finds it taken up elsewhere in the novel, often in apparently negligible details, such as a casual hint at “courtyards within courtyards” (740). Then again, even the tiniest urban fragment often evokes the entire city in Venice. Because Hunter’s image indirectly also hints at a metonymic spatial logic that is considered a hallmark of the Venetian cityscape. This logic implies that miniscule elements and symbols of everyday life denote a more general complex of ideas about the city. What proves Venice to be a shining example here, is that it probably ranks foremost among cities where such small details (e.g., canals, bridges, or gondolas) have an extremely high

11.  In fact, this spatial relationship also goes (or at least used to go) the other way round in Venice. Regarding the history of Venice as an independent city-republic, Curtis and Pajaczkowska have pointed out that there existed a “discrepancy between the small island in the lagoon and the vast trading Empire which it administered” (2002: 156).

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recognition value and foster an overall sense of aesthetic unity, harmony, and coherence.12 Especially from a contemporary perspective, it seems almost too unlikely that the impression conveyed by this spatial pattern might not be the result of a preconceived plan. The fact that such a cityscape took shape without any centralized efforts at urban planning is, then, all the more intriguing.13 On the other hand, Hunter’s labyrinth undeniably has sinister overtones as well, for the image of nested mazes is also a mise en abyme, suggesting the image of a bottomless abyss. As such, it anticipates the depiction of pedestrian Venice in terms of an ill-fated and entropic site, which the novel particularly unfolds in relation to the history of the city. This is also an aspect that the aerial views of Venice in Against the Day leave mostly out of consideration, because, even if they tentatively zoom in on the cityscape, they primarily operate on a synchronic level, thus lacking in historical depth. However, there is one exception, namely, an aerial image that points to the far-flung history of the cityrepublic, while at the same time inserting a prospective vision. After the Chums of Chance have witnessed the cityscape oscillating between pallor and vividness, their airship draws yet closer to the Venetian lagoon, eventually insinuating which one of the extremes will stand the test of time. With the aid of X-ray vision, the balloonists thus catch sight of the so-called Terre Perse, or Lost Lands. Since ancient times numerous inhabited islands here had sunk beneath the waves, so as to form a considerable undersea community of churches, shops, taverns, and palazzi for picked bones and incomprehensible pursuits of the generations of Venetian dead. (244)

This aerial view provides us with a tiny snippet of the otherwise invisible traces of Venetian history. In doing so, it obviously undermines the notion of a city that is resistant to change, for the notion of an entropic Venice is obviously highlighted here. The image therefore acts as a reminder that, in spite of the prevalent notion of Venice as frozen in time, we are in fact dealing with “a city which has never completely separated itself from its origins in nature and is

12. This metonymic logic between part and whole is also echoed in common Venetian place designations (such as piazza and piazzetta or campo and campielli). It likewise pertains to whole sections of the urban landscape as well as individual places. Cosgrove has traced, for example, how the complex symbolic structure of the city’s central node, Piazza San Marco, reflects the overall spatial balance of political, religious, economic, and technological realms, while also figuring as the central node within the overall symbolic landscape of Venice. For a detailed discussion see Cosgrove (1982: 149–153). 13.  While urban planning never played a role in the history of Venice, the city administration did start organizing efforts at urban preservation from the late sixteenth century onward, as Cosgrove (1982: 149) notes.

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subject to the return of natural forces long repressed” (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 2002: 161).

Contradictions in Space Let us now turn to how Venice in Against the Day is narrated from a ground perspective, and rendered as a genuinely pedestrian experience. By means of this change in perspective, Pynchon’s novel negotiates the question of the proper artistic strategy as well, to capture the very experience of walking in the city. For this purpose, the novel touches upon the history of urban policy in Venice, its artistic traditions, and a range of aspects related to the city’s mythology. In the process, it also revisits a number of tropes and metaphors that I have already introduced. Approached from a ground perspective, however, these yield rather different implications as well as additional and sometimes unexpected meanings. Of all the phenomena that elude an aerial view of the city, one seems particularly significant here, namely, the Venetian light. This is because the light is an essential condition for the aforementioned visual unity of Venice. The aesthetic coherence of its built form and the harmony of its spatial outline are indeed related to the metonymic spatial logic of Venice. Yet, these aspects cannot be reduced to purely architectural matters, for they would be unthinkable without the interplay between built form and atmospheric conditions as well as environmental factors. In this regard, Cosgrove has argued that the visual unity of Venice’s townscape derives from the quality of light and its reflection of open stretches of water and from a pervading lightness of architectural form contrasted with the sharp shadows of closed spaces. (1982: 149)

Needless to say, it might be somewhat difficult to cherish such a light from high above the city. For this spectacle to unfold, an observer absolutely needs to be located at ground or sea level. The light of Venice is, of course, one of the reasons why the city has for centuries exerted such an immense pull on artists, especially painters. It also seems that the full splendor of this light particularly shows to advantage at twilight, at least judging by the sheer frequency of its artistic depictions. Moreover, strategically deployed by the tourist industry in the twentieth century, the symbolism of the twilight was likewise instrumental in consolidating Venice’s reputation as “the World’s Most Romantic City” (Davis and Marvin 2004: 4). The Venetian twilight is also a prominent motif in Against the Day. In many cases, it serves as a metaphorical means to underscore the dreamlike quality of the city.14 One scenario, however, is particularly noteworthy, not least because 14.  The narrator mentions, for example, “certain lasagnoni” (255), that is, strollers wandering about the city’s public places, who are then accidentally photographed by

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Figure  2.1 Claude Monet, San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk, 1908. Courtesy National Museum Wales.

it amounts, by all indications, to an instance of ekphrasis, whose narrative rendering evokes an impressionist painting of the Venetian twilight. This ekphratic description occurs in an episode of a first-time visit to Venice. We are told how a young girl called Dahlia Rideout, while being transported on a water bus along the Grand Canal, catches sight of the pure Venetian evening, the blue-green shadows, the lavenders, ultramarines, siennas, and umbers of the sky and the light-bearing air she was breathing, the astonishing momentum of the everyday twilight, gas-lanterns coming on in the Piazzetta, San Giorgio Maggiore across the water lit pale as angels, distant as heaven and yet seemingly only a step, as if her breath, her yearning, could reach across to it and touch. (568)

There are perhaps dozens of other images that Dahlia’s sight might be evocative of. Nonetheless, I found it more than difficult to ignore its resemblance to Claude Monet’s 1908 painting San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk (Fig. 2.1). In the context of the storyworld of Against the Day, this passage is undeniably full

tourists, thus getting immortalized in images on which they remain, however, phantomlike extras, “blurry as bats at twilight” (256).

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of irony. For, the main reason why Dahlia is enchanted by the sight is that it reminds her of a replica of Venice, namely, Chicago’s White City.15 The narrator thus gives us to understand that Dahlia rediscovers the long-lost “hometown” of her childhood, as it were. At the same time, the passage is highly deceptive because it seems to depict an archetypical image of the city. The reader is led to believe that Dahlia progresses from simulacrum to reality, that so far she only knew a “fake” version of the city, so to speak, and now comes to discern the “real” Venice, which apparently overwhelms her with all the more force. However, especially in the novel’s later Venice episodes, it transpires that the twilight motif merely allows to capture a very selective snippet of the city. We are thus told in Against the Day how a newcomer to Venice gradually questions the seductive image of the city at twilight. At first, however, the novel depicts how Dahlia, once having decided to settle down in Venice, subsequently learns how to orient herself in the labyrinthine city. As she starts working as a street performer, Dahlia also traces the mesh of tourist routes in Venice. Therefore, she draws her own map of the city, on which she marks the most profitable spots, namely, those “little campielli [.  . .] which were scaled perfectly to gatherings of children and tourists on the way to better-known landmarks around town” (574). Yet, after a while, Dahlia develops an aversion to the increasing presence of tourists, mainly because she blames them for the increasing virtuality of the city: Quite soon she had grown to hate tourists and what she saw them doing to Venice, changing it from a real city to a hollow and now and then outrightfailed impersonation of itself, all the centuries of that irregular seethe of history reduced to a few simple ideas, and a seasonal human inundation just able to grasp them. (574)

The choice of words with which the narrator describes Dahlia’s change of mind deserves closer attention. It is telling that the transformation of Venice is described with recourse to the term “impersonation,” which derives from the Latin term persona, literally a theatrical mask. As such, a mask or persona denotes an item through (per-) which the sound (sona) of a speaker’s voice passes before reaching an audience. Considering this etymology, the mask trope itself is rendered slightly ambivalent, for its meaning seems to oscillate between visual and acoustic registers. It implies that a supposedly true face and identity are concealed from an observer, while also referring to a means of rendering a character’s voice plainly audible for an audience. In the extract, 15.  The White City, a utopian model city built on the occasion of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, also acts as the first major setting in Against the Day. The role of Venice as an aesthetic blueprint for the White City is an aspect that I return to in Chapter 4.

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however, we encounter an “outright-failed impersonation,” so Dahlia’s lament could also be read to the effect that the roaring tourists crowds drown out the genuine voice of the city. This is only the first in a series of hints in Against the Day that points to the possibility that the labyrinth of Venice might require a keen sense of hearing as well. In Dahlia’s case, however, the metaphor of the mask is apparently related to the idea of visual concealment. The reason for her initial discomfort in Venice is that the city is more crowded with tourists than with citizens, which is exactly what she wants to become. Thus, from her perspective, city life appears more and more like a despicable stage play, performed among others by female compatriots who are “pretending to ignore the covetous gazes of naval officers, guides, and waiters” (575). Hence, in order to distinguish herself as a true Venetian, Dahlia begins to join the public masquerade ball, yet on her own terms, as we are told that “she dressed these days as boy and escaped all male attention” (575). It seems that, especially in passages of this sort, Pynchon’s text points to a profound shift concerning the theatricality of everyday life that Venice has been said to undergo for quite some time. Regarding the historical interplay between the built form and environmental conditions, Lefebvre has argued that in Venice, “everyday life and its functions are coextensive with, and utterly transformed by, a theatricality as sophisticated as it is unsought, a sort of involuntary mise-en-scène” (1991: 74). Lefebvre also emphasizes that Venice, for all its lack of planning, “bears witness to the existence, from the sixteenth century on, of a unitary code or common language of the city” (1991: 73). Yet, the point is that this historical time frame is also tied to the city-republic’s economic decline and subsequent political demise. Hence, this period can be said to mark the onset of the popular image of Venice as a city frozen in time. From then on, the built form did not undergo major changes anymore; however, the city’s population has been shrinking continually, just as the role of civil society gradually began to dissipate. One could therefore say that the erosion of Venice as a social space figures as the flipside of the image of a city frozen in time. While its theatricality once served as an expression of the city as a lived space, it turned more and more into a means of concealing the latter’s absence. Accordingly, the theatricality of Venice has often been discussed in rather negative terms from the early twentieth century on. A prominent example is a comment by Simmel, who wrote in 1907 after visiting Venice that “the city’s decline has left behind merely a lifeless stage-set, the mendacious beauty of the mask” (2007: 44). Simmel also talks occasionally about “a dark passion” (2007: 43) that seems to lurk behind such a mask. He thus hints at another facet of the city that Dahlia likewise encounters in Against the Day, namely, that Venice represents “an anxiogenic object” (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 2002: 154). The novel here confronts her with the fact that the daylight mask of the city actually has a nocturnal

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equivalent. As Dahlia starts exploring Venice at night, she comes upon its underworld of vice: There was revealed to her, night by night in ever more depressing clarity, a secret and tenebrous city, down into whose rat-infested labyrinths she witnessed children her age and younger being drawn, infected, corrupted, and too often made to vanish like a coin or a card—just that interchangeably held in contempt by those who profited from the limitless appetite for young bodies that seemed to concentrate here from all over Europe and beyond. (581)

Venice’s underworld is then what links the city’s past and present, which is why its discovery faces Dahlia with its legacy of urban policy. As a city-republic, Venice has been noted for the degree of personal freedom granted its citizens on a constitutional basis. It is also well known that, with the decline of the Venetian empire from the sixteenth century on, the city became notoriously decadent. A lesser-known fact is perhaps that vices such as prostitution or gambling had been accepted as a part of urban life for much longer. One of the cityrepublic’s keystones of urban policy was actually the coexistence of freedom, even licentiousness on the one hand, and scrupulous social control by the city administration, on the other. Many vices were thus not banned but instead, rigorously policed and, more importantly, spatially confined.16 That Venice gained the doubtful reputation as “the continent’s brothel” (Davis and Marvin 2004: 3) after the city-republic lost its independence in 1797, however, is only one indicator of the changes that the city underwent as a social space. By all appearances, the tourist industry became the city’s most important productive factor from the nineteenth century on, presenting visitors a sight of profound beauty and sublimity. Every so often, however, Against the Day reminds us that, behind the veiled interiors and in the interstices of the urban fabric, clandestine dealings might be easily pursued. “Venice is a colorful town, but there’s too many blind corners” (741), as one of the novel’s characters puts it. It seems that getting to know about the dangerous side of the city also starts to break Venice’s spell that had enraptured Dahlia on arrival. The novel eventually relates that, while visiting the Biblioteca Marciana, Hunter “pointed up at Tintoretto’s Abduction of the Body of St. Mark” (579). Dahlia here comes to behold a late-sixteenth-century painting that depicts how the supposed relics of Venice’s patron saint, Mark the Evangelist, are stolen by Venetian merchants from Alexandria in the year 828 CE (Fig. 2.2). The reference to this painting in Against the Day is significant for a number of reasons. To begin with, it deals

16.  In this regard, Crang (2010:  951–955) has pointed out the rigorous control of space in Venice, and its use as a means of social segregation, especially the limitation of communication flows and mobilities that mostly ran along the lines of gender and ethnicity.

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Figure  2.2 Tintoretto, The Theft of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–63. Courtesy akgimages/De Agostini Picture Lib./F. Ferruzzi.

with Venice’s founding myth. Historically, the possession of what was deemed the body of St. Mark served the city-republic to acquire a sacred status. The burial ground, Basilica San Marco, still represents the site of Venice’s sacred legitimation. Yet, even though Venice considered itself a sacred city, externally it often prided itself as a city of secular trade, manifestly evidenced by the public display of its material wealth. In this sense, the city’s sacred status proved utterly beneficial, in order to palliate the ruthlessness that was often prevailing in the

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fields of commerce and trade. What Tintoretto’s painting therefore bluntly highlights is the crime at the heart of Venice’s founding myth. Put another way, Venice could only become a sacred city due to “an unholy offense” (579), as the narrator puts it in Against the Day, that is, a transgression that involved acts of bribery and body snatching. Here, the novel intimates another issue that is related to the latter deed’s motive. In a sense, the actual crime, which allowed Venice to acquire its sacred status, can be considered as the outcome of a course of action based on instrumental rationality. There was a specific end, there were efficient means, and obviously the plan worked out. Yet, the grounds, on which the Venetians assumed that the possession of the relics would sanctify their city in the first place, were ever so irrational. Stealing the body of St. Mark was solely legitimized by a dream that the evangelist allegedly once had, while traveling the lagoon where Venice was later founded.17 Accordingly, one finds a number of passages in Against the Day that counter the notion of a secular city based on principles of economic rationality with the image of a city arisen from and partly owing its grandeur to the irrationality of dream. A striking example is a passage that relates how Kit Traverse, while strolling about Piazza San Marco, muses about the phantasmagoric quality of the place: The town was supposed to’ve been built on trade, but the Basilica San Marco was too insanely everything that trade, in its strenuous irrelevance to dream, could never admit. The numbers of commerce were “rational”—ratios of profit to loss, rates of exchange—but among the set of real numbers, those that remained in the spaces between—the “irrationals”—outnumbered those simple quotients overwhelmingly. (732)

Another instance of phrasing an issue by means of a mathematical metaphor, this passage underscores how the “real Venice” that one could come to grips with by means of reason is transcended by the bulk of dreams and fantasies spawned by the city. On a related note, the reference to Tintoretto’s painting in Against the Day prompts scrutiny of the image of crepuscular Venice. Here, however, the novel does not so much aim at the painting’s motif as its mode of representation, more precisely, it is the painting technique on which it relies. Regarding Dahlia’s growing recognition of the perilousness of Venice, the narrator eventually relates: It put her in a peculiar bind, her feelings for the city undiminished yet now with the element of fear that could not be wished aside, each night bringing

17.  According to the legend, an angel appeared to the evangelist, announcing “Pax tibi Marce evangelista meus. Hic requiescat corpus tuum” (“Peace be with you, Mark, my evangelist. Here shall your body rest”).

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new intelligence of evil waiting up the end of any little alleyway. Hunter argued that this was why so many people had come to love Venice, because of its “chiaroscuro.” (582)

It is suggested here that, if there is anything like an “essence” of Venice, it might be adequately captured through chiaroscuro, a Renaissance painting style that relies on the use of pronounced contrasts between light and dark (which are notably featured in Tintoretto’s painting). The reason why this painting mode pertains to Venice, in particular, can be illustrated by comparing it with the motif of twilight. In the latter’s case, it almost seems that, exactly because of the ubiquity of its artistic depictions, one tends to overlook that twilight actually denotes a phenomenon that is primarily temporal. It can only occur between sunset and dusk or between dawn and sunrise. Hence, a painting of Venice at twilight can be said to merely capture a miniscule temporal fraction of the city. Chiaroscuro, on the other hand, rather seems to point to a spatial aspect because it foregrounds the simultaneity and coexistence of contrasting elements within a bounded spatial framework. In short, it emphasizes contradictions in space. This is why it can be considered a model for how to capture Venice more appropriately than drawing on a motif such as the twilight. As an artistic strategy, it potentially allows to account for the marked contradictions pervading the cityscape. Needless to say that, by referencing this painterly style, Pynchon likewise comments on how he himself has chosen to depict Venice. The way in which Venice is rendered textually in Against the Day seems often like a series of variations on chiaroscuro. Venice emerges here as a cityscape that conflates a myriad of contrasts, from light and shadow, clarity and opacity, enchantment and anxiety, sacredness and profanity to virtue and vice. The way in which Venice is envisioned in Pynchon’s novel thus becomes furnished with a dimensional depth that is far from the two-dimensional and maplike bird’s-eye views through which the city is introduced in the novel. Yet, such a richly multifaceted image does not belie an impoverished city life. Venice in Against the Day ultimately appears as a city from which the lifeblood has been drained; a city that, at the dawn of the twentieth century, is almost entirely thriving on the tourist and vice industries, while its local economy has sunk into insignificance. Here Pynchon’s portrayal clearly resonates with the assessment of Venice as “a case of arrested development” (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 2002:  161). This literary Venice may be a city where the rhythms and cycles of everyday life are still tied to natural forces and environmental conditions; a city where fall is announced by the fact that “one day the bora came, and the first wine trains up from Puglia” (582). At the same time, however, the cycle of seasons indicates the increasing heteronomy that affects the city’s residential community. The beginning of fall likewise means that, as “the last of the summer tourists were drifting away, rents had become cheaper” (727). Venice in Against the Day appears as a “tarnished city” (864) and thus, also as a fiercely contested city; it is a powerless city that

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has become vulnerable to foreign political and economic interests, but also a city which residents, both permanent and temporary, artists of all kinds, and old political elites attempt to reclaim and to redirect onto another course. The following section turns toward this struggle, eventually pointing out an important political subtext, which, however, is not so much related to Venice itself as to the production of urban space.

Simulacra, Masks, and the Sound of Venice Most episodes in which Venice figures as a setting in Against the Day take place between 1902 and shortly before the First World War, and within this time frame, especially the date of July 14, 1902 plays a decisive role. On this day, the campanile, that is, the bell tower of the Basilica on Piazza San Marco collapsed—a momentous event, because what was destroyed on that day was not any old building. As an architectural form, the campanile is not only extremely visible and symbolically potent; it is, moreover, located in the center of the city’s most significant public place and has been immortalized, so to speak, by countless depictions. Its destruction thus figures as a symbolical disruption that unequivocally bespeaks the fragility of a seemingly unchanging cityscape. In short, this incident amounts to nothing less than the worst nightmare for any urban marketing strategist.18 That the reconstruction of the campanile also involved an attempt at rehabilitating a timeless “spirit” of Venice is unmistakably indicated in Against the Day. “What stood for a thousand years” (257), we are told, is rebuilt by means of a tedious and time-consuming effort that orchestrates public space “like a form of architectural prayer” (259). Tellingly, the motto guiding the reconstruction is also mentioned here, namely, “dov’era, com’era” (259), which translates to “where it was, as it was.” Davis and Marvin have argued that this “would become both Venice’s defining credo and its eventual prison, setting it on the road to becoming the museum city it is today” (2004:  218). This assessment deserves some clarification. The plan to rebuild the original tower was actually thwarted by the lack of construction plans for the historical campanile. Moreover, the bricks of the original tower had been mostly reduced to useless debris by the collapse. Hence a completely new tower had to be built, which was, however, made to look exactly like the old one. It was therefore a “modern simulacrum Campanile [. . .] installed primarily to keep the illusion of Venice

18.  It has also been suggested that Pynchon’s rendering of the collapsing bell tower echoes the media images of the falling towers of the World Trade Center. In this context, Simonetti notes that “the fall of San Marco’s Campanile in Venice experienced from an airship’s perspective is one of the events most obviously linked with the New York attacks” (2011: 35). The role that such afterimages of 9/11 play in Pynchon’s negotiation of the vulnerability of cities is discussed in more detail in Chapter 8.

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going [. . .] so that the tourists would continue to come” (Davis and Marvin 2004: 218–19). The collapse of the campanile thus also signals a sea change concerning the function of facades and, by implication, of the Venetian cityscape generally. This is as much as to say that a process took hold that profoundly altered the conception of Venice in terms of an artwork. For ages, the profound beauty and harmony of Venice has prompted observers to compare the city to a work of art. Hence, it is probably not an exaggeration to describe Venice as “a space just as highly expressive and significant, just as unique and unified as a painting or a sculpture” (Lefebvre 1991: 73). Nonetheless, it seems that a kind of inversion took place throughout history, concerning the relationship between the city’s aesthetic value and its representative status. This implies a transformation as a result of which the cityscape ceased to express anything but its own beauty, whereas formerly, it served as a medium of expression and as a form of embellishment for another product, namely, the city as a socially produced space. The characterization of Venice as a work of art is therefore hardly tenable. Venice cannot be considered a work of art, as Lefebvre argues, because it lacks “art’s intentionality” (1991: 74). In other words, nobody ever proposed a master plan for Venice. The fact that the St. Marks’s Campanile is rebuilt “where it was, as it was” then points to two things. On the one hand, it indicates how the cityscape is increasingly considered in terms of a commodity that can be sold to visitors as if it were a work of art. The city thus turns into a museum that exhibits itself, so to speak.19 Somewhat polemically one could say that a dead city sells visitors the simulacrum of a living city. The fallaciously beautiful image of Venice is, however, not foisted exclusively on tourists. In principle, it can be distributed worldwide, which is obviously what happened in the course of the twentieth century, at least considering the myriad replicas of individual buildings, landmarks, and whole sections of the urban landscape.20 On the other hand, the

19.  This sentiment is, of course, far from recent. Especially from the early twentieth century on, one finds a host of commentators, who, while revering the cityscape, also lament its increasing lifelessness. A  prominent example is, again, Henry James, who in his Italian Hours perceptively states that the “Venice of today is a vast museum” (1993: 290). 20. This development is unmistakably echoed in Against the Day. Especially in those episodes following the collapse of the Campanile, the novel is pervaded by simulacra of Venice and replicas of the St. Mark’s Campanile. Aside from the already mentioned White City, which was modeled on Venice, the most conspicuous case is probably “a popular facsimile of Venice known as Venedig in Wien” (717). Although the latter example appears to be one of Pynchon’s concoctions, it is actually one of the world’s earliest theme parks. Opened in 1895, “Venedig in Wien” offered visitors to the “Volksprater,” Vienna most famous leisure zone, the experience of a sizeable replica of the island-city.

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question for whom the campanile was actually rebuilt leads to the conclusion that the reconstruction also amounts to a stage play. It was intended to give an already dwindling city population the impression that a civic spirit was being restored, whereas the primary aim was to sustain and fuel the influx of tourists. The latter aspect is repeatedly echoed in Against the Day. The new tower might be a carbon copy of the original, but the sound of the new bell seems to betray the sham. “The texture of the choir of city bells had changed” (259), as we are told. The novel also gives us to understand that not all Venetians come to believe the official story. “It was not quite the Venice older folks remembered. The Campanile had collapsed a few years before [. . .] and stories about its fall had multiplied” (575), as the narrator puts it. Especially in the episodes taking place in the aftermath of the collapse, Venice is portrayed in Against the Day as a realm where mystery increasingly gives way to conspiracy, where imperial agents are “moving among the ancient water mazes like ghosts of earlier times” (575). This is accompanied by a shift into the genre of the spy thriller, which hints at Venice’s history of spying and intelligence gathering. The city’s geographical position is particularly significant in this context. Venice “has occupied a fateful geopolitical cusp ever since it lay at the ancient intersection of Western and Eastern empires” (705), argues the British spy Derrick Theign in the novel. Thus, he adds, it cannot be “an unreasonable place for a listening post” (705). But the question is, again, for whom it might fulfill such a function. The island-city’s role as a global player obviously belongs to the past; yet Venice still occupies an important strategic position for the empires surrounding it. This is reflected in Against the Day as the novel suggests how, in the wake of the campanile’s collapse, the shifting political geography of Europe likewise affects the symbolic landscape of Venice: When the campanile in the Piazza San Marco collapsed, certain politically sensitive Venetian souls felt a strange relocation of power. Somehow, they believed, the campanile of San Francesco della Vigna, a little north of the Arsenale, where the angel visited St. Mark on the turbulent night recorded by Tintoretto, a close double of the one that fell, had come to replace it as a focus of power, as if by a sort of coup in which the Arsenale, and the bleak certainties of military science, had replaced the Palazzo Ducale and its less confident human struggles toward republican virtue. (860)

This passage unmistakably conveys a sense of the eventual decay of public space. It suggests how Piazza San Marco, where once “republican freedom was celebrated in the daily discourse of Venetian citizens” (Cosgrove 1982: 150), is replaced as a symbolic center by the Arsenale shipyard, that is, the city’s foremost military and technological hub. As signs are pointing to war, Venice is thus roped in for the general mobilization. After losing political independence more than a century ago, the utopian project of the city-republic is also symbolically

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laid to rest. The fate of Venice is now controlled from behind “the menacing walls of the Arsenale” (706), hidden from view and inaccessible to the public. The way in which Pynchon’s novel frames this rearrangement of the urban landscape is also telling insofar as it points to tabula rasa planning approaches (which, from the 1920s and 1930s on, gained worldwide currency through the work of modernist architects like Le Corbusier). This planning paradigm is traced back here to early-twentieth-century modernist movements, particularly when it comes to an authoritarian embrace of technology (and, in some cases, warfare) that was supposed to serve as a signpost for how to revive Venice and to keep it from turning into a museum. More precisely, Pynchon’s novel draws on the idea that especially Futurist painters, who came to regard the sumptuous and richly embellished cityscape of Venice as “the antithesis of Modernism” (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 2002: 161), were at times convinced that the city’s grandeur could be restored not so much by preserving as by erasing its heritage. A proponent of this approach that we encounter in Against the Day is the artist Andrea Tancredi, whose “paintings were like explosions” (585), as the narrator tells us. Disgusted with the nostalgic self-image maintained by the city, Tancredi outlines a radically different version of Venice’s future: Someday we’ll tear the place down, and use the rubble to fill in those canals. Take apart the churches, salvage the gold, sell off what’s left to collectors. The new religion will be public hygiene, whose temples will be waterworks and sewage-treatment plants. The deadly sins will be cholera and decadence [. . .]. All these islands will be linked by motorways. Electricity everywhere, anyone who still wants Venetian moonlight will have to visit a museum. Colossal gates out here, all around the Lagoon, for the wind, to keep out sirocco and bora alike. (585)

One might be inclined to take Tancredi’s account for a somewhat hyperbolic, dystopian vision, were it not for the unmistakable echoes of the Italian Futurists, who in fact promoted plans of this sort.21 While also exhibiting some coquetry (not unlike the actual Futurists), Tancredi seems to be earnest that urban renewal is best realized by using the sledgehammer. Yet, the

21.  Tancredi’s vision unmistakably evokes the Futurist manifesto “Against Passéist Venice” (1910). On July 8, 1910, the Futurists Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, and Russolo disseminated hundreds of thousands of copies of this manifesto across Piazza San Marco, throwing them down from the clock tower’s viewing platform. Tancredi’s vision has a striking resemblance to the Futurists’ ideas, who suggested, among other things, “to fill in its [Venice’s] little reeking canals with the ruins from its leprous and crumbling palaces” (67) and to “[l]et the reign of divine Electric Light finally come to liberate Venice from its venal moonlight” (68). See Marinetti et al. (2009: 67–70).

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outcome of this vision of an extremely sterile urban environment, in which all links between society and nature have been cut off, seems more than questionable in that it involves the almost complete erasure of the city as a lived space. It begins with the false assumption that urban renewal could be instigated by imposing a certain conception of space onto another one. The point is, however, that the spatial code of Venice was not preconceived at all. In order to describe the emergence of Venice in terms of a conceived space, one can merely refer to geographical and mythological aspects— “the sea at once dominated and exalted” (1991:  74), as Lefebvre put it succinctly. The spatial code of Venice then rather “grew,” so to speak, over the centuries and out of the interplay between conceived and lived space as both were “mutually reinforcing” (Lefebvre 1991:  74). In terms of a social space, Venice can therefore be described as a product of both labor and trade, whose results were put to highly aesthetic uses, be it the visual exuberance of its built form or the splendor of festivity and ceremony.22 But this Venice is, of course, a relic of bygone times, not least because productive forces have abandoned the city for a long time. It thus seems more than doubtful if the mere implementation of a conception of space derived on Futurist ideas could reanimate the city. In all likelihood it would shoo away the tourists. In Pynchon’s novel, we also come across a rather different attempt at reclaiming Venice as a lived space. The novel relates how a cultural movement tries to revive the fabled theatricality of everyday life, especially its bodily dimension, by subverting the Carnevale, literally a farewell to the flesh. Needless to say that, due to its transformation into a tourist spectacle, this festival has mostly forfeited its subversive potential as a means of temporarily suspending and overturning established hierarchies. “In a tourist culture the Carnevale increasingly is the lie that tells the truth about a city given over to recreation” (2002: 159), as Curtis and Pajaczkowska argue. In Against the Day, we are thus told how near the end of Lent, “the city having slowly regained a maskless condition” (879), a group of conspirators tries to regain the subversive potential of a ritual that has long lost its subversive power: On one of the outer islands in the Lagoon [ . . . ] stood a slowly drowning palazzo. Here at midnight between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday began the secret counter-Carnevale known as Carnesalve, not a farewell but an

22.  Lefevbre also argues that what proved highly beneficial here was that, unlike other wealthy mercantile cities such as Florence, Venice never practiced agriculture and was accordingly never forced to established any kind of relationship between city and rural hinterland, so that surplus production generated by means of overseas trade could be expended right on the spot. See Lefebvre (1991: 76).

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enthusiastic welcome to the flesh in all its promise. As object of desire, as food, as temple, as gateway to conditions beyond immediate knowledge. (880)

It seems questionable, however, if the novel seriously suggests that “Carnesalve” could figure as a way of reviving the city as a lived space. There are a number of hints that cast a doubt on such a conclusion, starting with the venue’s isolation and remoteness from the city center, its imminent sinking, through to the debauchery that apparently remains stuck in the delirium of an eternal present. Instead, it seems that the scenario of the “Carnesalve” implicitly points to a specific idea of self- or personhood. This manifests itself when we take a closer look at the repercussions that the revelry has: Eventually, after a day or two, there would emerge the certainty that there had always existed separately a world in which masks were the real, everyday faces, faces with their own rules of expression, which knew and understand one another—a secret life of Masks. (880)

This passage then seems to suggest another way of thinking about the relationship between the mask and self. It counters the modern notion of a mask as concealing a true identity, with the notion of a mask as producing personhood in the first place. In this regard, James Donald has argued, by drawing on ideas developed earlier by Marcel Mauss, how the mask and person were divorced by the emergence of the modern category of the self. In a slow but dramatic evolution, personhood no longer consists in the mask. It now exists as that abstracted position of ethical apperception which lies behind the public mask. Or rather, it appears to lie behind. It is in fact created retrospectively by the masquerade, yet as if it were not only topologically behind it but temporally prior to the mask. (1999: 102; italics original)

The performers in the “Carnesalve” thus temporarily discern, as they immerse into the “secret life of Masks,” the lost sense of the mask as engendering the self. While “during Carnevale, when civilians were allowed to pretend to be members of the Mask-world” (880), the split between the mask and self remains sustained, it is suspended during “Carnesalve.” By taking up on this notion of the mask, Against the Day eventually points to the performative aspect of everyday life and public discourse in the republican city. As mentioned earlier, persona originally refers to the theatrical mask through which a speaker’s voice passes. In this sense, the person is not furnished with an essence in the “public dramaturgy of citizenship” (Donald 1999: 101– 102). It is only by taking on a role, by putting on a mask, that the citizen enters the public realm. This kind of theatricality thus figures as the medium through which the republican ideal is given voice. In the case of Venice, ritual and

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ceremony were of particular significance to this end. Tuan has argued here that “Renaissance Venice, unlike the United States, lacked a revered text articulating the formal structures and ideals of society; for Venice, the state rituals were the constitution” (1993: 195). The link between mask and republican city in Against the Day then points to the idea that, for all its emphasis on the city’s visuality, the novel eventually suggests that sound takes precedence in Venice. This becomes especially clear in a statement by Andrea Tancredi, which gives us to understand that, although “the thousand-named mists of Venezia” (576) might figure as an impediment to vision, they still function as a medium of sound: “In Venice we have a couple of thousand words for fog—nebbia, nebbietta, foschia, caligo, sfumato— and the speed of sound being a function of the density is different in each. In Venice, space and time, being more dependent on hearing than sight, are actually modulated by fog. So this is a related sequence here. La Velocità del Suono […]” (587). Likewise, Dahlia comes to rely on her sense of hearing in order to orient herself in the city. The narrator tells us that one day she was “no longer steering campo to campo looking up to uncommiserating walls for names of alleyways and bridges,” and instead grows “serenely alert to saline winds and currents and messages of bells” (728). Nonetheless, it seems that, by relating the notion of the mask to the sociospatial paradigm of a republican city, Against the Day does not in any way suggest that one might take Venice as concrete role model for the political organization of a city. The novel’s portrayal of Venice rather urges us to scrutinize other issues such as the interplay between built form and the sense of place as well as communal belonging that a city might provide. Most notably, this idea is suggested in a conversation between Cyprian Latewood and Principe Spongiatosta, a member of the once powerful Venetian aristocracy. Considering his home city merely as “a clouded realm of pedestrian mazes and municipal stillness” (868), the Principe, while ranting against other corrupted republics, still upholds a republican ideal that he wishes to see revived in Venice. One of his remarks seems particularly noteworthy, as he argues that “[s]ome today, often in positions to do great harm, will never come to understand how ‘power’—lo stato—could have been an expression of communal will” (868). If we complement this assessment with a more materialist outlook, it appears quite cognate with an argument that Lefebvre has made, namely, the idea that Venice, at least during its heyday, provides a good example to examine “the relationship between a place built by collective will and collective thought on the one hand, and the productive forces of the period on the other” (1991: 76). Pynchon’s Venice, then, ultimately points to a question that is closely tied to the production of urban space. If a city is actually supposed to function as a space where the collective will is expressed, and where all kinds of different interest groups contribute to producing such a space, then the question is whether a politically independent small-scale city-republic might not be a

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good way of achieving this end. Above all, this seems to be a question of both scale and space and the opportunities for a civil society to fashion this space. Examining the case of Venice will certainly not provide us with definitive answers, but at any rate it compels us to ask this question. The island-city can figure both as role model and as cautionary tale. As long it has not sunk, Venice remains the “city of eternal negotiating” (246).

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Chapter 3 M OV E M E N T S A N D M AC H I N E S

In Chapter 1, I have traced how the Chums of Chance, the adventurous balloonist crew introduced at the very beginning of Against the Day, finally reach their path to self-determination at the end of the novel. Yet, I have bracketed out so far that the Chums also have to pay a price for this achievement, namely, sedentariness, as it were. Although their lives cease to be at the mercy of an anonymous and inscrutable corporation, the Chums still have to accept the fact of being tied down, if not grounded. As their airship grows into a city of its own, the balloonists get married, raise families, and apparently grow mature. Therefore, we no longer hear them singing songs that bear testimony to their self-adulation in terms of a mobile avant-garde, as we did early on in the novel: There’s fellows live in little towns, And those who live on farms, And never seem to wander far From smiles and loving arms— They always know just who they are And how their lives will go— And then there’s boys like us, who say Good-bye before hello. (15) Through lyrics like these, Against the Day clearly draws on a sentiment that has become highly popular in modern Western culture. Seen from this angle, mobility represents nothing less than a cardinal virtue. It implies dynamism, flexibility, freedom, and a willingness to take chances. Sedentariness, in turn, is associated with stasis, rigidity, and reserve, if not the inability to think outside the box. This discrepancy has often been translated into the juxtaposition of city and country. While rural kinship communities are seen as inflexible and immobile, urban society is considered as dynamic and mobile. In short, one could say that “mobility is central to what it is to be modern. A modern citizen is, among other things, a mobile citizen” (Cresswell 2006: 20). Needless to say, this understanding of mobility is not only somewhat romantic but patently myopic as well, not least because it neglects a number

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of controversial aspects. First, it does not take into account that, not very long ago, a great many people, peasant and town populations alike, were highly suspicious of the vagrant life (and it is safe to say that reservations and hostilities against itinerant people are still widespread).1 Besides, mobility has long since been considered an inconvenience by certain modern institutions. For the territorially organized nation-state in particular, mobility is a potential that needs to be contained and regulated. In this sense, to be a modern citizen presupposes, first and foremost, the ability and willingness to take up permanent residence. And although the city has often been depicted as the mobile site par excellence, city administrations do still consider undocumented immigrants, vagrants, and homeless people as a perennial thorn in the side. In other words, mobility can likewise be said to figure as the antipode to “a spatialized ordering principle seen by many to be central to modernity” (Cresswell 2006: 16). This chapter examines how the concept of mobility is negotiated in Against the Day. In a general sense, I understand mobility, in accordance with Cresswell, “as socially produced motion” (2006: 3). As such, it may refer to both physical mobilities and informational flows. I  have already indicated that mobility is a matter of importance in Against the Day, particularly in my discussion of exploration as a mobile form of knowledge production. In what follows I substantiate this claim, taking my cue from the ambivalent meaning of mobility just sketched. The significance of mobility in Against the Day already crystallizes if we glean a few general features of the novel. Consider, for example, the global outlook of Pynchon’s narrated world, its constantly shifting settings, not to mention its sprawling repertoire of peripatetic characters. All of these aspects certainly play a role here, yet the focus of this chapter is on one specific form of mobility, namely, the railroad. Occasional digressions on other forms of mobility will mostly serve to throw the distinctiveness of the railroad into relief. The reasons for singling out the latter are manifold; some of them stem from the character of railroad mobility as such, while others are instead related to the particular role it assumes in Against the Day. What is it then, in general, that makes railroad mobility significant for the formation of modernity? Although not the first means of public transport, the railroad, it has been argued, still “represents the first means of transport [. . .] to form masses” (Benjamin 1999a: 602). As such, railroad mobility involved new codes of conduct among travelers, just as it changed travelers’ consciousness of space and time as well as the modes of perceiving places and landscapes.2 Moreover, the expansion of railroad networks is closely tied to the rise of information technologies and networks. Alongside such means of communication like the telegraph, the railroad has been considered an integral part of the “great

1.  For a historical outline of the figure of the medieval vagrant and its impact on contemporary ways of thinking about mobility, see Cresswell (2011: 239–254). 2. On this issue, see Urry (2008: 101–102).

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acceleration” (Thrift 1996: 265), resulting, most notably, in the establishment of globally standardized clock-time. Precisely scheduled events and journeys, nowadays taken for granted, are difficult to imagine without the railroad. While it also fed into the notion of a shrinking globe (implied in the concept of time-space compression), the railroad likewise engendered the sense of an expanding globe as it made remote regions easily accessible to travelers on an unprecedented scale.3 One could therefore say that “[t]he railway system is central to modernity’s appearance,” because the emergence and massive expansion of railroad networks in the nineteenth century mark “that moment when enormously powerful machines are imbricated within human experience” (Urry 2008: 96, 93). Pynchon clearly echoes the idea that the railroad is a lead character in the story of modernity. “The Juggernaut” (31) is, for example, how the private train of the industrial tycoon and arch villain Scarsdale Vibe is called in Against the Day. The name speaks volumes, not only because Giddens suggested the image of the juggernaut, that is, “a runaway engine of enormous power” (1990: 139), as a metaphor to capture the experience of modernity. It seems that many a character in the novel has boarded this fateful train, unaware of how to steer, let  alone stop it. Indeed, countless characters in Against the Day ride literal trains as well. Nonetheless, the novel evinces only little interest in depicting the subjective experience of rail travel in a realistic manner. This is, however, not primarily because, at the time in which the novel is set, traveling by train had already become a habitual practice for a larger public, and thus might have shed its exceptional phenomenological quality. Revealingly, it is mostly when it comes to the dirty realities of finance, economics, and politics in the context of railroad expansion that Against the Day exhibits a considerable attention to historical detail. On that score, the railroad is portrayed, above all, as an opportunity for capital investment, as an object of financial speculation, as an all but cataclysmic force tearing apart long-lived communities and pristine landscapes, as a catalyst for territorial disputes between seemingly self-destructive power elites and, not least, as a casus belli. Needless to say, its focus on the railroad is also why Against the Day makes for a continuation of Pynchon’s long-standing concern with technology. Here, it is particularly the revisionist take on railroad history that seems to reflect what Pynchon, in a 1984 article, describes as “the Luddite impulse to deny the machine” (1984:  41). Although Pynchon admits that he himself is not completely unsympathetic toward this impulse, it is primarily the concentration of technology in the hands of governments and corporations that seems to give him a headache. “It is for these aggregate bodies of power, wealth, and authority that Pynchon reserves his greatest ire and suspicion, rather than for technology itself ” (2002: 202), as Conte characterizes the novelist’s Luddism.4 3. See, for example, Thrift (1996: 265) and Urry (2008: 100). 4. For an exemplary discussion of Pynchon’s Luddism, see Conte (2002: 199–204).

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Accordingly, this chapter underscores that, for all its attention to the railroad as a historical technology, something else is likewise at stake in Against the Day. For Pynchon eventually prompts us to grasp his narrative engagement with the railroad as a figurative vehicle in itself. This chapter, then, also considers how, by deploying the railroad as an emblematic figuration, Pynchon grapples with what Castells has described in terms of a “space of flows”, that is, the “spatial form characteristic of social practices that dominate and shape the network society” (2010:  442). Moreover, this chapter draws attention to how railroad expansion, especially in the context of the United States, serves in Pynchon’s novel as a cipher for the rise of corporate America. As such, this chapter is also a preliminary exploration of issues that later chapters look at more closely. For one thing, the formation of corporate capitalism (which was not least propelled by railroad expansion) left a visible imprint on urban development and planning—an aspect that Chapter 4 examines in greater detail. Moreover, the railroad was instrumental in altering established spatial relations between city and country. The traditional model of a city-hinterland relationship increasingly gave way to rail-connected networks between the metropolitan region and a scattered plurality of distant urban colonies. The wider implications of this shift, especially when it comes to processes of geographical development and economic restructuring, will then be discussed in Chapter 5.

The Time and Space of the Railroad Historically, the emergence of railroad mobility has instigated a love of speed. “The mechanization of movement through the railway initiates the valuation of speed” (2008: 99), as Urry argues. To the present day, the credo of rail travel seems to be “the faster, the better,” and since the early days of the steam locomotive, train velocities have increased about tenfold. The promise of more speed was, and certainly still is, often reason enough for new railroad construction. It has been argued here that “the dream of speed” spawned by the railroad is closely linked to “the notion that journey time is dead time” (2008: 99). This implies that rail travel is not so much about the journey itself; it is about efficient transport, about getting from A to B as fast as possible. As a result of the emergence of the railroad, the phenomenon of time-space compression is said to have occurred. Hence geographical distance becomes less of an impediment to travel, as remote places are seemingly brought closer to each other. In Against the Day, we find such considerations partly reflected, however, not only on a thematical level but, to some degree, also by formal and stylistic aspects. In the course of the novel, Pynchon frequently vaults the reader from one corner of the globe to another. However, in most cases, a reference to a train connection suffices to make us draw an imaginary line between two far-flung places. Consider the example of Dahlia Rideout, who travels from Telluride in Colorado to New  York. Her journey covers a distance of about

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2,000 miles, which, in the early twentieth century, must have taken more than a week (and which, at that time, would certainly have provided enough material for an entire novel). In Against the Day, the journey is treated in roughly half a page. This is how the first major section to the interchange station in Chicago is related: On the train trip east, Dally kept pretty much to herself, there being nothing, as she quickly learned, quite like the rails these days for cowboy poets, who along with confidence men, R-girls, and purse-thieves, could be encountered on every train west of Chicago. They rode in the parlor cars marveling hour on hour at everything that passed, introducing themselves as “Raoul” or “Sebastian,” chatting up young prairie wives traveling to or from husbands whose names seldom got mentioned. In the velvet-trimmed observation and dining cars everywhere, private and public, rolling and still, these birds smothered appetites and curdled stomachs. Coffee grew ice cold in the cup. Badmen out for mischief flinched, turned, and strode away, sleep crept like an irresistible gas, and those Wild West poets just went raving on. (336)

This account of Dahlia’s journey is telling in a number of ways. To some extent, the passage seems to capture the subjective experience of railroad mobility as it touches upon the notion of the railway compartment as the site of a new and extraordinary kind of sociability, characterized by anonymity and both proximity and distance between travelers in a confined space. At the same time, the passage humorously incorporates the slightly hackneyed set piece of the train compartment as a playground for rogues and small-time criminals. Yet, one would be clearly misguided to understand this passage as an attempt to echo the subjective experience of railroad mobility in a realistic manner. Although the text briefly alludes to the idea of a predominantly visual perception of landscape fostered by rail travel (“marveling hour on hour at everything that passed”), there is a complete absence of narrative elements that describe the passing scenery (as the entire passage rather evokes a cinematic time-lapse sequence). This seems less odd, however, considering that the narrative is obviously focalized through the consciousness of Dahlia, who, having spent a long period in her childhood perambulating the Midwest, apparently knows the landscape well. Somewhat ironically, then, for Dahlia, the duration of the train journey practically amounts to nothing but dead time, regardless of the increase in velocity provided by the railroad. This passage then pits the notion of the shrinking globe and the corresponding regime of clock-time implied in the “dream of speed” against the experience of lived time. In all objectivity, the journey time diminishes as a result of railroad mobility; nonetheless, from an experiential perspective, it increases exponentially. There is, however, another significant dimension to this scenario, which manifests itself when we compare the depiction of the train journey to how Dahlia’s earlier perception of the landscape is portrayed in Against the Day.

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Before embarking on the eastbound train, Dahlia and her foster-father, the itinerant craftsman and photographer Merle Rideout, roam about the Midwest in a horse-drawn carriage, from day to day, in “a sort of directionless drift” (63), always on the lookout for casual work in order “to get them through a couple of more meals” (72). One could therefore say that their mobility constitutes a whole way of life, and thus figures as the very antithesis to destination-oriented rail travel.5 Accordingly, the mobility provided by the carriage, which serves both as a means of transport and as a dwelling place, is tied to a profoundly different way of perceiving the environment, namely, to a situated and embodied mode of perception, which is not limited to vision. The following quote merely represents a tiny snippet of the vivid and profuse landscape descriptions that the novel provides in the context of Dahlia’s wayfaring life in the Midwest: Planted rows went turning past like spokes one by one as they ranged the roads. [ . . . ] Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life passing in such high turbulence, too much to see, all clamoring to have its way. Leaves sawtooth, spade-shaped, long and thin, blunt-fingered, downy and veined, oiled and dusty with the day—flowers in bells and clusters, purple and white or yellow as butter, star-shaped ferns in the wet and dark places, millions of green veilings before the bridal secrets in the moss and under the deadfalls, went on by the wheels creaking and struck by rocks in the ruts, sparks visible only in what shadow it might pass over. (70)

Although this passage clearly accentuates the visual, it relies on anything but the detached and disembodied vision of landscape engendered by railroad travel, that is, landscape as conceived through “a framed window providing a swiftly changing series of panoramic impressions” (Urry 2008: 102). Contemplated at a slow pace from the horse-drawn carriage, as if in slow motion, the landscape instead constitutes a single and unified field of vision, which is, more importantly, composed of a myriad of microscopical details. The perceptual intensity of the exuberant landscape is also reinforced by an acoustic and a tactile dimension (and later on, by an olfactory one when the novel relates how Merle takes a shot at wildcrafting). Put another way, locomotion and perception are, unlike in the case of rail travel, are intimately tied to each other in this scenario. This is further underscored by a metaphor (“like spokes one by one”), suggesting that, although the landscape is marked by the traces of cultivation, the dynamic and immersive perception on board the carriage still allows it to symbolically

5.  Despite the temporary sociability characterizing the railway compartment, one can still argue that rail travel belongs to a category of mobility that is ultimately detached from the realm of the quotidian, that it represents “not so much a development along a way of life as a carrying across, from location to location” (Ingold 2007:  25; italics original).

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integrate the rectilinear notches of agriculture into the landscape. Under the conditions of this kind of wayfaring mobility, the Midwestern landscape thus emerges as “unbroken country” (74). To return to the railroad, we can now clarify how the relationship between the railroad and the countryside is fleshed out in Against the Day. One could say that the plains of the Midwest figure as a “smooth space” that the expanding railroad network increasingly dissects and divides, thus eventually transforming it into a “striated space.”6 In other words, the railroad is portrayed as an instrument for straightening and converting a fuzzy meshwork of trails, paths, and trajectories into a structural grid of point-to-point connections. This is why, in the context of traveling by a horse-drawn carriage, the countryside is likened in the novel to a sea, to “a smooth space par excellence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 479). In Against the Day, the landscape of the Midwest is therefore described as “the Inner American Sea, where the chickens schooled like herring, and hogs and heifers foraged and browsed like groupers and codfish” (71). While relating the carriage’s movements, Pynchon’s narrator thus traces a nomadic trajectory, as it were. This implies a kind of movement that does not primarily follow fixed points, because what distinguishes smooth space is that “points are subordinated to the trajectory” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 478). The main function of the line constituted by the railroad, on the other hand, is to establish the most efficient route, that is, a decidedly rational linkage, between origin and destination points. In the case of Dahlia’s train ride to the Atlantic seaboard, this line remains only implicit, but elsewhere in Against the Day its character is reflected more distinctly. Hence the straight line is without doubt what rail construction, as a rule, endeavors to achieve, notwithstanding that railway lines are hardly ever implemented as the most direct route between two places.7 Unless in the case of accidents, delays, or other malfunctions, railroad mobility thus represents a highly regular and ultimately predictable form of movement. After all, rail travel relies on an extremely rigid and inflexible kind of infrastructure, which is reflected, perhaps most notably, by the fact that a train route cannot be altered spontaneously. One could therefore say that the “dream of speed” embodied by the railroad can only be realized at the cost of the freedom of choice. Once on board a train, the number of places where one could potentially disembark diminishes

6. For a detailed discussion of the concepts of smooth and striated space, see Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 474–500). 7.  Even in cases where a railroad constitutes a straight line, it often remains all but invisible, or only discernible on maps or construction plans. A case in point is a railway tunnel driven through a mountain range, where physical space figures as nothing but an obstacle through which the railroad forcefully cuts a swath. In this context, Against the Day (652–660) relates the construction of railroad tunnels through the Austrian Alps, putting special emphasis on the severe working conditions.

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continually. To stress this point, the train journey is often contrasted in Against the Day with the depiction of actual seafaring. Unmooring, we are told, implies entering a “non-human vastness” (506) and “an unloosening of fate as the unknown and perhaps the uncreated begins to make its appearance ahead and astern” (821). Naturally, both railroad and seafaring mobility rely on technological means, as they require a mechanical vehicle to facilitate movement in the first place. The fundamental difference between both forms of mobility, thus, stems from the particular kind of infrastructure. Indeed, seafaring is also about direct connections between ports, but it still can be said to involve, especially during the moment of departure, “a denial of inevitability” (821; italics original), whereas the railroad leaves no leeway for aimless drift.

The American Railroad Network As already indicated, the railroad is about establishing a straight line, and, if necessary, any kind of obstacle will be swept out of the way for this purpose. Historically, even human settlements had to disappear off the face of the earth in case they stood in the way of railroad construction. Especially in the wake of the mid-nineteenth-century “railway mania,” which took hold of both Europe and the United States, it was no exception that construction involved the mass displacement of people.8 This is not to say that the expansion of the railroad network did not also entail the founding of new towns or the consolidation of already existing conurbations. However that may be, the enormous increase in construction was, in many cases, hardly in compliance with the real demand for railroad lines. Aggressively promoted by corporate interests, at times government-sponsored and often proceeding heedless of the lives of locals, the emergence of the railroad system was thus also inextricably bound up with an anti-railroad sentiment. The notion of the railroad as a relentless force, which rips apart landscapes and communities like a butcher’s knife and therefore calls for resistance, is unmistakably echoed in Against the Day, not least in the context of the United States.9 Early in the novel, as the anarchist dynamiters Webb and Veikko debate

8. See Shaw and Docherty (2009: 93). 9.  While railroad construction was crucial as a means of nation-building in both Europe and the United States, there were also significant differences between the continents. In many European countries railroad networks were often thoroughly planned by governments, whereas construction in America generally took place with less or without any state intervention. The fact that the role of the US government was mostly restricted to financing, gave large corporations a considerable amount of free play. As a result, railroad building in America at times also turned out be more extensive, competitive and rampant. This is an aspect that I will return to later in this chapter.

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over how reasonable a target a railroad line might be, Webb’s conclusion is fairly unambiguous: [T]he railroad had always been the enemy, going back generations. Farmers, stockmen, buffalo-hunting Indians, track-laying Chinamen, passengers in train wrecks, whoever you were out here, sooner or later you had some bad history with the railroad. (85)

It seems that the anarchist’s scorn mainly figures in the novel as part of a counter-rhetoric, aimed at challenging a hegemonic account that apotheosizes railroad expansion as the glorious outcome of progress and as an emblem of national pride. Pynchon’s novel thus attacks a narrative that utterly disregards the casualties and blatant injustices such as mass displacement and the systematic exploitation of migrant labor that were part and parcel of railroad construction in the United States. In this context, especially with regard to the elaborate public celebrations after the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, Verstraete has argued: Competition, speed, massive corruption, the huge personal profit of local politicians functioning as national entrepreneurs, together with the exploitation of cheap Chinese coolie-labor at a time the country was waging a war over the abolishment of slavery, were the main ingredients of what has become a classic story of dubious but nevertheless ‘heroic’ white male ingenuity in California history. (2002: 148)

Voices similar to those of the anarchists are featured in Against the Day on a number of occasions. Although the novel is set at a time when the aspiration after prestigious national projects such as the First Transcontinental Railroad was slightly waning, it is apparent that the railroad business still had a determining influence on the nation’s fate during the 1890s. At one point, the novel relates how Frank Traverse gets into a debate with the native El Espinero, who “was not thinking too kindly of the railways, which like most of his people he hated for its destruction of the land, and what had once grown and lived there” (930). This sets Frank thinking, and eventually he admits to himself: Who at some point hadn’t come to hate the railroad? It penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak citydwellers with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love. (930)

Succinctly encapsulating a widespread anti-railroad sentiment, Frank’s indictment bespeaks, moreover, an anticorporatism that is central to the novel’s

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negotiation of the American railroad. For the extract also introduces another key historical and politico-economic affair that framed a number of labor conflicts and power struggles in the late nineteenth century, namely, the Panic of 1893 and the ensuing economic depression, that is, “the man-made bad times that had come upon [. . .] the nation” (70), as Pynchon’s narrator puts it. Just as the earlier Panic of 1873, the financial crisis beginning in 1893 has been considered, among other things, a result of massive railroad speculation and overbuilding during the previous decade.10 However, an important prerequisite for this “railroad bubble” to emerge in the first place was a laissez-faire capitalism that gave corporations carte blanche for almost unbridled construction and speculation. There is, then, a touch of grim irony to the fact that it was also corporate wealth that helped to avert state bankruptcy in the wake of the crisis.11 In Against the Day, the railroad thus epitomizes an overly conspicuous symbol of corporate power. This aspect is once again underscored by providing the depiction of an aerial view. As the Chums of Chance fly over Russian territory, the novel relates how the balloonists come to behold the Trans-Siberian railway. The sight of the world’s longest railroad line prompts Chick Counterfly to make the following comment: “From a high enough altitude [. . .] indeed that great project appears almost like a living organism, one dares to say a conscious one, with needs and plans of its own” (259). A trope that occurs repeatedly in Pynchon’s novel, the railroad network as a living organism is of particular relevance in the case of the United States. This transpires, above all, in the context of a discussion taking place in a fictional “Explorers’ Club.” At some point, one of the debaters reflects on the possibility of the human race being subordinated to another species: “Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what’s the next step— human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood— a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is” (147–148). It has been suggested that this passage hints at a particular legal issue concerning the taxation of railroad properties that was brought before court in the 1880s. Narkunas has argued that the novel might be echoing “the 1886 Supreme Court decision of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which took the Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection of freed slaves and

10.  The primary cause of the crisis has been routinely linked to the 1880s silver boom. However, railroad construction was inextricably linked to silver mining enterprises, since a large part of the railroad lines constructed during the 1880s were intended to serve mining settlements. 11.  Since the Treasury’s gold reserves were almost depleted at the time of crisis, the US government appealed to the financial magnate J. P. Morgan for a loan of around $ 65  million in gold. For a detailed discussion of these proceedings in the wake of the Panic of 1893, see Lears (2009: 167–221).

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conferred it on to corporations” (2011: 246). In the wake of this court ruling, corporations came to enjoy legal protection to an extent that made them equal to human beings.12 The fact that corporate enterprises became equipped with the status of personhood underscores that, while they had already occupied an almost matchlessly powerful position within the national economy, corporations henceforth came to “exercise governmentality; they have given themselves the right to govern and suggest a raison d’etat that puts their economic interests in line with that of the sovereign nation-state” (Narkunas 2011: 246). The concept of the corporation as a separate legal person also implies that, even though business decisions are ultimately still made by natural persons, the latter usually assume only limited liability. Based on this idea, Against the Day suggests that an utter loss of scale and perspective took hold of railroad investment in the United States, eventually leading to the kind of frenzied speculation mentioned earlier. Accordingly, statements by railroad magnates at times come to sound as if toy and not real trains are at stake in the railroad business. Take, for example, Scarsdale Vibe, who mentions, not without some admiration, a “fellow back in New Jersey [ . . . ] who collects railroads. Not just the rolling stock, mind, but stations, sheds, rails, yards, personnel, the whole shebang” (32). Faced with incredulity by his interlocutor, Vibe then merely retorts: “You have to have some idea of the idle money out here” (32). Through the eyes of railroad tycoons like Vibe, the uninterrupted expansion of railroad lines around the globe unfolds like a law of nature. Investment in the railroad is then basically about grabbing the biggest slice of the pie. Accordingly, as Vibe hears about the Arctic expedition, which the railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman as a matter of fact organized in 1899, the only conclusion he can arrive at is that his rival’s endeavor is “certainly suggesting a scheme for rail link across the Bering Strait, Alaska to Siberia, hooking on into the Trans-Sib, and from there God knows” (131). Hence Vibe himself likewise sets up an expedition team, which he sends to the Arctic in order to explore what he calls “the railworthiness of the terrain” (130). The term “railworthiness” figures in Against the Day as a catchword intertwining the conquest of space by means of geographical exploration with the consolidation of corporate power through railroad expansion. This nexus apparently converges in a geographical imagination that reduces the terrestrial globe to an economic resource, while crudely ignoring the sense of the earth as a dwelling place for living beings.13

12.  The significance of this court decision has also been taken up by a range of historians and critics of American corporate capitalism. Lears, for example, writes with regard to this particular case that “[w]hat began as a measure to confer rights on exslaves became a boon for big business” (2009: 88). 13. The term could likewise figure as an allusion to the notion of credit worthiness. In this sense, one could say that, for a railroad tycoon like Vibe, the earth figures as potential debtor, which is required to prove that its terrain is worthy of railroad development.

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The European Railroad Network In Against the Day, we reencounter the notion of “railworthiness” and its corresponding way of imagining the globe in connection with an unscrupulous German professor called Joachim Werfner. We are given to understand that “lives by the trainload were said to hang on his every pause for breath” (683). Eventually we are told by a British professor called Renfrew, who represents both Werfner’s rival and his bilocational double, that for the German academic, “the primary geography of the planet is the rails, obeying their own necessity, interconnections, places chosen and bypassed, centers and radiations therefrom, grades possible and impossible, how linked by canals, crossed by tunnels and bridges either in place or someday to be, capital made material […]” (242). It seems that, slightly rephrased, and perhaps in a less scientific idiom, this statement could have been likewise issued by an American railroad tycoon. Despite the kind of technological-scientific determinism that Werfner’s perspective is suffused with, the underlying conception of the earth seems remarkably cognate. The globe is looked upon as if it were a board game, in which trains and railroad lines figure as playing pieces. However, it is important to note that Werfner, who “styles himself the prophet of Eisenbahntüchtigkeit, or railworthiness” (242), acts as an advisor for the German Empire. As already indicated, railroad expansion in Europe followed a rather different pattern than it did in the United States; the main difference being that construction was far more regulated and controlled by state authorities. Although likewise promoted as a form of civil and individual mobility, especially in the context of a flourishing trans-European tourist market, national and military interests determined the formation of the railroad network to a considerable degree. In Europe, railroad companies thus never gained a foothold comparable to their monopoly position in the United States.14 In order to grasp the idiosyncrasy of the European railroad network, we thus have to consider it within a larger geographical framework and in relation to certain historico-political contexts. The contours of such a framework are indicated in Against the Day when we are told how Kit Traverse arrives in mainland Europe after voyaging on a steamer across the Atlantic. Kit is clearly one of the characters in the novel who is constantly on the move, as it were, sometimes using an opportunity, sometimes out of necessity. “Some always had homes to return, Kit had departure gates, piers, turnstiles, institutional doorways” (331), as the narrator tells us. After a brief sojourn in the Belgian harbor town of Ostend, Kit is about to board an eastbound train. Since it is his first stay in

14.  It has been pointed out that in cases where railroad networks were not entirely state-operated, national administrations granted concessions for railroad construction to companies, if anything, on a regional basis. See Shaw and Docherty (2009: 92).

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Europe, he acquaints himself with the continental railroad network and reaches the following conclusion: At the Ostende-Ville station, Kit had a moment—soon dissipated in purposeful noise and coal-smoke [. . .] in which he glimpsed how Ostend really might not be simply another pleasure-resort for people with too much money, but the western anchor of a continental system that happened to include the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian, the Berlin-to-Baghdad, and so on in steel proliferation across the World-Island. (567)

Hence Kit intuits that the Central European railroad network is merely a subsystem within a far more extensive infrastructural formation that, by all appearances, covers the whole Eurasian landmass. The terminology by means of which the narrator phrases Kit’s insight into the “Imperium of Steam” (567) is telling here. The term “World-Island” in particular is a clear reference to a concept proposed by the British geographer Halford Mackinder in 1904, which remained influential throughout the twentieth century, not least in the context of Cold War politics. According to Mackinder, the “World-Island,” which comprises the bulk of the Eurasian landmass, represents the central political stage of the world. Moreover, the World-Island is said to accommodate the so-called Heartland, a vast steppe region in Inner Asia that figures as the most important global geostrategic region. Protected by Arctic wastes, mountain ranges and deserts, the Heartland has served nomadic people throughout history as a singularly advantageous base camp and retreat, as Mackinder argues. He also contends that the emergence and the massive expansion of the railroad system in the course of the nineteenth century has put the Heartland back on the map of the Great Powers.15 Hence, by repeatedly associating the European rail system with the notion of the World-Island, Against the Day underlines how the formation of the supposedly public form of mobility provided by the railroad was also shaped, to a considerable degree, by geopolitical deliberations. Pynchon’s depiction of early-twentieth-century European railroad mobility, thus, has to be considered within the context of a number of lingering imperial conflicts. Unlike in the case of the United States, his novel portrays the European railroad network as determined, not so much by corporate, as by state and military interests. This is also why Professor Werfner regards the railroad

15.  The significance of railroad mobility for the concept of the Heartland is quite evident. Mackinder has reasoned, for example, that “trans-continental railways are now transmuting the conditions of land-power” and “directly replace horse and camel mobility, the road stage of development having here been omitted” (1904: 434). Elsewhere he states that “the Trans-Siberian railway is still a single and precarious line of communication, but the century will not be old before all Asia is covered with railways” (434). See Mackinder (1904: 421–437).

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as a means of distributing “flows of power as well, expressed, for example, in massive troop movements” (242). Yet, both European and American railroad mobility have in common here that the promise of greater individual freedom of movement made by expanding railroad systems are constrained and all too frequently thwarted by impersonal forces. Just like a number of other perpetual wayfarers in Against the Day, Kit Traverse assumes that, by boarding a train like the Orient-Express, “one might, for comfortably less than two hundred francs, be hurled into the East” (567). However, the terms on which he can only do so are obviously not up to him. In other words, railroad mobility is depicted as uncoupled from the choices an individual makes, because the geography underlying this mobility is, first and foremost, determined by dominant political and economic interests. With regard to the European railroad network, Against the Day thus shows a considerable attention to the fierce competition for strategically advantageous railroad lines that took place between competing imperial powers and alliances in the wake of the Eastern Question. Two historico-political affairs prior to the First World War are of particular importance in this context. The first one concerns the rivalry between the German and the British empires about obtaining a concession from the Ottoman Empire in order to build a railroad line to Baghdad, which would facilitate a trade link to the Persian Gulf.16 The second one involves the annexation of Bosnia by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1908, which implied that, given the political demise of the Ottoman Empire at that time, Austro-Hungary could one day, perhaps, establish a railroad connection to the Aegean Sea. Both historical episodes and their political and economic implications figure prominently in Against the Day, especially in the later episodes set in the Balkans. Here the novel distinctly highlights the role that both these affairs played in paving the way for the outbreak of the war. Concerning this issue, Narkunas has argued that [t]he specter of World War I haunts the entire text because it is the “illogical” outcome of all this rationalization via the railroad: it was Austro-Hungarian aspirations for a railroad to monopolize trade in the area that set in motion the events leading to war. (2011: 248)

The novel’s rendering of railroad mobility then ultimately reflects the fundamental ambivalence intrinsic to mobility in the modern age. Indeed, the railroad can be said to have resulted, to some extent, in a democratization of

16.  Since the British Empire considered the Middle East as its own sphere of influence, it was more than apprehensive that the German Empire would obtain the concession. Eventually, however, Germany won the bid, and the construction of the Baghdad Railway began in 1903 but took more than thirty years to complete. For a detailed discussion of the negotiations over the railroad concession, see McMeekin (2010: 32–53).

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mobility in that it made an essentially convenient means of transportation accessible to broader strata of society. This idea becomes abundantly clear almost every time a character in the storyworld of Against the Day boards a train, only to be transported with ease to some remote place before you know it. What is more, every now and then individuals even manage to squeeze their own personal profit from the railroad mania.17 Then again, the novel suggests all the more emphatically that the notion of unhampered mobility facilitated by means of transportation such as the railroad is ultimately unattainable, regardless of whether the terms of such mobility are prescribed by corporate or state interests. The railroad merely constitutes a transportation infrastructure and, as such, it can be deployed to move goods and people, be it civilians or military personnel. Still, the latter aspect does not only pertain to the railroad. In principle, the majority of transportation systems entails, in some form or another, the potential for both civil and military use, even those that are habitually associated with leisure mobility. This transpires on a number of occasions, in the novel, most notably, however, in a scenario that relates how the ocean liner S.S. Stupendica reveals “her latent identity as the battleship S.M.S. Emperor Maximilian” (515), thus reminding us of how effortlessly passenger vessels have been converted into troopships in times of war. Pynchon likewise stresses here that the currency of basically all kinds of mobility remains speed; hence the importance of technological innovations such as the invention of the internal combustion engine. In this context, the novel features, for instance, the “Rapid Unit for Shadowing and Harassment” (708) or R.U.S.H., that is, “a small international crew of motorcyclists, fast and nimble enough to stay ahead of the game” (708). This only one of the examples in Against the Day, which unmistakably highlight how physical mobility, once restricted to functioning either as a means of transportation or as an end in itself, is increasingly put into the service of an emergent informational economy.

Mobility and the Space of Flows Rail travel is obviously a ubiquitous phenomenon in Against the Day. Most characters in the novel at some point hop on a train, they know how to behave and, as we have seen, who to avoid on board a train. In Pynchon’s storyworld, railroad mobility has apparently become an integral part of everyday life, which

17.  In Against the Day there are a number of passages depicting how individuals aspire to and at times actually manage to make a tiny fortune with railroad bonds. One example revolves around a couple who receive financial compensation after being stuck in a Ferris wheel for several hours and subsequently “[p]ut the money into Chinese Turkestan railway shares and never looked back” (503).

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is therefore “run more and more by train schedules” (808). While the subjective experience of the actual train journey mostly remains a narrative void in the novel, there are exceptions to the rule as well. Take, for example, again Kit Traverse, whose impressions of the landscape during a protracted train journey on the Trans-Caspian Railroad to Inner Asia are described at some length in the text. As a rail traveler, however, this character also steps out of line. The narrator tells us that “people would ask Kit why he hadn’t brought along a hand camera” (751). Soon after, we learn that this is mainly because Kit is on the run, which apparently does not allow him “to enjoy the usual tourist’s suspension of disbelief ” (942) during a train journey. Yet, just as he was able to link the outline of the European rail network to the notion of the World-Island, Kit’s mathematical literacy seems to put him in a position to recognize something else. Eventually we are told: What he found memorable as he proceeded was less the scenery than a sort of railroad-metaphysics, as he stood between carriages, out in the wind, facing first one side, then the other, two radically different pieces of country. Plains flowed by right to left, mountains left to right, two opposite flows, each borne by the unimaginable mass of the entire visible world, each flowing at the speed of the train, an ongoing collision in silence. (751–752)

This passage offers itself to two different yet related readings. First, it can be approached via Kit’s biography. The reason that Kit is on board the train is after all his expulsion from Göttingen, where he went in order to study. What allowed him to go abroad in the first place was, however, funding provided by Scarsdale Vibe. The railroad tycoon, who years ago had ordered the murder of Kit’s father, the anarchist Webb Traverse, and financed Kit’s sojourn, intent on controlling him from a distance. Eventually, after learning that Vibe has stopped the cash flow, Kit fears that he might have become dispensable for the industrialist, perhaps even to the point that his life might be at stake. Hence, after a failed attempt at killing Vibe in Venice, Kit sets out to Inner Asia, but this time on behalf of the T.W.I.T., a Pythagorean sect, which means that he is once more at the mercy of a third party. Thus, one of the “flows” mentioned in the passage quoted earlier, figures as Kit’s physical mobility that is fueled by both fear and desire. Kit is yet again on the move, but ultimately, he has to acknowledge that his mobility is, and has been all along, contingent upon external flows of money and power, symbolized by the opposite flow along the railroad line. In other words, Kit ultimately realizes what he earlier on could only surmise, namely, that he figures as a pawn in a game whose rules he can maybe understand but which he cannot change. However, this passage can also be read in more general terms, for Kit’s notion of a “railroad metaphysics” likewise seems to point to “the prevalence of the logic of the space of flows over the space of places” (Castells 2002: 132). Indeed, the trajectory of Kit’s mobility proceeds along and within the space of places,

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that is, “the predominant space of experience, of everyday life” (2002: 132). Yet, Kit as well realizes on the train to Inner Asia in how far the experience of his physical mobility has been determined by the space of flows, which increasingly comes to dominate the space of places, particularly by means of information technologies. There is plenty of textual evidence which underpins this reading. Before going to Germany, Kit studied at Yale, which was likewise made possible by Vibe’s funding. Their agreement was confirmed by Vibe via telegraph from New York, while Kit was still in Colorado. Foley Walker, Vibe’s sidekick, had told Kit afterward that the money will “be there tomorrow at the Bank of Colorado Springs, made out to you personally” (102). By the same token, we are told that, while studying in Yale, he was constantly monitored by Vibe’s employees, “as if Kit were a species of investment, clues to whose future performance could be gathered only through minute-to-minute surveillance” (319). Later in Göttingen, the situation is not that different, only the geographical distance has increased, which is, however, only a miniscule barrier that Vibe’s henchmen can easily overcome by means of communicating via transatlantic telegraph cable.18 There are similar cases in Against the Day where characters experience how the space of flows increasingly dominates the space of places. This brings me back to the Chums of Chance, who, as already mentioned, often pride themselves on their airborne mobility. Due to their occupation, however, at times they cannot avoid interfering “in the affairs of the ‘groundhogs’ ” (1021). On the other hand, the Chums manifest an overt discontent about their submission to an anonymous corporation, “to whatever pyramid of offices might be towering in the mists above” (397). One could therefore say that the balloonists are literally floating between the space of flows and the space of places. This manifests itself, as we are told at one point, in how the Chums’ employers customarily get in touch with them: From time to time, messages arrived from Hierarchy via the usual pigeons and spiritualists, rocks through windows, blindfolded couriers reciting from memory, undersea cable, overland telegraph, lately by the syntonic wireless. (397)

This passage underscores that, although the space of flows is determining the balloonists’ mobility considerably, there are still points of contact to the space of places, even if the Chums themselves do not inhabit a place as such. If there is something which could be said to act as a place for the Chums, that is, as

18. It is important to note that the domination effected by the space of flows “is not purely structural. It is enacted, indeed conceived, decided, and implemented by social actors” (Castells 2010: 445). In Against the Day, this kind of dominance is clearly given a face, namely, through the vivid characterization of industrial tycoon Scarsdale Vibe.

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“a locale whose form, function, and meaning [.  . .] are contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity” (Castells 2002:  132), this would probably be their airship. But, as we have seen in Chapter  1, the Chums first have to resolve their subjection to the space of flows so as to convert their vehicle into an actual place. The emergence of the space of flows is commonly associated with the revolution in information technology that took place in the 1970s and the ensuing rise of the so-called network society. It might seem premature of to speak of a network society in the context of the historical scenarios discussed in this chapter. Nonetheless, the way in which Against the Day negotiates railroad mobility points to certain structural analogies between the spatial logic of an early-twentieth-century industrial capitalism and a late-twentieth-century informational capitalism, especially when it comes to structures of domination. While railroad networks primarily function as transportation infrastructures allowing the movement of people and goods, it is also important to note that the operation and coordination of railroad networks was contingent upon the emergence of information technologies such as telegraphy. This is one of the key factors that makes the railroad system somewhat cognate to contemporary informational networks.19 Yet, as we have seen, the railroad system can also marginalize subjects, and it can bring about the mass displacement of people. Another issue that is echoed in Against the Day is that the access to the railroad system is unevenly distributed and that the control over the railroad ultimately lies in the hands of corporations and states. Of course, we also come across eminently privileged characters in the novel, such as the moneyed Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, who is at liberty to board trains at her convenience, “traveling hot spring to spring in search of eternal youth” (368). At the further end, however, there are characters who succeed in saving themselves from getting intoxicated by the dream of freedom and speed. Consider, for example, Yashmeen Halfcourt who boards a train from Vienna to Trieste. Yashmeen is exiled from the city, as it were, because everyday life has become increasingly intolerable for her due to a growing anti-Semitism and also because she is shadowed and threatened by various intelligence agencies. In other words, Yashmeen can hardly be said to leave Vienna by her own accord, and it seems that being exiled also prompts her to put her conception of railroad mobility into perspective:

19.  This analogy can be further illustrated, for example, by scrutinizing a map of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the progenitor of the Internet, developed by the US Department of Defense in the late 1960s, which has a striking resemblance to a map of railroad connections. It hardly needs mentioning that the ARPANET also plays an important role in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009) and that the issue of its development in the context of Cold War politics is also revisited in his latest novel Bleeding Edge (2013).

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Leaving the Südbahn [sic], she gazed backward at iron convergences and receding signal-lamps. Outward and visible metaphor, she thought, for the complete ensemble of “free choices” that define the course of a human life. A new switching point every few seconds, sometimes seen, sometimes traveled over invisibly and irrevocably. From on board the train one can stand and look back, and watch it all flowing away, shining, as if always meant to be. (811)

Although this scenario is firmly grounded in a specific historical context, it once again suggests how Pynchon’s rendering of the railroad obliquely alludes to latter-day informational mobility. Especially the term “switching point,” which is also used in the field of telecommunications, indicates that we might have to draw a parallel to telephone and computer networks. The novel thus ultimately highlights that the optimism with which mobile technologies are often met should perhaps be complemented by some skepticism for good measure. Likewise, the “solutionism” based on which technological developments are frequently promoted seems to call for counter-narratives directing our attention to the ways in which technologies make certain things possible and others not. Such technologies are indeed rich in potential, which can be used, however, to both emancipatory and authoritarian ends, and accordingly they emerge as fiercely contested in Pynchon’s novel. Following up on this issue, Chapter 7 of this book then discusses Pynchon’s depiction of how a realm of information flows increasingly impinges on urban space.

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Chapter 4 THE WHITE CIT Y

This chapter turns to Pynchon’s negotiation of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, which also provides the first major setting in Against the Day.1 From an urbanist perspective, this world exposition is highly instructive, because the so-called White City, a temporary model city built in Chicago on the occasion of the 1893 Fair, acted as its centerpiece. Erected on former wasteland close to Lake Michigan, the White City was, above all, intended to promote a future model of urban advancement, a utopian vision of how a well-ordered and beautifully shaped city might bring forth a placid and harmonious community life. As such, its built form drew inspiration from the spatial outline of mercantile Renaissance cities such as Venice. The planners of the White City particularly strived to emulate the aesthetic unity and coherence that Venice has been noted for. By implication, the vision of the White City likewise aimed at offering a corrective to the rampant process of urbanization that had frequently led to social unrest and upheavals in late-nineteenthcentury industrial America. The White City was thus supposed to figure as a signpost for the direction that urban civilization should take in the United States. Yet, the planners of the White City actually had aspirations that went far beyond the United States. Given their elitist self-conception, the idea of national progress that stood at the center of the conception of the White City implied the progress of all mankind.2 Both fine arts and technological innovation were to be put to the service of this greater vision. What is more, the White City was implemented following a logic of “unity through subordination” (Trachtenberg 1. This chapter is an extended version of my essay, “Cracks in the Urban Utopia: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.” See Mogultay (2011: 39–52). 2. This self-conception of its planners becomes evident in an oft-cited remark that the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens once made to Daniel H. Burnham, the chief planner of the White City. During a meeting of the planning committee, the sculptor reportedly asked the urban planner: “Look here, old fellow, do you realize that this is the greatest meeting of artists since the Fifteenth Century?” (qtd. in Cawelti 1968: 338).

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Figure  4.1 World’s Columbian Exposition, Grand Basin, Chicago, 1893. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum.

1982: 213), which was reflected along both cultural and spatial dimensions. In the limelight of the White City’s vision was a Victorian ideal of “high culture” that found its most distinct expression in a monumental landscape of centrally located classicist exhibition buildings (Fig. 4.1). Indeed, the fair did not suppress its origins in the medieval carnival altogether, yet its planners made sure to neatly separate the realms of culture and leisure. Thus, located at the western end of the White City, the Midway Plaisance figured as a leisure zone, housing the realm of mass culture and popular entertainment and presenting a wide array of vernacular architecture (Fig. 4.2). This spatial hierarchy unashamedly stressed the message that while “the center represented America through its exhibitions, the outlying exotic Midway stood for the rest of the world in subordinate relation” (1982: 213). The White City deservedly met with harsh criticism, not least for its arrogant imperialist and racist overtones. While such criticism clearly resonates with its rendering in Against the Day, Pynchon likewise points to the role of the White City as a business model and an unprecedented media spectacle. In doing so, his novel underscores how the White City marks the onset

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Figure 4.2 World’s Columbian Exposition, Midway Plaisance, Chicago, 1893. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum.

of the urban spectacle as a cultural strategy of economic development. This idea manifests itself not least against the backdrop of the novel’s portrayal of Venice. As Chapter 2 has emphasized, the visual unity of Venice emerged historically as a corollary of the city’s function as a social space. This specific urban history was then decontextualized in the case of the White City and subsequently reinstalled as a visual theme that served to organize a centralized “landscape of visual consumption” (Zukin 1993: 232). Pynchon’s negotiation of the White City thus eventually points to two things. On the one hand, Against the Day accentuates that, instead of providing a viable vision of urban advancement, the White City rather served as a smoke screen to cover up simmering social conflicts, as “an oasis of fantasy and fable at a time of crisis and impending violence” (Trachtenberg 1982: 209). On the other hand, Pynchon’s novel also insinuates how an urban spectacle such as the White City might have ushered in, even if unwittingly, the emergence of a postmodern urbanism.

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The Vision of the White City Commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in America, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was opened to the public on May 1, 1893. This exposition has often been remarked upon as inaugurating a new phase in the history of world fairs. In former processes of exposition planning, the built environment of a given city had usually provided the feedstock for the eventual architectural form of a world fair. Up to this point, few, if any, novel structures were constructed, which mostly served to showcase a range of industrial products and artworks. The planning of the Chicago Fair was, however, closely “tied to dreams of metropolitan expansion, [ . . . ] emphasizing not a single building but an ensemble, a grouping, a spectacular series of landscapes and structures” (Harris 1990a: 115). To this end, its planners deliberately chose Jackson Park, an enormous parcel of land lying more or less waste, as the adequate site to build a city from scratch, as it were. While attending the exposition, visitors were thus regularly induced to perceive the White City as an autonomous urban microcosm, sealed off from the surrounding city of Chicago. The reasons why fairgoers came to experience the White City as a selfcontained city are manifold. Still, it was perhaps not least due to its stark aesthetic contrast to industrial Chicago.3 Drawing on the kind of symmetry that typifies classical architecture, the White City was planned by a group of renowned architects and artists, mostly from New York, almost all of whom had a similar training background in the Parisian Beaux-Arts style. What is more, the planners had to subordinate their individual creative will to a master plan, which laid great emphasis on aesthetic unity, formal harmony, and symmetry. Although technical know-how and expertise in the fields of civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering played a key role for the planning and construction of the White City, the realm of technology was after all supposed to take a backseat in its ensuing presentation. Most buildings that were erected on the exhibition grounds concealed a modern nucleus of steel-frame construction behind artfully crafted facades.4 Ultimately, the outcome of this planning effort closely

3. The impression of a self-contained city was, of course, also reinforced by the sheer magnitude of the fairgrounds and the necessity of “a whole complex of urban services,” including “water, sewerage, transportation facilities, police and fire protection” (Glaab and Brown 1967: 260), in order for the exposition to run smoothly. 4. The aesthetic unity of the official fairgrounds was in fact accomplished by a highly sophisticated organization of the field of visibility. While the technical infrastructure (e.g., power lines and sewage pipes) was painstakingly hidden from view, the orderly arrangement of the exposition buildings, along with the use of similar material, style, and paint, as well as formal devices (such as uniform cornice height and basic dimension) ensured the impression of aesthetic harmony. See Cawelti (1968: 341–342).

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resembled a pristine Renaissance city, apparently conjured out of nothing, as if by magic, “a neoclassical wonderland [ . . . ] on the desolate marshlands of the Lake Michigan” (Rydell 1987:  39). Needless to say, the White City therefore stood in marked contrast to “the chaotic disorganization, esthetic confusion, and ugliness of the existing industrial metropolis” (Cawelti 1968: 342). Yet the White City was likewise intended to embody a much greater vision. Although the history of Renaissance urbanism was an obvious source of inspiration for its planning, the White City was, rather, supposed to project a vision of a purified urban past. Serene, sublime, and suffused with architectural grandeur, but betraying no signs of vice or licentiousness, the White City has been described as “Venice reborn” (Cawelti 1968:  338). Remodeling and actualizing its Old-World heritage, the White City was therefore intended to convey a prospect of what the future of American cities might hold. As a model city, the White City aimed at signaling nothing short of an effective cure for America’s long-standing and vexatious urban problematic.5 The planners of the White City thus imagined a grand utopian design for the purpose of urban advancement, “a prophetic New Jerusalem, a perfect world, created from America’s technological ingenuity, engineering prowess, capitalist enterprise, frontier spirit, and the relentless, all-encompassing planning of its designers” (Adams 1995: 45). The official motto of the Chicago Fair read:  “Not Matter, But Mind; Not Things, But Men.” This credo underscores that at the heart of the White City’s urban vision was the idea of progress, but not so much material as cultural progress. This is also why the idea of advancing urban reality by means of social reform did not really strike a chord with the planners of the White City. They rather acted upon the notion “that reality must be sought in the ideality of high art” (Trachtenberg 1982:  213). If the built environment could live up to art’s ideal of timeless beauty, they were convinced, then the rest would also fall into place. Still, it was beyond doubt that the White City could only function as a test run. It was never intended as an actual residential city, but rather as an inspirational example in the form of a temporary model of an ideal city. Yet, in order to lend credence to this vision, it was indispensable that the White City would at least convey the illusion of permanence. Although the planners took great pains to maintain this illusion over a period of six months, in the end it did not quite stand the test of time. Adverse weather conditions left conspicuous marks of decay on the exhibition buildings, a considerable part of which, moreover, burst into flames toward the closing of the fair. Yet, as a monumental

5.  Here, I  refer to the antiurban tradition in American political thought that has been traced back to Jefferson’s rural ideal. I return to this aspect in Chapter 5, particularly when it comes to the reappropriation of such antiurbanism in the context of latenineteenth-century frontier mythology and its resonance in contemporary discourses on urban restructuring.

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and spectacular representation of an ideal city, it has been deeply ingrained in the urban imagination.6 Looking at its rendering of the Chicago Fair in Against the Day, this chapter thus takes its cue from the argument that the White City is best understood in terms of an unprecedented urban spectacle.

Approaching the White City The siren call of the White City is already discernible on the first page of Against the Day as the novel relates how the balloonist crew of the Chums of Chance sets sail for Chicago. It remains unclear when exactly the Chums head for the White City, but the narrator implies that it has to be a few months after the fair was opened to the public.7 Their expectations are described as follows: Since their order had come through, the “scuttlebutt” among the excited and curious crew had been of little besides the fabled “White City,” its great Ferris wheel, alabaster temples of commerce and industry, sparkling lagoons, and the thousand more such wonders, of both a scientific and an artistic nature, which awaited them there. (3)

As the balloonists have not reached their destination yet, this passage obviously amounts to a snippet of the mental image with which they approach the Chicago Fair. That the balloonists head for the fair with such an image in mind points to an important aspect regarding the planning of the exposition. In fact, the physical reality of the White City was supplemented and partly overlaid by an enormous representational machinery that was already in full swing for more than a year before the exposition was opened to the public. Later in Against the Day, it also crystallizes that the balloonist’s mental image is derived from the image of “the White City promised in the Columbian Exposition brochures” (10). This underscores that, apart from a concrete and tangible model environment, the White City likewise functioned as “a pioneer experiment in urban and experiential marketing” (Silla 2013:  n. pag), as evidenced by the establishment of the exposition’s own Department of Promotion and Publicity. 6.  This holds true not only in relation to the fields of architecture, urban planning, and design, but also when it comes to popular culture. High-priced Chicago Fair memorabilia, for example, continue to circulate within collectors’ markets, just as the ongoing resonance of the fair has been highlighted by the publication of Erik Larson’s bestselling true crime account The Devil in the White City (2003). 7.  This can be inferred, for example, from a reference to Turner’s paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” that was presented in the context of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association that took place at the Chicago Fair in July 1893.

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Its role as a media event was then part and parcel of the fair as a business model. As a commercial enterprise, the Chicago Fair was incorporated shortly after the city of Chicago had won the bid to host the exposition in 1890, taking shape as “a private entity created by the laws of the state of Illinois as ‘World’s Columbian Exposition’ and authorized to raise capital by selling stock certificates” (Trachtenberg 1982: 210).8 Serving both as an outwardly visible sign of its corporate nature and as a promotional article, the so-called Columbian half dollar was brought into circulation in late 1892. Specially minted in order to raise funds for the realization of the fair, the silver coin never came to fulfill its proper function. Coinciding with the silver-related financial crisis of 1893, it actually turned out to be a massive failure. This issue is also taken up in Against the Day, namely, when, years after the fair’s closing, Lindsay Noseworth tips a messenger with a Columbian half dollar, subsequently remarking that the coin “first sold for a dollar apiece” (397).9 The commemorative coin thus figures in Pynchon’s novel as a metonymical symbol that resonates with the failure of the White City’s vision. To return to the balloonist’s mental image, it also merits attention about what kind of city the image actually evokes. The tiny snapshot of the White City already asserts that, even if one has been to Chicago before, it is actually an entirely different city that awaits a visitor. The White City here emerges as a mythical island-city within the industrial metropolis, spatially consolidating the domains of trade, commerce, science, art, and leisure. As such, the mental image unmistakably evokes the image of a mercantile Renaissance city. Given the reference to the “sparkling lagoons,” the allusion to Venice is clearly palpable. At a first glance, only the Ferris wheel does not quite seem to fit into the picture. Yet, its mentioning stresses that a commercial logic has always set the tone in the planning of world fairs, and that the spectacular is, as a rule, prominently deployed as a drawing card. Hence, the construction and the promotion of the Ferris wheel has to be understood as an attempt to outdo in terms of spectacularity the Parisian exposition of 1889.10

8. Building on the fair’s status as a business enterprise, the White City is accordingly fictionalized in Against the Day as a franchiser to the private detective agency “White City Investigations” that provides surveillance services on the fairgrounds. That White City Investigations eventually turns out to be a fraudulent agency is, of course, more than telling with respect to the novel’s portrayal of the White City as a colossal sham. 9.  On the whole, about five million half dollars had been minted, but not even 10 percent of them could be sold for the initial premium price of a dollar. Nonetheless, the commemorative coin has remained a popular collector’s item at auction platforms to this day. 10.  This argument has been made, for example, by Zukin who notes that the Ferris wheel was undoubtedly “the United States’s answer to the engineering triumph of France’s Eiffel Tower” (1993: 225).

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When the Chums finally arrive in Chicago, the novel apparently provides a vista of the bustling industrial metropolis that the planners of the White City strived to reimage. Approaching the stockyards of Chicago, the balloonists at first have trouble in making out the location of the eagerly anticipated White City which ought to lurk “somewhere among the tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke” (10). However, their bird’s-eye view enables them to recognize the enormous stockyards, as yet another city within Chicago, traversed with “streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile” (10). In this context, the emphasis on the arrangement, hue, and size of the stockyards suggests a maplike representation of a Cartesian city. The latter denotes a rationally planned city, which stands in considerable contrast to an organically grown city. This is mainly because the “essence of the Cartesian city consists in the geometrical principle which unifies and dominates the totality of the city, and which excludes all forms of contingency from its urban space” (Sakaki 2000: 37). Since the Cartesian city exhibits a relatively high degree of legibility, provided that its observer beholds it from a bird’s-eye perspective, it may even embody a form of beauty, which, however, remains rather abstract as it seems “addressed not to human eyes but to God’s eye” (2000: 38). But even if the balloonists’ airship is once depicted as a “giant eyeball” (13), the overt legibility of the Cartesian city does not evoke any connotations of beauty with the crew. Instead, the spatial organization of the stockyards reveals itself as being in the service of relentless discipline: From this height it was as if the Chums, who [ . . . ] had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor. (10)

It is, of course, extremely tempting to read this passage as a negative counterimage to the White City, which would, accordingly, figure as a thoroughly planned yet tangibly beautiful city, which is free from domination and exists in close communion with nature. However, both the stockyards and the White City actually represent spaces into which a particular geography of power is inscribed, which is why both can be grasped as rationalized spaces. The main difference is that the White City has dispensed with the overly geometrical spatialization of power that the Cartesian city relies on. Instead, the spatial outline of the White City is organized in accordance with a subtler form of power that resonates with the logic of the spectacle—an aspect to which I return in this chapter’s concluding section.

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After the balloonists have landed at the fringes of the fair, and as crew members look forward to attending the exposition, a first dimension of socio-spatial tension is indicated by Captain St. Cosmo, who issues a warning as to an ominous area the crew should better avoid, lest they become victims of criminal acts. Although the novel at first withholds the exact location of the “sinister quarter where such dangers are most probably to be encountered” (16), it later transpires that this is a reference to the Midway Plaisance, that is, the carnivalesque leisure zone adjoining the fairgrounds, and yet not part of the official exposition. Still, the fact that the reader is at first kept in the dark about the identity of this place is not due to pure coincidence as the symbolically significant occurrence of electric light in Against the Day underpins. While the narrative follows two crew members on ground leave drawing nearer to the center of the exposition, the reader is also taken along with them. Their nightly stroll begins at the obscure periphery of the fair and successively advances toward the gleaming center of the White City, where electric light is abundant: “At a distance the boys could see in the sky the electrical glow of the Fair, but hereabouts all was in shadow” (21). Throughout his depiction of the White City, Pynchon makes frequent reference to the use of electric light on the fairgrounds. This reminds us of the fact that, although electric light had already been deployed sporadically in towns and cities, “[t]he first systematic explorations of using electric light to alter the ambiance of space occurred in the controlled urban environments of the World’s Fairs from the 1880s to World War I” (McQuire 2008: 117). On the premises of the White City, electric light was used on an unprecedented scale, which can be explained by economic considerations, but it also has to be seen as yet another attempt to rival preceding expositions.11 More than just reflecting this issue, however, Against the Day actually provides its own idiosyncratic mapping of the fair in terms of lighting conditions. This strategy then serves as a means to subvert a range of assumptions regarding cultural and educational values that altogether underlie the image of the White City.

11.  McQuire has pointed out that the extensive use of electric light made it possible to “[extend] the hours available for leisurely consumption in the same manner that factory lighting had already extended the productive hours demanded for the working class” (2008:  117). He also emphasizes that the amount of electric light used for the White City’s Electrical Building alone surpassed the amount of lighting used for the entire Exposition Universelle of 1889. More importantly, however, McQuire argues that, even if the electricity used for world fairs was not directly profitable for electricity companies, the public display of electric light “played a critical role in securing venture capital to finance the development of electrical technology and the roll-out of electrical infrastructure” (2008: 129).

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In the Thicket of the White Light A sublime vision of urbanity was supposed to take center stage in the realization of the White City. But since the exposition was also a commercial enterprise, its planners were not simply free to disengage from the imperatives of profitability and spectacularity. Hence, a burning question was how to meet both of these demands. One possibility would have been to spatially reconcile and intermingle the spheres of culture and leisure on the fairgrounds. However, this idea did not go down well with the planners and met with a “strong sentiment that no cheap entertainment be permitted to clutter the magnificence of the White City” (Rydell 1987: 62). The main concern was, in other words, that the utopian vision with its aim to promote civic virtue on the part of visitors might become diluted by the diverting influence of commerce and entertainment. The eventual decision to detach both realms on the site then seems directly related to this apprehension. The result was a strict geographical separation between the lucid White City itself, that is, the neatly arranged exhibition buildings on the official fairgrounds, and the crowded Midway Plaisance, tightly paved with sideshows, exotic villages, and stage performances (Fig. 4.3). Embedded into this separation, there is an implicit hierarchy between cultural realms, with the White City functioning as the agent of a consecrated bourgeois culture, whereas the Midway Plaisance embodies the sphere of a popular culture regarded as inferior. Yet, this juxtaposition is not only manifested in terms of area allocation. The extensive use of electric lighting on the fairgrounds and its comparative scarcity on the Midway Plaisance seems likewise indicative of the deliberate separation between high and low culture. The picture that Against the Day draws of the distinction between these two worlds is, by contrast, less clear-cut. Even if the narrative in part seizes on the connotations of the hegemonic lighting pattern, it primarily does so in order to dismantle and undermine this juxtaposition. To begin with, one can point out the differing sensory experiences that Against the Day depicts as to the uniformity and monochrome of “the aseptic structures of the White City” (Rydell 1987: 68) and the jumbled aura of the Midway Plaisance. The following passage relates how the two aeronauts Miles and Lindsay approach the leisure district of the Midway: From somewhere ahead too dark to see came music from a small orchestra, unusually syncopated, which grew louder, till they could make out a small outdoor dance-floor, all but unlit, where couples were dancing, and about which crowds were streaming densely everywhere, among odors of beer, garlic, tobacco smoke, inexpensive perfume, and, from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, somewhere up ahead, the unmistakable scent of massed livestock. (22)

This scenario pointedly underscores how both the nighttime darkness and the relative absence of electric light allow the acoustic and olfactory dimensions of

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Figure  4.3 Souvenir Map of the World’s Columbian Exposition at Jackson Park and Midway Plaisance, Chicago, 1893. Courtesy Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

the social gathering to come to the fore, thus adding a considerable vividness to the picture. The next passage, on the other hand, portrays a typical scene in the middle of the White City, presumably near the Court of Honor and its Great Basin, the central place of the official fairgrounds: The visibility today was unlimited, the Lake sparkling with a million highlights, the little electric launches and gondolas, the crowds in the plazas adjoining the mammoth exhibition buildings, the whiteness of the place nearly unbearable. (52)

Above all, it is the copious scattering of natural light unstintingly reflected by the monochrome facades of the exhibition buildings which seemingly transforms the center of the White City into a perfectly visible stage set. These contrasting

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accounts thus seize on and partly exaggerate the spatial divide between high and low culture mentioned earlier. Accordingly, the Midway Plaisance figures in the novel as a space where vice and crime potentially lurk and where lowlifes are on the prowl. On that score, the narrator even jeers that “[p]avilions here seemed almost to represent not nations of the world but Deadly Sins” (22). Such a depiction of the Midway Plaisance apparently lends all the more credence to the notion of the White City as a well-ordered public space and safe haven for a civic spirit.12 Yet, this distinction is also eroded in Against the Days in several respects. In the first instance, the novel suggests how an overly high measure of visibility, at a certain point, turns oddly into opacity. The narrative exploits this ambiguity by remodeling the fairgrounds of the White City into an arena ideally suited for corporate crime in that it allows the novel’s arch-villain Scarsdale Vibe to pursue his wheeling and dealing in plain sight: One could hardly have expected a widely celebrated mogul like Scarsdale Vibe not to attend the World’s Columbian Exposition. Along with the obvious appeal of its thousands of commercial possibilities, the Chicago Fair also happened to provide a vast ebb and flow of anonymity, where one could meet and transact business without necessarily being observed. (31)

In a similar fashion, Against the Day turns the assumption inside out according to which security gradually increases with brightness and visibility as one approaches the centrally located “searchlight beams sweeping the skies” (24) above the nocturnal White City. This crystallizes in an episode of petty crime which takes place around the Midway Plaisance in the evening hours. Passing through the all but deserted and pitch-black periphery of the White City in pursuit of “the safety of the lights in the distance” (22), Miles and Lindsay are hoodwinked even before reaching the infamous boulevard. However, it is not primarily the surrounding darkness that the perpetrator takes advantage of when he passes off “a gap in the fence, and an admissions gate with something of the makeshift about it” (21) as an official entrance. The impostor appears keenly aware of the boys’ apprehensions as to the potential perils emanating from the sinister Midway Plaisance and therefore employs a carefully targeted use of light. By means of the signal effect of “a single candle-stub” (21), purposefully placed at the faked entrance, he anticipates the remote aura of the lucid White City as he slyly exploits its connotations of security. 12.  To be sure, both spaces were actually supervised by authorities, but their disparate valuation is mirrored in the novel by the fact that the premises of the White City are policed by “Columbian Guards on patrol” (24), while the Midway Plaisance is monitored by “[a]rmed ‘bouncers,’ drawn from the ranks of the Chicago police” (22).

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Still, as this episode takes place at night, the strategic use of light does not exclusively contribute to the success of the set-up, since it is, somewhat paradoxically, the condition of being illuminated that allows for any kind of entrance, be it real or staged, to be encountered in the first place. This issue is related to yet another strategy by which the narrative symbolically punctuates and intersperses the rigid juxtaposition of cultural spheres with twilight zones and paradoxes. The balloonists do not accept to pay the fee simply because they are wide-eyed. Had it been a white male trying to set them up, Miles and Lindsay would probably have become suspicious. But since it is “a scowling Asiatic midget of some sort” (21), they cannot tell for sure if the entrance amounts to a sophisticated hoax, or if it is indeed authentic, as the midget might already be part of some attraction on the Midway Plaisance. By means of this ambivalence, the narrative, on the one hand, disturbs the concept of a definite passage from the surrounding city of Chicago to the exposition, thus blurring the boundaries between inside and outside as well as questioning the insularity of the White City. Then, on the other hand, this episode also foreshadows the spatial practices that the performers on Midway Plaisance employ so as to undermine their reification.

Lessons in Cultural Darkness Even if “the wholesome educational exhibits on the Fairgrounds” (45) were in the forefront of the exposition’s urban vision, the Midway Plaisance was not in fact wholly exempt from the overarching pedagogic mandate of the Chicago Fair. Its ragtag composition certainly provided ample opportunity for distraction and amusement, but still remained inconspicuously bound up with educational purposes. This is indicated, for instance, by the fact that the planning of the Midway Plaisance was “officially classified under the auspices of the exposition’s Department of Ethnology” (Rydell 1987: 40). Hence, as much as showcasing a vast array of profane and exotic pleasures functioned as a safety valve for visitors to take a break from the somewhat stifling aura of austere monumentality prevailing on the fairgrounds, the Midway Plaisance was likewise intended as a consistent and bona fide display of the many cultures of the world. However, as the conceptualization of this display was in fact heavily imbued with racial prejudice, it served, in effect, still more as a tangible yet negative benchmark suited to reassure a white middle-class audience of its achieved progress and apparent civility. Unsurprisingly, “the racial economics of the fair” (1987: 48) also found their distinct manifestation in spatial dimensions, as the foreign villages placed in close proximity to the fairgrounds were assumed to comply more with the standards of Western civilization than those positioned at the outskirts of the Midway Plaisance.13 13. For a detailed account of the spatialization of the Midway Plaisance along racial assumptions, see Rydell (1987: 60–68).

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Pynchon’s novel makes reference to this mode of racialized spatiality, first of all, by aligning the aforementioned mapping in terms of lighting conditions with the stratification of the Midway Plaisance along racial categories: Observers of the Fair had remarked how, as one moved up and down its Midway, the more European, civilized, and . . . well, frankly, white exhibits located closer to the center of the ‘White City’ seemed to be, whereas the farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery. (22)

Although the narrator purports to merely reproduce the genuine impression of a neutral observer (and, to this effect, feigns intimations of hesitation and slight embarrassment as to the credibility of the rather unpleasant observation), the tone of apparent objectivity is instantly revealed as mock-neutral when the narrative, in the subsequent passage, focalizes on the perspective of Miles and Lindsay strolling along Midway Plaisance: To the boys it seemed that they were making their way through a separate, lampless world, out beyond some obscure threshold [ . . . ]. As if the half-light ruling this perhaps even unmapped periphery were not a simple scarcity of streetlamps but deliberately provided in the interests of mercy, as a necessary veiling for the faces here, which held an urgency somehow too intense for the full light of day and those innocent American visitors with their Kodaks and parasols who might somehow happen across this place. (22)

Deriding the skimpy use of light as a means to cushion the shock and indignation refined spectators might experience at the sight of the people on Midway Plaisance, this passage then indirectly hints at the function of a seemingly uncivilized outpost that works as a foil to the White City’s utopian vision. The necessity that this outpost be somewhat tamed by the forces of civilization thus corresponds to the reassurance of evolutionary progress, so that visitors attending the Chicago Fair primarily to behold what was deemed the glorious future of city life could experience the utopian vision as even more sophisticated and sublime in view of the brute swarming on Midway Plaisance.14 Rydell has summarized this nexus as following: [T]he vision of the future and the depiction of the nonwhite world as savage were two sides of the same coin—a coin minted in the tradition of American 14. Interestingly enough, the only person mentioned in Against the Day who is more eager to visit the Midway Plaisance than the White City is someone who probably conceives of his civility as inherited, namely, archduke Franz Ferdinand, “out on a world tour whose officially stated purpose was to ‘learn about foreign peoples’ ” (45).

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racism, in which the forbidden desires of whites were projected onto darkskinned peoples, who consequently had to be degraded so white purity could be maintained. (67)

However, Against the Day does not content itself with sneering at a racist gaze; the novel also fictionalizes how those subjected to this gaze actually figure out ways to capitalize on the desires of their onlookers. Aware of the fact that their otherness is transformed into a commodity on Midway Plaisance, the supposed victims employ several strategies that bring them economic benefits. This can be a purposefully staged exoticism as it is the case with a show by Tungus reindeer herders, which is promoted by attractive women, “who, being blonde and so forth” (23) obviously not only pretend to hail from a remote country, but, beyond that, stylize themselves as zoophiles in order to reinforce the perception of their otherness. Another strategy is the exploitation of the scientific pretext under which its planners conceived of the Midway Plaisance. In this regard Against the Day depicts, for instance, drug traffickers selling their products as scientific exhibits or street vendors advertising their exotic commodities by pointing out their supposedly “great anthropological value” (23). In view of these strategies, it seems that the narrative actually counters the mapping of the Midway Plaisance along racial assumptions with a dissident mapping, thus providing glimpses of how victimization might be turned into empowerment. Hence the Midway Plaisance appears less as the “unmapped periphery” (22) of the Chicago Fair, which it first seemed to be, but more as the product of the spatial appropriation by those who were marginalized by a hegemonic mapping in the first place. Accordingly, Miles and Lindsay come to recognize the Midway Plaisance as an autonomous enclave “with its own economic life, social habits, and codes, aware of itself as having little if anything to do with the official Fair” (22).

The Afterlife of the White City Notwithstanding that they are in part left riveted by the attractions, Miles and Lindsay eventually realize how much of the display on Midway Plaisance amounts to little more than a bogus display of savagery and exoticism. Yet this lack of authenticity, which admittedly leaves them “adrift between fascination and disbelief ” (23), actually poses no serious problem to the boys, as they are more than willing to let themselves immerse in the spectacle. This holds equally true for their attendance of the Chicago Fair at large, the depiction of which in Against the Day is, like that of the balloonists themselves, situated in a liminal zone between reality and fantasy. Even though the Chums of Chance are often addressed as real characters by other characters in the novel, they are also “less real” characters than others, for they are similarly protagonists in a fictionalized series of adventure novels within the narrated world of Against the Day. Exactly

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by means of this “ontological ambiguity of the Chums of Chance” (Pöhlmann 2010: 32) the narrative further intensifies the liminality of the representation of the White City. Unsurprisingly, then, the balloonists are not in the least inclined to pit the “real White City” against the imaginary one, since, for them, the White City is equally real and imaginary: 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. (36)

At some point, however, the “harsh nonfictional world” gradually starts to seep through the veil that envelops the balloonists in the fairy land of the White City. “Autumn deepened among the desolate city blocks, an edge appeared to the hum of life here” (54), the narrator tells us. As the Chicago Fair slowly draws to an end, the most severe economic depression in American history also makes its presence felt to the balloonists, even if only indirectly. Ultimately, the nationwide disillusionment caused by the crisis does not manage to penetrate the screen that shelters both the White City and the Chums from the events of the day. As they are mildly grieved by a shortage of assignments, the balloonists simply make do with vicarious satisfaction, gorging themselves on cheap food and drink, hoping for “some rescuer entering the crew spaces, [ . . . ] a creature of fantasy to bring them back each to his innocence” (55). By mostly bracketing out the crisis-shaken fate of the nation until the closing of the fair, Against the Day thus forcefully asserts the role that the White City played in terms of an escapist dreamworld. For the Chums of Chance, the repercussions of the crisis are only remotely discernible, since their insulated and mock-heroic boys’ adventure reality is more or less cut from the same cloth as the patriotic fantasy embodied by the White City. Yet, Pynchon’s novel also features a scenario that emphatically underlines the extent to which the landscape of the White City was furnished with an immense power to stir the imagination. This aspect crystallizes most notably in the case of the young girl Dahlia Rideout, who resides in Chicago for the duration of the fair. Left behind by her mother as an infant and raised by an itinerant photographer, her nomadic existence at first seems to keep Dahlia from establishing something like an identity of place. It is only during her sojourn at the White City that she begins to develop what one could call a sense of home. Although the novel lacks any account of her direct experience of the fair, Dahlia’s vivid memory of the White City clearly illustrates this issue. After the closing of the fair, she and her fosterfather leave Chicago again, on their way encountering the numerous “refugees from the ‘national’ exhibits which had lined the Midway Plaisance [ . . . ]. Dally assumed these wanderers had all been banished for no good reason from the

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White City, too” (69) Thus, the fact that the different people on the Midway Plaisance for Dahlia merely represent “non-midwestern varieties of human” (69) like herself indicates her utter ignorance of the educational assumptions underlying its concept. The same applies to the White City itself, since Dahlia does not know the first thing about its concept as a utopian city. Instead, she takes the visual theme of the White City at face value, thus hoping, as she travels from town to town after the closing of the fair, that somewhere [ . . . ] it’d be there waiting for her, the real White City again, lit up all spectral and cool at night and shimmering by day in the bright humidity of its webworks of canals, the electric launches moving silently through the waterways with their parasoled ladies and straw-hatted men and little kids with Cracker Jack pieces stuck in their hair. (69)

It is not only until she arrives, more or less accidentally, in Venice, the inspiring example of the White City, that Dahlia recognizes with certainty how much she has actually been taken in by a picture postcard version of the White City.15 Up until then, however, her mental image of the White City remains compellingly powerful, not least because Dahlia never gets to see the underbelly of the White City and, being on the road again, is never told that “the abandoned structures of the Fair would come to house the jobless and hungry who had always been there, even at the height of the season of miracle” (55). Thus, a wide-eyed childlike Dahlia may not suspect the sham behind the elaborate facades of the “capital of dream” (70). However, other characters in Against the Day, such as the detective Lewis Basnight, have to find out that the tactile encounter with these very facades actually leaves telling material traces, which betray the White City’s impression of permanence: Lew slid like a snake from one architectural falsehood to the next, his working suits by the end of each day smudged white from rubbing against so much “staff,” a mixture of plaster and hemp fibers, ubiquitous at the White City that season, meant to counterfeit some deathless white stone. (46)

That a cheap and disposable fake marble was used for the facades of the exhibition buildings once again points to the idea that the urban vision of the White City was organized, first and foremost, around the notion of a visual spectacle. This issue leads directly to two of the major points of criticism with which the

15.  My phrasing can be taken quite literally here. Harris has argued that “the American picture postcard was essentially born at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, as were a host of other advertising novelties” (1990a: 126). This circumstance, of course, once again indicates the liminality between the real and the imaginary White City, that is, between its material reality and its media representation.

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planners of the White City were confronted. First of all, it was lamented that, instead of trying to develop a novel vocabulary of urban design, the White City’s rather conservative reversion to architectural classicism, which came to dominate American urban architecture for the following decades, heavily “impeded the development of what we now know as modern architecture in America” (Cawelti 1968: 345). Closely related is the argument that the urban vision of the White City, contrary to what it initially advocated, provided only few if any viable suggestions for tackling the exigencies (such as pollution or congestion) brought about by rapid and chaotic urbanization in the late nineteenth century. Such criticism unambiguously resonates with Pynchon’s depiction of the White City. Its claim as a pioneering urban form and as a signpost for future urban planning and development is ultimately rejected in the novel. This verdict is pointedly illustrated as the novel relates how Dahlia revisits Chicago by train, shortly after the turn of the century. To her disappointment, she eventually comes to realize that the vision of the White City hardly managed to rub off on the cityscape of Chicago: Somewhere in her head, she’d had this notion that because the White City had once existed beside the Lake, in Jackson Park, it would have acted somehow like yeast in bread and caused the entire city to bloom into some kind of grace. Rolling through the city, in to Union Station, she found herself stunned by the immensity, the conglomeration of architectural styles, quickening, ascending, to the skyscrapers at the heart of it. Sort of reminding her of the Midway pavilions, that mixture of all the world’s peoples. She looked out the windows, hoping for some glimpse of her White City, but saw only the darkened daytime one, and understood that some reverse process had gone on, not leavening but condensing to this stone gravity. (336)

It is not completely out of question that Dahlia might have received a somewhat different impression, if she had visited Chicago one or two decades later. After all, the implementation of the 1909 Chicago Plan, co-devised by Daniel H.  Burnham, had generously seized on the aesthetic legacy of the White City, thus reviving the City Beautiful Movement in America. Yet, it seems unlikely that she would have been particularly bedazzled by the sight, since Dahlia’s experience of Venice might have allowed her to distinguish between two fundamentally different kinds of cityscape. One is the historical product of the interplay between local community, economic, sociopolitical and cultural forces as well as environmental conditions, while the other represents a decontextualized visual theme cast into the form of a city that is anxious to conceal its feigned historicity.16 In other words, Dahlia might have come 16.  This discrepancy holds true even if one can discern certain formal analogies between these two kinds of cityscapes. In this regard, Trachtenberg argues that the

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to understand how a city could have been an expression of communal will. However, the cityscape that she comes to behold on returning to Chicago figures as the expression of something else entirely. Especially the architectural eclecticism and “the skyscrapers at the heart of ” the city foreshadows that, in terms of urban aesthetics, the White City was in the long run not more than a passing fad. But most importantly, the novel’s depiction of the cityscape of post-fair Chicago indicates that “ultimately the fair slipped away from its organizers’ intentions, revealing a central irony: the future belonged to the consolidated force of capital, and not the flimsy neoclassical structures that housed it” (Lears 2009: 168). Although intended as a model city where a republican ideal could potentially thrive, the main accomplishment of the White City was a different one. It brought the realms of arts, culture, and entertainment under the sway of the forces of capital and empire in a hitherto unparalleled fashion. Hence the White City is better understood as the republican ideal’s “transvaluation not into a communal but a corporate enterprise” (Trachtenberg: 1982: 230). Its rendering in Against the Day then ultimately suggests that, if anything, the White City can be said to typify a forerunner of postmodern urbanism that has been traced, since the 1980s, by various urban and spatial theorists using the paradigmatic examples of late twentieth century Los Angeles or Miami. The way in which the White City has organized and reconfigured urban space proceeds according to very similar principles. Most notably, the White City demonstrated that, despite its material reality, it was rather “built on the power of dreamscape, collective fantasy, and facade” (Zukin 1993: 219). As such, the White City can be said to have been “explicitly produced for visual consumption” (219). It goes without saying that all cities are both real and imaginary, but what distinguishes the White City is that its imaginary has been consciously constructed and harnessed as a means of control. The crucial point is, however, that such control seamlessly fits in with the urban landscape; it remains almost entirely unobtrusive as “usual forms of social control—by police, employers, corporate elites—are embedded in an amusing architecture” (219). In the case of the White City, this aspect is poignantly underscored in Against the Day. The novel relates how, during the heyday of the Chicago Fair, the Chums of Chance

White City in part also followed the kind of metonymic spatial logic that I discussed in relation to of Venice. According to Trachtenberg, the White City was characterized by the impression of “each building and each vista serving as an image of the whole” (1982: 212). This idea is also echoed in Against the Day as the narrator describes the gigantic Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building as “a miniature city, nested within the city-within-a-city which was the Fair itself ” (24). Apart from such incidental remarks, however, this spatial logic does not appear as a determining factor of the cityscape here, at least not when compared to its significance in Venice.

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work as subcontractors for White City Investigations, providing air surveillance above the exhibition grounds: Fairgoers would see the ship overhead and yet not see it, for at the Fair, where miracles were routinely expected, nothing this summer was too big, too fast, too fantastically rigged out to impress anybody for more than a minute and a half, before the next marvel appeared. Inconvenience would fit right in, as one more effect whose only purpose was to entertain. (36)

Notwithstanding that this scenario is fictionalized, it pointedly illustrates how the White City figures as an urban landscape where social control and entertainment blend into each other almost imperceptibly. Seen from this angle, the balloonists’ airship here appears as the equivalent to what Zukin has aptly described as “the friendly face of power” (1993: 228).

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Chapter 5 T H E U R BA N F R O N T I E R

On May 5, 1893, the Wall Street stock market crashed, eventually bringing to light what was already looming ahead months earlier, namely, the onset of the most severe economic depression that the United States had experienced until that time.1 The crisis was to put a stranglehold on the nation’s prosperity in the years to come, yet it would not keep nearly thirty million visitors from coming to marvel at Chicago’s spectacular White City, which had been opened only four days before the Wall Street crash. Among the visitors to the White City was the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who, on July 12, 1893, presented his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. In retrospect, it seems both ironic and fitting that Turner delivered his paper on the premises of the White City. This is because, on the one hand, his address implicitly drew on an antiurban sentiment that has been deeply ingrained in American culture, whereas its venue was actually intended to promote a pioneering vision of urban advancement. On the other hand, the White City was perhaps not the worst setting for Turner’s lecture, because the failure of its urban vision may have unwittingly supported his frontier thesis. Turner’s main accomplishment was, perhaps, to provide a scholarly foundation for the idea that frontier history represents the formative experience of American social development. In doing so, he built on and actualized a Jeffersonian agrarian ideal and its corresponding antiurbanism. The frontier settler thus followed in the footsteps of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer, in that both were seen as morally superior to the urbanite. Undergoing a process of decivilization, the frontier settler would be “denuded of the disabling sophistications of urban culture” (Mendieta 2009: 210). Advancing into the wilderness, he would adapt to a brute environment in which lawlessness reigns, but eventually reemerge as a new man, as “an American individualist—tough, independent, resourceful, manly” (Lears 2009: 40). More than just demarcating a geographical territory, the frontier then figures as a mythical realm, a “liminal space of both death and birth, a kenotic space in which the old self is 1.  This chapter is an extended version of my essay “The Urban Frontier in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.” See Mogultay (2016: 299–322).

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emptied and eviscerated so that a new self can be born” (Mendieta 2009: 214). Yet, given that the 1890 United States Census had declared the end of the concept of the frontier, Turner also had to face the prospect that the future might belong to urban America.2 In this sense, his frontier thesis must be seen as an attempt “to make sure that the American past at least was understood to be an anti-urban romance” (Conn 2014:  20). Notwithstanding that Turner’s paper has been sharply criticized for overstating the significance of frontier life and disregarding the role of cities in the development of American democracy, it remains “without question one of the most formative and influential pieces of scholarship” (Mendieta 2009: 212) in US history.3 Moreover, the frontier thesis obviously struck a popular chord with many audiences, coinciding with the increasing “transformation of frontier history into mass-marketed entertainment and popular mythology” (Lears 2009: 40). Accordingly, frontier mythology was consolidated and perpetuated over decades in countless novels, paintings, stage performances, and movies. Likewise, the frontier came to figure as an indispensable trope within political discourses, where it generally serves to invoke the sense of a promising departure and an appeal to a pioneering spirit, thus “lending historical resonance and traditional justification to particular political stances and gestures” (Slotkin 1998b: 17).4 Given its antiurban tenor, the frontier myth had a curious career in the twentieth century, since the 1970s and 1980s actually saw its resurgence in the very thick of the city. The concept of the frontier was then reconfigured into a discursive vehicle that encapsulates the effort at recultivating “urban wastelands.” The

2.  As a geographical marker, the frontier discriminated between “areas to the east settled at greater than two persons per square mile and those to the west that were more sparsely settled” (Kearns 2009: 265). The 1890 United States Census declared that the concept of the frontier would not find use in coming surveys anymore, since the settlement of the North American continent was already far too advanced. 3.  The frontier thesis has been justifiably attacked for vindicating the expropriation of land and downplaying the role of slavery. An early critic of Turner’s ignorance of the role of the city in US history was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., who, in his essay “The City in American History,” emphasizes “the persistent interplay of town and country in the evolution of American Civilization” (1940: 43). In fact, Turner eventually came to realize his bias more than three decades after first presenting his frontier thesis. As Schlesinger points out, Turner had to acknowledge in a letter in 1925 that “[t]here seems likely to be an urban reinterpretation of our history” (1940: 43). 4. The range of fictional works that draw on the frontier myth is far too extensive to be listed here. As an early and immensely popular theatrical production, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West is certainly worth mentioning. The most famous reference to the frontier myth in the field of late-twentieth-century politics was perhaps Kennedy’s invocation of a “New Frontier” in 1960. For a detailed discussion of the frontier myth in a wide range of twentieth-century popular discourses, see Slotkin (1998a).

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new frontier was pushed ahead by “urban pioneers,” who advanced not from east to west, but from periphery to center, toward the “wilderness” of the inner city that had been left in a state of decay ever since the postwar mass exodus to suburbia. These pioneers revitalized once deprived areas left to immigrants and the working class, turning them into seemingly livable neighborhoods. This process gained currency under the shibboleth of “gentrification,” and its promotion frequently drew inspiration from traditional frontier imagery. Needless to say, the notion of an “urban frontier” has justifiably met with criticism, not least because it suggests urban restructuring is primarily the result of the actions and decisions made by pioneering individuals. However, Smith has argued that the gentrification frontier is advanced not so much through the actions of intrepid pioneers as through the actions of collective owners of capital. Where such urban pioneers go bravely forth, banks, real estate developers, small-scale and large-scale lenders, retail corporations, the state, have generally gone before. (1996: xviii)

Just like Turner’s frontier, then, the notion of the urban frontier glosses over the systemic underpinnings of processes of geographical and economic development by idealizing the actions of individual pioneers. This chapter turns to the negotiation of the frontier myth in Against the Day—a novel which revealingly begins its narrative itinerary with the deceptive complacency of the White City and from where it sets out on an exploration of a crisis-shaken urban-industrial society that increasingly falls under the spell of the frontier myth. In doing so, Pynchon’s novel enacts a literary mapping of late nineteenth and early twentieth century geographical and economic development in the American West. To this end, Pynchon shows a keen eye for historical detail, especially when it comes to the history of labor relations, the conflict between capital and labor and its entanglements with state policy. Building on these historical contexts, Against the Day develops a narrative outlook that undermines the rigid dichotomy between country and city that the frontier myth relies on and, instead, underscores the complex interdependence of both realms. Further, by augmenting its perspective with a number of invented scenarios and anachronisms, the novel also points beyond the history of the American West and comments on the continuity of the frontier myth in the twentieth century, especially in relation to urban discourses.

The Frontier Myth The frontier myth stands in the tradition of a rural ideal and, therefore, relies on the construction of a binary opposition between country and city. In order to stress the interdependence between both realms, this dichotomy is repeatedly destabilized in Against the Day. That the idealization of either country or

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city is often informed by ulterior motives transpires early in the novel, namely, when the Chicago-based detective Lew Basnight learns about his imminent transfer to a regional office in Denver. Since Lew is only mildly excited about the prospect of settling down in rural Colorado, his boss Nate makes a pitch for the region, claiming that “it’s gold and silver mining out there. Nuggets for the picking up” (51). Nate thus invokes the image of the frontier as the land of plenty, where the riches simply lie dormant in the soil, so as to render the countryside attractive to his employee. But Lew remains unconvinced and instead replies by posing the following rhetorical question: Ever come out of work in this town when the light’s still in the sky and the lamps are just being lit along the big avenues and down by the Lake, and the girls are all out of the offices and shops and heading home, and the steak houses are cranking up for the evening trade, and the plate-glass windows are shining, with the rigs all lined up by the hotels, and—. (52)

Needless to say, Lew’s picturesque description of a supposedly typical early evening in the metropolis has little in common with his everyday life, let  alone his work routine, which often obliges him to shadow unionists from behind “factory fences breathing coal-smoke” (51). Lew is undoubtedly sentimentalizing city life at the expense of what he perceives as a humdrum existence in the countryside. Since he considers the latter as tantamount to involuntary retirement, he suggests to his boss a number of “names of plausible colleagues, all of them with an edge on him in seniority” (51). In this sense, his image of the city is quite cognate with the way in which Nate idealizes the American West. Regarding the reciprocity of both realms, Slotkin has pointed out that [t]he common images of the Frontier as a place of windfall profit, of plenty, of magic, of positive transformation, imply that the Metropolis is the obverse of these things: a place of relative scarcity, in which improvements of conditions can be achieved only by difficult labor within the bounds of customs, where expectation is dimmed by history and self-transformation limited by law and jealousy. (1998a: 40–41)

If the frontier’s promises are contingent upon the city’s deprivations (regardless of whether real or perceived), then to idealize the metropolis means partly to invert the frontier myth, which is exactly what Lew does in Against the Day. In an attempt at sidestepping his boss’s decision and against his better judgement, he discursively relocates a key aspect of the rural ideal, namely, the quality of life, right into the heart of the city. This episode already gives a rough idea of how the construction of country and city are tied to each other in the frontier myth. In what follows, Against the Day underscores the extent to which the historical realities of the American West are becoming increasingly transfigured by the myth. Eventually, the novel relates

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how an academic called Professor Vanderjuice issues a warning to the effect that “[i]t may not be quite the West you’re expecting” (52). Considering himself an authority on the subject of the frontier, Vanderjuice accordingly explains: I spent my earlier hob-raising years out where you’re headed, Denver and Cripple Creek and Colorado Springs, while there was still a frontier, you always knew where it was and how to get there, and it wasn’t always just between natives and strangers or Anglos and Mexicans or cavalry and Indians. But you could feel it, unmistakably, like a divide, where you knew you could stand and piss would flow two ways at once. (53–54)

For the academic, the frontier thus denotes a region that is virtually impossible to represent on a map, for it acts as a liminal space located on the threshold between nature and culture. It goes without saying, however, that the way in which the professor’s conception is rendered in the novel obviously mocks how the frontier encapsulates a distinctly male experience. In a sense, the urine can be said to figure as a male fertilizer that facilitates the cultivation of a nature that is constructed as feminine. But, interestingly enough, the urine flows toward the west as well as the east and urban civilization, which is why Vanderjuice’s image equally symbolizes an antiurban sentiment, a contempt for the supposedly corrupted cities on the Atlantic seaboard. Contrary to expectations, the academic’s contempt stems, not so much from actual urban experiences as from the efficacy of the frontier myth. This crystallizes when considering how Vanderjuice further contrasts the American West with urban society. Having taken cognizance of Turner’s thesis while visiting the White City, the academic wistfully has to admit “that the Western frontier we all thought we knew from song and story was no longer on the map but gone, absorbed—a dead duck” (52). Turner’s thesis apparently prompts him to establish a direct correlation between the closing of the frontier and the onset of a societal process of cultural decline, which implies an increasing loss of human ties with nature and which most notably makes its presence felt in the industrial city. On that score, Vanderjuice invokes the Chicago stockyards, both as a negative example of historical development and as positive proof for his cultural diagnosis. During an airship flight above the stockyards, the academic indignantly points at a group of tourists who enjoy a guided tour that involves “an instructive hour of throat-slashing, decapitation, skinning, gutting, and dismemberment” (53). Thus, Vanderjuice pits the alleged heroism of frontier life (and the killing of cattle by individual pioneers for purposes of self-sufficiency) against the cruel, automatized mass slaughtering that takes place within cities and mostly for urban populations. Indirectly, then, the academic proposes a model of American history in which the stage of frontier expansion is followed by the stage of urban-industrial society. “The frontier ends and disconnection begins” (53), he concludes. Although Vanderjuice interprets the course of this history as decadent, he is unable to

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explain the succession of its stages, which merely leaves him pondering: “Cause and effect? How the dickens do I know?” (51). Elsewhere in the novel, however, his interpretation actually refracts history through the lens of the frontier myth. As Slotkin has argued, “[i]n 1893 the Frontier was no longer (as Turner saw it) a geographical place and a set of facts requiring a historical explanation,” and instead “it was becoming a set of symbols that constituted an explanation of history” (1998a: 61; italics original). That Vanderjuice deploys the frontier as a mythical interpretation of history manifests itself in a passage that draws on a key figure of the frontier, namely, the American Cowboy. In view of the proceedings in the stockyards, he proclaims in an unashamedly nostalgic manner, here’s where the Trail comes to its end at last, along with the American Cowboy who used to live on it and by it. No matter how virtuous he’s kept his name, how many evildoers he’s managed to get by undamaged, how he’s done by his horses, what girls he chastely kissed, serenaded by guitar, or gone out and raised hallelujah with, it’s all back there in the traildust now and none of it matters, for down there you’ll find the wet convergence and finale of his drought-struck tale and thankless calling. (53)

For Vanderjuice, the closing of the frontier and the incipient triumph of urban-industrial society entail the symbolical death of the American Cowboy. However, his image of the heroic and virtuous cattle herder is derived not so much from the historical realities of the American West (in terms of a geographical space) as from the fictions created about the Old West as a mythical space. This is not least reflected by the fact that he refers to the scenario of automated meatpacking stockyards as “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show stood on its head” (53). Hence Vanderjuice’s notion of urban-industrial society functions as a symbolic obverse to his conception of the American West, which has been informed by a highly popular theatrical enactment of frontier history that does not provide “re-creations but reductions of complex events into ‘typical scenes’ based on the formulas of popular literary mythology” (Slotkin 1998b:  69).5 Vanderjuice’s vision of frontier history and his image of urban industrial society then can be said to figures as two sides of the same coin. Yet Pynchon’s novel likewise highlights that the significance attributed to frontier history does not necessarily have to be a simple reflection of the myth

5.  Given that Slotkin stresses the importance of dime-novel Westerns here, many passages in Against the Day, especially those set in the American West that emulate dime-novel set pieces and parody the literary formulas of this very genre, seem to comment on and subvert the dime-novel’s historical role in consolidating the popularity of the frontier myth. I revisit this issue in Chapter 7 which examines Pynchon’s treatment of dime-novel detective fiction. On the various forms of late-nineteenth-century dimenovel narratives and their relationship to the frontier myth, see Slotkin (1998b: 125–155).

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and its popular imagery. Instead, the meaning that the frontier assumes for individuals is embedded within biographical contexts, shaped by their geographical trajectories and not least contingent upon issues such as class affiliation. Consider, for example, a dream in which the mine worker Webb Traverse envisions the frontier: Webb would find himself standing at some divide, facing west into a great flow of promise, something like wind, something like light, free of the damaged hopes and pestilent smoke east of here—sacrificial smoke, maybe, but not ascending to Heaven, only high enough to be breathed in, to sicken and to cut short countless lives, to change the color of the daylight and deny to walkers of the night the stars they remembered from younger times. (86)

When considered out of context, it seems that Webb’s experience of frontier life fully corresponds to the imagery of the frontier myth, and that even its implicit antiurbanism has found its way into the dreams of pioneers. In this sense, the frontier symbolizes openness, mobility, and possibilities from which the good life might ensue, whereas the city represents an infernal and entropic environment that inevitably results in decay and death. Yet, on closer inspection, Webb’s antiurbanism is hardly directed at the city as a way of life. Rather, his contempt for the metropolis originates in its role as the seat of economic power upholding a system of exploitative labor, for which the frontier acts as “a region adapted to an internal imperialism” (Slotkin 1998a: 46). This can be illustrated by tracing a few key characteristics of Webb’s trajectory in Against the Day. That Webb one day “found himself in the back of a wagon heading west” (87) is hardly the result of a pioneering spirit, but is due to a family dispute that had sundered his kinship amid the ravages of the Civil War. Eventually, he arrives in southern Colorado, where various mining operations had already been in progress since the 1850s. More precisely, Webb takes up employment as a mine worker in Leadville—a town that was founded after the silver discovery in the late 1870s, resulting in a boom that lasted for over a decade and thanks to which many frontiersmen could make a living. Thus, with his economic survival secured, Webb settles down, marries and, within the bosom of a nuclear family, apparently leads a placid life in a local community. The sine qua non for settlement is, however, “the existence of a ‘resource’ Frontier” (Slotkin 1998a:  45) that is marked by an abundance of mineral deposits, but that is also constantly relocated depending on new discoveries. This frontier, in turn, relies on the city, since a labor-intensive industrial undertaking such as hard rock mining initially requires considerable capital investment. It is therefore indispensable also to take a “capital Frontier” into account, for which “the abundance/scarcity division between Frontier and Metropolis is reversed” (1998b: 45–46). This capital frontier is, moreover, contingent upon the availability of “a ‘cheap labor’ Frontier” (1998b: 46) that it considers as a resource in itself, and that it deploys as such in order to produce surplus capital.

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The frontier-capital nexus that ties economic survival to a fluctuating demand for cheap labor is, of course, also what Webb finds increasingly difficult to ignore. The worsening economic climate, including wage cuts and extended working hours, induces him to partake in collective action by organized labor. At some point, however, Webb devotes himself to vigilantism, as he begins to lead a double life as a clandestine dynamiter, thus gaining notoriety throughout the nation as “the great Wild West bomb-chucker known as the Kieselguhr Kid” (370). In other words, Webb does not renounce the myth in the face of the everyday realities of frontier life. Instead, he remodels a key figure of frontier heroism, namely, the outlaw, so as to turn this figure against the myth itself, and to call attention to (and to avenge) what the latter conceals—that is, the systematic exploitation of workers by a capitalist class. That Webb can only do so on the terms of the frontier myth clearly cuts both ways. After all, he reaffirms and perpetuates the myth, especially its rugged individualism, by staging acts of spectacular violence that function “as a safety valve for metropolitan social conflicts” (Slotkin 1998b: 127). What Webb’s trajectory thus illustrates is how the frontier myth rationalizes economic and geographical expansion, in that it transfigures socially produced wealth into the fruits of a wilderness, as it were, and idealizes individual action by touting traits such as “assertiveness and achievement [ . . . ] as values in themselves” (Slotkin 1998a: 33).

Urbanizing the Frontier Against the Day also relates the frontier myth to processes of economic and geographical development, particularly to processes of urbanization in the American West. In this context, the novel stresses that urban growth has to be understood as part of a larger framework of capitalist expansion, rather than merely in terms of a social process. A key region that Against the Day focuses on is Colorado, which, from the 1860s on, was marked by relatively pronounced population growth, industrial concentration, and gold and silver mining, which played a crucial role in the national economy. In fact, the US government purchased these two metals on a large scale, since both gold and silver money were valid as legal tender at that time, according to the monetary standard known as bimetallism. But the demand for silver was subject to drastic fluctuations due to changes in fiscal policy, which, in turn, had notable repercussions for mining towns. In other words, rural Colorado and the urban centers of economic and political power on the Atlantic seaboard were closely intertwined. As a regional focus, Colorado is therefore suitable for analyzing the interdependence of city and country obfuscated by the frontier myth. The nexus of economic development and urbanization in Against the Day emerges in a scenario that signals the impact of boosterism on urban growth in Colorado. The novel relates how Lew Basnight, while scouting the hinterlands of Denver, accidentally winds up in the fictional town of Lodazal, where

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he meets Burke Ponghill, “the editor of Lodazal Weekly Tidings, the newspaper of record for a town which as yet was little more than a wishful real-estate venture” (172). Moreover, we are told that “[i]t was young Ponghill’s job to fill empty pages with phantom stories, in hopes that readers far away would be intrigued enough to come and visit, and maybe even settle” (172). The so-called town thus consists of nothing more than undeveloped parcels of land, which could be sold for a profit in case future settlers should strike an undiscovered vein of wealth. The purely speculative nature of this scheme further transpires in the ensuing conversation between Burke and Lew: “[ . . . ] so far all we’ve really got’s a mining town that ain’t built yet.” “Silver? Gold?” “Well, ore anyway . . . containing this metallic element that ain’t exactly been—” “Discovered?” “Maybe discovered, but not quite refined out?” “Useful for . . . ?” “Applications yet to be devised?” (172–173) Even if this scenario acts as a parody of urban boosterism, the ostensible mockery also contains a grain of truth, because, as Self has noted, late-nineteenthcentury Western towns “have been promoted, hawked, and downright lied about on a scale rarely matched elsewhere in the nation” (2004: 415). Settlements in the American West were therefore an integral part of a flourishing real-estate market that was, in turn, bound up with other economic sectors such as the extractive industries. Boosters figured prominently within this market insofar as their promotional strategies served to attract both labor and investment capital.6 That Western towns were frequently established as instruments of economic expansion is likewise reflected in Against the Day by emphasizing the prefabricated aspect of townscapes. Pynchon particularly alludes to the “instant towns” (Abbott 2008: 106), such as Telluride—a mining town founded in 1878 after the discovery of gold, which is depicted as “the simple narrowed grid of a town that seemed to’ve been shipped in all at the same time and squeezed onto the valley floor” (2006: 281–282). The novel also leaves no doubt that, far from being isolated monads, such settlements act as outward anchors within a continental network of towns and cities primarily held together by the railroad. Having formerly worked in Chicago, a “city at the center of twenty or thirty railway

6.  Concerning this figure’s prominence within nineteenth-century real-estate markets, Self goes as far as arguing that “urban growth as an end in itself, an economic logic fundamental to capitalism, was elevated by western boosters to the level of civic religion” (2004: 415).

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lines, radiating with their interconnections out to the rest of the continent,” Lew Basnight becomes convinced that in Colorado “the steel webwork was a living organism, growing by the hour, answering some invisible command” (177). Lew subsequently has to acknowledge that “American geography had gone all peculiar” (177), because, against all expectations, he finds it difficult to discern a substantial difference between city and country. Less than making for a contrast to the metropolis, the small town in the American West instead functions as a colonial outpost of the industrial metropolis (and occasionally resembles its scaled-down mirror image). Further, as the urban fabric spreads its dominion, the landscape of the Old West is utterly changed out of recognition, while its vestiges, such as wayfaring paths, are incorporated into the urban supply chain. On that score, Pynchon’s narrator informs us that on the outskirts of Telluride, “the trail up the valley beside the tracks,” used to transport “ore and supply wagons” between mines and the rail station, “was all bustling, like streets of a town” (281). This issue gains another significant dimension as Against the Day relates how urban social conflicts spill over to the American West in the wake of the Panic of 1893. The novel particularly emphasizes that, as an arena for the upsurge of labor unrest, Colorado cannot be considered merely as a regional phenomenon, but rather, has to be seen as a focal point of social conflicts that were already under way in urban centers for decades. This is also why Lew Basnight, after staying on in Colorado, notes that “every day out here saw another little Haymarket” (176). Yet, the text also points to the role of state policy in acting as the final straw that facilitated the eruption of lingering conflicts in Colorado. This can be clarified by reviewing a number of issues related to US monetary policy that paved the way for the Panic of 1893. To begin with, the 1873 Coinage Act demonetarized silver and thus reestablished the gold standard. Due to new silver discoveries and being in need of a silver market, however, Western mine owners soon urged a return to bimetallism. Their demand was supported by the indebted agrarian classes in the South (in the hope that an inflation would ease their burden of debt), while the financial elites in the East pleaded to adhere to the gold standard. As a result of the 1878 Bland-Allison Act, the US Treasury eventually became the main outlet for the silver production in Colorado (and elsewhere), whereupon an overproduction during the 1880s caused a steep decline in the metal’s value. Since the pressure exerted by Western industrial and Southern agrarian interests did not abate, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act took effect in 1890, requiring the Treasury to buy an even greater amount of silver each month. In turn, the sellers of silver received bonds that could be redeemed for either gold or silver dollars, but as the majority chose gold, the government’s reserves were soon depleted.7 Crisis-shaken and

7.  It has also been pointed out that another reason why President Cleveland urged the repeal of the Silver Act in 1893 was that from 1890 on many foreign investors had

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threatened by bankruptcy, the US government consequently repealed the Silver Act in 1893, so that the value of silver hit rock bottom, numerous Western mines stopped their production for good, hosts of silver miners became unemployed, and plenty of mining settlements turned into ghost towns. The impact of the repeal of the Silver Act is unmistakably reflected in Against the Day, as the novel accentuates how a regional economic landscape that had relied on the frontier myth and its promise of windfall profit (so as to lure a workforce into settling down) is virtually turned upside down, and how a regional network of towns is drastically reconfigured: Leadville, thinking itself God’s own beneficiary when the old lode was rediscovered in ’92, got pretty much done in by Repeal, and Creede the same, sucker-punched right after the big week-long wingding on the occasion of Bob Ford’s funeral. The railroad towns, Durango, Grand Junction, Montrose, and them, were pretty stodgy by comparison. (89)

It is telling that Leadville, the town where 1880s silver boom started, is associated with the idea of divine providence, which implies that, given the alarming news of the closing of the frontier, the rediscovery of silver might have been seen as an act of divine grace, only to be exposed as an illusion by state intervention. Further, the novel implies two possibilities as to how towns could survive the man-made debacle. Acting as a transport hub certainly cushions the effects of the economic downturn, yet the most significant lifeline for towns seems to be the existence of nearby gold deposits. This crystallizes when we look at how the previous passage continues: Telluride was in the nature of an outing to a depraved amusement resort, whose electric lighting at night in its extreme and unmerciful whiteness produced a dream-silvered rogues’ district of nonstop poker games, erotic practices in back-lot shanties, Chinese opium dens most of the Chinese in town had the sense to stay away from, mad foreigners screaming in tongues apt to come skiing down the slopes in the dark with demolition in mind. (89)

The hyperbolic rendering of this scenario clearly anticipates the eventual restructuring of Telluride—as it is known, an upper- and middle-class resort town ever since industrial production stopped for good in the late twentieth century. At this point, however, the mining town seems to be flourishing

ceased to buy US government bonds out of a concern that the United States might abandon the gold standard. On this issue, see Northrup (2003: 256). For a detailed discussion of the role of silver in post-Civil War American monetary policy, see Timberlake (1993: 166–182).

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despite the Depression, which is hardly surprising given that the US government had to restock its reserves in the wake of the Panic of 1893, meaning that gold was in demand as never before. Further, this passage indicates the mass migration of labor triggered by state policy, as a town that once merely served to accommodate a miners’ workforce swiftly turns into a place of refuge where the unemployed congregate. However, the concentration and the ensuing oversupply of labor in individual towns and regions enabled mine owners to cut the wages and to extend the working hours. This, in turn, provoked strikes organized by miners’ unions, the first of which, early in 1894, was “the strike in Cripple Creek for an eight-hour day” (82). In response to such strikes, owners frequently hired strikebreakers as well as private detectives, mostly employed by city-based firms such as the Pinkerton or Thiel agencies, in order to protect the strikebreakers. In cases where violence eventually erupted, state militia was often sent in order to restore peace, which in many cases, however, resulted in massacres carried out against strikers and union members. The history of labor relations in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Colorado is treated in Against the Day with a keen eye for detail, starting with the unrest immediately after the Panic of 1893, through to the so-called Colorado Labor Wars between 1903 and 1904 as well as the Ludlow Massacre in 1914. In this context, Pynchon suggests that this series of regional conflicts was closely tied to a national framework of economic development. His novel emphasizes not least how, once triggered off by state policy, Colorado became the focal point for the conflict between capital and labor that had been lingering in urban centers throughout the United States for a considerable time. This outlook is repeatedly underpinned in Against the Day, often by narratively enacting an urban outsider’s point of view on this episode of the history of the American West. It is once again the perspective of Lew Basnight that hints at the significance of the regional conflicts in Colorado for the overall political and economic course of the United States. Eventually, Lew finds himself unable to deny that the labor struggles in Colorado were not “just unconnected skirmishing” and that these events instead represent “a war between two full-scale armies, each with its own chain of command and long-term strategic aims— civil war again” (177). On a related note, the novel stresses that the driving force behind the urbanization in the American West were not individual pioneers who discovered a source of wealth. While individuals (such as boosters) certainly played a role for the development of the American West, it is indispensable to acknowledge that behind their actions often stood a collective interest, which is exactly what the frontier myth obscures. The way in which Against the Day depicts the urbanization of the frontier thus seems very much in line with the argument that writing “[u]rban history as frontier history” merits close attention to “the full incorporation of the West into the system of modern capitalism” (Abbott 2008: 33).

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Toward the Urban Frontier In addition to the urbanization of the frontier myth, Against the Day addresses processes of regional and urban restructuring, especially regarding the significance of the American West as a tourist and recreational area. As already mentioned, industrial production in the American West was in many respects dependent on railroads, not least in order to transport mining products to the industrial centers and markets in the East. After the establishment of an extensive network of railways in the late nineteenth century, however, Western towns were also frequently incorporated by tourist routes that railroad companies eagerly promoted by drawing on the frontier myth and the imagery of the Old West. In other words, the urbanization of the American West involved the construction of a tourist-oriented image of the frontier. This issue manifests itself in Against the Day, for instance, when we are told how Lew Basnight runs into two Englishmen called Nigel and Neville, who happen to be touring the American West. Lew surmises that their presence in Colorado is due to the “Oscar Wilde influence” (185). The narrator subsequently explains: “Since the famous poet had returned to England from his excursion to America, brimming with enthusiasm for the West, and Leadville in particular, all kinds of flamboyant adventurers had been showing up in these mountains” (185–186). This reference suggests that Wilde’s veneration of the American West might have proved beneficial in increasing the region’s attractiveness for middle- and upper-class tourists, both domestic and foreign. Concerning the role of the American West as a tourist destination, it has been argued that “[d]efinining the western mountains and coast as recreation zones required substantial editing of history. Tourism [ . . . ] increasingly bypassed or ignored the industrial landscape of mining and manufacturing” (Abbott 2008: 125). Western tourism depended on an image of the American West that would retain an element of lawlessness and daredevilry, while at the same time being light fare. Thus, it stands to reason that Wilde’s visit seamlessly fits in with such an image, whereas the history of labor conflict, which I addressed earlier, obviously does not. The purposeful attempt to create a tourist-oriented image of the American West is also reflected in a scenario that revolves around the Telluride-based entrepreneur Ellmore Disco, whose family business is described in the novel as “the thrivingest enterprise between Grand Junction and the Sangre de Cristos” (284). Ellmore’s formula for success seems to be that he manages to advertise his goods to the residents of the local mining community. But it also transpires that the entrepreneur is in fact dependent on urban populations who visit the region from far and wide. Ellmore eventually made a habit of stylizing himself as a trigger-happy rogue threatening to shoot anybody who makes impudent remarks about his extravagant headgear:  “To strangers he was Ellmore the Evil, to friends an engaging enough customer despite these hat-related spells” (284). However, once serious trouble, labor-related or otherwise, is in the air

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in Telluride, his real interest is revealed to be nothing but de-escalation and appeasement. He explains his attitude on the following grounds: The one thing no form of business can really do without [ . . . ] is good old peace and quiet. Any disruptive behavior up here over and above the normal Saturday-night frolics will tend to discourage the banks down in Denver, not to mention the day-tripping into town of that pigeon population we’ve all of us come so much to depend on, next thing you know we’re into a slack cycle and well, the less of that the better ‘s all. (314–315)

That he refers to visitors as “pigeons” reveals that the entrepreneur pursues a con game, as it were, by impersonating a dangerously frenzied gunslinger. As such, he enacts a role that is part and parcel of a meticulously staged image of Telluride as a Wild West town. In other words, the novel depicts a consciously constructed townscape that is characterized, on the outside, by frontier ruggedness and entrepreneurial individualism, while concealing its dependence on cities near and far.8 Thus, while still serving as a residential place for the working class, Telluride already foreshadows its transformation into a recreational town. What Against the Day satirizes, in this regard, is how supposedly pioneering entrepreneurs claim to spearhead this process. As the subject of Telluride’s scenic appeal comes up in a conversation, Ellmore divulges his vision of the town’s future redevelopment, which notably involves a potential increase in the land’s value under a different use: You’re lucky to see it while it’s boom times, for when these veins give out at last, there’ll be nothing here to sell but the scenery, which means herds of visitors from places that don’t have any—Texans, for example. That side of the street you’re lookin at’s what we call the Sunny Side, you see those little miners’ shacks over there? Too narrow for any but the undernourished to stand, let alone turn around, in—well someday each of those will be going for a million apiece U.S., maybe two, and up . (285; italics original)

That such a vision of Telluride’s late-twentieth-century conversion into a wealthy recreational town echoes a process like gentrification is, of course,

8.  The fact that, in the wake of labor unrests, Telluride’s vice district is eventually outsourced to a satellite town, as it were, bespeaks the constructedness of the townscape as well. Once state militia have reestablished law and order in Telluride, the nearby Silverton, a defunct silver mining town, turns into a wide-open outpost of intemperance, which is described in Against the Day as follows: “Just a little grid of streets set in a green flat below the mountain peaks, but for wickedness it was one of the great metropolises of the fallen earth.” (191).

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hardly an accident. In this regard, the episode obviously mocks how the entrepreneur considers himself a pioneer in this process, which is underlined by his interlocutor’s sardonic comment on these deliberations as a “Man of vision” (285). Pynchon’s novel insinuates that such a prospect of regional restructuring primarily has to be understood as a scenario that is, in a way, to be expected, not least because the process that eventually results in Telluride’s conversion into a recreational town is already under way in the early twentieth century. For the time being, the nearby industrial concentration might be incongruent with the intended image of a frontier town. After production has stopped for good, however, the local mining facilities, once remodeled and marketed in terms of their industrial heritage, would likely cease to disturb and instead tie in with the image of a health-promoting resort town that is built on a rural ideal and shows its scenic beauty to its advantage.9 It is repeatedly underscored in Against the Day that the driving force behind such restructuring processes is not the entrepreneurial acumen of pioneering businessmen (as the frontier myth would have it), but rather, the collective actions of capital owners such as real-estate agencies, banks, financial investors, and the state. This argument is enforced, most notably, in a scenario that involves a fictional Western town called Nochecita. This town is located to the south or southwest of Colorado’s mining areas, and apparently it served as a transport hub during the heyday of silver mining, as we are told that “around the railhead and its freight sheds and electrical and machine shops, the town had grown” (200).10 With the gradual decline of the mining industry, however, it seems that Nochecita has turned into an all but deserted quasi-postindustrial Western town, as it were, whose center—once a residential area for the working class—now merely hosts a few catering and vice establishments that offer their round-the-clock services to travelers who happen to pass through town. The text also conveys that the propertied class once used to reside on the outskirts

9. Abbott has pointed out in this regard that Western “industrial landscapes needed to age and molder a bit before they acquired enough quaintness to be recycled as summer or winter resorts” (2008: 126). He also calls to attention that Colorado’s reputation as a healthy environment became an important factor in attracting visitors from the mid-nineteenth century on. Accordingly, “[c]ities that were recreational draws and industrial centers at the same time had to hope that working factories, at the least, emitted their smoke and fumes downwind from the tourist facilities” (2008: 126). For a detailed discussion of the role of the American West as a recreational area, see Abbott (2008: 115–131). 10.  The exact location of Nochecita remains unclear in Against the Day; the town could be located at the southwestern border of Colorado, but also in New Mexico, Arizona, or Utah. However, this detail does not seem to be of major importance; it seems more relevant that the town served as a transport hub linking the mining industry in southern Colorado with the urban markets at the Pacific coast and possibly in Mexico.

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of Nochecita, but eventually left town in the wake of the region’s decline. The novel then relates how, in the early twentieth century, Frank Traverse travels to Nochecita, where he makes the acquaintance of Estrella Briggs, who lives on the outskirts of the town, or, more precisely, upstairs in what had been once the domestic palace of a mine owner from the days of the first great ore strikes around here, now a dimly illicit refuge for secret lives, dark and in places unrepainted wood rearing against a sky which since this morning had been threatening storm. Walkways in from the street were covered with corrugated snow-shed roofing. (200)

The novel therefore implies that, after having been deserted by its owners, the building is about to decay, as its maintenance is increasingly neglected. The property value consequently declines, so that the “palace” becomes both affordable as a residential building for a low-income population and attractive as a gathering place for the town’s lowlifes: The restaurant and bar on the ground-floor corner had been there since the boom times, offering two-bit all-you-can-eat specials [ . . . ]. At all hours the place’d be racketing with gambling-hall workers on their breaks, big-hearted winners and bad losers, detectives, drummers, adventuresses, pigeons, and sharpers. (200–201)

Further, the ground level of the building is described through the metaphor of “[a] sunken chamber almost like a natatorium at some hot-springs resort” (201). The phrasing is telling insofar as it anticipates the structure’s imminent revalorization, which eventually manifests itself as the novel relates how Frank revisits Nochecita almost a decade later. What he comes to notice is that, although the old building is still in place, its condition has further deteriorated, while its neighborhood has surprisingly developed into a densely built-up area. This transformation is depicted in Against the Day to the effect that the upsurge of new construction fosters the dilapidation of the old structure: New buildings had gone up near Stray’s old place, so close sometimes that there remained only narrow slipways for the wind to pass, picking up speed, whereupon the pressure decreased, so much that as the unrelenting plateau wind passed through town, the flimsily braced older structure was actually sucked to one side, then the other, all night long, rocking like a ship, ancient nails creaking, plaster apt to chip away if you looked at it for more than a second, walls of the rooms shedding soiled white flakes, a threat of collapse in some near future. (460)

Setting the hyperbole aside, the narrowing of the distances between the old and the new structures can be read in terms of a spatial metaphor that points to the

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imminent closing of a rent gap. The latter has been defined as “the disparity between the potential ground rent level and the actual ground rent capitalized under the present land use” (Smith 1996: 65). In our case, this means that the actual ground rent of the old mine owner’s residence initially declined, so that the gap between the actual and potential ground rent widened. However, once the neighborhood becomes attractive again for capital investment in the built environment, the rent gap is ready to be closed, which is also when a process such as gentrification sets in. This is precisely what happens in Nochecita, after the town has started to attract capital again: The foundations had gone on crumbling back to pebbles and dust, and rain leaked in everywhere. Little or no heat in the place, floorboards not quite level. And yet the rent here, he heard people complain, kept getting higher each month, newer tenants continued to move in, earning more and eating better, as the place filled up with factory reps, real-estate salesmen, drummers of weaponry and medical supplies, linemen, water and road engineers, none of whom would ever quite meet Frank’s eyes, respond when he spoke, or recognize him in any but the most muted and shifty ways. (460–461)

The depiction of how local residents are threatened with displacement due to the influx of a higher-income group makes the reference to gentrification rather explicit. It is obvious, however, that the “gentrifiers” do not primarily choose to settle because they imagine the neighborhood as a place to live the good life. This is not least indicated by the fact that the new tenants either deal in real estate and arms or work in the construction and industrial sectors, which suggests that Nochecita is about to be redeveloped as a transport hub. As such, the town might actually take on a strategically significant role again, “owing to the troubles south of the border” (460), namely, the uprisings on Mexican territory that culminated in the revolution of 1910. To sum up, the revalorization of Nochecita is delineated as follows. As the Mexican borderland is increasingly characterized by political instability, the regional market is stimulated and starts to attract investment capital from far and wide.11 As a result, Nochecita becomes an economically advantageous

11. The economic upturn in the border region between Mexico and the United States prior to the Mexican Revolution is, of course, also what Frank Traverse observes but does not relate to the restructuring of Nochecita. We are told, for example, how Frank, before revisiting Nochecita, travels through Mexico as he is detained by militia who are armed with Mauser rifles manufactured in Germany. Much later in the novel, in an episode set during the revolution, Frank gains first-hand knowledge of the transnational capital flows involved in the arms trade, as he takes part in a deal that involves the smuggling of Norwegian Krag-Jørgensen rifles (which have been discarded in favor of newer models and sold by the US military) into Mexican territory.

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location again, so that a new cycle of investment into its built environment begins. This, in turn, creates a rent gap that affects the property in the neighborhood in which new construction takes place and which is eventually closed by a process of gentrification. Pynchon’s novel thus highlights that neighborhood revalorization and the ensuing process of gentrification have to be considered, to some degree, as intrinsic to development in the built environment under the conditions of capitalism. This idea is, of course, at odds with a demandoriented perspective that explains such processes mostly through changing consumer preferences. The position that Pynchon therefore takes up is, first and foremost, directed against how the frontier myth distorts discourses linked to processes of urban restructuring. In other words, the novel suggests that a process such as gentrification does not primarily occur because middle-class pioneers someday decide to move into a slum in order to recultivate a supposedly urban wilderness, but rather for structural economic reasons. Further, the anachronistic manner in which this idea is illustrated suggests a critical perspective on the ongoing popularity of the frontier myth in late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century urban discourses.

Into the Urban Wild The following section turns to Pynchon’s negotiation of the frontier myth in a distinctly metropolitan context, focusing on how Against the Day draws on a popular literary formula, namely, the narrative of the rural (and typically female) adolescent venturing out into the metropolis in order to climb the social ladder.12 In a sense, this narrative formula both inverts and reaffirms the frontier myth. Its trajectory begins with a movement away from rural parochialism and toward the metropolis, which is imagined as a marvelous place of promise and opportunity, “as a truly new world” (Ickstadt 2001:  303).13 However, the moment of arrival is usually followed by profound disillusionment, as the metropolis reveals itself as the stomping ground for a dog-eat-dog society, not to mention a cesspool of immorality and vice.14 In order not only to survive but to make it in the metropolis, the protagonist is then virtually

12. Although this formula also found expression in a variety of dime novels, its most prominent literary rendering is probably Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). 13.  Ickstadt further argues with regard to Dreiser’s Sister Carrie that the novel “reinvests and re-writes the myth of America (an original dream of Nature and the West) from the new experience of urban life” (2001: 303). 14. This is, moreover, aggravated by the fact that both the social and the sexual promiscuity offered by city life often goes hand in hand with the commodification of femininity. Although this aspect occasionally plays a role in this section as well, it will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.

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required to adapt to the urban wilderness. Conceptualized as a “metropolitan sublime,” this narrative paradigm has been said to mark a watershed in the context of American urban fiction. Although it retains a tendentially bleak and pessimistic outlook on urban life, the metropolitan sublime yet departs from an older realist tradition. Because, in the metropolitan sublime, “[t]he street is the city space par excellence: its order that of chance, its freedom the energy of the crowd” (Ickstadt 2001: 303). As such, it can also be seen as a precursor for later modernist renderings of an increasingly immaterial city, in that the empirical city vanishes behind an opaque realm of excessive signification. The metropolitan sublime therefore, heralded the “myth of the city as new West” (304) by molding urban space into a seemingly inexhaustible frontier whose promises are ceaselessly recycled by a mass-mediated consumer culture. The frontier of the metropolitan sublime in Against the Day is placed side by side with another frontier, which points to the city as a segregated place and which is linked to the popular turn-of-the-century pastime of “slumming.” This involved affluent citizens temporarily venturing into seedy and crowded immigrant and working-class districts, to seek cheap thrills and illicit pleasures. Although a pioneering spirit was part and parcel of the practice, slumming was in fact a thoroughly organized and promoted collective enterprise. While also critically judged by social and religious institutions, the public attention devoted to the phenomenon ultimately helped to consolidate the idea that “the slum constituted an identifiable and uniform region of urban poverty, congestion, and decay that was segregated, both geographically and morally, from the residential districts inhabited by middle- and upper-class whites” (Heap 2009: 22). In other words, the slum was discursively constructed and thus naturalized as an urban wilderness within a wilderness, as it were. In doing so, the systemic underpinnings of its existence, including the role of both urban policy and processes of economic development in the built environment, were effectively concealed.15 In a sense, then, we are dealing with two correlated urban frontiers. The metropolitan sublime relocates the frontier right in the heart of the city, where the newcomer, lured by the promise of a steep rise from rags to riches, aspires to upward social mobility. The slumming frontier, in turn, presupposes a relative affluence, so that the excursion into the urban “underworld” holds out not only voyeuristic or libidinal gratification but also the prospect of self-assurance regarding the legitimacy of the slummer’s social position. Further, in both cases, the metropolis appears as a space that is permeated by a complex economy of signs. The city thereby becomes an increasingly liminal space, since one and the same neighborhood can be constructed in the most divergent ways. For

15. For a detailed account of the historical emergence of slum districts in American cities, especially in New York and Chicago, and the growing prominence of slumming as pastime for the affluent since the late nineteenth century, see Heap (2009: 17–54).

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one group, it can act as a lived space of everyday life, whereas another group consumes the same space primarily as a spectacle. This liminal zone figures as a pivotal semantic territory that Pynchon surveys in order to destabilize the foundations of both frontiers. A striking reference to the metropolitan sublime in Against the Day can be found in the storyline that revolves around Dahlia Rideout, who, as an adolescent, travels from Colorado to New York, where she at first struggles to gain a foothold, but eventually succeeds as a social climber by finding employment in show business.16 Despite the borrowings from literary tradition, however, the novel modifies the conventional trajectory from country to city in significant ways. This already crystallizes on closer consideration of how the moment of arrival—a narrative linchpin of the metropolitan sublime—is rendered in Pynchon’s text, namely, as a travesty of both the popular image of the bustling metropolis and the idea that arriving necessarily implies a sense of being overpowered by the sight of urban crowds. The following passage depicts how Dahlia, right after leaving Grand Central Station, observes an ordinary street scene: In New York at last she stood out of the traffic, watching shadows of birds move across sunlit walls. Just around the corner, on the great Avenue, twohorse carriages curvaceous and sumptuary as the beds of courtesans in a romance moved along, the horses stepping carefully in mirror-symmetry. The sidewalks were crowded with men in black suits and stark white high collars, in the tangible glare of noontide that came pushing uptown, striking tall highlights from shiny top hats, projecting shadows that looked almost solid . . . The women by contrast were rigged out in lighter colors, ruffles, contrasting lapels, hats of velvet or straw full of artificial flowers and feathers and ribbons, broad angled brims throwing faces into girlish penumbras as becoming as paint and powder. (337)

Needless to say, this passage ironically rehashes the romanticizing sentiment through which the moment of arrival is often expressed in the metropolitan sublime. Instead of the social promiscuity associated with the city street, the heroine encounters a striking ordering principle, due to which street life seems to run like clockwork, almost to the point of appearing static. The crucial issue, however, is that Dahlia arrives in midtown Manhattan and not elsewhere in

16. The New York episode is actually the first in a series of urban scenarios (followed by episodes set in Venice, London, and Paris) that involve Dahlia’s rise to a famous stage actress. In this context, Severs has argued that “Pynchon essentially globalizes the working-girl narrative” (2011:  222) that proved highly popular in the early twentieth century. For an insightful discussion of Dahlia’s story as a postmodern take on Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, see Severs (2011: 215–238).

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New York. What she beholds is anything but a cross section of the city population; rather, she beholds a specific segment that mostly comprises relatively affluent middle-class citizens. More than just pointing to the geographical specificity of arriving, the novel likewise indicates that particular regimes of order actually underlie the image of the chaotic and effervescent metropolis. Notably, in our case, there is a divide that runs along gender lines, since the sidewalks are swarming with either male wage earners employed in the service sector or female flâneuses indulging in conspicuous consumption. The gendered logic of the use of public space is further underscored by the narrator’s bottom line, expressed through Dahlia’s observation: “A visitor from quite far away might almost have imagined two separate species having little to do, one with the other” (337). The city as a place of segregation figures prominently in the variation on the metropolitan sublime that Against the Day provides. This transpires when Pynchon’s novel continues to act out a series of set pieces modeled on this narrative paradigm. What usually follows the episode of arrival is an arduous search for employment that is aggravated by fierce competition on the job market. Thus, in order to strike it rich, the protagonist has to succumb to an urban wilderness that is epitomized by the mean streets and the teeming crowds of the metropolis. Playing through such a narrative pattern, the novel indicates several aspects that the myth of the urban wilderness trivializes. As chance would have it, on the day of her arrival, Dahlia makes friends with Katie, a fellow newcomer to New  York, who works part-time in a midtown restaurant where customers serve themselves, which is also why its low-paid female workforce is primarily responsible for maintaining “the hygienic brilliancy of the establishment” (338). Her desire to pursue a stage career apparently discourages Katie from leaving “this miserable town,” where, as she snaps, “[d]isrespect was invented” (338). Soon Dahlia likewise tries to find her way into the playhouses of the city but blunders first, as she applies for positions considered inappropriate for women, such as “a job as an organ tuner’s apprentice that didn’t pan out, owing, as far as she could determine, to her lack of a penis” (338).17 Through another chance encounter, however, Dahlia finds an acting job that requires her to play a naive young girl who winds up on the crowded streets of Chinatown, where she is seemingly abducted by hoodlums. Slummers who visit Chinatown on a guided tour are intrigued by these plays,

17. While drawing attention to the entry of an increasing number of female workers into the job market in early-twentieth-century American cities, Pynchon’s novel also stresses that gender-based discrimination often forced women work in the low-pay sector and as unskilled laborers. On a related note, Severs argues that “women are (to use an oxymoronic but appropriate phrase) prominently backgrounded in Against the Day, which subtly registers the huge influx of women into the post-Civil War U.S. workforce” (2011: 217–218).

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so that Dahlia soon “had uptown visitors gaping from their tour charabancs in amazement, ladies from out of town clutching their hats” (340). Eventually, the performances attract financiers from the entertainment industry, which results in a higher income for Dahlia and which allows her to move to a relatively affluent midtown neighborhood. The rendering of Dahlia’s advancement clearly draws on the metropolitan sublime in that it relates how the newcomer suffers a series of setbacks, but only to be ultimately redeemed by the urban crowd. The city figures as an environment that is inscrutable and perilous, but that, in the end, seems to reward individual courage and perseverance through the promise of fortunate chance encounters. Still, Against the Day likewise stresses how such mythologization effectively cushions the existence of social injustices such as gender-based discrimination, or unequal access to the labor market. On closer consideration, it also shows that the apparent fortuitousness that Dahlia owes her advancement to is linked to a logic of supply and demand. The essential condition for her contract with Chinatown’s “white-slave simulation industry” (339) is the pervasiveness of upper- and middle-class anxieties about the reputation of slums that were believed “to ensnare white native-born women in lives of involuntary sexual servitude” (Heap 2009: 46–47).18 Further, the text implies that Dahlia’s physical appearance corresponds to how kidnap victims were imagined according to the rhetoric of white slavery.19 In other words, her upward mobility is not so much related to any redemptive force of the crowd as to the fact that she fills a niche in a market. As such, Dahlia becomes part of an ingenious mise-en-scène, whose organizers shrewdly plug into an urban discourse so as to capitalize on it. Still, the novel indicates that it would be misguided to grasp this strategy merely as a process that transforms an authentic neighborhood into a world of make believe. Instead, the fictional “white-slave simulation industry” depicted in Against the Day has to be seen as a further development of preexisting strategies of constructing a neighborhood as “authentic” for the purposes of tourist consumption. “Slumming, as a tourist diversion,” it has been argued, “contained within itself elements of adventure and risk even as it was becoming an industry. The picturesque entwined itself with the dangerous to construct an alluring offer for aspiring pleasure seekers” (Christ 2003:  77). The staged abductions therefore represent the externalized and supposedly untamed equivalent of the picturesque interior of the Chinese restaurant that tourists frequent in order to

18.  That such anxieties often involved white women being kidnapped into literal underworlds also finds expression in Against the Day, namely, by the fact that, during the staged abductions, Dahlia is dragged down into a manhole. 19. This issue is hinted at in a conversation during which Dahlia wonders why she is not asked to audition for her role, whereupon her employer sarcastically replies: “Red hair! Freckles! Audition enough O.K.!” (339).

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consume “an uptown fad” (338) called “Chop suey”—as is well known, a dish invented by Chinese immigrants so as to appeal to native palates. The spectacle of street crime returns a sense of adventure to the constructed image of the slum. Put another way, these fake-crimes—aptly called “Chop suey stories” (339) by their artistic director—restore a wilderness into an otherwise all too easily digestible image of a neighborhood, for they “add an element of ‘spice’ to the show” (340). For the slummer, the immersion in the wilderness implies a manageable and even pleasant threat, for the supposed perils of the slum are after all spatially confined. Suffused with an uplifting sense of having crossed a frontier that separates civilization from savagery, the slummer can readily head home to the comforts of the bourgeois abode. Still, it is important to note that, while the personal gratification on the side of the slummer may be an invariable component of the experience, “with each successive vogue the practice of slumming came more and more to define the urban districts upon which it converged” (Heap 2009: 57). A prime example in this context, which Against the Day also refers to, is the development of Greenwich Village—a neighborhood that had been virtually deserted by a white middle class after the mass influx of immigrant workers in the late nineteenth century. Around the turn of the century, the latter were followed by numerous artists, bohemians and radicals, who moved into the neighborhood for its low rents. Consequently, the “Village” became a notorious hotspot of the counterculture that “provided enterprising young women and men with a rare opportunity to fashion lives outside the constraints of both traditional family networks and the industrial economy” (Heap 2009: 59). Given its novel residential composition, slummers eventually started to consider the neighborhood as increasingly safe. Thus, by retaining the gritty vibe of a working-class district, while infusing it with an air of bohemian dissidence, the Village was made palatable for high earners as a slumming destination. The onset of this process is illustrated in Against the Day in a brief yet telling episode. We are told how, after relocating to midtown, Dahlia and Katie repair to downtown in order to attend a party at an impresario’s townhouse in Greenwich Village: They took the sixth Avenue El downtown and got off at Bleecker Street. There was some apricot-pink light left in the sky, and a southeast wind bringing up the aroma of roasting coffee from South Street, and they could hear river traffic. It was Saturday night in Kipperville. Bearded youths ran by, chasing girls in Turkey red print dresses. Jugglers on unicycles performed tricks along the sidewalk. Negroes accosted strollers, exhibiting small vials of white powder and hopefully inquiring faces. Street vendors sold corn on the cob and broiled squabs on toast. Children hollered behind the open windows of tenements. Uptown slummers bound for places like Maria’s on MacDougal chatted brightly and asked one another, “Do you know where we’re going?” (348)

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In a sense, this passage can be read as an ironic reprise of the initial moment of arrival. After relocating to a prosperous district, the heroine, now an upstart socialite, ventures into a seedy downtown neighborhood; however, this time she does so, not out of necessity but as a pastime. Further, the passage suggests that the working-class neighborhood is on the cusp of profound transformation. The depiction of the picturesque streetscape, let alone the emblematic reference to the smell of coffee, prefigure that the Village, as it gradually sheds its semblance of a vice district, is undergoing gentrification. But Pynchon’s novel likewise signifies that such a condition is not precipitated by supposed pioneers, who seek to recultivate an urban wilderness. What allowed slummers to effortlessly tour the Village was in fact the rather recent provision of a system of mechanized public transport, which the text reflects through highlighting the Sixth Avenue elevated railway constructed in the late 1870s. The Village’s popularity as a slumming destination was, in other words, dependent on the development of a transport infrastructure, which, in turn, required intensive capital investment in the first place. This is not to deny the significance of the image of Greenwich Village as a stomping ground for libertines, but rather means that its attractiveness as a slumming destination has to be understood within a larger framework of economic development. What is more, its continuing integration into a transport network also made the Village increasingly attractive as an actual residential neighborhood for higher-income groups (mainly office workers and clerks employed in the financial district).20 In a way, then, its early appeal as a neighborhood of ill repute had a virtually paradoxical effect. As hosts of affluent slummers, lured by the promise of bohemian debauchery, poured into the Village, the district became attractive for capital investment. Consequently, the neighborhood underwent further redevelopment, while retaining its bohemian flair, so that it started to attract high earners as residents. Heap has put the nexus between the slumming craze and the restructuring of Greenwich Village as follows: “Far from reinforcing the districts’ association with poverty, degradation, or illicit sex, the slumming vogue for bohemian thrillage actually led to what might be considered one of the earliest examples of urban gentrification” (2009: 62; emphasis original). This is precisely the scenario that Against the Day alludes to, while indicating that such urban transformation was, above all, set in motion by capital investment and the development of a transport system. This is implied by designating Greenwich Village as “Kipperville”—an obvious reference to the 1939 children’s book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.

20.  In this context, Heap has particularly stressed the importance of the southward extension of Seventh Avenue in 1914, and the ensuing construction of the Seventh Avenue subway line that was opened in 1918, both of which “transformed the oncesecluded Village into one of the most central and easily accessible neighborhoods in the city” (2009: 61–62).

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The latter’s plot revolves around the eponymous steam shovel operator, who suburbanizes, as it were, in order to elude the growing competition by dieselpowered shovels. Although the operator’s decision can be seen as a display of personal ingenuity, it also represents a “passive” adaptation to market conditions obeying the logic of supply and demand. Put another way, this reference once again points to the systemic nature of economic development in the built environment, for which the construction machine figures as an emblem. When it comes to the frontier myth in relation to processes of geographical and economic development, Against the Day particularly stresses that the myth unduly idealizes the history of westward expansion, while downplaying the role of urban development in the United States. Pynchon’s novel likewise signals that the frontier myth was crucial to shaping a conception of the city as an urban wilderness. In this sense, it came to provide a semantic repertoire that serves to promote and legitimize the ‘revitalization’ of this wilderness by supposed pioneers. This kind of rhetoric thus should be treated with caution, as the novel suggests, for it abets displacement by rendering invisible preexisting community life and thus ultimately exacerbates the problems of residential segregation and social polarization. Used in this way, the frontier myth becomes an instrument—as the narrator in Pynchon’s latest novel Bleeding Edge scathingly mocks—for insatiable real-estate developers who sing to themselves:  “This Land Is My Land, This Land Also Is My Land” (2013: 166).

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Let us return to the trope of an urban wilderness that often goes hand in hand with the notion of the city as a realm of obscurity, confusion, and inscrutability. This conception can also be approached from a slightly different angle, namely, by following an ambivalence that has been framed as central to urban modernity. It involves the idea that the triumph of mechanization, bureaucracy, and instrumental rationality have precipitated the eradication of myth in industrial capitalism. This kind of sociological truism has been famously described by Weber in terms of a “disenchantment of the world.” Yet, by the same token, myth is said to have reappeared in urban modernity, not least as part of the emergence of consumer capitalism that brought in its wake a “re-enchantment of the world.” The spectacle of commodity culture thus virtually cast out the dullness and tedium of the mechanistic world of modernity, by infusing material reality with the magic of fantasy and dream. Crucial to this accomplishment was the construction and staging of spectacular urban experiences that were also molded into the built environment of the modern metropolis. Frequently relying on a meticulous fictionalization of its physical structures, the urban spectacle most notably found expression in transient spaces, such as shopping arcades, department stores, hotels, railroad stations (and later, also in airports), world exhibitions, amusement parks, and the like. Moreover, the logic of the urban spectacle still enjoys great popularity in the context of themed environments in the postmodern city.1

1. My use of the concept of the “spectacle” indeed has affinities with Debord’s notion of the “society of the spectacle” and, for that matter, with Baudrillard’s notion of an “order of simulacra” as well. Nonetheless, I hesitate from taking these ideas as explicit reference points, since I would agree with Romeyn that they “are informed by a barely hidden nostalgia for ‘authenticity’ ” (2008: 214). To understand the notion of the spectacle merely as the obfuscation of an essentialist notion of “authenticity” seems both misleading and inappropriate. Instead, I use this concept here to highlight the inherent theatricality or performativity of urban life that the “Venice” chapter (Chapter 2) has already touched upon.

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It is this very ambivalence of urban modernity that guides this chapter’s approach to Pynchon’s depiction of the city as a place of enigma, illusion, and unknowability. In fact, this trope has a considerable tradition in artistic renderings of the city, often taking shape as a threat to the moral integrity of urban dwellers. Still, to some extent, it seems to have reemerged in urban-industrial society with a new livery. “[M]ore secular, it focused less on sin and more on a new inexplicableness in city crowds and spaces, a new unintelligibility in human relations” (2007: 103), as Trachtenberg argues. In this sense, the incessant confrontation with a multitude of strangers in the big city came to figure as the central “theme of the spectacle of urban existence” (Gilloch 1996: 133).2 Assuming that the metropolis epitomizes the place where “[m]ystery had been raised to the level of spectacle” (Trachtenberg 2007: 104), the latter is then best understood quite literally. For the rise of the urban spectacle was not least contingent upon technological innovations in the visual culture of modernity. Especially the mechanical reproduction of images and their accelerated dissemination have contributed to the radical transformation of the urban experience. Further, integrated into a rapidly expanding consumer culture, this development likewise has been said to yield “the commodification of experience” (Gilloch 1996: 138). This chapter then continues a line of investigation that has already been adumbrated elsewhere in the book. Chapter 4 canvassed how Chicago’s White City, drawing on the logic of the urban spectacle, strived to exalt a utopian, yet mendacious, vision of architectural grandeur and civic progress. Then again, I have at times also implied that, outside the boundaries of such planned dreamworlds, the supposedly mundane reality of metropolitan life is not necessarily inferior in terms of its “unreality.” As noted in the “Urban Frontier” chapter (Chapter 5), an economic strategy such as staging an ethnic enclave as a slum for the purpose of tourist consumption shrewdly taps into the widespread desire for “authentic” experience that characterizes urban modernity.3 Pushing this perspective a bit further, this chapter traces how the metropolis emerges in Against the Day as a landscape of myth, fantasy, and illusion that thrives on

2. The notion of the metropolis as an appealingly inscrutable place has not least been catalyzed by detective fiction in the nineteenth century. Writers of city mysteries and detective stories have particularly exploited the anxiety that has accompanied the emergence of big city crowds. This is also why Brand describes classic detective fiction in terms of “a controlled exposure to urban anxiety” (1991:  11). While detective fiction as urban fiction is discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, the theme of urban anxiety is explored Chapter 8 of this book. 3. In this context, Romeyn has argued that “[t]he conception of low life as ‘real’ and transparent constitutes the background for the emergence of the slum as a tourist destination. There, the ‘desensitized’ urbanite could hope to recuperate the sense of experience and shock that [ . . . ] mechanized life had conditioned out of him” (2008: 54–55).

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the logic of the urban spectacle. In this regard, Pynchon particularly strives to reconstruct the shifting experiential and technological configuration of urban modernity. This is not least accomplished, as the central section of this chapter shows, through a focus on a key spatial microcosm of urban consumer culture, namely, the department store, which is eventually followed by an inquiry into the relationship between urban modernity and amnesia.

Restaging the Urban Experience It has become something of a tenet in discourses on urban modernity that the crowdedness and flux of city life confront the urbanite with an all but incessant bombardment by sensory stimuli. This condition has entailed, according to Simmel, the emergence of a specific urban mentality that is characterized by intellectualism, reserve, and indifference, all of which help the individual consciousness to cope with an overwhelming amount of heterogeneous sensory impressions.4 But how exactly does such a mental apparatus then render the experience of the metropolis? Here Benjamin’s reflections on urban modernity supplement Simmel’s diagnosis with acute insights into the interplay between the cognitive and technological aspects of metropolitan life. In a sense, Benjamin reformulates Simmel’s notion of sensory overstimulation in terms of a “shock experience” (2006a: 178) that he considers a key characteristic of metropolitan life. Although the shock provided by the sudden immersion into a multitude of strangers can be said to figure as “the definitive signature of modernity” (Gilloch 1996: 143), the emergence of new technologies of mass communication and transport has escalated the shock potential of city life, thus profoundly transforming the foundation of the urban experience.5 “The greater the shock factor in particular impressions,” Benjamin writes, “the more vigilant consciousness has to be in screening stimuli” (2006a: 178). But he concedes as well that “the more it does so, the less these impressions enter long experience [Erfahrung] and the more they correspond to the concept of isolated experience [Erlebnis]” (2006a: 178). The cognitive screen developed by the urbanite thus accomplishes that experience is primarily rendered as a

4. See Simmel (2003: 12–19). 5.  Interestingly, Benjamin also draws an analogy between the shock experience of urban life and the perception of film. In his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he notes that “film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus [ . . . ] that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic” (2007: 250). This is an important aspect that Chapter 7 takes up again, particularly in relation to Pynchon’s fictional “Integroscope”—a fictionalized proto-cinematic device that figures in Against the Day as a pathway to buried layers of urban history.

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disjointed series of volatile and incoherent episodes, bearing only little, if any, relation to each other, let alone to the realm of tradition. Of special importance here is the rise of mass media institutions (such as the illustrated daily press and advertising), which brought about an unprecedented availability of information and an enormous proliferation of mechanically reproduced images. Yet this development also involved, as Benjamin argues, the severe problem of relating an overabundance of information to one’s personal experience. In light of “the isolation of information from experience,” he thus contends that urban modernity involves “the increasing atrophy of experience” (2006a: 174). One could therefore say that a crucial paradox emerged in the late-nineteenth-century metropolis, since “the more knowable the world came to seem as information, the more remote and opaque it came to seem as experience” (Trachtenberg 2007: 125; emphases original). The decline of lived experience and the rise of vicarious experience then figure as two sides of the same coin. What the first lacks in excitement and thrill, the latter has to make up for by funneling attention to the spectacular, adventurous, and exotic, be it in the form of newspaper reports, illustrated advertisements, stage performances, urban exploration narratives, and so on. Mainly catering to a newly consolidated stratum of middle-class urban professionals, experience (in Benjamin’s sense of Erlebnis) thus came to be rendered as a commodity that appealed less to basic human needs than to the fantasies and desires of consumers. This development was likewise accompanied by the emergence of a whole spectrum of spaces of consumption that “marked the ascendancy of leisure as a structuring realm of everyday life, with media, marketing and advertising industries promoting narratives that connected pleasure and the purchase of commodities to being in, and being seen in, these spaces” (Mansvelt 2005:  39). Hence the urban spectacle is not only about consumption; it is about consuming for the sake of putting oneself on display while consuming. For the spatial formation of the spectacle was inextricably linked to a growing desire to cultivate a public image of selfhood, to fashion “a distinctive external persona [ . . . ] molded to impress and fascinate others in a society of strangers and momentary, fleeting impressions” (Romeyn 2008: xiv). The negotiation of the urban spectacle in Against the Day then has to be understood in the light of the increasing fragmentation of experience, and the recognition of urban space as a ubiquitous theatrical stage. Accordingly, the novel’s variation on the narrative paradigm of the metropolitan sublime (that Chapter 5 discussed in detail, albeit through a dissimilar conceptual lens) is rendered as a highly jumbled and disjointed series of brief vignettes, in the course of which the contours of the urban spectacle emerge. The immersion into the semiotic complexity of the metropolis thereby also figures in Pynchon’s narrated world as an intricate exercise, as it were, in reading the city and unlocking its secrets. To this end, the novel frames this process through the consciousness of a virtually nomadic character, namely, the young adolescent Dahlia Rideout, who can be considered, by all means, as experienced (i.e., in the sense of having

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travelled widely). Thus, lacking a distinct attachment to a specific place, Dahlia is portrayed in Against the Day as a virtual polyglot, whose voice resembles an acoustic palimpsest bearing the traces of her nomadic trajectory: Dally’s voice was hard to pin down to any one American place, more of a trail voice with turns and drops to it, reminders of towns you thought you’d forgotten or should never’ve rode into, or even promises you might’ve heard about and were fixing to get to someday. (298)

Pointing to the geographical itinerary that shaped her pronunciation, this passage testifies to the cohesive nature of Dahlia’s experience (in terms of Erfahrung), before she arrives in the metropolis and a process of disintegration sets in. Implicitly, however, the narrator also anticipates that the metropolis primarily poses a challenge for her sensorium because it speaks a visual language. As noted in the previous chapter, the stereotypical rendering of the expectations regarding the moment of arrival in the big city is upended in Against the Day, namely, as the shock involved in encountering an urban crowd somewhat ironically stems from an absence of the visual chaos and social promiscuity associated with such crowds. Dahlia instead beholds a highly conspicuous yet inscrutable organization of the field of visibility, a painstakingly choreographed middle-class street theater that she, lacking familiarity with its underlying sociocultural and visual codes, struggles to make sense of. Then, in the further course of the narrative, it transpires that the intricacy of deciphering the metropolis is related to the problem of matching perception and experience. Here, it is especially the detachment of visual impressions from other sensory realms that puts the protagonist on the spot. While this applies to the public life on the big city street as well, it holds all the more true in the meticulously stylized interior spaces of an aspiring service economy. Consider the subsequent vignette in which Dahlia, shortly after arriving in New York, visits a restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The olfactory aura of its interior almost immediately strikes Dahlia as familiar, for she associates it with the experience of her wayfaring past, “The unmistakable church-supper smell of American home cooking” (337), as the narrator, focalized through the protagonist’s consciousness, describes the odor suffusing the restaurant. Nonetheless, Dahlia seems incapable of reconciling this observation with other memories and impressions that have shaped her experience, least of all with the visual appearance of the restaurant’s interior: “No cuspidors she could see, nor cigar smokers—no tablecloths either” (337). Emphasizing the discrepancy between visual and olfactory sensation, the narrative thus indicates the increasingly atomized mode of experience that prevails in the metropolis.6 The further characterization of the restaurant

6. This idea becomes even more apparent when considering the depiction of Dahlia’s childhood experiences while traveling around Midwestern towns. In this context,

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is similarly telling here, for particular emphasis is laid on the electrified interior furnishing, the sight of “sparkling white tile nearly everywhere” and the fact that “the marble tops of the tables were kept scrupulously clean” (337). Pynchon’s novel here suggests that, while partly retaining a bucolic atmosphere through traditional food smells, the restaurant is, at the same time, staged as a state-of-the-art servicing business that signifies consumer-orientation, hygiene and progress. The rendering of Dahlia’s gradual immersion into the dazzling and disorienting metropolis in Against the Day, then, signals that the spectacular staging of city spaces along visual coordinates has to be grasped as a hallmark of urban modernity. On a related note, the novel highlights that to posit the metaphor of the stage as central to metropolitan culture by no means involves the masking or dissimulation of supposedly authentic spheres of everyday life. To understand the metropolis as a performative space, perhaps as “the space of theatricality” (Romeyn 2008: xvii) as such, therefore means, by implication, that it would miss the point to assume a strict separation between stage and audience. This issue is repeatedly highlighted in Against the Day, particularly in those episodes that revolve around Dahlia’s employment as an actress on the crowded streets of Chinatown. Here, however, Pynchon’s novel is far from depicting this scenario in terms of a collision of the real with the theatrical (or the authentic with the fake); instead, the narrative focus is on the interpenetration of different stagings, as a result of which a notable ambiguity arises as to which cast and set pieces actually belong to which particular staging. The ethnic enclave of Chinatown, especially the interior of “a chop suey joint down on Pell Street” (338), emerges in Against the Day as constructed in terms of a picturesque exoticism for the purposes of tourist consumption. To visit the neighborhood on a slumming excursion thus implies, from the outset, a thoroughly fictionalized and mediatized urban experience. It seems that Dahlia, after slightly acclimating to metropolitan life, begins to develop an awareness for its thoroughly staged character, since the narrator makes a comment (once again focalized through her consciousness) to the effect that, aside from those dishes catered to slummers, “the place smelled like serious cooking” (338). While, at some point, catching sight of a group of Chinese men entering the restaurant, Dahlia is told by her friend Katie that these very men, who apparently work for Dahlia’s prospective employer, a local gang leader, are “[t]he real article. Not like the play-actors you’ll be dealing with” (338). The phrasing is

Pynchon’s novel particularly underscores how the field of vision is intimately tied to other impressions, not least to olfactory sensations. The narrator recapitulates, for instance, how Dahlia “enjoyed the downtown stores smelling like yard goods and carbolic soap, black linoleum parquetry, went down sandstone steps to have her hair cut in fragrant barbershops in the basements of hotels, brightly lit against the stormy days, smelling of every grade of cigar, witch hazel brewed and distilled in the back rooms” (72).

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revealing insofar as it distinguishes between real criminals and performers, who merely purport to be gang members. The point is, however, that the actual gang members are, in a sense, likewise performers who partake in the urban drama of conspicuous consumption, not least because they stylize themselves as businessmen “sporting dark American suits and pomaded haircuts” (338). The ambiguity that results from such interlocking performative realms can be further illustrated through examining the Pynchon’s depiction of the staged abductions on the streets of Chinatown. As already noted, the staged street crime manages to add the necessary zest to an otherwise picturesque image of an ethnic neighborhood. As such, the target audience of these performances primarily comprises voyeuristic and thrill-seeking white upper- and middleclass slummers. This core audience, in turn, plays its own part in the drama of social distinction, since the consumption of the spectacle of the exoticized ‘Other’ also serves to reaffirm the supposed authenticity of bourgeois selfhood.7 Then, we also witness how random passersby enter the stage of the street crime, once their curiosity has been aroused by the turmoil of the staging. Moreover, there seem to be hired spectators among the onlookers as well, which makes it all the more difficult to discern who actually happened to pass by the spectacle and who merely answers the purpose of reinforcing a sense of crowdedness. “Neighborhood pedestrians who might or might not be part of the show stood as in a tableau vivant” (340), as the narrator frames this uncertainty. Further, by adding that all of the bystanders were “making no move to intervene” (340), the spectacle is rendered even more opaque. For such passivity could be due to having been instructed not to interrupt the performance, just as it could be an expression of metropolitan indifference, and not to a symptom of lacking of civil courage. Pynchon’s novel then relates how the performances undergo a dramatic change, as they are eventually produced in an increasingly elaborate and boisterous manner in order to convey the impression of a nascent war between rivaling Chinatown gangs (so-called tongs). This includes the use of guns with blanks whose “smoke [was] soon bringing a picturesque imprecision to the scene” (341). Consequently, police officers enter the stage as well, where they run into another group of law enforcers, “understood to be in the pay of the other tong,” both of which commence a fight “as to who had jurisdiction over the outrage” (341). It seems that, at this point in the narrative, the opacity of the spectacle culminates, for the text provides no clues as to whether the mentioned pay refers to bribes or performers’ salaries. This, then, is followed by the

7.  Concerning the modern conception of bourgeois selfhood, Romeyn argues that “as early as the seventeenth century, the Others of the bourgeois subject have tended to be constructed as the negative image of the real, authentic, truthful, stable, self-identical, self-contained bourgeois self, and represented as theatrical, inauthentic, exotic, flamboyant, slippery and false” (2008: xvi).

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description of how an “actual tong war in the neighborhood [ . . . ] heated up in earnest” (341); yet Against the Day also emphasizes that it would definitely fall short to grasp this development simply in terms of the suspension of a facade. Here, Pynchon’s novel rather highlights that showmanship and acts of spectacular self-fashioning (such as the predilection of gang leaders to establish trademark postures and combat styles) were part and parcel of such armed conflicts, and thus unsurprisingly, became a regular feature in urban myths as well as media representations.8 More importantly, however, the transition from staged crime to gang war is compared here to a process in which “all the expensive make-believe had somehow slopped over into ‘real life’ ” (341). Then, assuming an anti-mimetic stance, Pynchon’s novel both hints at and undermines the ascendancy of an early-twentieth-century bourgeois cultural disposition that came to value authenticity above all things. The Chinatown scenario rather points to the inherent performativity and theatricality of metropolitan life and culture, but at the same time makes sure to take the pervasive logic of the urban spectacle into account. This logic manifests itself in the novel as a complex and intricately nested play, with appearances that revolves around the organized staging of authenticity whose efficacy (not to mention profitability) is above all measured in terms of entertainment value. To underscore this aspect, the narrator in Against the Day relates, somewhat wryly, that “the enterprising Celestial,” who came up with the idea of staging abductions in the first place, “had begun his career as ordinary lobbygow or tour guide, but Chinatown was too close to the Bowery to insulate him for long from the allures of show business” (339). Along with the increasing atomization of experience, the expansion of the logic of the urban spectacle ultimately deepens the inscrutability of the metropolis. This circumstance is further aggravated by what has to be considered as the flip side of the modern cult of authenticity, namely, a growing concern over acts of deception and fraud. This issue is echoed in Against the Day as the novel stresses how, in the course of Dahlia’s social advancement in the metropolis, the question concerning who or what might actually be “the real thing” (341) becomes increasingly difficult to answer. In Dahlia’s case, the epistemological pitfall involved in this question is, of course, related to her being forced to recognize that, as a young woman, she herself is frequently looked upon as a commodity. Needless to say, this issue is precisely what her enactment as a supposed kidnap victim exploits, so that, during her engagement, Dahlia actually “began

8. In this context, a notable example is certainly the notorious gang leader Sai Wing Mock, better known as “Mock Duck,” who played a leading role in a tong war beginning in New  York’s Chinatown in 1900. In this context, Against the Day particularly refers to Mock Duck’s “well-known spinning squat,” a method which had him “firing two revolvers at a time in all directions” (341) and which is also mentioned in the journalist Herbert Asbury’s popular chronicle Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld, first published in 1928 and made into a film in both 1938 and 2002.

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to learn some of the all-but-impenetrable signs and codes, a region of life withheld, a secret life of cities” (339). However, outside of this stage-within-a-stage, so to speak, the urban experience often remains elusive and inscrutable, as the metropolis actually reveals itself as composed of a multiplicity of disparate worlds, all of which seem to call for very distinct ways of decoding.9 Modeled according to the logic of the urban spectacle, such worlds are frequently premised on a purposefully staged display of the field of visibility, but similarly involve its partial concealment, especially when it comes to the forms of domination that the spectacle relies on in order to function smoothly.

The Worlds of the Department Store The department store figures as a spatial point of convergence between the rational and oneiric dimensions of urban modernity. It embodies a quintessentially rational architectural form that is characterized by order and organization, rationality and discipline, functionality and efficiency. Yet, at the same time, it can be said to epitomize a realm of enchantment, fantasy, and dream that offers visitors a profoundly incoherent and intoxicating experience. This ambiguity is also central to the way in which the department store is rendered in Against the Day. In this context, Pynchon’s novel particularly modifies a number of significant features that have characterized the emergence of the department store in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such features are significant here, as they indicate how far the department store is predicated upon, but also differs from, other forms of architectural and spatial organization that are considered as distinctive of urban modernity. Historically, the department store marks the onset of mass consumption, as it came to displace the small-scale retail business located at street level. Made possible by technological developments such as steel frame construction, the department store was frequently realized as an extensive high-rise building, allowing it to dispense with the specialization in a particular class of goods. Instead, it offered the purchase of an immense spectrum of commodities, all of which were, moreover, classified and spatially separated into individual departments. Therefore, the store likewise served an educational purpose as it “taught

9.  One strategy of dealing with such illegibility seems to be the conceptual imposition of order on the fluidity of the urban experience by means of developing typologies so as to categorize the multitude of fleeting social encounters in the metropolis. Accordingly, Dahlia is at times portrayed in Against the Day as resembling the figure of the urban physiognomist. While she is approached, for instance, by an allegedly veteran theater producer who offers her an engagement in a Broadway playhouse, this prompts the question of whether “this customer proved to be the sort of pest it only took a girl a minute and a half in New York to tumble to” (340).

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the social location of goods [ . . . ]. It systematized, conveniently, the world of goods into discrete names, each with its niche, and in visible spatial relation to others” (Trachtenberg 2007: 132). Further, by establishing a sales policy based on fixed prices, the department store effectively led to “the abolition of bargaining” (Benjamin 1999a: 60), thus drastically reducing the amount of time necessary for the financial transaction involved in the purchase of goods. More than just rendering retail business smoother and more efficient, however, the department store added an imaginary element to the realm of consumption. Most notably, it lent weight to the notion that “[t]he store represented the world, and represented it chiefly in the form of an ideal home inhabited by ideal roleplaying characters” (Trachtenberg 2007: 132; italics original). Put another way, the department store did not merely offer an unprecedented array of goods for sale, but it was equally meant to provide customers with an outlook on a virtually perfect world in miniature, elaborately served up for visual consumption during a leisurely stroll.10 Hence the department store brought retail trade into line with the realm of mass entertainment, and eventually, came to conflate the roles of consumer and spectator. As a landmark urban spectacle, the department store thus incarnates a “[p]lace where consumers are an audience to be entertained by commodities, where selling is mingled with amusement, where arousal of free-floating desire is as important as immediate purchase of particular items” (Williams 1991: 204). Taken together, the department store manifests itself, on the one hand, as the result of a highly organized and rational effort, while, on the other hand, providing a deeply oneiric experience that appeals to the desires and fantasies of consumers. It is indispensable to note, however, that the entertaining and dreamlike display of the world of commodities rests upon a feat of concealment. The fanciful parading of the commodity obscures the “links between goods and factories, the origin of goods within a particular mode of production” (Trachtenberg 2007:  133). Through veiling the fact that its value is socially produced, the commodity on display appears as if its value were immanent, and as if it were endowed with a kind of magical aura.11 The emergence of the department store, therefore, has been said to mark “the moment when the production process closes itself off to people” (Benjamin 1999a: 367). By the same token, the department store has been depicted as a successor to the

10.  This is certainly also why the department store has been routinely compared with museums and world exhibitions. In his The City in History:  Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, to take a prominent example, Lewis Mumford depicts the department store primarily as “a many-storeyed market-place” but also notes that it likewise “served as an immense World’s Fair of art and industry” (1966: 499). 11. This kind of aura has been famously described by Marx in terms of a “commodity fetish” that involves the transformation of the commodity into “a social hieroglyphic” (1976: 167).

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early-nineteenth-century shopping arcades, while also considered as having deprived the arcades of their spatial ambiguities. In other words, the department store redrew clearly the blurred distinctions between inside and outside, private and public, as well as artifice and nature that were seen as characteristic of the arcades. Similarly, it is said to have obliterated the utopian figure of the flâneur and the latter’s dispassionate stance toward urban modernity. “By abolishing the distance between the individual and the commodity, the feminization of flânerie redefines it out of existence,” as Ferguson argues concerning the transformation of the ramblings of the flâneur into a decidedly “feminine pursuit” (1994: 35) that acts in the service of capitalist enterprise. These are, then, more or less the theoretical coordinates that also serve as implicit reference points in Pynchon’s rendering of the department store. In Against the Day, we encounter the store in the context of the novel’s take on the so-called metropolitan sublime. This comes as no surprise considering that the topos of the department store figures prominently within this narrative paradigm. Here the visit to the department store almost seems like an inevitable stage in the urban newcomer’s itinerary of social advancement. As such, the shopping tour also acts a rite of passage by which the social climber acquires further knowledge of the customs and codes of urban consumer culture. The basic requirement for such an excursion is, however, that the protagonist has already gained some foothold on the social ladder, since the department store is certainly not the place to head to purely out of need. Instead, it holds out the prospects of daydreaming and tickling one’s fancy, and eventually leads to the purchase of items that are considered as befitting one’s social position, trusting that these will leave a lasting impression on a society of strangers. Accordingly, the department store comes into the picture in Against the Day when Dahlia is eventually compelled to purchase an appropriate dress to wear at a social event. Before we turn to the actual experience of the department store, however, let us take a closer look at how such aspects as geographical location and structural design are fleshed out in Pynchon’s novel. The scenario in Against the Day that revolves around a shopping tour to a department store describes how Dahlia repairs to the “Ladies’ Mile” (345), a popular Gilded Age shopping district in midtown Manhattan (roughly corresponding to the latter-day Flatiron District). While signaling that urban shopping facilities like the department store often catered to a predominantly female clientele, this historical reference likewise bespeaks the issue of class distinction involved in the modern practice of shopping, most notably to its geographical dimension. Understood as a form of conspicuous consumption heralded by the emergence of a broad stratum of relatively affluent middle-class citizens, shopping was anything but a social practice that was pursued incidentally. It rather took place as a consciously planned undertaking, concentrated in implicitly designated areas, thus allowing customers to signal the economic power that permitted them to consume leisurely in the first place. Unsurprisingly, the fictionalized department store in Against the Day is therefore located, as the

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narrator notes somewhat sarcastically, “far enough north to avoid imputations of the unfashionable” (345). It is also revealing here that the narrator adds that the store was “yet not so far from others of its kind as to present inconvenience to any female client to shop the day through” (345). Although this remark seems to merely emphasize the comfort involved in the geographical proximity of shopping facilities, it can also be taken as alluding to a rather contemporary urban phenomenon, namely, the late-twentieth-century inner-city renaissance and its concomitant reappraisal of the pedestrian accessibility of centrally located consumption spaces. Geared to capturing the attention of passersby, the department store made an appearance in the metropolis as a bulwark of architectural monumentality, furnished with eye-catching window displays, lavish facade designs, and other decorative elements. With that said, it might at first seem peculiar that the department store in Against the Day is depicted in terms of an almost complete absence of external adornment: All but clear of surface ornament, towering in gray modernity twelve stories high and engrossing an entire city block, it [the department store] might’ve struck the visitor from out of town lucky enough to find an unjostled vantage point as more a monument for simple goggling at, than a real-life marketplace actually to be entered and engaged. (345)

It might stand to reason, to grasp the depiction of the exterior, particularly the emphasis on its cold austerity, as a contrast to its dreamlike interior (which is not altogether wrong, as the description of the interior will show). More importantly, however, by explicitly negating the image of an aestheticized facade, the passage likewise bespeaks the significance that external ornamentation might normally have had for urban structures of this type. This is not least because, historically, the department store was orchestrated for its clientele as a marketplace of epic proportions, although its construction was in fact well attuned to the tendentially placeless logic of a market economy. The department store was constructed according to the principles of standardization and convertibility, both of which again answered the higher purpose of profitability. “With no essential structural rearrangement the hotel, the apartment house, the department store, and the office building were convertible, one into the other,” as Mumford notes, thus suggesting a certain anonymity of architectural forms that rest upon “abstract units of space” (1966:  499).12 It goes without saying

12.  The name of the department store in Against the Day, which reads “I.J.&K. Smokefoot” (345), could be also read as hinting at the structure’s abstract character, since the initials evoke the three unit vectors of a Cartesian coordinate system. The term “Smokefoot,” in turn, seems to point to the conjunction of rational and dreamlike features in the department store, since “foot” could refer to both cubic and front foot

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that such anonymity, in a sense, calls for outward embellishment, by means of which a faceless structure can be invested with some kind of visual identity. The hint at its structural principle is, however, not the only indicator in Against the Day that highlights the extent to which the department store may be said to represent a rationally planned urban spectacle. Just as fundamental to its rational character is, of course, an enormous organizational effort, which, as the novel emphasizes, is likewise reflected in the internal layout of its structure and, equally importantly, linked to a thorough organization of the field of visibility. On that score, the narrator informs us that the size of the place was not due to whims of grandiosity but rather dictated by a need for enough floor-area to keep rigorously set a veil separating two distinct worlds—the artfully illusory spaces intended for the store’s customers and the less-merciful topography in between the walls and below the bargain basement, populated by the silent and sizable regiment of cash-girls, furnace-stokers, parcel-wrappers, shipping clerks, needlewomen, featherworkers, liveried messengers, sweepers and dusters and runners of errands of all sorts who passed invisibly everywhere, like industrious spirits, separated often only by inches, by careful breaths, from the theatrical bustle of the bright, sussurant [sic] Floors. (345–346)

This passage obviously points to the screen between consumption and production that the emergence of the department store has been said to consolidate. This screen obscures the realm of organized services that acts as a go-between for the process of industrial production and the eventual display of commodities in the department store. The disclosure of this link would perhaps not compromise the efficacy of the spectacle altogether; yet, the more the traces of the production process remain hidden from view, the more smoothly and captivatingly the magical aura of the commodity can be staged. It is, however, indispensable to note that, although the latter passage seems to raise the veil, as it were, this is perhaps not quite the case. In fact, the depiction of the department store experience in Against the Day indicates how effortless it can be to indulge in the spectacle despite the awareness of its artifice. Accordingly, the novel also refrains from simplistic assumptions concerning the manipulative potential that might be said to inhere in such spectacles. Pynchon rather seems to imply here that, to some extent, the spectacle accommodates a desire on the part of consumers to have an ingrained disbelief momentarily suspended. Thus, in order to convey this idea, Against the Day draws on a number

(that is, measuring units commonly used in the real estate industry), whereas the smoke might symbolize the opaque and intoxicating experience provided inside the store. Such a reading might seem somewhat far-fetched, yet it also goes with Pynchon’s rendering of the department store experience.

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of significant narrative twists when it comes to the rendering of the experience provided by the department store. To begin with, the novel rewrites the well-trodden narrative pattern of the urban newcomer, who primarily goes to a department store so as to purchase goods that signalize social advancement. Instead, this approach is ironically remodeled into an involuntary bargain hunt, so to speak, for we are told that Dahlia allows herself to be coaxed into visiting the store mainly because her friend “Katie knew a seamstress who” works in the store and “had a line on returned or just-out-of-fashion numbers which could be picked up for a song” (345). In other words, Dahlia is by no means bent on visiting a department store, and thus also feels somewhat out of place when facing its near grotesque monumentality. Further, the novel depicts the intoxicating experience of the department store in terms of an experience that is scrupulously organized and, to some degree, technologically induced. In this sense, the effectiveness of this realm of experience is, first of all, predicated on its rigid spatial detachment from the experience of the surrounding city, which is enforced by a strict entrance control. Having cleared this hurdle, the first impression of the interior then is rendered in the text in terms of being overpowered, which is induced, among other things, by the construction of an aesthetic incongruence between the exterior and the interior of the department store. On that score, the narrator tells us: Inside was everything that outside was not—luminous, ornamental, beautifully swept, fragrant with perfumes and cut flowers, a-thrill with a concentrated chic, as if the crowds in the Avenues adjoining had been culled for particularly modish women and they’d all just this instant been herded in here. Dally stood breathing it in, till Katie took her arm. (346)

In the course of the narrative, the experience of the department store at times also resembles a playful take on the cliché of a technological obstacle course that is equipped with a whole spectrum of technical marvels, including mirrors, mannequins, and moving staircases. Dahlia’s immersion into this experience is thus likened to a series of “the usual small humiliations” (346), which eventually send her into “a kind of daze” (347). The point is, however, that she remains capable of relishing these contraptions, notwithstanding that, at some point, she begins to grasp their inner workings. Not unlike in the case of a conjuring trick, she is enchanted by an astonishing experience such as an elevator ride, “which Dally found miraculous,” as we are told, “even after she’d figured out roughly how it had to work” (346). On closer consideration, it actually crystallizes that the intoxicating experience of the department store is instead related to its semiotic illegibility. This consumption space of the department store reveals itself to Dahlia as a staged world in which different times and places apparently coexist, not necessarily, however, in any discernible correlation with each other. It might be feasible to come to terms with individual

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elements of this stage set, yet the meaning of the overall ensemble remains arcane. The inscrutability of this experience can be illustrated by briefly taking stock of some of its components. Already the entry into the store involves a harsh aesthetic contrast between the mundane exterior and the colorful and fragrant interior. However, the entry requires, first of all, the approval of “two doormen”, described as “living pillars before whose serene inertia one was either intimidated into moving along or not” (346).13 Moreover, the doormen are called, as Dahlia is informed, “Jachin and Boaz” (346), that is, they are named after the pillars that stood in front of the Holy Temple in ancient Jerusalem, and they can be passed, curiously enough, by virtue of a flirtatious gaze. Further, the store’s interior accommodates a large assortment of fashionable commodities and an array of technical contraptions, which likewise serve to simulate natural environments, as for instance in the case of “a scale replica of Yosemite Falls” (347). Thus, a crucial reason why “the shopping tour floated by in nebulous incoherence” (347) is that Dahlia remains incapable of determining anything such as an underlying code based on which these signifiers could be patched together in spatial contiguity. Instead, she is confronted with a spatialized mosaic of signs, as it were, in which disparate spheres of meaning are decontextualized and then spectacularly placed side by side. Yet, the perception of these phenomena does not coalesce into anything that is remotely akin to some kind of coherent experience. The illegibility of the protean interior is therefore inextricably linked with the disintegration of experience in such a consumption space.

At the Edge of Memory The rendering of the intoxicating department store experience and the depiction of the urban experience then figure as complementary images in Against the Day. In this sense, the scenario that revolves around the shopping tour to the department store symbolically mirrors the image of the city as a complex realm of interwoven, yet often incongruent semiotic worlds. Occasionally, this idea is also explicitly indicated in the novel, if only through small details, for example, when her friend Katie admonishes

13.  It is quite telling that, by all indications, the phrase “living pillars” seems to be borrowed directly from Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences,” which is almost perfectly in line with Pynchon’s depiction of the department store interior. Especially the first stanza of the poem gives expression to the image of an interior, which is marked by profound semiotic inscrutability and in which the distinction between culture and nature is blurred. The first stanza reads as follows: “Nature is a temple where living pillars / Let sometimes emerge confused words; / Man crosses it through forests of symbols / Which watch him with intimate eyes.” See Baudelaire (1974: 23).

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Dahlia to get a grip on herself inside the department store, telling her that “it’s New  York. It all looks a lot more wonderful than it is” (346). Most notably, however, this correspondence between shopping world and urban space can be illustrated by examining how Pynchon links the experience of both department store and metropolis to the issue of forgetfulness. In this context, it is first necessary, however, to briefly reconsider a few aspects that are related to Dahlia’s narrative trajectory in Against the Day, particularly to the circumstance that the initial reason for her coming to the metropolis is described as biographically motivated. In her early childhood, Dahlia is actually told that her mother Erlys had left her behind as an infant. Then, in the course of their wayfaring life, her foster-father Merle again recounts the story of how he met Erlys and how she came to leave him. “Piece by piece,” Dahlia thus “got some of the story” (67), as we are told. Hence, “those gypsy years with Merle” (339), during which he gradually relates the story of Erlys, seem to enter Dahlia’s experience (in terms of Erfahrung). In other words, Merle passes on his experience to his fosterdaughter through telling a story that “bears the trace of the storyteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the potter’s hand” (Benjamin 2006a: 174). At some point, however, Dahlia finds out about the whereabouts of her mother, as Merle eventually presents her with a magazine article he came across in a cigar store in Denver. Thanks to this article, which also includes a reproduction of a photograph of her mother, Dahlia learns that Erlys left for New  York, where she started a new family with a stage magician. From the moment when Dahlia comes into possession of this magazine, “it was going to be only a matter of time,” as the narrator puts it, “before she was off to New York in a great irresistible surge of energy” (76). Pynchon’s novel thus indicates that Dahlia finds out about her mother’s location essentially by way of a mass-mediated information code.14 As opposed to her father’s story, the information about her mother’s whereabouts bears no traces of the past, whose gaps Dahlia strives to fill. Since it does not shed light on why her mother left her in the first place, Dahlia eventually heads toward the east coast years later. However, it seems that, in the wake of the disintegration of experience in the metropolis, her initial motivation soon fades from memory—at least she makes no effort at all to find her mother, not 14. This is further indicated when the narrator adds that the photograph was “printed by what looked to be some new kind of gravure process, in a grain so fine that squint as he [Merle] might, he could find no evidence of screenwork” (75). This seems to be a reference to the technique of halftone reproduction of images that, from the 1880s on, became highly popular in print culture. This method, described as “an iconographical revolution of the first order” (Harris 1990b: 307), did not merely endow image reproductions with an unprecedented degree of accuracy, but actually required that an original image was first coded into information before it could be reproduced.

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until her mother finds her, as it were. While visiting the department store, she actually happens to catch sight of Erlys from afar; however, bedazzled by the semiotic maze of the store’s interior, Dahlia remains incredulous as to the reality of her observation, forcing herself to dismiss it as a mere phantasm. Her mother’s appearance blends into the illegible semiotic texture of the commodity world and thus also resembles, in a sense, a commodity, in that it asks to be looked at, yet refuses to divulge its deeper meaning. What she comes to behold is “a figure in lady-shopper’s streetwear in a violet and gray check, the egret plume on her hat articulating sensitive as a hand, not looking at Dally in particular but somehow demanding her attention” (347). It is, of course, significant that her observation is mostly rendered in terms of visual cues, as the appearance reminds Dahlia not of her mother, but of the image of her mother that she knows from a magazine. Accordingly, “the clarity of the apparition” (347) agitates her not so much in an affective as in an intellectual manner; it seems to trigger a memory, which, however, essentially amounts to a “voluntary memory” that is primarily “in the service of the intellect” (Benjamin 2006a: 173). Yet, unlike Dahlia’s other impressions in the department store, catching sight of the supposed apparition seems to be related, at least indirectly, to some kind of affective sensation. This is apparently an important factor why this impression remains among the few images that Dahlia is capable of remembering later on. This issue manifests itself in a later episode during which she attends the party for which she purchased a dress. As Dahlia eventually finds herself appalled at her dress’s lack of fashionableness, her thoughts are rendered in the text as follows: What was she thinking? Or not thinking. It had been that near-supernatural moment in Smokefoot’s, she guessed, that maternal spectre in violet and gray that had sent her judgment so out of kilter. She couldn’t even remember now what the dress had cost. (349)

While the rest of her impressions in the department store already fell into oblivion, Dahlia seems to be able to recall the appearance of her mother, since this impression bears a trace (howsoever faint) of her past. This form of memory is then contrasted in Against the Day with another one, namely, the involuntary memory that may comprise “only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not happened to the subject as an isolated experience [Erlebnis]” (Benjamin 2006a:  175–176). While attending the party, Dahlia is eventually dragged into participating in a magic show. As she is led to the stage by an assistant, we are told that “she recognized the very same woman she had seen in Smokefoot’s yesterday” (350), as the assistant turns out to be her mother. The point is, however, that the assistant’s face is veiled, so that her recognition is only made possible because, “sneaking in by way of Dally’s nose,” there was “something else, beyond time, before memory or her first baby words,” namely,

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“the snoot-subverting fragrance of lilies of the valley” (350) that she has unconsciously come to associate with her mother.15 This scenario then ultimately intimates that the atomization of experience in the metropolis is, in some way, related to the issue of forgetfulness. As noted earlier, the crowdedness and flux of metropolitan life can be said to have an inherent tendency toward rendering experience primarily in the form of Erlebnis, that is, as an incoherent series of fragmented events. Further, this dynamic is reinforced by the increasing proliferation of disparate worlds of images and signs. “Erlebnis is,” however, “the corollary of forgetfulness” (1996:  144), as Gilloch notes. In this regard, the urban experience and the intoxicating experience provided by a staged environment such as a department store are depicted in Against the Day as realms that reflect and reinforce each other. Although a spectacle such as commodity world of the department store spatially condenses and precipitates the disintegration of experience, the metropolis likewise resembles a confusing and illegible interior and eventually figures in the novel as “the Cabinet of Ultimate Illusion, known also as New York City” (353). The fragmentation of experience in metropolitan life that paves the way for forgetfulness is, in turn, expressed in the context of the department store through a revealing metaphor. Regarding Dahlia’s incoherent experience in the store, the narrator comments that “none of it hung together, the details were like cards tossed on the table of the day that upon inspection could not be arranged into a playable hand” (347). The use of such a metaphor is notable insofar as, in gambling, “[e]ach game is independent of the previous one and those following it” (Gilloch 1996: 160). Thus, as a consequence, “[t]he world is repeatedly encountered ‘for the first time’. The role of memory is negated. The hallmark of the gambler is amnesia” (1996: 160). Nonetheless, it seems that the ascendancy of the urban spectacle is not dismissed out of hand in Against the Day. Instead, Pynchon occasionally provides hints at its widespread appeal and desirability, as a remedy for the disenchanted world of modernity. At some point, for example, we are told how Merle Rideout comes across an abandoned church that has been converted into a movie theater. This form of restructuring seems utterly plausible “to Merle, who didn’t see much difference between movie audiences and crowds at tent-meetings—it was

15.  Although it is not implied why exactly Dahlia came to associate this scent with her mother, it becomes clear that we are dealing with an involuntary memory, as this incident actually refers to a similar one that is related much earlier in the novel. In the course of their wayfaring years, as her foster-father takes a shot at wildcrafting, Dahlia comes to take a smell at a flower that reminds of her the lily of the valley. It seems to be at this point in the narrative (i.e., far earlier than Dahlia takes possession of the photo of her mother) that the unconscious link is established. Accordingly, Dahlia’s sensation is described in the novel as “[a] scent at the edge of her memory, ghostly as if a presence from a former life had just passed through” (70).

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the same readiness to be carried into some storyteller’s spell” (450). Although the novel does certainly not deny the significance of such enchanting experiences, a crucial question that Against the Day prompts is, however, what the spectacle might obscure by rendering the conditions of its existence invisible. In this context, the novel indicates, above all, how the spectacle might uphold certain structures of domination and control, while also facilitating the perpetuation of these very structures. This issue particularly takes shape as the novel describes Dahlia’s last impression of the department store. This involves the fictionalization of how the otherwise invisible sphere of production is spatially incorporated into the structure of the department store. As Dahlia eventually descends to “a sub-basement” (345) of the building, she catches a glimpse of “the scene behind the scene,” more precisely of an underlit chill where conversation did not exist either because it was forbidden or because there was too much work to be done, grimy pipes hanging from corroded brackets ran along the ceilings, the smell of cleaning and dyeing solvents and steam from pressers’ irons pervaded all the space, workers slipped by silent as wraiths, shadowy doorways led to crowded rooms full of women at sewing machines who did not look up from their work except with apprehension when they felt the supervisor draw close. (347)

This passage imaginatively relocates the model of sweatshop production into the department store, thus rendering visible the circumstance that “[t]he birthplace of the commodity is the site of unchanging drudgery” (Gilloch 1996: 161). Moreover, the passage clearly resonates with the earlier use of the metaphor of gambling, as both the gambler and the factory worker share common ground when it comes to the disintegration of experience. This is because “the factory worker, like the gambler at the gaming table, performs a set of disconnected and continually re-enacted movements” (1996: 161). Put another way, both gambling and factory work can be said to take place in an eternal present, as it were, devoid of long experience (in terms of Erfahrung). This passage in Against the Day thus acts as a counter-image, figuring as the downside of the bewildering experience staged on the upper floors of the store. This image also concludes the scenario that revolves around a visit to the department store. Yet, despite the abjectness of the sight it provides to Dahlia, it obviously does not stick in her mind. Just like almost all the other impressions of her shopping tour, it is bound to fall into oblivion. In Pynchon’s novel, the city as dream experience thus emerges facilitated by technological developments and based on rationalist principles. Thriving on the pervasive logic of the spectacle, this dreamworld can be said to foster the atomization of long experience. Moreover, as a corollary of the intellectual strain to make sense of the urban experience, an increasing forgetfulness seems to take hold. Pynchon indeed provides a quite Benjaminian rendering of urban modernity here, which can, accordingly, be construed as mirroring

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the aesthetics of postmodern urbanism.16 The historical vision of a pedestrian New York that sees an unbridled dissemination of images and a proliferation of inconsistent sign-worlds might or might have not existed in the manner as Pynchon imagines it. The more worthwhile question here seems to be, however, what kind of things such a city makes possible and which ones it does not. Experienced in a dream-infused state of distraction, this city might certainly help restoring an exhilarant modicum of magic to mechanized life. Then again, the urban dreamworld can as well hamper the recognition of social iniquities, not least because they remain fleeting impressions amid the maelstrom of city life. At this point, it would seem premature to determine which alternative proves more decisive in Against the Day, for the urban dreamworld comes in various guises here. While we have already looked at a number of them—such as the dream of the redemptive urban crowd, the utopian dream of an urban future or the lost dream of a communal city—some still await consideration. Among them is the quintessentially postmodern dreamscape of Los Angeles that will be introduced in the following chapter, “A Tale of Three Cities.” This chapter will also turn to Pynchon’s depiction of cities as bad dreams and nightmarish visions—a line of investigation that Chapter 8, “The Doleful City,” then pursues in more detail.

16.  Over the last two decades or so, Walter Benjamin’s work has met with renewed interest within the fields of architecture, urban design and sociology, where his account of modernity has provided a fruitful interpretive approach to the urban landscapes of postmodernity. On this issue, see Hassenpflug (2001: 248–261).

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Chapter 7 A TALE OF THREE CITIES

In the context of urban fiction, the notion of an urban wilderness is frequently imagined, as noted in the previous chapter, along with the increasing presence of crowds in the industrial metropolis. In this sense, the crowd represents a wilderness that holds out the prospect of upward social mobility. There also exists, however, a kind of negative of this image—its “evil twin,” so to speak—in which the urban crowd emerges as a gateway to wretchedness and misery. This is the crowd that Lew Basnight encounters in Against the Day. Described as a middleaged suburban husband, who commutes each day to Chicago for an office job, Lew unexpectedly finds himself in an infernal city, where the downtown crowd declares him a pariah: He was denounced in the local newspapers. Newsboys made up lurid headlines about him, which they shouted all through the civic mobilities morning and evening, making a point of pronouncing his name disrespectfully. Women in intimidating hats glared at him with revulsion. He became known as the Upstate-Downstate Beast. (37)

Leaving aside the causes of such unsought notoriety for now, let us focus on the dynamics between crowd and individual. This scenario, then, obviously both alludes to and inverts the way in which the crowd is often envisioned in classic detective fiction. Here, the crowd figures as a veil or screen behind which the individual is rendered invisible, behind which personal identity turns opaque. Accordingly, the crowd is conceived as a perilous wilderness in that it provides a hiding place for criminals and lowlifes, an “asylum for the reprobate and proscript” (Benjamin 1999a: 446).1 In our case, however, the crowd acts not as a

1. In establishing the trope of an urban wilderness, early writers of city mysteries and detective stories frequently borrowed from the tradition of the frontier romance, which holds true for both American and European writers. The influence that, for instance, Cooper had on Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (1842) is registered in Benjamin (2006b: 73), whereas Slotkin (1988: 95–96) points to his influence on Lippard’s Quaker City, or the

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screen but virtually as a medium. This crowd serves to disseminate information, which is used, regardless of its veracity, to identify an individual, beyond the city borders at that. Further, once this information is put into circulation, it yields irreversible damage for the person concerned. Losing both job and marriage, Lew is left without any chance of returning to his previous life by clearing his name. As a relentless verdict delivered by one of his former coworkers underscores: “You have destroyed your name” (38). This chapter examines, in the most general sense, the way in which the genre of detective fiction is negotiated in Against the Day. For the scenario just outlined provides the point of departure for an extensive detective plot in the novel. The protagonist Lew Basnight, deprived of his suburban existence, gradually turns into a city slicker and eventually begins a career as a professional detective. The focus is here on how Pynchon relates the urban epistemology underlying classic detective fiction to the genre poetics of postmodern detective fiction. Then, in the course of the novel, the detective plot moves from Chicago in the 1890s to London in the 1900s and finally to Los Angeles in the 1920s. In doing so, this storyline also taps into three different genre traditions, namely, the dime-novel detective story, late Victorian detective fiction, and the hard-boiled school of detective fiction.2 The cities involved here, however, do not serve as mere settings, nor do the genre borrowings only act as stylistic devices underpinning a historical narrative. Instead, Pynchon’s novel harnesses the dissimilar urban imaginaries underlying each subgenre of detective fiction so as to stage a confrontation between a detective figure and the informational city, that is, a city where the space of everyday life loses ground to a space of informational flows, to “a world in which control of knowledge and information decide who holds power” (Low 2005: 14).

The Pedestrian City and the Pilgrim-Detective Returning to a prominent motif in Pynchon’s work, the detective plot in Against the Day begins with a forced exile.3 This strategy likewise serves to accentuate Monks of Monk Hall (1844). The strategy of rewriting frontier mythology was also important in late-nineteenth-century dime-novel detective fiction, as I return to in the Chicago section of this chapter. 2.  Also, the rendering of this storyline is a prime example for how Pynchon’s novel borrows from genres whose popularity coincides with the unfolding of his novel’s storyworld. While this approach is pursued elsewhere in the novel rather loosely, here it is conveyed perhaps most vividly. As noted earlier, this strategy of synchronized “genrepoaching” is discussed in more detail in McHale (2011: 15–28). 3. While Pynchon’s work abounds with characters who are abruptly banished from a more or less idyllic refuge, here it is particularly the transition from suburb to city that echoes the destiny of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 ([1966] 2000a).

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the difference between two contrasting ways of knowing the city, both of which are in their own way relevant to detective fiction. Certeau’s distinction between voyeur and walker is useful as a conceptual shorthand. At stake here is the difference between an abstract cartographic knowledge of the city and an ambulatory way of knowing the city based on the everyday spatial practice of walking.4 This contrast finds expression in Against the Day, most notably, in a passage that depicts how, once forced to abandon his regular commuter route, the exiled suburbanite takes to walking in the city. This process is rendered as a virtual crossing over into another world so as to foreground the idea of the pedestrian city as a realm of illegibility and contingency: 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 streetsigns, even those of better-traveled thoroughfares . . . foreign languages, it seemed. (38)

The touch of the surreal in this passage pointedly indicates that the antagonism between voyeur and walker is not specific to any particular city. The point is rather, that exploring the city at street level spawns subjective and localized forms of urban knowledge that ultimately elude the authority of cartographic representation and the fixity of prescribed routes. “Surveys or routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by” (1988: 97), as Certeau notes. Hence, by entering the pedestrian city, the exile in Against the Day comes to join the “walkers in the urban unmappable” (1988: 38). An important reason why the distinction between voyeur and walker is relevant to detective fiction is that, although the pedestrian city represents the privileged playground of the detective, this figure also symbolizes the overview of the city.5 By imposing order on the urban labyrinth, the detective hero personifies the idea that the city can after all be rendered into a transparent text. Conventional detective stories therefore can be said to “[p]roduce reassuring representations of urban space because these fictions

4. See Certeau (1988: 91–110). 5.  An oft-cited classic example that illustrates this aspect is a passage from Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “A Case of Identity” (1891), in which Sherlock Holmes contemplates the possibility of a totalizing overview of the city. The desire for such a point of view is palpable in the way in which Holmes’s rumination begins: “My dear fellow [ . . . ], if we could fly out that great window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on” (Doyle 1993: 30).

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exemplify the belief that the city is ultimately knowable” (Howell 1998: 360). This assumption, which basically accompanies the genre from its inception, is what the postmodern detective story frequently problematizes. Here, a key strategy for challenging “the epistemological genre par excellence” (McHale 1987:  19) has been to construct an intricate textual maze that mirrors the idea of the city-labyrinth.6 It is important to note, however, that by merely replacing the axiom of the legible city with that of illegible city, the postmodern approach “itself becomes a thoroughly conventional position” (Howell 1998: 365). Unsurprisingly, given Pynchon’s renown for postmodern detective fiction, the practicality of knowing the city in a totalizing manner is also rejected in Against the Day. When it comes to its specific take on detective fiction, however, the novel reflects not so much a labyrinthine poetics as it builds on the model of a journey narrative. More precisely, the detective plot in question resembles a form of pilgrimage, with a forced exile serving as its point of departure. Seen from this angle, the detective figure appears as a wanderer between worlds, for whom each urban experience constitutes another station of the pilgrimage. Further, the stages of the journey take shape as a series of urban explorations, each of which involves a different challenge of reading the city. Hence, this aspect of the journey can be said to represent its secular part (which I discuss in the following three sections of this chapter). Its other aspect is the spiritual or sacred dimension of the journey, which involves the exile’s almost lifelong search for a sense of community and belonging.7 One could therefore say that Against the Day resonates with the antiheroic tenor of postmodern detective fiction in that it renders a detective plot as a failed or tragic pilgrimage. Each of the cases that the detective investigates basically turns out to be a fool’s errand. It is significant for the spiritual part of the journey, however, that the detective has gained increased self-knowledge in the end. What is more, this recognition is narrativized in such a way that the journey appears as a circular pilgrimage that breaks with the causality of the conventional detective story. The latter usually begins with an unexplained

6. A case in point for this strategy is certainly Auster’s “City of Glass” (1985), but also the labyrinthine proliferation of clues in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 ([1966] 2000a) is worth mentioning here. For a related discussion of the different strategies by which literary texts, including detective fictions, stage the notion of urban complexity, see Gurr (2011: 11–38). 7. It should be noted, however, that the distinction between these two aspects merely serves analytical purposes here, since both are in fact closely intertwined in the novel. As Elias argues regarding the role of pilgrimage as a narrative model in Pynchon’s text: “[ . . . ] Against the Day combines a search for social values with pilgrimage toward the sacred; social and mystical pilgrimage become Escher-like inverses of one another” (2011: 41).

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crime and continues with the search for its perpetrator. This process of solving the crime thus implies the reconstruction of a past, so as to shape a future in which the crime is punished. In our case, the story also begins with an unexplained crime, but the point is that its effects precede the crime. Thus, when its consequences start to make themselves felt, the crime as such has not been committed yet. Somewhat paradoxically, then, crime and punishment collapse into each other in the course of this pilgrimage. In order to clarify this narrative strategy, let us first take a closer look at how the novel initiates the detective plot in the proper sense. As already noted, the notion of exile is crucial here. It all begins with Lew Basnight losing everything he holds dear due to “a sin he was supposed once to have committed” (37). Although clueless as to what this transgression might be, Lew encounters an infernal urban landscape, where he is condemned by the crowds. While trying to escape his nightmare, he happens upon a spiritual guide, who helps him to find a way out.8 Thus, going through purgatory, as it were, Lew eventually finds himself endowed with what he “came to think of as grace” (42). Based on the assumption that he has atoned for his sin, Lew beholds a cityscape that seems almost Edenic to him, regardless of its enduring hazards: Spring arrived, wheelfolk appeared in the streets and parks, in gaudy striped socks and long-billed ‘Scorcher’ caps. Winds off the lake moderated. Parasols and sidelong glances reappeared [ . . . ]. One mild and ordinary work-morning in Chicago, Lew happened to find himself on a public conveyance [ . . . ]. Despite the sorry history of rapid transit in this city, the corporate neglect and high likelihood of collision, injury, and death, the weekday-morning overture blared along as usual [ . . . ]. He understood that things were exactly what they were. It seemed more than he could bear. (42)

8.  The echoes of Dante’s Inferno are clearly discernible in this section of the novel. Although not explicitly mentioned, the narrative features, apart from loose structural analogies, a number of symbolical references, most notably the spatial juxtaposition of fire and ice that is a hallmark of Dante’s hell. The winter that Lew endures during his exile is thus depicted as “a sub-zero-degrees version of Hell,” where he beholds, reflected in a room window, “a mirage of downtown Chicago” that seems to be “smoldering as if always just about to explode into open flames” (41). In fact, Inferno figures as an important reference point in other parts of the novel as well. Gourley even argues that “Dante’s poem is one of the crucial allusions underpinning the structure of Against the Day” (2013: 144). I return to this issue in Chapter 8, in which I discuss a scenario that revolves around the destruction of New York and that explicitly references Inferno. For an interesting discussion of Dante’s use of urban imagery and the different ways in which this imagery has been adopted by both romantic and modernist writers, see Gambera (2010: 175–190).

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Shortly afterward, Lew is hired as a regular employee at a detective agency, whereupon he finally considers himself as rehabilitated into society. Yet, it seems obvious that Lew misinterprets the “progress” of his pilgrimage here. This is not least suggested by certain satirical overtones in the light of which his experience appears as no more than a mock redemption.9 Such a conclusion seems even more plausible when considering his passage through hell from a more secular standpoint. Lew is at first deprived of a middle-class existence so that he finds himself as an urban pauper. The point is, however, that Lew is not completely without resources, since what he actually does is to trade his labor power for shelter and guidance.10 Therefore, he rather becomes part of an urban proletariat, starting all over again as a day laborer who “continued to perform chores assigned him [ . . . ], transacted in languages he didn’t always understand” (40). In doing so, he explores the pedestrian city and, at length, becomes inured to the complexity of urban everyday life. In short, Lew does not attain salvation, but rather develops a metropolitan mindset. This leaves us with the question of what to make of his “original sin.” It seems that the key to it lies in a confusion of individual and collective fate. Misrecognizing the “progress” of his pilgrimage as a personal effort, Lew fails to see its social character, and therefore ignores the fact that he shares a similar fate as countless other urban underdogs. Moreover, this kind of misjudgment seems to be a constant companion during his pilgrimage. It is above all decisive for his taking up a detective career in the first place. Lew basically starts working for a detective agency, because he lets himself be convinced that he was personally qualified for the job. Then, while investigating working-class quarters in the line of duty, he suppresses the feelings of solidarity with his subjects that he occasionally experiences. Instead, he follows a professional ethos, but ultimately remains only loyal to himself. It is not before he spends his sunset years as a well-off, but jaded, private eye in Los Angeles that he comes to acknowledge his complicity in dismantling the working class as a collective force. Hence, at the end of his pilgrimage, the circle is complete, as Lew recognizes “the ongoing crime that had been his own life” (1057). In short, his detective career is the “original sin,” due to which he is exiled in the first place. The circular aspect of the pilgrimage thus frames the individual stages of the detective plot, but also functions as a fiercely satirical attack on the conventional

9. His experience is, for example, lampooned as a kind of temporary apotheosis due to which “Lew found himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him” (42). The narrator further mocks how his self-perception as a saint-like figure apparently allows Lew to regain his anonymity in downtown Chicago, since “being transfigured and all, it was like he passed unidentified” (43). 10.  This idea is clearly hinted at in a conversation between Lew and the guide who offers him help. Worried that he might not be able to pay for help, Lew gets the following reply: “Pay! Of course you can pay! Everybody can! [ . . . ]” (39).

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heroism of the detective figure. Hence, the frame narrative seems to point to the binary of “Elect” and “Preterite” that, as numerous critics have argued, traverses Pynchon’s texts.11 In our case, then, the irony lies primarily in the fact that the detective figure considers himself as among the “chosen ones,” thereby ignoring that he is constantly preyed upon as one of those who are “passed over.” This bias goes hand in hand with his belated appreciation of the journey in terms of a pilgrimage. “If the Elect quest, the Preterite pilgrimage” (2011: 40), as Elias notes. Thus, instead of settling for self-knowledge, the detective in Against the Day is constantly in search of some kind of grail. The way in which this pursuit plays out exactly in different urban contexts is then the subject of the following sections of this chapter.

Chicago: South of 47th Street The first part of Pynchon’s plot is modeled on dime-novel detective fiction, an American subgenre of detective fiction that emerged in the late 1870s as a cheaply produced and serialized mass publication. More precisely, we are dealing with a narrative formula that is typically set in a big city milieu, and which revolves around an operative working for a private detective agency, who is assigned to infiltrate organized labor. This pulp formula borrows openly from the frontier romance, for it rewrites frontier mythology as urban fiction in which “the ‘man who knows Indians’ is replaced by a ‘man who knows strikers’ ” (Slotkin 1998a: 126) In this sense, the industrial metropolis, particularly the workingclass neighborhood, figures as a hostile wilderness where hordes of savages are up to mischief. The supposedly uncivilized character of the enemy camp, then, justifies the operative’s use of immoral methods in the investigation (such as sabotage or incitement to violence). This representational strategy obviously serves both to discredit labor unions and to whitewash the ruthless actions of real detective agencies based on which fictional ones were routinely modeled.12

11. For exemplary discussions of the Puritan distinction between Elect and Preterite in Pynchon’s fiction, see Sanders (1976: 139–59) and Krafft (1977: 55–73). 12. Most notably, Allen Pinkerton, the founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency—“the largest provider of investigative and protective services in the United States between 1858 and 1898” and “the only instrument of police power to function throughout the nation” during that time—did not miss out on converting his company’s exploits into well-selling detective narratives, since he “saw ‘cheap literature’ as an ideal medium for promoting his agency’s work to potential clients, and for building public admiration and support for detectives as professionals and for corporate clients as a class” (Slotkin 1998a:  139–40). To this end, Pinkerton also took the liberty, as Klein (1994: 134–135) notes, to hire ghostwriters, who often had experience as romance writers, and also to incorporate accounts of fabricated events.

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Further, by foregrounding the courage and cunning of a single operative, who takes up the challenge with an unruly mob, such narratives effectively obscure the organizational apparatus that facilitates the operative’s course of action in the first place. An important fact thus passes from view, namely, that the operative is “part of a rational organization of systematic detection, bureaucratically structured from above and with little space for initiative from below” (Frisby 2001: 84). While all too readily disregarded in the context of the dime-novel formula, however, the organizational logic of the private detective agency takes center stage in Against the Day. Here, the novel likewise stresses the agency’s character as a profit-oriented organization that primarily deals in intelligence. In doing so, the text particularly tackles the urban imaginary which underlies the dime-novel formula. The notion of an urban wilderness as a “natural” given is revealed as a discursive construction that serves particular interests. Here, the novel fictionalizes how this vehicle is deployed by a detective agency so as to create a demand for the information gathered in neighborhoods that are designated as a wilderness. Some preliminary remarks on the kind of organization we are dealing with seem appropriate here. The private detective agency typically employs field operatives, whose principal task is to gather information. These operatives are hired because they are assumed to possess the proper skills to fulfill such a task. Suffice it to say that a distinct urban mentality represents a kind of minimum requirement in this regard.13 What is also crucial here is the conception of the city as a visual field that needs to be surveyed, if possible in a totalizing way. Accordingly, the professional skills of the operative are not least related to the realm of the visual. This implies, to take the most notorious example, the ability to act as a “shadow,” in which case the operative traces a person of interest, while trying to remain unnoticed as an observer. Similarly important is the work as a “spotter,” which requires the operative to identify suspects from among the visual chaos of the city. As a rule-following subordinate, however, the operative does not necessarily know what purpose the gathering of information ultimately serves, within the larger organization. As Frisby argues in this regard, “the overview, the total gaze, is only available to the heads of the organization itself ” (2001: 79). Hence, an element of secrecy seems to be intrinsic to the operational structure of bureaucratic organizations such as the private detective agency. In Against the Day, these ideas then serve as the framework for the first part of a wide-ranging detective plot. In this first section, a detective agency

13.  Frisby argues in this context: “The speed of reaction to new situations and contexts, the analytical skills for preparing for emergency and the instant disguise (of self and motives) are all features that are developed in metropolitan modernity but heightened in the profession (and training) of the detective” (2001: 71; italics original).

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provides a newly hired operative with a repertoire of expert knowledge of the city—a map, if you will—that is supposed to serve as a professional guideline. As it turns out, however, the agency’s map proves fairly incongruent with the operative’s personal experience of the city. Eventually, the operative is not only compelled to acknowledge that the agency’s map was an insidious concoction from the outset, but also that his detective work has unwittingly contributed to abetting a confidence game devised by his superior. In order to trace the narrative stages that lead to this revelation, let us first take a look at how this storyline is set in motion. The detective plot begins, as indicated earlier, with Lew Basnight’s initiation into the complexity of urban life. While indulging in a state of exaltation, Lew is approached by Nate Privett, the director of an upstart detective agency called “White City Investigations.” Taking advantage of Lew’s undiscriminating frame of mind, Nate convinces the greenhorn of his supposed observational skills and hires him as a spotter.14 Subsequently, Lew is provided with a set of ideas concerning the social geography of late-nineteenthcentury Chicago. A first aspect already manifests itself during the job interview, as Nate explains: “See it’s not safecrackers, embezzlers, murderers, spouses on the run, none of the dime-novel stuff, put all that out of your head. Here in Chi, this year of our Lord, it’s all about the labor unions, or as we like to call them, anarchistic scum […].” (43). More than just figuring as a metafictional quip, this statement significantly draws on the term “scum,” which carries organic associations that evoke a disease festering within the urban fabric.15 Such a rhetoric can be said to function in two ways. Indirectly, it diverts attention from sanitary issues exigent at a citywide scale by attributing the cause of an urban malaise to one particular social group.16 Moreover, it seems to suggest that, in order to cleanse the city, this very 14.  The phrasing by means of which the narrator refers to Lew’s supposed talent is remarkably ambivalent here. We are told that “what distinguished him was a keen sympathy for the invisible” (43). One is at first inclined to take the last term literally here, so that “sympathy” would refer figuratively to the ability to see objects that are hidden from view. In fact, however, it rather seems to be the other way around. In the context of Lew’s exploration of Chicago’s working-class districts, it shows that he shares the feelings of particular urban populations that are marginalized and, so to speak, rendered invisible. 15. Among other things, “scum” refers to the sewage gathering on the top of a cesspool. In a sense, then, this term can be said to anticipate the London episode of the detective plot, since the image of a social and ethnic cesspool was extremely common in late-nineteenth-century writing about London. For a discussion of how texts by both literary writers and social reformists used to envision London as a city ravaged by disease, see Druce (2005: 93–122). 16.  As Kargon notes, regarding the effects of an insufficient sanitation infrastructure in late-nineteenth-century Chicago: “Population growth and industrial expansion after the Civil War turned the city into a disease-ridden locale permeated by an almost unbearable stench” (2010: 133).

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group needs to be eradicated. The latter idea is further enforced by Nate, while disclosing where exactly the alleged disease is located, namely, when he rants that there are “more damned anarchistic foreign-born south of Forty-seventh than you could point a Mannlicher at” (46). He thus posits the existence of a frontier—a north-south divide that supposedly marks the boundary between civilization and savagery. For Nate, the wilderness begins south of the Union Stockyards, because crossing this frontier involves the encounter with a population of mostly immigrant workers that he identifies as savages. Although he primarily refers to anarchists, Lew soon learns that the name of this group serves to pigeonhole the entire working class: Nate Privett, everybody else at W.C.I., needless to say most of the Agency’s clients, none had too good of a word to say about the labor unions, let alone Anarchists of any stripe, that’s if they even saw a difference. There was a kind of general assumption around the shop that laboring men and women were all more or less evil, surely misguided, and not quite American, maybe not quite human. (50)

Hence, in the map of Chicago propagated by the agency, a socio-spatial segregation along class and ethnic lines is overlaid with moralistic assumptions. This map further exploits a preexisting imaginative geography by drawing on Chicago’s South Side, which, since the city’s rise to an industrial powerhouse in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, “has always been associated with the combined stench of slaughterhouses, factories, lard refineries and other industrial plants specializing in the rank and malodorous” (d’Eramo 2002: 5). The agency’s map then focuses on this image of an inhospitable wasteland, while adding a crucial element of peril. This way the South Side becomes a pesthole that breeds, according to the agency’s director, “a couple a thousand hunkies [ . . . ] with hate in their hearts” (45). This rhetorical map, then, mainly serves to increase the demand for the services provided by the detective agency. The operative is accordingly assigned to gather information about labor union activities taking place in the notorious district. Thereupon, he is required to report back to the agency headquarters, where “functionaries of government and industry [ . . . ] began to appear [ . . . ] to ask respectfully for advice which Nate Privett kept a keen eye on the market value of ” (51). In doing so, however, the operative also comes to question the agency’s map, although at first only reluctantly. Once, assigned to spy upon an anarchist meeting, Lew encounters a crowd that makes it somewhat difficult for him to keep a professional distance. His first impression upon arriving is described as follows: The crowd—Lew had been expecting only a handful of malcontents—was numerous, after a while in fact spilling into the street. Unemployed men from out of town, exhausted, unbathed, flatulent, sullen .  . . collegians having a

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look at possibilities for hell-raising . . . Women in surprising numbers, bearing the marks of their trades, scars from the blades of the meatpacking floors, squints from needlework carried past the borderlands of sleep in clockless bad light [ . . . ], women just looking to put up their feet after too many hours of lifting, fetching, walking the jobless avenues, bearing the insults of the day. (49)

This passage reflects how Lew at first tries to read the crowd from a professional angle, merely categorizing it into distinct groups of attendants. But this detached observer’s perspective soon gives way to a sense of astonishment, even sympathy, it seems. The point is that, while studying this gathering of men and women who sing together of Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills,” the operative beholds a crowd that he actually fits in with.17 Put another way, it dawns on him that he himself is an overworked and underpaid wage laborer.18 Then, failing to reconcile his firsthand observation with the agency’s depiction of this group, Lew thinks to himself, here was this hall full of Americans, no question, even the foreign-born, if you thought about where they had come from and what they must’ve been hoping to find over here and so forth, American in their prayers anyway, and maybe a few hadn’t shaved for a while, but it was hard to see how any fit the bearded, wild-eyed, bomb-rolling description too close, in fact give them a good night’s sleep and a square meal or two, and even a veteran detective’d have a hard time telling the difference from regular Americans. (50)

Although dumbfounded, the operative abstains from rejecting his employer’s map out of hand. Even if Lew comes to question some of its partial aspects, by and large he still clings to it in his work routine. In particular, this seems

17.  The novel refers here to a choral based on Blake’s poem “And did those feet in ancient time,” also known as the anthem “Jerusalem” and, as Pynchon’s narrator puts it, “taken not unreasonably as a great anticapitalist anthem disguised as a choir piece” (49). 18.  That Lew infiltrates this meeting is because he reluctantly accepted to work a night shift, thereby shedding the hope that he “might grab some sleep” (49), as he earlier explained to Nate. In order to talk his employee into accepting the task, Nate in turn had advanced the argument that “Anarchy never sleeps” (49). This statement obviously represents a pun on the promotional slogan of the Pinkerton agency that reads “We Never Sleep.” In fact, however, an important reason why Lew accepted to work for White City Investigations in the first place, despite the prospect of low pay, is that Nate capitalized on the notoriety of the Pinkerton agency by suggesting to Lew: “You think working for the Eye’s a life of moral squalor, you ought to have a look at our shop” (43).

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to hold true for the notion of an urban frontier. Anxious to adapt to the wilderness, Lew therefore keeps trawling the South Side, “walking picket lines in various of W.C.I.’s thousand disguises, learning enough of several Slavic tongues to be plausible down in the deadfalls where the desperate malcontents convened” (51). Pynchon’s novel further implies that, at this point, Lew adopts this course less out of self-assertiveness, but rather, because a tacit professional ethos takes precedence. This issue becomes clear, once the novel shifts the setting of the detective plot. Transferred to the mining areas of Colorado, where labor unrest erupts into violence, Lew is assigned to spearhead the manhunt for a notorious outlaw.19 At a remove from Chicago, the operative at last puts the agency’s map radically into question. The sine qua non for doing so seems to be an increased awareness of his professional practice. The distance from his accustomed work milieu thus initiates a reflective process, as the following passage exemplifies: In the course of his Anarchist-hunting days in Chicago, Lew had found his way to a convenient insulation [ . . . ] from too much sympathy for either victim or perpetrator. How could you walk into the aftermath of a bombing and get anywhere by going all to pieces over the senseless waste of life, the blood and pain? (175)

It is not least the shift to free indirect discourse which suggests that a selfreflexive stance on the part of the operative develops here. Lew’s subsequent train of thought then betrays that he primarily had followed the agency’s map on the assumption that it was specifically urban. Noticing that city and country make no difference in terms of abject labor conditions, however, Lew reconsiders the map and eventually redraws its centerpiece, namely, the frontier, in such a way as to suspend the city as a frame of reference: It was most obvious at the Yards, but [ . . . ] he’d bet you could find this same structure of industrial Hells wrapped in public silence everyplace. There was always some Forty-seventh Street, always some legion of invisible on one side of the account book, set opposite a handful on the other who were getting very, if not incalculably, rich at their expense. (176) 19.  As discussed in Chapter 5, the sections of the novel that take place in Colorado are crucial when it comes to destabilizing the city-country dichotomy on which the frontier myth relies. This idea is at times also reflected through the detective plot, for example, when we are told that Lew finds himself “reluctant to wager more than a glass of beer that Chicago, for all its urban frenzy, had much on this country out here” (175). More importantly, however, the shift to a rural setting serves in the context of the detective plot to underscore the predominantly placeless rationale of an informational capitalism, in accordance with which city-based detective agencies operate.

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Yet, despite recognizing that the frontier was not more than a vehicle to demonize an underclass, the operative does not break with the agency. Although he seems to be aware that the agency benefits from the ubiquitous social injustice, Lew does not yet know that his superior is actually one of its architects. Hence, for the time being, a heroic bent takes over when it comes to serving justice. Devoting himself solely to the one-on-one challenge, the operative singlemindedly chases the wanted outlaw. Then, not unlike its beginning, this section of the detective plot also concludes with the forced exile of its protagonist. While pursuing the outlaw, Lew turns into a frantic information gatherer, who is “slowly pushed out of half his office space by an accumulation of files” (177). But the more information he gathers, the more his outlook dims. Ceasing to provide the “balloonheaded clarity” (176) that served to unravel the agency’s map, the Colorado landscape is virtually buried under information, the proliferation of which moreover seems to outpace everyday life: “Nearly every workday [ . . . ], he was running across [ . . . ] folks, from both the Union and the Owners Associations, who previously had been only names in field reports” (177–178). Even worse, some suspects show up on two payrolls at the same time, so that Lew cannot rule out the involvement of parties “loyal only to U.S. currency” (178). As it turns out, his boss falls into this very category, which Lew realizes as Nate carelessly suggests that he go easy on the manhunt. In fact, the investigation led by the operative was part of a fraud scheme, in which Lew’s role from the outset was to sustain the cash flow from client to agency. Somewhat ironically, then, the strenuous efforts that the operative put into the manhunt were mainly vital to keep the fraud scheme running, since the point is that the outlaw may never have existed at all.20 Thus, out of wounded pride, Lew finally turns against the agency. While pretending to go back to business as usual, he spends his salary on a drug-fueled holiday, “in effect quitting the case” (184). This, in turn, earns him an attempt on his life, which the operative is lucky enough to survive, but which also prompts him to leave for England, since “where else did he have to go anymore, now that he’d crossed over what just been revealed with such clarity as the terrible American divide, between hunter and prey” (186). It is not least in the light of this cynical ending that the narrative takes on the form of a moral indictment. As such, its stinging criticism is above all leveled against surrendering the realm of public safety to the corporate sector, regardless of whether in the city or the country. This tendency might give rise, as suggested by the urban scenario under discussion, to an increasingly polarized cityscape that ultimately perpetuates spatial segregation. Pynchon’s novel

20.  Ultimately, the novel remains inconclusive here, but all things considered, it is suggested that the outlaw could be only a fiction that has been devised by the agency (and enacted by another operative) and that serves, just like the map of Chicago, to increase the demand for the agency’s services.

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symbolically deploys the private detective agency as a corporate actor that, by reinscribing a national mythology, constructs an urban knowledge so as to utilize the uneven geography of Chicago for its own purposes. Further, the novel subverts the dime-novel formula by fictionalizing how the antilabor detective’s heroism ultimately turns against himself, as it serves not so much the detective work as his superior’s fraud scheme. Yet, what matters here is that, although the agency’s director withholds information from his employee, to attribute this secrecy only to personal greed would be to oversimplify how bureaucratic organizations work. Rather, it seems that the agency’s director takes advantage of a structural given, since the overview of an organization such as the private detective agency is only accessible, as noted earlier, to the heads of the organization. A certain degree of secrecy is therefore crucial to the internal structure of such organizations, insofar as it increases efficiency. Moreover, from a sociological point of view, this secrecy merely represents a distinct form of a social technique that is in principle relevant to modern urban society as a whole. Through the expansion of secrecy, Simmel argues, “modern life cultivated a method for the secluding of private affairs in the midst of a large urban collective density, just as earlier it was achievable only through spatial exclusion” (2009: 330). Thus, distinguishing social institutions according to the degree of their internal secrecy, it seems safe to say that the bureaucratic organization ranks among the most secretive. Simmel also argues, particularly with respect to secret’s potential for concealing realities, that “[t]he secret offers the possibility of a, so to speak, second world next to the apparent one, and this is influenced by the former most strongly” (2009: 325). This is, of course, a key aspect when it comes to the significance of the secret in detective fiction. In this sense, the figure of the detective is not least concerned with penetrating into this second world. Hence, it seems that both of these two aspects are conflated in Against the Day. On the one hand, the novel depicts an organization, whose internal hierarchy is structured around secrecy, thus giving ample scope, as the text illustrates, for the abuse of power and authority. On the other hand, the narrative follows a detective, who, while working for the organization, happens to lift the veil of secrecy and, in doing so, discovers the possibility of a second world—a world in which the detective might have been chasing a ghost all along. The possibility of a second world that is concealed by a secret also plays a significant role in the following stage of the detective plot, in which the protagonist gets involved with—the name says it all—a secret society.

London: Bilocating the City The second part of the detective plot unfolds in London in the early 1900s, and, as this setting already suggests, the genre of detective fiction is approached from a somewhat different angle here. In fact, this part is not as explicitly

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modeled on one particular narrative formula as the previous scenario. Instead, it loosely intertwines a variety of genre references, including elements of the spy thriller, urban gothic and, as one would perhaps expect, the tradition of the gentleman detective. Considering how disastrously the previous episode ended for the detective, this part of the story unsurprisingly also involves an attempt at self-improvement, not to say self-purification. Hence, relocating to the Old World goes hand in hand with the prospect of refashioning a professional identity. Leaving behind his former existence, “the New Lew” (185) arrives in London, the second station of his pilgrimage, where he tries to reinvent himself as a more venerable detective. It should not go unmentioned that there is an unmistakable irony in the fact that an American detective figure modeled on a frontier hero should seek self-reinvention in the Old World. Significantly, then, this attempt clearly backfires in Against the Day. Failing to enact the role of the gentleman detective, Lew degenerates into an unscrupulous intelligence dealer, who eventually returns to the United States. Hence, the London episode also functions as a biting satire, insofar as the ideal of gentlemanly detection ultimately remains beyond reach for a detective, who becomes embroiled in imperial affairs. In what follows, I draw particular attention to the role of urban exploration in this episode. Here, the novel points to two coexisting cityscapes, both of which are in turn related to two different lines of detective work. First, we are told how Lew starts working for a secret society that specializes in occult practices and the study of paranormal phenomena. Thus, employed as a “Psychical Detective” (222), Lew encounters London as an illusory cityscape, as a phantasmagoric realm that seemingly obscures a transcendent reality. However, at some point, this storyline branches off, as it were, namely, when media hype about a serial murderer catches the detective’s attention. Following in the footsteps of an amateur sleuth, Lew starts investigating this case on his own initiative, thereby discovering an increasingly mediatized cityscape. Then, while working on two cases at the same time, a key problem for the detective is also to reconcile two divergent cityscapes. Yet, unsuccessful with establishing the link between both criminal cases, the detective likewise fails to discern the connection between the two cityscapes. To begin with, however, let us turn to the setting of this episode. If we leave aside the Colorado interlude, then we are dealing with a shift from latenineteenth-century Chicago to early-twentieth-century London. The narrative thus passes from a modest-sized metropolis of rather recent date to a profoundly historic and, at that time, the most populous metropolis in the world. With that said, the way in which London is rendered in Against the Day may at first strike one as inexpressive, not to say insipid. More precisely, London appears as a markedly pale and lifeless city, often devoid of human presence, lacking a distinct architectural identity, sparsely strewn with structures that “somehow leached all color from the immediate surroundings” (220), apartment blocks emerging as “a ragged arrangement of voids and unlighted windows” (227),

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while some buildings are merely “nondescript” (234). Besides, London figures here as a mostly undifferentiated cityscape, betraying no traces, for example, of any contrast between West End and East End. Also, the novel largely dispenses with commonplace tropes deployed in writing about London, such as the fogbound city, to take the most prominent example. However, the point is that this representational strategy partly resonates with the detective story that is set in London. This can be clarified by considering how Lew’s detective career continues abroad. In London, the expatriate is introduced to an organization that “had chosen to follow a secret neo-Pythagorean way of knowledge” (220), and whose ultimate objective is “someday to transcend the gray, literalist world of hotel corridors and requisition vouchers” (222), as its leader explains. This secret society advocates a myth, according to which, ages ago this world has fallen from grace, after a group of so-called Trespassers from another world brought time into this once timeless world. Allegedly, the Trespassers still determine the way of this world, which is why, as Lew inquires about the exact nature of their crime, he is accordingly told: “History, if you like” (223). Lew’s task as a “Psychical Detective” is then to keep an eye on the Trespassers and to prevent them from doing further damage. His first major case involves two of the Trespassers, the rival academics Renfrew and Werfner, both of whom act as military counselors for the British and the German empires, respectively. Thus, in his new line of detective work, the disenchanted expatriate suddenly discovers an unprecedented meaningfulness, a sense of a “purposeful life” (233).21 In this context, the novel underscores the way in which the myth averred by the secret society comes to shape the detective’s urban experience. Moreover, this idea obviously plays into the representational strategy by means of which London is rendered in the novel. Its lackluster depiction partly reflects that, for the “Psychical Detective,” London as a space of everyday life is more or less irrelevant. This holds true, it seems, even for the physical reality of the

21.  Needless to say, this entire scenario also works as a satire on organizations such as the Theosophical Society. Beyond that, however, Pynchon seems to suggest that the early-twentieth-century popularity of such organizations needs to be understood in the light of the fragmented and impoverished sense of experience that is characteristic of urban modernity (as discussed in the previous chapter). Accordingly, the novel seems to echo Benjamin’s sentiment that “the reverse side of this poverty is the oppressive wealth of ideas that has been spread among people, or rather has swamped them entirely— ideas that have come with the revival of astrology and the wisdom of yoga, Christian Science and chiromancy, vegetarianism and gnosis, scholasticism and spiritualism” (1999b: 732). In line with this, Pynchon’s text points to the existence of a brisk market for the ideas promoted by such “arrangements for seekers of certitude, of whom there seemed an ever-increasing supply as the century had rushed to its end” (219).

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city, which the detective merely considers as a chimera concealing a higher truth. Thus, walking around London, Lew constantly tries to discern more than meets the eye, yearning to discover “remnants of something older” (225), clues to a world that transcends the phantasmagoria of the apparent one. The subsequent passage, for example, captures how Lew, accompanied by an acolyte, takes a walk through Hyde Park, following a westbound route toward Soho: All around them, just behind a vegetational veil tenuous as the veil of maya, persisted the ancient London landscape of sacred high places, sacrificial stones, and mysterious barrows known to the Druids and whoever they had picked up their ways from. (224)

It is not least the allusion to the Hindu notion of the “veil of maya” that signals the detective’s effort to penetrate the all-encompassing illusion known as the City of London. Yet, more importantly, the declarative tenor of this observation, which the narrator focalizes through Lew’s perspective, clearly parades the conceit that underlies this mode of perception. This is because the detective’s vision implicitly posits a clandestine urban history, written over the centuries by a succession of secret societies and only accessible to the adept. In a sense, such hubris seems to be related to the secret society as a specific type of organization. What we are dealing with here is—unlike the private detective agency whose operational structure only partly relies on secrecy—an organization that “assumes secrecy as its form of existence” (Simmel 2009: 337). Thus, with secrecy as its foundation, this kind of organization vehemently tries to shield an exclusive knowledge from outsiders and therefore can be said to have “a necessarily ‘aristocratic’ character” (Scott 2009: 277). Accordingly, the urban experience of the “Psychical Detective” is often rendered in such a way that counters this elitist conceit with irony and sarcasm, particularly in those cases in which the detective presumes to “lift the veil.” This becomes especially clear in a passage that depicts how Lew, “increasingly claimed by a higher argument” (233), continues his walks around London, thereby witnessing the technological transformation of the urban landscape: Despite the growing presence of electric street illumination, London in resolute municipal creep out of the Realm of Gas, he had begun to discover a structure to the darkness, dating from quite ancient times, perhaps well before there was any city here at all—in place all along, and little more than ratified by the extreme and unmerciful whiteness replacing the glare-free tones and composite shadows of the old illumination, with its multiplied chances for error. Even venturing out in the daylight, he found himself usually moving from one shadow to another, among quotidian frights which

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would only become unbearably visible with the passing of lamplighting-time into the lofty electric night. (233)

It goes without saying that this passage mocks how the detective, having credulously adopted the knowledge system of the secret society, fancies himself as an urban archeologist who shrewdly unearths a primordial realm. More importantly, however, by foregrounding the new technology of electric street lighting, this comic skit symbolically introduces the notion of a mediatized city into the detective plot. This idea takes on further resonance through the textual reference to the “quotidian frights,” which allude, as it later transpires, to the sensationalist media coverage of the so-called Whitechapel murders committed between 1888 and 1891. Let us take a closer look at how the idea of a mediatized city is fleshed out in the context of the detective story, and how the latter at some point apparently bifurcates. The first hints at mediatization are already faintly discernible in the storyline that revolves around the “Psychical Detective.” We are told, for example, that, in the sanctuary of the secret society, “[f]aces well known from the illustrated press went drifting by” (220). Further, despite its higher aims, the secret society itself is at times described as a medium for “gossip—a secular force [they] would never transcend” (238). However, the notion of a mediascape does not really take effect in the detective plot until the media hype about Scotland Yard’s manhunt for a serial bomber starts to play a more significant role. What is eventually brought to Lew’s attention is the case of “a mysterious figure in white flannels, known [. . .] as the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly, after the only known photograph of him with the usual cricketer’s bag slung from one shoulder” (236). The bomber’s strategy is to attend cricket matches, where he throws poison gas grenades disguised as cricket balls. The perfidy is that the gas is colorless as well as basically odorless and that it takes effect only belatedly, causing spectators to drop dead the next day, without warning, “mysteriously as the newspapers say” (236). Thus, while continuing to work as a “Psychical Detective,” Lew also starts investigating the serial bomber, thereby enacting the role of the amateur sleuth. In a sense, then, the detective persona seems to split in two, with each professional role attached to a different kind of cityscape, as it were. However, the point is that, both of these cityscapes are, after all, not so much unlike each other. Both can be said to refer to closed systems of signification that are not least characterized by their self-referentiality. As I have pointed out, the “Psychical Detective” refracts the cityscape through the exclusive knowledge of the secret society. The detective’s encounter with the electric street lighting (i.e., an outpost of a centralized electricity network) then symbolically mirrors the self-enclosed power structure of the secret society. The gentleman detective, on the other hand, discovers an increasingly self-referential mediascape, not to say a media simulacrum that, to some degree, effaces the city as the space of everyday life. This idea takes shape in Against the Day, particularly in relation to the Whitechapel murders. Here, the novel indicates the role that

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London’s press played in transfiguring these crimes into an outgrowth of the intrinsically depraved nature of the eponymous district.22 Although this issue is not explicitly addressed, it is echoed in an episode in which Lew repairs to the Strand to attend a stage play called Waltzing in Whitechapel. As it turns out, this play about the incidents in Whitechapel is rather a play about a play in which a theater ensemble struggles to dramatize the unsolved murders. That a mediascape encroaches upon the city as a lived space is then once again symbolically enforced, as the narrator jests that, on the evening of the theatrical performance, the dazzling electric “streetlighting carried [ . . . ] the luminous equivalent of a steady, afflicted shriek” (678). Notably, this analogy between two ostensibly disparate cityscapes also finds its counterpart on the level of the actual detective plot. Although it seems at first that the plot branches off in two directions, both cases that the detective works on are eventually revealed as closely connected. The Gentleman Bomber is actually testing the effects of phosgene—a chemical weapon developed with the collaboration of Professor Renfrew and Professor Werfner for later military use in the First World War. Moreover, it transpires that the two professors are, in fact, only one person. It is most striking in this context how the detective explains this discovery, because his interpretation signals an unwillingness to suspend the juxtaposition of two cityscapes. Thus, instead of contemplating the possibility of a split personality on the part of his nemesis, Lew construes his findings as a case of bilocation. In other words, he convinces himself “that Renfrew and Werfner were one and the same person [ . . . ], that this person somehow had the paranormal power to be in at least two places at the same time” (685; italics original). Hence, despite his awareness of having been used by the secret society merely as a “hired gunslinger from the States” (684), it seems that Lew still clings to their belief system. Keeping a spiritual affinity with the secret society is apparently convenient to the detective on two grounds. First, it helps him to look back on his past career in a more positive light. Thus, on the verge of suicide due to his recent failure as a gentlemanly detective, Lew still finds solace in the fact that at least he had tumbled early, almost from the start, to how little he really wanted the rewards his colleagues were in it for, the motorcars, lakefront galas, introductions to desirable women or useful statesmen, in an era where “detective” was universally understood code for anti-Union thug. (688–689)

More importantly, however, the possibility of bilocation provides an imaginary escape route from the impasse at which he arrives. The renunciation of materialistic greed is obviously not enough to compensate for his failure to live up to

22.  For exemplary discussions of this issue, see Walkowitz (1992:  191–228) and Freeman (2007: 36–88).

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a professional ideal. However, bilocation allows the detective to succeed in this second matter, even if only in a vicarious manner. Put another way, without the possibility that bilocation actually exists, Lew might have more difficulty assuring himself that somewhere else was the bilocational version of himself, the other, Sherlock Holmes type of sleuth, fighting criminal masterminds hardly distinct from the sorts of tycoons who hired “detectives” to rat on Union activities. (688–689)

Hence, the concept of bilocation is significant in the novel, insofar as it functions as a metaphorical signpost in the detective plot.23 Failing to establish the connection between the two cityscapes, the detective from here on acquiescently accepts that they simply coexist side by side. While cutting himself off from the secret society, Lew still keeps shadowing the Trespassers independently over the years. At the same time, he launches a career as an intelligence dealer whose business principle is: “Take his money and call him Knucklehead” (685). In this capacity, he grows increasingly ruthless over time, showing no qualms about inciting informants to turn a blind eye on their personal loyalties. Such conduct does not amount to betrayal, according to his new professional rationale— “it was more in the nature of gathering information,” we are told, “as much of it as possible” (903). In some sense, then, the detective’s pilgrimage can be said to culminate at this point. This is not least signaled by the fact that the narrative breaks with a decisive pattern here. Up to this point, an initial pursuit of moral selfimprovement eventually gave way to a charade of heroic showmanship, only to be followed by the revelation of a secretly organized scheme, after which the pattern began again. However, the way in which the London episode concludes unmistakably signals a change in course here. The point is that, having infiltrated the switch boards of the informational city, so to speak, the detective can finally dispense with organizational support. Seen from this angle, the conclusion of this episode likewise paves the way for the last part of the detective plot set in Los Angeles in the 1920s. Here we reencounter the detective as a well-off private investigator living on accrued reserves—as a private eye that represents, perhaps more than anything, “a non-organisation man’s eye” (Porter 2003: 95). This episode then relates how the detective’s getaway

23. Admittedly, my reading of the novel’s use of “bilocation” is mainly focused on its spatial aspects. This is not to say, however, that the concept would lack temporal implications. In this context, Gourley has rightly observed that bilocation “in Against the Day manifests effects on both space and time” (2013: 119). Although I find his claim that temporality and “the reconceptualization of time” are “the ultimate focus of the novel” slightly overstated, Gourley nonetheless provides an insightful discussion of a range of temporal aspects in Against the Day (2013: 105–142).

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route to material self-enrichment ultimately leads to the collision with an unacknowledged past.

Los Angeles: Universal Dream Casino The last part of the detective story—a brief coda of about twenty pages—builds on the hard-boiled tradition. In terms of genre, this part seems to take up a line of development that began with the Chicago episode. Similar to the antilabor detective of the dime-novel, the tough and manly private eye of hard-boiled fiction recasts the traditional frontier hero. However, a crucial difference lies in the way in which the city is conceived in each case. Instead of a more or less neatly demarcated urban wilderness that figures as a crime hotspot, the hard-boiled imagination tends to identify malfeasance as “a pervasive feature of the urban landscape, a network that crosses neighborhood, class, and racial divisions” (Fine 2000:  119). Faced with ubiquitous corruption, the detective figure thus ceases to embody the idea that the city can be ultimately kept under control. Taking on an admonishing resonance in hard-boiled fiction, the detective acts “not as meliorist assuring readers that society (thanks to him or her) is correctable and essentially sound but as a social critic” (2000: 119). Yet, despite its early critical impetus, the hard-boiled figuration eventually also came to represent, as Klein argues, little more than “the dark side of tourism” (1997: 80). Its fatalism can be said to merely invert the booster myth of Los Angeles as a salubrious and pastoral metropolis.24 The popular image of the hard-boiled detective, envisioned as “the white knight in a cesspool of urban decay,” then represents a travesty insofar as it “distracts the memory away from community life as it existed inside the city” (1997: 79–80). Although such neglected community life is not explicitly portrayed in Against the Day, the novel indirectly points to this issue. This is accomplished by way of staging the Los Angeles episode as the intersection of a buried local past and the personal past of a private eye. The historical moment on which the novel draws is crucial in this context, since the 1920s are often described as marking the dawn of a new era in the history of Los Angeles—an era in which the foundations of the latter-day metropolis were laid. During the 1920s, Los Angeles experienced not only unprecedented urban growth, most notably in the form of a massive westward sprawl occurring in the wake of building booms and increasing automobility. The 1920s were also the decade of industrial consolidation in Los Angeles, with the oil, aircraft, and motion picture industries leading the way. The movie business is particularly worth

24.  For exemplary discussions of the construction of the booster myth of Los Angeles, see Starr (1990: 90–119), Davis (1992: 24–30), Klein (1997: 27–72) and Fine (2000: 27–50).

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mentioning here, since it became the city’s major industry at that time, and also left its permanent imprint on the urban landscape. Thus, taking these boom years as a starting point, the rendering of Los Angeles in Against the Day suggests that the economic upturn should be gauged against an episode of local history that has perhaps not received the attention it deserves, both in hardboiled fiction and elsewhere. More precisely, the novel links the city’s avenue to prosperity to the decade-long campaign that economic elites and industrial owners waged against labor rights.25 Hence this issue is narrativized in Against the Day in such a way that the retrieval of this urban past coincides with the return of the repressed personal history of the private investigator. The echoes of the hard-boiled tradition are discernible early on in the Los Angeles episode, as parody-tinged as they might be at times.26 Most notably, Pynchon’s novel projects a profoundly corrupted urban landscape from which the protagonist by no means stands apart. We encounter Lew Basnight—some years after repatriating from London as a detective turned mercenary—working as a private eye, slightly over-the-hill, yet well-off, since it was [n]ot that Lew was doing that bad. There was a lot of money from someplace overseas, some said from gambling interests, others insisted it was gunrunning, or some extortion racket—the story always came down to how the storyteller felt about Lew. (1041)

What is remarkable about this passage is that, although referring to the detective’s past, it dispenses with focalizing through his perspective. As such, it remains an exception, because the Los Angeles section is in large part focalized through the detective’s perspective (unlike the Chicago and London episodes in which such focalization was rather rare). In a way, this strategy brings the narrative closer to the first-person account typical of hard-boiled fiction; but, more importantly, it allows the novel to point to the biased nature of the detective’s memory. This becomes particularly clear in those passages that, while focalizing through the detective’s perspective, also have a bearing on his past, such as the following one:

25. Davis has pointedly described this campaign as the “Forty Year War for the Open Shop” (2001b: 102), which began in 1896 with the establishment of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association. This advocacy group represented a concerted effort under the aegis of Los Angeles Times publisher and real-estate tycoon Gray Otis that first aimed at industrial advancement, but later in the 1910s shifted its focus to keeping Los Angeles union-free. 26.  On a formal level, the reference to the hard-boiled traditions in this episode in Against the Day is not least accomplished, as McHale notes, through “the generic character roles (tough guy, femme fatale), the wisecracking repartee, the slangy colloquialisms [ . . . ] and above all the cynical, world-weary tone” (2011: 19).

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He knew that other lawfolk of his day, those who worked both sides till they’d forgot which they were on, who’d came to rank [ . . . ] among the baddest of the bad [ . . . ], were getting rich off of real-estate deals only slightly more legit than the train robberies they used to depend on for revenue. (1041)

Compared with the former passage, the latter seems to indicate a distorted retrospection that apparently serves to whitewash a personal past. Lew implicitly brags that he refrained from turning into a sleazy real-estate developer as some of his former colleagues did. Excoriating these “lawfolk of his day” thus allows Lew to see his own past in a rosier light. Yet, it is beyond doubt that he, too, capitalizes on a sordid past. After all, he invested dirty money from abroad, as we are told, into the downtown construction boom thanks to which he runs a detective’s office located in “one of those swank new buildings going up along Broadway, with elevators and electricity throughout” (1040). In short, this seems to be a matter of glossing over past iniquities, by persuading oneself that others have even more skeletons in the closet. This strategy for rendering tolerable an unpleasant past already anticipates that memory figures as an unsolicited burden in this episode. Accordingly, the hard-boiled cityscape in Against the Day is not least populated by stranded souls trying to escape their disreputable personal histories by seeking refuge in an eternal present. Hence, we encounter a private eye who lives mainly in the moment, preferring “to take care of day-to-day business and not spend too much time brooding” (1050). Moreover, this aspect semantically finds expression in the text particularly with recourse to metaphors related to gambling.27 Thus, the daily performance of the detective depends on whether, after boozing all night long, “breakfast happened to be in the cards” (1040). Elsewhere we witness him cuckolding a suspect whose world-weary wife— “having begun to find that what most people took for some continuous reality, one morning paper to the next, had never existed”—over and over again “placed her wagers at the Universal Dream Casino” (1054). The latter moniker for Los Angeles seems fitting insofar as it links the idea of an eternal present to the motion pictures and, by implication, to a key feature of the booster myth, namely, the trope of the land of sunshine.28 In their own

27.  Here, the novel once again echoes Benjamin’s conception of the gambler as an emblematic figure of disintegrated experience that I discussed in the previous chapter. As I have pointed out, the gambler rejects the role of memory by encountering the world anew with every game. 28. Although not solely decisive for drawing the movie industry to Los Angeles, the regional abundance of sunshine has often been considered a key factor. Fine, for example, has argued that Southern California became attractive for the movie industry not least “because the region had plenty of sunshine, open space for outdoor shooting, and a varied landscape (including mountains and deserts for westerns)” (2000: 12).

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way, both of these elements play into the hard-boiled cityscape in Against the Day. For one, the image of a sun-drenched arcadia reflects the idea of an amnesiac city. In a way, then, the perpetual sunshine seems to enforce the eternal present of the cityscape here. The constant presence of sunlight figures as the symbolical equivalent to the permanent absence of an urban memory.29 In relation to the built environment, this nexus is particularly concretized in the novel by stressing the omnipresence of skylights.30 Virtually resembling the architectural reflex of an heliotheist, the skylight not only serves to partly suspend the barrier between indoor and outdoor space; it also transforms the interior into a dreamlike spectacle, inviting in “blues and golds somehow more intense than the desert-bleached ones you usually saw around town” (1040), or bathing “the shadows where the roof should’ve been [ . . . ] with the early light coming through it a dusty rose color” (1055). With regard to public space, the surreal quality of the cityscape is not least called forth by the movie industry. Here the novel alludes to the indistinguishability between vernacular and movie set architecture that Los Angeles has been noted for since the 1920s. The resulting incoherence of a seemingly centerless cityscape is above all registered in those passages in which the narrative jumps within a few lines from “massive fluted columns with elephants rampant on top” to “bungalows in Mission Revival style grouped around a swimming pool with a fountain” (1049).31 Thus, embedded in this amnesic and depthless cityscape that is as lucid as it is dreamlike, the conclusion of the detective story unfolds. An actual detective plot is perhaps only of marginal importance here, as already indicated by the fact that the private eye is not dependent on his work as a source of income. Besides, the demand for a corrupt detective offering his services in an “unaging and temperate corner of the land, where everything was permitted” (1058–1059), seems questionable anyhow. Hence, the narrative mainly follows

29. In this context, Pynchon’s novel seems to suggest that the diurnal cityscape even has a nocturnal counterpart, namely, in the form of a boundless landscape of electric lights. This becomes clear in a passage that depicts an aerial view of Los Angeles at night. While approaching the city on board their airship, the Chums of Chance find themselves taken aback by “the incandescence which flooded forth from suburban homes and city plazas, athletic fields, movie theatres, rail yards and depots, factory skylights, aerial beacons, streets and boulevards bearing lines of automobile headlights in constant crawl beyond any horizon” (1032). 30.  On a related note, the novel points to the prevalence of low-slope roofs. Due to the absence of bad weather, we are told, “the house roofs of Southern California [were] all pitched at shallow angles because there was nothing to shed” (1048). 31.  The scenery described in the first quote actually refers to D. W. Griffiths’s film Intolerance (1916) for which a “colossal three-hundred-foot Babylon set” was erected near Sunset Boulevard, remaining there “as an architectural monument [ . . . ] for years after the completion of the film” (Fine 2000: 18).

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Lew investigating the occasional missing person or giving security advice, as for instance, to a duo of technology developers that invented a much-coveted cinematic device. The “Integroscope,” as it is called, is of crucial significance to the Los Angeles episode in that it figures as a gateway to histories that are kept locked away beneath a dazzling eternal present. This fictional device makes it possible to bring photographs back to life, as it were, for it animates still images, and thereby transmutes either the past or future histories of the depicted subjects into motion pictures. Its potential to unearth “those long-standing mysteries of the past” (1049) is obviously why certain parties are anxious to monopolize access to this device. Then, in what follows, the private eye uses the Integroscope to track down a missing person and thereby inadvertently excavates a buried local past that belongs to the underbelly of the success story of Los Angeles. Led by the device to a place that is aptly and ironically called “Carefree Court,” Lew encounters a local community that obviously got a raw deal during the boom time: It was a gathering impossible at first to read, even for an old L.A.  hand like Lew [ . . . ], sugar daddies tattered and unshaven as street beggars, freeloaders in bespoke suits and sunglasses though the sun had set, Negroes and Filipinos, Mexicans and hillbillies, faces Lew recognized from mug shots, faces that might also have recognized him from tickets long cold he didn’t want to be reminded of, and here they were [ . . . ] recalling aloud felonies imagined or planned but seldom committed, cursing Republicans, cursing police federal state and local, cursing the larger corporate trusts . (1057)

Notably, this passage is rendered in such a way as to remotely echo Lew’s salad days as an operative in Chicago. The text follows a similar pattern here, in that it reflects how the detective at first tries to survey a crowd from a detached observer’s perspective, but eventually struggles to keep a professional distance. Yet, despite this analogy, there is also a significant twist. This time the detective lays eyes on a crowd that has gathered not so much in order to further a common cause as to tacitly commemorate a defeat, more precisely, the defeat of the Angeleno working class. In this sense, the detective beholds a crowd that figures as a living memorial to a local history of abjection that has been taking its irrevocable course “[s]ince that fateful December of 1911” (1058). This key date points to the unfortunate series of events in the wake of the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building that heralded in the demise of the local labor movement.32 Thus, the urban landscape of prosperity and oblivion, which

32.  More precisely, this date points to the conviction of the McNamara brothers, who were accused of bombing the Times building in October 1910. Once having unexpectedly changed their pleas to guilty on December 1, 1911, the brothers’ subsequent conviction caused a political landslide for the local labor movement, not to mention the

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serves the private eye as a retreat during his sunset years, eventually gains a historical dimension. By way of encountering this local community, the detective is forced to recognize that “the picture business, land development, oil, citrus, every great fortune down here’s been either founded or maintained on the basis of starvation wages” (1058). What is more, however, Lew’s discovery of this local past is inextricably linked to a confrontation with his personal history. In fact, his response to the encounter with the crowd at Carefree Court likewise figures as an act of remembering that revolves around a defeat, namely, his defeat as a detective. This becomes unmistakably clear as he further contemplates the sight of the crowd: Lew slowly began to get a handle, for weren’t these just the folks that once long ago he’d spent his life chasing, them and their cousins city and country? through brush and up creekbeds and down frozen slaughterhouse alleyways caked with the fat and blood of generations of cattle, worn out his shoes pair after pair until finally seeing the great point, and recognizing in the same instant the ongoing crime that had been his own life. (1057)

Thus, faced with this crowd, the detective eventually finds himself unable to deny his unwitting complicity in preying upon and disfranchising workingclass communities. What is particularly striking about the rendering of Lew’s recognition is the vividness with which he recollects, all of a sudden, work experiences from thirty years ago. Here, the novel seems to suggest that the detective’s encounter with this crowd results in an experience that comes close to time travel. Most importantly, this idea refers back to the Integroscope that pointed Lew to in the direction of Carefree Court in the first place. In a way, then, the functioning of the Integroscope can be said to encapsulate the way in which Los Angeles is rendered in Against the Day. Seen from this angle, the still image of a city that is seemingly without history serves as a basis for a process in which this image is gradually “animated.” Thus, by means of narrativizing its genesis, the novel provides this image with a previously absent historical depth. As such, the Integroscope serves as a prime example for the idea that “Against the Day’s narrative itself also acts in many ways as a time machine” (Dalsgaard 2011: 118). The Los Angeles episode under discussion then particularly illustrates how such a narrative strategy might be employed so as to reveal obscured layers of a seemingly timeless image of a city.

fact that it was decisive for the failed mayoral bid of Democrat Job Harriman, who, after supporting the McNamara brothers, suffered an electoral defeat on December 5. For a detailed discussion of the background and the aftermath of this episode in the history of Los Angeles, see Laslett (2012: 39–61).

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This chapter has traced how, by remodeling different genre traditions, Pynchon constructs a detective plot in terms of a circular pilgrimage that involves a series of dissimilar urban imaginaries. First, the frontier of dimenovel detective fiction is undermined by stressing the tendentially placeless logic of an informational capitalism according to which the private detective agency operates. Then, more than just acting as a satire on the American propensity for self-renewal, Pynchon’s novel pits the tradition of gentlemanly detection against a mediascape that transfigures crime into a primordial phenomenon of the urban landscape. This idea then serves as the foundational principle of the corrupted cityscape in hard-boiled fiction, which the novel subverts in such a way as to excavate a local history of social abjection buried under a resplendent landscape of prosperity. Rendering this timelessly oneiric and architecturally eclectic urban landscape of 1920s Los Angeles, Against the Day undoubtedly offers a prime example of what is widely understood in terms of the postmodern city. Thus, in the larger context of Pynchon’s take on detective fiction, there is an intriguing implication in play here. It seems as if the postmodern dreamscape of Los Angeles succeeds the industrial metropolis of Chicago as a hiding place for criminals. For the private eye who makes a living on white-collar crime, Los Angeles here figures as a refuge without any crowds, where delinquents can simply hide in the open, provided that they can afford to do so. This has already been insinuated elsewhere in Pynchon’s novel; yet here, the reconfiguration of the generic trope becomes more palpable, not least because it refers back to the urban imaginary based on which the entire detective plot was set in motion.33 This twist is significant insofar as it suggests a line of development when it comes to the portrayal of cities in Against the Day. The underlying idea seems to be that, with the shift toward the postmodern city, livability becomes a function of residential affluence. The question then is, as we will return to later, if the postmodern dreamscape might also be where the dream of a just city is laid to rest.

33.  The notion of the postmodern city as an arena in which corporate crime takes place in plain sight transpires most notably, as discussed in Chapter 4, in the scene where the industrial tycoon Scarsdale Vibe overtly conducts his schemes amid the dreamscape of the White City.

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Chapter 8 THE DOLEFUL CIT Y

This chapter takes its title from an episode in Against the Day in which a metropolis is largely reduced to rubble. Although its name remains unmentioned, it seems beyond doubt that the city in question is a thinly veiled rendering of New York in the early 1900s.1 At some point, the novel relates how, in the aftermath of the catastrophe, the city authorities arrange for a memorial to be constructed. “It being the grand era of arch-building in the City,” we are told, “usually of the triumphal sort,” this time a memorial arch is being built, bearing on its entablature the following inscription: “I AM THE WAY INTO THE DOLEFUL CITY—DANTE” (154). The epigraph thus quotes the first line of the inscription that Dante’s pilgrim in Inferno beholds above the gate leading into hell proper.2 This reference obviously serves to echo a literary tradition in which “the Dantesque metaphor of Hell as the City becomes the modern metaphor of the City as Hell” (Fiedler 2008: 298).3 More importantly, however, the trope of the infernal city in Against the Day does not function in a figurative

1. Among the various allusions to turn-of-the-century New York in this episode, the most telling hint is perhaps dropped in a passage mentioning “the recent incorporation” (153), that is, the consolidation of the five boroughs into the “City of Greater New York” in 1898. 2.  The entire text of the inscription reads as follows: “I AM THE WAY INTO THE DOLEFUL CITY, / I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL GRIEF, / I AM THE WAY TO A  FORSAKEN RACE. / JUSTICE IT WAS THAT MOVED MY GREAT CREATOR; / DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE CREATED ME, / AND HIGHEST WISDOM JOINED WITH PRIMAL LOVE. / BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS / WERE MADE, AND I SHALL LAST ETERNALLY. / ABANDON EVERY HOPE, ALL YOU WHO ENTER.” See Dante (1984: 89). 3.  The metaphor of the infernal city can be traced back at least to the Renaissance, particularly to Shakespeare’s urban plays. Yet, it is safe to say that its use culminated in modernism, with Eliot’s The Waste Land ([1922] 1998) being perhaps one of the most prominent examples. On the various uses of this trope in Western literary history, see Fiedler (2008: 296–303).

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sense alone. The episode in question revolves around the consequences of an Arctic expedition that excavates and ships a supposed meteorite to New York. Shortly after arriving, the discovery reveals itself as some kind of wrathful ancient deity that sets about taking vengeance for having been removed from its accustomed habitat, subsequently wreaking havoc in the city and disfiguring it into a fiery furnace.4 Needless to say, the setting of this scenario in Against the Day is neither surprising nor incidental. “No city has been more often destroyed on paper, film, or canvas, and no city’s destruction has been more often watched and read about” (2008:  14), as Page notes, regarding the status as the capital of creative destruction that New York has been successfully defending for about two centuries.5 Page further argues that “each era has found it useful to destroy New York in its own particular way, and for its own particular political, social and cultural reasons” (2008:  15–16).6 Seen from this angle, Against the Day ostensibly reflects a specific historical moment during which various forms of pulp-magazine science fiction captured a growing recognition of the fragility of the capitalist metropolis.7 More precisely, the episode that depicts the 4. As noted in the previous chapter, the notion of the city as hell is in many ways also significant in a figurative sense in Against the Day. Hence the scenario that depicts how New York literally turns into hell seems to be consistent with a narrative strategy that Pynchon repeatedly deploys, namely, “the literalization of a situation initially implied as metaphorical” (Simonetti 2008: 57). On this strategy, see Simonetti (2008: 56–64). 5.  Page also provides an impressive list of the myriad ways in which New York has been imaginatively wiped out since the early nineteenth century:  “Earthquake, fire, flood. Meteor, comet, Martian. Glacier, ghosts, atom bomb. Class war, terrorism, invasion. Laser beams from space ships, torpedoes from Zeppelines, missiles from battleships. Apes, wolves, dinosaurs. Environmental degradation, nuclear fallout, ‘green death’ ” (2008: 4). The term “creative destruction” was coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 1940s. While originally referring to the self-regenerating dynamics of capitalist development in a more general sense, the concept also found use with regard to the rapid cycles of demolition and rebuilding in urban environments. For its exemplary application to the history of real estate development in Manhattan between 1900 and 1940, see Page (1999). 6. Key factors especially worth mentioning, among a wider range of issues that fueled the longing for the imaginative destruction of New York, are certainly “the ambivalence towards cities, the troubled reaction to immigrants and racial diversity, the fear of technology’s impact, and the apocalyptic strain in American religious life” (Page 2008: 4). 7.  Despite their different ways of fictionalizing an urban catastrophe, the stories published in such pulp-magazines can be conceptualized as “expressions of a culture increasingly aware of the fungability [sic] and disposability of its built environment” (Yablon 2009:  267). It should not go unnoticed that this issue was reflected, somewhat ironically, in “a medium also noted for its rapid obsolescence” (2009:  268). For an instructive analysis of the hermeneutics of metropolitan ruination underlying

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destruction of New York seems to be loosely based on the postapocalyptic “scientific romance.” Unlike those pulp stories focusing on the act of destruction itself, this subgenre “posited the catastrophe as having already occurred prior to the narrative’s inception” (Yablon 2009: 270). Thus, despite including a few analeptic passages, the scenario discussed in this chapter primarily takes place after the catastrophe, that is, once the flames of hellfire have been extinguished. Further, by embedding the narrative reconstruction of the cataclysmic event into a mythologized framework of retribution, the postapocalyptic romance is mostly uncoupled from its original historical context. Instead, this narrative formula is converted in Against the Day into an allegorical exploration of the themes of urban anxiety and vulnerability. It seems fair to say that, as unremitting corollaries of urban modernity, these issues still cast their shadow on city life in the early twenty-first century. In this context, various critics have pointed out that Against the Day can be read as a form of historical writing that responds, even if only obliquely, to the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001.8 Taking up on this issue, this chapter focuses on how Pynchon’s novel represents a grievously wounded city, and how it negotiates the strategies for dealing with such woundedness in relation to the framing of an urban memory.

The Vulnerable City: Urban Anxiety and Uncanny Retribution In a sense, anxiety has certainly always been an integral part of city life. The material wealth fostered by a thriving urban economy implies not only the anticipation of more wealth but also the fear of its eventual shortage, not to mention its utter deprivation. This anxiety, anything but a contemporary phenomenon, already afflicted proto-urban communities in the Neolithic Age. It also gave rise to strategies for managing urban anxiety, not least to those that seek to contain natural forces, which are, in the worst case, capable of smashing a city to smithereens with lighting speed. “Urban man sought to control natural events his more primitive forerunners once accepted with dumb grace” (1966: 53), as Mumford notes, concerning this paradigm shift in anxiety management.9 It is perhaps not an exaggeration to argue that the century-long transition from walled city to industrial metropolis has been accompanied by an exponential increase of urban anxiety. By the same token, the strategies of

pulp-magazine science fiction and a number of other turn-of-the-century literary texts, see Yablon (2009: 243–287). 8.  Two of the most detailed discussions of this issue can be found in Simonetti (2011: 26–41) and Gourley (2013: 105–109) 9. On the role of collective anxiety in ancient urban cultures, particularly in relation to sacrificial and belligerent practices, see Mumford (1966: 51–60).

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managing such anxiety, and of holding natural forces at bay, have turned more and more elaborate in urban modernity. Such efforts were particularly buttressed by a scientific epistemology, which (as I discussed in Chapter 1) conceptually separates society from nature in order to study, tame, and ultimately colonize the latter. With this in mind, the postapocalyptic scenario in Against the Day can be seen as a complementary piece to the episode depicting the Arctic expedition (both of which are, significantly, consecutive episodes in the novel). Objectified by a team of scientists, the ancient deity figures as a nonhuman entity that assails New York—a metropolis symbolizing the supposed triumph over nature as much as the cultural estrangement from it. The way in which the postapocalyptic scenario is then rendered in Against the Day follows an underlying logic of the uncanny.10 More precisely, Pynchon’s novel suggests that a collective urban anxiety, ordinarily balanced by the everyday illusions of safety and control, eventually erupts as subdued natural forces overrun New York. This process is rendered in the text to the effect that the uncanny side of the metropolis turns from subliminal foreboding to irrevocable manifestation in the wake of the disaster. As already mentioned, New  York is depicted in Against the Day, among other things, as a metropolis fraught with dangers, both real and imagined. Its slums and seedy underworlds, populated by criminals and lowlifes, are portrayed as anxiogenic environments that suffuse the urban landscape with an air of latent apprehension. “This city, even on the best of days, had always been known for its background rumble of anxiety” (151), as the narrator remarks. At the same time, however, this aspect of metropolitan life is rendered as a kind of negotiable inconvenience. The “complacent multitudes” (152) that inhabit New York have their ways of coping with the everyday frenzy and dangers of metropolitan life. It is not least the regime of commodified clock-time governing the mechanized world of urban modernity that proves itself useful here. The sense of predictability it provides finds expression in the novel in terms of a symbolical currency, as it were, based on which the civilizational debts of uncertainty and risk can be virtually amortized:

10.  Brought into prominence by Freud, the concept of the “uncanny” (das Unheimliche) found use among various disciplines as an aesthetic category that, in the widest sense, refers to “the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream” (Vidler 1992: 7). It is important to note that, in relation to urban space, “the ‘uncanny’ is not a property of the space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation” (1992: 11). Here it rather indicates “a frame of reference that confronts the desire for a home and the struggle for domestic security with its apparent opposite, intellectual and actual homelessness, at the same time as revealing the fundamental complicity between the two” (1992: 12).

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Anyone, who wittingly dwelt here gambled daily that whatever was to happen would proceed slowly enough to allow at least one consultation with somebody—that “there would always be time,” as citizens liked to put it. (151)

Although this illusion of safety alleviates the symptoms of an urban anxiety, it is yet far from being an effective cure for a more deep-seated source of discontent, namely, the uncanny side of the city that lurks exactly beneath its technicalrational order. Here the novel particularly indicates that the uncanny sensation generated by the urban environment is entrenched in a sense of having ultimately dominated the natural elements and processes from which the city has been wrested as a “second nature.” This can be clarified by taking a closer look at how Pynchon’s novel depicts the unfolding of the catastrophe. The passages referring to the immediate consequences of the cataclysmic events primarily illustrate the pace and ease with which the tacit undercurrent of urban anxiety is scaled up into outright terror. Once the routines of everyday life come to a standstill, “[t]he screaming that went on all night, ignored as background murmur during the day,” as we are told, “now, absent the clamor of street traffic, had taken on urgency and despair” (152–153). Moreover, the disruptive forces inundating the city apparently override the regime of clocktime that otherwise provides a means to dispel anxiety, as the following passage indicates that quarterless nightfall, events were moving too fast even to take in, forget about examine, or analyze, or in fact do much of anything but run from, and hope you could avoid getting killed. That’s about as closely as anybody was thinking it through—everyone in town, most inconveniently at the same time, suffering that Panic fear. (151)

It is particularly the use of the term “quarterless” that seems noteworthy here, as it points to the suspension of regular divisions of time and space. Beyond that, however, the more archaic meaning of the term implies a lack of mercy or clemency. In this sense, it seems that the logic of retribution is brought into play here, for the wrathful entity laying waste the city obviously acts as an agent of revenge. Further, the capitalized term “Panic”—an indication of its etymological origin in the Greek god of nature—suggests on whose behalf such vengeance might be exacted. It is crucial in this context, however, that the avenger’s “unaccountable advent” (153) represents less a payback for the overexploitation of natural resources, but rather, figures as the return of the uncanny side of the metropolis that was repressed so far. Indirectly, this is already signaled by the nondescript appearance of the agent of destruction, which the narrator almost exclusively refers to as the “Figure” (151) and characterizes as defying categorization and measurement (as noted in Chapter 1). Put another way, this otherworldly entity functions in the novel as a projection surface against which

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the latent uncanniness of the city manifests itself. This idea is perhaps most emphatically highlighted in a conversation taking place during the interrogations of the expedition team. One of the explorers argues that “someone of our party, by failing to perform due observances, showed deep disrespect, causing the Power to follow its nature, in exacting an appropriate vengeance” (151). When asked what such vengeance is supposed to be “appropriate to” (151), the man of science gives the following reply: “To urban civilization. Because we took the creature out of its home territory. The usual sanctions—bad ice, blizzards, malevolent ghosts—were no longer available. So the terms of retribution assumed a character more suitable to the new surroundings—fire, damage to structures, crowd panic, disruption to common services” (151). It is important to note that the deponent’s account of the “usual sanctions” refers to how other human beings (in this case, indigenous people inhabiting the Arctic) conceive of the creature’s “nature.” Hence, the crucial point seems to be that the featureless object ultimately has no “nature” whatsoever. The overt plot, rather, functions as a vehicle here that serves to spectacularly stage the uncanniness of the metropolis. This urban uncanny emerges as an unintended consequence of the technological efforts to construct the city as a place of safety and homeliness.11 In the technologically advanced capitalist metropolis, as Davis argues by drawing on ideas developed by Bloch, “the quest for the bourgeois utopia of a totally calculable and safe environment has paradoxically created radical insecurity” (2001a: 41).12 Davis clarifies this argument by means of contrasting the modern metropolis with the preindustrial city, which he describes as “an imperfect and carnivalesque improvisation that yields to the fluxes of a dynamic [. . .] environment” (2001a: 40). Even if the danger of calamity might be objectively greater in the latter, the metropolis yet can be said to create a more profound and pervasive sense of insecurity and fear, since its “interdependent technological systems [ . . . ] have become ‘simultaneously so complex and so vulnerable’ ” (2001a: 41). The fundamental uncanniness of the metropolis is thus linked to the fact that the anxieties it generates issue not so much from the “conventional modes of chance and accident” as “they dwell amid the complexities of mechanized existence itself ” (Bloch 1998:  307). Concerning such anxieties, Bloch further argues that, “with respect to ‘nature,’ they inhabit nothingness: a

11.  The featurelessness of the “Figure” is also a significant aspect that distinguishes this episode in Against the Day from a tradition of similar narratives in which the alien invader symbolizes a more concrete historical or sociopolitical threat. Sontag, for example, remarks on the popularity of such narratives in the Cold War era: “The accidental awakening of the super-destructive monster who has slept in the earth since prehistory is, often, an obvious metaphor for the Bomb” (1966: 218). 12. More precisely, Davis builds his argument on Bloch’s 1929 essay “The Anxiety of the Engineer.” See Bloch (1998: 303–314).

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nature consisting of nothing but calculations, a nature that arrived with the machine and that increasingly has taken up residence under ever less perceptible conditions” (1998: 307). Then, given these reflections, it seems that especially the rendering of Venice in Against the Day provides a foil to the industrial metropolis. This is not least because both transience and decay are symbolically integrated into the Venetian cityscape (most notably perhaps, as noted in Chapter 2, through the conspicuous presence of already sunken parts of the island-city).13 The industrial metropolis, on the other hand, can only be construed as a supposedly impregnable stronghold against natural forces at the expense of an increasing dependency on technological systems. The repressed sense of being at the mercy of the realm of technology then returns as the urban uncanny, as “a permanent foreboding about urban space as potential Ground Zero” (Davis 2001a: 39).14 In Against the Day, therefore, the uncanniness of the metropolis can be said to figure as an affective substratum to a more general sense of anxiety underlying urban everyday life.15 The episode of urban destruction then, not least serves to throw into relief the contours of this uncanniness. The encounter between the metropolis and the intangible invader—an apt symbolical concretization of the urban uncanny—thus draws attention to the modern city’s estrangement from

13.  This is not say that Venice lacks uncanny qualities altogether; yet its uncanniness seems to be of a radically different kind than the one that manifests itself in the industrial metropolis. Moreover, it seems striking that, when it comes to writing Venice, the island-city most often appears uncanny only to a single person, usually a visitor, and hardly ever to long-term residents. This feature, which also resonates with its representation in Against the Day, can be frequently found in literary texts set in Venice, as Wolfreys (2008: 168–69) has pointed out. 14. As the term “Ground Zero” suggests, Davis builds his argument against the backdrop of the events of September 11, 2001. Actually, Davis’s use of the term “Ground Zero” seems somewhat inappropriate here (even if it makes sense, given that he wrote his essay in the immediate aftermath of the attacks), because, as Pynchon’s narrator in his latest novel Bleeding Edge reminds us, “Ground Zero” is “a Cold War term taken from the scenarios of nuclear war so popular in the early sixties” (2013: 328). Moreover, with regard to the ensuing prominence of this term in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the narrator in Bleeding Edge adds: “This was nowhere near a Soviet nuclear strike on downtown Manhattan, yet those who repeat ‘Ground Zero’ over and over do so without shame or concern for etymology” (2013: 328). On Pynchon’s negotiation of 9/11 in Bleeding Edge, see Berressem (2014). 15.  Indirectly, this idea is also reinforced by the humorous style in which the more mundane hazards of an increasingly vertical city are depicted in Against the Day. A notable example is “The Phenomenal Dr.  Ictibus and His Safe-Deflector Hat”—a device “invented to address the classic urban contingency of a heavy steel safe falling from a broken purchase at a high window onto the head of some unlucky pedestrian” (344).

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nature that an excessive reliance on technological systems abets. In this context, Pynchon’s novel further points to the fallacy that the uncanny effects of the metropolis could be mitigated through increased technological prowess. Once the invader is gone, the city authorities, desperate for a way to avert another onslaught, resolve on installing searchlights that project the image of a human countenance into the night sky—a scarecrow made of electric light, so to speak. However, it seems hard to ignore that, instead of restoring a sense of safety, this technological measure introduces yet another element of uncertainty: Each night at dusk, the luminous declaration was tested for electrical continuity, power level, accuracy of colors, and so on. Spare lamps were kept ready, for the possibility haunted everyone that the projection device might fail at a critical moment. (153)

The novel thus seems to float the idea of a self-reinforcing dynamic between technological upgrading and the increasing vulnerability of the urban environment. Hence, the uncanniness of New York in Against the Day ultimately deepens, once the carnage has come to an end and the onrush of mass hysteria has dissipated. Also, it seems revealing in this context that the novel says nothing about how the city manages to free itself from the stranglehold of the invader. “All attempts to counter-attack or avoid the Figure would be defeated” (152), as the narrator tersely states, before continuing to relate the aftermath of the catastrophe. Yet this lack of explanation makes perfect sense if one grasps the “Figure” as a projection of the urban uncanny. Seen from this angle, the invader actually does not vanish at all; it rather seems that an overt sense of uncanniness subsides again into a more latent state. By way of concluding this section, let me say a few words on that very aspect of the uncanny that can be described as the “eerie sensation of reality invaded by fantasy” (Davis 2001a:  38). This basically means that the uncanny often engenders an utterly inconceivable kind of horror, in that it appears as a nightmare come true. In Against the Day, this aspect takes on significance in several regards. In the most general sense, the novel seems to link the moment of shock caused by the onslaught to an unconscious awareness of the vulnerability of the Icarian metropolis. Hence we read: Down the years of boom and corruption, they’d been warned, repeatedly, about just such a possibility. The city more and more vertical, the population growing in density, all hostages to just such an incursion. (151)

Thus, it is precisely due to such longstanding premonitions that the actual scene of devastation— “the great city brought to sorrow and ruin”—strikes citizens as a “bad dream” (148) they cannot wake up from. Moreover, the uncanny confusion between reality and fantasy is in this very case aggravated by the novel’s setting. As already noted, New York has been imaginatively destroyed over and

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over again, which is reflected in Against the Day in certain metafictional passages such as the following one: “Everyone in town seemed to know what the creature was—to have known all along, a story taken so for granted that its coming-true was the last thing anybody expected [ . . . ]” (151). Needless to say, such passages obviously relate to a sentiment that has been voiced by countless witnesses of the events of September 11, 2001. Regarding this uncanny aspect of the terrorist attacks, Žižek wrote that “the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise” (2002: 16). Taking up this issue, Pynchon’s catastrophe scenario is likewise rendered in such a way that is plays out exactly like a long-cherished fantasy. Here Against the Day draws particular attention, as the following section of this chapter outlines, to “the significance of disaster zones as cultural construction sites” (Rozario 2005:  28). In other words, the novel is concerned here with the strategies of making sense of the catastrophe, of embedding it into a narrative, so as to shape both an urban memory and a vision of an urban future.

The Wounded City: Reconstruction and Urban Memory Even if Against the Day makes no explicit reference to the 2001 terrorists attacks in New York, it has been argued that “9/11 resonates like an afterimage” (Simonetti 2011: 35) throughout the novel. Aside from a range of somewhat more incidental echoes, the following passage, which renders a view from high above the scene of devastation left behind by the invader, unmistakably seems to evoke those images that have been etched into our minds on that very day, charred trees still quietly smoking, flanged steelwork fallen or leaning perilously, streets near the bridges and ferry slips jammed with the entangled carriages, wagons, and streetcars which the population had at first tried to flee in, then abandoned, and which even now lay unclaimed, overturned, damaged by collision and fire, hitched to animals months dead and yet unremoved. (150)16

In approaching the events of September 11, Against the Day mostly follows a strategy of imaginative displacement. Here the novel particularly draws on the notion of hell as a semantic framework in order to imagine an urban catastrophe. This strategy obviously serves to invert and thereby to throw into relief what Davis put as “New York’s messianic belief in its exemption from the bad

16.  Another scenario in Against the Day that conspicuously echoes the falling towers of the World Trade Center is the collapse of the St. Marks Campanile in Venice that I discussed in Chapter 2.

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side of history” (2001a: 34).17 Moreover, it seems that, by rendering a scenario of urban conflagration in terms of a vision of hellfire, Against the Day offers a biting critique of the way in which this city tries to cope with the consequences of an awful disaster. Here the novel above all suggests that the urban population fails to integrate the disaster into the meaningful framework of an urban memory. To rebuild a city upon which disaster has been routinely brought, involves the narrative reconstruction of the disaster. Such narrativization serves to make sense of the disaster, to inspire a community with confidence and to project a sanguine future for the city in question. As Rozario writes in this regard, “narrative has long been the magic that makes blessings out of calamities” (2005: 34). This is mainly accomplished in disaster narratives, as Rozario further argues, by positing the catastrophe as a turning point, as an Aristotelian peripeteia, thus “encoding it as a principle of transformation” (2005: 33) that fuels an ensuing process of regeneration. Seen from this angle, it is highly significant that the urban disaster in Against the Day takes shape as a conflagration. This is because, over the centuries, actual firestorms that consumed bigger parts of cities came to yield a proliferation of narratives intended to support a communal effort to revive a wounded city.18 The notion of the disaster as a catalyst of urban rebirth is, on the one hand, clearly reflected in Against the Day, particularly with reference to the potential of the conflagration, namely, when the narrator tells us: Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would’ve expected any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics. (153)

On the other hand, however, the invocation of this idea in the novel mostly serves to underscore the extent to which the city falls short of reassembling the detritus into a vision of collective betterment. Instead, the novel projects a metropolis that is hijacked in the aftermath of the catastrophe by corrupted elites regarding themselves as “Archangels of municipal vengeance” (150).

17.  Davis’s statement has to be understood with regard to the fact that, compared with the myriad ways in which it has been imaginatively destroyed for about two hundred years, New York might have come to be regarded by its citizens as an almost untouchable stronghold. 18. The prime example in this context is probably the Great Fire of London 1666. For a discussion of the different ways in which this event has been negotiated in the context of London poetry in the aftermath of the conflagration, see Gassenmeier (1989: 11–93). For a discussion of how the Chicago fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 have been narrativized in terms of a collective volte-face, see Rozario (2005: 27–54).

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Moreover, we are told that, while “expressing such offended righteousness” (150), these local politicians stage a witch hunt, in the course of which they desperately look for suitable subordinates to make into scapegoats. However, the most irate indictment of the moral bankruptcy manifesting itself throughout the city is delivered with regard to those who personally capitalize on the disaster. At some point, the narrator asks: “Who outside the city would have imagined them as victims taken by surprise—who, for that matter, inside it?” (151). This question is then followed by the narrator’s chiding comment that “many in the aftermath did profit briefly by assuming just that affecting pose” (151). The inability to embed the catastrophic event into a meaningful narrative is, perhaps, most distinctly expressed in Against the Day in relation to the downtown epicenter of devastation and the subsequent efforts to transform it into a site of memory. In this context, the novel indicates that, even before the disaster, the city of New York reflected anything but an integrated community. Rather, New  York is described in terms of a spatial mosaic of fragmented places, as “a metropolis where Location was often the beginning, end, and entire story in between” (153). It seems, however, that the focal site of ruination comes to stand completely apart from this spatial order. Thus, virtually amputated from the rest of the city, it turns into a “post-urban tract” (150), since New Yorkers obviously lack the language to make sense of what their city has been subjected to “for the first time in civic memory” (152). This idea clearly comes to the fore in a passage that invokes the notion of a traumatic wound. We are thus told that the site of destruction was kept wrapped in a plasma of protective ignorance, extending at last to the enormous rampart of silence along its edge, one limit of the known world, beyond which lay a realm the rest of the city could not speak of, as if having surrendered [ . . . ] even the language to do so. (154)

While this passage obviously points to “the ‘unspeakable’ nature of the historical trauma” (Jarvis 2006: 59), there seems to be something else at stake here. For the novel likewise suggests that the municipal authorities might be complicit in fostering and sustaining the general stupefaction, not least because of their failure to invest the site in question with meaning in such a way as to project a viable vision of the city’s future. Let me illustrate this aspect by taking a closer look at how Against the Day depicts the ensemble of commemorative structures and practices devised by urban policy makers. To begin with, the novel mentions the construction of “a number of propitiatory structures” (154), supposed to transform the site of destruction into a sacred place. However, these sanctified structures provide neither memorials to the casualties nor sites of votive offerings made by survivors. Instead, reflecting a kind of moral surrender, they act as sacrifices in themselves, as they represent “demonstrations of loyalty to the Destroyer” (154). This idea is expressly underlined by the narrator mentioning that these

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structures “were deliberately burned, attempts being made to blacken the stylized wreckage in aesthetic and interesting ways” (154). Moreover, we are told, as mentioned earlier, that the city arranges the construction of a monumental arch bearing the inscription of the gate to hell in Dante’s Inferno. The depiction of this monument can be said to function in two ways. On the one hand, it serves to compare the destruction of New  York to a scenario of hell on earth. The “great Portal” thus suggests the continuity of hell in the aftermath of the catastrophe, since the monument is also described as a “transition point into the forbidden realm” (154), in whose depths the flames of hellfire might be still smoldering. On the other hand, the gateway symbolically points to a path to redemption the disaster-stricken city is neither willing nor able to take, because it chooses instead to turn away from the past injury.19 In this context, the novel further advances the idea that such evasiveness might be liable to arrest a vision of the future. This becomes clear through the reference to a commemorative ritual, which is conducted “on each anniversary of that awful event” and which involves “a night panorama” (154) projected into the sky.20 This light memorial is obviously meant to figure as that part of the commemorative ensemble that symbolizes a confident future. Its potential to do so, however, is clearly contested in the novel by stressing the intangibility of the display, since we are told that the “abstract array of moving multicolored lights” provides a sight “into which the viewer might read whatever he chose” (154). The disaster-stricken New  York in Against the Day is thus portrayed as a metropolis unable to integrate a past injury into a meaningful framework, which could serve as a fertile soil from which to project a prospective vision. This diagnosis is unmistakably rendered in the novel in the form of a jeremiad that indicts the ignorance about the potential for a fresh start for the city offered by the catastrophe. What the novel underscores here is how, instead of triggering a process of rethinking and rebuilding a community spirit, the aftermath of

19.  This is also implied as the novel fictionalizes how Hunter Penhallow, together with a group of exiles, escapes from New York with the help of a time machine. Thus, descending into the underworld of New York on board the machine, Hunter makes a foray into the future. The point here is that Hunter shows the courage to look forward, even if the outcome of his endeavor is completely uncertain. Accordingly, we are told that “Hunter was on his way to refuge, whatever that might have come to mean anymore, in this world brought low” (155). 20.  Here Pynchon seems to allude to the installation “Tribute in Light,” which consisted of searchlights projecting two vertical columns of light into the night sky of New York in order to commemorate the attacks of September 11. In fact, a number of critics rejected this memorial for being somewhat crude, not least because of its uncanny resemblance to Albert Speer’s “Cathedral of Light”—a spectacular light installation in the service of Nazi propaganda. On this issue, see Jarvis (2006: 53–55).

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the disaster heralds an era of decline and fatalism. Without doubt, this sentiment is most emphatically voiced in the following passage: So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence— not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be—its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury. (153)

As noted earlier, the fictional scenario depicting the destruction of New York also includes a number of references to the events of September 11, 2001. Seen from this angle, the scenario’s rendering as a jeremiad can likewise be taken as a comment on post-9/11 memory culture, particularly with regard to the construction of the site of destruction as a place of memory. Thus, Against the Day—Pynchon’s first novel published after 2001—seems to offer a narrative argument with post-9/11 urban America that is continued more explicitly in Bleeding Edge (2013), which is, significantly, set in New York in 2001. This is why this chapter concludes with a passage from Bleeding Edge that concretizes the more oblique criticism in Against the Day. In this passage, the narrator decries that, only a few weeks after the terrorist attacks, the site of the World Trade Center turns into a focal point of real-estate speculation: The atrocity site, which one would have expected to become sacred or at least inspire a little respect, swiftly becomes occasion instead for open-ended sagas of wheeling and dealing, bickering and badmouthing over its future as real estate [ . . . ]. Some notice a strange underground rumbling from the direction of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, which is eventually identified as Robert Moses spinning in his grave. (2013: 328)

What adds the final touch to this rant is the sarcastic reference to Robert Moses—one of the most controversial figures in the history of urban planning in the United States. The punchline is that the ruthless profiteering in the wake of 9/11 would even make somebody shudder, who proclaimed notorious maxims such as: “When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax” (qtd. in Berman 1988: 290). Taking an episode of urban disaster as an exploration of urban anxiety and vulnerability, this chapter detailed how Pynchon envisions a wounded city unable to come to terms with what it has been subjected to. The ruined city relies on technological mobilization so as to make itself less vulnerable in the future, while ignoring that its vulnerability is not least a function of technological progress. The belief in such progress seems so unshakable here that the path the city takes in the wake of the catastrophe appears without any alternative, no matter if it might eventually result in even more ruins. Thus, the metropolis in ruins can be said to emerge as the corollary of urban development in capitalist

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modernity. Pynchon here indirectly also seems to respond to an issue that became a much-debated topic in the wake of 9/11 (although not exclusively pertinent to the United States), namely, the question of whether there might be “a possible elective affinity between ruins and modernity” (Hell and Schönle 2010: 5). Although Pynchon does not bespeak such a link in any explicit sense, his novel signals that there might be something to it. For in the narrated world of Against the Day, the production of modern ruins apparently keeps pace with the rampant process of urban development. Take, for example, the balloonist crew of the Chums of Chance who barely manage to avoid “an unpremeditated collision with a Chicago skyscraper building which had not, as far as any of the boys knew, been there the day before” (109). While the proliferation of urban ruins seems almost inexorable here, they likewise emerge as objects to be appreciated aesthetically. As such, they might not even be altogether undesirable, because, in Pynchon’s disaster scenario, a ruin aesthetic is also a significant element of an urban memory culture. However, the point is that these ruins do not commemorate anything; instead, the wreckage resulting from the disaster is intentionally aestheticized “in hopes of being spared further suffering” (154). The fatalism that afflicts the wounded city, which pretends to soldier on as always, is hardly concealed in Against the Day. If anything, then, its ruins might accommodate a nostalgia for a past, in which the city might haven taken an alternative path.

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C O N C LU SIO N

The main concern of The Ruins of Urban Modernity has been to trace the various facets of the literary vision of modernity in Against the Day. The novel’s portrayal of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century modernity is, as we have seen, idiosyncratic through and through. This is not least because, as Bellin has rightly observed, Pynchon develops a rambling montage of “the kind of historical material that a decorous professional historian would pass over or throw out [ . . . ], of materials overlooked, undervalued, and left behind” (2013:  298). This book has particularly sought to convey that the notion of spatiality and its various social, political, and cultural implications are of paramount importance in Pynchon’s heteroclite rendering of modernity. It should have also transpired, however, that such a focus on spatiality is not the same as to ignore the issue of temporality. On the contrary, it is to set sights on how different aspects of spatiality (e.g., conceived and lived spaces) and temporality (e.g., commodified clock-time and lived time) intersect and thereby shape and potentially exacerbate the contradictions of modernity. In this sense, the depiction of modernity in Against the Day can be said, on the one hand, to chime in with the famous dictum by Marx and Engels that, in modernity, “[a]ll that is solid melts into air” (2008: 38). Yet, on the other hand, Pynchon’s novel leaves little doubt that such an upheaval and its concomitant discharge of utopian energies constantly entails new and unexpected constraints and pitfalls. In this context, Against the Day suggests, for instance, that an increase in individual mobility spawned not only the image of the shrinking globe but also the notion of dead time that needs to be minimized as far as possible. Likewise, the novel highlights that the endeavor to dominate nature eventually takes its toll as a sense of uncanniness is unleashed due to an increasing reliance on the realm of technology. Significantly, the latter issue is staged in Against the Day, above all, in relation to metropolitan space, which figures here as an arena in which the contradictions of modernity manifest themselves in a most distinct way. In this regard, The Ruins of Urban Modernity has focused on how Pynchon draws on a wide range of turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban narratives (such as detective fiction, narratives about urban newcomers, urban exploration, and slumming narratives). In particular, this book has devoted attention to the way in which Pynchon upends and rearranges the spatial imaginaries underlying such

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narratives as a means to renegotiate the ambivalences of urban modernity. An important strategy to this end is to reframe the experience of the modern city within a more globalized outlook, which Pynchon accomplishes, among other things, by conceiving biographical trajectories that unfold within transnational and transcontinental spatial frameworks. Revisited in several chapters of this book, the most noteworthy example here is certainly the story of Dahlia Rideout that ranges from Chicago and the American Midwest, Colorado and New York, Venice and London to postwar Paris. Yet, no less significant in this context is probably the trajectory of the detective Lew Basnight, whom I have followed from Chicago to London and eventually back to the United States at the end of the novel. The Los Angeles episode seems especially remarkable here, because it aptly illustrates the intriguing strategy that is consistently pursued in Against the Day. It seems at first that Pynchon primarily depicts 1920s Los Angeles in such a way as to resemble a postmodern dreamscape of the 1980s. Yet, on closer consideration, it shows that his historical vision of the city is not altogether inappropriate (at least, not in view of such aspects as the ubiquity of movie set architecture that has marked the urban landscape of Los Angeles since the 1920s). At the same time, Pynchon’s novel undermines the urban imaginary of hard-boiled detective fiction by way of unearthing a buried local history. This textual strategy is, however, also interspersed with allusions that obviously urge us to recombine past and present into a composite image. Most notably, in this case, it is the reference to Lew Basnight’s investment of capital from abroad that hints at the 1980s downtown redevelopment of Los Angeles that was largely propelled by international capital.1 Then again, the quotation of this relatively recent process of urban restructuring is referred to the urban imaginary of classic detective fiction, thus implying that the shift toward the postmodern urbanism involves surrendering the city to those who can afford it, regardless of how they came into the position to do so.

1. The trend to which the novel alludes is certainly not specific to Los Angeles; yet the latter’s downtown redevelopment in the 1980s represents, as Davis notes, “a particularly vivid example of how the new urban ‘renaissance’ has increasingly become a function of international financial speculation on an unprecedented scale” (1985: 109). With regard to the Los Angeles episode that I sketched here, one could even add another dimension to the novel’s strategy of blurring the boundaries between epochal terms. As I discussed in Chapter 7, the urban imaginary of hard-boiled detective fiction is best understood as the underbelly of the booster myth of Los Angeles. Forged in the early 1900s, the latter was primarily based on mass advertising, tourism, and an extensive service economy. This is also the reason why Klein writes that “L.A. appears more ‘postmodern’ in 1900 than in 1920” (1997: 30), as industrial construction took hold in Southern California. This is, of course, an unmistakable indicator of the messy terrain in which we often find ourselves, when trying to make sense of Los Angeles.

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Thus, by means of such textual strategies and anachronistic references, Pynchon’s Against the Day narrativizes a variety of spatio-temporal superpositions in the light of which two seemingly distinct issues coincide, namely, the excavation of the origins of the postmodern city and the attempt at tracing the afterlife of the modern city. While oftentimes inextricably merged in the context of the novel, these two issues will be distinguished here for the sake of analytical clarity. First, let me recapitulate a number of key aspects when it comes to how the modern city is rendered in Against the Day. As we have seen, Pynchon seizes on a stage in the development of the modern city in which urban environments are increasingly conceived along visual coordinates. More precisely, his novel reflects how, facilitated by innovations in construction and media technologies, urban development and restructuring became more and more geared toward the fabrication of place images. However, while ordinarily invoking a geographically distinctly cultural heritage, such place images are at the same time uncoupled from any local or regional context, relatively easy to reproduce and therefore potentially marketable around the globe. Hence, the cultural capital mobilized for the construction of spectacular place images ultimately serves to yield a sign value, which can be turned to advantage by cities that find themselves under increasing pressure of interurban competition. It goes without saying that, by capturing such exigent issues of turn-of-thetwentieth-century urbanism, Pynchon’s text resonates with a range of phenomena that are usually treated under the rubric of the postmodern city, which has been routinely considered as representing a radical break with urban modernity. What the kaleidoscopic vision of the modern city projected in Against the Day suggests, however, is that the assumption of such a rupture might rest on a somewhat myopic understanding of urban modernity. Instead, Pynchon’s novel seems to chime with the argument that, especially when contemplated from an urban perspective, “the post-modern can be seen only as a quantitative rather than a qualitative shift within modernity” (Savage and Warde 1993: 144). Against the Day thus draws attention to the idea that the roots of the postmodern city can be traced back to developments in late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century metropolitan life and culture. Beyond that, however, it seems difficult to ignore that Against the Day takes up a decidedly critical stance toward postmodern urbanism, that is, toward an aesthetic movement staging itself as a critique of high modernism that reached its apex in the 1960s. Throughout this book, I have time and again thematized such points of criticism, yet it seems appropriate to briefly pick up some key aspects here. A central issue that Pynchon’s novel raises is that the bias towards the construction of place images and the accumulation of sign value eventually undermines the use value of a city. A case in point is certainly the White City, which acted as a model city without residents, as an urban spectacle for the purpose of visual consumption, but not as a real place where people could actually live. What renders urban projects of this sort problematic is not least that they mostly benefit actors who are not part of a local community. This issue is

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further thrown into relief in Against the Day by invoking Venice as a counterpoint, which is represented in the novel in such a way as to echo the idea of a city as an expression of communal will. On a related note, Pynchon’s text points to a disconcerting aspect that might have been overlooked by overly enthusiastic apologists of the postmodern city, who rashly praised the latter as a liberation from the aesthetic austerity of the modernist city. What I am referring to here is the circumstance that traditional forms of control, domination and exclusion might be reinscribed into the postmodern cityscape, even if less obtrusively. A prime example in this context is, again, the White City, whose crude conflation of aestheticist elitism, imperial hubris and racial prejudice served to implement an urban environment marked by an appalling regime of surveillance and socio-spatial segregation, not to say ghettoization. Further, as the fictionalization of the department store reminds us, the spectacular dreamworlds of consumption and the invisible spaces of exploitation (concretized in Pynchon’s novel through the sweatshop production in the store’s basement) might be separated only by the thinnest veil. Hence, by refracting the image of the postmodern city through the lens of urban modernity, Against the Day seeks to increase our awareness of the idea that postmodern urbanism often tends, as Davis argues, “not to hegemonize the city in the fashion of the great modernist buildings, but rather to polarize it into radically antagonistic spaces” (1985: 113). It seems to me that, particularly when considered from an urban perspective, this is perhaps the central problem that Pynchon’s rendering of modernity shines the spotlight on. In other words, Against the Day suggests that the shift toward postmodern urbanism might have actually fostered antiurban tendencies, not least because this shift gave rise to increasingly polarized cityscapes. A crucial reason that renders such tendencies antiurban is that they are more than difficult to implement without undermining what has often regarded as the key feature of urban life, namely, social and cultural diversity. Nowhere does this idea become clearer than in the novel’s relentless attack on the notion of the frontier in its role in both asserting an increasingly polarized city and eroding the vision of a just and variegated city. In short, the crucial question that the reconsideration of urban modernity in Against the Day pushes back into the limelight of the present seems to be the following one: How antiurban is the postmodern city? That such a point concerning the postmodern city is made by looking back at turn-of-twentieth-century urbanism is then perhaps what renders it most intriguing. Because this strategy after all links the city of a second golden age of utopianism with the city of a supposedly post-utopian age. As noted in the introduction to this book, postmodern urbanism came to pride itself not only for providing the coup de grâce to the modernist city. Regarding the latter as the consummation of urban utopianism, it also went hand in hand with a dismissal of any kind of utopian thinking. What then do we make of the fact that Pynchon conceives the late-nineteenth-century utopian city and the postmodern city as the spitting image of each other? It seems that the implication here

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is that the postmodern city might have emerged as “a form of revanchist utopianism, reclaiming utopia in capitalist terms” (Baeten 2002: 151; italics original). In other words, Against the Day suggests that the urban paradigm of the White City might have returned with a vengeance in the late twentieth century, namely, as a postmodern urbanism that figures as the spatial correlate of a neoliberal economic regime. Moreover, with socialist and modernist utopianisms off the table, this paradigm is apparently left without an alternative, so that it can praise itself as the gospel of urbanism. One certainly does not have to concur with such a sentiment, yet Pynchon seems to touch a nerve when he signals that the specter of utopia is still haunting the post-utopian city. It is not least the prominence and appeal of urban ruins in Against the Day that bespeaks a subdued utopian desire, for such ruins figure not least as monuments to a past in which another future seemed still possible. To be sure, Pynchon’s novel makes sure not to concretize how such a future could look like. Nonetheless, it can be said to raise the following question as well: Will we make do with gazing at the ruins of urban modernity?

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INDEX Abbott, Carl 123, 126–7, 129 n.8 adventure story 21, 23, 27, 109 aesthetics 4, 13, 27, 60 n.15, 67, 70, 152, 154–9, 160, 192 n.10, 200, 202, 205–6 austerity 206 contrast 98, 155 legacy 112–13 norm 30 playfulness 17 ruin 202, see also ruins unity 57–8, 95, 98 allegory 34, 45, 191 American West 1, 4, 16, 117–20 and tourism, see under tourism and urbanization, see under urbanization anachronism 2, 25, 53, 117, 132, 205 anarchism 82–3, 169–70 antiurbanism, see under urbanism apocalypse 7, 18 n.29, 32 n.9, 36, 190 n.6, 191–2 arcadia 184, see also rural ideal Arctic, see under landscape aristocracy 9, 41 n.22, 52 n.5, 72, 177 Auster, Paul 164 n.6 authenticity 29, 107, 109, 136, 141 n.1, 142, 146–8 Bacon, Francis 25 n.5 Baedeker, Karl 51, 51 n.2, 51 n.3 Balzac, Honore de 12 Baudelaire, Charles 155 n.13 Baudrillard, Jean 141 n.1 Benjamin, Walter 13 n.21, 14–15, 76, 143–4, 150, 156–7, 159–61, 176 n.21, 183 Berman, Marshall 201

Berressem, Hanjo 195 n.14 bilocation 86, 179–80 bimetallism 122, 124 Blake, William 171, 171 n.17 Bloch, Ernst 194, 194 n.12 boosterism 122–3, 126, 181, 181 n.24, 204 n.1 Borges, Jorge Luis 55 n.10 Bulson, Eric 7, 51 n.3 bureaucracy 141, 168, 174 Burnham, Daniel H. 95 n.2, 112 California 6–7, 6 n.7, 9, 83, 183 n.28, 184 n.30, 204 n.1 capitalism 1, 27, 99, 113, 117, 121–3, 123 n.6, 132, 151, 190, 194, 201, 207 anticapitalism 171 n.17 capitalist urbanization, see under urbanization consumer 14, 141 corporate 78, 85 n.12, see also corporatism industrial 4, 9, 92, 141 informational 92, 172 n.19, 187, see also information laissez-faire 84 carnival 1–2, 70–1, 96, 194 Cartesianism, see under Descartes, Rene cartography 3, 8, 22, 40–7, 49, 54, 56 cartographic consciousness 41, 43–5 cartographic representation 22, 24–5, 31, 163, see also map Castells, Manuel 78, 90–2 Certeau, Michel de 42–3, 54, 163 chiaroscuro 65 Chicago Chicago Fair, see under White City South Side 170–2 Stockyards 102, 119–20, 170

222

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Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Lord Byron) 52 Chinatown 135–6, 146–8, 148 n.8 city aerial view of 54, 57, 102 as discourse 50–1 as dreamworld 52, 110–11, 113–14, 142, 159–60, 204 and forgetfulness 156, 158–9, see also urban memory and fragmentation of experience 16, 143–5, 155–6, 158–9, 183 n.27, see also urban experience as hell 9, 161, 165, 165 n.8, 189–90, 190 n.4, 197–8, 200 image 8–9, 10, 17, 49–51, 55, 60–1, 65, 100, 118, 134–5, 138, 147, 181, 184, 186, 204–5 informational 17 n.26, 162, 180 as labyrinth 60, see also labyrinth mediatized 178–9 mental image of 49, 100–1, 111, see also mental map pedestrian 5, 41 n.20, 55, 57–8, 72, 152, 160, 163, 166 Renaissance 11, 72, 95, 99, 101 republic 15, 56 n.11, 61–3, 68, 72, see also Venice and selfhood, see under personhood as shock experience 142 n.3, 143, 143 n.5, 145 as theatrical space 146–8 writing 10, 50, see also urban fiction City Beautiful Movement 18 n.29, 112, see also urban planning Cold War 11 n.20, 87, 92 n.19, 194 n.11, 195 n.14 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 31 n.7 colonization 15, 28–9, 33, 35, 39, 43, 47, 192 Colorado 118–19, 122, 124, 127, 129, 129 n.9, 172–3 labor history in 126 Conrad, Joseph 19–20, 40 n.18 conspiracy 68, 70 control 8, 22, 38, 40–1, 154, 162, 181, 206 sociospatial 62

and spectacle 113–14, 159, see also urban spectacle corporatism 78, 82, 82 n.9, 83–5, 101, 113, 173–4, see also capitalism Cosgrove, Denis 25, 27, 31, 34, 57–8, 68 cosmography 24–5, 27 Counter-Earth 24–6 Cowart, David 5 n.4, 9 creative destruction 190, 190 n.5 Cresswell, Tim 75–6 Curtis, Barry, and Claire Pajaczkowska, Claire 54 n.9, 55–6, 58, 61, 65, 69–70 Dalsgaard, Inger H. 5 n.4, 8 n.16, 186 Davis, Mike 7 n.15, 181 n.24, 182 n.25, 194–7, 194 n.12, 198 n.17, 204 n.1, 206 Davis, Robert C., and Garry R. Marvin 58, 62, 66–7 Debord, Guy 141 n.1 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari 81, 81 n.6 department store 149–55 and concealment 150 geography and architecture 151–2 interior organization 153 and semiotic illegibility 154–5 as spectacle 150, 153, see also urban spectacle Descartes, René 37–8, 102, 152 n.12 detective agency 101 n.8, 166–74 as bureaucratic organization 168, see also bureaucracy detective fiction 161 dime-novel 120 n.5, 167 gentleman 175, 179–80 hard-boiled 181–2 postmodern 162, 164 subgenres 162 as urban fiction 161–5, see also urban fiction Dickens, Charles 12 Donald, James 71 Doyle, Arthur Conan 163 n.5 Driver, Felix 19–20 Duyfhuizen, Bernhard 8, 40 n.18 dystopia 9, 18 n.29, 69

223

Index Eastern Question 88 Eeckhout, Bart, and Bart Keunen 12 ekphrasis 59 electricity 69, see also White City electric street lighting 177–8, 184, 196 Elias, Amy J. 8, 164 n.7, 167 Eliot, T. S. 32 n.10, 189 n.3 Engels, Friedrich 203 entropy 2, 57, 121 epistemology 15, 22, 30, 34, 37 n.16, 40, 46–7, 192 urban, see under urban epistemology visual 22, 37–9, see also vision eschatalogy 31 Eureka (Edgar Allan Poe) 25 n.5 exile 7, 46, 53, 92, 162–6, 173, 200 n.19 exoticism 31, 96, 104, 107, 109, 144, 146–7 exploration 5, 6 n.11, 8, 10, 15, 27–39, 47, 76, 85, 144, 164, 175, 203, see also geography; scientific 19–22, 25, 29, 33–5, see also science Felski, Rita 16 n.125 Fiedler, Leslie 189, 189 n.3 Fine, David M. 181, 181 n.24, 183 n.28, 184 n.31 focalization 3, 79, 108, 145–6, 177, 182 fog trope 72, 176 Foucault, Michel 37 n.16 Frisby, David 168, 168 n.13 frontier 7, 15, 206 and gentrification 138–9, see also gentrification as land of plenty 118 as liminal space 119 myth 115–17, 120–2 thesis 115–16, 119 trope 33, 47 urban 132–3, 170–2 Futurism 69–70, 69 n.21 gambling metaphor 158–9, 183, 183 n.27 gentrification 16, 117, 128, 131–2, 138, see also frontier

223

geography 5, 7–8, 11, 15, 19–26, 44 n.23, 68, 86, 88, 102, 124, 169, 174 geographical knowledge 8, 15, 19, 22, 25, 39–40, 43–4, see also map imaginative 30, 35, 170 secular 24 as spatial science 22 as visual discipline 22 geopolitics 68, 87 Giddens, Anthony 77 Gilloch, Graeme 14 n.24, 142–3, 158–9 globalization 10, 134 n.16, 204 Gourley, James 5 n.4, 165 n.8, 180 n.23, 191 n.8 governmentality 85 Greenwich Village, see under New York Gregory, Derek 22, 30, 35, 37, 39 Gurr, Jens Martin 164 n.6 Haraway, Donna J. 22, 29 Harriman, Edward Henry 85 Harris, Neil 98, 111 n.15, 156 n.14 Harvey, David 19, 41 Heap, Chad 133, 133 n.15, 136–8, 138 n.20 Heidegger, Martin 37, 37 n.15 Humboldt, Alexander von 20 Huyssen, Andreas 3 n.2 hyperbole 33, 125, 130 Ickstadt, Heinz 5 n.4, 132–3, 132 n.13 imperialism 1, 15, 21, 40, 68, 88, 96, 121, 175, 206 Inferno (Dante) 165 n.8, 189, 189 n.2, 200 information 144, 156, 156 n.14, 168, 173–4, 180 age 15, 34 as commodity 34, 170 flows 76, 93, 62 informational capitalism, see under capitalism informational city, see under city informational mobility, see under mobility technology 92 infrastructure 5, 9, 81–2, 87, 89, 98 n.4, 103 n.11, 138, 169 n.16 Ingold, Tim 42–4, 52–3, 80 n.5 Italian Journey (Goethe) 52 n.5

224

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itinerary 26, 42–7, 50, 52 n.5, 145, 151, see also map narrative 4, 23, 117 James, Henry 50, 67 n.19 Jameson, Fredric 17 n.27, 27 Jarvis, Brian 5 n.6, 19, 199 Jefferson, Thomas 99 n.5, 115 jeremiad 200–1 Kepler, Johannes 25 n.5 King, Anthony 10–11 Klein, Norman M. 181, 181 n.24, 204 n.1 labyrinth 6, 9, 55–7, 60–2, 163–4, see also city as labyrinth landmark 31, 36, 60 landscape 8, 27, 38, 46, 82, 90, 173, 183 n.28 of American West 124–5, 127, 129 n.9 Arctic 30–4, 52–3 cultural 10 materiality of 30, 32 mythical 30, 142 perception of 76, 79–81 urban, see under urban landscape Lears, Jackson 84 n.11, 85 n.12, 113, 115–16 Lefebvre, Henri 61, 67, 70, 70 n.22, 72 legibility 12, 45, 102, 163–4 illegibility 55, 149 n.9, 154–5, 156, 158 Livingstone, David N. 25, 29 London 7, 12, 16, 52, 134 n.16, 162, 169 n.15, 174–80, 182, 198 n.18, 204 Los Angeles 6 n.10, 12, 16, 17 n.27, 113, 160, 162, 166, 180–7, 204, 204 n.1 as amnesic city 184 booster myth of 181, 183, 204 n.1, see also myth and sprawl 181 Lovecraft, H. P. 35 Luddism 77, 77 n.4 Lynch, Kevin 27 Mackinder, Halford 87, 87 n.15 Manhattan, see under New York

map 4, 19–22, 39–47, 40 n.18, 41 n.21, 45 n.24, 51 n.3, 60, 65, 81 n.7, 92 n.19, 102, 119, 163 cartographic 8, 42–3, 54, 54 n.7, 56, see also cartography cognitive mapping 27–8 as discourse 22 as geographical knowledge 39–40 and lived experience 44 mapping 5, 12, 15, 24, 26, 29, 33–4, 46, 103, 108–9, 117 mental 49, 53 rhetorical 169–73 and territory 55, 55 n.10 and vision 24 and visualization 45 Martin, Reinhold 17, 17 n.27 Marx, Karl 150 n.11, 203 mask trope 55, 60–1, 71–2 Massey, Doreen 11, 11 n.20, 23 Mauss, Marcel 71 maze, see under labyrinth McHale, Brian 9, 13, 13 n.22, 162 n.2, 164, 182 n.26 memory 91, 110, 181–2 and forgetfulness 156, 158–9, 183 n.27 urban, see under urban memory voluntary and involuntary 157, 158 n.15 metafiction 169, 197 metonymy 7, 12, 57–8, 101, 112 n.16 metropolitan sublime 132–6, 151, see also urban fiction Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (Virginia Lee Burton) 138–9 mimesis 13, 148 mise en abyme 57 Mitchell, Timothy 37, 37 n.16 mobility 15, 75, 121, 203 ambivalence of 75–6 automobility 5, 181, 184 n.29 informational 93 railroad, see under railroad mobility seafaring 82 social 133, 136, 161 as way of life 80–1, see also nomadism modernity 4–5, 10–13, 39, 76–7, 152, 158, 160 n.16, 202 capitalist 1, 201–2, see also capitalism

225

Index contradictions of 204 urban 9, 13 n.22, 14 n.24, 15–17, 37, 141–6, 149, 151, 159, 168 n.13, 176 n.21, 191–2, 204–7 Monet, Claude 59 monument 7, 152, 184 n.31, 200, 207 Moses, Robert 201 Mumford, Lewis 150 n.10, 152, 191, 191 n.9 myth 9, 25, 28–31, 32 n.10, 191 founding 63–4, 70, 101, 141–2, 148, 176 frontier, see frontier myth place 15, 50 Narkunas, J. Paul 84–5, 88 nature 2 n.1, 8 n.16, 28, 57, 70, 102, 132 n.13, 151, 155 n.13, 193–6 discursive construction of 119 domination of 15, 33, 39, 47, 192, 203 as representation 30, 39 neoliberalism 7–8, 7 n.15, 207 network 8 n.16, 10, 12, 123, 125, 137–8, 178, 181 railroad, see under railroad network society 78, 92 underground 5, see also infrastructure New York 5, 6 n.7, 9, 11–12, 36 n.13, 49– 50, 78, 91, 98, 133 n.15, 149 n.9, 156, 158, 160, 189–202, 189 n.1, 200 n.19 Chinatown, see under Chinatown Greenwich Village 137–8 imaginative destruction of 16, 36 n.14, 165 n.8, 190–2, 190 n.5, 190 n.6, 196–7, 198 n.17 Manhattan 49, 134–5, 145, 151, 190 n.5, 195 n.14 nomadism 81, 87, 110, 144–5 nostalgia 2, 3 n.1, 8, 12, 18, 20, 53, 69, 120, 141 n.1, 202 Ostend 86–7 Page, Max 190, 190 n.5, 190 n.6 palimpsest 145 Panic of 1893 84, 124, 126 Peary, Robert 21 n.4, 36 n.13 personhood 60–1, 71, 84–5, 144, 147, 161–2

225

phantasmagoria 23, 64, 177 photography 8, 29, 49–50, 58 n.14, 156 n.14, 178, 185 and experience 156 Pickles, John 40 pilgrimage 2, 52, 164–7, 164 n.7, 175, 180, 187 Pinkerton, Allan 126, 167 n.12, 171 n.18 planning, see under urban planning postcolonialism 10 postmodernism 12–13, 18, 134 n.16, 162, 164 postmodernity 3 n.2, 5, 10, 160 n.16 postmodern urbanism, see under urbanism private eye 180–4, see also detective fiction Pynchon, Thomas “A Journey Into the Mind of Watts” 6 n.10 Bleeding Edge 6 n. 7, 9, 92 n.19, 139, 195 n.14, 201 Crying of Lot 49 The, 5–6, 6 n.7, 162 n.3, 164 n.6 Gravity’s Rainbow 6–7, 6 n.11, 7 n.13, 51 Inherent Vice 6 n. 7, 9, 92 n.19 Mason & Dixon 8, 9 n.17, 19, 21, 23–4, 40, 40 n.19 Slow Learner 51, 51 n.2; V. 5, 6 n.12 Vineland 6 n. 7, 7–9 railroad 15, 76–93 ambivalence of 88–9 anti-railroad sentiment 82–3 expansion 76–8, 82–3, 85–7 experience of 79–80 and geopolitics 87–8 mobility 76–7 network 76, 78, 81–2, 82 n.9, 84, 86–8, 86 n.14, 90, 92, 127, see also network speculation 84–5 rent gap 131–2 Romeyn, Esther 141 n.1, 142 n.3, 144, 146, 147 n.7 Rose, Gillian 35 Rozario, Kevin 197–8 ruins 1–4, 6–7, 13–15, 13 n.23, 13 n.24, 55, 69 n.21, 199, 201–2, 207

226

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rural ideal 99 n.5, 117–18, 129 Rydell, Robert 99, 104, 107–8, 107 n.13 Saint Mark the Evangelist 62–4 satire 7, 28, 128, 166, 175, 176 n.21, 187 science 8, 8 n.16, 21–2, 25, 28–9, 33–7, 42–3, 68, 86, 101, 109, 192 Enlightenment 8, 21 Scientific Revolution 25 secrecy 174–80 and bureaucracy 174, see also bureaucracy secret society 175–80 Seed, David 5, 9 n.17 September 11, 2011 9, 66 n.18, 191, 195 n.14, 197, 200 n.20, 201 Silk Road 42, 46 Simmel, Georg 2 n.1, 61, 143, 174, 177 Simonetti, Paolo 66 n.18, 190 n.4, 191 n.8, 197 simulacrum 12, 60, 66–7, 141 n.1, 178 Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser) 132 n.12, 132 n.13, 134 n.16 Slotkin, Richard 116, 116 n.4, 118, 120–2, 120 n.5, 161 n.1, 167, 167 n.12 slum 5, 5 n.5, 16, 132–9, 133 n.15, 142, 142 n.3, 146–9 discursive construction of 133 as media experience 146 slumming frontier 133, 136–7, see also frontier tourism 16, 135–8, 146–7 Smith, Neil 117, 131 space abstract 152, 152 n.12 of flows 78, 90–2 gendered logic of 135 of knowledge production 29 liminal 109, 119, 133, see also frontier lived 61, 70–1, 134, 179, 203 of places 90–2 public 66, 68, 71, 106, 135, 184 smooth and striated 81 spatial polarization 6 n.10, 139, 206 spatial segregation 139, 173 spatial turn 10, 10 n.19 spatialization of power 8, 102 Sontag, Susan 194 n.11 St. Clair, Justin 5 n.4, 35

suburbanization, see under urbanization surveillance 7, 41, 91, 101 n.8, 114, 206 sweatshop 159, 206 synecdoche 12 Telluride 123–5, 127–9 Thrift, Nigel 76–7, 77 n.3 Tintoretto, Jacopo 62–5, 68 time-space compression 77–8 Tocqueville, Alexis de 14, 14 n.23 toponymy 47 tourism 5, 16–17, 51–2, 54 n.7, 54 n.8, 54 n.9, 58–62, 65, 67, 70, 86, 90, 119 in the American West 127–9, 129 n.9, 181, 204 n.1 postindustrial 2–4, 3 n.2 slum, see under slum tourism Trachtenberg, Alan 95–7, 99, 101, 112 n.16, 113, 142, 144, 150 transport 56, 59, 89, 92, 124–5, 127, 129, 131, 143 and travel 52–3, 78, 80, see also travel public 76, 138 travel 5, 8, 28, 35, 43–7, 52–3, 54 n.7, 78–81, 145 and perception 76–7, 81 and transport, see under transport writing 29, 53 n.6 Tuan, Yi-Fu 72 Turner, Frederick Jackson 16, 100 n.7, 115–17, 116 n.3, 119–20, see also frontier twilight motif 58–60, see also Venice underground, see under network underworld 62, 133, 136 n.18, 192, 200 n.19 urban anxiety 190–5 catastrophe 189, 192, 198 conflagration 198, 198 n.18 crowd 133–6, 142–3, 142 n.2, 145, 147, 154, 160–2, 165, 170–1, 185–7 disease 169 n.16, 170 epistemology 16, 148, 162, 164, see also epistemology experience 6, 16, 53, 56, 58, 98, 112, 119, 132 n.13, 141–8, 156, 158–9, 164, 169, 176, 204

227

Index fiction 8, 12–13, 132–3, 161–3, 167, 203, see also city writing frontier, see under frontier landscape 2, 7, 57 n.12, 67–9, 96–8, 113–14, 160 n.16, 165, 177, 181–2, 184 n.29, 185, 187, 192, 204 marketing 66, 100 memory 16, 184–5, 198–201 mentality 143, 166, 168 modernity, see under modernity planning 7, 17–18, 18 n.29, 57, 57 n.13, 61, 69, 78, 98–101, 201 renewal 69–70 renaissance 7, 7 n.15, 152, 204 n.1 restructuring 7, 10, 16, 99 n.5, 117, 127, 129, 131 n.11, 132, 138, 204–5 spectacle 97, 100, 102, 109, 111, 134, 141–4, 147–50, 153, 158–9, 205, see also White City uncanny 192–6 wilderness 117, 132–3, 135, 137–9, 141, 141 n.1, 167–8, 170, 181 urbanism 17–18, 205 antiurbanism 16, 99 n.5, 115–16, 119, 121, 206 New Deal 7 postmodern 6, 6 n.9, 17–18, 53, 97, 113, 160, 205–6 Renaissance 99 urbanization 10, 95 of American West 1, 122, 126–7 capitalist 14 in late nineteenth-century America 112 suburbanization 3, 139 uncanny, see under urban uncanny utopia 1, 2 n.3, 8, 15, 17 n.27, 18 n.28, 18 n.29, 60 n.15, 68, 95, 99, 104, 108, 111, 142, 151, 160, 194 post-utopia 17–18, 206 revanchist 206–7 Urry, John 76 n.2, 77–8, 80

as model for White City 60 n.15, 95, 99, 101, 111–12, 112 n.16 as museum 66–7, 67 n.19, 69 Piazza San Marco 57 n.12, 64, 66, 68, 69 n.21 as sacred city 63 spatial code of 70 St Marks Campanile 66–9, 66 n.18, 67 n.20, 197 n.16 underworld of 62, see also underworld urban policy in 62 Verstraete, Ginette 83 Vidler, Anthony 192 n.10 Vienna 67 n.20, 92 vision 15, 22–3, 34–6, 46, 145 n.6 and epistemology, see under epistemology gendered 38 and landscape 80, see also landscape and visuality 35 wasteland 3, 95, 116, 170, see also urban wilderness White City 1, 15, 60, 67 n.20, 95–114, 101 n.8, 115, 117, 119, 142, 205–7 as dreamworld 110–11, 113–14 and use of electric light 103 as liminal space 109–10 planning of 98–9 and racialized spatiality 107–8 and spatial hierachy 104–7 as urban spectacle 96–7, 101–2, 111, see also urban spectacle Whitechapel murders 178–9, see also London Weber, Max 141 Wilde, Oscar 127 wilderness 9, 31, 33, 122 urban, see under urban wilderness Wood, Denis 22, 40, 40 n.17, 41 n.21 Wylie, John 30, 32 n.9 Yablon, Nick 14, 14 n.23, 190 n.7, 191

vagrancy 76, 76 n.1 Venice 11–12, 15, 41, 46, 49–73, 90, 97, 134 n.16, 141 n.1, 195, 195 n.13, 206 light of 58

227

Žižek, Slavoj 197 Zukin, Sharon 97, 101 n.10, 113–14

228