The Ruins of Urban Modernity

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day

Utku Mogultay

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501339516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Ruins of Urban Modernity examines Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day through the critical lens of urban spatiality. Navigating the textual landscapes of New York, Venice, London, Los Angeles and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Against the Day reimagines urban modernity at the turn of the 20th century. As the complex novel collapses and rebuilds anew the spatial imaginaries underlying the popular fictions of urban modernity, Utku Mogultay explores how such creative disfiguration throws light on the contemporary urban world. Through critical spatial readings, he considers how Pynchon historicizes issues ranging from the commodification of the urban landscape to the politics of place-making. In Mogultay's reading, Against the Day is shown to offer an oblique negotiation of postmodern urban spaces, thus directing our attention to the ongoing erosion of sociospatial diversity in North American cities and elsewhere.

Chapter 1

EXPLORATIONS AND MAPPINGS

“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 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).

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 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 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 Height,—whilst back at ground level, traveling about the Country, one regains bodily the realities of up and down, only to lose any but a rough sense of the other two Dimensions, now all about one. (1997: 504–505)

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 Aides-mémoires 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on the Text
• INTRODUCTION
• 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
• Copyright Page