Category: Books

I’ve been meaning to write for a while about Tricia Sullivan’s SF novel Sound Mind. But now it is too long since I read it, and I’ve forgotten too many details, so (pending a rereading, which I don’t have time for now) I can only comment on it vaguely and briefly. The novel is a sequel to Double Vision (which I wrote about here), and is probably incomprehensible if you haven’t read the previous volume. (For an excellent account of both books together, see Timmel Duchamp’s review).

Sound Mind is hard to describe, because it is a strange visionary novel which is nonetheless rooted in the mundane: both the details of everyday life in suburban New Jersey (where the author grew up) and at Bard College in New York state (where the author went to school), and the details of television. Basically, there is a cosmic struggle between forces of integration and disintegration, or concreteness and abstraction, or system-building and system-breaking, and a set of experiences reflecting at once a sense of impending catastrophe (as a small region of upstate New York) gets hit by a violent destructive force, and then enclosed in a bubble that does not and cannot communicate with the rest of the world, or indeed the universe), and a sort of Dungeons-and-Dragons derived videogame; and (like the previous novel) a kind of scenario in which televison-induced hallucinations control behavior and fulfill various corporate agendas including, but not limited to, selling consumer products. The way in which commodification and advertising feed into all other sorts of self-referential loops and psychotic-breakdown modes of feeling is of course the part of the novel of most interest to me, but it really cannot be separated from some of the other themes, involving avant-garde improvisational music as a means of “cross[ing] the boundaries between systems” (332), and synaesthesia, and lots of other things I can’t quite remember.

The point is, Sound Mind is mind-fuel, with such a density of cultural references, slippery almost-theories that tease and allure and never quite coalesce, that it is quite mind-blowing, even as it weaves and bobs and evades your grasp in the way martial arts (one of the subjects of Double Vision) at their best are supposed to do.

Some notes on William Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country:

“The door opened like some disturbing hybrid of bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bombproof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness.” William Gibson’s prose is cool and precise: minimal, low-affect, attuned to surfaces rather than depths. It’s overwrought, filled to bursting with similes and allusions; yet somehow it still manages to feel as if it had been executed skeletally, entirely without flourishes. There’s a sense of density built up in layers, but packaged inside a bland and featureless box; this writing is like a nondescript cargo container (one of the book’s main images) filled with everything from expensive brand names, hi-tech geekery, and the detritus of popular culture to micro-perceptions of psychological shifts that take place just beneath the threshold of conscious attention.

At times, the effect of this prose is one of deadpan absurdity, as when townhouses in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. are described as radiating “the sense that Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren would have been hard at work on interiors, together at last, sheathing inherently superior surfaces under hand-rubbed coats of golden beeswax.” At other times, it’s surreally dislocating, as when one of the protagonists is startled by the actions of her companion, so that “for an instant she imagined him as a character in some graphically simplified animation.” At still other times, it’s slyly mordant, as when one character is described as looking “like someone who’d be invited quail-shooting with the vice president, though too careful to get himself shot.”

But most of the time, Gibson’s prose is just a little bit spooky, dislocated, and unbalanced. Some details stand out disconcertingly, like the teeth of one character, “presented with billboard clarity” when he smiles. Other details are blurred out by distance; or better, they are muffled like when you’re addicted to downers, as one of the three main protagonists, Milgrim, actually is. Milgrim thinks of his drug-cushioned perception as being like “one of the more esoteric effects of eating exceptionally hot Szechuan… that sensation, strangely delightful, of drinking cold water on top of serious pepper-burn — how the water filled your mouth entirely, but somehow without touching it, like a molecule-thick silver membrane of Chinese antimatter, like a spell, some kind of magic insulation.”

Gibson’s prose style is his way of perceiving, and presenting, the world. And the world he presents is the one we live in today: a postmodern world of globalized flows of money and information, driven by sophisticated technologies whose effects are nearly indistinguishable from magic, saturated by advertising and by conspicuous consumption run amok, undergirded by murky conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, and regulated by nearly ubiquitous forms of surveillance. Distant points are closely connected, as if space had been altogether abolished; so that when Hollis, another major protagonist, in Los Angeles, talks on her mobile phone with a friend in Argentina, she is startled by “a true, absolute and digital silence” on the line, “devoid of that random background sizzle that she’d once taken as much for granted during an international call as she took the sky overhead when she was outside.”

At the same time that everything is global, specific localities become ever more important. Spook Country is centrally concerned with GPS tracking, and how it creates a “grid” so that every point on the earth’s surface can be monitored and distinguished. There is also a lot about “locative art”: which means site-specific multimedia installations that only exist virtually, and that can only be accessed by wearing a virtual-reality helmet with a WiFi connection, so that you see spectral 3D images (bodies, furniture, architecture) overlaying actual physical locations. Both GPS and locative art give new meaning to the local; and emphasize the point that, in our globalized world, every particular site is unique, not to be confounded with anyplace else.

William Gibson, of course, is best known as a science fiction writer. His 1984 novel Neuromancer was the seminal work of so-called “cyberpunk” SF, as well as the book that invented the word “cyberspace,” and influenced a whole generation of software engineers, who mistook its dystopian visions as the epitome of cool. But Spook Country is Gibson’s second book — after Pattern Recognition (2003) — to be set in the present moment instead of the future. (The narrative of Spook Country takes place in February 2006). Evidently Gibson wants to suggest that the actual world today is science-fictional enough as not to require fictive extrapolation. The technology that we used to think of as startling and different is increasingly being woven into the texture of our everyday lives. One of the characters in Spook Country even says that “cyberspace” is now an outmoded term. “It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction.” But now, “we’re here. This is the other side of the screen. Right here… We’re all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it.”

I’ve been writing about Gibson’s prose, and how it embodies a view of the world. But of course, Spook Country is also a genre novel: a high-tech thriller, or a “caper” story, to be precise. The title refers both to the spookiness of virtual reality and advertising simulacra, and to “spooks” meaning spies or secret agents. The story concerns — not to give away the plot — a cargo container, with mysterious contents, which is “of interest” to a variety of feuding CIA (or ex-CIA) factions, as well as to advertising entrepreneurs and elements of the underworld. The novel is carefully and elegantly plotted, and all the characters and plot strands come together in an action climax that provides some unexpected twists, while resolving questions about the nature of the cargo and of the various parties’ interest in it.

And yet, the slick narrative that I am describing is to a very large extent beside the point. It almost tends to dissolve, or to have its outline blurred, amidst the welter of details of which it is made up. And by the end of the book it somehow loses importance — it all turns out to be rather mundane, and of limited relevance to anybody. The illegal caper that the whole narrative has prepared us for is just a kind of high-tech, super-secret “prank” (as one of the characters comes to think of it), rather than an exploit that will make anyone fabulously rich, or that possesses any wide political significance. In our world of spooks and surveillance, there are conspiracies aplenty — but none of them seems to come to much of anything.

This odd sense of anticlimax and disillusionment is, I think, the greatest accomplishment of Spook Country. The novel moves us through a series of muted excitements and muted anxieties, to an endpoint of (relative) equilibrium. What are we left with? In the final pages of the novel, the former singer of a defunct post-punk band with a cult following is faced with the dilemma of whether or not to “sell out” (for a suitably high fee, of course) and allow one of her songs to be used in a car commercial, so that it may become “a theme, an anthem, of postmodern branding.” The erstwhile avant garde returns to business as usual. And Spook Country gives us an uncomfortably lucid glimpse of just those aspects of our hypermediated lives that we generally do not notice, because we take them so much for granted.

M. John Harrison‘s latest SF novel, Nova Swing, is set in the same 24th-century futurescape as his previous novel Light, but it’s a very different sort of book. (Also see Harrison’s blog, here).

Nova Swing could be described, perhaps, as film noir meets Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (the Soviet SF novel perhaps best known as the inspiration for Tarkovsky’s Stalker). The novel and its characters revolve around a place known only as “the event site”, a zone where, as the result of an obscure catastrophe, the laws of physics are suspended. The site provides the background for life in the city (or on the planet?) of Saudade (as it is appropriately named). The characters are a group of anguished refugees, habitues of seedy bars, petty hoodlums, down-on-their-luck hookers, world-weary detectives, burnt-out grifters and con men, etc. Nobody lives in and for the present; nobody imagines any sort of future; instead, they all seem to brood upon past failures, or former moments of glory that proved all too evanescent.

The culture of Saudade is itself a kind of postmodern simulacrum; it is entirely void of vigor or novelty, and seems to be composed mostly of 24th century nostalgic remakes of artifacts from the mid-20th century. The detective rides around in a lovingly recreated simulacrum of a vintage 1952 pink Cadillac convertible; all the hookers have gotten DNA retrofits to become clones of Marilyn Monroe; all the bands play versions of bebop or “New Nuevo Tango.” Harrison’s own noirish stylings for the novel seem similarly hollow and inauthentic; indeed, the invention of a morbid melancholia which persists precisely on the basis of undermining its own assumptions and stylizations is precisely Harrison’s great achievement in Nova Swing.

Noir and hardboiled stylings seemed brilliantly appropriate for science fiction twenty-five years ago, the time of Neuromancer and Blade Runner. They expressed a kind of edgy, alienated energy, and a sort of affirmative sense of style even in the midst of a landscape of physical decay and political or economic oppression. Now, however, there’s nothing left of it all. Our culture’s continued references to the 1950s have become tired, and as empty as they always pretended to be. Harrison paints a landscape of demoralization and debasement, doing for science fiction pretty much what he did for fantasy in his novella “In Viriconium” (the next-to-last of the stories in his Viriconium collection).

As k-punk says in his brilliant discussion of Children of Men: “how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?” Nova Swing deals in its own way with this sort of cultural and social (and also, or ultimately, political and economic) exhaustion. In the world of the novel, “tailoring” (genetic alteration, whether for fashion, or for physical enhancements, or for cyborgian interfacing with machines) is as easy and as commonplace as getting a tattoo or a piercing is today. And about as meaningful. As for the romance of interplanetary traveling, it has given way to tourism for rich people (if it’s Tuesday, this must be Saudade). The critic Darko Suvin famously defined science fiction, several decades ago, as a genre defined by “cognitive estrangement”: in projecting its futures, or in extrapolating from existing social and technological forces, SF leads us to see the limitedness, the contingency, and the bizarre parochialism of everything that we take most for granted, that we regard as “natural” or given. I’m tempted to say that Nova Swing is the exact inverse of this: rather than presenting us with wonders, or making us aware of the contingency of the present, it makes genetic engineering and space travel so banal and commonplace that they do not give us any “utopian” sense of otherness at all. We’re stuck, not so much in an eternal present, as in an eternal past, where our late-capitalist culture of pseudo-nostalgic recycling and imaginative exhaustion becomes a permanent and inescapable state. No “estrangement” (cognitive or otherwise) from this situation seems possible at all. Indeed, the characters’ estrangement, anomie, etc., is itself an inescapable cultural cliche.

The novel’s one source of novelty, invention, or difference is the event site itself, where nothing is stable, nothing happens the way it is supposed to. This is why the event site is such a magnet of attraction for most of the novel’s characters, several of whom are “tour guides” who specialize in expeditions into this realm of the unknown, and several others of whom are police from the “Site crime” division, seeking to prevent the contamination of Saudade by illicit visits to the site, or by “artifacts” emanating from it. Indeed, several of the novel’s key characters end up lost in the event site, wandering around endlessly (or until death) and never emerging. But the event site, although literally a “utopia” in that it is a displacement of all space, and therefore “nowhere,” is not in any sense a source of redemption, or even renewal. What happens there seems to be a reflection of the desire of the person exploring it, but only in the negative sense that it offers mocking reflections of one’s fantasies, and lures or allures one into extended episodes of frustration. People like to fuck when they are there, as if in search of some sexual transcendence or transformation; but none of their experiments ever pans out.

If human beings are always seeking to enter the event site, the reverse is also the case: pseudo-humans are continually emerging from it to explore the “real” world of Saudade. They are invariably described as being eager, full of appetite, yet entirely blank and naive. They are always “trying to have sex” without quite knowing how to go about it, greedily scarfing up whatever drink or drugs or whatever other forms of mind-altering entertainments are on offer, and eventually just fading away or dissolving into thin air. Their blank slates of cheery impulse are the flip side of jaded and culturally saturated (you might say over-written) minds of all the “real” inhabitants of Saudade.

As for the “artifacts” brought back by explorers from the event site into Saudade, they usually turn out to be sources of infection; they seem to offer strange powers, but instead draw whoever has contact with them into distressing metamorphoses, known as “escapes”: it “presented, like the majority of escapes, as a loose, luminous fluid medium sometimes the consistency of rice pudding or lentil soup, sometimes having the visual qualities of a pool full of chlorinated water agitated gently in powerful sunlight; often too bright to look at, and developing intricate internal flows independent of input. If there was code in there, no one knew what it was doing. No one knew how it bound to the substrate of proteins and nanotech. It looked beautiful, but stank like rendered fat. It would absorb you in seconds. Was it an end-state? Was it a new medium? No one knew” (p. 231).

This would seem to be the only alternative offered us to a culture of ultra-commodified recycling and repetition. No wonder the authorities put it into quarantine at the first opportunity. I think the passage I have quoted also gives a good indication of Harrison’s gorgeous prose, with its own rhythms of attraction and repulsion, allurement and debasement. Although I should add that the novel ends (as Light did) on a strangely upbeat note, as those of the characters who do not end up wandering forever in the event site all seem to rejuvenate themselves with bursts of (entrepreneurial?) enthusiasm and energy, whose pathos comes from the fact that these upbeat feelings are in themselves real, even though their object (the idea of a non-lethal “escape,” and of a more vital and interesting life) remains entirely illusory. All in all, Nova Swing is simultaneously a powerful expression, and a stinging critique, of what Fred Jameson somewhere calls “nostalgia for the present”, that affective state where the future has been entirely drained of possibility, the past converted into nothing more than a storehouse of static images, and the present thinned of all duration until it is nothing more than a nearly imperceptible membrane in between such a future and such a past.

Samuel Delany’s beautiful new book, Dark Reflections, is something like the inverse of a “pornotopic” book like The Mad Man (see also here), or a metapornographic one like Phallos. For Dark Reflections tells the story of a black gay poet, Arnold Hawley, who cannot come to terms (until far too late) with his sexuality, and whose sexual life is therefore largely unconsummated. It’s about a lot of other things as well: the ironies and disappointments of the literary life, the dubious nature of the publishing industry, the extremely marginal status of poets (and of poetry) in American society today, and the way that race intersects with gender and sexuality. And it is also about loneliness, and madness, and having to come to terms with one’s own mortality. But the book’s sharpest focus is on sexual desire, and on being afraid.

I suppose the lament for a life half lived is itself some sort of literary genre. But Delany, as always, has a unique take on what might seem a common theme. For Arnold is not “repressed,” in any psychoanalytic sense of this term. He is fully aware, throughout, of his desires; and he doesn’t disavow them, so much as he is first afraid of them, and later wearied by the prospect of trying to act on them. “Internalized homophobia” is also not quite the right term for Arnold’s condition. He doesn’t hate himself, or hate what he is, or feel himself driven by impulses that he dares not avow, or that he thinks will damn him. It is just that he feels, well, uncomfortable: uncomfortable in coming out of the closet at a time when there are real dangers in doing so; and later, when the existence of an active (and sometimes activist) public gay culture offers some defense against those dangers, uncomfortable with living his life in public, as a kind of spectacle.

Arnold also cannot be diagnosed as lacking the courage to live fully — in the manner of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, “do I dare to eat a peach?” (and remember that Eliot himself was something of a closet case). Rather, at times Arnold is (if anything) too generous and impulsive, as is dramatized in the middle section of this three-part novel (it moves backward in time, from an opening account of Arnold’s middle and old age, to a final section which goes back to his youth, his formative experiences, his sexual awakening). The middle section contains some of the most harrowing writing of Delany’s entire career: it narrates how Arnold agrees to marry a young homeless white woman whom he hardly knows, and who (as it turns out) really is crazy — or has been driven crazy, as “the pure products of America” always are (to quote another great American poet). The consequences of this impulsive, and non-sexual, marriage are calamitous — though they also provide the material for much of Arnold’s best poetry. Art is often nourished by horror and tragedy, though it certainly does not “redeem” or “ennoble” or “compensate for” such tragedy.

If anything, Dark Reflections is about the sad consequences of an exacerbated self-consciousness — although, in contrast to traditional (19th century) treatments of this theme, the problem is not intrinsic to self-consciousness itself, but determined by its social, cultural, and political surroundings. Arnold is hyper-aware both of being gay, and of being black, in America, and of the discrimination that has customarily attached to both. This is only heightened by the fact that he is as cultivated and sensitive as he is — which is a stereotype often applied to gay men, and the exact opposite of a stereotype often applied to black men and women. The book is haunted by a vile racist remark that Wallace Stevens made at the Pulitzer Prize banquet in 1950, responding to Gwendolyn Brooks’ winning of the poetry prize; Delany writes in a concluding “Historical Note” that this remark is “a refrain not only throughout this tale but in the mind of any black writer contemplating his or her possibility for reward or recognition in America.”

Indeed, Arnold is preoccupied with the question of recognition; he somewhat vainly and pompously tends to imagine himself as the object of a future biographer’s scrutiny, the result and reward of his becoming famous as a poet. But of course poets in America today do not become famous — and Arnold has to face the fact that his works have only been published in small editions, mostly by small presses, and that they are generally not to be found in any library. In his old age — described in the first section of the book — Arnold is poor and largely companionless. He is so alone that he even misses out on Nine Eleven entirely (despite living in lower Manhattan; but he has neither friends nor a television, so he doesn’t even find out about the attacks until the following day). Years earlier, as recounted in the final section of the novel, Arnold also misses out on the Stonewall “riots” or protests of 1969 — he had been a habitue of that bar the previous year, but he entirely misses the events that give Stonewall its historical significance. (Delany does remind us, however, that the Stonewall was largely a “black and Hispanic gay bar” — a fact that is often omitted from the official gay histories).

The sense of a “missed encounter” is crucial to Arnold’s history, and is the best key to his failure to live the life he might have lived. In the book’s last third, we do see Arnold in the Stonewall, with black, gay male friends and at least a nascent sense of community; but one that seems to slip away as Arnold grows older, and more private an circumspect. And the book ends with an epiphany, which is both aesthetic and erotic in import: it brings Arnold back to a crucial turning point, from early adulthood, when (an understandable) fear and an aggravated sense of isolation proved more powerful than desire, setting him on the path to his later loneliness and frustration. It’s almost a Sartrean moment of existential choice: and Arnold makes the “wrong” choice, condemning himself to subsequent ill-at-ease-ness and unfreedom. It’s as if Arnold had been offered a glimpse of a Delanyesque “pornotopia” — but was too freaked out by it, in a late-1950s social climate far different from the bohemian one that Delany himself (as recounted in his memoir The Motion of Light in Water) found just several years later in the East Village. In any case, Arnold’s aesthetico-erotic epiphany, with which the book ends, recovers the past in an almost Proustian sense — but (unlike Proust) without thereby redeeming it. It’s the missed encounter itself that returns, with its real sense of potentiality and hope, but also with the mortal awareness that such potentiality and hope have themselves been squandered.

I’ve written before about how Delany, almost uniquely among writers of the last half-century (or more), presents a vision of sexuality, and sexual “excess,” involving both real bodily expenditures and the projection, beyond possibility, of extravagant sexual fantasies, that is nonetheless not organized around the tiresome themes of “transgression” and “impossibility.” In Dark Reflections, Delany in effect writes correlatively about the denial of such a vision, or the failure to attain it, which nonetheless is not organized around the usual themes of hysterical repression and a puritanical thirst for denial (or “obscene superego jouissance”) with which libertines have baited their opponents for the last two centuries. This is not only to say (rather obviously) that Arnold is no T. S. Eliot, but also to register how deeply the personal is implicated in the transpersonal, or the social. It is not that selfhood is generic, or stereotypical, or a mere byproduct or epiphenomenon or structural effect of some sort of social “conditioning” or (more sophisticatedly) “coding”; but rather that the most deeply singular, private, and unsharable depth of ones own being is the place where one is most profoundly marked by one’s past encounters with others (both contingent, personal encounters, and more generally social ones that have to do with the priority of parents, of language, of mores and prejudices, etc.). This sort of precedence cannot really be described either in Sartrean terms of being condemned to freedom, or in Lacanian terms of the big Other — though both of these theories refer to aspects of it. Dark Reflections does indeed offer us a sophisticated account of the genesis and the maintenance of subjectivity, and of how things like gender, sexuality, race, and class impact upon it at the deepest level (without thereby “determining” it) — except that this “theory” cannot be abstracted away from the contingencies and particularities of Arnold Hawley himself, the fictive protagonist who, in Delany’s narrative construction, inhabits and projects it. Which is, of course, what makes the book a work of fiction rather than of theory, something that is larger than, and irreducible to, what it exemplifies — which is, I think, what we really look for in great works of fiction.

I just finished reading Pynchon’s new novel. It took me two months. I only read it in the late evening, just before going to bed. Sometimes I would only read for 15 minutes or so, sometimes for an hour and a half — it depended on how tired I was, and how late it was. But I read at least a few pages every single night.

The phenomenology of reading is important, when it comes to a novel that is 1085 pages long. (This makes it, I think, the third longest novel I have ever read cover to cover — after Proust, of course, and Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling). With a very long novel, you need to sink into the rhythms of the prose; these rhythms have to insinuate their way into your dreams. If a long novel doesn’t put me into an altered state, there is no way I will ever finish it; but if it does, then I will go on reading it, in a sort of trance, and — when I finally reach the end — feel regret that there wasn’t even more. One way to read a great long novel is to take a vacation from the rest of your life — reading it all day, picking it up and putting it down, and picking it up again — doing nothing else in between the bouts of reading, except for household chores and physical exercise. There was no way I could do this with Against the Day, given how busy my life is at the moment — so the only alternative left was reading it at bedtime, when I was already starting to slip into an oneiric state, and when I could let all the concerns of the day just concluded slip away…

You will gather that I am utterly unable to comprehend the most frequent comment people have made about Against the Day: that it is impossible to read, that its size is just too imposing, that forcing yourself to go through it is a chore, etc. etc. To the contrary: for me, reading it was an extraordinary pleasure, an epicurean delight. Pynchon’s supple and sinuous prose is something I have to savor, reading slowly and carefully, letting my mind wander in the labyrinths of clauses and associations, in the twists and turns and continual modulations of tone, from the crassly comic, to the urgent, to the elegiac. There may well be other writers who are more profound than Pynchon; but there no other living writer of the English language whose sentences I enjoy anywhere near as much as I do Pynchon’s.

1085 pages? I was only sorry that the book had to come to an end, when the lives of the characters, and the flows of History in which they found themselves immersed, clearly were able to continue…

Against the Day is set mostly in the two decades 1893-1913; that is to say, from the great Chicago World’s Fair, up until just before the outbreak of the First World War. In geographical extent, during these years, it covers most of the northern hemisphere: the US, Europe, and Asia. Pynchon passes over the War itself in just a few pages, and the novel ends with a sort of post-War coda, in Hollywood and Paris at the start of the Roaring Twenties.

If the book has an overarching theme, it is that of people trying to live their own lives, despite being overwhelmed by the forces of History. The two decades in which most of the novel takes place are a time of ferment and imagination and invention, but also a time when everything is hurtling towards disaster. The characters are dancing on the deck of the Titanic, even though they do not realize it. (The Titanic disaster is itself absent from the pages of the book, unless I missed it somehow, which is always possible with a text as encyclopedic as Pynchon’s).

The novel is filled with politics: capital versus labor in the mines of Colorado; the Mexican Revolution; Anarchist agitations and bombings of all sorts; the jockeyings of the European Powers for influence and control in the Balkans, and in “inner Asia.” There are also ongoing quests of a more esoteric sort: searches for mystical cities hidden beneath desert sands; passages through the “hollow earth”; speculations on the secret cause, and hidden significance, of the Tunguska Event of 1908; psychedelic journeys of the Tarahumara; crackpot inventions of time machines, and of devices for exploring additional dimensions.

Most of the characters — the American ones, especially — just want to be left alone to live their own lives. But this (very American) desire is constantly being thwarted by the depredations of Capital, and the machinations of the Great Powers. And so, most of the characters also have ethico-political committments and allegiances: they are mostly Anarchists, sworn enemies of State and Capital (if sometimes a bit lackadaisical in their actual commitment to the cause). The politics of the novel are perhaps best summarized in an essay one of the characters, a teen-ager and high school student, writes on the subject of “What It Means to Be an American”: “it means to do what they tell you and take what they give you and don’t go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down” (page 1076).

This being Pynchon, the novel is also highly concerned with science and technology: we get some bits about Nikolai Tesla, and a lot of talk about the mathematics, of the time, particularly quaternions and vectors, the legacy of Riemann, and the new sorts of mathematics that are associated with the Theory of Special Relativity (the novel mostly precedes any consideration of the Theory of General Relativity, which Einstein published in 1915, or of quantum mechanics, whose major principles were only worked out in the 1920s).

These mathematical and scientific developments are related, on the one hand to war, and the technologies behind the machinations of the Great Powers — there’s a good deal here about the transition from balloons to airplanes — and on the other hand to the possibilities of Escape from the horrors of war and political repression, and, more generally, History.

The way that Pynchon so casually passes over, or through, World War I in a few distant and allusive pages is itself expressive and meaningful: the war’s horrors simply defy representation, cannot be narrated in this otherwise amazingly capacious volume. Almost at the end of the novel, in Paris in 1920 or so, one of the characters remarks that “We’re in Hell, you know… The world came to an end in 1914. Like the mindless dead, who don’t know they’re dead, we are as little aware as they of having been in Hell ever since that terrible August” (page 1077). And arguably, we still are, to this day.

The daytime is the realm of History with all its horrors — which is one reason why the novel is entitled Against the Day: a retreat into the hoped-for safety and shelter of the nighttime, but also the quest for another sort of illumination, one that is not bound to the imperialism of the Day. (Hence all the talk of time travel, and vectors, and additional spacetime dimensions). The epigraph of the novel (attributed to Thelonius Monk) is quite beautiful: “it’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.” Stephen Dedalus called history a nightmare from which he was trying to awaken; for Pynchon, the daylight world is itself a waking nightmare, from which his characters are always trying to escape, through an alternate sort of illumination which is also a kind of blissful sleep. (And which none of the characters ever finds, though the book does end with a kind of respite; the War is over — or, it is not yet apparent that an even worse one is a mere two decades ago — and the characters are paired together and reunited in a sort of reconciliation that is characteristic of comedy as a genre. Even though, really, nothing is resolved. Pynchon did something similar with the ending of Vineland).

But let me get back to the prose, to the sentences of Against the Day. For all its historical and geographical and scientific and pseudo-scientific detail, the novel is largely an affective text. What really makes it work is the beautiful expression of various affective registers, and the ways that these registers continually shift and modulate. I love the way the novel works itself out moment by moment, with all its impressions of landscape and of memory and desire. At one moment we are reading about the subtle distinctions of light in Venice, at another about the ambivalent emotions animating the vaguely s&m, and overtly bisexual, menage a trois in which certain of the characters have become involved, at still another moment about the perils of drowning in a river of mayonnaise. As a reader of the novel, I cannot avoid the modernist tendency of trying to fit it all together, trying to discover some grand plan, finding a schematics that draws all the metaphors and all the situations into one overarching structure or system. But I also feel the need to resist this tendency; I love the novel most of all for its sensitivity to microclimates of feeling and desire, to the various sorts of yearning, nostalgia, satisfaction (sometimes, rarely), envy, imagination, and lust that it bathes me in moment to moment.

I do not agree with the tendency of so many readers to fetishize Gravity’s Rainbow as Pynchon’s one great book, and to ignore, or dismiss as uninteresting and second-rate, all three of the novels he has written and published since. To my mind, Mason & Dixon, and now Against the Day, both of which are longer than Gravity’s Rainbow, are both every bit as wonderful — and indeed as timely, or as untimely — as that earlier book — even if they do not overtly display all those kewl proto-cyberpunk dynamics.

Samuel Delany pointed out to me that, in my previous posting on his novel The Mad Man, I made a crucial parapraxis, or misreading: I quoted him as writing, in his opening “Disclaimer” to the novel, that the book was a “pornutopic fantasy”; when in actuality he wrote that it was a “pornotopic fantasy.”

The change in one letter is crucial. The Mad Man is not a “porn-utopia,” but a “porno-topia” (“topos” = “place”). As Delany wrote to me: “rather than [Thomas] More’s fibrillation between ‘ouk-topia’ (no place) and ‘eu-topia’ (the good place), I’m evoking ‘pornos-topia’ (the place of the prostitute — prostitute in the sense of one who indulges in ‘sexual exchange’ or ‘exchanging things for pleasure,’ money, other sex, communication, information, sexuality seen as part of the extant social exchange system, rather than as a sublime/transcendent occurrence outside the social exchange system).”

It’s all the more startling (and embarrassing) for me to realize that I translated “pornotopia” into “pornutopia”, in that my own reading of the novel is precisely that it does not present sex — even extravagant and copious (in quantity) sex — as being transgressive, sublime, or transcendent, but rather seeks to bring it back to the everyday. This means that The Mad Man should be understood, not as a utopia (a no-place or good-place), but rather as what Foucault called a “heterotopia” (an “other-place”). Foucault writes that heterotopias, “as opposed to utopias,” are “real places, actual places… in which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are, at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed, sorts of places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable.” (This from a 1967 text of Foucault’s called “Different Spaces”).

(Recall, too, that Delany’s much earlier novel Trouble on Triton (1976) was subtitled “an ambiguous heterotopia”; the book can be read as, among other things, a response to Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed (1974), which bore the subtitle: “an ambiguous utopia.”)

As a pornotopia or heterotopia, The Mad Man is explicitly concerned with sexuality in relation to “the social exchange system.” And indeed, this is something I didn’t say enough about in my previous posting. Indeed, I wrote there that “there is a lot here, which I lack the space and energy to get into, about the logic of sexual exchange, and how it relates to, and potentially differs from, the ubiquity of market exchange.” But this difference in logics is of course crucial. The two murders in the novel are precisely the result of a clash. between market exchange and another form of (noncapitalist) sexual exchange. The homeless “Mad Man Mike” institutes a strange rule of sexual exchange and sexual ownership, in which the cost of sexual desire/activity/transference is fixed at precisely a penny; and this comes into tragic conflict with the stringencies and desperations of the “market” for hustling at The Pit, the hustler bar in which the novel’s two murders take place.

I think that The Mad Man stands alongside Marcel Mauss’ The Gift and Pierre Klossowski’s La monnaie vivante (Living Money, unfortunately still not published in English translation) as one of the great texts about alternatives to capitalist/market version of (commodity) exchange.

(Note 1: I realize that I am leaving a lot out here, giving way too summary an account. One also has to look at, for instance, Braudel’s claims about the medieval “market” being something very different from the “anti-markets” of large-scale capitalist commodity exchange; not to mention other anthropological accounts, like Alan Page Fiske’s typology of forms of social exchange).

(Note 2: it was rather amusing to see how, in their “Freakonomics” column in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven V. Levitt went through all sorts of bizarre contortions in order to explain our habits of holiday season gift-giving in terms of standard — bourgeois, capitalist — economic rationality).