5 - Against the Day

Summary

With Against the Day (2006), Thomas Pynchon sets his readers their largest challenge yet to process multiple plotlines, histories and genre traces. Throughout his novels Pynchon has experimented with mixing genres, writing parodies and pastiches, and creating multi-voiced texts, but with Against the Day he pushes the boundaries of his tendencies toward encyclopedic fiction. Summarizing fully and accurately the plot of Against the Day would be a daunting task, and even then the numerous intersections of plotlines are likely to end up a tangled mass. The novel spans some thirty years beginning in 1893, includes some 170 characters, and covers the globe from the west coast of America to inner Asia, locating many historical events in new juxtapositions – yet, the text repeats the mantra found in many Pynchon novels: “everything fits together, connects.” Many of the plotlines nod toward a specific genre that allows Pynchon to contextualize his narrative within an array of intertexts while simultaneously maintaining a reasonably consistent narrative voice. That consistent narrative voice is one familiar to Pynchon readers as it is based in the genre of Menippean satire, which he has used before to shape his various texts' political substructures. The Menippea's features are “stylistic multiplicity (and the philosophic pluralism it implies), fantasy and philosophy, intellection and encyclopedism, an ‘anti-book’ stance, a marginal cultural position, and carnivalization.”