I've finally finished the last sections of Against the Day. I think I finally understand the difficulty people have with Pynchon's writing. It's not the length of the book that's daunting: it's the scope. In a single chapter a character might form a new romantic relationship, become pregnant, travel to an Eastern European nation, get involved in a local war, give birth, and escape again to Italy. For most writers that would be enough for an entire novel, but Pynchon knocks it out in 25 pages. Multiply that times 40 and add in plenty of references to obscure historical events, archaic scientific theories and advanced mathematics, and you have Against the Day. After a while, reading it becomes exhausting.

My frustration came when I realized the book didn't seem to be going in any one direction. There's a lot that happens, but most of it doesn't have much to do with everything else. I saw this at the beginning, but I assumed that the various threads would converge in a single climactic event. But whenever something sufficiently momentous occurs in the book, like the explosion of a meteorite in the earth's atmosphere, that event quickly fades into the general background of the novel and the characters go on with their lives. I began to realize that there is no unifying event, that the stories do not neatly converge in a single climactic moment, and I started getting tired of reading the book. Sure, there are a lot of interesting ideas in it, but is that really any good if the novel doesn't tell a good story?

Then last week I came across an article that put Against the Day in a whole new light for me. It was this article about the discovery of a new state of matter called a string-net liquid. As it turns out, the thinking behind the discovery ties into string theory in physics, which explains the unification of everything in the universe, including light and matter.

From the New Scientist article:

"Suddenly we realised, maybe the vacuum of our whole universe is a string-net liquid," says Wen. "It would provide a unified explanation of how both light and matter arise." So in their theory elementary particles are not the fundamental building blocks of matter. Instead, they emerge from the deeper structure of the non-empty vacuum of space-time."

This linking of light and matter is one of the central themes to the various stories running throughout the novel. Some of the more bizarre occurrences in the book, such as a magician using a device to actually create duplicates of human beings, are extensions of this idea (I should point out that The Prestige bears a striking resemblance as well, probably because it and Against the Day both draw heavily on the theories of Nikola Tesla).

Here is a passage from Against the Day that addresses the link between light and matter in particularly direct way:

As if imparting a secret Lew could not help thinking he had somehow, without knowing how, become ready to hear, the Cohen said, "We are light, you see, all of light--we are the light offered the batsmen at the end of the day, the shining eyes of the beloved, the flare of the safety-match at the high city window, the stars and nebulæ in full midnight glory, the rising moon through the tram wires, the naphtha lamp glimmering on the costermonger's barrow...When we lost our æthereal being and became embodied, we slowed, thickened, congealed to"--grabbing each side of his face and wobbling it back and forth--"this. The soul itself is a memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light. The first step in our Discipline here is learning how to re-acquire refraction, that condition of light, to become once more able to pass where we will, through lantern-horn, through window-glass, eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is an expression in crystal form of Earth's velocity as it rushes through the Æther, alterning dimensions, and creating double refraction...."

It occurred to me then that Against the Day is as much a reflection of string theory as it is an elaboration on the scientific theories of the early 20th century. My thinking led me to think again about the string-net liquid described in the New Scientist article:

"If you take a snapshot of the position of electrons in an FQHE system they appear random and you think you have a liquid," says Wen. But step back, and you see that, unlike in a liquid, the electrons dance around each other in well-defined steps."

It occurred to me that this could very well describe the structure of Against the Day itself. There are several narrative threads going on that seem to have little to do with what else is happening in the book, and don't seem to be moving in any particular direction. It can seem pretty random at times. But as the novel goes on, the stories begin to intersect and intertwine in various ways. They don't converge into one narrative, but they become interconnected, like a net. And of course, laid across the whole thing are those themes I keep bringing up: light, refraction, doubling, anarchy, and war.

When I recognized these correlations between string theory and Against the Day, I gained a new appreciation for Pynchon's novel. It's a very challenging work, but it's also entertaining and very rewarding. From the lack of a clear resolution, I get the idea that the reader is expected to simply enjoy the book's multiple threads and not worry about where it's going.

Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg