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Visual simultaneity and temporal
multi-layeredness in Thomas Pynchon’s Against
the Day
Arkadiusz Misztal
Abstract
The paper seeks to discuss the dynamics of visual simultaneity and temporal multi-layeredness in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day. The title of the book is the translation of the French term contre-jour, “a photographic effect that refers to photographs where the camera is pointed directly toward the source of light, creating backlighting of the subject” (PynchonWiki). Accordingly, Against the Day, another of Pynchon’s encyclopedic narratives, explores the concept of visual time, mostly but not exclusively, in photography. I argue that Pynchon in Against the Day resorts to this new visual medium to study the modern temporal dimension of culture and its knowledge frame grounded on the conceptual principles of physics, the idea of linear causality and reversibility. The novel breaks with the prevailing knowledge of clock-time by deconstructing the idea of “a slice of time” and replacing it with more complex visions revealing the temporal multi-layeredness of the photographic image. This multi-layeredness reinforces temporal fluidity which informs Pynchon’s imaginative strategies employed in the creation of co-existing but disjunctive temporalities, radically different timescales and multiple temporal itineraries. These strategies not only deliberately sabotage chronology and linearity of the narrative, but also playfully engage with some of scientific models of time (such as Einstein’s theory of relativity or Minkowski spacetime) and contribute to what Pynchon calls the “modern Luddite imagination” and its “impulse to deny the machine”.
Résumé
Le présent article analyse les rapports entre simultanéité visuelle et multiplicité temporelle dans un roman de Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (le titre du livre est une traduction de l’expression française « à contre-jour »). Le texte, qui fait partie des récits « encyclopédiques » de l’auteur, explore la notion de temps visuel, notamment mais pas exclusivement en photographie. Je défends l’idée que le roman de Pynchon s’appuie sur la photographie pour étudier la dimension du temps dans notre culture moderne et l’ancrage de cette nouvelle conception du temps dans les recherches sur la physique, la causalité linéaire et réversibilité. Le roman rompt avec le savoir dominant sur le temps linéraire de l’horloge en déconstruisant la notion de « tranche » temporelle, qu’il remplace par une vision plus complexte, ouverte à la multiplicité temporelle de
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l’image temporelle. Cette multiplicité renforce la fluidité temporelle qui soutient les stratégies imaginaires et fictionnelles de Pynchon dans sa poursuite de temporalités coexistentes mais disjonctives, puis d’échelles temporelles radicalement différentes et de trajectoires chronologiques multiples. Ces stratégies ne se contentent pas de saboter la chronologie et la linéarité du récit, mais entament aussi un dialogue ludique avec certaines conceptualisations scientifiques du temps (comme par exemple la théorie de la relativité d’Einstein ou le notion d’espace-temps de Minkowski). Elles contributent également à ce que Pynchon appelle l’ « imaginaire moderne anti-technologique » et son désir de « nier la machine ».
Keywords
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Part Four of Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against the Day registers “a heavenwide blast of light” (AtD 779)1, generated by the mysterious explosion that occurred on 30th June 1908 near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river, in the Siberian region of Russia. The explosion widely known today as the Tunguska event – is believed to have been caused by an incoming asteroid or comet, which exploded in the atmosphere 40 miles north of Vanavara settlement by the Tunguska river, releasing massive energy that flattened millions of trees over an area of 830 square miles and caused a sound wave that encircled the planet multiple times. The explosion left no crater, but the closest seismograph installed in Irkutsk, 600 miles from the epicenter, recorded strong vibrations lasting more than an hour. The seismic rumbles were also observed all over Europe, even as far away as the UK.
Whatever had happened out there provided its own annunciation, beginning upriver from Vanavara and booming westward at six hundred miles per hour, all through that darkless night, one seismograph station to the next, across Europe to the Atlantic, via posts, pendulums, universal joints, slender glass threads writing on smoked paper rolls driven clockwork-slow beneath, via needles of light on coatings of bromide of silver, there was the evidence . . . in distant cities to the west, “sensitive flames,” some of them human, dipped, curtseyed, feebly quivered at all-but-erotic edges of extinction. Questions arose as to the timing, the “simultaneousness” of it. New converts to Special Relativity took a fascinated look. Given the inertia of writing-points and mirrors, the transit times at focusing lenses, the small variations in the speed at which the bromide paper might have been driven, the error of the seismograph recordings more than embraced the “instant” in which a hitherto-unimagined quantity of energy had entered the equations of history. (AtD 796-797)
The novel, in the manner Pynchon’s readers come to expect, puts forth several possible explanations for the Tunguska event. Among these possibilities are a meteorite, a comet, alien visitation, a misdirected energy beam generated by Nikola Tesla or some form of disturbance in the curvature of space-time2. The “instant,” suggests
Professor Vanderjuice (one of the “early converts to Special Theory of Relativity” in the novel), might have been a “singularity”: a “hole” or “edge of spacetime” where time and space merge indistinguishably and cease to have any meaning. The “event” would puzzle the early adopters of Einstein’s special theory of relativity for another reason. The theory, with its emphasis on observer dependency, refuted the idea of unique global time that could be used to determine the simultaneity of the events and turn the timing of the “instant” into a real challenge. In other words, the “simultaneousness” of the event would be problematic, as Einstein’s theory rejected the idea of absolute ordering of events that will be true for all observers at all places and all time.
As the above passage makes clear, one of the most explicit ways in which Against the Day approaches the problematic of simultaneity is by placing the concept in the context of the new views of light, space and time that Einstein’s theory of relativity put forward. The novel incorporates also the story of Michelson and Morley’s 1887 experiment carried out to prove the existence of the hypothetical ether, the medium in which light was supposed to travel, as well as extensive reference to Minkowski’s model of spacetime, which some of the characters in the novel employ to explain such attendant effects of Einstein’s theory as length contraction, time dilation and the possibility of time travel. These scientific theories and models effected 1 See Pynchon, Against the Day (Penguin Press, 2006).
122 a profound and lasting change in the ways time was represented, understood and experienced. Einstein’s special theory highlighted the paradoxical relation between two seemingly contradictory models of time: the tensed theory predicated on seriality, and the tenseless or block view, in which the past, present and future exist simultaneously, being relative to the position of the observer in the space-time block. As Jared Gardner reminds us, this second model, seemingly beyond our experiential capacities, was in fact developed a long time before Einstein’s 1905 paper and can be traced back to the crucial systematic shift growing out of optics. This transformation in the makeup of vision, in Jonathan Crary’s view, occurred in the early 19th century when
the geometrical optics of the 17th and 18th centuries with its stable and fixed relations incarnated in the camera
obscura collapsed and was displaced by radically different notions of an observer and a new valuation of visual experience. The new vision located in the empirical immediacy of the observer’s body freed the eye “from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space” (Crary 19) by endowing it with an unprecedented mobility and exchangeability. Perception became in this way acutely temporal and kinetic.
This transformation of vision had not only reconfigured the world into new perceptual components but also affected temporal sensibilities of the emerging modernity. The need for the new representation of time, at the beginning of 20th century, was apparent both in the fields of science and art. One can thus find, as Arthur J. Miller has shown, common ground between Picasso’s cubism and Einstein’ relativity: both were motivated by the urge to “confront the concept of simultaneity” (Miller 239). In his effort to develop a new aesthetic, Picasso was looking for a formula that allowed for “the simultaneous representation of entirely
different viewpoints whose sum constitutes the depicted object” (Miller 239, emphasis in original). This is,
for instance, reflected in the complex treatment of time in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), composed of two simultaneous series, one made up of five motion picture frames tending towards increased geometrization and the other, that of the squatting demoiselle, as a sequence of snapshots superimposed on each other (Miller 239). As Miller points out, “Einstein’s temporal simultaneity shares with Picasso’s the notion that there is no single preferred view of events” (239). In a similar vein Paul Virilio has argued that Einstein’s view of the physical world resembles a general optics or aesthetics. This resemblance was strong enough for Einstein to entertain the thought of replacing the term ‘relativity theory’ with Standpunktslehre (“point of view” theory). His relativistic model based on the primacy of light as an unsurpassable “cosmological horizon”, paved the way for “a new order of visibility where the passing time of chronology and history is replaced by the time which is exposed to the absolute speed of light” (Virilio, Polar Inertia 37, emphasis in original). The arrival of this new order, in Virilio’s eyes, can be best characterized in terms of kinematic optics and visual technologies that contributed to its emergence. “This shift from the scientific absolutism of Newtonian space and time to Einstein’s speed of light is itself revealing [révélatrice], in the photographic sense of development [revelation]” (Polar Inertia 37). The time of succession becomes with Einstein order of exposure in which past, present and future exist simultaneously as interlocked figures of underexposure, exposure and overexposure. In other words, the extensive chronometric time gives way to the intensive time of exposure of the relativistic eternal present (Polar Inertia 41).
Aware of the limitations and inconsistencies in Les Demoiselles, Picasso continued his research into spatial and temporal simultaneity during the summer of 1909 at the small Spanish village of Horta de Ebro (now known as Horta de San Juan) where he took his first landscape photographs and experimented with printing
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superpositions of photographic negatives. The photographic medium allowed him to satisfactorily work out the problem of moving beyond a single visual impression and of representing three dimensions and color on a flat surface (Kahnweiler 7). By enabling Picasso to envision multiple viewpoints in their dynamic and simultaneous interaction,3 the camera clearly acted as a catalyst to his development of Cubism.
Against the Day, with its encyclopedic scope, does not ignore these artistic developments and anxieties.
As Roden Taveira has plausibly suggested, the Pynchonesque photographs of the Tunguska Event “degraded nearly to the most current of abstract art, but no less shocking—virgin forest—every single trunk stripped white, blown the unthinkable ninety degrees—flatten for miles” (AtD 796) are most likely a reference to Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, as they were making their moves into Cubism: “I would specifically cite Picasso’s Maisonette dans un jardin (Maisonnette et arbres) (1908) and Braque’s Houses at L’Estaque (1908), his reaction to seeing Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1908, initially only shown privately to friends and fellow artists)” (Taveira 138).
Out of all Pynchon’s novels, Against the Day appears to be the most heavily saturated with conceptualizations, models and theories of time projected against the technological and scientific paradigm of modernity. The scientific framework represents thus an obvious point of departure for studying simultaneity and its impact on narrative time in Against the Day, especially through the lenses of the theory of relativity4. Yet the novel
offers also an alternative perspective on “the little understood enigmata of the simultaneous” (AtD 259). This perspective reveals itself in Pynchon’s imaginative exploration of the new sensibilities that were combined and installed by one of the greatest engines of modernity—photography. In what follows I argue that Pynchon resorts to this visual medium to study the temporal dimension of modernity and its knowledge frame grounded on the conceptual principles of physics, the idea of linear causality and reversibility. More specifically, he explores the potentials of early photography that distanced the medium from its indexical model of representation. Accordingly Against the Day attempts to recapture the spirit of the early photography with its capacity of deconstructing the idea of “a slice of time” and replacing it with more complex visions revealing the temporal multi-layeredness of the photographic image. I will approach this multi-layeredness as an example of visual simultaneity and argue that it strongly affects narrative trajectories and methods of imaging and imagining time in Pynchon’s text.
The temporal frame in which Pynchon cast his narrative roughly encompasses the period from 1880 to 1917, the formative years in the history of photography, when the camera became an integral part of the emerging techno-scape. Towards the end of the nineteenth century photography was no longer a novelty: “Experiments in photomechanical processes led to the development of half-tone plate in the 1880s. By the 1890s, photographs could be cheaply reproduced in magazines and newspapers. The Kodak Camera, introduced in 1888, marked the debut of photographs produced directly by the middle class consumer, rather than by professional photographers” (Marien XIV). The new medium radically transformed the visual experience and cognitive picture of the world. Studying the mutual relation between photography and the history of perception
3 The paintings inspired by experiments were intended to move beyond the representative mode typically associated with photography and yet this was not apparent on the first viewing. Gertrud Stein in her notebook observed, “Picasso had by chance taken some photographs of the village that he had painted and it always amused me when everyone protested against the fantasy of the pictures to make them look at the photographs which made them see that the pictures were almost exactly like the photographs” (14).
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as it developed in the nineteenth century, Bernd Stiegler has contended that the proposed theoretical models of perception in that period were essentially the theories of photography and that by the beginning of the twentieth century “seeing was photographic”. In this new paradigm “the camera’s image either determined or extended what the eye could see. The camera’s eye symbolized this photographic seeing, which defined what was perceived and imagined about the world” (Cuevas-Wolf 158-9). This new model of perception affected also the ways in which time was visualized and conceptualized. Reflecting on these changes, Mary Ann Doane points out that “time became palpable in a quite different way—one specific to modernity and allied with its new technologies of representation (photography, film, phonography)” (4). These transformations in the restructuring of time and its representability have had substantial and long-lasting effects: “A sea change in thinking about contingency, indexicality, temporality, and chance deeply marked the epistemologies of time at the turn of the last century” (Doane 4). Unsurprisingly, the camera, with its capacities of objectively recording the transient, easily found its way to scientific laboratories. In 1883, Étienne-Jules Marey, a French bio-physicist, used photographic images to study force by arresting individual instants of time and superimposing them on each other. Marey aptly called this method “chronophotography,” literally “the photography of time”5.
In the same period Eadweard James Muybridge employed cameras in his detailed studies of movement, which paved the way for motion pictures6.
Even though the names of these two figures do not appear explicitly in the text, it seems that Pynchon was aware of them when working on the novel and recognized in their experiments a scientific fascination with capturing the ephemeral and measuring the passage of time in a truly objective way. Yet, as I have argued elsewhere7, he has also returned in Against the Day to the concept originally used to characterize photography
at the moment of its invention as a “way of writing and drawing with light” (Trachtenberg 3). Consistently throughout the novel, Pynchon regards photography not merely as a new mechanical technology of vision but as the medium capable of bringing forth a system of representation that is alternative to empirical reality. One of the primary ways of imaging and imagining time is, as the text explicitly posits, “by way of photography and its convergence of silver, time and light” (AtD 454, underlined emphasis – A.M.)8. Merle Rideout, one
of the novel’s photographers, hopes that his cameras will shed some light on “[t]he Mysteries of Time” by allowing him to “to bring it [time] a little closer to his face, squint at it from different angles, maybe try to see if it could be taken apart to figure how it might actually work” (AtD 454). The “photographic convergence” is integrated with the novel’s central theme and concept, light, which Pynchon explores from different angles and standpoints: scientific and parascientific, historical and fictional, factual and imaginary. Light in Against
the Day becomes a character with many faces and functions. It is presented as energy conducted by aether, as
spiritual force akin to the creative light from Genesis, it is also an agent of mysterious and monumental events, “a secret determinant of history” (AtD 431).
This extended imagery involving light is closely connected with the motif introduced early in the novel: the story of Iceland spar, a form of clear, colorless calcite which was originally discovered in the eastern fjords of Iceland9. One of the crystal’s characteristic properties is bi-refraction: when light passes through the spar it
5 See Braun for a comprehensive study of Marey’s chronophotography. 6 See Solonit for a detailed discussion of these experiments.
7 See Misztal’s paper “Delineating Pynchon’s Timescapes: time and photography in Against the Day.”
8 For a general discussion of photography as a technique and a metaphor in Pynchon’s novels, see Lévy’s paper “As far as Pynchon ‘Loves Cameras’”.
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is split by polarization into two rays that are bent into two different angles (known as angles of refraction). A person viewing an object through the crystal will see its two images. In Against the Day the spar is related to the creation of double presences and parallel worlds, a process that Pynchon calls “[t]he doubling of the Creation” (AtD 133). And indeed one finds in the novel multiple parallel worlds, which often include “imaginary” or “invisible” shapes. Many characters in Against the Day appear simultaneously in two or more locations. The old Shaman Magyakan from Siberia, for instance, visits the scientific expedition in the Antarctic thanks to “the mysterious shamanic power known as bilocation, which enables those with the gift literally to be in two or more places, often widely separated, at the same time” (AtD 143). Such occurrences, in more or less explicit form, appear throughout the novel and are not limited to its last part called “Bilocations”10.
Reflecting on the Pynchonesque principle of the “doubling of the Creation”, Heinz Ickstadt observes that it does not merely point to the capacities of the new technologies of vision to double the world in images, but should be primarily understood as characterizing the doubling power of fiction in general, power capable of intertwining “the apparently real with its double- or counterimage” (214). Moreover, the dynamics of this doubling reinforces also the idea of temporal fluidity: “Past, present and future,” as Ickstadt observes, “are fluid categories [in the novel – A.M.]; in fact, they interact and mirror each other. Events that happen in narrated time resound in the narrating time that is the reader’s present” (Ickstadt 214). In the process of reading one can thus find what Edward Mendelson has called, “the centrifugal movement” that sends Pynchon’s readers back to the world and helps them to understand the world somewhat better. In point of fact some of the first responses to Against the Day in 2006, the year when the novel was published, emphasized its uncanny contemporaneity that allows the text to be “read against the present”. To give an example, Steven Moore in his Washington Post review underlined that “[a]s in his last historical novel, Mason & Dixon, Pynchon [in
Against the Day –A.M.] draws parallels between the past and present — there’s a brilliant evocation of the
9/11 attacks on Manhattan, where Pynchon lives — and it’s clear that the worldly author doesn’t see much
various optical instruments throughout the 19th and 20th century. It was for instance “a strategic mineral during WWII used for the sighting equipment of bombardiers and gunners” (PynchonWiki).
10 The question of bilocation emerges also in the context of Einstein’s critique of quantum mechanics. With his two colleagues Podolsky and Rosen, Einstein designed a special Gedanken experiment, known as the EPR paradox, to disprove the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In the experiment two particles are linked by the strange quantum property of entanglement. More
precisely, in the language of quantum mechanics, they are described by the same mathematical relation known as a wave function. When the two particles subsequently become widely separated in space (one being close to the observer, the other one million of light years away), it is possible, by measuring the position or momentum of the first particle, to determine the value in the second particle. When similar measurement is performed on the second particle, the observer can determine the value in the first particle. The EPR paradox has revealed that quantum entanglement violates the uncertainty principle since both the position and momentum of particles can be predicted with certainty (i.e. with probability equal to unity). Moreover, it appears that the entangled particles communicate faster than the speed of light, which, according to special relativity, is impossible. Einstein found this “spooky action at a distance” unreasonable and concluded that quantum mechanics must be wrong, or at least incomplete. The EPR paradox stumped Bohr and his followers, and remained unresolved until 1964, when Cern physicist John Bell described entanglement as nonlocal phenomenon in which particles influence instantaneously one another and transfer information
without violating special relativity. Yet the mysterious nature of the process has not been clarified. As the more recent studies of interference (the ability to be in multiple places simultaneously through superposition) in the two-slit experiment has shown, small particles such as photons can interfere not only with themselves but also with each other. The latter scenario has been recently measured: a photon hit by a beam splitter “turns into what are effectively two versions of itself in two different places, which display the same sort of correlations between its two manifestations. Björn Hessmo and colleagues at the Royal Institute of Technology in Kista, Sweden, have managed to make delicate phase measurements of the two photons, which were really just one photon going two ways (Hessmo et al. 2004). They find that once again the bizarre predictions of quantum mechanics really do hold in our universe” (Reucroft and Swain, 11). In the fictional universe of Against the Day these “bizzare” predictions as well as the emerging models of quantum time (such as Hugh Everett’s many-worlds and others) might provide a theoretical framework for bilocation and other “Mysteries of Space and Time”.
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difference between the corruption of the late Gilded Age and that of our own era” (Moore).
And yet the temporal fluidity in Against the Day is not limited to this centrifugal trajectory of reading, but also contributes more directly to the problem of time and its representability. The idea of temporal fluidity is, as I argue, hinted at in the book’s title and visually recorded on the cover11. The title of Pynchon’s text is
the translation of the French term contre-jour, which refers to the technique used in photography when the camera is pointed directly toward the source of light. The contre-jour technique, according to Jorge Lewinski’s
Dictionary of Photography, introduces a change of focus and generates a kind of stereoscopic effect. Shooting
into the light enables “stronger concentration of interest on the main subject” and adds “a three-dimensional quality to the image” (Lewinski 34). In Against the Day Pynchon not only allows for stronger, more intensive concentration of interest on the main subject matter, but also adds a fourth dimension to it. Photography becomes in this way, to use Hollis Frampton’s phrase, “a four-dimensional solid, or a tesseract of unimaginable intricacy” (50), which can be used to “navigate that dark fourth-dimensional Atlantic known as Time” (AtD 415). As Taveira points out, “Pynchon’s execution of contre-jour reveals his awareness of the way Time violently undergirds visual media—painting, photography, and cinema—as they appear and work in Against
the Day” (Taveira 136). The new visual technologies, in particular chronophotography, exerted a strong and
lasting influence on the Italian Futurists and their approach of showing movement in painting. In Against the
Day these radical sensibilities are expressed by the fictional Futurist painter and anarchist Tancredi, whose
“explosive” paintings seek to move beyond “the damnable stillness of paint” (AtD 586). In his efforts to record the elusive element “born in the living delirium of paint meeting canvas” (AtD 738), Tancredi hopes to capture “[t]he energies of motion, the grammatical tyrannies of becoming” (AtD 587) and “show as much of the passage” of “everything […] all on the way from being one thing to being another, from past to Future” (AtD 586)12.
Furthermore, the cover’s design reveals also another photographic phenomenon: the ghost image. As perceptive contributors to The Pynchon Wiki noted, not only are such ghost images produced by the double refraction of light in Iceland spar, but they also appear in multiple typefaces. Pynchon’s reported involvement in the design of the dust jacket, with its combination of traditional serif fonts with modern sans-serif ones, suggests deliberate invocation of temporal fluidity and interaction. Correspondingly, the camera in the novel does not merely take a moment out of the passage of time. Photography is not reduced to an indexical record of what has been, but frequently poses heterochronic qualities, capable of displaying various distinct temporal phases or layers. By reanimating these phases in the present of the perception, the image makes one aware of time’s potential richness and complexity and counters an oppressive reduction of the possible. Its power to “contradict the given world,” as Zombini the magician puts it (AtD 354), can even satisfy a yearning for miracles. Accordingly, Against the Day eagerly returns to the “natural magic” of photography, when it was practiced as the art of illusionism. In the early years of the twentieth century magician-filmmakers were still
11 It is not my intention to explain away the complex narrative shape of the novel by means of an interpretative, paratextual key from the book’s cover. Such an approach will surely not do justice to the complexity of timescapes and temporalities that Pynchon invokes in Against the Day. Instead, I see these paratextual elements as revealing some of the most dominant perspectives and concerns, much in the same way as the ampersand in Mason & Dixon points to the novel’s preoccupation with connection, relation, and possibility. If, as Samuel Cohen has shown, at the very center of Pynchon’s picaresque tale of America in
Mason&Dixon is the ampersand, then likewise the tale Pynchon spins in Against the Day begins literally with the novel’s cover.
12 For a more detailed discussion of Futurist and Cubist engagements with space and time in Against the Day, see Taveira’s paper.
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taking advantage of the photographic image and cinema, and exploiting “the deceptive possibilities inherent in montage and mise-en-scène to produce new marvels” (Solomon 2). One needs only think of Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, who claimed to have discovered “the specific tenses of vision” or Georges Méliès, the inventor of special effects in film and the last director of Houdin’s Théâtre des soirées fantastiques, running from 1888 to 1924 (Virilio, The Art of the Motor 66). One should also not forget in this context the phenomenon of spirit photography that appeared in the United States in the second half of the 19th century, with the intellectual and spiritual support of the religious movement known as Spiritualism. The ghosts conjured up by the trick of duplicitous double exposure were alleged not only to provide evidence of the afterlife but also implied that photography had the power to open up “a virtual window into a realm freed from the constraints of time entirely” (Kaplan 28).
This “haunting time” significantly contributes to the temporal make-up of Against the Day, which abounds in numerous examples of crossings-over between worlds, ghost characters like trespassers traveling back in time, and ghost light emanating from unknown sources13. It is important to note that Pynchon’s haunting
time differs from its cinematic counterpart in which different layers of the past coexist with, and continue to influence the present. In horror films, as Ann Powell has argued, the insistent past not only threatens to dominate the present and undermine a linear map of time, but also shapes “the future in its own replicated image, which brings stasis. Time loops back and refuses to progress as earlier periods insist on their equal, or superior, validity to the present era” (Powell 155). In Against the Day the photographic image is not so much a frozen time-frame as a mobile section of time, which retains a certain sense of temporal fluidity. The haunting and traversing mode of being in the novel “involves contamination, porosity and mobility, just as much as paralysis and repetition” (Battesti 4). While the image reveals the past’s invasion of the present moment, it also simultaneously resists indexical stasis. It has the power to retain the past, activate the present of the perception and foreshadow the future. It is essentially heterochronic and as such capable of recording parallel temporal phrases in visual simultaneity.
Correspondingly the camera in the novel can be easily turned into a time machine, such as the Integroscope constructed by the novel’s characters, Merle and Roswell. Inspired by Minkowski’s model of the space-time continuum, they build an impossible device which allows for the shift from “optical to temporal light” (AtD 1061). The Integroscope gives access to multiple times and spaces hidden within light by sending people in photographs “onto different tracks” and opening up “other possibilities” (AtD 1060). Its temporal mobility allows one to “enact new and different(iating) vectors of possibility” (Taveira 146) and thus in animating the still image the Integroscope achieves what the Futurist paintings strove for. It operates as a vision machine capable of dynamizing space and time.
In the fictional journal that breaks the first-person narration in part one of the novel, Pynchon describes another impossible technology: a device that allows one to look inside the nunatak, a mountain top protruding out of a surrounding glacier as it is described by the Eskimo. “The Special Ray Generator” connected with “the curious camera lucida” enables one “to view the “nunatak” in a different light, so to speak” (AtD 139) revealing a mischievous looking figure: “Though details were still difficult to make out, the Figure appeared to recline on its side, an odalisque of the snows—though to what pleasures given posed a question far too dangerous—
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with as little agreement among us as to its ‘facial’ features, some describing them as ‘Mongoloid,’ others as ‘serpent-like’” (AtD 141). Developed by William Hyde Wollaston in 1807, the camera lucida is an optical device originally used by artist as an aid in drawing outlines in proper perspective. The device “performs an optical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface upon which the artist is drawing. The artist sees both scene and drawing surface simultaneously, as in a photographic double exposure” (Camera lucida). As a matter of fact, Wollaston’s invention paved the way for Fox Talbot’s discoveries in photography and contributed to the development of other “light-recording technologies”14. In Pynchon’s text “the curious
camera lucida” is not so much a device capable of recording geological “deep time” but it is used rather to
signal the existence of various embedded worlds or nested zones, which appear to co-exist in some parallel dimensions, and yet resist efforts to contemplate them simultaneously.
As the above examples show, the photographic medium in Against the Day often acts as an imaginative strategy employed in the creation of co-existing but disjunctive temporalities, radically different timescales and multiple temporal itineraries. These strategies not only deliberately sabotage the chronology and linearity of the narrative, but also they all go against scientific models of time that fill up the novel. Cameras in the novel are not, to use Roland Barthes’s expression, “clocks for seeing”, but are rather the mechanisms capable of expressing alternative views on time and temporalities that cannot be integrated with the emerging clock-time paradigm of efficiency and productivity. As such, the photographic medium that Pynchon explores in the novel can convey the Luddite impulse to resist the machine15, and more specifically oppose the mechanical
representability of time and the Grid of “orthogonal time”. Pynchon is, however, not an orthodox Luddite who contemptuously ignores and despises the modern technologies of vision. Instead, his narrative seeks to rediscover the transition from the camera as a machine that records time to the camera as a machine capable of articulating a plurality of times in visual simultaneity. In his New York Times essay on sloth, in which he looks at cinema and television, Pynchon points out that they are the mediums that allow for reshaping temporality at will and seemingly exploiting it forever: “We may for now at least have found the illusion, the effect of controlling, reversing, slowing, speeding and repeating time -- even imagining that we can escape itˮ (57). The camera in Against the Day reveals itself as corollary of the specific temporality generated by visual storage media such as VCR and others, which Pynchon describes in his essay as “videotime” (57). Capable of fostering a non-linear awareness and of articulating alternative temporalities, the camera acts as a time-proposing device and the photographic medium becomes for Pynchon a mode of resistance against the reconceptualization of time and its representability in capitalist modernity.
14 Wollaston is also credited with the invention of the refractometer, an instrument for determining refractive index. The refractometer helped Wollaston verify the laws of double refraction in Iceland spar, on which he wrote the treatise “A Method of Examining Refractive and Dispersive Powers, by Prismatic Reflection” published by Royal Society in 1802.
15 In his 1984 New York Times essay Pynchon explores the Luddite phenomenon in the context of C.P. Snowʼs famous Rede Lecture on the disjunction between the literary and scientific cultures. Surveying “a broad form of resistance” to the unsettling appearance of the Age of Technology, Pynchon recognizes an undercurrent stream of resistance in the form of Luddite
imagination and its “impulse to deny the machine” in such humanistic concerns as “exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/time, wild philosophical questions” (Luddite 41).
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Arkadiusz Misztal is Assistant Professor in American Studies at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. His
research and teaching interests focus on contemporary American fiction, literary theory, and the philosophy of time. He has published on Auster, Beckett, DeLillo, and Pynchon, and is currently completing a book on time, narrative, and temporal representation in works by Thomas Pynchon.
