pynchon review uni glasgow

7/27/2019 pynchon review uni glasgow

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However, abstract manifestations of the globe do not simply exist asexpressions of the legible; their illusion of transparency, which interpretsspace as luminous [and] intelligible,7 actually betrays and dismantles itselfthrough the very radiance it emits. This condition of duplicity, or even

multiplicity, is thus explained by Lefebvre: transparency and readability[have] a content a content that [they are] designed to conceal(p. 147). He goes further, still, when he writes that light is identifiedwith established authority (p. 34), a statement also raised, if somewhatdifferently, by Pynchon in Against the Day by which he implies thatunimaginable horrors arise from, and hide in, shining emissions. Visualhallucinations, certain types of hypnosis, issued through light so as tocamouflage manifestations of evil in plain sight, appear in Against theDay, too; in many ways a novel about light it features the mysterious

Nikola Tesla it detects similar unsettling qualities regarding its glows.At times a weapon releasing blindness and terror (p. 953), or else in theform of blinding searchlights and rays, light, always in the service of mili-tary wisdom (p. 1008) and other destructive orders, carries a fundamentalideological, as well as tactically utilised, violence. Directed against elementsof dissent and hostile to darkness, which [comes] for many to seem like aform of compassion (p. 1008), light, proposes Pynchon, might be a secretdeterminant of history beyond how it had lit a battlefield or an opposingfleet, how it might have come warping through a particular window during

a critical assembly of state. . .

(p. 431). He suggests that it might havedeveloped a consciousness and personality and could even be chattedwith, often revealing its deeper secrets (p. 59), which, in the context ofmaps as alleged structures of transparency, turn out to be the circumstances,and persisting consequences, of their existence. They are, then, deceptivearrangements, and contain arrays of buried properties: their supposedfirm ground collapses easily and gives way to compositions of intricateand obscured strata. Modes of configuring energy, especially comprisingemissions of light and the practices of maps, both processes associated

with rationalisation, with the establishment of order and form, are familiarmotifs and provide recurring investigative sites in Pynchons extensivework; the alignment of these types of illumination, dynamic and organis-ational, marks the core interest of the Pynchonian terrain.

Into the wings

So difficultly traced while looking at the sky, by observing the movementsand positions of celestial bodies, earthly delineations are, evidently, caughtin an irresolvable tension, a paradox of Stars and Mud, ever conjugate, asMason mutters (p. 724). A recurring sentiment in a tale that resists the

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concept of territorial neutrality, or indeed the innocence of astronomy,apparently located in a detachment from worldly disputes and spiltblood because of eyes turned upward, the soild (p. 209) entanglementsof politics and star-gazing, and, by extension, science, develop a conjunc-

tion which raises the two-dimensional projections of maps intohyperspace domains of multiple Dispensation[s] of Space, yea andTime, as Mason jots down in his hidden Journal (p. 433).

As an idea, hyperspace varies widely; its complexity lies in its interpret-ations. A term lifted from the domain of physics and cosmology, hyperspaceemerges as a necessity in the inflation theory, a model of thought first pro-posed by Alan Guth, which contends that the universe, at the moment of itsbirth, suddenly expands. Still an incomprehensible force, the mechanismresponsible for the inflation might yet be active; its enormous energy undu-

lating through the fabric of space-time, generating new, other, universes,which remain, as yet, invisible and inaccessible. A premise at odds withluminous and intelligible space as much as with deficits of the imagin-ation, hyperspace mostly lacks hard, verifiable data, and is, above all, justa realm of speculation and possibility. As such, it occupies a singularspot, between mathesis and failure to attain certainty, where quick slipsoccur. There is indeed a pervasive, underlying nervousness meanderingthrough Michio Kakus studyParallel Worlds(2005), poignantly also sub-titled The Science of Alternative Universes, as if his subject threatened, at any

moment, to leap from demonstrable claims into wild hypotheses. Already inthe opening pages, as well as throughout the piece, Kaku finds his branch oflearning in need of defence: Cosmology today is finally coming of age,emerging from the shadows of science, he writes, while observing that[h]istorically, cosmologists have suffered from a slightly unsavouryreputation, perceived to be absorbed in a collection of loose, highly specu-lative theories whispered like mythology. . . around campfires.8

Generally speaking, science has, of course, always carried a wealth ofmysterious attributes; the wavering traits exhibited by theoretical disciplines,

often falling short of assuming concrete reality, find their correlations else-where, too. Victoria Nelson, in her exposition The Secret Life of Puppets(2001), writes that the figure of the mad scientist did not arise, as is com-monly believed, from a mistrust of the new empirical sciences stupendousachievements, good and bad, but rather from a much older mistrust ofthose who mediate with the supernatural outside the bounds of organisedreligion at heart here thus lies a fear of sorcery.9 Sorcery and science,whose magic is dependant upon the extraction and manipulation of naturalresources, both sit on a verge which breaks away into, if hardly ever comple-tely, on the one hand, a zone of enchantment, and, on the other, a region ofunrest and troubled temperament. As such, their mystical domains involveexciting as well as frightening prospects; their entanglements, by necessity,

Fabienne Collignon A glimpse of light


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cause scientific research and endeavours to impart strange sensations.The larger aspects to such impressions absorb thoughts revolving aroundthe many unknowables attached to begin with, as Merle Rideout remarksin Against the Day (p. 58), interestingly linked, in Mason & Dixon, to

Faith in a Mechanickal Ingenuity, whose ways will be forever dark tomost (p. 449). Often juxtaposed, Machines, Powders, Rays, Elixirs andsuch (p. 192), elements so daunting as to provoke widespread anxiety, alsoimpel readings that confer scientists, by and large, with accusations ofduplicity: what is to be said, of men who so regularly find themselvesaboard at midnight? Evading the honest light of Gods day (p. 329), scien-tists, far from creatures of rationality, effectively are considered were-wolvesand vampires, creatures of the night a suspicion already aired by RobertLouis Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and

HG Wells The Invisible Man. The latter, a short piece published in 1897,drops the word devilry,10 links the scientific process to thievery and paranoia,and implicates it in murder; it also introduces a formula, operating through amotorised concoction, which permits the ascent into a higher dimension,hidden in light.

The peculiar feelings and apprehensions that cluster around thecurious twilight properties of scientific crafts, of which maps are a manifes-tation, provide a topography whose distinguishing traits feature ordersbeyond the immediately evident. Whole other worlds are interred by the

surface surroundings, universes whose fabric of laws might be different,whose indeterminate regions might unfold according to unknown prin-ciples of physics and bizarre lines of force. The earth, rather than a three-dimensional sphere, contains unmapped regions, still, ranges whose levelsstretch above and deep into the ground: imagine, writes Pynchon in

Against the Day, lateral world-sets, other parts of the Creation, [which]lie all around us (p. 221), set only infinitesimally to the side of the onewe think we know (p. 230). Such world-views, of alternative planes ofexistence, other piece[s] of the spectrum, out there beyond visible light,

or a new extension of the mind beyond conscious thought, and maybesomeplace far away the two domains are connected up (p. 670), partlycirculate, as Revd Cherrycoke thinks, as yearning[s] for flight (p. 440).Cherrycoke, like Emerson, treats maps in the manner of Aide-memoiresof flight (p. 504), and flying at its best, as William Langewiesche explainsin Inside the Sky(1999), is a way of thinking, free from the constraints ofthe treeline and the highway.11 Earthbound, however, Emerson explainswith an emphasis Dixon cannot describe the full strangeness of :

we are limited to our Horizon, which sometimes is to be measurdbut in inches. We are bound withal to Time, and the amountsof it spent getting from one end of a journey to another. Yet aloft,

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in Map-space, origins, destinations, any Termini, hardly seem tomatter, one can apprehend all at once the entire plexity of possiblejourneys, set as one is above Distance, above Time itself. (p. 505)

Centred around the possibility that there might exist a place of refuge, upin the fresh air, out over the sea, Pynchons extensive novels search, attimes obsessively so, for a territory removed from the ordinary set ofprinciples that govern, and devastate, space and time:

a place readily found even on cheap maps of the World, some groupof green volcanic islands, each with its own dialect, too far from sea-lanes to be of use as a coaling station, lacking nitrate sources, fueldeposits, desirable ores either precious or practical, and so left

forever immune to the bad luck and worse judgement infesting thepolitics of the Continents a place promised . . . by certain hiddengeometries of History, which must include, somewhere, at least at asingle point, a safe conjugate to all the spill of accursed meridians,passing daily, desolate, one upon the next. (Against the Day372/3)

Routes of Escape, pockets of Safety, that Mason and Dixon, too, areinvestigating (p. 69) and that, in some way or another, have beenignored, deliberately overlooked, whose heart[s] have stayed intact and

have remained unharmed by explorers,12

traverse V(1963) as well asGravitys Rainbow (1973): shelter in time of disaster,13 however, provesa chimera, the luminous utopia14 a cooperative structure of lies.15

InAgainst the Day, Kit, a mathematician, in order to evacuate personaltragedy the assassination of his dad turns to Vectorism, an area deceiv-ingly associated with higher promise, trusted to offer a gateway intoregions the operatives of Wall Street were unlikely ever to understand,let alone penetrate (p. 319). However, what begins as a perspective ofrelease transpires, in due time, to be an instrument entirely maintained

by the operatives of Wall Street, whose magic establishes itself onpoor peoples sweat (p. 79) and performs acts of transformation onlythrough appalling applications of brutality: deep among the equationsdescribing the behaviour of light, field equations, Vector and Quaternionequations, lies a set of directions, an itinerary, a map to a hidden space, Kitdiscovers in a dream (p. 566). Consequently, the latitudes glimpsed duringthe course of the various surveys are not outside, or beyond, the gridwork(p. 1075) of the operatives of Wall Street; instead, they form the darkitinerary that has always lain, as if in wait . . . within the daylight andobvious and taken-for-granted (p. 566). The efforts to detect gatewaysand passages to places of retreat, then, are not merely spiritual exercises,but journeys of a political, and literal, nature that manage to pass



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through glittering integument[s] to a dead-point of truth, as Pynchonnotes in V(p. 184).

Mundus subterraneus

Walter Kafton-Minkel, in his bookSubterranean Worlds(1989), writes thatdescents into underworlds are in many ways like religious beliefs, consid-ering our desire to shape the universe and our own natures into acompact, comprehensible form16 a prevalent line of reasoning alsoascribed to conspiracy theory. Actually, however, one discovers a muchmore acute treatment of a mundus subterraneus in the pages of Lefebvresinvestigation. He receives his image, of a pit . . . deep above all in

meaning, from Heidegger, and describes the void placed at the centre ofthe conception of the worldas an estuary of hidden forces and mouthof the realm of shadows (p. 242). Considering that his study begins withan assertion pertaining to the existence of an indefinite multitude ofspaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within, the next(p. 8), Lefebvre argues, throughout the course of his book, that space iscomposed of a solid, though not continuous, crust, by no means immortal or cohesive (p. 11), beneath which echelons of operations unfold. As aresult, the void at the core of the world is not empty space, the huge,

yawning expanses far from vacant; the hidden forces swarming beloware the sub-plots of an apparently tranquil or pacified surface (p. 63).From this vantage point, all narratives and designs move downward.

Against the Daybegins with the celebrated aeronautics club known asthe Chums of Chance ascend[ing] briskly into the morning and beholdinga sight, much like one relayed by a satellite, of the features left behind on theground having now dwindled to all but microscopic size (p. 3). Much ofPynchons latest text travels down, into mines and caves, towards the under-ground organisations of revolutionaries and Wall Street operatives; its con-

centration is directed toward the excavation of concentric spheres, greathollow cavities at the centre of the earth, worlds within worlds. In thisvein, an apparently solid mountain is really a collection of hot springs,caves, fissures, passageways, one hiding-place within another (p. 658); theliving mountain depths (p. 289) form a philosophy of thought whichimagines a range of interior environments. A view concerned with the subter-ranean spaces of the earth and ideas of layered depths, it consists of buriedjourneys, and follows coordinates that, if combined, divulge other counte-nances of the material world, trace different images of the space-timecontinuum. Familiar grid patterns suddenly end, are distorted into anexpression of some other history of civic need, streets no longer sequentiallynumbered, intersecting now at unexpected angles, narrowing into long,

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featureless alleys to nowhere, running steeply up and down hills which hadnot been noticed before (p. 154). Everything [is] on the skew, notes LewBasnight as he is allowed . . . entry into an urban setting, likethe world hehad left but differing in particulars which were not slow to reveal themselves.

Evidently not a replacement, then, of one world by another, but a simul-taneous coexistence of planes of being that occasionally elude alignment,such multitudes of orders, at variance with each other, necessarily comprisegateways, thoroughfares, that allow expeditions. Fragments of other compo-sitions, remote and unfamiliar part[s] and enormous district[s] whoseexistence [no one], till now, had even suspected (p. 38), push up throughaether opening[s] (p. 99), through passages that interrupt the continuouslandscape (p. 164). Worm-holes and dimensional portals, consequently,occur not simply as theoretical probabilities Einsteins model of general

relativity admits the possibility of trapdoors but exist as actual entrances.Often, these are detected at the poles, which are but phantoms hiding

inner riches, great treasures that would lift the burden of poverty: a newworld, notes William Reed in his 1906 publication The Phantom of the Poles,would mean the disappearance of most of the woes of the present half-worldon which we dwell, ignorantly taking it to be the whole world.17 The strangelight emanating from the poles, these entirely lifeless and empty place[s],blazes fiercely in the private colonies of the imagination,18 where luminousutopia[s] proliferate. Their unknown stretches impart, in the words of John

Leslie, the purest ethereal essence, Light in its most concentrated state,shining with intense refulgence and overpowering splendour.19 The Scottishphysicist and mathematician elaborates on his own hollow earth model in the1829 edition ofElements of Natural History, a treatise in which he presumesthat the vast subterranean cavity must be filled with some very diffusivemedium, of astonishing elasticity,20 a most pertinent characteristic, indeed.The astonishing elasticity applies, above all, to the mundus subterraneustendency to accommodate utopian constructions which, incidentally, arescarce before the Civil War, because, as David Standish writes, [American]

culture hadnt needed [them] before then (p. 188) as well as projectionsthat Pynchon, in V, designates as gaudy dream[s]. The planted corpseof a rainbow-coloured spider monkey, a trace of Vheissu in the barrennessof the Antarctic, is agleam with mockery, you see: a mockery of life (p. 206).

Pynchon, of course, chronicles a few such voyages beneath the surfaceof the earth, a region of more temperate climate, where the eternal snowsgradually melt to be replaced first by tundra, then grassland, trees, planta-tion, even at last a settlement or two, just at the Rim, like border towns, hewrites in Against the Day. The paradisiacal prosperity of these areas,however, is unstable, itself just at the Rim, as if already belonging toperiods bygone, to former times, or else is on the verge of inaccessibility.The great portal[s] in the Antarctics immense sweep of whiteness,



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which grant admission, seem to have become noticeably smaller, with astrange sort of ice-mist, almost the colour of the surface landscape, hoveringover it and down inside (p. 115): the closure is a self-protective reflex(p. 116), a defensive measure against topside aggressions. Dixon, on a

path which is taking him at first gently, then with some insistence,down-hill, ever downward to the inner Surface of the Earth (p. 739), is,once there, introduced, with great Cordiality and respect upon all sides(p. 740), to the fellows of the local Academy of Sciences. Relating theepisode to Mason in The Jolly Pitman, Dixon proceeds to explain thatthe inner-surface Philosophers (p. 740) told him that once the solar par-allax is known, . . . once the necessary Degrees are measurd, and the size andshape of the Earth are calculated at last, all this will vanish (p. 741). Thethreat here is clear; a landscape subsisting on grounds of the unknown,

and holed up in an immeasurable vacuity, will, in due course, fail toendure repeated assaults from above. The incendiary materials droppedfrom the sky, in this case, are the blinding lights of reason, the mathematicalfunctions of the Enlightenment, which eventually calculate and determinethe extinction, through exploitation, of such unharmed, secret places.

Strangely, as indeed Pynchon writes in his latest tome, even violenceand totalising observations start with dreams. Maps, intended to causelegible results via the establishment of the size and shape of the Earth,derive from the aspiration to settle quarrels, to install justice and democ-

racy, even an argument evoked, for example, in relation to the 1785Land Ordnance Survey, which seeks to redress the unequal balance ofpower through a redistribution of property. Their beginnings and motiv-ations, thus, transmit a desire for accessibility and a rebuttal to great con-centrations and disparities of influence; their ink-impressed routesanticipate arriving at a benevolent and luminous utopia where knowledgewould be independent, and instead of serving an oppressive power wouldcontribute to the strengthening of an authority grounded in reason.21 Thislatter statement, however, opening up yet vaster areas of critique by invok-

ing Adorno and Horkheimers analysis of the suspect operations andpurposes of science, its blinding and autocratic radiance, invests the lumi-nous utopia with a flip-side, with buried depths whose existence theEnlightenment originally intends to dispel, and which plot not simplystrategies of imposition, but, beyond that, also of compulsion. As such,the exact scientific processes of computing measurements and applyingthis to the environment, political but, importantly, also physical, onlypartly emerge as a reaction to counter tyranny; their more immediateaims, argue Adorno and Horkheimer, concern the programs to fence in,and fix, the world through mathematical theorems.22 Pynchon concurs,and similarly interprets such projects as attempts impelled by complex pat-terns of anxiety and fright, as intensions to constitute an impediment to the

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numerous superstitions radiating from the earth: [t]he open countrysideseemd made only to pull coal out of and run a few sheep on, and toharbour all the terrors imaginable to a boy, he writes, shortly before allow-ing Mason to elaborate. Growing up between the great treeless Plain of

Oakridge Common on one end, and Bisley Common, haunted by wildmen and murderers, and its Wind never ceasing on the other, Mason,like Dixon, senses the surrounding terrain as a source of limitless Fear.This affliction, as Mason styles it, and which he, in time, defeats, isDixons motive for pursuing the practice of surveying, as it provides himwith an incentive, to enclose that which had hitherto been withoutForm, and hence haunted by anything and evrything (p. 504).

As an objective, of course, the compulsion to enclose, the unsettlingcustom picked apart in Dialectic of Enlightenment(1944), marks troubled

grounds. In his sombre, dense monograph, The Production of Space,Lefebvre frequently revisits the notion of dominated space, which is tosay space transformed and mediated by technology, by practice(p. 164), and which is usually closed, sterilised, emptied out (p. 165).Pynchon, too, in Against the Day, articulates allegations of crime, com-mitted by the railroad, whose winding tracks are flows of power, agentsof profit or despair because of places chosen or bypassed (p. 242). Theattempts to arrange distances as straight lines on paper (p. 83), executedbecause of terrors discharged from the surroundings, or on behalf of sinister

forces the formidable discourses of progress and development, the pro-cedures of rationalisation and command over space cannot, as YoungNathe remarks to Mason, be a kindly Act. The aggressive exactitude ofmathematical efforts, of clearing and marking a Right Line of anHundred Degrees, into the Lands of Others (p. 573), yield but injury,bear but mechanisms of division and rupture. In effect, dreams so easilyturn gaudy and twist into nightmares: equal distribution of power, prop-erty, knowledge, reverses back to tyranny, if in an amended variety. Gridsmight well have had some noble origins; their outcomes, however, [brutal-

ise] the countryside

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and define the planet, through a geographical systemtransmitting the containerisation of power,24 as David Harvey describes itin The Condition of Postmodernity (1992), as an encoded structure. Thetotalising observation here, then, lies in a form of spatial dominationthat identifies and treats the earth as an entirely knowable, and, accordingly,as a conquerable and containable entity.

A vortex inside the planet

Yet, despite the raids, the inner Surface of the Earth does not entirelydisappear; it is, however, submitted to drastic modifications. The masses



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of data assembled warp it: its conditions now vandalised, it sheds anyparadisiacal attributes, or hopes, and spills over into the order emergingout of the rationalisation project so bound up, as mentioned earlier,with abuse. The mockery of life that emanates from lurid, dead forms,

stumbled across in the Antarctic, refers to the travesties of a culture, andof its maintenance, relying on imitations of innocence and tricks oflight, when it, in effect, is of a terminal nature the Antarctics void isan indication of what this world is closest to: a dream of annihilation.25

Hence, in terms of this shift, the concept of a hollow earth ceases to applyto undiscovered inner riches and refutes the need for symmetry, a traitKafton-Minkel assigns to the theory (p. 48), and plummets into moremenacing depths. What, then, waits below?, asks Dennis Crenshaw, ofThe Hollow Earth Insider, who considers the use of advanced technology

as a means to hide the much-talked-about pole-holes through holograms,mind-blocks, a space-time curve, or methods not even imagined by ourlimited knowledge.26 He hints at answers himself, in his commentariespacked with references to dodgy manoeuvres by the federal government,but which nonetheless manage to isolate a specific regulation as indicativeof an extensive plot. On 18 November 1988, the Senate and the House ofRepresentatives passes Public Law 100-691, the Federal Cave ResourcesProtection Act, which decrees any naturally occurring void, cavity,recess, or system of interconnecting tunnel, aqueduct, or other manmade

excavation as off limits a clue, perhaps, that underworlds are scenesof crime.In Against the Day, the size of a store in New York, a grey modernity

[towering] twelve stories high and engrossing an entire city block, is

not due to whims of grandiosity but rather dictated by a need forenough floor-area to keep rigorously set a veil separating two distinctworlds the artful illusory spaces intended for the stores customersand the less merciful topography in between the walls and below the

bargain basement, populated by the silent and sizable regiment ofcash-girls, furnace-stokers, parcel-wrappers, shipping clerks, needle-women, feather-workers, liveried messengers, sweepers and dustersand runners of errands of all sorts who passed invisible everywhere,like industrious spirits, separated often only by inches, by carefulbreaths, from the theatrical bustle of the bright, sussurant Floors.(pp. 345/6)

Gathered together, among grimy pipes hanging from corroded brackets,and enveloped by the smell of cleaning and dyeing solvents and steamfrom pressers irons, are vestiges of injury, that the bright, sussurantFloors attempt to expel to places of underlit chill and enforced silence

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(p. 347). The luminosity of the top levels, however, already implyingcriminality, casts shadows in its own domains; separated only by inches,by careful breaths, the two worlds, though distinct, are, of course, compo-site, one a product, or a spectre, of the other. Absorbed and dissolved into

each other, the artful and illusory spaces and the phantoms of their under-sides combine, to the point that the fake transparency of the first, throwninto doubt, is disclosed not as solid, as it feigns, but as void, with its interiorvolumes carved out.27 Within, then, hangs another half-world, wheretransparency converts into its inevitable counterparts, into its contents, theunderlit chill and murky regions of its own surfaces, where its lustreswitches to darkness which is, after all, as Don DeLillo notes in WhiteNoise(1984), just another name for light.28

As transparency disbands, complex structures emerge; their opacities,

aspects not strictly limited to specific expanses, or curtailed around particu-lar peaks and valleys, are adept at arising wherever. The entire globe, allexistence elsewhere and when, is inferred with mapless horrors29 that,like telluric currents or seismic movements, shift within. Pole-holes,thus, are no longer confined to the southern and northern extremities ofthe globe; points of entry, as Lew Basnight and Kit detect, are not necess-arily fixed in place, but also happen suddenly, accidentally, while sleepingor as a result of waking swoon[s] (p. 38). In a novel which contains a greatdeal of energy Against the Dayrings with detonations, of rage, gunshots

and explosive devices pole-holes occur as explosions, whose initialblasts, or big bangs, and residual particles generate new configurations ofspace-time curvatures. Each fireball, each flash of light, adds storeys asthey go off in dreams, during pauses or interludes in thought, as if theAntarctic were a province of the mind, the pole-holes psychic cracks.Pynchon, in V, notes that everyone has an Antarctic (p. 241), referringto an obsession, a magnet and a haunted place, yet also suggesting aninternal, personal topography, an immense sweep of whiteness inter-rupted by gulfs leading toward a vast and tenebrous interior, as he

writes in Against the Day (p. 115). In this vein, outer space becomesinvested with analogous anatomical constitutions, so that, as Lew observes,every cabin, outbuilding, saloon, and farmhouse in his field of sight con-cealed stories that were anything but peaceful (p. 175). Undergroundreverberations, the impression of intuiting, or residing in, a hollow half-world, are not evidence of psychosis, though, but, instead, are part ofan old tradition which locates truth in caves. As the antechamber of theclassical underworld, the land of the dead, a halfway point from whichto contact the gods in their separate reality, as Nelson writes, the grotto,in pre-Socratic Greek beliefs, is a place of wisdom and exceptionalintelligence resources, found in darkness, not the light (p. 3). Thecircumstances, in Pynchons novels, resonate with such a claim: the



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peculiar nature of the fabled interior regions consists, in Against the Day,of abandoned mining works in which are deployed clandestine transmit-ters in order to fight imperceptible wars (p. 122), of subarenaceousworld[s] (p. 435), whose accessibility is privileged, whose very existence

top secret information.In its elaborate, unseen tunnels, space holds the covert intentions and

secrets pertaining to the half-world above ground; its channels, however,are far from direct or level, but are, instead, a series of overlapping incli-nations, of slopes that drop further. Simple vertical descents, hoping toarrive at a lush centre of revelation and final data, to a dead-point oftruth, fail when confronted with divergences and trajectories thatdigress, become fault lines and dead ends. Such manifestations, aware ofshifting grounds and magnetic variations, evidently belong to a common

postmodern sensibility, uncomfortable with concrete assertions, withclosed, formal, and falsely neutral systems; it is, as such, often remarkedupon as a distinctive trait arising in Pynchons compositions, an attribute,indeed, which he does not attempt to hide or disguise. Though anexhausted, tired, argument, whose pursuit has become a cliche, the refer-ence to it here yields up the full volume of the novels concerns, theirefforts to ascertain how rationalities are formed, how they behave, andwhere they fail. In this context, the brief interpellation of a jaded ideapermits a return to the apparently coherent, transparent and flattened

terrain of a map, promising an uninterrupted passage through geography,but effectively marking yet other deceptions; rather than plane[s] of tota-lising observations, maps hide their own vast and tenebrous interior[s].The subdesertine frigate Saksaul, whose destination is Shambhala, a lostcity below the Asian desert, proceeds on its journey equipped with theSfinciuno Itinerary, a route charted by Alonzo R. Meatman, an agent.However, when placed beneath a lens of Iceland spar, a doubly-refractingcalcite (p. 114), the document, already strangely-distorted and onlypartially-visible, acquires further complications (p. 437). As the micro-

scopic crystals of the mineral break up light into two separate rays,termed ordinary and extraordinary, a property. . .

exploited to createan additional channel of optical communication (p. 114), the messagereleased in this manner presently consists of a long and fearful plungestraight down into the map, revealing a terrain at finer and finer scales,perhaps in some asymptotic way, as in dreams of falling. The contentsof the Itinerary, thus, are not arranged into schemes of clarity; instead,the coordinates, though refer[ring] back to an origin point at Venice,[and] painstakingly accurate for the earths surface and the variousdepths below, begin to fade, to [drift] out of focus, until they actuallybecome invisible. Accordingly, transmissions emitted from maps resistsimple, precise interpretations and compose destabilising elements that

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intentionally mislead, almost as if there were some . . . additional level ofencryption (p. 437). In odd ways, then, maps hint at flows of the unseen,are emblematic of veiled sub-surface currents beneath apparently tranquilor pacified surface[s]; their hidden messages, like the gleams of light that

yield them, are duplicitous, modified and manipulated through secret tech-nical process[es] (p. 114) to serve certain unidentified interests. Particularcodes, consequently, remain impenetrable, their faint and spidery sketchesfall short of realising a full spectrum of inks (p. 853) levels plunge andmysteries abound.

Phantom shapes, implicit in the figures

The Revd Cherrycoke explains that somehow the Arc, the Tangent, theMeridian, and the West Line should all come together at the sameperfect Point where, in fact, all is Failure. The Arc fails to meet theForty-Degree North Parallel. The Tangent fails to be part of any Meridian.The West Line fails to begin from the Tangent Point, being five milesnorth of it. Describing this as a spirit of whimsy [which] pervades theentire history of these Delaware Boundaries, as if in playful refusal toadmit that America, in any way, is serious (p. 337), it could, however,also be read as an indication of remnants of wild forces, unrestrained

and still at large. The rational, systematic perspective, though strainingto dismiss any kind of paranormal events, nonetheless admits links tothe spiritual; rather than eliminating such fancies, it only relegates themto the hollow half-world below its own surface activities. Such powers,of course, rarely stay buried, their formidable energies escape throughpole-holes in the fabric of rationality, through rifts that are created bythe application of its laws. In Mason & Dixon, Captain Zhang, evereager upon the Topick of the Line and its Visible expression upon theLandscape, informs the pair about the Lines star-dictated indifference

to the true inner shape, or Dragon, of the Land. Shan, as this force isknown, perceives the right lines upon the Earth (p. 601) as a conduitfor Evil (p. 701), intended to separate one from the other (p. 648), tocalculate wide expanses into areas of instant Control (p. 617). Shan,thus, is a disconsolate, angry essence, conceiving Sorrows [which] shallpersist and obsess for as long as we continue upon this ill-omend Line(p. 692), which slic[es] through the land like a great knife in orderto carve out a meshwork or chequerwork, as Lefebvre writes in TheProduction of Space(p. 165). Zhang gives details:

Evrywhere else on earth, Boundaries follow Nature, coast-lines,ridge-tops, river-banks, so honouring the Dragon, or Shan



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a geographically limited interval, but a spot which provides evidence that apainstakingly defind grid push[es] over or stamp[s] into being unex-plained spatialities phantom shape[s], as Mason says, are implicit inthe figures (p. 772).

Phantom shape[s] infer leylines, too, psychic, and magical, currentsof energy, invisible straight lines in the sky, as Revd Cherrycoke thinks,somehow linked to underground streams and magnetic tides, and whichpermit travel without once touching the Earth. Emerging in a short,speculative exposition written by the Revd, the attributes linked up withleylines transfer to the most prodigious such Line yet attempted, to theastronomically precise (p. 440) frontier that Mason and Dixon aretracing, and which sends out so much fretfulness and apprehension.[T]heres all thah Bad Energy, flowing there night and Day, bad

for us anyhow, Dixon concedes, before accepting that its effects onother, stranger, lives may be more benevolent, and disquieting, still:[b]ut for the Duck? Who knows? Mightnt it, rather, be nourishing her?helping to increase her Powers, even . . . uncommonly so? (p. 666)The ensuing consequences and potentialities, then, conveyed by straightlines, and thus by maps, are unexpected circumstances, conditions andforces previously unheard of, which unequivocally widen the terrain secret masses, kept hidden (p. 487), move into the orbit of perception,into the periphery of [the] senses (p. 769). Map-space, consequently,

aware of invisible presences and dimensions that, at ground level, arelost, shifts from an article of reason to phantom shape[s], to a speciesof faith, as Pynchon notes in Against the Day (p. 570): possessing theability to conceive of, and hide, different spatial and temporal orders,maps, presenting slips into the Invisible of geography,30 rip the worldwide open. As such, remarkably, instead of proclaiming geography ascompact and compressible, Map-space ultimately renders the aspirationto permanently enclose unworkable that which is without Formremains so.

University of Glasgow

Notes

1 Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 250.2 Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon(London: Vintage, 1998 (1997)), p. 17.3 Pynchon, 1997, pp. 5 6.

4 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall,(Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1997 (1984)),pp. 11921.



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5 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith,(Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), p. 17.

6 Pynchon, 1997, p. 8.7 Lefebvre, p. 28.

8 Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and OurFuture in the Cosmos(London: Allen Lane, 2005), pp. 10 and 288.9 Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA and London:

Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 8.10 HG Wells, The Invisible Man(London: Everyman, 1997 (1897)), p. 72.11 William Langewiesche, Inside the Sky: A Mediation on Flight (New York:

Vintage Departures, 1999), pp. 8 and 4.12 Thomas Pynchon, V(London: Vintage, 1995 (1963)), p. 205.13 Thomas Pynchon, Gravitys Rainbow(London: Vintage, 1995 (1973)), p. 728.14 Lefebvre, p. 256.

15 Pynchon, 1973, p. 728.16 Walter Kafton-Minkel, Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 Years of Dragons,Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races & UFOs from Inside the Earth (Port Townsend,Washington: Loompanics Unlimited, 1989), pp. 5 and 7.

17 William Reed, The Phantom of the Poles ,http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/potp.. Accessed on 10 December 2006.

18 Pynchon, 1963, pp. 205 and 158.19 John Leslie quoted in David Standish, Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious

History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilis-ations, And Marvellous Machines Below the Earths Surface (Cambridge, MA:

Da Capo Press, 2006), p. 50.20 Leslie quoted in Standish, p. 50.21 Lefebvre, p. 256.22 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philo-

sophical Fragments, ed by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. by Edmund Jephcott,(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 (1944)), p. 18.

23 Lefebvre, p. 165.24 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of

Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 255.25 Pynchon, 1963, p. 206.

26 Dennis Crenshaw, What Waits Below?,

http://www.onelight.com/thei/thei.html.. Accessed on 16 December 2006.27 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely

(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 22021.28 Don DeLillo, White Noise(London: Picador, 1999 (1984)), p. 301. Thanks to

Maria Dick for bringing this to my attention.29 Pynchon, 2006, p. 723.30 Pynchon, 2006, p. 327.

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