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There is money everywhere : Representation, authority, and
þÿthe money form in Thomas Pynchon s Against the Day
Käkelä-Puumala, Tiina
2013-03-15
Käkelä-Puumala , T 2013 , ' There is money everywhere : Representation, authority, and the
þÿmoney form in Thomas Pynchon s Against the Day ' , Critique (Washington) , vol. 54 , no. 2
, pp. 147-160 . https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2011.553846
http://hdl.handle.net/10138/313613
https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2011.553846
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Tiina Käkelä-Puumala
University of Helsinki
“There is money everywhere”: representation, authority, and the money form in Thomas
Pynchon’s Against the Day
Against the Day (2006) begins at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and ends sometime in the
early 1920’s. In this novel Pynchon seems to provide the reader with a full account of what
happened in world history within this time span, making it a vast enterprise—over 1000 pages—
packed with people, events, and Byzantine plots bordering on the incomprehensible. Too much is
happening too fast—the novel is excessive in every way, just like history itself. There are,
however, certain threads that run through the narration, and show that Pynchon is, and always
has been, a writer who is interested in going beyond the linear history of successive events to
look for inner logic and repetitive patterns. In Against the Day one of these threads is economy.
Economic questions have always been present in Pynchon’s works but nowhere more explicitly
than in this novel, which came out in 2006—two years before the global financial crisis we are
still going through at the moment. Which is not to say that Pynchon could have somehow
foreseen the global financial disaster of 2008; I only want to emphasize that as much as Against
the Day is a historical novel, it is also a very contemporary novel in its analysis of the
economization of life and the inherent vulnerability of economic value.
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Apart from numerous reviews, there are still few critical studies available on this novel. The first one and most
often referred to is Kathryn Hume’s article “The Religious and Political Vision of Pynchon’s Against the Day”
(Philological Quarterly 2007, vol. 86: 163-187), where Hume focuses on Pynchon’s presentation of religious and
political stances, which in this novel are much more straight than in his earlier works. The view that Against the Day
starts a new phase in Pynchon’s work also comes out in the first anthology of criticism, Against the Grain. Reading
Pynchon’s Counternarratives (ed. Sascha Pöhlmann) that appeared in August 2010. The anthology, which has set
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In Against the Day economy is not a field of human activity, but the field in which human
life is defined, for it permeates social relations and thinking. A scene near the end of the novel is
emblematic of this theme that recurs throughout. Three prominent characters—Yashmeen
Halfcourt, Reef Traverse, and Cyprian Latewood—join up in the Balkans with a research group
consisting of Professor Sleepcoat, his assistants, and a university accountant named Gruntling.
The group wanders around the Balkan area gathering folksongs just before the outburst of the
First World War. One evening, when the group is in the region of Trache where Orpheus is
alleged to have been born, they discuss the myth of Orpheus and his failed attempt to bring
Eurydice back from Hades:
Later the Professor seemed to have Orpheus on the brain. “He couldn’t quite
bring himself to believe in her desire to come back with him to live in the upper
world again. He had to turn around and look, just to make sure she was coming.”
“Typical male insecurity,” Yashmeen sniffed.
“Typical female lust for wealth wins out in the end, is the way I always read that
one,” commented Gruntling.
“Oh he’s the Lord of Death, for goodness’ sake, there is no money there.”
“Young woman, there is money everywhere.” (ATD 946)
In Against the Day money is indeed everywhere. The novel depicts the cultural, historical
and political change that took place in the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries, the era in which
technological innovations abounded and global markets flourished, and yet at the same time a
sense of imminent catastrophe pervaded people’s minds. The catastrophe, as we know now, was
itself the aim to question the unity of Pynchon’s oeuvre and to re-evaluate it, contains such research topics as
Pynchon’s politization of genre fiction and mathematics, the uses of visual culture in the novel, and the writer’s
“postnational imagination” (Pöhlmann 16) that marks a move beyond the postmodern framework.
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not only the First World War but also its aftermath: the economic depression that affected much
of the world, and the political fanaticism that grew from it.
Pynchon describes in the novel a historical situation in which political economy had
reached a new level, which changed permanently people’s everyday life. Everything expanded:
finance markets, international trade, flows of capital, multinational corporations, migration,
consumption, technologies of communication and transportation. As a result, economy became a
more and more important cultural register. Pynchon thematizes and elaborates this change
throughout the novel by using economic rhetoric in situations where it seems at first out of
place—interpersonal relations and subjectivity—and shows how with money, larger political
issues become intertwined with private life.
Often the issue is touched upon very lightly. When, for example, the mysterious professor
Renfrew/Werfner some years after 1900 openly compares himself to a share—“My market value
seems to fluctuate. At the moment it is up” (683)—this seems at first to be nothing more than an
anachronistic joke. But if this statement is put in a broader context within the novel, one may ask
what the twin professor is other than an abstraction comparable to stocks. His identity, the bond
between name and person, is highly suspicious.
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Professor Renfrew and his rival and colleague
Joachim Werfner are the same man under different but palindromic names, or, as another
character suspects in the novel, Renfrew/Werfner has a paranormal power to be in multiple
places at the same time (685) —not an exceptional gift in the novel where several characters are
involved in paranormal phenomena. Not much can be said about him, for his identity, the
reference (value) behind the name(s), seems to be purely contingent, bound to time and place.
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Renfrew/Werfner’s artificiality as a character is underlined in the novel in many ways. When, for example,
detective Lew Basnight talks with him, he notices that “the Professor’s face became distinct, exhibiting a
brightness….no, a denial of ordinary vision… a smile that would never break forth from any interior cordiality”
(240), as if Renfrew/Werfner were nothing but a bright surface, and nothing beneath.
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Much more touchingly, economic rhetoric is associated with characters like Estrella
“Stray” Briggs, Reef Traverse’s first wife. Stray sees that her poor chances in life are like bad
money that cannot make a good fortune:
She got sometimes to feeling too close to an edge, a due date, the fear of living on
borrowed time […] she couldn’t see her luck as other than purchased in the worn
unlucky coin of all those girls who hadn’t kept coming back, who’d gone down
before their time. (651)
Another example is the self-consuming and disastrous passion between Lake Traverse—
Reef’s sister—and Deuce Kindred, the man who had murdered her father. Although the
relationship between Lake and her lover Deuce never develops into affection, Lake is driven by
Deuce’s desire for her, which gives her power over him. The powerplay is even enforced once
she comes to know his crime:
But the really strange thing was, that with all there was to send them off down
forever separate tracks, he continued to desire her […] and she finally started
paying attention as she felt it turning to power for her, flowing out of the invisible
unknowability of men like bank interest into some account in her name she hadn’t
known was there, growing with the days […]. (484)
However, money in Against the Day is more than a metaphor for certain human condition
or certain kinds of relationships. The critical angle of this novel, I argue, is not so much that of
money corrupting social relations, but the inherent bond between money, representation and
social power. In Against the Day, this bond is revealed through a certain representational crisis.
Speculation over economic value is recurrent in the novel, and it is more or less openly related to
the crisis of the fading gold standard at the beginning of the 20
th
century, when the gold