Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

166
ROBERT E. KOHN
Modernism Becomes Complex along the Rules-Oriented Road
Modernism is said to have begun in America with the Chicago Columbian
Exposition of 1893, which may explain why Pynchon began
Against the Day in that venue. In his eponymous biography, Henry
Adams recorded the enthusiasm for human progress through scientific
and technological advancement that he felt in his visit to the Chicago
World’s Fair. Although he marveled at the exhibits on railroads,
explosives, dynamos, electric batteries and telephones, Adams was
most impressed by the fantastic displays of the Cunard Steamship
Company before which, this “student hungry for results found himself
obliged to waste a pencil and several sheets of paper trying to
calculate exactly when, according to the given increase of power,
tonnage, and speed, the growth of the ocean steamer would reach its
limits” (341). His on-the-spot calculations resonate on the penultimate
page of Against the Day in the description of an airship “grown as
large as a small city” (1084).
Modernism is hailed by turn-of-the-nineteenth-century denizens of
Against the Day for its “electric runabouts, flush toilets, 1,200-volt
trolley dynamos and other wonders of the modern age” (65). In this
fabulous fin de siècle world, there was plenty of bell-hanger work for
Merle Rideout:
[A] sudden huge demand was spreading throughout the Midwest for
electric bells, doorbells, hotel annunciators, elevator bells, fire and burglar
alarms—you sold them and installed them on the spot, walked away down
the front path counting out your commission while the customer stood there
with her finger on the buzzer like she couldn’t get enough of the sound.
(Against 72-73)
This delightful passage echoes the beginning of capitalistic consumerism,
abetted by the utopian promise of Nikola Tesla’s “project of free
universal power for everybody” (158). The mere mention of words
like “laboratories” and “experiments” stirred excitement, as did the
anticipation of scientific miracles like “wireless waves, […] Roentgen
rays, whatever rays are coming next. Seems every day somebody’s