Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

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ROBERT E. KOHN
local murder case (1052); that Deuce, who had become a trusted sheriff
after Lake presumably straightened him out, is now the “little runt
of a studio cop” that Basnight intends to arrest “for a whole string of
orgy-type homicides” (1059); that the two main characters, Dally and
Kit, should not only meet but become involved in a sadly dysfunctional
marriage (1067); that after Reef, Yashmeen and their daughter
Ljubica emigrate to Colorado, Stray and Yashmeen, both parents of a
child by Reef, become involved in a lesbian relationship (1075-76); it is
as though Pynchon is anticipating the “breakdown[s] in rejection,
separation, abandonment, violent struggle, abuse, and even murder”
that a few years later Carroll would acknowledge are counteradaptative
(“Evolutionary” 113). Despite his utopianism, it is Carroll
himself who reminds us that: “Civilizations, like species, have often
come to bad ends” (“Rejoinder” 368).
The enormous complexity of Against the Day, as well as that of the
characters that people it, is a metaphor for the complexity of human
life in our disorienting hypermodern world. In the 40-plus years since
Pynchon wrote The Crying of Lot 49, there has been “the roaring
current of change,” that Alvin Toffler foresaw, “a current so powerful
today that it overturns institutions, shifts our values and shrivels our
roots” (3). In those years, the population of the earth has doubled, and
the complexity of life for that doubled population has been
geometrically intensified by globalization, new communication technologies,
new weaponry, and so forth. We have come so far from the
utopian modernism that peaked in the 1950s that the postmodern
ethos is no longer relevant, but has become what John V. Knapp calls
“a moment in critical history rather than something current” (qtd. in
Kohn, “Unwitting” 314).
The penultimate page of Against the Day is symbolic of the new age
of hypercomplexity:
The [air]ship by now has grown as large as a small city. There are
neighborhoods, there are parks. There are slum conditions. It is so big that
when people see it in the sky, they are struck with selective hysterical blindness
and end up not seeing it at all. (Against 1084)