This essay proceeds from the contention that Thomas Pynchon's massive novel Against the Day (2006) is built upon the foundations of John Dos Passos's equally voluminous USA trilogy.Footnote ¹ Although it would be incorrect to describe Pynchon's work as a postmodernist rewrite of the earlier text, there are nonetheless tantalizing similarities between the two novels that indicate both a considerable influence and a deliberate revision of that influence on the part of the later author. The second contention of the essay is that this revision is based upon contrasting attitudes towards the relationship between political engagement and sensual enjoyment that are specific to the historical situations of both authors. In USA, for instance, indulgence in alcohol is generally represented in negative terms, distracting the leftist protagonists of the trilogy from their goal of effecting social progress. Despite sharing much ideological ground with the earlier work, Against the Day, in keeping with Pynchons's association with the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s,Footnote ² treats hedonistic pleasure (especially drinking) much more indulgently, in ways that amount to not only a critique of Dos Passos and the context in which he wrote USA, but also to an assessment of Pynchon's own place in a tradition of American literary dissent.Footnote ³

Against the Day and USA are both set in the period between the final years of the nineteenth century and the years that followed World War I, and both are written from a determinedly left-wing perspective in which the Great War features not only as a definitively traumatic cultural event, but also as a marker and agent of American leftist defeat and disillusionment. Furthermore, both works relate the picaresque wanderings of characters who travel across the US, Mexico and Europe (and beyond, in the case of Pynchon's novel); both feature references to the “Great Game” of early twentieth century diplomacy on the part of the Western powers, as well as to oil interests in the Middle East;Footnote ⁴ and both focus upon the fierce mutual antipathy of American plutocrats and radical left-wing activists. At a still more detailed level, the mathematical musings of Kit Traverse and Yashmeen Halfcourt in the German city of Göttingen as recounted in Against the Day are prefigured in Dos Passos's Nineteen Nineteen by a reference to the period spent by J. P. Morgan as “a crack mathematician at the University of Göttingen” (USA, 614).Footnote ⁵ Similarly, the biographical chapter devoted to Thorstein Veblen in The Big Money notes that Veblen established himself “at the new University of Chicago that had grown up next to the World's Fair” (USA 811) – the same event of 1893 that features in the opening chapter of Against the Day. Are these connections anything other than coincidental, given the settings of the novels and their engagement with contemporary social and political events?Footnote ⁶

David Dickson has indicated correspondences between the two novelists, arguing that Pynchon's Vineland (1990) takes up the story of the suppression of the American left where USA ends.Footnote ⁷ With Dickson's correspondences in mind, Against the Day can be understood as an attempt by Pynchon to interpret the nature of leftist aspiration in the US, drawing upon its traditional, programmatic, modernist phase in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while addressing its (arguably) more freewheeling, postmodernist manifestation during the decades that followed World War II. Such an attempt, which is effected via a recession through time to a period that immediately preceded the activities of the most senior characters in Vineland, may also be interpreted as a “late postmodernist” rejoinder to the alleged amnesia and solipsism of contemporary life, and the disastrous consequences of those phenomena, in both political and literary terms, for leftist narratives of progress and collective resistance.Footnote ⁸

The historical background to both the USA trilogy and Against the Day is one of immense social and political turmoil. Phenomenal economic growth, and technological development and territorial expansion, combined with the advocacy of laissez-faire economic and social policies on the part of government, led to inevitable conflict between the forces of capital and labour in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. During the wave of industrial disputes that occurred during this period, employers used Pinkerton detectives, local militia, vigilante groups, “scab” labour, no-strike “yellow dog” contracts, and blacklisting in order to break the resolve of strikers, who frequently answered the use of violence against them with more violence. Events such as the Haymarket incident of 1886, the Homestead and Coeur d'Alene strikes in 1892, and the Pullman strike of 1894 led to a public outcry over both the tactics of the bosses and the alleged aims of the activists.Footnote ⁹ Widespread anxiety regarding the security and stability of the nation provoked a drive for conciliation that eventually manifested itself in the growth of the Progressive movement, “trust-busting” legislation, attempts at “de-Kaisering” the workplace, and the eventual development of a consensual “American Plan” that sought cooperation between employers and trades unions.Footnote ¹⁰ The route to consensus was uneven, however, and in 1914 the tensions between plutocrats and workers reached a climactic moment when a dispute at the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company led to a tent colony at Ludlow inhabited by miners' families being machine-gunned by militiamen – an event described in some detail by Pynchon (ATD 1007–17).Footnote ¹¹

The shock of the Ludlow massacre, coupled with the patriotic sense of social solidarity engendered by America's entry into World War I, galvanized a general determination to put an avowedly consensual American Plan into effect. In both USA and Against the Day, however, the war is described not as a unifying event, but as one that was unequivocally disastrous for the left: in Dos Passos's short account of the life of Thorstein Veblen, the narrative declares that, after the emergence of Eugene Debs and the International Workers of the World, “War cut across all that: under the cover of the bunting of Woodrow Wilson's phrases, the monopolies cracked down. American democracy was crushed” (USA 813); while a character in Pynchon's novel contends that “the world came to an end in 1914″ (ATD 1077). Both authors are, of course, looking back at the period with varying degrees of hindsight. Historians suggest that, contrary to these bleak perspectives, the war provided several means by which the left was able to make significant advances against the (real and fictional) tyrannical plutocrats described by Dos Passos and Pynchon. The liberalism of the Wilson presidency and its introduction of a National War Labor Board, the development of welfare capitalism, bureaucratisation, and the growth of new management philosophies that led to the birth of the industrial-relations expert (represented in USA by the character of J. Ward Moorhouse) contributed to the sense of a more “pluralistic, democratic culture in the workplace.”Footnote ¹² As Robert Wiebe testifies, however, this apparent inclusiveness was limited to “draw[ing] a line around the good society and dismiss[ing] the remainder,” effectively delimiting the ambitions of the left to those that were in keeping with the interests of a more stable market-friendly environment.Footnote ¹³ More ominously (and in keeping with the apparent respective sympathies of Dos Passos and Pynchon for the Industrial Workers of the World and various anarchist groups), much of the progress made on the part of labour during the war was reversed in the period that followed the 1918 ceasefire and the signing of the Armistice the following year. Fears provoked by the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia, and by hostility towards those radicals who refused to lend their consent to the war, provoked the “Red Scare” of 1919–20, the merciless repression of the IWW, the Palmer raids, and a revival of virulently antiunionist action by employers.Footnote ¹⁴

American involvement in World War I also exposed crucial divisions within the left. In particular, a younger generation of Progressivist commentators, centred around figures such as Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford, opposed the support given to the war by their mentor John Dewey, and argued that the emphasis within Progressivism upon science, statism and technique was too akin to the Taylorist model of capitalist production that was alleged to have led to the inhuman deterioration of communal life in modern America.Footnote ¹⁵ The “Young Americans” sought to reaffirm the need for a form of personal and collective regeneration that had at least as much in common with the spiritual aspect of Emersonian Transcendentalism as with the functional and material basis of Dewey's pragmatism. As Casey Nelson Blake's account makes clear, however, the group's aspirations for a new hybrid of Progressivism and a specifically American form of radical communitarianism were to remain unrealized, while its members succumbed to a despair, frequently accompanied an “atmosphere of disillusioned hedonism” that is alleged to have been common within the American left during the interwar years.Footnote ¹⁶ It is certainly true that this sense of despair and disillusionment is present throughout USA, becoming evident in the increasingly fractured, frenetic and subjective nature of the “Camera Eye” sections that are mirrored by the collapse of many of the characters into dissolution and dipsomania.

The effective enclosure of the American left within a moderate version of the Progressivist vision had the effect of marginalizing radicalism of any stripe while leaving intact the notion of a valid and viable Enlightenment-based capitalist social and economic model. Because of the remoteness of America from the European trenches, and the lack of prolonged involvement by the US in the war, confidence in the perfectibility of such a model remained unaffected by comparison with the traumatic loss of faith experienced throughout Western Europe in the second decade of the twentieth century – a loss that, after a subsequent, and even more disastrous, European conflict, was famously encapsulated by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). It is in the American (and pre-Auschwitz) context of relatively untroubled confidence in the perfectibility of human society that the federal government of the USA proceeded in 1919 with the grand social experiment of prohibition.

As historians of the prohibition era testify, heavy and regular drinking was a distinguishing feature of American life long before 1919, and was almost certainly the prime reason for the introduction of the Eighteenth Amendment.Footnote ¹⁷ Although Dos Passos was considered (along with most other writers of the time) as a “wet” during the period of prohibition,Footnote ¹⁸ it is noticeable that, throughout USA, alcohol contributes significantly to the downfall of characters across the political spectrum. In The 42nd Parallel, the leftist boozer and itinerant worker Fainey McCreery is raised in a family of drunks, not least his uncle, Timothy O'Hara, who is scolded by his wife for “fiddlin’ round with these godless labor unions and social-democrats and knights of labor, all of ‘em drunk and loafin’ bums like yourself” (USA 33). Later, in The Big Money, the activist Mary French (whose father was a hard-drinking but socially conscientious doctor) is “taught … to drink” by the left-wing journalist Jerry Burnham, who “lived … in an alcoholic haze” (USA 1096). Throughout the trilogy, men (and it is mainly men) on the left raised to anger by the economic and social injustice of the times find their political commitment compromised by nights spent boozing and whoring.

It is not solely those on the left, however, who drink and cavort ruinously within USA. In fact, Dos Passos reserves particularly grim fates for those non-leftist characters who party too hard: Charley Anderson, the energetic aircraft engineer and entrepreneur, dies as the result of injuries sustained in a (second) car crash, having undermined his own potential for material success with a sustained run of spectacularly self-destructive, drink-fuelled behaviour; the “Texas Belle” Anne Elizabeth Trent (or “Daughter”) is killed in an aeroplane crash after being taken on a flight by a drunken pilot; the socialite Eveline Hutchins dies of an overdose of sleeping pills after hosting an extravagant cocktail party; and the middle-class liberal Richard Ellsworth Savage is beaten unconscious and robbed after a tour of illicit watering-holes.

The fact that the wages of sin are allocated so generally makes it difficult to conclude hastily (along with Mrs. O'Hara) that the failure of the American left to establish itself as an effective political force was due in no small amount to sensual self-indulgence and irresponsibility on the part of its own activists. Nevertheless, there is a revealing passage in “The Camera Eye (46)” when the narrator considers “that letter from that collegeboy asking me to explain why being right which he admits the radicals are in their private lives such shits” (USA 851). It can be inferred from this notion of “being right” that, for the narrator of this passage, the irresponsibility of the left-wing hedonists is greater than that of the conservatives because the former have aligned themselves with an ethical imperative to change society for the better: an imperative they have betrayed far more than those who, like Eveline Hutchins or Charley Anderson, can be said merely to be enjoying their prosperity within the economic and social order to which they subscribe. Although the proliferation of alcohol-related deaths and downfalls in the trilogy suggests that a streak of Puritanism may be evident in the treatment of his characters by the supposedly “wet” Dos Passos, there persists the feeling that, although the deaths of Anderson and Hutchins are certainly wasteful, there is something of the tragic about the fate of a more sympathetic (and left-wing) character such as McCreery.

With the possible exception of Mary French, who is more betrayed (by hard-drinking men of the left) than betrayer, the tragedy of Dos Passos's leftist failures is underlined by the suggestion that their fall is substantially self-inflicted through excess enjoyment of earthly pleasures. The behaviour of such characters is in stark contrast to that of their real-life equivalents, such as Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood and Joe Hill, all of whom are portrayed in the potted biographies scattered throughout the trilogy in an admiring, heroic, light. There is little or no mention of the drinking habits of these figures, which raises the question why Dos Passos appears so determined to link the faults of his fictional characters to alcoholic consumption. Had the likes of Hill, Debs and Haywood been portrayed as admirably abstemious, it would be easy to infer much more of an unambiguously “dry” attitude on the part of Dos Passos. Whether or not such a portrayal would be accurate, the omission of any significant comment on the subject by the author implies a degree of ambivalence towards the hedonistic behaviour of his fictional characters that becomes evident early in The 42nd Parallel when a minor character, the journalist and IWW activist Fred Hoff, is said to dislike drinking and tells Fainey McCreery that “a wobbly oughtn't to have any wife or children, not until after the revolution.” In reply, “Mac” asks Hoff, “what do you want us to be, tin saints?” (USA 97), suggesting that there are limits to the demands that can reasonably be imposed upon the dedication of ordinary activists to the socialist cause. Activists are faced with an unenviable choice: to defer endlessly their own gratification in the name of a distant goal, or to indulge that gratification, and make that goal even more distant.Footnote ¹⁹

Although indulgence meets with doom regardless of political persuasion, it appears that dedication to the work ethic reaps some form of reward – whether moral or material – and that this principle also applies across political boundaries. There is no doubt that leftists of temperate habit such as Fred Hoff are more effective operators than Mac or Tim O'Hara, while, on the other side of the political fence, the opportunistic public-relations tycoon J. Ward Moorhouse is shown to achieve success only after abjuring alcohol early in his adult life. His work ethic is articulated by his assistant Janey Williams, who declares, “It's better to be busy … Leisure's all right if you have something to do with it” (USA 606). Yet, just as Dos Passos is ambivalent about the deferment of present enjoyment advocated by leftists like Hoff, he also qualifies his acknowledgement of the benefits of constant industry by providing scathing short biographies of real-life advocates of unrelenting hard work such as F. W. Taylor, Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan. Among his fictional characters, the modestly successful Janey is described towards the end of The Big Money as possessing a “sour lined oldmaidish face” (USA 1131), as if her self-denial were as great a sin as the self-indulgence of Eveline Hutchins. It seems that only a rare and heroic human being can avoid being on the one hand an irresponsible sot who betrays the struggle for a better world, or on the other an unrealistic and unenvied “tin saint” whose adherence to the Protestant work ethic seems to place him (or her) suspiciously closer to the plutocrats than to the masses. Such an outlook – that the fate of society is decided by the emergence of “great men” – is at odds with the egalitarian pretensions of Dos Passos at the time of writing USA, and may go some way to explain his subsequent shift to the political right, as well as his admiration in his later works for distinguished historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson.Footnote ²⁰

The confrontation between hedonism and ethics (especially with regard to political complicity) is a distinguishing feature of Thomas Pynchon's fiction, but the nature of this confrontation in his later novels differs slightly from that presented in his earlier writings, where an apparent relish for hedonism (usually in the form of recreational drug use and promiscuous sex) is offset by a degree of wariness that in some instances indicates disapproval. In the early short story “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna” (1959), the world-weary narrator Cleanth Siegel allows the psychotic Ojibwa tribesman Irving Loon to run amok with a hunting rifle at a bohemian party in Washington, DC, as if Loon were an avenging angel who punishes the drunken guests for their sins of solipsism and self-gratification. In Pynchon's later tale “The Secret Integration” (1964), the portrayal of the black alcoholic Mr. McAfee and of the child alcoholic Hogan, while far from unsympathetic, nonetheless suggests that the vice of these two characters is pathetic and perverse. In V. (1963), the drunken behaviour of the Whole Sick Crew, although fully exploited for comic effect, is presented as symptomatic of terminal cultural entropy, while the Rabelaisian excesses that occur throughout Gravity's Rainbow (1973) are partially countered by a conflation of sex and death that is evident (to cite only one example) in the way that the sites of Tyrone Slothrop's couplings are subsequently devastated by V2 rocket blasts.

Although it would be incorrect to infer from the examples given above that the younger Pynchon was a closet Puritan, there appears to be a shift in the balance of Pynchon's conflicted nature towards the pleasures of the flesh in Against the Day. Whether faced with adversity or opportunity, Pynchon's characters head for the nearest bar, restaurant or pleasure-dome. Drink flows, food is relished, music plays, friends are found, and children abound, but although horror is always present or threatening, it is not depicted as the consequence of such satisfaction, but rather as its opposite. Everyday pleasures are treated in Against the Day not as a betrayal of a deferred goal – whether that of socialism or of capitalist prosperity – but rather as a radical, non-teleological alternative to such goals, and as a vital compensation for the failure of political projects and other such “grand narratives.”Footnote ²¹

Both Dos Passos and Pynchon toy with the stereotypical notion of the USA as puritanical-but-dynamic, and of Europe as sensual-but-decadent. In Nineteen Nineteen, Dick Savage mocks a friend with the ironic accusation that “you're just an old Puritan … you ought to be more Continental” (USA 629) – as if the excesses already committed stateside had not done enough to subvert the notion of America as a land of teetotallers and temperance drivers. Similarly, in his portrait of the ludicrous Wilsonian politician George Barrow, Dos Passos satirizes Barrow's much-repeated appreciation of the European (and Latin American) “art of life” (USA 268, 834) as no more than a pretentious excuse for his own lechery and drunkenness. In both USA and Against the Day, Europe is certainly the site of much carousing, but this is no less true of the US, where the growing influence of the prohibition and temperance movements at the turn of the twentieth century is of little import to the determined imbibers described by both Dos Passos and Pynchon. While Dos Passos's characters move from seedy saloons to cocktail parties and speakeasies, those of Pynchon patronize an astonishing array of drinking establishments (and consume an equally astonishing array of alcoholic drinks), nearly all of which are described as centres of warmth, solace and conviviality.Footnote ²² The photographer and light-fanatic Merle Rideout joins an “Aetherist community” in Whiskey Hill, Cleveland, which is described as being “maybe as close as Merle ever came to joining a Church” (ATD 60); the private investigator Lew Basnight finds himself in a cheerful “Anarchists' saloon” (ATD 179) in Denver; while numerous significant meetings and reunions (Webb Traverse and Deuce Kindred, Reef and Frank Traverse, Frank and Wren Provenance) occur in bars spread across the US. Because of this, it comes as no profound cultural shift when the novel decamps to yet more barroom rendezvous in Agadir, Ostend, Göttingen, Venice and beyond.Footnote ²³

In fact, both writers employ alcohol as a symbolic portal to hedonistic indulgence in a wider sense that is not limited to the physical sphere but includes an aesthetic aspect. Both Dos Passos and Pynchon are drawn to sensuality as a source of lyrical inspiration that, in crudely utilitarian terms, does little to advance the political content of either work. Witness the following passage from The Big Money:

The impression given here is one of relish rather than distaste, even allowing for the probability that the perceptions are those of Charley Anderson, recounted in free indirect discourse. Significantly, this passage occurs in the third part of the trilogy, when it can be argued that the levels of dissolution and disillusionment in the work have reached the point where one of Dos Passos's few remaining options is to surrender to the kind of aesthetic withdrawal noted by his peers in the Young Americans group.Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, despite this diversion into the lyrical promotion of carnal delight, and the misgivings about the virtues of puritanical industriousness, the carousing characters in USA inevitably receive a serious comeuppance which, even if not fatal, frequently involves arrest, venereal disease, serious accident or a descent into vagrancy.

In Pynchon's novel, things are otherwise. Sensual lyricism is even more in evidence, as in the following passage, which occurs as Yashmeen Halfcourt and Vlado Clissan are enjoying impromptu outdoor sex. For Yashmeen, the experience transcends the sexual realm, and even suggests a significance that moves beyond the merely aesthetic towards new social, spiritual and even scientific possibilities as she envisages herself travelling.

This passage suggests that the only option remaining to the writer is not the use of experience to effect aesthetic withdrawal, but rather an unfolding outwards of sensual experience into other realms that include both the aesthetic and the political.

In any event, the attitude summed up by Reef Traverse that “a party's a party, never turn one down” (ATD 740) goes unpunished, and characters utter comments such as, “In that case, we'd better get in some drinking” (ATD 280) or “A visit to his local tavern would seem in order” (ATD 409) without necessarily incurring adversity or perdition. Furthermore, drinking is portrayed not as a solitary vice (or, at least, one indulged in the company of other isolated reprobates, as is often the case in USA) but, like dining, as a pleasure that ought to be enjoyed in the company of others and that is viewed by the novel's cast of anarchists and misfits not only as a compensation for servitude and defeat, but as a symbolic instance of the goal of collective joy and affirmation towards which such characters aspire. As a consolation for the absence of moments of triumph and immanence, the narrative asserts that, for many of the characters in the novel, “the shelter of the trivial would prove a blessing and a step towards salvation” (ATD 778).

This option is not available in USA. Iain Colley detects in the fate of most of the trilogy's characters evidence of an “engrammatic quality of life” that is defined as “the unheroic wearing-away of the human spirit by an accumulation of petty sufferings and defeats.”Footnote ²⁵ As noted above in relation both to early Pynchon and to the Young American commentators who were the contemporaries of Dos Passos, this acute sense of inevitable decline, frequently the outcome of equally inevitable self-indulgence and subsequent guilt, is reminiscent of a Puritanical sense of sin and damnation. In Gravity's Rainbow, the trauma of World War II is followed not by an optimistic sense of reconstruction and revival but by a stunned sense of dissolution, negation and despair in which all that remains of the novel's principal character is unidentifiable “fragments of Slothrop.”Footnote ²⁶ By contrast to its occasional moments of hedonistic joy, a mood of impending doom persists throughout Against the Day that is summed up by the declaration in relation to World War I that “all history after that will belong properly to the history of hell” (ATD 554). In USA, the war represents a straightforward reversal of fortune for the American left, but for Pynchon it indicates a more profound crisis with regard to the Enlightenment project of human and social perfectibility: a project that had forced the radical left out of any participation in mainstream society, and had led not towards unrelenting improvement, but to the industrialized slaughter of the Chicago stockyards and to the trenches of France and Belgium.Footnote ²⁷ Yet the last section of the novel qualifies this Frankfurt-school-meets-end-of-days sensibility with a description of the airship Inconvenience, which “has grown as large as a small city” that, replete with children, parks and neighbourhoods, perseveres in a “favorable darkness” with “an acceptance of sky” (ATD 1084). In place of the Schopenhaurian pessimism that would otherwise have dominated Against the Day, Pynchon at the last moment substitutes the more hopeful notion that “grace” (the last word of the novel) is available not in utopian projections of the future – in the social and political “sky-pilgrimage” (ATD 1085) whose defeat would otherwise be the unqualified subject of the novel – but in the boisterous, anarchic communal life-in-the-present that represents the work's stoical, but cautiously optimistic, alternative conclusion. Pynchon is drawing parallels between the sense of failure and disillusionment experienced by leftist movements of the early part of the twentieth century and a comparable sense of collapse and compromise experienced by his peers as the counterculture of the 1960s was transformed by the events of the following decades. The social and political movements of the counterculture were, of course, not untainted by the kind of utopian projections that tend to be followed by pessimism and various types of recrimination. Just as one of the seminal texts of the counterculture, Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man (1964) attempted to anticipate this trajectory within the dissenting strategies it proposed, the final section of Against the Day can be understood as an attempt to manoeuvre away from “engrammatic” pessimism towards themes of renewal and recuperation that follow from re-engagement with society as it is, rather than from an ever-thwarted vision of another type of society.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, Marcuse's concluding vision of a society based upon “the planned utilization of resources for the satisfaction of vital needs with a minimum of toil, the transformation of leisure into free time,” reads like a description of life on board Pynchon's airship.Footnote ²⁹

This tension between optimism and pessimism is the consequence of the need of socially engaged writers to maintain a sense of what John Patrick Diggins, drawing upon Hegel's term, describes as “negation”; that is, a refusal of existing social, political and economic realities, by means of the contradictions that exist within those realities, in favour of a conviction that other realities are possible or desirable.Footnote ³⁰ For David Dickson, the struggle to maintain this kind of optimistic intent despite an apparently doomed outcome is not restricted to the author's treatment of the subject matter, but manifests itself in formal terms. By comparing the sociopolitical crises encountered by Dos Passos and Pynchon to the insistence on “newness” of expression within the work of Emerson in order “to create forms for the enunciation of American modernity,” Dickson connects the problem of effecting negation to narrative innovations within both USA and Pynchon's Vineland.Footnote ³¹ These innovations – the four narrative strands of fiction, history, biography and autobiography within USA, and Pynchon's postmodernist confounding of narrative stability – are effectively the compensation for the apparently doomed prospect of leftist aspiration whose utterance in literary form provides the fuel for a renewed (albeit tentative) sense of negation. By certain lights, this may seem like a retreat into aestheticism, but a less reductive viewpoint might acknowledge that a novel is, after all, a work of art whose use as a political tool will always be limited. The recuperative tone at the end of Pynchon's novel is in keeping with Adorno's recommendation that committed art must avoid tendentiousness, but grow from empirical reality and, finally, “point to a practise from which they [works of art] abstain: the creation of a just life.”Footnote ³²

The manipulation of genre, pastiche, parody and narrative voice within Against the Day makes Dickson's formulation as relevant to Pynchon's later work as it is to Vineland. Like Dos Passos, Pynchon engages with radical leftist sympathies, but advocates no conventional explicit ideological programme. In this sense, they not only follow Adorno's prescriptions for committed art, but also fulfil the need for social and literary “newness” that Dickson suggests is a vital part of an Emersonian tradition of American artistic pioneering. In terms of the social aspect of newness, USA is predicated upon a socialist future, and the (increasingly dim) possibility of such a future being realized, but Against the Day moves its focus to the possibilities inherent in the sensual present. Before engaging in debate – and sometimes instead of it – characters in Pynchon's novel frequently smell cooking and direct themselves towards a canteen or restaurant: they drink, play ukuleles and accordions, sing, dance, have sex and appreciate fine clothing (not least millinery). If it is the case that this curious appeal to nonintellectual satisfaction on the part of Pynchon represents a rupture in a body of work that at an earlier stage was littered with explicit references to high culture, it is arguable that such a rupture dates from the reassessment within Vineland of the counterculture and the extent to which the “irreverent individualism” of the latter contributed to its own collapse and to the subsequent emergence of Reaganism.Footnote ³³

Although brute force and the economic retrenchment brought about by the 1973 oil price rises and the cost of the Vietnam War were arguably greater factors in the rise of the New Right, Pynchon is particularly interested in the notion of countercultural complicity with the forces of reaction. In Vineland, this is effected by means of a network of doper informants and acts of counterrevolutionary betrayal, all of which are controlled by the figure of Brock Vond. Although directly authoritarian when required, Vond frequently exploits an evident need for subservience amongst his victims that appears to be founded upon their individual – and individualistic – appetites for self-gratification, frequently via drugs and sex. (At the end of the novel, Vond's funding is cut due to the fact that the submissiveness of a younger cohort renders his techniques superfluous.) By prioritizing their own needs, Vond's countercultural agents – Frenesi Gates in particular – break with the collective bonds of family and friendship in ways that recall the hard-drinking failures and opportunistic party functionaries within USA. In Vineland, recuperation comes in the form of re-establishing those ties, as at the conclusion of the novel, when the open-ended, inclusive Becker-Traverse “clan” puts aside old enmities during their assembly in the woods of northern California.

A similar emphasis in Against the Day on the importance of community and conviviality as a mode of opposition to the social isolation that breeds political complicity links Pynchon to the communitarian ethos voiced by Bourne, Brooks et al., as well as to the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau. Pynchon may be the postmodernist innovator par excellence, collapsing genres and hierarchies of cultural value within his fiction, but he is also a traditionalist – albeit a traditionalist of “the New” – whose ambition “to engage with tradition, or at least to understand its present state, can be seen as a form of resistance, perhaps even a means of literary survival.”Footnote ³⁴ This reassessment of individualistic indulgence in favour of its collective equivalent may also represent a response to critics who have suggested that white male practitioners of the postmodernist novel such as Pynchon (who is bracketed alongside contemporaries such as Don DeLillo and John Barth) are attempting by insidious means to recapture (or reinforce) the cultural influence – perhaps typified by figures such as Emerson and the Young Americans – that they perceive themselves to have lost in recent decades. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, for instance, argues that the recurring anxieties with regard to technology and mass culture that occur in such fiction (including Pynchon's writings up until and including Vineland) are evidence of a fear of “massification” on the part of a cultural elite that accepts “the Enlightenment individual as the foundation of freedom.”Footnote ³⁵ According to Fitzpatrick, white male postmodernist writers tend to regret a cultural centrality and sovereign individuality that has allegedly been lost to the “hive mind” (198) of “mindless feminized masses” (7) who in turn are being manipulated, principally via nonprint media, by the imperious forces of contemporary capitalism. After pointing out that many social groups have never known anything other than marginalization rather than centrality, and that many individuals have been denied the luxury of being able to consider themselves as centred subjects, Fitzpatrick proposes that the “hive mind” ostensibly feared by the likes of Pynchon and DeLillo (and their antecedents in the Frankfurt school)Footnote ³⁶ is not necessarily indicative of a fascistic, top-down order, and may not entirely be the unwitting dupe of capitalism, but might instead be considered a mode of activity that is “communist in nature” (198), and that raises the question “what revolutionary possibilities might be contained in the bottom-up organization of complex, plural intelligences?” (199).

Pynchon's fiction since Vineland appears to have anticipated this line of argument. Although Vineland is indisputably a critique of televisual, consumerist culture that may be guilty in part of some of the accusations proposed by Fitzpatrick, its tentatively hopeful ending in the Californian woods invokes the very kind of pluralistic, communitarian discourse to which Fitzpatrick alludes in such positive terms. Moreover, Pynchon's next novel, Mason & Dixon (1997), was no less than an interrogation of (white male) Enlightenment assumptions in which those assumptions were given both the convivial, humane face of Jeremiah Dixon and a considerably darker aspect – not simply that of the haunted and gloomy Charles Mason but, more pertinently, the depiction of slavery, genocide and environmental destruction as the true bases of a nation avowedly constructed on Enlightenment principles. In the novel, America is judged to have rejected the pluralistic, life-affirming outlook of Dixon (who returns, disillusioned by the American project, to England) in favour of mean-spirited rapacity and the violent establishment of a wealthy white male elite. Despite its implicitly pessimistic critique of early America, however, the novel suggests that, although the principles of the Enlightenment may have been profoundly compromised by the social and historical circumstances of their emergence, at least some of those principles – represented in the novel by Dixon's concern over the ill-treatment both of other human beings and of the natural world – are not necessarily an exhausted seam for those who envisage a less brutal form of society.

Against the Day is further evidence that Pynchon's later works are attempting to distance their creator from the accusation that he represents part of an attempt to (re)situate white middle-class men at the centre of a cultural hierarchy that dismisses supposedly ephemeral or subaltern artefacts and activities to the margins, and that seeks to reverse or obstruct assaults on certain Enlightenment assumptions.Footnote ³⁷ One reason for the historical setting of the novel is that it serves to remind the reader that the concerns encountered by Pynchon's contemporaries within the counterculture were not new, and had also challenged the left at the beginning of the twentieth century: concerns that included political and cultural complicity (especially with regard to consumerism and self-indulgence), conflict between radical and pragmatic strategies, and persistent sexism.Footnote ³⁸ Another is that the historical setting renders problematic the simple equation of sensual indulgence and quotidian pleasure with the conspicuous consumerism of the contemporary period that is frequently the object of criticism in a great deal of fiction set in the present or recent past (Vineland being an example of this). Having established a critical and historical distance that breaks the negative association between sensual pleasure and the politics of consumerism, but which maintains a thematic strand that runs back through American political and cultural history, Pynchon then invokes a debate about the implications of the enjoyment of nonintellectual pursuits: can such enjoyment ever be said truly to represent an act of defiance against the imprecations of Puritans and plutocrats; or is it in fact the basis of a surrender to the bourgeois values that bolster the wealth and power of the likes of Pynchon's plutocratic villain Scarsdale Vibe? The agreeable lifestyle enjoyed by the otherwise sympathetic Chums of Chance is an example of complicity through consumption: they may occasionally rescue an individual from a lynch mob, but it is made clear throughout the novel that they are payrolled by the forces of reaction. Furthermore, their damning (if comic) ignorance is made clear when they can express only incomprehension (and a degree of guilty irritation) when the digging of trenches for war interrupts their supply of champagne.Footnote ³⁹

It is left to the Traverse brothers – Frank, Reef and Kit – to answer the charge that enjoyment in the day amounts to collusion with bourgeois values, and represents a desertion of duty for those pitched against the “plutes.” Reef, who spends much of the novel drifting around the spa towns of Europe living as a card-sharp, dandy and gigolo, certainly has a case to answer, but defiantly states, “Don't tell me I'm infected with bourgeois values” (ATD 850) as he settles down at a pleasant Venetian café just before an anarchist bomb explodes nearby. As the son of a bomb-making anarchist, Reef is familiar with the notion that such attacks are often justified on the grounds that there are no innocent bourgeois, but rejects this idea on the basis of a general empathy with other human beings and a life-affirming appreciation of delight that prizes “long-evolved and dearly bought civility” (ATD 850) over ideological righteousness.

Later, the anarchist Ewball Oust qualifies the argument, admitting that “slaughterin the innocent” is pointless “when what we need is more slaughterin of the guilty” (ATD 922). Ewball claims that plutocrats such as Vibe (who is the target of several assassination attempts) are the true nihilists because, contrary to their widely accepted status as repositories of all the values that underpin modern capitalist society, “they don't believe in shit” (ATD 922). This seems borne out by the conversation between Vibe and his bodyguard Foley Walker, during which Vibe poses the question, “Should there be moral reservations, in a class war, about targeting one's enemies?” and confesses to a “desire to kill off every damned socialist and so on leftward, without any more mercy than I'd show a deadly microbe” (ATD 332). Hearing the word “moral,” Walker scrutinizes Vibe's speech for an indicator of the ethical imperative behind Vibe's mission to rid America of all forms of socialism – an equivalent to that desire for a more equitable world that inspires Vibe's enemies – but, beyond a deep-seated white supremacism that scorns “the Asiatic masses, the pan-Slavic brutes … the black seething spawn of Africa interminable” (ATD 333), is concerned to find in Vibe nothing but a failure “even to ask the right questions about anymore” (ATD 334). Beyond the acquisition of great wealth, it appears to Walker that there is no substance to Vibe other than that of “a ruler isolated in self-resonant fantasy” (ATD 333) whose only connection to the world is through the assertion of power and death. The implication of Ewball's comment is that the kind of iron militancy that attempts to justify the indiscriminate killing of the bourgeoisie is too close to the nihilistic outlook of men like Vibe who have effectively cut themselves off from all positive human contact, and therefore from all life and pleasure beyond that afforded by assertive opulence and status.Footnote ⁴⁰

Against the Day, however, is not an apologia for pacifism or withdrawal. Although none of Pynchon's more sympathetic protagonists relish killing, some “slaughterin of the guilty” occurs with a degree of implicit approval: Frank avenges his father Webb by shooting dead Webb's assassin, Deuce Kindred; the sinister intelligence operative Derrick Theign is killed in a well-received act of revenge; and Vibe is murdered by Walker before Frank and Ewball can perform the same task. This is not the kind of extermination of an enemy advocated by Vibe – an outright and general extermination on the basis of a general hatred of other races and other ideologies – but an attempt to redress a form of moral imbalance with an attack on a specific and culpable target. This is clearly difficult ethical territory, where Pynchon's tracks are at least partly covered by the way in which Against the Day parodies various literary genres (revenge western, espionage thriller, Tom Swift-style adventure tale) in such a way as to mask the kind of authorial sympathy that is evident in Dos Passos, and to make it far from evident that the novel advocates selective assassination in place of pacifism as a means of achieving social and political change. It is notable that, throughout USA, events such as Haymarket, Ludlow and the Sacco and Vanzetti trials tend to be evoked not through extended narrative but rather through brief and oblique references within the “Newsreel” and “Camera Eye” sequences – perhaps because, at relatively close quarters, these events are too familiar (and too painful) to recount at length. Writing some seven decades later, Pynchon's re-creation of the Colorado labour wars demonstrates no such reluctance and may indeed be a requirement if the alleged cultural amnesia of many twenty-first-century readers is to be overcome.

If the novel can be said to offer any means by which the conflicting demands of morality, militancy and immediate pleasure might be reconciled, it is through strategies of secession, refusal and deconstruction. The Chums of Chance and their airship only begin to grow and prosper as adults rather than naive “balloon boys” after they make their decision to “disaffiliate” (ATD 1018) from their employers; the British intelligence agents Cyprian Latewood and Auberon Halfcourt withdraw from the hierarchies of power with which they were complicit; and, when Reef, Yashmeen and Cyprian arrive at the “Anarchist spa of Yz-les-Bains” (ATD 931), they encounter Cyprian's secret-service colleague Ratty McHugh (now known as Reg), who reveals that, inspired by the killing of Theign, there occurred “sudden personnel vacuums all over Whitehall, amounting in some shops to mass desertion” (ATD 932). Ratty (or Reg) now advocates “the replacement of governments by more practical arrangements’” (ATD 933), as well as an assault on the “patriarchal rubbish” that he claims has dominated not only the plutocracies of mainstream society but also revolutionary movements. “With women in the equation,” his audience agrees, “Then there's a chance … As long as men can let go of that old we-know-what's-best illusion” (ATD 934). In this way, Pynchon's novel concludes not with the assertion of white male centrality, but with its surrender. This is literally so: the amalgamation in the last section of the novel of the Chums of Chance with a group of female aeronauts is agreed “only on the understanding that [the latter] would always operate independently” (ATD 1083). This conclusion is in keeping with the recommendation of at least one commentator that the future of the radical left depends, at least in part, on the substitution of austere “revolutionary heroism” in favour of “a commitment to … a universal society of fun and enjoyment.”Footnote ⁴¹

If Against the Day can be read as a swan song for white male centrality, it is more difficult to make a similar claim with regard to USA. As Kenneth Rose attests, the temperance and prohibition movements in the USA were inextricably linked to campaigns for female suffrage and to home-protectionist notions of women as inherently disinclined to physical and mental dissolution.Footnote ⁴² The implication that men, who were deemed not be so intimately associated with nurturing and caring for others, were cursed with a tendency towards destructive self-indulgence is in keeping with the behaviour of Dos Passos's characters, but with the qualification that, in USA, it is not only home and hearth from which drinkers turn their attention, but also the care and nurturing of their own ambitions, whether socialist or capitalist. With this qualification, Dos Passos accepts the idea of masculine vulnerability, but reasserts social and political phallocentrism with the implication that the temptations of alcohol (and of sex) represent a test of masculinity with regard to the ability of a man to perform social and political functions that are implicitly deemed more important than domestic concerns. To evade this test is the strategy only of “tin saints,” but to confront and overcome the temptations of the flesh can be considered the mark of the heroic and extraordinary man. (Similarly, it might be argued that prohibition would represent not a heroic victory over temptation but rather an emasculating denial of heroic male agency.) The fact that Dos Passos's trilogy begins and ends with the figure of Vag, a young male itinerant, leads Linda Wagner to claim that, at the conclusion of the work, “America's hero, the average man, had become her outsider.”Footnote ⁴³ Vag serves the same purpose as the Pynchonian figure of the schlemihl (in V.) or the member of the preterite (in Gravity's Rainbow): a sympathetic but marginalized male character who yearns for a righteous cultural centrality apparently denied him by political and historical circumstance. This denial is at the heart of Dos Passos's concerns in USA, but is the subject of critical scrutiny, and of eventual deconstruction and refusal, by Pynchon in Against the Day. In essence, Pynchon is exploring the possibilities that might reside in the collective experience of marginality rather than bemoaning that marginality in terms of a defeated, phallocentric individualism.Footnote ⁴⁴

An interest in the subversive potential offered by “passed-over” people and their experiences is also evident in the work of the Young Americans group. Blake contends that the most valuable aspect of the work of the group was their insistence on the importance of “the emotional, symbolic, and value-laden aspects of social experience in which most people understand themselves and their surroundings,” by contrast with the tendency of other American progressives to ignore or condemn as false consciousness “the cultural components of citizenship.” Mindful of their commitment to democratic principles in both the artistic and political realm, the group were wary of what they perceived as the heartless mechanism not only of capitalist society but also of programmatic, utopian responses to the ills of capitalism, and valued quotidian and marginalized experiences as a humanizing rejoinder to such mechanism. Such an impulse, however, can have the effect of reinforcing rather than challenging marginalization, and the Young Americans were aware that their sympathies might effect either “saintly withdrawal” into aestheticism, or surrender to destructive and complicit hedonism.Footnote ⁴⁵

Pynchon is aware of this kind of ambiguity. In his essay on sloth (or acedia, defined as “a loss of spiritual determination … producing what are currently known as guilt and depression, eventually pushing us to where we will do anything, in the way of venial sin and bad judgment, to avoid the discomfort”), Pynchon confesses to sympathizing with the Couch Potato on the grounds that withdrawal from productive social engagement (whether aesthetic or hedonistic) can be understood as a revolt against Franklinite utilitarianism.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this instance, Pynchon suggests that the appropriation of consumerist technology can contribute to the development of a “nonlinear awareness” that amounts to a new form of subaltern agency. In keeping with the criticism of modern popular culture by the Frankfurt school, however, Pynchon also notes that the notion of revolt-by-acedia is vulnerable to a collapse into a mere “cosmic despair on the cheap” that effectively neutralizes radical activity by luring the Couch Potato into incessant diversion.

Beyond the ambivalence of these musings is the fact that they are based mainly on instances of individual indulgence. For all their professed love of community and the dispossessed, there is a touch of distaste with regard to the masses within the writings of Van Wyck Brooks et al. that has something in common with the way in which Pynchon's sofa-bound video jockey is both a participant in mass culture while remaining withdrawn from it. By contrast, the approval of collective enjoyment within Against the Day is quite unambiguous. The communal bonding that occurs at the end of Vineland is experienced at frequent points in the later novel by groups of convivial drinkers absorbed in constructive and life-affirming conversation whose experiences are very different to those of the self-destructive drinkers in USA.

The conflict between self-denial and self-indulgence among Dos Passos's characters has already been noted. Such ambivalence is also evident in Dos Passos's long-standing reputation – established by the publication of Manhattan Transfer in 1925 – as the bard of the American modernist cityscape, which is at once an ordered grid that represents a solid testament to rationality, progress and mastery, yet also a failed attempt to impose form and fixity upon the multiplicity and diffusiveness of its contents. Like the practitioners of nineteenth-century realism, Dos Passos attempts in USA to capture the entire “collective life of a nation,”Footnote ⁴⁷ while including in that project, by way of the “Newsreel” and “Camera Eye” episodes, an acknowledgement of the fragmentary and protean nature of modern urban life.Footnote ⁴⁸ For at least one commentator, however, this unresolved tension does not collapse into nihilism but instead generates a troubled yet persistent “openness to the future, to promise,” that is manifest in the character of Vag.Footnote ⁴⁹

Debatable though this conclusion may be, the more discernible optimism at the end of Against the Day stems from Pynchon's apparent desire to reassess in a contemporary context the issues that reach back to the period covered by USA. One critic has written of the “tragic temper” of literary modernism, the suggestion being that modernist texts such as USA expressed the disillusionment that followed from the relatively recent conviction that the hopes and assumptions upon which all Enlightenment discourses had been built were in crisis. During the seven decades that have elapsed since the publication of USA, the passing of the “grand narrative” has been widely accepted to the degree that the same critic has argued that postmodernism “is too young to remember a time when there was (so it was rumoured) truth, identity and reality, and so feels no dizzying abyss beneath its feet.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This notion appears to be borne out by the fact that Pynchon's novel, unlike USA, bears very little relation to classic realism, but instead abounds in parody, pastiche, historiography and narrative uncertainty. Furthermore, despite the tentative optimism at the end of Against the Day, the body of the novel is overshadowed by the suspicion that human civilization is not progressing towards a steadily improving future but is instead trapped within recurring cycles of infernal, chaotic repetition. Throughout the novel, the descriptions of both real and fictional events such as the battles of Ypres (ATD 554), and a devastating attack on an unnamed metropolis by “a Figure” (ATD 151), as well as references to place-names such as Groznyi (ATD 441), Chiapas (ATD 637), Tchernobyl (ATD 784) and Sarajevo (ATD 826) evoke chilling correspondences with more recent history, and serve to undermine confidence both in historical linearity and in the effectiveness of human aspiration.Footnote ⁵¹ As Ryder Thorn, the “Trespasser” from the novel's future, exclaims, “You have been so easy to fool – most of you anyway – you are such simpletons at the fair, gawking at your Wonders of Science, expecting as your entitlement all the Blessings of Progress” (ATD 555).Footnote ⁵²

The Enlightenment project seems to be at an end that is symbolized in Against the Day by the Interdikt: an immense chain of poison gas traps created by the scientist(s) Renfrew/Werfner that have been strung out over Eastern Europe as some form of ultimate weapon in the event of war.Footnote ⁵³ It appears that the impulse to order and master – like that of Dos Passos over his own literary project – terminates not in a Utopia of reason and propriety (not to mention sobriety) but ultimately in doom: the Interdikt is apparently no longer under the control of any political or military entity but – like the nuclear stand-off during the Cold War – appears to have adopted a life of its own, threatening Central Europe with “a great cascade of blindness and terror” (ATD 953).

The frequent expressions of horror at the world situation that occur throughout Pynchon's novel do not fit well with the claim that postmodernist expression cannot conceive of a moment when foundations – ethical, ontological or epistemological – were tenable. Revulsion, sympathy, and the sense of a fallen world are all in evidence throughout the work, and suggest the existence of some form of critical force that provides “negation.” These features resist, or at least resent, the notion that much contemporary antifoundationalist critical theory leaves the radical with little to assert apart from an emphasis on endless deconstruction and on the ludic nature of artistic expression that offers little in the way of signalling or effecting social change. However reductive or insufficient this contention may be, it can at least be said that Pynchon, at least in his later novels, is in broad alignment with those commentators who are attempting to salvage something of value from the humanistic principles of the Enlightenment that can be incorporated into those modes of thought and practice able to survive in the shadow of the horrors of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵⁴

Ever since certain strands of postmodernist practice appeared to revive early modernist aestheticism (albeit with a sense of flattened cultural hierarchies), critics have been made uneasy by the idea that contemporary fiction ought to abandon social engagement in favour of “play” – John Barth's concept of a type of fiction that “will represent nothing beyond itself, have no content except its own form, no subject but its own processes.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Writing in the 1980s, Allan Lloyd Smith castigated what had become of the experimental novel: “the openness came to look like closedness, as reality balefully (and joyfully) persisted in the face of fiction's dismissal of it.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Two decades later, Jeremy Green claimed that later postmodernist fictions – in particular, those written close to the year 2000 – were returning “with urgency” to social and historical concerns, and rejecting or revising “some of the bold pronouncements of the first generation of postmodernism.” For Green, a vital part of this return is “the creation of partial counterpublics,” which is in keeping with the way in which Pynchon's more sympathetic characters in Against the Day express both their dissent and their enjoyment in collective rather than individualistic terms.Footnote ⁵⁷

By contrast with the isolated figure of Vag, Pynchon's novel comes to a conclusion in which groups of characters form allegiances that advocate critical refusal and secession. No ethical code is mapped out in terms of a utopian programme, but is instead grounded in the contingent. The movement towards grace with which the work ends can be understood as a desire for the “Left's categorical imperative”:Footnote ⁵⁸ a transcendent form of contingency that can be asserted confidently against political adversaries as the basis for action (and Against the Day can be described accurately as a novel of political action). It is in this respect that Against the Day gives more weight to Dickson's contention that Pynchon is fulfilling the Emersonian demand for newness. Crucially, newness in this context is not to be understood as an ahistoric fascination with the future, or with a vision of Utopia, but is necessarily oriented around what Blake describes (with particular reference to the work of Mumford) as a “usable past” that becomes the tool of the “critical intelligence” of individuals and communities.Footnote ⁵⁹ This is in keeping with both Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, yet this recuperative stance, with its implication that history represents the foundation of some form of teleology, remains prone to the criticism articulated throughout the latter novel that meliorist notions of progress and improvement – however tentative – may be held responsible for much of the world's ills and do little to explain how the issue of power might be addressed. What is significant about the later stages of Against the Day, however, is that the establishment of a better life in the present seems to take priority over the notion of a better future. Ratty McHugh's outburst in Yz-les-Bains indicates that what hope remains to a project of social and political criticism and engagement lies not with inherently patriarchal teleologies that rely on strict adherence to abstract principles and endlessly deferred goals, and on programmes of mastery, order and control, all of which are vulnerable to sensual human failings in the perpetual present, but with a surrender of such Enlightenment-based hegemony to an “equation” in which the collective enjoyment of present and immediate satisfaction is accepted not as a threat to a meliorist project but as a vital part of its objective and of its vindication. This appears to be the fate of all those who travel on the kind of ever-expanding and anarchic vessel Inconvenience that, in the last paragraph of the novel, “has transformed into its own destination, where every wish that can be made is at least addressed if not always granted” (ATD 1085).

From this, one can conclude that Against the Day represents an attempt to establish a dynamic balance between radical innovation and a sense of historical context – a balance that is in itself a component of a (seemingly paradoxical) tradition of newness within American literature. In its choice of settings and references, the novel invokes the modernism of Dos Passos and the Young Americans, while its narrative instability, its use of pastiche and parody, and the freewheeling hedonism and irreverence of its characters reveal the influence of postmodernism and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Referring to the origins of this tradition, both Casey Nelson Blake and Christopher Gair have noted the influence of the Transcendentalists upon the counterculture, particularly in the way that both movements tended to sympathize with instinctive and instantaneous thought and action in preference to stringent theoretical and practical analysis.Footnote ⁶⁰ This, claims Gair, stems from the desire of American dissenters to thwart “master narratives of assimilation and … social control” and to eschew dangerously prescriptive models of newness in favour of “examples … of how to construct other worlds.”Footnote ⁶¹ To this might be added the contention that what characterizes the newness of Pynchon's own work is an awareness of the need for the kind of analytical thinking and pragmatic action demanded by historical consciousness alongside the knowledge that history is not a matter of fixity and certainty but is instead a constantly fabricated and disputed object.