Phantasmagoric 9/11: Blowback and the Limits of Resistance in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day

Abstract

Pynchon's Against the Day (2006) displaces and defamiliarizes the attacks on the World Trade Center and their aftermath, positioning the reader between a pair of funhouse mirrors, one backlit with the specter of 9/11 and the other with an early twentieth-century history of anticapitalist insurgency—with the two reflections bi-locating the reader within their surreal temporal overlap.

Keywords::

• novel
• postmodern
• terrorism
• capitalism
• resistance
• anarchism

Notes

Notes

¹ As you will see, a thematic intimation.

² Since we know from time references on page 397 that this scene takes place in 1903, I consulted an Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) map from 1906 to trace the southward progression of New York City's Ninth Avenue El line, which leads right into the vicinity of what will become the World Trade Center site. Though the research to confirm Pynchon's reference originates with me, I credit the anonymous author of the Against the Day wiki with the suggestion that following the old subway line might lead to the WTC. See the entry for page 401 titled “Seeming to date from some ancient catastrophe, far older than the city,” which is included in this article's Works Cited list, along with the IRT map comprising Figure 1.

³ Kristiaan Versluys' Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (2009); Richard Gray's After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11 (2011); Martin Randall, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror (2011); Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, eds., Literature after 9/11 (2008).

⁴ See, for example, Justin St. Clair's “Binocular Disparity and Pynchon's Panoramic Paradigm” (Severs and Leise).

⁵ For a more thorough discussion of the alternate time motif as a possible intervention in ATD, see Inger H. Dalsgaard's “Readers and Trespassers: Time Travel, Orthogonal Time, and Alternative Figurations of Time in Against the Day.”

⁶ I refer, more specifically, to the 9/11 conspiracy theories chronicled in the documentaries Zeitgeist (2007), Loose Change: Final Cut (2007), and Zero (2008).

⁷ It might be worth noting the homonymic in-joke Pynchon embeds into this scene: Padzhitnoff sounds like Pajitnov, the last name of the inventor of Tetris. All credit to the anonymous author of “Page 123” on the Against the Day wiki.

⁸ All credit to the anonymous author(s) of the entries compiled under the wiki's “Against the Day and September 11th” page, which appears in this article's Works Cited list.

⁹ For a further account of how supposed nineteenth-century anarchist bombings were actually performed by agents of imperial powers, see Alex Butterworth's The World That Never Was (2010).

¹⁰ The oil prospectors are drinking in Baku, which is both an oil-rich region as well as the Old Persian word for god. It is also the word Kurt Vonnegut, in Player Piano (1952), puts into the mouth of the Shah of Bratpuhr to mean “false god” (123). Pynchon subtly shows, and in a way that will become increasingly clear as this multi-passage reading progresses, that U.S. oil-chasing and reliance on fossil fuels is tantamount to the worship of a false god.

¹¹ See, for example, the post-9/11 revised, second edition of Blowback (xii).

¹² Despite its quasi-mimetic strategy, the café scene could be seen as another reference to the aforementioned web of media productions challenging the official account of the WTC collapse, with several documentaries stressing firsthand video accounts of bombs destroying the lobby. Firefighter interview videos such as this one stoke the controversy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zED8dy63w.

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Mark Young

Mark Young teaches in the Warren College of the University of California, San Diego. He earned his PhD in English from the University of California, Riverside, and specializes in sound studies, digital media, science fiction, and American literature. His work has been published in Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, the SFRA Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.