Against The Day - Themes

Themes

Critic Louis Menand sees an organizing theme of the book as

something like this: An enormous technological leap occurred in the decades around 1900. This advance was fired by some mixed-up combination of abstract mathematical speculation, capitalist greed, global geopolitical power struggle, and sheer mysticism. We know (roughly) how it all turned out, but if we had been living in those years it would have been impossible to sort out the fantastical possibilities from the plausible ones. Maybe we could split time and be in two places at once, or travel backward and forward at will, or maintain parallel lives in parallel universes. It turns out (so far) that we can’t. But we did split the atom — an achievement that must once have seemed equally far-fetched. Against the Day is a kind of inventory of the possibilities inherent in a particular moment in the history of the imagination. It is like a work of science fiction written in 1900.

Menand states that this theme also appeared in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and that it ties in with a concern present in nearly all of Pynchon's books:

was apparently thinking what he usually thinks, which is that modern history is a war between utopianism and totalitarianism, counterculture and hegemony, anarchism and corporatism, nature and techne, Eros and the death drive, slaves and masters, entropy and order, and that the only reasonably good place to be in such a world, given that you cannot be outside of it, is between the extremes. "Those whose enduring object is power in this world are only too happy to use without remorse the others, whose aim is of course to transcend all questions of power. Each regards the other as a pack of deluded fools," as one of the book’s innumerable walk-ons, a Professor Svegli of the University of Pisa, puts it. Authorial sympathy in Pynchon’s novels always lies on the "transcend all questions of power," countercultural side of the struggle; that’s where the good guys — the oddballs, dropouts, and hapless dreamers — tend to gather. But his books also dramatize the perception that resistance to domination can develop into its own regime of domination. The tendency of extremes is to meet, and perfection in life is a false Grail, a foreclosure of possibility, a kind of death. Of binaries beware.

Science is either a method of disenchantment and control or it is a window onto possible worlds: it all depends on the application. he relevant science is mathematics, specifically, the mathematics associated with electromagnetism, mechanics, and optics — with electric light, the movies, and, eventually, weapons of mass destruction.

Steven Moore, in a Washington Post book review, writes:

Pynchon is mostly concerned with how decent people of any era cope under repressive regimes, be they political, economic or religious. 'Capitalist Christer Republicans' are a recurring target of contempt, and bourgeois values are portrayed as essentially totalitarian."

Jazz (or, as Pynchon refers to it in one variant spelling of the novel's time period, "Jass") provides a non-hierarchical model of organization that the author relates to politics about a third of the way through the novel, according to Leith, who quotes from the passage, in which ‘Dope’ Breedlove, an Irish revolutionist at a Jazz-bar makes the point. Breedlove characterises the Irish Land League as "the closest the world has ever come to a perfect Anarchist organization".

"Were the phrase not self-contradictory," commented ‘Dope’ Breedlove.

"Yet I’ve noticed the same thing when your band plays — the most amazing social coherence, as if you all shared the same brain."

"Sure," agreed ‘Dope’, "but you can’t call that organization."

"What do you call it?"

"Jass."

In a Bloomberg News review, Craig Seligman identifies three overarching themes in the novel: doubling, light and war.