Putting the Mass in Mass Culture

The first (and for many folk, apparently, the last) thing you hear about Pynchon’s Against the Day is that it’s a formidable doorstop.

As Jay Parini says of another generously-proportioned volume,

This book would have been ideal for travel, had it been fitted with little wheels and a retractable handle. It's more than eleven hundred pages in length, and weighs as much as a block of cinder.

When did gross displacement become an aesthetic? Is this literary criticism or the battle of Midway? (a name with polyphonic resonance in Chicago)

What’s Against the Day about? How do you get to Carnegie Hall? The canonical punch lines are the most fitting: 1085 pages; Practice.

What is Finnegans Wake about? What is Kind of Blue about? Where are the Snowdons of yesteryear?

Rumors say Pynchon's text is scattered and difficult, a game not worth the candle.

What I know so far (70 pages in):

This is the work of a writer at the peak of his powers, in full control of his material. Look at the elegiac ending of the “Chicago Fair” section,

Later, after closing day, as autumn deepened over the corrupted prairie, (p.55)

the precise and luminous language, the carefully modulated touching of all the right notes (Colorado Mining Camp, debris, drifters, descent, hell-raisers, fires, excursions, miles aloft, invisibly, season of miracle, substance of wonder, run of the fair) and the way this thematic statement flows into the next section, where “Merle Rideout dreamed he was in a great museum.” The Midway having closed (the rides all out) the only surviving remnant of the Fair is The Museum of Science and Industry, a vast and various collection like the catalog Merle enumerates.

The lovely notion of Merle’s wallet as “a sort of museum, on a smaller scale-- a museum of his life, overstuffed with old ticket stubs, receipts, notes to himself…” Boxes within boxes, like something by Cornell (Pynchon’s alma mater). For a gem of an illustrated essay, rich in Pynchonian themes and literary allusions, see Joseph Cornell’s Virtual Reality.

At this juncture (p.57) the bookish “boys own adventure” narration drops out and we continue in the voice Merle Rideout, reg'lar guy (as we say in Chicago):

He had already heard in some dim way about the AEther, though being on the more practical side of things, he couldn’t see much use for it. Exists, doesn’t exist, what’s that got to do with the price of turnips basically.

Also, he hates Columbus, Ohio. So what’s not to like?