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The Complicity of Consumption: Hedonism and Politics in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and John Dos Passos's USA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2013
Abstract
This article is a comparative study of two epic works that share a historical setting and a broad political outlook, but diverge significantly in at least one respect. Frequent and heavy alcohol consumption is a feature of both Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and John Dos Passos's USA trilogy, but the way in which these authors describe heavy drinking – and hedonistic behaviour in general – indicates fundamental differences between the modernism of Dos Passos and Pynchon's postmodernist strategies. The article contends that this aspect of Pynchon's novel represents a critique of attitudes within the twentieth-century American left towards sensuality, patriarchy and the failure of leftist aspiration within a contemporary context that invokes such subjects as the complicity of consumption, terrorism and the ethics of political assassination.
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References
1 USA was originally published in separate volumes as The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932) and The Big Money (1936). The trilogy was first published in one volume in 1938.
2 See (for example) Mattesich, Stefan, Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon (London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, Robberds, Mark, “The New Historicist Creepers of Vineland,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 36, 4 (1995), 237–48Google Scholar, Chambers, Judith, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Twayne, 1992)Google Scholar.
3 The consumption of alcohol is an especially significant topic given the growth of the temperance and prohibition movements that culminated in the ratification of the Volstead Act of 1919. This event is acknowledged in USA by occasional references to hip flasks, blindtigers and speakeasies, but goes curiously unmentioned throughout Against the Day.
4 In Nineteen Nineteen, a character named Robbins comments that “John Bull's putting his hands on all the world's future supplies of oil … They've got Persia and the Messpot and now I'll be damned if they don't want Baku.” Passos, John Dos, USA (1938; reprint, London: Penguin, 1978), 585–6Google Scholar. Further references to USA are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as USA. In Against the Day, intrigues over oil supplies in the Middle East form the basis of the voyage of the “subdesertine frigate Saksaul.” Pynchon, Thomas, Against the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 434Google Scholar. Further references to the novel are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as ATD.
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19 Dos Passos's suspicious treatment of alcohol recalls Lutz Koepnick's discussion of the significance of whiskey and coffee within the western movie. According to Koepnick, the stimulating effect of drinking coffee supports the American work ethic and acts as an agent of social bonding. By contrast, whiskey is an unstable (and exclusively male) bonding agent that frequently results in masculine isolation and destruction. See Koepnick, Lutz, “Siegfried Rides Again: Westerns, Technology and the Third Reich,” Cultural Studies, 11, 3 (1997), 418–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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22 A viewpoint echoed by Andrew Sinclair's description of the pre-Prohibition saloon as “the church of the poor” that acted as a labor exchange, site of political organization and source of community and consolation. Sinclair, 91–93.
23 Examples of alcoholic excess in the novel are legion: witness the experiments of Neville and Nigel with “opium beer” (ATD 490), the obsession of the Chums of Chance with champagne, the creation of the anarchist Crocodile cocktail (ATD 941), the persistence of incidents in which “the brown jug came out” (ATD 174), and the repast on board the Russian airship Bolshai'a Igra that is accompanied by “an enormous jug full of vodka” (ATD 1024), amongst many others.
24 Blake, 132, 215, 237.
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38 On this latter topic see, for example, Gair, Christopher, The American Counterculture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 9Google Scholar.
39 It is arguable that the literally transcendent Chums of Chance may be a satirical representation of the Young Americans group as described by Blake: predominantly upper middle class, somewhat dandified, compromised by their apparent inability to confront power, but united by a persistent belief in friendship.
40 In Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) – the novel being read in Against the Day by the dog Pugnax – the principal character, Hyacinth Robinson, experiences a similar dilemma that ends in his own self-annihilation. Hyacinth swears allegiance to a revolutionary cadre, but is seduced by the attractions of aristocratic and bourgeois life. Again, attitudes towards alcohol play a significant role, and are couched in gendered terms according to which masculinity is associated with deferment, abstraction and purity, and femininity with pragmatism, sensuality and fulfilment in the present. Robinson's political mentor, Paul Muniment, is an abstemious ideologue who remarks that “the world is full of unclean beasts whom I shall be glad to see shovelled away by the thousand,” whereas Robinson's lifelong friend Millicent Henning indulges “an appetite for beer and buns, for entertainment of any kind. She represented … the eternal feminine.” James, Henry, The Princess Casamassima (London; Penguin, 1987; first published 1886), 289Google Scholar, 159.
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45 Blake, Beloved Community, 289–90, 132.
46 Thomas Pynchon, “Nearer My Couch to Thee,” originally in the New York Times Book Review, 6 June 1993, available at www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html, last accessed 7 Feb. 2012.
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48 Ludington, Townsend, “John Dos Passos 1896–1970: Modernist Reader of the American Scene,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 72, 4 (1996), 565–80Google Scholar, part IV.
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51 Pynchon is foreshadowing the battles of Ypres (1914 and 1915) during World War I, the attacks on the Chechen city of Groznyi by Russian forces in 1994–95, the guerrilla and peasant rebellions in the Mexican region of Chiapas during the 1990s, the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986, and the siege of Sarajevo by Serbian forces in 1992–96. The passage that features the “Figure” is a surreal amalgam of the story of King Kong, a Christian apocalyptic vision and the 9/11 attacks on New York City.
52 Foley, “From USA to Ragtime,” 92, argues that whereas the fictional creations of Dos Passos are “subdued to the demands of history,” postmodernist authors such as Doctorow and Pynchon seek to undermine confidence in the solidity of history.
53 The twin characters of Renfrew and Werfner recall the claim by Peter Nicholls that the presence of the double is a feature of modernist writing. In this instance, Pynchon represents the double identity of the scientists as indicative of the Enlightenment project in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century: at once predicated upon the dream of rational progress, but delivering the nightmare of mechanical destruction. See Nicholls, Peter, Modernism: A Literary Guide, 2nd edn (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 15–19Google Scholar.
54 See (for example) Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (London: Harvard UIniversity Press, 2000), 138–55Google Scholar. Dickson sees in Vineland an attempt to articulate a postmodernism of renewal and recuperation rather than of apocalypse or endless recursiveness. See Dickson, The Utterance of America, 144–55, 153–54, 189.
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60 Gair, The American Counterculture, 23,130; Blake, 297.
61 Gair, 144, emphasis in original.