Bílé město, 1893, technologický, komerční, kulturní zázrak; Against the Day, 2007, Thomas Pynchon

Létalová, Michaela

Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day presents an extreme challenge to the reader's knowledge of sciences and arts as well as to his reading skills. The age of information overload the contemporary society lives in requires fast adaptation to the continual tide of data, products, stress, and to all what civilization calls conveniences and labor saving devices of the modern age. Pynchon's books play the role of the "simulation of the disorienting overload of modern culture".1 All of Pynchon's texts tend to be "long, rambling, multilayered, underplotted, quasi-unfinished monsters. But with this one [Against the Day] there is the feeling that the magician has fallen in love with his own stunts, as though Pynchon were composing a pastiche of a Pynchon novel, says Louis Menand."2 Further according to Menand, Against the Day is imperfect in the sense of "What was he thinking?"3 In order to successfully approach any of Thomas Pynchon's texts the reader needs to be either extremely well educated in all fields of human knowledge, and able to discern between the science part and the fiction part of the text, or capable of a swift use of the computerized body of knowledge - the data stored on the internet, besides the still fairly high required level of education. Knowing as little as we do about the author himself,...

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