ABSTRACT
Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) begins with the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and ends with the immediate aftereffects of World War I in 1920. Yet the novel depicts not only the history and politics of the turn-of-the-last-century as we have received them but also “the other side of the tapestry,” a darker and alternative history. The Chums of Chance surveil “the inexorably rising tide of World Anarchism,” only seven years after the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. In the historical paramorphism of the novel, what if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand met his demise while cavorting in the New World rather than by assassination in Sarajevo in 1914? A small perturbation in the course of history might have averted the cascade of events that brought the Triple Alliance to war with the Central Powers in the “General European War.” The novel is set during the heyday of international Anarchism that sought to dislodge plutocrats from power and turn the material assets of the industrial monopolies over to the workers. Attacks on European royalty and heads of state followed the principle of “propaganda of the deed,” but the repentant bomber Webb Traverse ultimately declares his loyalty to anarcho-syndicalism. The novel draws a double refraction between the Belle Époque of monopoly capitalism and the post-9/11 politics of globalization.
