The Virtual World of Pynchon’s Fabulation: Against the Day Lit World

Abstract

Adapting Deleuze’s conceptualization of the virtual, this study shows that Against the Day intends to undermine our narrow conception of reality by surpassing the actualities of the known world. In the darkness of the novel, “the virtual” lurks; the novel is a travel against the day, against the actual world to an actual-virtual world, toward “the nights” which “will be dark enough for whatever visions must transpire across them, no longer to be broken into by light” (Pynchon, 2006, 1083). Indeed, the presence of mysterious, paranormal, and magical events (such as the uncanny tales of ghosts, séances, visions, hallucinations, and other-dimensional interventions) along with actual events functions as a defiant modus operandi against the actual-oriented, secular Western Philosophy. That is, through virtual occurrences, lines of flight are created (from the real/actual) offering alternative systems of looking at the world.