“Adrift without Certainty, Only Conjecture”: Nomadic Utopia in Pynchon’s Against the Day
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Abstract
In a 1085-page novel brimming with utopian imagery, utopian thought, and utopian projects (real, imagined, and in-between), one utopian vision stands out: the book’s final sequence, in which a blimp piloted by a crew of teenage aeronauts (“The Chums of Chance”) escapes from low-earth orbit and becomes a self-contained unit, no longer beholden to the world below. Critics have overwhelmingly interpreted this scene as a total and transcendent realization of the utopian imaginary that has so far eluded our characters: a triumphalism that signifies the ultimate overcoming of contradictions. This paper offers a revisionist reading of Against the Day’s closing scene, and, in doing so, complicates our understanding of Pynchon’s utopian thought. The Chums’ exodus may gesture toward a transcendent overcoming, but only to perpetuate that which they had sought to dismantle. Contra the Chums, the paper locates an alternative utopian site in the novel’s conjecutral locomotive undercommons. Its power lies in the flux of undecidability that resists codification through plans, blueprints, or programs–not a condition but a condition of possibility. © 2025 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Recommended Citation
Walker, Abe, "“Adrift without Certainty, Only Conjecture”: Nomadic Utopia in Pynchon’s Against the Day" (2025). College of Humanities and Social Sciences. 470.
https://digitalcommons.uncfsu.edu/college_humanities_social_sciences/470