The Ruins of Urban Modernity: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (Utku Mogultay, Bloomsbury, 2018)

Utku Mogultay’s The Ruins of Urban Modernity begins with an allusion to Dante’s Inferno: halfway through Against the Day we encounter the fictional town of “Wall o’ Death” constructed around the remnants of a carnival modeled after the Chicago World’s Fair. Mogultay argues that Wall o’ Death “is built on the ruins of the city of tomorrow” (1), as the so-called White City was meant to establish a new urban template for future cities. He observes that Wall o’ Death, superceding that template, reflects “the wider transformation of the postwar American urban landscape” (2). Taking his cue from this symbolic scene, Mogultay argues that Against the Day calls into question “received notions of modernity” and challenges “the present by rewriting the past” (4). Digging into the geographies of fin-de-siècle modernity, Mogultay investigates how Pynchon’s novel reimagines the classical understanding of the modern metropolis as we know it, that is, the industrial city of capitalism thriving at the turn of the twentieth century.