“The Last Light Bulb”: On Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket
Thomas Pynchon’s descriptive writing is not celebrated nearly enough. While the public conversations thus far around his newest novel Shadow Ticket have focused on either the wacky comedic hijinks or the deeper political messages, for me the most exhilarating parts of the novel were Pynchon’s evocative descriptions of the various settings his characters move through. Such paragraphs usually appear at the beginning of a scene and introduce us to a new place with a particular Pynchonian flair, a long sentence made up of a series of modifying phrases that heighten a specific sensation or emotion through a careful layering of sensory detail, what writers often call cumulative sentences and which I’ve written about several times before. As the novel barrels forward towards its melancholy and ruminative conclusion, these passages often dispense with main clauses entirely and become simply a list of evocative images and sensory details, such as in the example below:
“A busy echoing interior comfortably dim with all-night cigarette and kitchen smoke, young runners who never fall asleep in and out bringing seafood fresh from the Adriatic, a continuous wind outside, down from the high limestone, a theremin of uneasiness, sliding around a narrow band of notes, in which it’s said you may come to hear repeated melodies, themes and variations, which is when you know you’re going bughouse, with only a very short period of grace to try and escape before it no longer matters.” (pg. 266)
In a way, this passage in particular summarizes the very feeling of reading one of Pynchon’s long descriptions in Shadow Ticket: it might start out somewhat “comfortable,” a “busy echoing interior” full of sound and sensory imagery, the modifiers continuing like the “wind outside” or the “young runners” bringing you endless seafood — but underneath it there is that “theremin of uneasiness,” the minor key notes in Pynchon’s strange rhythms that remind you of the darker currents, the “themes and variations” you can’t help but pick up on, the sinister feeling wrapped up in the lyrical beauty.
Ultimately, it’s the atmosphere created by these descriptive passages that gives Shadow Ticket much of its power — first Milwaukee, somewhat quaint and charming, with its bowling alleys and its dance clubs, then the chaos of the Stupendica making its way across the Atlantic, and finally the darkness of Central and Eastern Europe, with its mess of nations and borders, where the second half of the novel is set. It’s this later part of the book where Pynchon’s atmospheric writing really shines — espionage-ridden Vienna, gloomy Budapest, city of suicides, Vampiric Transylvania full of howling wolves and “strange, almost theatrical back and fill lighting to alter faces grown familiar over the summer,” an Ustashi training camp on the Croatian border where Fascists of various nations gather in a “ruined limestone amphitheater, once dedicated to bloodletting presented as amusement, back when the Fifth Macedonian Legion were busy here invading and occupying” — and eventually Fiume, D’Annunzio the proto-Fascist’s city, where the novel’s climactic scenes take place, “a tattered ghost city with a sordid history of secret treaties and sellouts, edging its way through what the Fascist Italian regime calls Year Ten, continuing to collapse in on itself, unlikely to be redeemed, barricaded and wire-fenced, corroded, sentry-boxed, moonlit some nights brighter than what flickering neon remains…” (pg. 264)
Altogether, these descriptions serve a larger purpose: they provide a dark backdrop to the novel’s absurd primary plot, an atmosphere of looming Fascism behind the simple story of runaway cheese heiress Daphne Airmont. What Pynchon is doing here though all this beautiful atmospheric detailing is reminding us that this is not just a story about cheese but also about a significant historical pivot, right as the fallout from one world war is about to lead Europe into a second and even more destructive one. It’s no accident that almost all of the novel’s European settings were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose dismemberment at the end of World War I led to much of the nationalist frenzy that gave rise to Fascism. The novel even features a rogue Austro-Hungarian submarine whose captain refused to accept decommissioning after World War I. At first, this feels like just another Pynchonian gag, akin to the autogyro or the motorcycle pig — but by the end of the novel, we come to see that this submarine represents an alternate historical trajectory that the world might have taken. What if Austria-Hungary had survived, Pynchon implicitly asks? Would we still have had World War II?
The role of Austria-Hungary as a historical pivot is addressed most clearly by Egon Praediger, the cocaine snorting Viennese Interpol agent whom Hicks ends up working for:
“This is the ball bearing on which everything since 1919 has gone pivoting, this year is when it all begins to come apart. Europe trembles, not only with fear but with desire. Desire for what has almost arrived, deepening over us, a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna, rapidly and without limit in every direction, and so across the continents, trackless forests and unvisited lakes, plaintext suburbs and cryptic native quarters, battlefields historic and potential, prairie drifted over the horizon with enough edible prey to solve the Meat Question forever…” (pg. 157–158)
These sinister musings pay off most dramatically in the novel’s final chapters, an exhilarating reading experience that mixes the genre fiction comedy action that Pynchon is known for with more wistful and profound reflections on the progress of history. The most moving section here is when Daphne is in Germany searching for her clarinetist lover Hop Wingdale. As she wanders Hamburg, “once the Swing Kid metropolis,” she notices to her dismay how everything has changed with the arrival of the Nazis and how the old culture of swing music, which of course has taken up a good chunk of Shadow Ticket, is gone, perhaps forever:
“No greetings of ‘Swing Heil!’ anymore, not even in a whisper. No more gathering up closer to the bandstand to listen, humming harmony, sometimes just to hold each other and what they called ‘sway’ in time to the music. Daphne understands that she has already seen the last days of Klezmania, traveling parties of Swing Kids and Red Front fans, Jewish and otherwise, fraternizing shamelessly, who knows what expectations tumbling through their minds…” (pg. 257–258)
In this melancholy passage, Pynchon is lamenting the end of a particular cultural world that could not survive the Nazis. More broadly then, this whole novel becomes a bittersweet celebration of that world, the dancing, the music, the old-timey songs, all of it soon to be swallowed up by Fascism.
This feeling of wistful melancholy is returned to again in what essentially functions as the novel’s emotional climax, the final scene between Daphne and Hicks, when Pynchon lingers on what is unspoken between them, lines that perhaps they “should have been saying” to each other:
“We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree. If anybody’s around to remember. Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark. Until finally we turn to look back the way we came, and there’s that last light bulb, once so bright, now feebly flickering, about to burn out…” (pg. 268–269)
Of course, they don’t say this to each other, because they don’t know what’s to come. We the readers have been reading all this with the knowledge of history, with the awareness of the impending cataclysm, but for Hicks and Daphne and everyone else in the novel, the future is unknown. As the journalist-adventurer Glow Tripforth del Vasto says in an earlier scene, “whatever it is that’s just about to happen, once it’s over we’ll say, oh well, it’s history, should have seen it coming…” Of course, Pynchon’s point is that you can’t always see it coming, especially when you’re living it. For those of us living today, after all, can we see it coming? Or does it exist only as a shadow haunting us, a possible future playing in the background, like the ghostly note of a theremin?
This, ultimately, is why Shadow Ticket works so well, this feeling that Pynchon captures of impending doom. The novel is set in 1932, right before Hitler will come to power. Pynchon himself was born in 1937, and though he was just a child, likely too young to remember very much, the Second World War was clearly the great event that marked the beginning of his life. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon attempts to reckon with the significance of that world-historical tragedy by looking at the aftermath, the way the war ended. With Shadow Ticket, by contrast, he turns his attention to how the war began by taking us to the moments right before, creating with his atmospheric descriptions a nostalgia for a time just before he was born, the cultural world that couldn’t survive what was to come. As Daphne seems to realize in her wanderings though Hamburg, one day soon, the swing music will stop.
All of this makes an earlier scene in the novel particularly moving: Hicks’ goodbye to April Randazzo, his on-and-off Milwaukee girlfriend. In a Chicago train station, intoxicated by her perfume, they stand a moment and “[dance] together to a tune only they among the hundreds streaming by can hear.” In the air, meanwhile, there is “a sulfurous note from the coal smoke,” a suggestion perhaps of the darkness to come. Something about the way the scene is written suggests that Hicks almost knows he won’t be coming back.
